The Cathedral of St. John Celebrates Ten Years of Cathedral Commissions

The A Team:
Antoinette Vischer’s
Commissions for Harpsichord

Marguerite Bertha Antoinette Vischer (born February 13, 1909, in Basel, Switzerland) was the only child of a wealthy banker and his wife. She began her musical career as a pianist, and, with the connections that her affluent family was able to provide, had a fair success, although her hands were smaller than ideal for a pianistic career. In 1931 Vischer began her harpsichord studies in Vienna with Herr Erhard Kranz, and there she made her debut as a harpsichordist on an instrument of undoubtedly sturdy character, as was the wont of Germanic production instruments of the time. A brief press notice of the concert informed the public that “Fräulein Vischer played Bach’s C Minor Fantasia and Fugue on a harpsichord loaned by Herr von Hoboken.”

During the same year, probably at the suggestion of Basel’s musical guru Paul Sacher, Vischer studied with Wanda Lan-dowska, the reigning priestess of the harpsichord, at her “temple of early music” in St-Leu-la-Fôret, near Paris. Although it is not known just how many lessons Vischer had with Mme. Landowska, a communication regarding the price of study exists in the Vischer Collection at the Sacher Foundation: private lessons cost 400 French francs each; a bargain package of three could be had for 1,000.

Rolf Liebermann

Back home in Switzerland, Vischer spent the next 21 years concentrating on “old” music. She developed a group of devotees for her early music house concerts, many of them with collaborators Max Meili, tenor, and Fritz Wörsching, lutenist. It was the Swiss composer and international opera administrator Rolf Liebermann who initiated Vischer’s interest in contemporary music, beginning with a question to her, “Why only old music?” Since the harpsichordist admired Liebermann’s polyphonic style of writing, she offered her first commission to him, resulting in his Musique pour clavecin in 1952. An astute multi-faceted musician and administrator, Liebermann encouraged Vischer to record. Her first essay in this format included Liebermann’s new piece as well as a work by another Swiss composer, George Gruntz.

Bohuslav Martinů

Liebermann also served as Vischer’s conduit to other composers: a 1958 letter affirms his fulfillment of Vischer’s wish that he contact Bohuslav Martinů, the Czech composer, at that time resident in Switzerland. This connection led to one of Vischer’s finest commissions, Martinů’s 1958 Sonate pour clavecin, as well as his Deux Impromptus, two small satellite pieces completed in 1959, the year of the expatriate composer’s death.

From that first 1952 commission until Vischer’s death in 1973 she commissioned at least 44 new works that bolstered (and sometimes battered) the contemporary harpsichord repertoire. Composers rarely refused her offers: that she was the only daughter of a Swiss banker doubtless helped, but it was evident as well that she was interested in novel forms of musical expression—the more startling the sounds, or the method of producing them, the better.

Maurice Ohana

In 1960 Vischer turned to the French-Spanish-Moroccan composer Maurice Ohana. His Carillons for the Hours of the Day and of the Night incorporated bell-like clusters, the French folksong Frère Jacques, and, for the accommodation of her small hands, two wooden rulers, one 12-inch, one 13½-inch, to achieve the spans of large diatonic and chromatic tone clusters, triple forte, composed as conclusion for the evocative work.

Luciano Berio

Vischer first met Luciano Berio during the intermission of a concert in Basel, and she gladly accepted the composer’s invitation to visit him in Milan. Was it, perhaps, the influence of the “many shared whiskeys” which led to the unusual format of that harpsichord composition, Rounds? This graphic work is to be played right-side up, then upside down, and finally repeated in its original format, but at a faster tempo. Perhaps because of the vocal prowess of Berio’s wife Cathy Berberian, a voice part was added for an alternative version, which was the one Vischer chose to employ for her recording of the work.

In the waning years of the twentieth century when I visited the Sacher Foundation for some research in the Vischer Collection, it was a delight to discover a letter to Vischer from my first harpsichord teacher, Isolde Ahlgrimm, who wrote:

Congratulations on the recording [of] the Berio piece . . . . I find it fantastically played. I am, presently, in need of help because one of my students wishes to play the Berio without voice part, and I cannot read this notation. Never-the-less I am of the opinion that one cannot disregard this music, which is much better written than all the ‘Pseudo-Bach’ with wrong notes. (Letter dated February 10, 1970)

Cathy Berberian

The visit to Milan also resulted in a second commission: “Hurrah!” wrote Vischer. “Cathy [Berberian] will make for me a piece. I think some sort of moscitos [sic] played with the right hand, and the left has to kill the moscito with claps on my knee!” The “score” of this creation consists of a pre-addressed postcard to be mailed to the composer, with the request for a return message; a table for translating that message into a rhythmic form of Morse code; a sample sketch of how this all works, followed by an outline of a possible performance, illustrating how the right hand begins playing notes at the very top of the keyboard, then descends gradually to the bass register, finally killing the imaginary buzzing mosquito by slapping the right hand with the left and exclaiming loudly “SPLAT.” The title of this “drama in music,” Morsicathy, is a four-way pun: Morsi is the Morse code used for the rhythm; Cathy is the author of the original message and the piece; Morsicat(h)y is the phonetic spelling of the Italian word “morsicati” or “bitten”—the fate of mosquito victims; Mors is the Latin word for death, and also the fate of THIS imaginary insect.

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller

Berberian’s piece is a jolly scherzo compared to the mega-happening created by Americans John Cage and Lejaren Hiller. As early as 1962 Vischer had requested a work from the bad boy of chance music (John Cage), and had been put off with the suggestion that she consider performing a work that already existed: his models of indeterminacy Variations I and II. By 1967, however, Cage was thinking forward to a grand-scale extravaganza that came to be known as HPSCHD (the computer’s six-letter name for the instrument).

While engaged in another of his “chance” performances, Cage typed a letter to Vischer (the amplified sounds of his typewriter forming one strand of the in-progress composition), requesting that she consider a trip to Illinois for the realization of his HPSCHD master plan. Eventually, it all came together, comprising the simultaneous collaboration of seven harpsichordists playing random bits, Mozart excerpts chosen according to patterns from the Chinese I Ching, together with the assistance of 52 tape machines, 59 power amplifiers, 59 loud speakers, 40 projected motion-picture films, 208 computer-generated tapes, 6,400 slides shown by 64 projectors . . . a dizzying and overwhelming four and one-half hour assault on the senses in this May 16, 1969, premiere at the Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois, Urbana. The New York Times described it as “the multimedia event of the decade.”

In a review of the Nonesuch recording of HPSCHD, Igor Kipnis commented that “At first noisy, this ‘experience’ ultimately becomes one of tedium and almost unrelieved boredom. Personally, I find the New York Subway offers as much sonic anarchy, and at least there you are getting from one place to another.” (Stereo Review, May 1970, p. 121.)

The price for this celebrity commission was 1,000 Swiss francs, the same amount paid to Martinů for his Sonate.

Duke Ellington

Another Vischer commission is the only harpsichord-related piece from the great jazz artist Duke Ellington, who at the request of a friend, had sent a copy of his A Single Petal of a Rose to Vischer at Christmas 1965. A longtime aficionado of jazz, Vischer included it on her Wergo recording Das moderne Cembalo, although correspondence shows that she was not certain if this work was dedicated to her, or whether the Duke planned to write something else for her. When at last she had the opportunity to meet Ellington following his concert in Basel, she presented him with a tape of her performance. As she remarked, “The tape fit under the arm more easily than a harpsichord.” Ellington was quite pleased with the sound of the piece on her instrument, but he had to admit that he could not dedicate the work to her because it was “already dedicated to another lady.” “Who might that be?” she inquired. “Why, Her Majesty, the Queen of England,” Ellington responded. 

Györgi Ligeti

When Hungarian composer György Ligeti moved to the West in 1956 he espoused electronic music and the current avant-garde musical scene almost immediately. It was, however, not until 1965 that Vischer contacted him to suggest the possibility of a commission. He assured her right away that he was interested, and that the size of her hands would present no difficulty, since he planned to write something using narrow intervals. Completed in January 1968, Ligeti’s ”four-minute-or-less” composition Continuum is undoubtedly THE masterwork of all Vischer’s commissions. It holds the position, for many of us, as the single most original solo harpsichord composition of the twentieth century.

Some of the composer’s written comments to Vischer are enlightening: “I conceived the work completely from the instrument.” [January 30, 1968.] “It should sound like a Zephyr wind—more like Debussy, had he composed for harpsichord.” [April 11, 1968.] “Play Continuum irrationally fast: even faster than possible.” [February 15, 1968.] Improbable velocity is exactly what Vischer achieved in her recording! That the notes may have been recorded an octave lower and re-recorded at double speed is made clear by Ligeti’s constant urging Vischer to play faster and his additional comments about recording studio manipulation in a letter of June 19, 1968, and by the known fact that Vischer’s virtuosity did not extend to this level of dexterity in any other of her known performances.

