In the Wind. . . .

Meeting the future

This weekend, Wendy and I drove to Massachusetts to visit our new grandson. Samuel John Vichiett-Bishop was born last Thursday (October 22) at 3:45 p.m., weighing 3.45 kilograms (7.61 pounds), the second son of my second son Christopher and his wife Alessandra. Big brother Benjamin is almost three years old, a turbo-charged, bright-eyed, bilingual beauty. (Alex is Brazilian so they speak Portuguese at home.) Sam is just big enough to rest in my two cupped hands. His feet are about the size of my thumbs, and his toes are like the little peas in snow pea pods. The whole thing is magical, remarkable, moving, and inspiring.

Three years ago when we were anticipating Ben’s birth, I was looking forward to the rite of passage of becoming a grandfather. But as those who know me have heard me say, I was not prepared for the joy of seeing my son as a father. And yesterday, watching Chris confidently scoop up the teeny boy, and seeing Chris and Alex as a team preparing for Sam’s first few weeks, discussing schedules about daycare and medical appointments, all while managing Ben’s rambunctious motions, I was simply bursting with pride.

Then, driving home to New York, listening to news reports about national and international politics, I reflected on the first days of the life of a tiny person, wondering what kind of world he will know as an adult. 

Kids these days . . . 

Old fogies like me have been saying that for centuries, but I still like to make comparisons between generations in my family. My grandfather pointed out that local transportation when he was young involved horses, and he was about the age I am now when humans walked on the moon. When my father was growing up, a truck drove around his urban neighborhood delivering ice for iceboxes. My generation was the first to establish households that required refrigerators, air conditioners, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, and, heaven-help-us, computers at the outset.

Our thirty-something children are of the first generation to have had cell phones while attending school. CDs were the standard format for recorded music, color television was ubiquitous, and the Internet was barely a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, used only by scientists and academics.

When I was a kid, Popular Mechanics magazine predicted that by now, we’d be whisking about in personal jet-powered vehicles. It didn’t bother me that the cartoon renderings made them look like trash cans—I’d be happy to stand on banana peels and coffee grounds if my PJV would speed me through the Lincoln Tunnel two feet above the stalled traffic. I’m a little disappointed that this hasn’t happened yet. I think they spent too much time developing the fax machine.

When I wonder what the future holds for four-day-old Sam, it’s safe to say the technological products that will be important to him when he’s a young adult have yet to be imagined. But since I’m far from the field of technological development, I’ll leave that speculation to the engineers.

A couple years ago, Wendy and I were visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, when Christos, an architect, took us to visit an ancient amphitheater outside the city. He told us that the large architectural firm for which he had worked held employee conferences at the site so they could study the particulars of the design and construction, and he pointed out some incredible facts. I was especially impressed by the fact that the 10,000-seat structure occupied a section of a perfect sphere, and after thousands of years was still perfectly level. Christos explained that the techniques used for the design, surveying, and construction must have been written down, but that all documentation had been lost through the ages. He recalled his boss lowering his voice and posing the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the Library at Alexandria?”

The death of culture

Just as hundreds of generations of accumulated recorded knowledge was lost forever in the (multi-stage) destruction of that venerable library, our modern society seems capable of losing important components, ironically at the hands of the very advance of technology. As life becomes more complicated and methods of information management and communication proliferate, our collective attention spans are diminishing. National Public Radio is still able to retain an audience willing to listen to news stories that last several minutes, but most of our news is delivered to us in brief bursts. It’s easy to get the sense that some of the things that are central to our culture are being threatened by our collective ability to pay attention, to concentrate, and to participate in activities that require the thoughtful use of time.

One example of this is as simple as the written word. A friend who had neurosurgery on her right arm fell and broke her left arm while traveling in Italy. Her right hand is still tingly as her nerves heal, and her left arm is in a heavy rigid plaster cast. She reports the delight in taking advantage of the Dictation and Speech functions of her MacBook. Having lost comfortable use of both hands at least temporarily, she is able to continue her work as an attorney, dictating letters, e-mails, and formal documents into her machine. And I confess to frequent use of voice memos with my iPhone. But when I recently heard a story on NPR about how some educators are starting to wonder whether it’s necessary to teach cursive writing in public schools, I shudder while acknowledging my culpability.

Will Sam go to school in an age when copperplate script is obsolete? What would that mean to our society? Do we care? Or would that be a lamentable loss?

§

Most readers of The Diapason can read music. With a glance at a score, we can accurately hear melody, harmony, and rhythm in our “minds’ ears.” We’re multilingual. We might take it for granted, but we learned every jot-and-tittle purposefully. When and where did we learn this? I’ll speak for myself—you can fill in your own story. I had my first piano lessons when I was about eight, and I know Miss Swist laid the foundation for my musical literacy. I also remember the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who crowed in front of elementary school classrooms, teaching us simple songs and writing quarter notes and rests on the blackboard using a cool chalk gang-holder to draw staves.

Of course, I’ll encourage Chris and Alex to give Ben and Sam music lessons—I’ll offer to pay for them. But I doubt they’ll experience anything like the even questionable musicianship provided by Miss Louden in Winchester, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. When I was leading a church youth choir, most of the kids had no background reading music, so I gave it to them. I know that many of my colleagues do exactly that as part of their work with children. But that covers only those kids going to church. If the schools aren’t teaching basic musical skills, a huge swath of children would never be exposed to quarter notes. Do we care about that? 

Plato said, “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the key to learning.” Imagine a Presidential Education Commission that promoted the teaching of music as a basic tenet of public education. What a world that would be!

In 1920, the population of the United States was about 106,000,000, and 300,000 new pianos were sold. That’s one new piano for every 353 Americans. Today there are about 319,000,000 Americans, and according to an article published in the New York Times, in 2006, Americans bought only about 76,000 pianos.¹ That’s one new piano for every 4,197 Americans. That huge decline must have been caused largely by the introduction of radio, television, and electronic recordings. But I can’t escape the notion that a hundred years ago, most households owned pianos and included family members who could play them.

Chris and his older brother Mike grew up singing in choirs that I directed, they both had piano lessons, and they were both often conscripted as “tuner’s helper,” but when they were out on their own, they made their own choices about church. I doubt that Sam or Ben will follow their grandfather’s footsteps into church music, but I hope they’ll both go through life with an understanding of the art of music, enough to allow them to be free to be moved by it.

§

Throughout the centuries, artists have manipulated materials as various as marble and linseed oil to record their observations and interpretations of the world around them. And they took it seriously. Michelangelo’s stunning statue, David, is almost 17 feet tall and weighs almost 12,500 pounds. Do we assume that the original block of marble was twice that heavy (25,000 pounds), 2½ times (31,250 pounds) as heavy, or more? It was removed from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, and the finished statue is in Florence, over 80 miles away. No big deal; a heavy crane lifts it onto a truck, and off we go on an asphalt highway. No, Michelangelo completed the statue in 1503—that 13-ton stone was hauled over hill and dale using carts with wood wheels drawn by oxen over roads of mud and stone.

When I was in college, I took several art history courses, learning rudiments of style, iconography, and techniques—knowledge that enhances every visit to an art museum forty years later. I’ve watched droves of tourists stream from their buses along well-worn pathways toward an iconic masterpiece like Mona Lisa, ignoring hundreds of compelling artworks, actually missing the entire experience while snapping bootleg photos, as I sneaked off in the other direction to have sumptuous galleries to myself.

Walking through a doorway from one gallery to another, I’ve burst into tears encountering an iconic painting. I would have been introduced to the image by a slide in a Carousel machine in a darkened lecture hall forty years ago, but seeing the real thing is visceral. The Starry Night on a tee-shirt doesn’t raise the hairs on your neck, but the very piece of canvas and streaks of paint that were handled by Vincent Van Gogh sure do.

Sam and Ben live more than 200 miles from us. I’m looking forward to having them here for Grandpa visits when I can take them to New York’s wonderful museums. Meanwhile, I know that Chris and Alex will take them to the great museums of Boston. I hope that forty-something Sam will take his children to art museums.

§

The three major broadcast networks and two UHF channels that were around when I was growing up have become hundreds of cable channels broadcasting everything from real art to pure bunk. Originally hailed as the greatest educational tool of the twentieth century, television has deteriorated into a wasteland of misnamed experiences. You might tune in to Animal Planet, expecting something like the carefully researched nature programs of public television, but find a blood-and-guts story about feeding habits, narrated in an emergency voice, as if normal feeding habits should be reported like war zones. (Oh no! Look what that alligator did to that egret!) The History Channel shares idiotic testosterone-induced antics that have nothing to do with history, and while The Weather Channel could teach us some fascinating science, you’re more likely to see poorly equipped, poorly educated “researchers” racing across Texas and Oklahoma, intending not to be hit by a tornado and acting surprised when they are.

Hollywood provides an endless supply of violent, gory fantasies, and full-length movies are instantly available to us, streaming through our laptops and phones, but what about live theater? When I was in high school, dozens of friends were gathered by the music department to learn, produce, and perform Broadway musicals. I’ll never forget the lyrics to the songs of Oklahoma! or Little Mary Sunshine, having pounded out the tunes on the piano hundreds of times, and watching my friends spread their thespian wings was a delight.

