Rebirth and enlargement of a great carillon: Indiana University

Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

The University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel houses one of the crown jewels of carillons worldwide—the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon. The 72-bell instrument is a sister to the other carillon donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—the carillon in The Riverside Church in New York City. Both carillons were cast by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, England, and they are the two largest carillons in the world by weight, with Chicago’s carillon second heaviest at over 100 tons. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon was cast over a three-year period and installed in 1932. The university proudly celebrates the 90th anniversary of the carillon’s installation by hosting the annual congress of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America in June 2022 (gcna.org).

The carillon’s mechanics and design bear some hallmarks of Gillett & Johnston’s style while also incorporating contemporary features. The bells possess a rich, full tone because of their fine craftsmanship and extra-large profile, true to the Gillett & Johnston tradition. The large range of the keyboard was of the foundry’s own design, similar to that of their instrument in New York, before unifying keyboard standards were adopted by carillon guilds. The keyboard transposes down four semitones, intensifying the bells’ low register and long resonance. The largest nine bells of the carillon were connected to an electro-pneumatic mechanical system to ring the time in 15-minute increments and to ring the six largest bells via an electric switchbox mounted directly on the carillon keyboard.

In 2005, members of the university administration solicited gifts from alumni to fund an organ and carillon renovation on the occasion of University President Don Michael Randel’s retirement and 65th birthday. Through these generous donations, Eijsbouts of the Netherlands was able to execute a full-scale renovation in 2007 and 2008. The transmission system was updated from a roller bar to directed crank, and the bells were repositioned on a new frame to allow for better sound transmission from the belfry to the ground. All clappers were replaced. The original playing cabin was dismantled, rebuilt, and repositioned within the tower, allowing for better sound transmission and playability from the keyboard. The original keyboard frame was retained but outfitted with an updated World Carillon Federation keyboard design. The electro-pneumatic mechanical system was decoupled from the carillon transmission system in the bass bells, making them more playable for the carillonist. The highest 46 bells were slightly retuned to offset the effects of corrosion over the decades. All in all, the carillon became more consonant, resonant, playable, and easier to hear for audiences.

The original Gillett & Johnston practice keyboard is currently being restored by the B. A. Sunderlin Bellfoundry of Ruther Glen, Virginia. The foundry cast new tone bars and rebuilt the transmission for the full six-octave keyboard. The project is expected to be completed in time for the GCNA Congress in June.

Joey Brink, a member of The Diapason’s 20 Under 30 Class of 2015, has been university carillonist since September of that year, although he will be stepping down in September 2022 (see page 3). An active student carillon guild involves undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in carillon instruction and activities. About twenty students per year enroll in weekly carillon lessons led by Brink, and they assist in playing daily recitals and leading tower tours.

The carillon is played each day, 12:00–1:00 p.m. and 5:00–6:00 p.m., during the academic quarters. Recitals are performed by Brink and students of the carillon guild. The Sunday noon concert, following the chapel service, is programmed and performed by Brink or other local professionals. The carillon is also played for special occasions in the Rockefeller Chapel, including weddings, funerals, and university convocations.

—Kimberly Schafer, PhD

Carillonist and campanologist

Chicago, Illinois

Carillon website: rockefeller.uchicago.edu/the-carillon

Kimberly Schafer, founder and partner of Community Bell Advocates, LLC, is a bell performer, researcher, and advocate. She has performed on the carillon since a college student, in recital across the United States and Europe.

Schafer studied bell instruments as part of her musicological dissertation research at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, the journal of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (gcna.org). She advises institutions on the repair, installation, performance, and programming of tower bells and bell instruments in North America and coordinates events to promote them.

The Netherlands Carillon monument, located in Arlington, Virginia, next to the Arlington National Cemetery and Iwo Jima Memorial, was a gift from the Netherlands to the United States in gratitude for their liberation during World War II and Marshall Plan aid. A Dutch press officer, Govert Verheul, had dreamed up the idea of giving the United States a carillon at a time when the administration was searching for an appropriate present for their generous benefactor. The subsequent “Bells for America” committee solicited donations from Dutch people, provinces, businesses, and organizations for the carillon. Queen Juliana announced the gift to the United States on her state visit to the country in 1952. While the bells were cast only one year later, the carillon would not be installed and dedicated until 1960.

The carillon and tower were designed to showcase Dutch culture and society. The instrument was provisioned with forty-nine bells cast by three different Dutch bell foundries: Eijsbouts, Petit & Fritsen, and Van Bergen. The bells were exquisitely inscribed and decorated to represent varying divisions of Dutch society. The lowest were dedicated to Dutch territories, the middle to professions and professional organizations, and the highest to the youth. Eugenia van den Grinten-Lücker, Louis Meijs, and Gerard van Remmen designed the bell ornamentation. The rhyming couplets centered on Dutch life and aspirations were composed by poet Ben van Eysselsteijn. The modernist tower was designed by Joost W. C. Boks and is bordered by Dutch royal lions by Paul Koning and forty-nine tulip beds to match the number of bells.

The carillon project was delayed and marked with problems from the beginning. Dutch carillonist Ferdinand Timmermans and Belgian Kamiel Lefévere performed for the official presentation of the carillon to the United States on May 5, 1954, Liberation Day for the Netherlands. The carillon was housed in a temporary structure in West Potomac Park until its relocation in its permanent tower in 1960. By that time, the United States had its own growing carillon culture, so Charles T. Chapman, the carillonist of the Luray Singing Tower memorial carillon, Luray, Virginia, inaugurated the instrument during its formal dedication on May 5, 1960.

In 1963, Frank Law, also carillonist at the Valley Forge Carillon, became the first director carillonneur of the instrument and tirelessly advocated for its performance and care. By 1970, though, the carillon had already fallen into disrepair. Thanks to Law’s advocacy and publicity from The Washington Post, the National Park Service allocated the necessary funds to screen off the open belfry from birds, refurbish the transmission system, and replace the keyboard.

A full renovation did not happen until 1994–1995, which was conducted by Eijsbouts. Two Dutch businessmen, Berend Boks, son of the tower’s architect, and Kersen de Jong, spearheaded the fundraising campaign that gathered donations from Dutch businesses and the government. One of the primary aims was to re-tune the smallest thirty-six bells to sound more concordantly together, since the three bell foundries did not produce bells of the same casting and tuning quality. Other improvements in the renovation included yet another new keyboard aligned with the North American keyboard standard, new transmission system, new clappers, and a new automatic playing mechanism controlled by a computer, replacing the obsolete tape-playing mechanism.

In 1995, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Dutch liberation, Prime Minister Wim Kok presented a fiftieth carillon bell to President Bill Clinton. The newest Eijsbouts bell was now the smallest, and it featured two lions to represent the Netherlands and a bald eagle for the United States, along with the message of “Freedom / Friendship.” The newly expanded and renovated instrument was inaugurated by Washington, D.C., carillonist Edward Nassor and Dutch carillonist Jacques Maassen on May 5, 1995. Nassor, Law’s student, had become the director carillonneur after Law’s death in 1985. The liberation commemoration and celebration was a lavish two-day affair, including a ceremony honoring fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, the performance of the musical Bells of Freedom composed for the occasion, and a dinner and dance for over 1,000 Dutch businessmen and American veterans and diplomats.

In 2010, the tower was closed to visitors due to safety issues. Water damage had noticeably corroded bolts and the exterior paint, raising concerns about the tower’s structural integrity. By 2015, the automatic-playing mechanism had broken, ceasing the daily noon and 6:00 p.m. playings. Because of these issues and the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the Dutch liberation, an international fundraising team comprising both governments, the Netherlands-America Foundation, and corporate donors raised funds for the latest renovation to the tower and carillon.