It was, as well, an expensive commission for her: Ligeti refused to accept the standard 1,000 Swiss franc honorarium and charged her double that amount, explaining, “I spend much time on small works, reworking them to my satisfaction.” [October 16, 1965.] The sheer physical effort of writing so many notes was certainly worth the higher fee, as was the outstanding masterpiece received. At last a genius had provided a harpsichord work totally without any neo-baroque tendencies or antique references, but one that fit the instrument’s capabilities in a perfectly idiomatic manner by exploiting the trill and tremolando throughout.

Mauricio Kagel

The final work added to the Vischer catalog was Recitative-Varie for Singing Harpsichordist by Mauricio Kagel. This creation is yet another mini-drama in which the female performer makes her entrance very slowly, proceeding with small steps while uttering some German titles from Bach cantatas, the words connected in such non-sequential ways that they become obscene. The vocal technique required is known as Sprechstimme, half speaking, half singing while employing non-specific pitches. The two hands are placed together in an attitude of prayer, these visual requirements all meant to remind an audience of the pre-performance mannerisms associated with Wanda Landowska. After being seated at the instrument, the harpsichordist accompanies herself only with the left hand in “um-pah-pah” bass patterns borrowed from a Chopin nocturne, while continuing her vocal Bach-babbling. At the end, a lethargic exit from the stage completes the choreography.

Vischer never performed this ultimate work. She wrote to Kagel that her voice would not be adequate for the task, and that for someone else to learn the part would take an immense amount of time. He replied that “apparently, she had not understood the humor of the piece, and that a beautiful voice was unnecessary for its authentic performance.” One doubts that a faux-Landowska performance of the Kagel work would have done any damage to Vischer’s reputation, just as one imagines that this “camel” [meaning a hybrid constructed of opposites] was probably much better for her health than the number of Camels [American cigarettes] that she chain-smoked every day.

Vischer died of a heart attack in December 1973, just three months after the death of her father; the only child did not survive for long without family. Her legacy of 44 new works for the harpsichord almost certainly means that she will not be forgotten. Her friend, the distinguished Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, contributed these perceptive words to the notes for her first major recording (dated December 24, 1966):

Antoinette Vischer has gone down in the annals of musical history in the most legitimate manner: as patroness. She caused the modern and ultra-modern composers of our time to interest themselves in an old-fashioned instrument—the harpsichord. As a result, an old-fashioned instrument became modern, and its abstract quality suited modern music. By commissioning compositions for it, Antoinette Vischer led modern music on to new paths. The manner in which she did this proves how consciously she proceeded
. . . . She knew whom she was ordering from, and was supplied with what she wanted: musical portraits by composers of themselves, in that they had to occupy themselves with apparently unfamiliar tasks. Thus, through the wiles of a woman once again, something new was born.” [Reprinted in Ule Troxler, Antoinette Vischer: Dokumente, p. 10; translated from the German by LP]

Follow the money

In August of 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, ending a long process of suspicion, investigation, and Senate hearings into allegations that the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) used subterfuge and “dirty tricks” to sabotage the efforts of the Democratic Party leading up to the presidential election in 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post, were central to that investigation, jumping on the story of the notorious break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex near the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. They worked so closely together that they were known by their names melded as “Woodstein.” The story as they told it is widely regarded as the birth of modern investigative journalism.

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation, Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), which was a precursor to the 1976 movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. There’s a scene in the film where Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) is interviewing an accountant who worked for CREEP, who revealed that there was a stash of money—a secret fund—that was used to bankroll those dirty tricks. As Bernstein questioned her, she said, “Follow the money.” I suppose that phrase had been used before, but it’s popularly understood that it originated in that movie.

Woodward and Bernstein followed the money, which led them to discovering how many White House officials and Nixon appointees were involved in the scandal, ultimately unraveling Nixon’s presidency. I’m writing this in mid-September, and I realize that you will likely be reading it a few days before Americans go to the polls to decide what must be one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in the nation’s history.

Don’t take it for granted.

When I was a kid, I had practice privileges in four different local churches. I came and went as I pleased and made plenty of noise while I was there. I even had keys to a couple of them. One was the church where I had my lessons. Looking back, I suppose my teacher had made the arrangements for me, but I don’t remember any of the details. If I remember right, I played for an occasional funeral—I guess that was in return for the right to practice. I’m pretty sure that money never changed hands, and I know I took it for granted. Wasn’t I lucky?

When I arrived at Oberlin as a student in the fall of 1974, I was flabbergasted by the number of organs. There were sixteen practice organs, four in teaching studios, a big Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, and the brand-new Flentrop in Warner Concert Hall. Organ majors had two weekly lessons—one in the studio and one in the concert hall. And of course, we needed practice time in the hall. That was the way things worked, and I never paid attention to how frustrating it must have been for students studying other instruments. If you wanted to rehearse a string quartet in Warner Hall, you had to sneak past all those organists.

Of course, Oberlin also had a lot of pianos—hundreds of them. There was a marble plaque on the wall near the dean’s office that read, “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Music.”¹ I remember paraphrasing it: “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Steinway & Sons.” There were close to two hundred Steinways in the practice building, Robertson Hall. There was a Steinway “B” in every teaching studio, and two Bs in every piano teacher’s studio. Two Bs, or not two Bs, there was no question that we had access to excellent instruments wherever we turned. I suppose there were close to three hundred pianos. I wonder what that cost? The pianos were there in support of all the students—flautists, singers, violinists—but the organists sure ate up most of the real estate. 

We all had our favorite instruments. I certainly knew which practice organs I preferred, but I also had a half-dozen favorite pianos. I knew them by room number and serial number. Wasn’t I lucky to have a half dozen favorites out of the multitude? I once had a dream that Oberlin was replacing all the pianos at once, and they were discarding all the old ones. To make the disposal easier in the wacky world of dreams, the pianos were placed on the curb in front of houses all over town for trash day, and we raced about, looking at serial numbers to claim our favorites. I found mine on the curb in front of Fenner Douglass’s house on Morgan Street—the one with the big organ pipe out front. Lucky guy.

WWFS? What would Freud say? That I took it for granted that lovely instruments would be provided for me wherever I went? That I felt it was somehow my right? That was the time when I was getting deep into organ building and started to realize how much money was involved.

I’ve heard colleagues say something like this: “I’ll accept that job, but I told them they’ll have to buy me a new organ.” Have you ever heard anything like that? Have you ever said anything like that?

A crazy business

Picture a parish church with 250 “pledging units.” The organ is a broken-down, tired relic, and someone gets the idea that it should be replaced. How do we get started? What’s it going to cost? However they get started, somewhere along the line they start receiving proposals from organbuilders. $650,000. $800,000. $1,200,000. Wow! I had no idea.

To pay for an $800,000 instrument, every family in that church would have to donate $3,200. To pay for $1.2M instrument, more like $4,800. Of course, it never works like that. More likely, one family gives a third of the cost, three other families split the second third, and the rest comes in small gifts from the other 246 families. The smallest gift comes from the First Grade Class of the Sunday School.

Let’s think about this. A small community of people ponies up an average of $3,200 a head to buy a musical instrument. Crazy. Are they doing that as a gift to the organist? I doubt it. They may be doing it in recognition and appreciation for the wonderful music. The organist’s artistry may have inspired them. And they may be doing it in part to be sure they’ll be able to attract the next good musician. Whatever the motivation, we shouldn’t fail to notice what a remarkable process that is.

One brick at a time

Last April, Wendy and I spent ten days in the UK. She was attending the London Book Fair, so I had a few days on my own to explore the big city. After the fair, we traveled to Durham, to York, and to Oxford, especially visiting big churches and their organs.

I wrote about that trip in the June and July 2016 issues of The Diapason and touched on how the British National Lottery provides funding for the restoration of the pipe organs and church buildings through a program called Heritage Lottery Fund, which is dedicated to preserving the nation’s heritage. Durham Cathedral was built between 1093 and 1133, and a major renovation project is underway now. Dubbed “Open Treasure,” the project is focused not only on the fabric of the building, but on programming involving the use of the spaces as well. You can read about the project on the website: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/open-treasure. 

The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the project in large part, but Durham Cathedral is responsible for raising a huge amount of the money. And there’s a marvelous project as part of that campaign. In the gift shop, a large and ancient room that also houses a restaurant, there was a Lego™ model of the cathedral under construction. It’s more than 12½ feet long, 5½ feet tall, and includes more than 300,000 bricks. For a donation of £1 per brick, you could add to the model. We gave £20, and with the help of a cheerful volunteer wearing an “Open Treasure” sweatshirt, I followed architectural drawings to install my 20 bricks.

There’s a website describing that project: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/visit/what-to-visit/durham-cathedral-lego-bui…. When I looked at it this morning, I learned that the project, which started in July of 2013, is now complete. That webpage includes a video in five parts that animates the history of the cathedral using Lego™ bricks, with terrific singing by the cathedral choir in the background.

A note to readers: I hope you open the links I publish with this column. And Google “Durham Cathedral Lego.” You’ll find lots of newspaper coverage of this unique project.

In the July issue, I shared the tenth-century story of St. Cuthbert and the missing cow, part of the legend of the founding of the cathedral. There’s a commemorative statue of a cow high on the exterior of the cathedral, and there’s a Lego™ cow in the model, along with a representation of the famous poly-chromed façade of the cathedral organ, notable because it sports two 16′ Open Wood Diapasons, one which extends to 32′! Now we’re talking.