Those productions were more energetic and enthusiastic than artistic, and our Curly was no Alfred Drake (original Broadway cast, 1943), but that troupe of school chums sure got a taste of what’s involved in live theater. We dealt with stage fright, casting jealousy, embarrassing stage kisses, memory lapses, and missed cues, but that was really a life experience, giving us an appreciation of the emotion of acting. Two people on a stage can make an audience gasp, cringe, laugh, or cry. You see spittle flying between faces and realize the extent to which the actors have abandoned themselves in service of the story. I hope that Sam will appreciate and seek out live theater.

§

Wendy is a literary agent, working to enable authors selling their manuscripts to publishers and laboring to promote and advocate the books as they arrive on the shelves in bookstores. In many ways, her work parallels mine. Books and pipe organs are facing competition from electronic alternatives; both are viewed by many as outdated, even unnecessary. But just like a pipe organ, there’s no substitute for a real book. You feel its weight in your lap, you handle the pages, you can even write in it, leaving notes for yourself or for the next person to read. 

I’m proud that my kids grew up loving books, and that they love books as adults. Chris and Alex’s condo is alive with books—hundreds of books. We bring more each time we come, and we know that friends and family join us. Ben loves to sit in a lap to “read” a familiar book. He knows many of them by heart and recites along as you read, imitating inflections and correcting errors.

I trust that Sam will become an adult in a world that reveres the printed page, in which information is disseminated and discussed on paper and in which stories are told on paper. I trust that he will pass on that love to his friends and the family members that follow him. And I’ll be giving him books at every opportunity.

§

Books, music, theater, and art are all still in the mainstream of our culture. People who seek and appreciate them enjoy the wealth of knowledge and depth of expression of those who have preceded us. And through their exposure to the heights of human culture, they are open to the appreciation of less prevalent expressions. As participation in the American church has diminished, fewer members of society are likely to be familiar with pipe organs, or even have experienced them at all.

I imagine that Sam will be more familiar with the pipe organ than other kids in his classes—I’m looking forward to sharing my passion with him as part of his awareness of his family. And who knows, maybe he’ll take some lessons. 

I fully expect Sam to be familiar with video games—his father and uncle are products of the generation that started with PacMan and Mario Brothers and has since gone deeper into that world that I don’t understand. As our kids were the ones who understood how to program a VCR, my grandsons will be virtuosic in operating gadgets we haven’t dreamed of.

But I hope, and I’ll do all I can to guarantee, that his education will not only expose him to the wide world of culture, but also immerse him in it. He’ll be well versed in the latest games, movies, music, and art. And he’ll be familiar with Shakespeare and Shostakovich, Donatello and Don Giovanni, Brunelleschi and Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Bernstein and Sondheim. He’ll know the difference between Bach and Offenbach, and he’ll pass it all on with love and passion. I’m not pretending that he’s going to be an artist, an actor, or a musician, but intending that he’ll know enough about those things to care about them. I expect it of him, and I expect it of me. Lucky for all of us.

Notes

1. Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Laid-Back Labor” (Freakonomics blog), The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007.

It’s about time, it’s about space . . . 

Music is one of the most elegant ways we have to measure and control time. Time is about the generous breath an organist gives the congregation at the end of a line of a hymn and the beautifully paced pause between verses. Time is about never giving the listener or singer the sense that you’re in a hurry, even in a piece that is fast and furious.

Inspiration is a magical word that refers to innovation and new ideas and also to the intake of breath. One of the special moments in musical time is the sound of inspiration as a choir breathes in unison at the start of a piece. The music starts a full beat before the first note. All these examples are also about space, the breath between lines or verses, and the control and spacing of tempo. Thoughtful consideration of time and space are among the most important elements in a moving musical performance.

When I was a pup, just out of school in the late 1970s, I was working for Jan Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. One of our projects was the renovation of a Wicks organ in the cavernous and ornate St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio.¹ I don’t recall the exact date, but remember that the organ was built in the 1930s, comprising a big three-manual instrument in the rear gallery, and a modest two-manual organ behind the altar, all played from two identical consoles. The 1970s was the early dawn of solid-state controls for pipe organs, so our project was replacing the original stop-action switches with new analogue switches.

The job involved weeks of repetitive wiring, much of which I did alone, sitting inside the organ during daily Masses and the recitation of devotional rites. I heard “Hail, Mary” repeated hundreds, even thousands of times, led by the same faithful woman, so I not only memorized the text, but can still hear the quirky inflections of her voice, which I associate with the memory of the beeswax-and-incense smell of the church’s interior: “. . . and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, JEE-zus.”

The building is huge, and the acoustics endless, and there was a majesty about that repetitive chanting. It was even musical because the different tones of inflection lingered in the reverberation, turning the spoken word into song. Listening to that for countless hours allowed me insight into the origin of music. The later intonation of text as chant made the words easier to understand, and the natural succession of fauxbourdon embellishing the single line was the first step toward the rich complexity of today’s music.

A few weeks ago, Wendy and I attended a concert by Blue Heron, a polished vocal ensemble that specializes in Renaissance choral music. You can read about them, and hear clips from their recordings at www.blueheron.org. They are in the midst of a project titled “Ockeghem@600,” in which they are performing the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (1420–1497) over a span of about five years. The project includes performances of music by Ockeghem’s predecessors and contemporaries, providing a significant overview to the development of this ancient music.

That music roughly fills the gap between the origin of chant and the advent of tonal harmony, more than a hundred years before the birth of Sweelinck (1562–1621). Ockeghem and his peers were striving to take music in new directions, wondering what sounded good as chordal progressions, as counterpoint, and simply, as harmony. There is a sense of experimentation about it that reflects the genius of innovation. The performance we heard was at First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square, where the brilliant Peter Sykes is director of music. The building is a grand Victorian pile, and while it doesn’t have the endless acoustics of that stone interior in Lakewood, Ohio, it’s big enough to have spacious sound.

As we listened to the timeless sounds, my mind wandered to the devoted Hail, Mary women of Lakewood, drawing connections between the “spoken singing” I heard there and the explosion of innovation at the hands of the Renaissance composers. There were many homophonic passages, but also exploration into imitation (the forerunner of fugues) and melismatic polyphony. And along with the tonal innovations, those composers were learning to manage time.

Harvard University professor of music Thomas Forrest Kelly is an advisor to Blue Heron, and the ensemble recorded a CD of plainchant and early polyphony to accompany Kelly’s insightful book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,² in which he traces the invention and development of musical notation. In Chapter 3, “Guido the Monk and the Recording of Pitch,” Kelly examines how Guido of Arezzo, Italy, developed notation to indicate musical pitch around the year 1030, and in Chapter 4, we meet Leoninus, an official of the as yet unfinished twelfth-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, who is credited with developing notation for the recording of rhythm in music.

I recommend this book to anyone whose life revolves around reading music. Professor Kelly unveils countless mysteries about musical notation, including the origin of the names of the solfège scale. It is a compelling read.

§

There were some wonderful organs in the wood-frame-and-plaster New England buildings of my teenage life, but they certainly didn’t have much reverberation. I was around 25 years old when we did that work at St. James in Lakewood, Ohio, and it was one of the first places where I had freedom to play in such a huge acoustic. I was mesmerized by the sense of space. There was the obvious magic of releasing a chord and listening to the continuation of sound, but even more, I loved the way the building’s space gave the music grandeur. I had an epiphany as I played Widor’s ubiquitous Toccata. Suddenly, it wasn’t about 32 sixteenth notes in a measure, but four grand half-note beats. The harmonic motion was like clouds rolling across the sky, and the spaciousness of the room turned the sixteenth notes into chords. The music went from frantic to majestic. So that’s what Widor had in mind.

Take a minute with me on YouTube. Type “Widor plays his toccata” in the search field. Voilà! There’s the 88-year-old master playing his famous piece on the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris. It takes him seven full minutes to play the piece. Scrolling down the right-hand side of the screen, there was a list of other recordings of the same piece. I saw one by Diane Bish with 5:47 as the timing. I gave it a try and found that Ms. Bish was speaking about the performance and the organ for nearly a full minute, and she played the piece in less than 5/7 of Widor’s time. There sure were a lot of performances to choose from. Most of them were around five-and-a-half minutes long, and only a few were over six minutes. No one but Widor himself made it last for seven. Have we learned anything today?

More than 800 years after Leoninus started writing down rhythms at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, on November 15, 2015, a special Mass was celebrated there in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris two days earlier. Olivier Latry was on the bench, and as the priest consecrated the bread and wine, Latry set sail with La Marseillaise like only a genius cathedral organist can. The vast church was full, and emotions must have been running high. Latry established a powerful rhythm and gave the music a harmonic structure worthy of the towering room. His improvisation was about time and space in the extreme. It’s just over four minutes long, but it seems eternal, perfectly paced, and exquisitely scaled for the occasion. If I had been in that church, I would have needed to be carried out. Sitting at my desk in Maine, I’m weeping as I write. Watch it with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbwJACUxXdo.