The work began in October 2019, when all fifty bells were removed and returned to the Eijsbouts bell foundry in the Netherlands for another round of re-tuning. Three new bells were added, one low and two high, and the bells have been re-keyed at concert pitch, rather than transposing down a minor third. The range extends down to a low G, making the instrument an American grand carillon, and thus continuing the Dutch tradition of expanding and upkeeping their gift according to the prevailing standards. Other improvements include a World Carillon standard keyboard, new clappers, updated automatic-playing mechanism, and new playing cabin. The three new bells were dedicated to extraordinary Americans in the twentieth century: General and Secretary of State George Marshall, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and First Lady and activist Eleanor Roosevelt. The three new bells were exhibited in Washington, D.C., in May 2021, and the entire carillon was reinstalled in June 2021. The project had been delayed by a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The tower will undergo repairs until autumn 2021, when an inauguration recital is scheduled. Edward Nassor continues as the director carillonneur of the Netherlands Carillon and will lead the regular concert schedule.

The author consulted three sources for this profile: Tiffany Ng’s doctoral dissertation, “The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism” (2015); Diederik Oostdijk, Bells for America: The Cold War, Modernism, and the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington (2019); Edward Nassor, “A Culture Inscribed: Inscriptions and Reliefs on the Bells of the Netherlands Carillon, USA,” The Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 70 (2021).

Let’s hoist a few.

On September 24, 2023, Alyson Krueger published an article in The New York Times under the headline, “My Running Club, My Everything,” telling of the culture of running clubs in New York City in which twenty-five or more people gather at a specified meeting place and run together for four or five miles. She described an outing of the Upper West Side Running Club that met at the American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at Eighty-First Street) where members ran a loop around Central Park and wound up at the Gin Mill on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-First Street, one block west of the museum. I chuckled as I read because the Gin Mill is a favorite after hours haunt of the Organ Clearing House crew. I wonder how many of you reading this have sat there with our guys?

The Gin Mill has a happy hour routine with discounted drinks, and if you are anything like a regular and the bartender knows you, it seems as if you are charged by the hour. Your glass gets magically and repeatedly refilled, and the closing check is a nice surprise. I have spent quite a few evenings there, but our boots-on-the-ground crew has spent dozens. In 2010 the crew spent most of the summer hoisting organ parts into the chambers at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, followed by hoisting pints and other concoctions at the Gin Mill. Numerous subsequent projects have allowed reunions with the friendly staff there—friendly to good natured partyers, but hard on bad apples.

Since so many of our projects involve hoisting organ components in and out of balconies, towers, and high chambers, I spend a lot of time talking with scaffolding vendors around the country. I have first-name relationships with reps in a dozen cities, as well as with our personal representatives from national scaffolding vendors. We own several electric hoists, including one with a 100-foot reach purchased for that job at Saint John the Divine that can hoist a 2,000-pound load 100 feet in two minutes with a soft start and stop. A multiple-week job like that means that someone has held a finger on the up or down button for dozens of hours. We like to ship our own hoist across the country because specialized rental equipment like that can be hard to find and in poor condition. In a usual setup, the hoist is hung from a trolley that rolls on an I-beam so a heavy load like a four-manual console or ten-stop windchest can be lifted clear of a balcony rail, trolleyed out over the nave floor, and safely lowered. Safely for the console, safely for our crew.

The bells, the bells

Wendy and I left our apartment in Greenwich Village on the heels of the pandemic and moved early last year to bucolic Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, about five miles from the New York border. Our house is three doors up Church Street from Main Street where stands the granite Children’s Chime Tower on the Village Green that is shared by the First Congregational Church. After we moved in, we were delighted to learn that we can hear the largest bell ringing the hour, every hour, from the house—no more wondering what time it is in the middle of the night.

The tower was built in 1879, the gift of David Dudley Field II, son of David Dudley Field, pastor of the Congregational Church, and his wife, Submit (really). David II was a prominent New York politician and attorney who represented William Magear “Boss” Tweed in his Tammany Hall embezzlement trial. (Tweed died in prison.) David II dedicated the tower to his grandchildren, stipulating that the chimes should be played every day from “apple blossom time to first frost.” His grave is in the Stockbridge Cemetery, just across Main Street from the Chime Tower. My grandfather was rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge when I was a kid, and I remember sitting on that green with my grandmother at picnic suppers listening to recitals on the chimes. The music was simple as there are only eleven bells, but since it was more than fifty years ago, I remember it as grand. That tradition continued until recently when the timber frame supporting the chimes was deemed unsafe due to an infestation of carpenter ants.

The big bell continued to ring every hour until a storm caused a power failure last spring, stopping the clock at 2:16. The clock was not reset after the storm, leaving us wondering about the time during the night. At the last town meeting, the citizens approved rebuilding the chimes with a new steel frame, refurbishing the chimes’ playing action, replacing the roof, and re-pointing the stone work.

I was returning to Stockbridge last week from our place in Maine and saw a large crane set up next to the tower. I went home, unloaded the car, walked back to the green with Farley the Goldendoodle to see what was going on, and I found three men from the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, preparing to hoist the bells back into the tower. They had removed them earlier in the week, placing them on a flat-bed trailer owned by the town so they could be driven to safety overnight at the public works yard a half-mile away. The new steel frame was in place, and they were hoisting the bells with their new striking mechanisms back into the tower.

In the twenty months since we moved to town, we had only heard the largest bell as it tolled the hours, but now, as the people from Verdin were putting things together and testing the new actions, I heard all the bells for the first time in more than fifty years. At least one of the technicians knew how to play a little so a few hymns and a couple children’s songs wafted up the street to our house. Before they left town, they set and started the clock, freeing it from 2:16 to cover all 720 minutes of the twelve-hour cycle. The morning after the first night of tolling the hour, I was walking Farley a few minutes before 7:00 and ran into our neighbor Marty with Brody the Labrador at the poop-bag kiosk across from the tower. When the bell tolled the hour and we were chatting about the return of the bells, Marty told me that Stewart across the street used to play the chimes and was looking forward to volunteering again when the rest of the work on the tower is complete and the chime goes back into service. I suppose I will, too.

Doing it the old-fashioned way

After Wendy and I visited Florence, Italy, in May 2023, I wrote about the hoisting equipment designed by Filippo Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of the cathedral there. He had won the design competition in 1418, and construction started in 1420 on what is still the largest unsupported dome in the world. Brunelleschi’s hoisting gear was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill on the floor of the cathedral, a rig that was a lot messier and required more maintenance than what we use on our job sites. He made use of blocks and tackle, the same as used to handle the rigging of sailing ships. It is fun to picture workers hauling hay into the church to feed the oxen, and I suppose there was a poop-bag kiosk there also.

The real genius of Brunelleschi’s hoist was the crane at the top that could transfer stones weighing thousands of pounds laterally to every spot in the circumference of the dome. In the world of rigging, it is one thing to hoist a heavy load vertically; it is a very different challenge to move horizontally from under the hoisting point.

We marvel at ancient feats of lifting. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, is believed to be between four- and five-thousand years old. It includes some thirty stones, some as heavy as twenty-five tons. The stones came from a quarry sixteen miles away—simply bringing them to the site was effort enough. In most American states, the weight limits on tandem axles of commercial trucks are between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds. Rhode Island has the highest limit, 44,800 pounds, which is about the weight of one of the stones at Stonehenge. The Grove crane that was helping my friends from Verdin hoisting bells is a robust machine with a fifty-ton lifting capacity. The engineers and laborers at Stonehenge would have been pleased with help from Gary the crane operator.

We visit iconic churches in Europe built in centuries past and admire their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs. The monumental organ completed in 1738 by Christian Müller at the church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has 32′ pipes in the pedal tower. As modern organbuilders, we know how much work it is to handle things like that. Those eighteenth-century craftsmen worked very hard.