Buy a pipe.

The idea of buying bricks is not new. There are a couple bricks with our names on them in the path leading to the Skidompha² Library in Damariscotta, Maine (population 2,218). And my grandparents donated stones in honor of me, my three siblings, and ten first cousins for the construction of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I have no idea where those stones are located, but whenever I’m there, I look up and think about it.

A common gimmick for raising money for an organ project is “Buy a Pipe,” or “Adopt a Pipe.” The organbuilder and organ committee team up to create a catalogue of prices. You could list anything from a 13/5′ Tierce ($800) to a 32′ Bombarde ($75,000); a keyboard ($3,500) to a blower ($5,000). Donors could mark boxes on a form, and send in their checks. I’ve seen organ benches, carved pipe shades, and swell boxes listed as family gifts in dedication booklets. I’ve even seen an antiphonal Trompette-en-Chamade with the knob engraved Trompette Boyd, in memory of the son who died in the war.

This exercise is always a little mythical—it’s hard to make a list that accurately covers the entire cost of an organ. Windlines, schwimmers, ladders, and walkboards don’t make appealing memorials. Maybe you inflate the value of a music rack to cover a tuner’s perch. But it certainly is meaningful to donors to know they supported something specific. I often quip that raising money to build an organ is easier if there will be lots of space on the case for a plaque.

Place a big organ pipe, at least an 8-footer, in the narthex. Mark it with increments of $100,000, and fit it with a gold tuning sleeve. As gifts come in, move the sleeve up the pipe. Nice visual.

§

There are lots of reasons for a church to purchase a new organ. The old one is worn out, or the old one was never any good. A new instrument would help revitalize the place. We care deeply about the meaning and role of music in our worship.

And there are reasons not to. A couple years ago I worked with a church, helping them to sell a large tracker organ. It was less than twenty years old, and very fancy, with carvings and moldings, shiny façade pipes, and turned rosewood drawknobs. But a significant number of members had been bitterly opposed to the acquisition. Many of those people left the church, and the opposition that remained carried on the battle. The installation of the new organ could be traced directly to the failure of the church and the disbanding of the congregation. Soli Deo Gloria. 

Wendy and I recently joined a church that installed a new organ a few years earlier. It was named the Bicentennial Organ, commemorating the bicentennial of the parish, and it was paid for by the wide membership of the parish and surrounding community. As a new member, I’ve enjoyed meeting people there. When they learn that I’m involved with pipe organs, they light up and speak eloquently about the church’s new instrument. They’re well informed about it. They not only know it’s a good and important organ, but they know why. They’re proud of it, and its presence in the building means a lot to them.

Care for the money.

The people who paid for the organ are entrusting it to you. Be sure that it’s always well cared for. That means tuning and mechanical issues, but there are some bigger, less obvious reasons. There’s someone on the property committee, the finance committee, or the board of trustees who is responsible for the church’s insurance policies. You are the advocate for the care of the organ. Take a moment to ask if the organ is properly insured. The organ should be specified on the policy, with a letter of assessment attached. If the organ is damaged by fire, by a roof leak, or by vandalism, they’ll find out very quickly how much it will cost to repair. If the organ was purchased for $200,000 thirty years ago, it may have a replacement value of over $1,000,000—$200,000 wouldn’t even cover the Rückpositiv. It’s remarkable how many organs are not adequately insured.

When the parish is planning renovation in the sanctuary, you are the advocate for the care of the organ. Be sure the organ is properly covered. If it’s going to be really dusty, the reeds should be removed to storage. New carpets, sanding the floors, painting, and carpentry are all enemies of the organ. I once saw a painter standing on top of the swell box in an antique organ, working over his head, a drop cloth and roller pan at his feet. Paint was dripping onto the Great pipes, and the guy had no idea how little structure there was under him. He could have fallen though and wrecked the organ. Might have gotten hurt, too.

Make sure that your music is well chosen and beautifully played—an inspiration to everyone in the pews. Use the organ to nurture and lead the congregation, not to aggrandize yourself. Use the organ as if it’s a privilege to play it. The people who paid for it are entrusting it to you. It’s there to provide beautiful music, but more fundamentally, it’s there as an expression of the congregation’s faith.

The new organ is a gift to future generations of worshipers. Your gift to those future generations is the inspiration you’ve provided—the magic, mystery, and majesty you’ve added to worship—that has encouraged the congregation to express their faith by supporting that new organ. Aren’t we lucky? ν

Notes

1. While writing this, I learned that Steinway provided a second plaque celebrating 150 years, honoring Oberlin as an “All-Steinway School.”

2. “Skidompha” is an acronym using the first initials of the names of the members of the club that founded the library. First Lady Laura Bush awarded the National Medal for Museum and Library Services to the Skidompha Library in 2008.

Human gestures

The 2007 documentary film Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, provides a rare glimpse into the art of building pianos. The cameras travel through the factory from one work area to another, interviewing the craftsmen and women, and showing each step of the process. It’s fascinating to see a team of men making the laminated body of an instrument by running the twenty-foot-long layers through a machine that applies glue, bending them around a heavy form, and tightening dozens of powerful clamps to hold the thing together. We see the fitting of the iron plates, the forming of soundboard and bridge, painting, stringing, and tuning. Individual workers explain what they’re doing and share their pleasure in participating in the art, and a roster of well-known pianists, from Lang Lang to Hank Jones, and Hélène Grimaud to Harry Connick, Jr., discuss their relationships with the instrument—how an individual piano affects their art, and their playing serves as background to many of the factory scenes.

It’s easy to find the film online (I bought it from Amazon), and I recommend that anyone interested in the art of musical performance and instrument building should see it. Steinway’s emphasis on hand craftsmanship is central to the film including the fitting of the iron plate, the making and fitting of the soundboard and bridge, stringing, and Steinway’s insistence that all tuning, from the first “chipping in” to the final fine tunings, be done by ear.

French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is featured throughout, working with Steinway concert technicians as he compares and selects pianos for particular concerts and recording projects, and he comments on the differences between instruments and how different artists approach their instrument. When commenting on hand craftsmanship, he stresses the importance of the “human gesture.”

I’ve watched the movie several times, both alone and with friends, and each time I’m moved by Aimard’s use of that phrase. It’s a reflection on his sensitivity as an artist, and his understanding of the importance of art to the human condition.

A stroke of the pen

One of organ building’s lovely traditions is the ceremony of signing a contract for a new instrument. The organbuilder and the appropriate officer of the purchasing institution sit at a table, surrounded by friends, colleagues, and often donors. Copies of the document are spread out in front of them, and photos are taken as ink and champagne flow.

The light-speed pace of technological developments has given us the widespread acceptance of “electronic signatures.” We can sign contracts, insurance documents, even birthday cards by following instructions on our screens. We click a box to accept the terms, and the deed is done. You don’t have to show up at the attorney’s office, but the personal touch is gone. The way the nib of the pen indents a piece of paper—the human gesture—somehow makes the agreement more official.

Stand close to a painting by Rembrandt or Monet, and look across the surface from different angles (remember that the gallery guard has his eyes on you), and you can see the ridges and valleys, the start and stop of each stroke, even the motion of the bristles as the artist twists the brush between his fingers to create a special texture. You can almost smell the linseed oil as the master moves his brush—the human gesture. Tiziano Vicelli (Titian) died in 1576 at the age of 99. I wonder if he knew that the paint he was mixing would still be vivid 440 years later? It’s nice to have a print of a wonderful painting, but it’s the three-dimensionality of the original piece that makes a personal encounter so special. 

Beethoven’s autograph manuscripts are rife with notes, riffs, and passages that have been scribbled out. You can feel his irascibility from the vigor of the strokes. What a thrill to be allowed a peek at the creative process of that innovative genius. To touch a piece of paper that was touched by Bach or Leonardo da Vince is to bridge centuries.

I’ve had the privilege several times of playing the first performance of a piece of music from a hand-written manuscript, and the immediate presence of the composer is unmistakable. I admit that can be tricky. Poor penmanship is not limited to words on paper, and a couple times I’ve had to ask the composer what note was what. But while music notation programs like Finale or Sibelius produce precisely legible scores, the human gesture is missing.

Twenty years ago, I restored an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook. At that time, the organ was 138 years old, and as I passed its bits and pieces across my workbench, I admired the pencil marks of the craftsmen who built it. I guessed that their pencil leads were harder than what I’m used to because the marks were so precise, and their techniques for the simple task of sharpening a pencil outstrip any machine you can buy at Staples. Those marks gave me the feeling that the craftsmen in Boston so long ago were my colleagues and mentors. By comparison, the pencils around my workbench seem like crayons that had been left in the sun.

Live and in person

Where we live in lower Manhattan, there are several movie theaters, lots of small performance venues, and a great theater company within a few blocks, and Wendy and I take advantage of the easy accessibility as often as we can. Cinema is dazzling. Beautiful photography and high-tech projection and sound systems drive the action right through you. A crystal-clear close-up of a human face might be twenty feet tall on the screen, showing every pore and blemish as if through a microscope. The storytelling is often as spectacular as the visual effects.