The other day I had a meal with David Briggs, the virtuoso organist who is dining out these days on his capacious transcriptions of symphonies by Mahler and Elgar. How appropriate that he has been appointed artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Church buildings don’t get bigger, and pipe organs don’t get grander. That iconic church is a perfect stage for solo music-making on such a grand scale.

Like Notre Dame, but for only about an eighth as long in time, St. John the Divine has been the site of immense pageantry and ceremony. Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have preached there. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic there. Philippe Petit walked across the nave on a tightrope there. John Lindsay, Alvin Ailey, and Duke Ellington were buried from there. Elephants have paraded down the center aisle for the blessing of the animals. To walk and breathe in any building of that scale is to experience the ages.

It is no wonder that David could be master of such a space. He was bred for it. As a boy chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, he watched the organist out of the corner of his eye, waiting for him to draw the Pedal Trombone. He was organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where the renowned choir sings in one of the world’s largest college chapels, with one of the trickiest organ console placements in Christendom. From that hidden console, twenty-something David had the bench for some of the most visible services in history, as the Festival of Lessons and Carols is broadcast to hundreds of millions of listeners around the world. He has held positions at the cathedrals in Hereford, Truro, and Gloucester. He was born and bred to make music in huge spaces, a far cry from the frame buildings of my musical childhood.

David’s performances and improvisations are informed by his innate understanding of space. While many musicians are baffled by long reverberation, he harvests it, molds it, and makes it serve the music. No building is too large for his concepts of interpretation. A great building joins the organ as vehicle for the flow of the music.

Bigger than the great outdoors

Bagpipes, yodeling, and hog-calling are all forms of outdoor communication with a couple things in common. Bagpipes were commonly used on battlefields for military communication. Yodeling traces back to the sixteenth century, when it was a means of communication between Alpine villages and by animal herders for calling their flocks. Hog-calling is for, well, calling hogs. The other thing they have in common is that they are all air-driven. Wind-blown acoustic tone is as powerful as musical tone gets. No one ever put a Plexiglas screen in front of a violin section.

Around 1900, Robert Hope-Jones, the father of the Wurlitzer organ, invented the Diaphone, a powerful organ voice with unusually powerful fundamental tone. The sound of the Diaphone carried so efficiently that the United States Coast Guard adopted the technology for foghorns, used to warn ships of coastal dangers. The pipe organ combines bagpipes, yodeling, hog-calling, and foghorns as the one instrument capable of filling a vast space with sound at the hands of a single musician.

Igor Stravinsky famously said of the organ, “The monster never breathes.” He was right. It doesn’t have to. It’s the responsibility of the organist to breathe. Playing that wonderful organ at Notre Dame, Latry has infinite air to use. That does not give him the mandate to play continuously, and he doesn’t. The recording I described shows him at the console in an inset screen. The space he leaves between chords is visually obvious—his hands are off the keys as much as they’re on. He uses every cubic foot of the huge space for his breathing. As Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.” A Zen proverb enhances that: “Music is the silence between the notes, and the spaces between the bars cage the tiger.”

Nowhere in music is the space between the notes more important than for the organist leading a hymn. You have an unfair advantage. According to Stravinsky, you can hold a huge chord until Monday afternoon without a break. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), the lung capacity of an adult human male averages about six liters. There’s a six-pack of liter bottles of seltzer in our pantry waiting to be introduced to whiskey, and it surprises me to think that my lungs would hold that much. It doesn’t feel that way when I’m walking uphill. But it’s a hiccup compared to the lungs of a pipe organ. With the privilege of leading a hymn comes the responsibility to allow singers to breathe.  

As you read, I imagine that you’re nodding sagely, thinking, “Oh yes, I always allow time to breathe.” Because of the amount of travel my work requires, I no longer lead hymns. I’m a follower. Frequently, as I gasp for breath, I wonder if my admittedly energetic hymn playing allowed those congregations time to breathe. I hope so.

I often write about my love for sailing. Friends seem surprised when I draw a parallel between a sailboat and a pipe organ, but for me, it’s simple. Both machines involve controlling the wind. You can describe the art of organ building as making air go where you want it, and keeping it from going where you don’t want it. When I’m at the helm, I harvest air, the same way David Briggs harvests space. I set the sail so it reaps maximum energy from the air. And to inform my organ playing, when I’m sailing, I use only a fraction of the air available. The huge volume of air above the surface of the ocean moves as a mass. Sometimes it’s moving slowly, and sometimes it’s flowing at great speed. I raise 400 square feet of canvas to capture thousands of cubic miles of moving air.³

Two weeks ago, we experienced a violent storm on mid-coast Maine. It blew over 60 miles per hour for 18 hours, and it rained hard. We were fortunate to avoid damage to our house, but friends and neighbors were not so lucky. Thousands of trees fell, there was no power, phone, or internet service for nine days, and it took emergency workers four days to open the road to town. I love wind. It’s my favorite part of weather. I love sitting on the deck with wind coming up the river. I love it when I’m sailing. But there’s such a thing as too much. That storm was too much. People in Houston and Puerto Rico know what too much wind can be.

When you’re playing a processional hymn, you’re Aeolus, god and ruler of the winds. You’re Zephyrus, god of the west wind. You have the wind at your fingertips. What a privilege, and what a responsibility. Use it wisely. Use it to create time and space. Use it to move a sailboat, not to knock down trees. Think of the spaces between the notes. Think of the clouds flowing across the sky. You’re the weather maker. You’re lucky.

Note: ‘It’s about time, it’s about space . . . .’ are the opening words of the theme song of a 1966 television sitcom by the creators of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ ‘Gilligan’ lasted three seasons while ‘It’s About Time’ lasted only one, a clear indication of the degree of artistic content. It has been an annoying earworm today as I try to conjure images far more grand.

Notes

1. There’s a slide show of photos of this church on the homepage of https://www.stjameslakewood.com/.

2. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

3. Ours is a 22-foot catboat with a single gaff-rigged sail.

Who you gonna call?

When I was an organ major at Oberlin in the mid-1970s, I had a part-time job working for Jan Leek, a first-generation Hollander who came to the United States to work for Walter Holtkamp and wound up as Oberlin’s organ and harpsichord technician. Traveling around the Ohio and Pennsylvania countryside with Jan making organ service calls, I learned to tune and learned the strengths and weaknesses of action systems of many different organbuilders. I moved back to Boston in 1984 with my wife and two young sons to join the workshop of Angerstein & Associates, where along with larger projects including the construction of new organs, I made hundreds of service calls. That workshop closed in 1987 when Daniel Angerstein was appointed tonal director for M. P. Möller, and I entered a decade during which I cared for as many as 125 organs each year as the Bishop Organ Company.

I’ve always been an advocate for diligent organ maintenance, but ironically, I’ve noticed in my work with the Organ Clearing House that century-old instruments that have never been maintained are sometimes the most valuable. The pipes are straight and true, the original voicing is intact, and there’s not a trace of duct tape anywhere. You remove a dense layer of grime (mostly carried out of the organ on your clothes) to reveal a pristine instrument. You might take that as an argument not to maintain an organ, but the truth is that I’ve found most of those organs in remote humble churches, where in many cases they haven’t been played for decades.

The challenge for the conscientious organ technician is not to leave a mark. If your tuning techniques damage pipes, you’re not doing it right. You should not leave scrape marks on the resonators with your tuning tools, and you shouldn’t tear open the slots of reed pipes. Cone-tuned pipes should stay cylindrical with their solder seams unviolated. Wiring harnesses should be neat and orderly, with no loopy add-ons. Floors and walkboards should be vacuumed and blower rooms should be kept clean.

There are legitimate excuses for fast-and-dirty repairs during service calls, especially if you’re correcting a nasty problem just before an important musical event. But if you do that, you owe it to the client to make it nice when you return.¹ And, when you do make a fast-and-dirty repair, you should adjust your toolkit to accommodate the next one. Did you use a scrap from a Sunday bulletin to refit the stopper of a Gedeckt pipe? Put some leather in your toolbox when you get home.

Many of the churches where I’ve maintained organs are now closed. Many others have diminished their programs and aren’t “doing music” anymore. Some tell me that they can’t find an organist, which is often because they’re not offering a proper salary, and some have “gone clappy.” In this climate, I think it’s increasingly important for organ technicians to be ready to help churches care properly and economically for their pipe organs.

Some churches charge their organists with curatorial responsibilities, purposely placing the care of the organ in the musician’s job description. Others do not, and it’s often a struggle to get boards and committees to grasp the concept of responsible care of their organs. It’s also important to note that while most churches once had full-time sextons or custodians, that position is often eliminated as budgets are cut. Lots of church buildings, especially larger ones, have sophisticated engineering plants that include HVAC, elevators, alarm systems, and sump pumps. The old-time church sexton knew to keep an eye on all that, and to be sure they were serviced and evaluated regularly. Hiring an outside vendor to clean the building does not replace the custodian. I think it makes sense for such a church to engage a mechanical engineer as consultant to visit the building a few times each year checking on machinery, and have volunteers clean the building.