I was twenty-one years old when my mentor John Leek and I helped a crew from Flentrop in Zaandam, the Netherlands, install the three-manual organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. The organ has a beautiful twenty-five-foot mahogany case topped with a massive crown with heavy moldings that stands on a pedestal balcony something like fifteen feet above the floor. The balcony is shallower than the organ case so when you are up on top, you look straight down to the floor.

There is a polished 16′ Principal in the façade, and come to think of it, we installed that organ using technology and equipment similar to that used by Brunelleschi, lifting everything to the balcony and into the organ using a block-and-tackle with hemp rope. Looking back, it would have been a lot more pleasant had anyone thought of using nylon rigging rope like you find on a modern sailboat because that hairy, prickly hemp was hard on our hands. The heaviest piece of the organ was the impost frame with the huge moldings that form the bases of the case towers and the rigid structure that connects the lower and upper cases. I suppose it weighed around 1,500 pounds; so instead of oxen, there was me and a young guy from Flentrop pulling on the rope. We were much neater and easier to maintain than Brunelleschi’s oxen. My sixty-seven-year-old shoulders and back could no more do that kind of work now than fly me to the moon.

To lift the big shiny façade pipes up to the case, a co-worker picked up the top of the pipe and climbed a ladder from the nave floor to the balcony as others moved the toe end toward the ladder, bringing the pipe to vertical. I wore a leather harness around my waist as if I was carrying a flagpole in a parade, we placed the toe of the pipe in the cup, and I climbed the ladder, toe following top as the others above me balanced and guided it into place. Today I stand in a church gazing up at the organ, remembering doing that work, incredulous. I am not half the man I used to be.

I have been with the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years, watching my colleague Amory Atkins set up scaffolding and hoisting equipment on dozens, even hundreds of job sites. There is still plenty of hustle to the work, but the I-beams, trolley, and electric hoist all supported by steel scaffolding make for a much safer and less strenuous work site.

Making the impossible possible

When I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area in the 1980s, we had a releathering project in the large organ of one of Boston’s great churches. As usual, we started the job with a string of heavy days disconnecting organ components covered with decades of city grime and removing them from the organ for transportation to our workshop. After we had wrestled a particularly awkward and heavy part down the ladders and out of the building, one of my employees announced that now he thought he understood organbuilding. “It’s squeezing into tiny spaces to remove screws you can’t reach, to separate a part of the organ the size of a refrigerator that’s covered with mud and sharp pointy things and carrying it down a ladder next to a Tiffany window.”

He was right. A big manual windchest might weigh 800 or 1,000 pounds, more for a large console. If we are planning to dismantle or install a Skinner organ that has one of those wonderful electro-pneumatic harps, we might plan an entire day to handle that single specialty voice—they are big and heavy and include row after row of little prickly things that dig into your hands, arms, and shoulders. When I hear a harp in service playing, recital, or recording, my mind jumps instantly to the titanic struggles I have had moving them. They sound so ethereal in a lofty room, but they are pugnacious bulky brats to handle.

The thrilling rumbles of big 16′ and 32′ stops do not happen anywhere else in music, but again, my mind jumps to the herculean task of moving such things. The pipes, racks, and windchests of a 32′ Double Open Wood weigh many tons and will fill half of a semi-trailer. One of the marvels of the pipe organ is the idea that a single pipe might be approaching forty feet in length including pipe foot and tuning length, weigh close to a ton, and can produce only one musical tone at one pitch at one volume level. What a luxurious note.

When I meet people at social events, they are invariably surprised when they learn about my work. “A pipe organ builder. I didn’t know there were any of you left.” Another common comment is someone remembering the organ looming high in the back of the church and if they ever gave it any thought, they assumed that it was part of the building. Not so. Every organ in every building anywhere in the world was put there intentionally by craftsmen. They had to figure out how to mount and secure each heavy component. Think of the sprawling sixteenth-century organ case at the cathedral in Chartres. It gives the impression that it is somehow hanging from the stained-glass windows, but 500 years ago, those workers built scaffolding clear up to the clerestory windows and hoisted and lugged the heavy woodwork and huge pipes to their lofty spots.

Twenty years ago, we were delivering a three-manual organ to a church in suburban Richmond, Virginia. There was a big organ case with polished façade pipes, five large windchests, all the machinery and ductwork for the wind system, seventy or eighty eight-foot pipe trays full of nicely packed pipes, the console, and all the mysterious looking bits and pieces that make up a full-sized pipe organ. Parishioners volunteered on a Sunday afternoon to help unload the truck, and by day’s end the sanctuary was jam packed with carefully made, expensive looking stuff. I had worked with the church’s organ committee and governing board to create and negotiate the project and knew several of the people involved very well. After the dust had settled that evening, one of them came up to me and commented, “John, it wasn’t until this moment that I understood why organs cost so much money.”

Designed for the space

When an organ builder accepts the challenge of creating a new instrument for a particular space, they incorporate all the features of the room: architecture, acoustics, ambient climate, and building surfaces like floors, walls, and ceilings. All are factors that influence the design of the organ. Many builders have a portable windchest equipped with blower, regulator, and sample pipes that they ship to the church, allowing them to hear and compare pipes of different scales at different wind pressures in the room where the organ will go. If the walls, ceilings, and floors are made of materials that absorb sound, the builder recommends changing them by replacing carpet with stone tiles, sealing soft ceilings with material that reflects sound, and doubling or tripling the thickness of sheetrock walls.

A formula is developed that includes the scope and content of the organ, the scales of various ranks of pipes at certain wind pressures, and the adaptation of the room that encloses it. It is both a scientific equation and an artistic composition. It is purposeful and intentional; there is no sense of “hit or miss.” Building a pipe organ is an expensive adventure, and it is important to get it right.

Perhaps I am describing an ideal. Often there are compromises because of budget limitations or conflicts with other groups within a parish about changing the look and feel of a sanctuary—a congregation that is accustomed to carpets and pew cushions may not part with them easily. In any case, it is customary for an organbuilder to spend a lot of time and effort creating the most effective equation considering the limitations.

If each instrument is carefully planned for a specific room, how can it be that we routinely relocate organs from one place to another? That has been central to my work as director of the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years. We accept as new listings those organs we judge to be good candidates for relocation, and we help guide the placement of an organ based on our sense of the same design equation used to plan a new instrument. Sometimes it is necessary to design and build a new case to get the architecture right. In other cases it helps to rescale some of the stops to increase the depth of the sound of the organ. Increasing the scale involves making the pipes larger in diameter relative to their length by adding new pipes for the lowest few notes, moving the pipes up the correct number of holes and cutting them shorter to make the correct pitch. Increasing scale along with raising wind pressure will make an organ more bold and powerful, ready to fill a larger space with sound.

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A couple years ago the Organ Clearing House organized the relocation of Gabriel Kney’s Opus 93 (two manuals, forty ranks), built in 1980 for First Community Church of Dallas, Texas. The organ was offered for sale because that church decided to divest itself of real estate to create an endowment it could administer to meet specific needs of the community, confining the organized worship to more simple surroundings. The organ’s original home was a contemporary room with a sharp-pitched roofline, something like an A-frame. It was moved to a richly decorated chapel at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.

The organ has classic lines and proportions. It is housed in a free-standing “honey” oak case with a narrow lower section that spreads wider midway up to accommodate a common three-tower design. The towers have flat roofs that neatly parallel the flat but coffered ceiling of the chapel. The honey color of the case complements that of the wooden chairs, while walls and ceiling are a similar but darker hue. Someone seeing the organ for the first time in the chapel at Saint Meinrad might think it was originally designed for that room.

The bright and powerful classic tones of the organ carry effectively through the large space, which with its contoured ceiling provides a rich acoustical surrounding. Mr. Kney’s equation for the creation of an instrument for the church in Dallas transposed easily to the different surroundings.