But there’s something about the live theater, where living, breathing humans are before you portraying a story, a thought, a series of emotions. You hear the stomp and shuffle of their feet, the rustling of clothing as they embrace, and the urgency in their voices as spittle flies. Sadness is sadder, happiness is happier, and jokes are funnier when delivered in real time through human gestures.

§

I recently celebrated a birthday that ends with zero, and one of the gifts I received was an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with our son-in-law, taking a culinary tour of various artworks.  I’ve always supported my love of eating with an equal love of cooking and the lore and history of cuisine (Wendy says I have a lot to show for it), so this was a welcome and thoughtful gift. (It turned out also to be Wendy’s ruse to get me out of the house as family and friends gathered for a stupendous surprise party!) The tour guide was charismatic, entertaining, and full of wonderful information, and he provided a well-prepared, fascinating tour of a wide variety of art based on and inspired by food. 

One of the artifacts was a four-by-six scrap of papyrus dating from the third century A.D., on which the Greek philosopher Heraclides of Pontus had written a letter that included a shopping list to his brother who was about to visit. No doubt the poultry, bread, chickpeas, kidney beans, and fenugreek would be transformed into a wonderful welcoming meal. And our guide showed us a photograph of another grocery list, this one written by Michelangelo. The great artist had lovely penmanship, so assuming you can read Italian, the list is easy to read—two loaves of bread, herring, two servings of fennel soup, anchovies, and red wine. Beside the written list, Michelangelo provided a drawing of each item because his assistant was illiterate—such an elegant and caring human gesture.

More than 450 years after his death, we celebrate and revere Michelangelo’s art—the depth of expression of the five-and-a-half ton marble David, the tragic Pietà, and the rollicking frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But witnessing his workingman’s lunch adds the human gesture to our awe, reminding us that whatever the reach of his genius, Michelangelo was a living person who passed through daily life just like the rest of us. I wonder if the cost of the meal was billed to the Pope or the Medicis—whoever was the patron of the moment—or if he was responsible for expenses as part of a contract price. Science tells us that the earth is supplied with a finite amount of air and water. That must mean that we all ingest and inspire molecules that passed through Michelangelo’s body. Doesn’t that make you feel clever? Give me a chisel and a hunk of marble. You haven’t seen anything yet.

You can see images of both these lists at the website traveltoeat.com:

https://traveltoeat.com/michelangelos-shopping-list-and-origins-of-writ….

And what a gesture

The organ—its heritage and history, its repertoire and repartee, its majesty and monumentality—is an integral part of the world of arts and humanities. Because it was the most complex machine assembled by humans hundreds of years before the invention of most mechanical devices, I’ve always regarded the organ as one of the greatest human gestures, and I believe that connecting my love of the organ to the wide world of human gestures is essential.

Imagine yourself as a German churchgoer in 1457, showing up on a Sunday and hearing the new organ play. There’s an organ in the village church in Rysum built in that year. Take a look at this video clip to see and hear the instrument in action—Gwendolyn Toth playing Scheidemann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46b25dTcdjg.

This video proves to us that 559 years ago, people—human gestures—built pipe organs that are relevant to us today. You don’t have to have arcane training, you can simply sit down to play. Michelangelo was born eighteen years after that organ was built. What does village life at that time look like in your mind’s eye? What was the public water supply like? How about sanitation? I think it’s a miracle that a musical instrument so intricate, so refined, so sprightly, and so current was built that long ago.

In our undergraduate music history courses, we learned to trace the easy route from Scheidemann to Buxtehude to Bruhns to Bach. We understand the growth of the particular style of organs and organ music in eighteenth-century France, when lots of Couperins worked for lots of Louis’s. We know of Father Willis, patriarch of the great British firm, who was central to the quintessential sound of English Cathedral music. We revere the amazing innovations of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, whose brilliant organs engendered the great mass of romantic French music, and we admire Ernest Skinner who transformed the American pipe organ.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the great renaissance of American organ building gave us the rebirth of mechanical-action instruments—reclaiming the human gesture in the building of pipe organs. Today, we celebrate the result of that debate—fabulous new organs of every description being built by American organbuilders.

With a heritage of five and a half centuries, you’d think that the organ’s place in the world is safe, but there are forces that can threaten the very core of the instrument we all love. There was a dramatic drop in the size of college and university organ departments in the 1980s. Important organ departments such as those at the New England Conservatory and Northwestern University have closed—departments that produced generations of brilliant musicians. Thankfully, the population of serious students of the organ is reviving, but we need to take note of that ominous dip.

The Christian Church has been at the heart of the development and sustenance of the pipe organ, from ancient instruments like that at Rysum, to the glorious French symphonic instruments, to the hundreds of organs built by the Hook Brothers, to our modern builders. And the Christian Church has been changing. Where I live in the northeastern United States, many congregations are struggling to maintain buildings and pipe organs built generations ago, when parish membership was ten times what it is today. I maintain a 60-stop organ for a church in suburban Boston with a congregation of about seventy-five. The building seats nearly a thousand, and there is embossed china service for 800 stored in glass-front cabinets in the pantry next to the kitchen.

The fact that hundreds of wonderful pipe organs are for sale today is a reflection on the state of the church, upon which the organ depends so heavily.

The electronic organ was developed fifty years ago, and has burgeoned to occupy a huge share of the church organ market. While the fancy sparkly consoles are beguiling, and many organists in smaller churches love sitting at monster three and four manual consoles, the tone of the digital organ, no matter how advanced the technology, is nothing like the real thing. But they’re easy to acquire, and relatively inexpensive on the short term. Someone on the Board of Trustees says, “It’s good enough for us.”

What’s next?

When the twentieth century renaissance was in full swing, we organists knew we were in the middle of something great. Hundreds of new instruments were being built, and it was common for church lay leaders to be swayed by their musicians to move with the times. Of course much of that was good and we have a lot to show for it, but at the same time, plenty of wonderful organs were sacrificed in favor of the tracker-action craze. We should be selective about when organs are replaced and when they are renovated. An organ should not be replaced because a local organist thinks it lacks a few voices.

The other day I had an inquiry from an organist who was seeking a proposal for the expansion of the organ in his church. He told me that many critical stops are missing, there is no space for additional pipes, and there is little money, so the additions would be digital voices. The existing stoplist shows a complete three-manual instrument. Given the size of the building, the 32-footers, solo Tuba, and Trumpet-en-chamade he wants to add would be superfluous, unnecessary, even intrusive. It’s a modest building and a fine organ. What’s the point of adding artifice to overblow the place?

The same goes for fully digital organs. A church that seats 200 people should have an organ matched to the cubic space and acoustics. “But I need to play Widor.” Big city music belongs in big city buildings. I don’t want to hear Widor or Vierne with blazing artificial 32-footers in a little country church. I just don’t. It’s like eating a two-pound T-bone as a snack.

In Richard Torrence’s “irreverent biography” of Virgil Fox, The Dish, Ted Alan Worth is quoted as saying, “The organ world is the worst world in the world.” A herd of historians, a lobby of librarians, or an eccentricity of engineers may love to talk shop, but there’s something about organists that takes the bell away. It’s as if there was nothing else.

Because the pipe organ is so expensive, because commissioning and creating an instrument is such a complex undertaking, we need to be sure that we’re connected to the real world. We need to communicate our love for our instrument effectively and joyfully. We need to be known outside our professional circles as creative, cooperative, stimulating colleagues. We need to create atmospheres in our work places that encourage others to appreciate the deep heritage of our instrument so that we don’t lose the pipe organ to expediency. We need the entire collection of human gestures to enrich our musicality and
our souls.

Why it matters.

An hour ago, I finished my last “Christmas” tuning. It’s been a fun season involving lots of organs—some wonderful, and some a little less wonderful. I started tuning organs in Boston in 1984 when I joined Angerstein & Associates after returning from almost ten years in northern Ohio that included my years as a student at Oberlin, my first marriage, a long stint as director of music at a large Presbyterian church in Cleveland, and my terrific apprenticeship and friendship with Jan G. P. Leek. I still tune quite a few of the organs I first saw when working for Dan Angerstein in 1984—organs that were nearly new then and that have lots of miles on them now. In those churches I’ve outlasted as many as ten organists, five pastors, and who knows how many sextons.

It’s fun to return to these places several times each year, visiting the old friends who work in the buildings and monitoring the condition of the organs. Many of my tuning clients couple with a particular restaurant or sandwich shop. We were disappointed a couple weeks ago in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to see that the favorite sandwich shop near the church had been torn down. A sign indicates that they’ll reopen in a new building in the spring, but I think it will take twenty years to get the place seasoned so things taste right.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to be associated with some very special organs—special because of their size, their musical beauty, or their historical significance. It’s exciting to tune an organ that was played by Marcel Dupré, Lynnwood Farnam, or Pierre Cochereau. And I’ve had the thrill of preparing organs for concerts by such giants as Simon Preston, Madame Duruflé, Catharine Crozier, and Daniel Roth. You sit in the audience waiting for the artist to play that C# in the Swell Clarion you had so much trouble with two hours ago. Hold on, baby, hold on!