A pipe organ is a machine like none other, a combination of liturgical art and industrial product. A layman might look inside an organ chamber and see a machine, but the musician sits on the bench facing a musical instrument. If you think that the governing bodies of your church don’t fully appreciate the value of their organ, I offer a few thoughts you might use to raise awareness.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

It’s an old saw, but besides your personal hygiene, there’s likely nowhere in your life where it rings truer than in your pipe organ. After fire, flood, and vandalism, dirt is the worst enemy of the pipe organ. An organ technician knows that a fleck of dust getting trapped on the armature of a chest magnet or the surface of a pallet is enough to cause a cipher. The leg of a spider will wreck the speech of a trumpet pipe, most likely one of the first five notes of the D-major scale, ready to spoil almost every wedding voluntary.

But where did that dirt come from? When building windchests, windlines, bellows, and wind regulators, the organbuilder tries hard to ensure that there’s no sawdust left inside. I have an air compressor and powerful vacuum cleaner permanently mounted by my workbench so I hardly have to take a step to clean the interior of a project I’m finishing.

Assuming that the organbuilder delivered a clean organ, the first obvious place for an organ to pick up dirt is in the blower room. Many organ blowers are located in remote basement rooms, and in many cases, there’s no one changing the light bulbs in basement corridors, and there’s no one in the building who knows what that thing is. We routinely find blower rooms chock full of detritus—remnants of Christmas pageants, church fairs, flea markets, and youth group car washes. Organ blowers can have electric motors of five horsepower or more, and I often see 90 or 100-year-old motors that throw impressive displays of sparks when they start up. If the ventilation is obstructed, a fire hazard is created. That sign from the 1972 church fair isn’t that important. Throw it away.

To illustrate the importance of cleanliness, I share our protocol for cleaning a blower room:

• Seal the blower intake with plastic and tape.

• Close the circuit breaker that provides power to the blower so it can’t be started accidentally.

• Vacuum, sweep, wash walls, ceiling, floor, blower housing, wind regulators, and ductwork.

• Leave the room undisturbed for 48 hours to allow dust to settle before opening and starting the blower.

Likewise, if a church fails to cover and protect their organ while the floor of the nave is sanded and refinished, they can expect serious trouble in the future.

Identification

As organist, you might be the only person in the church who can identify the areas occupied by the organ. Designate organ areas as “off limits,” with access limited to the organ technician. Nothing good will happen if the organ chamber is used for storage of old hymnals or folding chairs. Nothing good will happen if teenagers find their way inside to create a secret hidey-hole.² Nothing good will happen if the altar guild puts a vase full of water on the organ console, and, by the way, nothing good will happen if you put your coffee cup there.

The organ’s tuning will almost certainly be disrupted if someone goes into the chamber out of curiosity. Most things inside pipe organs that are not steps lack the “no step” marking, like the touchy areas on an aircraft wing have.

Insurance

Maybe that 1927 Skinner organ in your church (lucky you) cost $9,500 to build. In the early 1970s, a new two-manual Fisk organ cost less than $40,000. I’m frequently called as consultant when a church is making a claim for damage to their organ, working either for the church or the insurance company, and I’ve been in plenty of meetings where bad news about the difference between loss and coverage is announced. It’s both possible and wise to have the replacement value of an organ assessed every five or ten years, with that value named on the church’s insurance policy.

If the organ at your church sustains $250,000 of damage because of a roof leak, and the replacement value of the organ is not specifically listed on the church’s insurance policy, a lot of discussion is likely to lead to a disappointment.

What makes good maintenance?

It’s not realistic to make a sweeping statement about how much it should cost to maintain an organ. Some instruments require weekly, even daily attention, especially if they’re large and complex, in deteriorating condition, and in use in sophisticated music programs. Some instruments require almost no maintenance. A newer organ of modest size with cone-tuning could go five years or more without needing attention.

I suggest that every organ should be visited by a professional organ technician at least once a year, even if no tuning is needed, even if every note plays perfectly, even if all the indicators and accessories are working. The lubrication of the blower should be checked, and the interior of the instrument should be inspected to guard against that one pipe in the Pedal Trombone that has started to keel over. If it’s not caught before it falls, it will take the pedal flue pipes with it. A four-hour annual visit would prevent that.

It’s usual for an organ to be serviced twice a year. While it’s traditional for those service visits to be before Easter and Christmas, at least where I live in the temperate Northeast, Christmas and Easter can both be winter holidays, so it makes more sense to tune for cold weather and hot weather, or for heat on, heat off.

Most organs do not need to be thoroughly tuned during every visit. In fact, starting over with a new “A” and fresh temperament every time can be counterproductive, unless it’s a very small organ. While the stability of tuning varies from organ to organ, most instruments hold their basic tuning well. I generally start a tuning by checking the pitch stops in octaves from the console, writing down a few that need tuning, and check the organ stop-by-stop for inaccuracies. I list a couple dozen notes that need tuning and a half-dozen stops that don’t need anything, and I list which reed notes (or stops) need to be tuned. In that way, I can build on the stability of tuning established over years, keeping the broad picture of tuning clear and concise.

Regular organ maintenance should include cleaning keyboards, vacuuming under pedalboards (the tuner keeps the pencils), checking blower lubrication, and noting larger things that will need attention in the future. Tuners, if you see cracks in a leather gusset on a wind regulator, make a note with your invoice that it will need to be releathered within several years. Your client doesn’t want to hear bad news, but they don’t want a sudden failure and emergency expense either.

When you should call

The better you know your organ, the easier to judge. I once received a panicky call from an organist saying the entire organ had gone haywire. He was abusive over the phone, and demanded that I come right away. I dropped everything and made the 90-minute drive to the church. Haughtily, he demonstrated the cause of his concern. It took me just a few seconds to isolate one pipe in the Pedal Clarion. If he had bothered to look, he could have played without the Clarion for weeks, but I couldn’t tell him that, and I’ve carried the memory of that unpleasant encounter for more than 30 years.

You should call your tuner/technician when:

• You hear a big bang from inside the organ. (Once it was a raccoon tripping a Havahart trap!)

• You hear unusual wind noise. (In some organs, a big air leak like a blown reservoir can lead to the blower overheating.) 

• You hear unusual mechanical noise, grinding, thumping, squeaking, etc.

• You find paint chips in organ areas. (Is the ceiling falling in?)

• The organ blower has been left on accidentally for a long time. It’s a long time for a blower to run between Sundays.

• And obviously, when something important doesn’t work.

When you should not call

Sudden changes in climate often cause trouble with the operation of a pipe organ. Several days of heavy rain will raise the humidity inside a building so Swell shutters squeak and stick, keyboards get clammy and gummy, and the console rolltop gets stuck. If you can manage, simply let the organ be for several days. When conditions return to normal, chances are that things will start working again. Likewise, excessive dryness can cause trouble.

A couple years ago, I was rear-ended in heavy traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County, just north of New York City. I drive a full-size SUV and have a heavy-duty trailer hitch so while the Mercedes that hit me left a rainbow of fluids on the road under its crumpled radiator, the only damage to my car was that the back-up camera stopped working. As I’ve driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one, I didn’t bother to get it fixed, and I’m still perfectly happy driving the car.

If there’s a dead note in the middle octave of the Swell to Great coupler, call me and I’ll fix it. It’s important to the normal use of the organ. If there’s a dead note in the top octave of the Swell to Choir 4′ coupler, and it’s spoiling a melody in a certain piece you’re playing, choose a different registration, or choose a different piece. One good way to head your church toward giving up on the pipe organ is to spend a lot of money on single repairs that don’t matter much to the music. Remember that your church pays me the same for mileage and travel time whether I’m doing a full service call with dozens of little repairs, or making a special trip for a single issue. A cipher is a bigger issue than a dead note.

It’s important to the long life of an organ not to “overtune.” Believe it or not, many churches in northern climes do not have air-conditioning, and it’s usual for temperatures to climb into the 90s inside the organ during the summer. If an organ was built, voiced, and tuned for A=440 at 70°, you’ll ruin the reeds—really ruin them—if you try to tune them to the Principals at 90°. It doesn’t make sense to wreck an organ’s reeds for one wedding, no matter who is the bride.

One of the most difficult tuning assignments I’ve had was at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, in the early 1990s when Brian Jones, Ross Wood, and the Trinity Choir were making their spectacular and ever popular recording Candlelight Carols. It was surreal to sit in the pews in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweltering in mid-July heat, listening to David Willcocks’s fanfare and descant for O come, all ye faithful. Everyone wanted the organ to be in perfect tune, but it was my job to be sure that the organ’s spectacular antique Skinner reeds would live to see another real Christmas. More than 200,000 copies of that recording have been sold, so lots of you have a record of that tuning!

§

Remember what I said about those dead notes that are a nuisance but not critical to the use of the instrument? The most important part of the organist’s role in organ maintenance is keeping a list. Maintain a notebook on the console, and write down what you notice. You might hear a cipher in the middle of a hymn that goes away. If you can pay attention enough to identify anything about it (what division, what stop, what pitch), write it down. If you think of a question, write it down. Maybe you noticed a tuning problem during a hymn. Write down the hymn number and what piston you were using. I’ll play the hymn and find the problem.