About twelve years ago, we relocated a 1916 Casavant organ, Opus 665, from the “downstairs church” at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine, to the nave of Church of the Resurrection on East Seventy-Fourth Street at Park Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four 16′ stops from previous organs in the church were incorporated and added to the specification. The Pedal Principal 16′ became the Great 16′ Violone; the Gemshorn 16′ extended the Postif Dulciane 8′ to play at 16′ on both manual and pedal; the Pedal Bourdon 16′ serves as an independent pedal stop with the remote Positif; and the Pedal 16′ Quintadena was cut shorter to create a 10-2⁄3′ Quinte, which effectively increased the scale of the stop by five notes. A fourth “new” 16′ stop was created with the extension of the Récit 8′ Hautbois with a new bass octave so the rank could speak at 16′ pitch on manual and pedal, making a total of four sixteens and a ten-and-two-thirds added to the already sonorous Double Open Wood, Subbass, and Trombone. Pretty good foundation for a forty-rank organ.

Originally, there were two Open Diapasons on the Grand Orgue. We left one in that division as the usual foundation of the main principal chorus, and the other, larger diapason became the base of a new Solo division, which includes a restored Skinner French Horn and new replicas of a Skinner Harmonic Flute and high-pressure Tuba.

These and other modifications transformed the organ from a downstairs small-town organ to an upstairs big-city organ. You can read about this instrument and follow links to see full specifications at resurrectionnyc.org/organ.html.

Monumental art

I am thinking about moving large objects that were made for specific places after reading an article by Hilarie M. Sheets published in The New York Times on October 13, 2023, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act.” Orpheus and Apollo is a metal sculpture 190-feet wide and forty-feet deep comprising 188 Muntz metal bars¹ suspended in a system of complex angles from 444 woven stainless-steel wires. The wires were fastened to eye bolts in the ceiling personally by the sculptor Richard Lippold (1915–2002) in the grand lobby of Philharmonic Hall in New York City’s Lincoln Center. The work was in place for the opening of the hall in 1962 (E. Power Biggs, Catharine Crozier, and Virgil Fox shared the dedication recital of the Aeolian-Skinner organ there that year), but fifty years later conservators grew concerned about the stability and safety of the massive complex work. The wires that suspended the heavy metal bars were fraying, and as a second reconstruction and renaming of the hall was being planned, Orpheus and Apollo was documented, dismantled, and placed in a storage facility in New Jersey. Just like seemingly countless pipe organs I have seen go into storage, there was little hope that the grand piece of art would ever see the light of day.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, lecturer at the Parsons School of Design and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the column “Skyline” in The New Yorker magazine, was serving as consultant to Lincoln Center for the selection of the architect of the transformation of Philharmonic Hall, then Avery Fisher Hall, into Geffen Hall, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport. As he followed the planning of those two major projects, he noticed similarities in the two monumental spaces and conceived the idea that Orpheus and Apollo might be installed at LaGuardia. “Lincoln Center had a sculpture in search of a space, and the airport had a space in search of a purpose,” Goldberger said of the atrium at LaGuardia. The article continues, “With the sculpture as the centerpiece of this new gathering spot with a mezzanine lounge, Goldberger feels it is ‘entirely consistent with what Lippold intended, which was to enliven an architectural space, to have people moving around it.’”

Peter Flamm, executive director of the Lincoln Center Development Project, said, “We believed LaGuardia to be the best solution that provided a manner to appropriately appreciate the piece.” Lincoln Center not only gave Orpheus and Apollo to the Port Authority but also funded the restoration and re-lacquering of the 188 metal bars. When conservator Marc Roussel dismantled the sculpture, a precise 3-D scan of the original installation was created—that was included in the gift to the Port Authority.

Frank Rapaccioli of the fine-arts mover Dun-Right Carriers was responsible for the installation at LaGuardia, converting the model into a format that mapped out the placement of the screw-eyes and the lengths of the new steel wires that determined the height of each end of the sculpture. The original layout had to be changed to accommodate the lower ceiling in the LaGuardia atrium, and conservator Roussel was charged by the Lippold Foundation to observe and approve those changes in the interest of preserving as much of the integrity of the original installation as possible.

The installation took thirty days. At the outset, there was a lot of trial and error as the installers and curators realized how easy it was to leave wires rubbing against others, and many pieces had to be cut down and moved even a few inches for clearance. As the work progressed they got the hang of it, and there were far fewer “back steps” in the second half of the project.

The article concludes, “While profoundly disappointed about the sculpture’s displacement, Anthony C. Wood, executive director of the Ittleson Foundation, which originally funded Orpheus and Apollo at Lincoln Center, is relieved that it was so well documented and hasn’t been consigned to storage, in pieces, for eternity. Putting it in a new and exciting home, where it will be seen by more people, is the silver lining,” Wood said. “But you don’t have to be an art expert to know that it’s going to be different. How could it not?”²

This story speaks of inspiration, cooperation, and flexibility. Paul Goldberger had the great idea, and officials and conservators at Lincoln Center and the Port Authority cooperated to make it happen. The fact that the iconic sculpture would not fit in the new space in its original form did not stop them. They reconfigured it to fit, retaining as much of the work’s integrity as possible. The overriding sentiment was that it is better to have the work renovated and installed in a busy public place than to have it languish in storage, never to be seen again.

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We at the Organ Clearing House have faced just this question with numerous pipe organs. Imagine a large three-manual, nineteenth-century organ built by E. & G. G. Hook or Henry Erben. It is installed in an immense balcony, stands thirty or forty feet tall, and has a footprint thirty feet wide by twelve feet deep. (I am thinking of a particular organ I visited last week.) What newer church can accommodate an instrument of that size? But when a potential purchaser who loves the sounds of organs from that era arrives representing a church that has adequate space for this organ but would wish to equip it with electric stop action and a solid-state combination action, I would be tempted to refuse on the grounds that the historic monument should be preserved without alteration. What do I achieve? Nothing. The interested party moves on, and the organ remains dormant.

Why not consider adapting that grand organ to suit the needs of a modern congregation? After all, there would be only a few churches that could house such a massive organ. A careful restoration of the windchests, reservoirs, keyboard and stop action, and pipes could be enhanced by adding electric solenoid stop action motors to the existing mechanical stop action. The only actual violation of the original organ would be drilling piston buttons into the keyslips between the keyboards, and the original keyslips could be retained in case someone later chose to reverse the project and remove the electric action.

The organ would be used and admired, and it would sound just as it did when it was new. It would leave the vast assortment of historic organs languishing in storage or in abandoned buildings.

When conservators restore a piece of furniture owned by Marie Antoinette, they place it behind velvet ropes, keeping visitors from touching it. When we restore or renovate a pipe organ, we intend it to be used. The purpose of preserving an organ is so people can hear the timeless sounds.

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There is a grand relief-plaster sculpture thirty feet wide called The Spirit of Transportation in a secondary waiting room in the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia. One passes it on leaving the main concourse and heading for the public restrooms or the Amtrak first class lounge. It was created by the Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter (1867–1915) who emigrated to the United States in 1889. The Spirit of Transportation was created for the opening of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and depicts the history of transportation from ox carts to fanciful imaginations of air and space craft. When the Thirtieth Street Station was built, its predecessor the Broad Street Station was demolished, but curators and designers had the foresight to preserve this and several other important sculptures. One might have preferred to have the work installed in a busy central place in the new station rather than in an out-of-the-way place, but at least it was preserved where it can be freely admired by the public.

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In the first weekend of November 2023, my colleague Amory Atkins and I attended dedication concerts of the rebuilt and reimagined 1977 Klais organ at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue (at the CitiCorp building) in Manhattan. I have written previously about the emergency removal of the organ a couple winters ago following a major water main break at the intersection of East Fifty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. The lower levels of the church were profoundly flooded, and while there was only about a half inch of water in the organ, there was great concern about mold developing and the need to remove the organ quickly for remediation in the entire room.