Of course, most of those experiences happen in big city churches with rich histories, fabulous artwork, heavy tourist traffic, and outstanding musicians. I’ve always felt it’s a special privilege to work behind the scenes in those monumental places, surrounded by all that heritage. But let’s not forget the importance of the small church with the seemingly inconsequential organ. 

Yesterday, I tuned one of the older Möller unit organs known as The Portable Organ. The opus list of M. P. Möller includes something like 13,500 organs, and while we know plenty of big distinguished instruments built by that firm, by far the most of them were these tiny workhorse organs with two, three, or four ranks. They built them by the thousand, and you find them everywhere. Maybe you’re familiar with the newer Artiste models that have a detached console, and one or two, or even three eight-by-eight-by-four foot cases stuffed full of pipes like a game of Tetris. The model I’m referring to predates that—they were popular in the 1940s, had attached keyboards, and usually three ranks, Spitz Principal (they called them Diapason Conique—oo-la-la), Gedeckt, and Salicional. The ranks were spread around through unit borrowing, each rank playing at multiple pitches, and there were compound stops such as “Quintadena” which combined the Gedeckt at 8′ and the Salicional at 22⁄3′.

The particular instrument I tuned yesterday was originally in a Lutheran church in Bronx, New York. As that parish dissolved a few years ago, the Organ Clearing House moved the organ to another Lutheran church in Queens. There was no budget for renovation, so we simply assembled it, coaxed all the notes to work, gave the case a treatment of lemon oil, and off we went. It had been a year since the last tuning, and it was fun to find that all the notes were working, the tuning had held nicely, and the organ sounded nice. I spent less than an hour tuning the three ranks, chatting with the pastor, and cleaning the keyboards.

When I got home this afternoon, I had a quick lunch and took a look at Facebook to be sure everyone out there was behaving. I was touched to see a post by colleague Michael Morris who works for Parkey OrganBuilders in the Atlanta area. He had just tuned another copy of the same Möller organ and wrote this:

It’s not always the quality of the instrument that makes a tuning job enjoyable. For some years now, my last regularly scheduled tuning has been in Georgia’s old capital of Milledgeville. It’s usually a pleasant drive through farm country to get to the antebellum Sacred Heart Church.

This was Flannery O’Connor’s parish, the center of her spiritual life and an influence in her writing. In 1945 Möller delivered a three-rank unit organ and placed it in the heart-pine gallery. It’s not a distinguished instrument, but it’s always easy to tune and I enjoy the thought that this instrument was part of the fabric of her life.

I’m always done just before the parishioners start the Rosary before noon Mass. I have lunch at a Mexican restaurant, then drive back to Atlanta knowing I have put another tuning season behind me.

Nice work, Michael. 

Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) was a devout Roman Catholic. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, she lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with classics translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. In 1952, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus (from which her father died in 1941) and returned to her childhood home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. 

Her writing is spiritual, reflecting the theory that God is present throughout the created world, and including intense reflections on ethics and morality. The modest little organ in Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville was present for her whenever she worshipped. On such a personal level, that three-rank organ is every bit as important as the mighty 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston or the iconic Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

How did you get started?

After his ordination as an Episcopal priest, my father was rector of a small church in Somerville, Massachusetts. Subsequently, he was the first rector of a new parish in Westwood, Massachusetts, starting there when it was formed as a mission. I was two years old when we moved into the rectory next to the church building. The church building was designed as a very simple structure, sort of an A-frame with a linoleum floor. It was furnished with folding chairs, so the single room could be used for worship, dinners, and all sorts of other things. A few years later, the planned second phase was executed. An adjoining parish hall was built, and the original building was turned into a proper church with towers, stained glass, pews, and a rear gallery for organ and choir. The organ was also planned in stages. It was one of the first instruments built by Charles Fisk, back in the days when he was of the Andover Organ Company. It had six stops, mechanical action, and a detached-reversed console, all mounted on a six-inch-high platform down front. Get it? It was the console and Rückpositiv of an organ that could be expanded to include two manuals and pedal. When the second phase was under construction, there was a moment when the roof was off—and that’s the moment they moved the organ. They lifted the whole thing with a crane, pipes and all, and placed it in the new balcony. I would have a fit if someone did that with one of my organs today, but seeing that organ hanging from the hook of the crane is one of my earliest pipe organ memories. It was more than twenty years before the second case containing Great and Pedal was built.

When I was ten, we moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad became rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, home to an Ernest M. Skinner organ built in 1904 (Wow! That’s an early one.), during the time when Robert Hope-Jones was working with Mr. Skinner. I started taking organ lessons a couple years after we got there and was quickly aware that the organ was on its last legs. I didn’t play the Skinner organ much, because less than a year after I started taking lessons, I was playing for money at other churches. That organ was replaced by a twelve-stop Fisk in 1974, their Opus 65. Six additional stops that were “prepared for” were added in 1983. The on-site installation of those stops was under way when Charles Fisk passed away. A 16′ Open Wood was added in 2012.

My organ lessons continued a few blocks away at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home to Fisk’s Opus 50.¹ During my high school years, I was assistant organist to George Bozeman at the First Congregational Church in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played on the fabulous 1860 three-manual E. & G. G. Hook organ, which at 156 years old is still one of the very few remaining pre-Civil War three-manual Hooks. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I got to Oberlin a few years later and started hearing about the organs my classmates got started on.

All my college buddies were terrific organists, but I learned that some of them had never played a pipe organ before their audition at Oberlin. And while I had free access to those glorious organs by Fisk and Hook, some had only ever played on modest electro-pneumatic unit organs. The first time I played a tiny electro-pneumatic pipe organ was in a practice room at Oberlin! But thinking back and knowing that all of them were wonderful organists when they were in high school, I’m sure that thousands of parishioners in those few dozen churches were moved and excited to hear such young people play those organs so beautifully.

A matter of scale

Many composers and musicians consider the string quartet one of the purest forms of music-making. The composer working with four musicians and four independent parts is writing intimately and minimally. Each measure, each individual chord is specially voiced and tuned for the moment. There is no blurring of the edges; everything is exposed. Compare that to a symphony orchestra with twenty first violins. Conductors are fond of saying that an instrumental or choral ensemble is only as strong as its weakest member. I’ve always thought that was baloney. It’s a great cheerleading sentiment, but it seems to me that in a twenty-member violin section, the stronger players inspire and encourage their colleagues, helping them to achieve new heights. I’ve led volunteer church choirs whose collective ability far outshone the individual skills and musicianship of the weakest member.

We can draw an analogy with pipe organs. A tiny chamber organ with four or five stops is every bit as beautiful as a big-city monster with two hundred ranks. It’s almost unbelievable that both are called by the same name. When you’re playing a chamber organ, you listen to the speech of each individual pipe, but when you’re whipping through a big toccata with a hundred stops drawn, each four-part chord involves four hundred pipes. There might be an individual stinker in the Swell Clarion (remember, the pipe I was having trouble with), or a zinger in a Mixture that stands out in the crowd, but otherwise, you’re really not listening to individual pipes any more than you single out an individual violist in a Brahms symphony.

If we agree that a tiny chamber organ and a swashbuckling cathedral job are both beautiful organs, we should also agree that they serve different purposes and support different literature. I suppose we should allow that it’s likely to be more effective to play Sweelinck on a hundred stops than Widor on five. But we’re lucky that we still have organs that Sweelinck knew, so we can imagine and even reconstruct how his playing sounded. I don’t know if Widor had much opportunity to hear others play his music, but I bet he wouldn’t have liked hearing “that Toccata” on a small two-manual organ in a two-hundred-seat church.

Will it play in Milledgeville?

I’m sure my colleague Michael Morris did a lovely job tuning that little Möller organ. I assume, or I hope that some caring person will be playing lovely music and our favorite Christmas carols on the organ in the next few days. Maybe the congregation will sing “Silent Night” while holding candles, lighting that simple sanctuary with magical twinkling. Maybe that lovely effect will make people’s eyes go moist. Families will go home after Mass, whistling and humming those familiar tunes.

We know that Flannery O’Connor worshipped in that church during bleak moments in her life. There was that first Christmas after she was diagnosed with the disease that killed her father. There was that last Christmas before she died, when she must have been in terrible pain. But there was that organist doing that special thing that adds so much to worship at any time, and on any scale. And the organ was in tune.

One more thing . . . 

I’ve tuned around forty organs in the last month. Some days it seems that all I do is carry my tools back and forth to the car. I’ve seen a ton of Christmas decorations—some gorgeous, and some horribly tacky. The brightly colored life-sized inflatable plastic Nativity scene was the nadir. I expect there will be some snickering going on there on Christmas Eve.

The sacred spaces that are the most worshipful are almost always beautifully kept. There are no ragged stacks of last Sunday’s bulletin, no wastebaskets overflowing with Styrofoam coffee cups, and no inflatable Santas.