When I make repairs, I can check things off your list, write comments about the cause, make suggestions for future repairs or adjustments, and invite you for coffee the next time. The console notebook is the most important tool for maintaining an organ.

Notes

1. As I write, I’m thinking of the three clients where I owe follow-up. You know who you are.

2. I once found a little love nest inside an organ, complete with cushions, blankets, candles, and burnt matches. What could happen?

Keeping up appearances

Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue in New York City run north and south, parallel to each other a block apart. Together they form one of the world’s premier high-end shopping districts starting around 34th Street and continuing north. On Fifth Avenue, the shopping district ends at 59th Street, which is the southern edge of Central Park, a few blocks north of Trump Tower, and on Madison Avenue it continues north to perhaps 86th. That’s where you find the shops where people pay more for a handbag than I pay for a car. Saks Fifth Avenue, Shreve, Crump & Low, and Tiffany & Co. are some of the big landmarks. Rolex, Ferragamo, Versace, and Louis Vuitton continue the roster along with a host of lesser but equally dear names. The NBA Sportswear Store and the Disney Store are newer arrivals that cater to a different crowd.

Manhattan’s Upper East Side boasts some of the most expensive residences in the world. There’s a four-floor, 20,000-square-foot, 16-bedroom place on Central Park South that’s listed for $250,000,000. If you can afford a place like that, you can certainly afford a $100,000 handbag.¹

The sidewalks in that neighborhood are full of designer people with designer handbags, designer dogs, and designer facelifts, doing their expensive best to show the world who they are. While I expect many of them live in multi-million dollar homes and can actually afford all that, I’m sure there are people spending above the reasonable limits of their disposable income, going deep into holes to keep up appearances.

I’m reminded of an exchange I overheard 40 years ago in an auto parts store in Oberlin, Ohio, when a fellow customer asked the clerk for a CB antenna. The clerk asked what kind of radio he had, and the customer relied, “I don’t have a radio, I just want people to think I do.” That CB antenna had a lot in common with a $100,000 handbag.

What you see is what you get.

The pipe organ is the only indoor monumental musical instrument, and the only one with the possibility of having an architectural identity. Of course, many organs are housed in chambers, separate from the rooms into which they speak. Some of those have façades of organ pipes, while others have simple screens of cloth and wood. I’ve always felt that there’s something dishonest about concealing an instrument behind a grille. I love the feeling of walking into a building and knowing right away that I’m in the presence of a pipe organ. Whether the organ displays a simple fence of pipes with some woodwork surrounding to hold them up, or it has a grand decorated case, either freestanding or projecting from the front of a chamber, the visual information about the instrument is an exciting prelude to hearing it.

We can argue about when the development of the modern pipe organ began, but since I’m the one writing and there’s no one else here just now, and since I know I can back this up simply enough just with photos, let’s say that things were rolling along pretty well by the middle of the 16th century. By then, many organs had been built that had multiple manuals, stop actions that were easy to operate, and highly decorated architectural cases. An important feature of many of those cases was the fact that one could tell a lot about the content and layout of the organ with only visual information. The layout of the façade directly reflected the number of manuals, the principal pitches, and even the layout of the windchests.

There’s typically a Rückpositiv installed on the balcony rail, which is necessarily played by the bottom manual, because the tracker action would go down to the floor behind the knee panel (sometimes called kick-panel) and then under the pedalboard to the balcony rail. There’s an impost, the heavy molding that traverses the organ case above the console, forming the transition from the narrow base of the organ to the wider upper case. That upper case contains the Hauptwerk (Great), which includes the central Principal Chorus, the tonal foundation of the organ. The layout of that façade might show that the windchests are arranged diatonically (odd-numbered notes on one side, evens on the other), and it might further show that the trebles of the chests are arranged so major thirds are adjacent to each other. That’s when the “C side” (whole tones C, D, E, F#, G#, A#) is split, so one side reads “C, E, G#” while the other reads “D, F#, A#.” Likewise, the C# side of the organ is split so one side reads “C#, F, A” and the other reads “D#, G, B.”

That may seem complicated, but it’s a simple reordering of the notes that results in lovely symmetrical visual appearance. Also, in an organ tuned in a historic temperament, when major thirds are adjacent, chords draw beautifully in harmony with each other.

If there are three manuals, the top one might be a Brustwerk (literally, “Breast Work”) located above the music rack and below the impost. That division would be based on a higher Principal pitch, and would contain smaller, lighter stops—likely an 8′ stopped flute such as a Gedeckt, a single 4′, mutations, upper work, and a reed with short, fractional resonators such as a Schalmei or Regal.

The top manual of a three-manual instrument could also be an Oberwerk, a separate division above the Hauptwerk at the top of the case. If there are four manuals, you might have both Oberwerk and Brustwerk in addition to the Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv.

Some people are better at judging measurements than others, but I’m guessing that if challenged, most anyone could tell the difference between 16 and 32 feet. And, you could also pretty easily guess at a succession of lengths, each half as long as the one previous. So you know all you need to know to judge the pitches of the divisions in an organ with classic case design. If you’re sure that the largest pipes in the pedal towers are 16-footers, then you can tell that the Principal pitch of the Hauptwerk is 8′, the Positiv is 4′, and the Brustwerk is 2′. If the Pedal has 32′ Principal, the Hauptwerk is 16′, the Positiv is 8′, and the Brustwerk is 4′. In a four-manual organ, the Oberwerk is likely to be an 8′ division, with smaller scales than the Hauptwerk.

Are you not sure you could tell the difference between a 16′ or 32′ pipe? Sixteen feet is a length or width measurement for a room in an average home. Our bedroom in New York is about 16 feet long. If you could get a 32-footer into your living room, you live in a big house!²

Werkprinzip is a twentieth-century term coined to describe an organ that’s arranged in clearly defined divisions that can be easily identified by viewing the façade. This simple and elegant style of organ design evolved from the simplest ancient organs where the keyboard of the Positiv division was on the back of the Positiv case, and the organist had to turn around to play it.

The Hamburger Schnitger

Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was a prolific organbuilder whose work influenced all of organ history since then. Forty-eight of his organs survive, a great achievement by modern standards. But when you realize that he accomplished all that without electricity, power tools, trucks, or even FedEx, Mr. Schnitger’s output seems staggering. I was introduced to his work as a kid by E. Power Biggs’s 1964 recording, The Golden Age of the Organ. Biggs was right in choosing that title. Schnitger’s organs were the epitome of the high Baroque with thrilling voicing, marvelous complex actions, and stunning architectural cases.  

One of his largest organs is in the Jacobikirche in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city. It has four manuals, 60 stops, and is a terrific example of a classic Werkprinzip organ. There are two 32′ pedal towers, a 16′ Hauptwerk, and an 8′ Rückpositiv visible. There are two additional divisions that cannot be identified just by looking at the façade, an 8′ Oberpositiv (at the top of the organ), and an 8′ Brustpositiv above the keydesk.³

The façades of the Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv cases reflect the windchest layout of major thirds. On either side of the large center towers, there are fields (flats) of façade pipes arranged with the largest in the center, the pipes getting smaller in each direction. I don’t know exactly which note is in the center of the flats, but by counting the pipes in the center and side towers, I’m guessing that it’s A# (below middle C) on the left, and B (below middle C) on the right. So starting in the center of the lower left flat and going toward one side, the pipes would be A#, D, F#, A#, D, F#—and in the other direction C, E, G#, C, E. To the right of the center tower, starting in the center, you have B, D#, G, B, D#, G#—and in the other direction C#, F, A, C#, F. If you’re confused, just think of these sequences as every other whole tone.

What window?

The First and Second Church in Boston, Massachusetts, is located at the corner of Berkeley and Marlborough Streets in the neighborhood known as the Back Bay. The fifth church building on that site was a large stone Gothic structure, built in 1867 with a large rose window and a tall stone steeple. The building housed a large Aeolian-Skinner organ—no coincidence, as William Zeuch, vice-president of Aeolian-Skinner, was organist of the church from 1930 until 1958, and famously played weekly organ recitals on Sunday afternoons to huge audiences.

There’s a story about that rose window. Leo Collins was organist at First and Second Church from 1964 until 1997. Shortly after he started there, interested in the newly emerging movement of the return to classic styles of organ building, he assembled an organ committee to research the possibilities of replacing the Aeolian-Skinner with a new tracker organ. Rudolf von Beckerath was invited to propose a new organ, and he traveled to Boston to present his design to the committee. Predictably enough, his drawing showed a tall free-standing organ case with pedal towers in front of the rose window. An elderly and proper woman, denizen of the Back Bay, asked him, “Mr. Beckerath, what about our window.” He replied, “We have covered windows lovelier than this.”

That project never happened because the building burned in 1968, leaving only the east wall with the rose window and the steeple. A new building was designed by architect Paul Rudolph that incorporated the remains of the stone edifice. Leo got what he wanted. The church commissioned a fine mechanical-action organ by Casavant Frères (Opus 3140, 1972) with three manuals and 64 ranks.⁴ I assume that the organ was paid for with the help of the insurance settlement after the fire. I first tuned the Casavant organ when I joined the staff of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and six organists later, I still maintain the instrument.