There had been questions about the viability of the instrument for many years. It has an iconic case designed by Massimo Vignelli, but the windchests and mechanical action were problematic, the wind system was inadequate, and the tonal structure was substandard. The organ was shipped to the workshop of C. B. 
Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it was reworked with a new wind system and tracker action, several lovely replacement voices, and a general revoicing. The resulting instrument is a joy to hear. The preservation of the case and visual design of the organ was an important move, retaining the original architectural content of the striking and unusual sanctuary.

This project was a great example of how thoughtful changes can extend the life and improve the usefulness of an artwork. It is exciting to celebrate that organ’s rebirth concurrently with the installation of the restored and re-invigorated Lippold sculpture, Orpheus and Apollo. Neither project was a strict historical restoration, and both brought new life to important works of art through open-minded appraisal and thoughtful craftsmanship. There are a lot of ways to interpret the concept of historical preservation.

Notes

1. Muntz metal is an alloy of 60% copper and 40% zinc that is stronger, harder, and more rigid than other forms of brass.

2. Hilarie M. Sheets, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act,” The New York Times, October 13, 2023.

David Engen holds degrees in organ from St. Olaf College and the University of Iowa, and a master’s degree in software engineering from the University of St. Thomas. He has been in the organ business since 1970. He is currently president of Grandall & Engen, LLC, in Minneapolis where he shares duties with vice-president David Grandall.

Editor’s note: many of the organs mentioned in this article can be found with stoplists and pictures at the website of the Twin Cities Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

Charles George Hendrickson, 85, died at his home in Saint Peter, Minnesota, on December 17, 2020. He was born June 10, 1935, in Willmar, Minnesota, to Roy and Frances (Eklund) Hendrickson. Roy Hendrickson was an attorney and member of the board of directors at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, from which Charles graduated in 1957. His intent was to continue in nuclear physics, but he once admitted to me that during his time of graduate study at the University of Minnesota, aspects of nuclear physics were “beyond me.” He taught physics at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and Northeast State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

I believe it was after his father’s death that his mother became secretary to the president of Gustavus Adolphus. It was she who introduced Charles to the woman he would marry, Birgitta Gillberg, a language teacher at Gustavus Adolphus and later at nearby Mankato State University. He taught physics at Mankato State, and he and Birgitta were married in Sweden in 1964. They had two sons: Eric and Andreas. Birgitta preceded him in death by two years.

In 1964 he started building his first organ in rented space in an old canning plant in Winthrop, an instrument for nearby First Lutheran Church. The three-manual organ of thirty-four ranks, which has since been enlarged, had the first Rückpositiv division in Minnesota. David N. Johnson, then of Saint Olaf College, played the dedication recital.

Philosophy

I first met Charles at about the time the Winthrop organ was completed in 1966. He was measuring pipes in the new Holtkamp organ (Job Number 1778) at my home church in Minneapolis, Westwood Lutheran Church, Saint Louis Park. He told me of the upcoming David Johnson recital at Winthrop, which I attended. I started working for him in 1970 and continued for much of the time until 1984.

Charles was a fan of the architect Mies van der Rohe and ascribed to his “less is more” philosophy (although in the shop we often changed it to “more is more”). Most of his designs with casework are simple boxes. He also much admired the work of the organbuilder Robert Noehren, whose unit organs on all-electric action were a big influence.

More than one hundred organs came from the Hendrickson shop, ranging in size from a one-stop, one-rank portable “organetto” (Opus 19) to his “magnum” Opus 92 of four manuals and seventy ranks for Wayzata Community Church in Wayzata, Minnesota. Most of his organs were built for churches, but many were built for colleges (both concert halls and practice rooms), and several were built for individuals. There was a series of three three-stop portativ organs built for touring groups, the first for the Saint Olaf Choir, designed to fit through the door of a Greyhound bus.

Many organs had mechanical action, and in general the smaller organs were unit organs on all-electric action. These followed the Noehren philosophy of unification, where octave unification was avoided if possible.

One of Charles’s notable innovations was the use of plywood Subbass pipes. Built in the shop, they were made of three-quarter-inch plywood. In the ravages of Minnesota’s wild seasonal humidity swings, almost every old organ we encountered had splits in the big pedal pipes. Plywood avoids this, and these pipes were used in virtually every organ. He also exclusively used aluminum for the façade pipes above 4′, made by Justin Matters of South Dakota.

Another unique feature of the small unit organs has to do with celeste and tierce stops. In a very small organ it is difficult to justify the expense of either of these. Both are typically the softest stops, and both can be either string or flute scale. We found that if the tierce is borrowed from the celeste (tuned flat instead of sharp), you can have both in a single stop by adding just a few more pipes. One tunes the tierce perfectly from middle C up, then tunes from there down for a pleasant flat celeste (beats tend to get too wild in that range if tuned to the perfect tierce). It is an inexpensive compromise that is of great benefit to a tiny organ.

Friends and collaborations

Some of the best organs to come from the shop during my time were designed in conjunction with friends who acted as consultants. Among those were Merrill N. (“Jeff”) Davis, III, of Rochester, Minnesota, and William B. Kuhlman of Luther College, Decorah, Iowa.

Both pushed Charles to some of his most inspired designs, visually and tonally. Opus 4 was a pair of positiv divisions added to a Wicks organ in memory of Jeff Davis’s first wife at the Congregational Church in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. In an acoustically dry room, these positivs pulled the sound of the enclosed Wicks into the church. This was but the first collaboration. Many other projects resulted in very unique and unusual instruments over the years.

Bill Kuhlman was behind what was to become the first mechanical-action organ constructed in Minnesota in the late twentieth century. This was a thirty-six-rank teaching organ for Luther College (Opus 10) in Decorah, Iowa. As a successful teacher, Bill had many students study on that organ who went on to careers in music.

Other consultants included Robert Kendall and Robert Thompson of Saint Olaf College and Kim Kasling, then of Mankato State University.

Significant instruments

I had personal experience and/or input in almost all of the organs from Opus 1 through Opus 70, and it would be tempting to tell stories of each one. Except for the three portativs, no two were alike. (Fritz Noack once told me that when you mass-produce organs, you have an opportunity to replicate your mistakes!)

One overriding memory I have is that every time we built a mechanical-action organ, the shop looked forward to building electric action. When we were lost in the wiring of electric-action instruments, we would long to build another tracker.

Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, Opus 10, two manuals, 36 ranks

After the Winthrop organ had launched the company (we cleaned and added to it some years later after a Christmas Eve fire), all organs through Opus 9 were built in the Hendrickson garage and backyard. Starting with the Luther College organ (Opus 10) the operation moved to the current shop location at the north end of Saint Peter in an industrial park. The shop was built during the winter of 1970–1971. During the first rainstorm in 1971 the skylights leaked, and several of us frantically covered the Luther windchests in the middle of the night to prevent damage.

There was a lot of overcompensation in design. The pallets were large, we had complex bleed holes in the channels, and we used foam slider seals. Having a heavy coupled action, it had optional electric couplers. The horizontal trumpet was on electric action and played at 16′, 8′, and 4′ on the Great and at 8′, 4′, and 2′ on the Pedal to create maximum “blast.” There were prepared stops in each division. Perhaps the most unusual feature was that the whole organ could be moved around Koren Chapel at Luther with an air flotation system by one person! Gerald Near wrote his Second Fantasy for the dedication concert.