Wendy and I worship at Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York. It’s a beautiful Gothic-inspired building with magnificent stained-glass windows, elaborate carvings around the pulpit and choir stalls, a big, shiny brass eagle holding up the lectern, and a fabulous organ built recently by Taylor & Boody. John Boody has a degree in forestry and a special affinity for beautiful wood. I believe that Taylor & Boody is alone among American organbuilders in harvesting trees and milling and curing their own lumber. And the Grace Church organ sure looks it. Intricate enchanting grain patterns abound. The two facing organ cases and the massive freestanding console add their gleam to the place. It’s nice that I’ve never seen a stack of music on the console.

There are lots of organ consoles that look like the day after a fire at a Staples store. Everything from Post-it notes to rubber bands, from cough drops to hair brushes festoon the cabinet. The organ console is a worship space, especially when it’s visible from the pews. I know that the console at your church is your workspace. I know you have to view it and use it as a tool, a workbench—something like a cubicle. But you might think of creating a little bag that contains all your supplies, or installing a neat little hidden shelf to hold your hymnals. I bet your organbuilder would be happy to build you one. 

Please don’t let the state of your organ console intrude on someone’s worship. Every week you’re playing for people who are suffering, scared, sick, or worried. Be sure that everything you do is enhancing their experience of worship. That’s why we’re there. ν

Notes

1. On the Fisk website, this organ is referred to as Winchester Old and Opus 65 is Winchester New. Another similarly cute organ nickname belongs to the Bozeman-Gibson organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts—Orgel-brookline.

Cuthbert and the Cow

Cuthbert (634–687 AD) was a monk and later a bishop in the Northumbrian Church, in the northeast of England, the area of modern Newcastle, near the Scottish border. After his death, his remains had remarkable adventures, which seemed to contribute as much to his eventual sainthood as did his activities while breathing. Eleven years after his death, his tomb was opened in preparation for his reburial, and to the amazement of those present, his corpse was miraculously preserved, inspiring the swift development of a cult honoring his memory and making him the most popular saint in England at the time.

Several centuries after his death, his admirers dug up his remains again to take him on the lam, protecting him from a Danish invasion. Suddenly and mysteriously, the cart carrying the coffin became stuck in the road. According to the legend, it wasn’t mud, and it wasn’t a mechanical breakdown, it was just stuck. Bishop Aldun, the leader of Cuthbert’s groupies, had a vision that St. Cuthbert was asking to be taken to Dunholme. Trouble was, no one knew where that was. As they pondered, a milkmaid wandered by looking for her lost cow. When she asked if anyone had seen her cow, a young woman pointed up the road, saying she had seen the cow heading toward Dunholme (now Durham). Miraculously, the cart was freed, and the roadies continued to Durham. Cuthbert was buried there and a great church was built to honor his memory. The present cathedral was built on the same site a century later, and Cuthbert was unearthed again and moved to a shrine attached to the new building. Apparently that was the end of Cuthbert’s travels, more than 400 years after his death, though after all that, I wouldn’t stand too close to his grave, beautifully preserved or not.

The episode with the cart might have been the first time on record that the men stood around wondering where they were, while a woman asked for directions. By the way, she found her cow, whose role in the legend is commemorated by a Victorian bovine statue, in a niche high on the exterior of the cathedral.

§

Durham Cathedral is an incredible place. William the Conqueror appointed William of St. Carilef as the first bishop there in 1081. Construction of the new cathedral started in 1093, and the nave was completed around 1130 (AD, not AM). It’s officially called the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin, and St. Cuthbert of Durham. “Durham Cathedral” works for me. While the great buildings of the High Gothic defy gravity, relying on exterior buttresses to support the weight of huge high ceilings while walls are nearly all glass and apparently structure-free, the Norman architecture of Durham Cathedral is gravity-intensive. The ancient fabric of the building is solid, and it seems as though the engineers and architects were experimenting as they went. Some arches are round while others are pointed, and clerestory windows don’t line up above those in lower stories. Buttresses between the windows are integral with the building, amounting to “thickening” of the walls rather than flying free.

Wendy and I spent one night in Durham during our recent trip to England. After dinner, we walked up to the cathedral where bellringers’ practice was going on, and the building was bathed in light. I had the sense that we were witnessing the early development of monumental ecclesiastical architecture, a prelude for our visit the next day to the High Gothic masterpiece of York Minster. The 150 or so years between the buildings at Durham and York, just seventy miles apart, brought incredible advances in construction techniques. Those builders were true innovators, and I wonder how much communication there was between builders in England and those in France at the same time. There was no Chunnel facilitating travel between the two countries, but there must have been plenty of interchange. Maybe there were international job fairs for medieval stonecutters. Come visit us at booth #1081.

Durham is home to 65,000 people and is about 270 miles from London. It’s a long way to go for a one-night visit, but besides visiting the cathedral, I was being offered a cobblers’ dream holiday. Church musicians make pilgrimages to the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge to hear the world-famous choir and organ. I got to see that iconic Harrison & Harrison organ in the workshop during its reconstruction.

Not that Harrison,

The American organ world celebrates a British immigrant organbuilder who started his working life as a patent attorney before “catching the bug.” G. Donald Harrison was largely responsible for the development of the American Classic pipe organ­—that unique style of instrument found in places like the Church of the Advent in Boston, known for sprightly Principal choruses and Baroque-inspired secondary choruses on Positiv divisions with low wind pressure. They represent a style unto themselves and helped inspire the mid-twentieth century revival of classic styles of organbuilding. Harrison was also responsible for the great organs of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and the Riverside Church in New York City.

I mention Mr. Harrison somewhat out of context here because we’ve just passed the 60th anniversary of his death. In June of 1956, he was working feverishly to complete the rebuilding of the Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City in time for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, while New York was suffering the unfortunate combination of a heat wave and strike of taxi drivers. After work on June 14, Harrison walked the eight blocks from St. Thomas to his Third Avenue apartment, stopping on the way to pick up a dose of smelling salts. After dinner, while watching Victor Borge on television with his wife, Helen, Harrison suffered a fatal heart attack.

Four days after Harrison’s death, the British organist John Scott was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, foreshadowing Scott’s brilliant career as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church, so sadly cut short last August by his sudden death.

That Harrison (& Harrison).

In 1861, Thomas Harrison established a pipe organ building company in Rochdale, near Manchester in the U. K., and in 1876, he moved the company to Durham. He built a number of wonderful organs, and the company really took off when his sons Arthur and Harry took over in 1896. They were exceptionally gifted organbuilders, Harry at the design table and Arthur in the voicing room. The catalogue of Harrison & Harrison organs shows dozens of instruments built in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arthur and Harry must have been especially pleased to have the hometown opportunity to rebuild the 1876 Willis organ in Durham Cathedral in 1905. Arthur Harrison died in 1936, and Harry retired in 1946, and the cows came home when control of the firm was passed on to Harry’s son, Cuthbert in 1945. Cuthbert was director of the firm until 1975 and remained Chairman of the Board until his death in 1991.

Mark Venning ran the company from 1975 until 2011, when Christopher Batchelor was appointed managing director. Dr. Batchelor was my tour guide in the busy workshop, where, among other projects, the King’s College organ was being prepared for shipment back to Cambridge.  

A member of the Harrison & Harrison staff met us at the train station, dropped Wendy off at The Victoria Inn (a crazy little B&B above a six-stool pub), and took me to the workshop, a snazzy place built in 1996 to replace a 124-year-old building that had outlived its usefulness. There’s a small entry vestibule (narthex?) inside the front door that contained two items of interest. One was a four-stop dual-pitched continuo organ (which is for sale), and the other was a letter signed by Queen Elizabeth, framed with a special commemorative medal honoring the work done by Harrison & Harrison as part of the restoration of Windsor Castle following the devastating fire there in 1992.

An organ fit for a king

Reading that letter, I remembered thoughts I had while watching the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on television in 2011. That was some job for the organ tuners. The Harrison & Harrison organ at Westminster Abbey was installed in 1937 and was played for the first time for the Coronation of King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth. We were recently reminded of King George VI, as he was the central character in the 2010 movie, The King’s Speech. Remember, he’s the one who became king when his brother King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. 

All of us in the business of organ building have been involved in projects that must be finished by Christmas, by Easter, or in time for the wedding of the donor’s daughter. But who else besides the people of Harrison & Harrison have been faced with such momentous events, so many times? An internationally televised royal wedding or coronation is a terrible time for a cipher!

And speaking of kings, the marvelous Harrison & Harrison organ at King’s College was built in 1934. There are famous photographs that show the organ case perched atop the central screen. Graceful towers on either side of the case seem like upraised arms, while the center of the main case ducks out of the way of the view. It looks monumental, but in fact, the case is not large enough to house the massive organ, so much of the instrument is concealed within the screen, below the level of the organ’s console.  

Installing a large organ in an ancient building is charged with difficulties. Even though the chapel building is huge (those at King’s College, Duke University, and Valparaiso University are supposedly the world’s largest collegiate chapels), the original designers made no provision for placement of an organ. And if they had, they would never have conceived of our modern instruments with 32-foot pipes, heavy expression boxes, and all the other pneumatic goodies that take up so much space.