While it may seem apocryphal, the story about Beckerath and the rose window was told to me by Leo Collins, who was present at that meeting. That’s a good way to lose a job.

A new way to look at it

The Casavant organ at First Church in Boston is a great example of a modern Werkprinzip organ. If you’ve been paying attention as you read, you can tell instantly just by looking at the photo that the Pedal has a 16′ Principal, the Great (at the top of the main case) has an 8′ Principal, and the Positiv has a 4′. The modern adaption of the style allows for a large Swell division above the keydesk. You can see that the Great and Positiv are arranged in major thirds: the largest pipes in each of the spiky towers, from left to right, are C, C#, D, and D#. So the “C” tower has C, E, G#, C, E, G#­. The next has C#, F, A, C#, F, A. The next has D, F#, A#, D, F#, A#. And the last has D#, G, B, D#, G, B.

Though you can’t see it, behind the shutters, the Swell is arranged in major thirds, mirroring the Great and Positiv.

The arrangement of the Pedal tower is unconventional. There are three towers that start with C, C#, and D, so minor thirds are adjacent. That means that tuning the Pedal is arpeggios on diminished chords. I assume that the three-tower arrangement is for visual effect. The three spiky pedal towers nicely answer the four of the main case. Perhaps Paul Rudolph was involved in that design.

While tuning the minor-third Pedal division is arpeggios on diminished chords, tuning the major-third divisions provokes a parody on the main theme of Johann Strauss’s An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), which starts with the three notes of a major triad. Altering that theme by playing two adjacent major thirds, with the answering treble triads adjusted accordingly, provides a comical effect—just the right tonic after tuning all the mutations and mixtures in that fully equipped organ.

§

While I’m talking about pipe organ façades, there’s another interesting thought to share. Many organ cases, both ancient and modern, have large towers in their façades. Some are round or multi-sided in plan, while some are “pointed,” triangular in plan. It’s easy to identify them as purely architectural elements, but they also conserve space within the organ case, as they bear the largest pipes of an organ outside the confines of the case. Giving them rounded or pointed profiles also diminishes the width of the entire instrument. Standing five or seven 32′ pipes next to each other would add up to a lot of additional width.

§

Of course, many wonderful organs have been built with clearly defined internal divisions whose façades don’t reflect the internal design. The massive Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris is a good example. There is a massive wood case festooned with a procession of larger-than-life statues that take up so much space that it’s a wonder the sound can get out at all. What appears to be a Rückpositiv is actually concealing the back of the console. Of course, that’s not a reflection on the quality or content of the organ, just another way to present the instrument as a monumental work of visual art.

I’ve been in many churches where a modest organ is concealed behind a huge case. In some of those cases, the organ is a small, cheaper replacement for a much larger original instrument. But sometimes, the monumental case was designed by the architect of the building, and there was no funding for an instrument of appropriate size. That’s the equivalent of the guy in the auto parts store who didn’t have a radio but wanted an antenna for appearances, or buying a $100,000 handbag to imply that you live in a $100,000,000 house. Who’s going to wash the windows?

Notes

1. Maybe you think I’m kidding. Google “Hermès crocodile bag” and see what you get.

2. Our standard pitch designations refer to the “speaking length” of a pipe, which is the measurement from the bottom of the pipe’s mouth to its tuning point. Almost all façade pipes are two or three feet longer than speaking length to allow for the height of the pipe’s conical foot, and any “false length” at the top to allow for a tuning slot at the back. So a 32′ façade pipe is often close to 40 feet long. A standard semi-trailer passing you on the highway is 53 feet long. I’ve been working with pipe organs for more than 40 years, and I still marvel at the idea of a 32′ organ pipe, a thousand-pound whistle that can play one note at one volume level.

3. You can see the specifications of the Hamburg Schnitger organ here: http://www.arpschnitger.nl/shamb.html.

4. You can see the specifications of the First Church Casavant organ here: http://database.organsociety.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=23152.

When it’s time, it’s time.

Old friends from New Haven came to New York for an overnight visit on Friday, April 13. We heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play at Carnegie Hall that night, and spent Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were taking the train home in the afternoon and had luggage with them, so we took my car to the museum, and I found a lucky parking space on East 79th Street. After lunch, we returned to the car to learn that I had misread the signs and had been treated to a bright orange envelope tucked under my windshield wiper. Oh well. It was in the mid-seventies that day, so I turned on the air conditioning. Nothing. We drove down Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Terminal with the windows open.

New York is a great place to live, but as we have the luxury of a house in Maine, there are a few things we try to do only in Maine to avoid the city surcharge. Among others, our dentist, veterinarian, and dog groomers are in Maine. (Besides the exorbitant cost, you should see some of the fru-fru rainbow jobs that come out of Greenwich Village Doggie Spas!) Groceries and staples like paper products and cleaning supplies are far cheaper in Maine, with many items at half the city price. And car repairs. Sitting in the waiting room of a Manhattan garage, you just know that creepy stuff is going on behind the scenes. I waited until I got back to Maine to have the air conditioning checked.

I drive a 2008 Chevy Suburban, that big black job used by the Secret Service, FBI, and Tony Soprano. It has three rows of seats, so there are two air conditioners. Can you tell where this is going? The service manager came to the waiting room with bad news. It would cost $2,500 to fix the AC, and the check engine light was on, which meant another $850 for a pressure sensor in the fuel tank.

Traveling back and forth between New York and Maine, and thousands of miles visiting churches, organ shops, and job sites, I surpass the mileage limits of any auto lease, and a lot of that driving happens with heavy loads in the car, sometimes towing trailers. I use cars very hard. I have long figured that it is best for me to buy a car a year or two old with low mileage, letting someone else use up the high retail value of a brand new car, then drive it until it will not go any further. Since about 1980, I have driven six cars over 225,000 miles, two of those over 275,000. About halfway through that list, I experimented with a Dodge Grand Caravan—a mistake because although with seats out I could carry loaded eight-foot pipe trays, it was not a truck, and the transmission left at around 189,000. That is a lifetime total of over 1,500,000 miles, or an average of 43,000 miles a year.

The Suburban had just 225,000 miles on it, but I could not see spending over $3,300 on repairs, so I went shopping. Now I am in a 2017 Suburban, silver this time, so people will not think I am the limo they ordered and climb into the back seat. Gotta love New York.

Parts is parts.

As I went in and out of car dealerships over the last couple weeks, I was thinking about the business of car repair and replaceable parts. Henry Ford really had something there, figuring that any item that you might sell a lot of could be made of carefully designed and manufactured parts, identical in every separate unit. Every dealership I visited had a little van with “Parts Shuttle” written on the sides. I do not know how many different models of cars Chevrolet makes and could hardly guess how many parts there are in each one, but I imagine that each dealership needs access to hundreds of thousands of different parts. Some things are closer to universal. Maybe they only need to stock six different oil filters, and the 5.3 liter V8 engine in my Suburban is used in pickup trucks and vans as well as SUVs, so hundreds of engine parts overlap ten or twelve models. But it’s still a lot of parts.

There are plenty of differences between a Chevrolet, a Ford, and a Toyota, but if you saw a piston from an engine by each maker, you would have to be an expert to tell them apart. Windshield wipers are pretty close to universal, with their overall length being the biggest difference. In fact, as the designers of vehicles seek the perfect aerodynamic shape, cars built by many different companies look more and more alike.

Recently, a colleague posted a photo of a broken organ part, asking if anyone knew how to replace it. I recognized it immediately. It was a Bakelite lever used in the console combination actions of Casavant organs in the 1950s and 1960s, about six inches long, with an axle hole in the middle, and forks at each end that “click” into place. They transfer the motion of the drawknobs between levels of the combination action, moving the traces that carry the toggles that allow the stops to be set on pistons. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly . . .) When one breaks, the stop cannot be set on or off any piston, and the stop action won’t turn on.

I recognized it because in about 1980, my mentor Jan Leek and I faced just such a repair in an organ in Rocky River, Ohio. It was an organ technician’s nightmare. The console was tightly surrounded by carpenter-built choir risers that had to be substantially dismantled to reach the access panels, and once we were inside, it took a couple days to wrestle the broken part out. The axle was common to about fifteen of the levers, and it was less than an inch from the framework of the console side. We happened to have some Bakelite in the workshop, and even knew where it was, so we were able to make a half dozen replacements. That repair must have taken sixty or seventy hours.

Early in the twentieth century, the Austin Organ Company developed a distinctive style of “modern” organ console. They are easily recognizable with two rows of stop keys above the top keyboard, unique piston buttons on stems like lollipops, curved maple expression pedals, and shallow-dip keyboards whose keys are about twelve inches long and pivoted in the center. The combination action is in a tray at the top of the console, with a horizontal trace for each piston that carries toggles that click up or down when you move the stop keys to create settings. When you press a piston, a double contact system activates a pick-magnet that pulls up a little pivoted lever at the end of the trace and fires a huge solenoid that moves a bar that engages the lever and pulls the trace. The toggles on the trace move the stop tabs according to the setting. (. . . that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her . . .) The action of that solenoid provides the signature “ka-thump” sound of a piston firing in an Austin console.