Jensen-Noble Hall of Music was opened in late 1982 on the Luther campus, so the Hendrickson company was engaged to move the organ into a teaching studio in the spring and summer prior to the opening. Being the only employee left who had helped build it, I wound up in charge of disassembly and reinstallation. We were able to take what we had learned from building about a dozen tracker organs in the intervening years and apply those lessons to what became a successful renovation. Since there was no need for the flotation system in a studio, we removed it and built a new and more reliable pedal action in that space. Pallet openings and pallets were reduced in size, resulting in a lighter action that no longer needed electric couplers. The blast from the horizontal trumpet at multiple pitches was not needed in the smaller space, so the trumpet was placed on mechanical action and lower wind pressure, speaking from the Great channels. Three of the five prepared stops were added. It continues to function, fifty years after construction, as a teaching and practice organ under Bill Kuhlman’s successor, Gregory Peterson.

Saint John Lutheran Church, Owatonna, Minnesota, Opus 34, three manuals, 51 ranks

Saint John Lutheran Church is a huge A-frame building, but the typical front transepts are in the back balcony. Floor to ceiling windows in the balcony provide wonderful light, but the acoustic issues for a gallery organ are significant since glass does not reflect bass. Charles’s solution was to cantilever the main organ as far into the room as possible and to provide a very large Rückpositiv as well as a prominent horizontal trumpet.

Since there was virtually no unification on the manuals, I talked Charles into building slider windchests. We opted to try the Holtkamp slider chest design with all-electric magnets on the channels rather than pallets with pull-downs. Forty-five years later the organ continues to serve the church—as does Shirley Erickson, who was organist when the organ was installed!

Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Mankato, Minnesota, Opus 35, three manuals, 59 ranks

Following right behind the 51-rank Owatonna organ, we tackled what would briefly become the largest mechanical-action organ in Minnesota. (The Fisk organ at House of Hope Presbyterian Church, Saint Paul, followed very soon thereafter.) Kim Kasling was consultant, and Jim Dorn was organist. An original plan for a high, stacked organ in the right front of the nave eventually became a balcony installation. Again, a large Rückpositiv was in the design, but the ancient church balcony could not hold its weight if placed in the normal location on the rail. It sits instead on the floor, right behind the keydesk, with new steel beams under the floor to hold the weight.

A huge Great division with two mixtures sits above a relatively small Swell, with Pedal split and across the back inside the organ. There are many pipes from the previous organ spread throughout, as well as a 32′ Bourdon from the old Soul’s Harbor organ in Minneapolis and a 16′ open wood diapason discarded from the Sipe rebuild of the organ at Christ United Methodist Church in Rochester, Minnesota. The church interior has been tastefully remodeled since the organ went in, and there is now less carpet than there had been.

First Lutheran Church, Saint Peter, Minnesota, Opus 45, two manuals (with a third coupler manual), 44 ranks

First Lutheran Church in Saint Peter was the Hendrickson family church. Founded in 1857 by Swedish immigrants, 164 years later it retains its Swedish roots, although services have been held in English for 100 years. It has always been closely connected with Gustavus Adolphus College, which is just a mile away. On Mother’s Day, May 13, 1962, the old church was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Charles was already involved in organ renovations, and there was an existing organ fund.

The firm of Harold Spitznagel and Associates of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, designed the new church to replace the old one on land purchased on the edge of town. The first service was held in the new edifice on September 5, 1965. The sanctuary was half a cube, 76 feet on each side and 40 feet high topped with clerestory windows. The congregation did not want to suffer another fire, so this building is made of concrete and brick. As a result, the sanctuary has incredible acoustics for music.

To avoid having a temporary electronic organ, Charles assembled parts he had on hand into an eight-rank exposed organ that he leased temporarily to the church. The four-second reverberation made this mongrel organ surprisingly successful. It was later rebuilt for another institution.

In 1975 plans began in earnest for a new organ. The original concept had four manuals with a Rückpositiv division. Fundraising and unrelated issues delayed the project, and in a period of high inflation the organ shrank by the month. We finally decided to start over and took the tonal design of the Luther College organ as a starting point. The entire Luther organ can be found within the specification of the First Lutheran organ. One major difference is inclusion of a coupler manual.

This became the flagship demonstration organ for the company, being located just a mile from the shop and in a room with incredible acoustics. What many do not realize is that the asymmetrical design of the organ case is inspired by the brick sculpture on the front wall of the church (the story of Creation). The pipe shades are inspired by the bird figures in that sculpture. The asymmetrical “Family of Man” and the birds are at the top.

Saint Wenceslaus Catholic Church, New Prague, Minnesota, Opus 47, three manuals, 43 ranks

Robert Thompson of nearby Saint Olaf College was consultant for this organ and gave the organ a decidedly French accent, although this is a congregation of Czech descendents. This was the only organ built during my time at the shop with supply house chests, ordered from Laukhuff. Robert Sperling always voiced in a Germanic style. Initially, the Recit 8′ flute sounded like a quintadena. After reworking it with higher cutups and nicks, it was the stop that elicited the most comments from visitors. Sperling thought he had ruined it. The whole time he was revoicing he grumbled that he was turning it into a 1920 Möller Melodia!

First Unitarian Church, Rochester, Minnesota, Opus 49, two manuals (with third coupler manual), 24 ranks

Merrill N. Davis, III, of Rochester was the consultant for this project. Fondly called “The Bell Organ,” the 2′ on the Ripieno division is a Glockenspiel; there is a wind-driven Zimbelstern; the Continuo mixture is a Glockenzimbel, which starts at 2⁄5′ pitch and includes a tierce on every note. The unison on the F above middle C is the F above high C of a 2′ and had to be voiced with a magnifying glass. Like First Lutheran Church, it has a third coupler manual. The casework is walnut, and the Continuo division in Rückpositiv position has no façade.

Saint John’s Lutheran Church, Kasson, Minnesota, Opus 57, two manuals, 29 ranks

Merrill N. Davis, III, was again consultant. Kasson is not far from Rochester. This organ was conceived with a big blockwerk on the Great based on a 16′ Principal with a big mixture. There are two cornets on the Great—a four-rank mounted cornet of flute scale, and a three-rank Sesquialtera of principal scale, along with a dark trumpet. Originally the Swell did not couple to either the Great or Pedal. These couplers have since been added. What started as an unsuccessful 1′ Principal on the Great was changed to 8⁄9′ to add spice to the ensemble and to the two cornets. The organ was originally tuned to Chaumont temperament.

Saint John’s Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Opus 63, three manuals, 47 ranks

Saint John’s Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis is one of the biggest rebuild projects we undertook. Hillgreen-Lane had rebuilt the previous organ (perhaps a Hall) in 1959 at 32 ranks. Our 1983 rebuild significantly enlarged the organ and made access for tuning and servicing much easier than it had been in the Hillgreen-Lane organ. Many ranks were retained. Much of the Pedal is recycled from the Hillgreen-Lane. A string had been converted into an 8′ Gelind Gedackt by Hillgreen-Lane, but the scale was very small and the caps did not seal. We rescaled it again. We presume it had been Hillgreen-Lane that had soldered two diapasons together end-to-end to make a 16′ Salicional, which was retained. This organ had one of the early multiplex relay systems, this one donated by Dirk Moibroeck of Cincinnati (ICMI).

Union Presbyterian Church, Saint Peter, Minnesota, Opus 64, two manuals, 11 ranks

Though far from a significant organ, Union Presbyterian Church is an example of the smaller all-electric unit organs that were quite successful. Union Church’s acoustics were horribly dry when the organ was designed, but when the chancel was modified for the new organ we discovered a small space with a very warm acoustic. When the organ was first played the room amplified it too much! We dropped the pressure and revoiced everything. For many years this was the location of a well-attended hymn festival, and the organ has often been used with various instruments. A small-scale trumpet was added in later years, and the relay and combination action were recently replaced with current technology. The 4′ Octave, mixture, and trumpet are on the right side near the console. The Bourdon/Rohrflute and 8′ Principal trebles are on the left side behind the choir. The Swell is in the middle behind the grill, with the largest 16′ Subbass pipes (plywood) on its roof. Organist at the time, Charles Eggert, was consultant.