The organ at King’s College is used very heavily, and after 80 years, mechanical systems became increasingly difficult to maintain, so much of the mechanical structure of the instrument is new, including windchests, reservoirs, structure, expression boxes, and other appliances. Maintenance passage boards are mounted on hinges to swing up, providing freer egress of sound, especially allowing the organists to better hear the organ from the console. All of the new structure was standing in the shop during my visit. A large part of the project was complete before the organ was removed early in 2016.

The original pipes are being cleaned and repaired, ready for installation during the summer, with the project scheduled for completion in September. We (along with millions of others) can all look forward to hearing the renovated instrument in the broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve.

I found it strangely moving to see pipes in crates from particular stops I remember hearing on recordings and radio broadcasts, like the English Horn in Berlioz’s Shepherds’ Farewell. And who among us hasn’t wept to the strains of that Tuba pointing out the melody under descants in Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, or O Come, All Ye Faithful? (Special thanks to the late David Willcocks.) I also saw the famous gold-leafed façade pipes, many of which date from the original organ built in 1605, some of which had suffered terrible gravity-induced damage. A pair of cheerful metal workers showed me how they were cutting off time- and weight-ravaged toes, reinforcing the pipe feet, and soldering on new cast toes—a sort of galvanized pedicure.

A fund-lowering pitch

As Peterborough Cathedral celebrates its 900th anniversary, they’ve embarked on an ambitious campaign, raising funds for a large number of extraordinary projects. You can see the scope of Peterborough 900 on the cathedral’s website at www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/home/campaign-objectives.aspx. Two of the projects are directly related to music. One is a £1,000,000 Cathedral and Community Music School (when we were in the U. K. last month, £1 cost almost $1.50), and the other is lowering the pitch of the 1884 Hill Organ. The organ was originally built at “Old Philharmonic Pitch,” commonly used in the late nineteenth century. While modern concert pitch is A = 440 cycles per second, Old Philharmonic Pitch is A = 453 Hz, enough higher that singers are surprised by it, and many modern orchestral instruments can’t match it.  

Changing the pitch of a large pipe organ is a complicated process. Each pipe has to be made longer (the Peterborough organ has 5,286 pipes). It’s also a tricky decision because lengthening an organ pipe changes its scale, which is the ratio of length by diameter. During my tour, I saw many pipes from the Peterborough organ, both wood and metal, with their extensions and new tuning scrolls in various stages of completion. I was impressed that big projects on two huge and famous organs were underway in the workshop at the same time. There sure were a lot of organ parts stacked about. And that wasn’t all. A new two-manual tracker-action instrument was underway as well.

When one is not enough

The morning after my tour of the Harrison & Harrison workshops, H&H operations manager Jeremy Maritz met Wendy and me “by the font” at the west end of Durham Cathedral to show us the organ. The three of us crowded into the tiny console gallery above the quire and explored the kaleidoscope of tone color revealed by the luxurious ivory drawknobs. Isn’t it rich when a Great division has both First and Second 8′ Diapasons? But wait—this organ has four! It’s the Swell division that has “only” First and Second Diapasons. And here’s a new one—in the Pedal division, Open Wood 16′ I and Open Wood 16′ II. Those two huge stops are located on opposite sides of quire, in the surrounding ambulatory—and it’s Open Wood 16′ II that’s extended to 32-foot. Heavens! And as if that’s not enough, there’s also a 16′ Diapason made of metal. Reeds, you ask? 32′ Double Ophicleide (an extension of the Solo Tuba) and 32′ Double Trombone. It’s embarrassing.

I’m grateful to Jeremy Maritz, Christopher Batchelor, and the staff of Harrison & Harrison for their hospitality and for the great education I received at their hands.

Betting on the future of the past

Here in the United States, lotteries operated by governments are a mixed bag. In Colorado, proceeds from the state lottery are largely invested in parks and recreational facilities, while in Kansas significant lottery money goes to the construction and maintenance of prisons. In Great Britain, the Heritage Lottery Fund provides funding for countless projects related to the preservation of the country’s heritage, from steam-powered tugboats to church bells, from medieval cathedrals to pipe organs. Actually, the projects are not countless—the lottery’s website claims that £6.8 billion have been awarded to support 39,000 projects since 1994.

Durham Cathedral has an ongoing project called Open Treasure that involves restoration and preservation of the building itself as well as new programs and uses for the enclosed spaces. Exhibition spaces are being developed for the display of incredible treasures owned by the cathedral, and the lottery has provided £3,850,000. Peterborough 900 has received grants totaling £2.5 million from the lottery.

Go to the website www.hlf.org.uk, type “pipe organs” into the search field, and you’ll find a list of projects that have been supported by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund—from £44,000 for the restoration of the 1881 organ built by K. C. Reiter in the parish church of All Saints’, Roos, to £950,000 toward the restoration of the Harrison & Harrison organ at Royal Festival Hall.

During our trip, we saw signs proclaiming the support of the HLF at York Minster, Blenheim Palace, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We saw it at Westminster Abbey and at St. Martin in the Fields at Trafalgar Square.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is one of twelve specialty funds that disperse the proceeds of the National Lottery (www.national-lottery.co.uk). Other funds support arts councils, sports organizations, and the British Film Institute. As a short-term observer from the outside, it seemed pretty enlightened to me. Can you imagine our federal legislature coming up with something like that? I’d buy a ticket.

A Pokémon world

Last week, I visited a church in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with the rector, wardens, and organist about placing a vintage pipe organ in their historic building. After the meeting, I walked the eight blocks up Nostrand Avenue back to the subway. It was 97°, so I stopped at a corner bodega for a bottle of cold water. While I was paying, there was a series of great crashes just up the street, and I was among the crowd that gathered to see what had happened. A white box truck had rear-ended a car stopped at a traffic light and shoved that car into another that was parked at the curb. The truck must have been going pretty fast because there was lots of damage to all three vehicles—broken glass everywhere, hubcaps rolling away, mangled metal. Apparently, no one was hurt, but everyone present was hollering about Pokémon. 

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an important concept in our system of law enforcement, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that the driver of the truck was chasing a virtual-reality fuzzy something-or-other, and didn’t have his eyes on the road. When I told my son Chris about it, he asked, “So . . . , what did he catch?” 

Take away the deadly weapon of the automobile, and you’re left with at least a nuisance. Living in a big city, much of our mobile life is on foot, and we routinely cross streets with dozens of other people. It’s usual for someone to be walking toward me with ear buds pushed in far enough to meet in the middle, their nose buried in their screen. I often shout, “Heads up,” to avoid a collision. I wonder what’s the etiquette in that situation? When there’s a collision on the sidewalk and the phone falls and shatters, whose fault is it?

I know I’ve called home from a grocery store to double-check items on my list, but I’m annoyed by the person who stands in the middle of the aisle, cart askew, talking to some distant admirer. Perhaps worst is the young parent pushing a $1,000 stroller, one of those jobs with pneumatic suspension, talking on the phone and ignoring the child. No, I’m wrong. Worst is that same situation when the child has a pink kiddie-tablet of his own, and no one is paying attention to anyone. Small children are learning billions of bytes every moment—every moment is a teaching moment. It’s a shame to leave them to themselves while talking on the phone. 

The present danger is the possibility of accidents that result from inattention. The future danger is a world run by people who grew up with their noses in their screens, ignoring the world around them.

Starry eyes

An archeological site at Chankillo in Peru preserves the remains of a 2,300- year-old solar observatory comprising thirteen towers whose positions track the rising and setting arcs of the sun, their eternal accuracy confirmed by modern research. There are similar sites in ancient Mesopotamia. If I had paid better attention to my middle school Social Studies teacher, Miss Wood, who nattered on about the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as if she were reading from a phone book, I’d have a better understanding of modern Iraq and the tragedy of the current destruction of ancient sites there. 

Early astronomers like Aristotle (around 350 BC) and Ptolemy (around 150 AD) gave us the understanding of the motions of celestial bodies. I imagine them sitting on hillsides or cliffs by the ocean for thousands of nights, staring at the sky and realizing that it’s not the stars, but we who are on the move. I wonder if there’s anyone alive today with such an attention span.

The man from Samos

In April of 2014, Wendy and I and three other couples, all (still) close friends, chartered a 60-foot sailboat for a week of traveling between Greek Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands are within a few miles of Turkey, and many of us are increasingly familiar with that region as the heart of the current refugee crises. The island of Lesbos has a population of 90,000, and 450,000 refugees passed through in 2015. Lesbos was not part of our itinerary, but it’s adjacent to other islands we visited. We visited Patmos, where St. John the Divine, sequestered in a cave, received the inspiration we know as the Book of Revelation, but for me, our visit to Samos was a pilgrimage.

Pythagoras is my hero. He was a native of Samos who lived from 570 BC to 495 BC. He gave us the eponymous theory defining the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and importantly to readers of The Diapason, he defined musical tone and intervals in terms of mathematics that led directly to our modern study of musical theory. He was the direct forebear of the art of music. Approaching the island from the north, we entered the harbor of the main town (also called Samos) to be welcomed by a statue of Pythagoras. It shows the great man posed as one side of a right triangle, a right triangle in his left hand, and right forefinger pointing skyward toward a (compact fluorescent) light bulb. Okay, okay, it’s pretty tacky—even hokey, but you should see the Pythagoras snow-globe I bought there that graces the windowsill in my office.