The general construction of these Austin consoles is also unique. There is a simple steel frame that supports the table on which the keyboards sit. The side case panels, which include the track for the rolltop, screw to those frames, the back-panel screws to cleats on the side frames, and the top sits on top of it all. Voila! The traces, toggles, pick magnets, and springs of the combination action are all interchangeable. It is a very simple system. I wish that Casavant console in Rocky River had removable side panels.

But there is something funny about Austin consoles. A Massachusetts organ technician, William Laws, thought that design was just about perfect, and he waited until the original Austin patents expired, and immediately started producing “Austin Clones.” I learned this innocently enough thirty years ago, calling the Austin factory to order a new solenoid. In spite of the Laws nameplate, I assumed it was an Austin console. It was Gordon Auchincloss who took my call, and asked, “Is it an Austin or a Laws?”

Ernest Skinner was famous for his beautiful consoles. He worked incessantly developing the geometry of his consoles, striving for complete comfort for the musician. He used elegant materials, and machined controls were all specifically intended to have a signature feel to them. The half-inch travel of a stop knob, the quarter-inch motion of a piston button, and the superb action of the keyboards were all part of the experience of playing a Skinner organ. A Skinner combination action produces a unique “Phhht” at the press of a button, nothing like the Austin ka-thump. Harris Precision Products in California has developed two sizes of electro-magnetic drawknob motors that duplicate the feel of the Skinner drawknob, but gone is the pneumatic Phhht of the piston action. Even when a hundred knobs are moving at once, there is a minimal bump at the touch of a piston.

The funny thing about Harris drawknobs is that they are so well made, so easy to install, so reliable, and so quiet that many organbuilding companies use them. That is great for the organists because the knobs work perfectly, but gone is the individuality of different companies. Any experienced organist could tell the difference between a Skinner and an Austin console blindfolded, but Harris drawknobs are everywhere.

It’s the pipes.

The musical heart of any pipe organ is its pipes. That may seem a simple thing to say, but while it is easy to focus on knobs and keyboards, music rack lights, and blower switches, an organ is there to produce musical tone, and it does that by blowing air through pipes. We all know that an organ voice comprises a set of pipes, one for each note on the keyboard. Each pipe is unique with different length and diameter. It is possible to make identical sets of pipes. In fact, though I was never in the Möller factory while it was in operation, I am pretty sure they had identical “stock” ranks. I have worked on enough Möller Artistes to conclude that.

But when you make a rank of pipes, you cut sixty-one rectangles to make the cylindrical resonators, sixty-one pie-shaped pieces to make the conical feet, and sixty-one discs to make the languids. Each successive piece is a different size, the dimensions calculated using elegant mathematics. Three ratios make up the math of an organ pipe: the ratio between diameter and length (scale), the ratio between mouth width and circumference, and the ratio between mouth width and mouth height (cut-up). Even at its most mechanized, pipe making is a personal thing. I know of no robotic substitute for the pipe maker’s soldering iron. The quality of the pipe and ultimately its tone are the result of the mathematics and the skill of the pipe maker. The saying, if it looks good it will work properly, is nowhere truer than in the making of organ pipes. If the languid is loose inside the pipe, the speech will be poor. Because of all that, two ranks of pipes built to identical dimensions can never sound exactly alike.

There are many other factors that determine the sound of an organ pipe besides those three ratios. The composition of the metal is critical. Most metal pipes are made of a mixture of tin and lead. The most common spotted metal pipes are in roughly the range of 40%/60% to 60%/40% tin and lead. Go to 70%/30% or 30%/70% and you will have a different sound. The thickness of the metal is important to the quality of speech. A pipe made of thick metal will speak more reliably and more profoundly than one made of foil.

While the pistons from a Chevy or Ford look very much alike, the pipes from an Austin or a Holtkamp organ look nothing alike. And the pipes in organs by “handcraft firms” like Fritts, Richards-Fowkes, Fisk, or Noack look very different. I admit that I say that with over forty years of experience tuning organs by every builder you can think of, my eyes are as experienced as my ears. But the individual ethic, habits, tools, and philosophy of each pipe maker are different enough that no two craftspeople can make identical pipes.

What’s the difference?

Any good organ is a teacher, guiding a musician’s expression, inviting each musician to explore sounds and effects. Most organists participate in the choice of a new organ only rarely, if ever. And some organists only ever play on one instrument, whatever organ is owned by the church where they work. I get to play on many different organs in the course of any working month. It is one of the fun things about my work. I love experiencing and comparing different organs, gleaning what each organbuilder had in mind, mining the instrument for the richest sounds, the brightest colors, the most mystical effects.

I often refer to my tenure as curator of the organs at Trinity Church in Boston, the venerable pair of Skinner/Aeolian-Skinners matched with the magical LaFarge interior of the H. H. Richardson building. An important feature of the music program of that church continues to be weekly organ recitals, and as curator, I suppose I heard eighty or a hundred different people play that organ. For each player, the organ was different. Sometimes, the organ was victor and the experience was not so great. People could get eaten alive by the big unwieldy antiphonal beast. But the difference in the sound of the instrument as different masters played it was remarkable. Understanding how different organists could draw different things from a single instrument was one of the more important experiences of my organ education.

Likewise, I have heard single organists playing on many different instruments. That allows a glimpse into the musical personality and philosophy of the musician. Some seem to do the same thing with each instrument they play, while others bend their style and approach toward the instrument of the day.

I do not drive anywhere near as many different cars as I do organs. I drive Wendy’s car once in a while, and I drive rental cars when traveling on business, but almost all the driving I do is in that Chevy Suburban. Unlike the organ, I am not looking for means of expression when driving a car whether it is mine or not. When I mentioned to my colleague Amory that I was shopping for a car, he said, “Buy a Ford.” He drives a snazzy and beefy Ford pickup truck that’s perfect for his work. But I really liked my black Suburban. It was comfortable, quiet, and sturdy, all important for someone who has driven one-and-a-half-million miles. It is great for carrying tools and organ components, and for the boating side of my life, our eight-foot rowing dingy fits inside with the doors closed. Like a Skinner console, the geometry of the driving position fits me beautifully. (I know, I know, that’s a little romantic.) If all goes well, I will be driving the new one for 250,000 miles over eight or ten years. Come to think of it, it may be the last work car I buy.

Give it your life

For many people, a job is just a job. I’ve seen film clips of people working in industrial-scale meat packing facilities, flailing away at a relentless marching army of animal carcasses, videos that often accompany news stories about occupational injuries. Near where we live in Maine, there is a long tradition of monotonous food processing in the seafood business. If it was your job to shuck clams in a busy cannery, you were likely to put a knife through your palm at least once in your career.

Forty years ago, I had a landlord in Ohio who worked in the nearby Ford factory. Paul was an ebullient, fun-loving guy whose job was a means to an end. His skilled position came with a high hourly wage that enabled his muscle-car hobby. He played an aggressive game of poker and approached his fun at full throttle. He seemed proud to be the only one in his circle of friends who had flipped a car end-over-end in his driveway. His son had paid a high price for that lifestyle, confined to a wheelchair as the result of a teen-age sledding accident that involved adult beverages used childishly. That Ford factory was not the pride of Paul’s life. He did not consider his work there as his life’s mission. It simply allowed him to support his family and have fun.

My father was an Episcopal priest. Because of his service on Guam in World War II, he was not ordained until he was nearly thirty, but he was a priest every day of his life until his death a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday. That was his calling, and he was faithful to it through his last breath.

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who helps writers prepare their manuscripts and sell them to publishing companies. Her work brings richness to my life as I am exposed to her clients, sharing meals with them, and learning about their passions. A university professor who is passionate about Civil War history is just as devoted to his trade as any musician or instrument builder I have known. He puts down his fork, and with arms waving, describes a slavery document he has discovered, demonstrating its significance to concurrent events. When two or more are gathered, it is comparable to the table full of organbuilders talking earnestly into the night about mixture compositions or the best brass for reed tongues.

Some of the writers I have met are not devoted for life to a particular study but to the art of storytelling, whether fiction or non-fiction. One of Wendy’s clients, environmental journalist Katherine Miles, has written books about an Irish famine ship, celebrated because not a single immigrant died on board in ten years of constant voyages; about Super Storm Sandy and the inadequacies of weather forecasting in the United States; and about earthquakes. Did you know there is a nuclear power plant, built on a geological fault line, twenty-four miles north of Manhattan? What could happen? Google “Explosion at Indian Point Power Plant” and you will find newspaper stories with headlines like, “Explosion closes Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City; no danger of radiation leak.” (New York Post, November 8, 2010). Kate’s next book is in the mill right now. Bet you’re interested to know what it is about.

A modern Renaissance

I am thinking today about people who are passionate about their work because two colleagues, seniors in the field of organbuilding, are traveling together in Morocco, posting photos on Facebook as they go. Gene Bedient and John Brombaugh, two berets in a land of fezzes, are seen at an olive market, in the Medinah of Marrakech, at the Grand Mosque in Casablanca, and returning from an evening at Rick’s Café. One photo shows John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back. I commented, “I’ve had jobs like that.”