Saint Joseph’s Catholic Cathedral, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Opus 78, three manuals, 62 ranks

The two largest organs were built after I left, and I have never seen the Sioux Falls organ. Nonetheless, it is a significant instrument in a large and very reverberant space.

Wayzata Community Church, Wayzata, Minnesota, Opus 92, four manuals, 70 ranks

The company’s magnum opus is in a suburb west of Minneapolis. C. Charles Jackson gave funds for it, and Charles Hendrickson’s long friendship with sculptor Paul Granlund at Gustavus Adolphus was the genesis of the sculpture (“Aeneous Aegis”) in the middle of the organ case. For many years this was home to an extensive organ concert series under staff organist, Diana Lee Lucker. Charles attended most of these concerts. Following Diana Lee’s retirement, this series ceased.

Trinity Episcopal Church, Excelsior, Minnesota, Opus 111, two manual, 29 ranks

Trinity Episcopal Church had been home to a five-rank Möller organ (Opus 8026). The new organ was impetus for a complete church remodel project, which is quite successful with movable chairs and hard surfaces. The Hendrickson organ includes pipes from the Möller as well as pipes from a practice organ (Opus 20) built for the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire that was repurchased. Andreas Hendrickson designed the unusual façade.

Shop stories

The Luther College organ had a flotation system, which Charles developed the summer of 1971. Each iteration of his design resulted in the call to everyone in the shop to come and stand on a piece of plywood to see if it would float with the added weight. We eventually had a winner that was installed on the organ.

The Rochester Unitarian organ was playing in the shop when Jeff Davis came to see it. He did not like the relationship between the 4′ and 2′ of the Continuo division, so a new rank was ordered and the ranks affected were re-racked.

There was a fire at the shop on November 15, 2013, that originated in one of the light fixtures. Even though the majority of the building was left intact, insurance deemed the structure a loss, and a new building was put up in its place. Amazingly, only one wood pipe rank was in the shop at the time. The remainder of that particular project was stored down the hill in the nearby shop warehouse.

Children of the shop

Most organ shops have spinoffs, and Hendrickson’s shop was no exception. Notable among the “children” of the shop is Lynn Dobson, of Dobson Pipe Organ Builders, Ltd., of Lake City, Iowa, founded in 1974. I succeeded Robert Sperling as voicer in 1979 and remained until 1984. My company, Grandall and Engen, LLC, of Maple Grove, Minnesota, has been operating since 1984 and does tuning and enhancements for many clients in the Twin Cities area and western Wisconsin, including a number of universities. The third offshoot is Rob Hoppe, of Robert D. Hoppe & Associates of Algoma, Wisconsin, founded in 1986. He often builds new organs with digital enhancements. Charles’s two sons, Eric and Andreas, took over the business when Charles retired in 2015 and continue today.

Read more about Charles Hendrickson here.

Samuel Russell is the library and archival collections manager at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida. He oversees the Anton Brees Carillon Library and the Chao Research Center, which houses the archives of the Bok Tower Gardens Foundation and its predecessor, The American Foundation. The Chao Research Center is also home to many artifacts related to the founder: Edward W. Bok.

This interview took place February 19, 2022, at the Blue Palmetto Café on the campus of Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales, Florida. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra was studying with Geert D’hollander and playing four concerts at Bok Tower during the week of February 14–19, 2022. I conducted this interview before Pamela had a meeting with Geert. The conversation ended a little early as we heard the bells chiming in the background, which reminded us that it was time for her meeting.

I have Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra with me today. She is a carillonist in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I play mid-day recitals at the University of Michigan.

And you are also on faculty there?

Not right now. I was the visiting carillonist at the University of Michigan during the 2019–2020 academic year, when Tiffany Ng was on a fellowship leave.

How long have you been playing the carillon?

Eight years. I first started playing the piano when I was a child. Then I added the organ when I was about twelve. As an undergraduate, I majored first in piano and then organ and choral music education, and then went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts and doctoral degrees in organ with secondary music theory, conducting, and sacred music fields.

Were you aware of the carillon during your childhood?

No, I didn’t live near a carillon in my childhood. It was only when we moved to Ann Arbor and I took the organ professor position at Eastern Michigan University that I started hearing the bells. I was so enchanted by their time keeping capabilities, but also by their role as messengers—that they could speak to the moment of any given day.

The history of letting people know if there was a special event going on, or pirates were coming, or whatever the news was.

Exactly. I had a sabbatical in Ostfriesland, Germany, to study and play historic instruments there. The oldest organ in that area was from 1457 in Rysum, and the church had a bell that was tuned to a low E, the same low E as the pitch on the organ. In his Fundamentum Organisandi (1452), Conrad Paumann composed E drones with figuration above the repeated Es. The pastor of the Rysum church at that time loved the bell. Every time I’d go to practice, she’d say to me, “Shall we play? Can we do the bell and organ piece?” For that E drone in the Paumann piece, she would keep pulling the bell to ring repeatedly in rhythm, and I’d play the Paumann figuration above it. We had so much fun playing that fifteenth-century “duet.” She called it the “Echt Rysumer Hit,” or the true hit from Rysum. A fifteenth-century piece was their town hit!

But then we had to stop because Rysum is in a rural area and the farmers were plowing their fields. They could hear the bells miles away, kilometers away, and for centuries they used the bells to signal when someone died. They would ring the bell the number of times that corresponded with the age of the newly deceased person. The farmers would stop their tractors and start counting: eighty-two, eighty-three . . ., “Oh, it must not be Berta.” Eighty-four, eighty-five . . ., “I wonder if it’s Henk.” Eighty-six . . . . While the pastor and I were playing, they’d hear the bell over and over, and they got stirred up wondering, “Who in our community died?” So that is why we had to stop.

That is fascinating. It definitely means something to that culture and how the bells were translating a message, or sharing the message of something. Did you find it an easy transition from the piano and organ to picking up playing the carillon?

Well, knowing the keyboard layout and playing with my feet translated from the organ, but as for the dimensions, it was a whole new haptic awareness, because it’s like playing on a keyboard built for a giant instead of using a five-finger technique.

I also play the harpsichord and clavichord. The clavichord taught me a lot about arm weight and getting the most beautiful tone. And even though the clavichord is the quietest keyboard instrument, I found the technique of playing it the most helpful in teaching myself how to play the carillon. When I first learned to play the clavichord, I would just sit at the keyboard for hours and think, how do I get the best sound?

Okay, that note bloomed a little, but could it bloom more? And that note sounded choked. Why?

It’s important to ask these questions. I’m an improviser, which helps to let my ears guide first. I find that I can bring out the soul of the instrument better if I initially improvise on it rather than reading music because then my eyes can take over.

That is a very interesting word choice: can you go more into it? Finding the soul of the instrument.

I discovered this when playing historic organs and then harpsichords and clavichords. Each instrument is different, just as each carillon is different. There are some schools of thought where people impose a technique, usually the same technique, on every instrument they play. Even if they’re Steinway artists, Steinways differ from one piano to the next. I find that the finest, the most sensitive and expressive musicians seek to pull out the sound that the instrument most wants to make. So you pay attention to where the most resonance can be found. Is it in the bass or tenor? Is it in the treble? And what does that tell me about what repertoire I choose? Or about what kind of weight I’m distributing here or there? And what parts must be softer so that the melody comes out? What effects communicate well?

When you’re playing and listening to the instrument in real time, how do you become one with the instrument as you’re playing it so that there is that intimate connection?