Pythagoras deduced the overtone series by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers and anvils; he realized overtones are a succession of intervals defined by a mathematical series, and you cannot escape that his genius was the root of music. He noticed that blacksmiths’ hammering produced different pitches, and he first assumed that the size of the hammer accounted for the variety. It’s easy to duplicate his experiment. Find any object that makes a musical tone when struck—a bell, a cooking pot, a drinking glass. Hit it with a pencil, then hit it with a hammer. You’ll get the same pitch both times, unless you break the glass. So the size of the anvil determines the pitch. 

But wait, there’s more. Pythagoras noticed that each tone consisted of many. He must have had wonderful ears, and he certainly was never distracted by his smart phone ringing or pushing notifications, because he was able to start picking out the individual pitches. Creating musical tones using a string under tension (like a guitar or violin), he duplicated the separate tones by stopping the string with his finger, realizing that the first overtone (octave) was reproduced by half the full length (1:2), the second (fifth) resulted from 2:3, the third by 3:4, etc. That numerical procession is known as the Fibonacci Series, named for Leonardo Fibonacci (1175–1250) and looks like this:

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

3+5=8, etc., ad infinitum.

The Fibonacci Series defines mathematical relationships throughout nature —the kernels of a pinecone, the divisions of a nautilus shell, the arrangements of seeds in a sunflower blossom, rose petals, pineapples, wheat grains, among countless others. And here’s a good one: count out how many entrances of the subject in Bach’s fugues are on Fibonacci numbers. 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

If you’ve ever blown on a hollow stem of grass and produced a musical tone, you can imagine the origin of the pipe organ. After you’ve given a hoot, bite an inch off your stem and try again: you’ll get a different pitch. Take a stick of bamboo and carve a simple mouthpiece at one end. Take another of different length, and another, and another. Tie them together and you have a pan-pipe. You’re just a few steps away from the Wanamaker!

I have no idea who was the first to think of making a thin sheet of metal, forming it as a cylinder, making a mouthpiece in it, devising a machine to stabilize wind-pressure, and another machine to choose which notes were speaking, but there’s archeological evidence that people were messing around like that by 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompeii, and preserving a primitive pipe organ. And 350 years earlier, in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hydraulis was created, along with visual depictions accurate enough to support the construction of a modern reproduction.

I’m sure that the artisans who built those instruments were aware of Pythagoras’s innovations, and that they could hear the overtones in the organ pipes they built, because those overtones led directly to the introduction of multiple ranks of pipes, each based on a different harmonic. Having five or six ranks of pipes playing at once produced a bold and rich tone we know as Blockwerk, but it was the next smart guy who thought of complicating the machine to allow single sets of pipes to be played separately­—stop action. They left a few of the highest pitch stops grouped together—mixtures. Then, someone took Pythagorean overtones a step further and had those grouped ranks “break back” a few times, stepping down the harmonic series, so the overtones grew lower as you played up the scale.

Here’s a good one: how about we make two organs, one above the other, and give each a separate keyboard. How about a third organ with a keyboard on the floor you can play with your feet? 

As we got better at casting, forming, and handling that metal, we could start our overtone series an octave lower with 16-foot pipes. Or 32 . . . I don’t know where the first 32-foot stop was built or who built it, but I know this: he was an energetic, ambitious fellow with an ear for grandeur. It’s ferociously difficult and wildly expensive to build 32-foot stops today, but it was a herculean task for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century workers. And those huge shiny pipes were just the start. You also had to trudge out in the forest, cut down trees, tie them to your oxen, drag them back into town, and start sawing out your rough lumber to build the case for those huge pipes.

How long do you suppose it took workers to cut one board long enough to support the tower crown over a 32-foot pipe using a two-man saw? It’s a good thing they didn’t have smart phones because between tweets, texts, e-mails, and telemarketers, they’d never have finished a single cut.

It’s usual for the construction of a monumental new organ to use up 50,000 person hours or more, even with modern shortcuts such as using dimension lumber delivered by truck, industrial power tools, and CNC routers. How many hours did the workshops of Hendrik Niehoff (1495–1561) or Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) put into their masterpieces? And let’s remember that Schnitger ran several workshops concurrently and produced more than 150 organs. Amazing. He must have been paying attention.

Pay attention

The pipe organ is a towering human achievement. It’s the result of thousands of years of experimentation, technological evolution, mathematical applications, and the pure emotion of musical sensibilities. Just as different languages evolved in different regions of the world, so did pipe organs achieve regional accents and languages. The experienced ear cannot mistake the differences between a French organ built in 1750 from one built in northern Germany. The musicians who played them exploited their particular characteristics, creating music that complemented the instruments of their region. 

Let’s think for a minute about that French-German comparison. Looking at musical scores, it’s easy to deduce that French organs have simple pedalboards. But let’s go a little deeper. It’s no accident that classic French organ music is built around the Cornet (flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). Those pitches happen to be the fundamental tone and its first four overtones, according to Pythagoras, and they align with the rich overtones that give color and pizzazz to a reed stop. The reeds in those organs are lusty and powerful in the lower and middle octaves, but their tone thins out in the treble. Add that Cornet, and the treble blossoms. Write a dialogue between treble and bass using the Trompette in the left hand and the Cornet in the right. (Can you say Clérambault?) Add the Cornet to the Trumpet as a chorus of stops (Grand Jeu). And while you’re fooling around with the five stops of the Cornet, mix and match them a little. Try a solo on 8′-4′-22⁄3′ (Chant de Nazard). How about 8′-4′-13⁄5′ (Chant de Tierce)? It’s no accident. It’s what those organs do!

History has preserved about 175 hours of the music of J. S. Bach. We can only wonder how much was lost, and certainly a huge amount was never written down. But 175 hours is a ton of music. That’s more than a non-stop seven-day week. I guess Bach’s creativity didn’t get to rest until about 9:00 a.m. on the eighth day! We know he had a busy life, what with bureaucratic responsibilities (he was a city employee), office work, rehearsals, teaching, and all those children. When he sat down to write, he must have worked hard.

Marcel Dupré was the first to play the complete organ works of Bach from memory in a single series of recitals. We know he had a busy life as church musician, professor, mentor, composer, and prolific performer. When he sat down to practice, he must have worked hard.

In 1999, Portugese pianist Maria João Pires was scheduled to perform a Mozart concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. She checked the orchestra’s schedule to confirm which piece, and prepared her performance. Trouble was, the published schedule was wrong. The first performance was a noontime open rehearsal. Chailly had a towel around his neck, and the hall was full of people. He gave a downbeat and the orchestra started playing. A stricken look appeared on Pires’ face, and she put her face in her hands. She spoke with Chailly over the sound of the orchestra, saying she had prepared the wrong piece. It’s not easy to tell what he said, but I suppose it was something like, “Let’s play this one!” And she did. Perfectly. You can see the video by typing “Wrong Concerto” into the YouTube search bar. Maybe Ms. Pires wasn’t paying attention when she started preparation for that concert, but she sure was paying attention when she learned the D-minor concerto. It was at the tip of her fingers, performance ready, at a panicky moment’s notice.

Often on a Sunday morning, my Facebook page shows posts from organ benches. Giddy organists comment between churches on the content of sermons, flower arrangements, or the woman with the funny hat. Really? Do you have your smart phone turned on at the console during the service? If your phone is on while you’re playing a service, is it also on while you’re practicing? I suppose the excuse is that your metronome is an app? Oh wait, you don’t use a metronome? To paraphrase a famous moment from a 1988 vice-presidential debate, I knew Marcel Dupré. Marcel Dupré was a friend of mine. You’re no Marcel Dupré.¹

A time and a place

I love my smart phone. In the words of a colleague and friend, I use it like a crack pipe. I read the news. I order supplies and tools. I look up the tables for drill-bit sizes, for wire gauges, for conversions between metric and “English” measurements. I do banking, send invoices, find subway routes, get directions, buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and do crossword puzzles. I check tide charts, wind predictions, and nautical charts. I text, tweet, e-mail, telephone, and “go to Facebook.” I listen to music and audio books, check the weather, look for restaurants, pay for groceries, and buy clothes.

The people who invented and developed our smart phones must have been paying attention to their work. It’s a world of information we carry in our pockets, and there must be millions of lines of code behind each touch of the screen. I’m grateful to have such an incredible tool, but I’m worried about its effect on our lives. We know a lot about the stars and orbiting planets, but I’m sure we don’t know everything. I hope there’s some smart guy somewhere, sitting on a remote hillside with no phone, wondering about something wonderful.

I’m not pushing strollers so often anymore, but I keep my phone in my pocket when our grandchildren are visiting. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the dog because it’s fun to be with him. And I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the streets of the city alone. I wouldn’t want to miss someone doing something stupid because they weren’t paying attention. Hope they don’t drop their phone. ν

Notes

1. Poetic license: truth is, I never met Marcel Dupré.