John apprenticed with Charles Fisk and Fritz Noack and worked as a journeyman for Rudolf von Beckerath. In 1971, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to study historic European organs. He founded his fabled firm, John Brombaugh & Company, in 1968 in Germantown, Ohio. In 1977, the firm was reorganized as John Brombaugh & Associates, Inc., and moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he continued building trend-setting instruments until his retirement in 2005.

Gene Bedient founded the Bedient Organ Company in 1969. When he retired in 2010, it was reorganized as the Bedient Pipe Organ Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, LLC, and continues to produce fine instruments with some of Gene’s former employees at the helm.

The Noack Organ Company, founded in 1960, and C. B. Fisk, Inc., founded in 1961, were among the first of a wave of new firms founded by young men passionate about the pipe organ, especially as it was built in Northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with Brombaugh and Bedient, other firms that followed included Hellmuth Wolff (1968), Karl Wilhelm (1966), and Bozeman-Gibson (1971).

Some of the earliest work on tracker-action organs in the United States was accomplished by the Andover Organ Company, founded in 1948 at the very cusp of “The Movement,” operated and owned for several years by Charles Fisk, and continuing seventy years later as prominent builders and restorers of pipe organs. Fisk founded his eponymous firm in nearby Gloucester, Massachusetts, close to his family’s summer home, and Noack came from Germany to work with Fisk, so the early location of the Andover Organ Company can be traced as a principal reason why so much mid-twentieth-century activity in the pipe organ world was centered in Boston. The proximity of the New England Conservatory of Music added to the excitement with its vibrant community of young organists arriving in town every year.

Here are a few more regional tidbits. E. Power Biggs lived on Highland Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became organist of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Harvard Square in 1932. He was famously fired from that position because the rector felt that his concert career was detracting from his work at the church. On January 2, 1935, Charles Fisk, a boy chorister there at the time, noted in his diary “I went to choir practice, Mr. Bigs [sic] wasn’t there.”¹ As an apprentice with Walter Holtkamp, Fisk worked on the 1956 installation of the organ at St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (my father’s alma mater and the site of my first organ lessons). Melville Smith, the director of the neighboring Longy School of Music and organist for the seminary, was an early proponent of the resurgence of tracker organs.  

There must have been a moment when Smith, Biggs, Holtkamp, and Fisk were together in that cramped loft, discussing one of the first modern Rückpositiv divisions. It would have been around that time when Biggs commissioned the now-revered organ by Flentrop for installation at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall), as the organ was installed in 1957. C. B. Fisk was founded just four years later.

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If you made a list of every American organbuilding firm founded in the United States between 1960 and 1975, and a list of all the people who worked for them and tried to draw lines to connect all the relationships, it would look like the Etch A Sketch^® you got for Christmas in 1966 after you tried to color in the whole screen. Take it back a step: Charles Fisk apprenticed with Walter Holtkamp in the mid 1950s, John Brombaugh worked with both Noack and Fisk before starting his firm, George Bozeman worked with Otto Hoffman in Texas, then with Noack. Fritz Noack once said he figured that most organ guys in the United States whose first name is John worked for him at one time. That list would include Brombaugh, Boody, Dower, and Farmer (but not me!).

A new wave of firms emerged during the 1970s, including Taylor & Boody (who both worked with Brombaugh) and Richards-Fowkes (who both worked with Brombaugh), you get the picture.

Because of a few posts on Facebook, I am painting a picture of a dramatic movement within the worlds of arts and humanities. While it is hard to pin down exactly who started it, E. Power Biggs is a good guess. Between 1942 and 1958, Biggs hosted a weekly radio program on the CBS Radio Network, using the experimental, trendsetting Aeolian-Skinner organ at Busch Hall, the organ replaced by the new Flentrop in 1958. The radio broadcasts were abruptly cancelled shortly after the installation of the Flentop organ. His revered recording, Bach: Organ Favorites was released in 1961, the same year as the founding of C. B. Fisk.

Unlike the chairperson of the fund-raising dinner whose life is ruined for leaving someone off the list of people to thank, I know very well that I am unable to name everyone who has been important to this movement. But as I look at the photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, I reflect on how that grand generation of inquisitive masters has passed the baton to their successors.

Charles Fisk died of cancer in 1983 at the age of fifty-eight. As someone who is just turning sixty-two, I admire Charlie’s profound contribution to the world of the organ, and the wider world in general. His company’s website (www.cbfisk.com) includes a beautifully written biography of Charlie and of his philosophies. The bottom of that page bears a quote from him: “The organ is a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to seem to be alive.” That philosophy stands as mantra for that generation of organbuilders and all who follow them. One might say, a mantra for a Montre.

John Brombaugh, Karl Wilhelm, Fritz Noack, and George Bozeman are in their eighties. Gene Bedient, John Boody, George Taylor, and Manuel Rosales are in their seventies. Collectively, these masters and their peers are responsible for the creation of hundreds of individual instruments. But there is so much more. Along with luminary performers like Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and John Eliot Gardiner, they changed the world of music. Through their intensive studies of instruments built by earlier masters, they brought a new vitality to our instrument, and inspired generations of musicians to explore the symbiotic relationships between historic repertory, the people who played it, and the instruments they played it on.

I do not intend this to be read as though the classically inspired tracker-action organ is the way, the truth, and the life. I like to think that the “organ wars” of the 1970s and 1980s are over. I am often asked which type of organ I prefer, and I always answer that I prefer good organs. My favorite organ is the best organ I have heard today. An important result of the narrowly named “tracker organ revival” is that the emphasis on excellent craftsmanship inspired new understanding of the work of geniuses like Ernest Skinner, who built organs in a comparatively huge factory with hundreds of workers but maintained a level of quality and history of innovation that allow his century-old organs to sing like Fisk’s ideal as a living organism. It has been nearly forty years since the Organ Clearing House first added a Skinner organ to the list of available instruments, joining the seemingly endless list of organs by Hook & Hastings, Hutchings, and Jardine.

That revived awareness has led to the heritage of firms like Schoenstein, Lively-Fulcher, and Nichols & Simpson who specialize in building high-quality electro-pneumatic organs with deep artistic content. Likewise, we are blessed with a generation of young organists who are comfortable playing on any style of instrument, placing the beauty of the music above bias regarding the medium. If an artist can revel in playing the music of Bach on an organ by Silbermann or Paul Fritts, so can an artist revel in playing her own transcription of a Wagner overture on an organ by Skinner or Schoenstein. The Skinner organ informs the performance of the transcription as fully as the Silbermann informs Bach.

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There is a historic building in our little village in Maine that has been home to a fine fresh seafood market on the left side of the ground floor. The symmetrical right side housed a leather shop until recently—the two businesses share a set of three central steps up from the sidewalk. A couple years ago, August Avantaggio, a local young man who is the son of the beloved, now deceased area surgeon, fulfilled his lifelong ambition of opening a butcher shop in the space next to the fish market. He was joined right away by two thirty-something guys who are as passionate about their work as any lifelong organbuilder is about our instrument. They source the meat they sell from local organic and free-range farmers, and they cut and package it expertly. I was in the store one afternoon (those who know me can easily guess that I am in there frequently) looking for something good for supper, and spent a few extra minutes watching Ryan take apart a side of beef. I asked him to narrate for me, and when he started with the Latin names of the various muscles, I knew I was talking with someone who cares about his work.

The Riverside Butcher Company is the antithesis of the punishing and cruel industrial meat packers I mentioned at the outset. They offer the finest products using the finest materials, and the apex of craftsmanship. You could almost be describing an organbuilding shop. Of course, things are a little a more expensive there. But one bite of that $7 per pound whole chicken, perfectly roasted, provides a symphony of sensations. It just is that much better. Last fall, Wendy and I hosted a reunion of her father’s extended family. They are all of German heritage and we thought a sausage cookout with a tub of sauerkraut would be a big hit. August pointed me to a website with hundreds of recipes for sausages, and I conferred with Ross to choose just the right ones. What fun it was to pick up fifty pounds of custom-made sausages and run the grill that evening.

There are lots of ways to criticize the impact Facebook has had on our culture, but when I see a photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, and another of Gene Bedient standing in a picturesque Moroccan square, I felt a fun connection to the band of people who are my colleagues in this unique compelling field. My work with the Organ Clearing House is special to me because it brings me into direct contact with so many of you—you who have elevated the art through life-long dedication.  

Building a single pipe organ is an expression of ambition and joy mixed with moments of confusion, questioning, anxiety, and uncertainty. Building a hundred pipe organs expands all that exponentially. Working together with a band of like-minded people, all working in parallel, produces more than just a lot of organs, more than a trade, more than a movement. It is an expression of the best of the humanities. And it comes at a time in our history when celebrating the best of humanity is heartwarming, reassuring, and necessary.  

Good work, friends. Keep it up, pass it on, and feed the monkey.

Notes

1. Craig Whitney, All the Stops, Public-Affairs, 2003, p. 86.