It is again improvisation. If I am struggling with a passage or hearing something that doesn’t sound optimal to me, then I’ll take that passage and I’ll create an improvisation that is similar to it to figure out. When I take my eyes out of the equation, it opens up the ears. The instrument will speak. It will, it will . . .

Tell you what it wants to play?

It really does, by the quality of the sound. How much color comes, how much bloom? Does it sound forced? Does it sound weak?

What are your favorite types of things to play on the carillon?

I love Geert D’hollander’s music and how he plays the carillon so sensitively. I’m also strongly committed to presenting works from underrepresented composers and cultures and to broaden our repertoire and audience to be diverse and inclusive.

Let’s talk about both of those aspects. First, are you referring to Geert’s original compositions?

His original compositions. He is such a fabulous composer, and each piece is different. His works never sound like cookie-cutter replicas of each other. There is always something fresh in them and yet something historically grounded where you can tell how much music he’s listened to and how much he has studied. Every time I see he has published something else I want to get it and play it because it is just magnificent. And having the opportunity to coach with him here at Bok Tower is just such a dream. It is thanks to the Emerging Artists grant I received from the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) to come here.

The Emerging Artists grant is new and for people who have passed the carillonneur exam in the past three years. It is a wonderful opportunity. It is not like you’re done studying when you pass the GCNA certification exam. I consider that a new beginning, and I think it is really brilliant of the GCNA to offer the award to encourage people to go deeper and to get to the next level of expressive playing or understanding repertoire.

And because I am a composer and Geert is a composer we are talking about compositional techniques, too. I’m sharing my compositions with him, and he is giving me some great feedback on it, saying, “This is lovely, but this—maybe it’s in G minor too long,” or that kind of thing. And then I’ll say to him, “That is exactly what I was thinking. Let’s talk about that.” Then he shows me some of his new compositions that haven’t been published yet, and we talk about them.

I wrote two books on Bach and the Art of Improvisation. Geert improvises, too. So today we are going to have a session about carillon improvisation in the style of Bach, because he recently was commissioned to take some of Bach’s cello or gamba suites, unaccompanied, and arrange them for carillon, but with a twist. He is giving a kind of modern commentary on them, but you can still hear Bach in them. I create improvisation blueprints from Bach preludes and use the same unaccompanied gamba suites for the organ and the harpsichord, and I have written about this in my books. So today we are going to take my books and then the music of Matthias Vanden Gheyn, the well-known Baroque carillon composer whose three-hundredth anniversary we celebrated last year, and we are going to talk about how this might come full circle so that we can develop an improvisational method for the carillon. A carillon student, Carson Landry, will join us.

This opportunity is hugely stimulating. What a beautiful setting to be here in the Bok Tower Gardens and have access to the carillon all day long—into the evening. That is very rare. Most towers have very limited playing time, but here, the playing time is not restricted, and Geert is accessible, kind, and generous with his time, and we are having a blast.

I’d like to delve into your history as a composer and learn more about your style.

Because I’ve studied and performed a lot of early music, I’ve composed in a Baroque or even earlier Renaissance style as well for some of my organ works. But then I started getting commissions for organ. One of the commissions was from a brilliant young organist, Wyatt Smith, who wanted six pieces for a liturgical cycle entitled Liturgy LIVE! He wanted each piece to have a world influence. I started digging into ethnomusicology and finding music from all over the world and figuring out what aspects I could combine. Wyatt also wanted German chorales from the seasons to be featured with that world music. It was an interesting pairing.

Can you tell me more about what that means?

My daughter is from Ethiopia, so I took some Ethiopian rhythms and combined them with a chorale, for instance. I paired a Yoruban lament from Nigeria with the Advent chorale Nun komm, der heiden Heiland. I featured a French Romantic toccata with the Pentecost chorale Komm, heiliger Geist. Each piece had a different character and musical features from around the globe.

What else inspires you in your writing?

When I came to the carillon, I became acutely aware that this is a public instrument. In Ann Arbor we have students from around the world. So, I’d come out of the tower and hear all sorts of world languages and see people from around the world and then I would think, I’ve just played all this music by dead European men. Right? That is not the demographic here. Even though there are some people from European descent, that doesn’t represent everyone—it excludes a lot of people.

How does this public instrument connect with people from around the world? And imagine how much wonderful music the carillon has been missing when so many cultures haven’t been represented! Then I started thinking that my compositional direction must be to lift up the voices that have been missing from classical keyboard music. I interviewed people from the African American, Muslim, and Arab communities, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and then several people from the Latin community. I asked them about their experience with prejudice. They were incredibly generous in telling their stories. They said they were really glad that somebody finally asked. They wanted to talk and then they gave me permission to write pieces about their stories. It was cathartic for them in that they felt silenced when they were experiencing discrimination, but through this music, they had a voice. And now there was a way to claim agency in a situation where they’d had no agency.

You’re taking feelings from what people tell you and then putting that into the feeling of the music.

The feelings are there definitely, and that’s extremely important to me to get into the right affect for the piece, and the character and style of music. But I’m actually telling a story as well. So the piece I’ll play at Bok Tower today, Earth Blood Reprise, is about a woman, Jackie Doneghy, who grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and studied with top piano professors when she was in middle school and high school. When she auditioned for a conservatory (not Oberlin), she was heckled because the head of the department didn’t want to allow an African American person into the conservatory. As a result, she dropped the piano and never came back. Her story is implanted into Earth Blood Reprise. I include quotes from Lift Every Voice and Sing, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and spirituals.

How do you take the story and then put it into music notation?

I’ve also been getting into storytelling with journalists. I collaborate with international journalists from the Knight-Wallace fellowship program at the University of Michigan. I compose music on stories that they have not been able to report on. The stories are under-reported and some of the journalists have been censored. These journalists and filmmakers and I founded Collaborative Investigative Composing (CIC) to tell these stories via music and document them in music scores and film.

The process is a little different for each CIC, depending on how much the storyteller wants to get involved in the music notation. I’ve worked with Jet Schouten, a Dutch journalist who took twenty years of piano lessons. Jet wanted to play the notes on the carillon that she wanted in a CIC composition, while I notated the music. Venezuelan journalist Marielba Núñez played themes and effects on the carillon while she verbally told me the stories of Venezuelans who are fleeing the authoritarian government and humanitarian crisis. I took Marielba’s themes and developed them more to fit with her stories. At that point, I play what I notated and ask the storytellers whether the music tells their story effectively or whether something is missing.

Marielba is also a poet, and she has a keen ear for form, structure, and balance. She’s not a musician, but she could describe in literary terms the changes she suggested.

When Jackie gave up the piano due to the audition trauma she endured, she became a singer instead. She asked for some spirituals to be included along with Lift Every Voice and Sing, and then I added the Moonlight Sonata, because that is one of the pieces she played on the piano. Including the Beethoven was a way for Jackie to reclaim it in her own voice, not in the disparaging voice. So there are layers there. A general audience may not know the story there unless there are program notes or if a performer has a chance to talk with them. This means, of course, it is also really important that the music can stand alone, which it absolutely does.

People will ask me questions about it afterwards, and they’ll say, “That is such an intriguing piece. Tell me about it.” And then we have a chance to talk about it after the concert.

As an example, on Saturday (February 19, 2022) at Bok Tower, I performed Earth Blood Reprise along with some pieces from The Music of March: A Civil Rights Carillon Collection edited by Tiffany Ng, some spirituals, including Go Down, Moses and Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, which I arranged in Global Rings, and Joey Brink’s arrangement of Lift Every Voice and Sing. After the concert, an African American man approached me and he said, “Thank you for including music for us. I like the sound of the bells, but I never thought I’d hear something that directly speaks to our experience. It makes such a difference.” He then told me that as he walked around the gardens listening, he met several other African Americans, and each one of them would smile and nod, or wink, or show a thumbs up that indicated that they, too, felt included by the carillon that day. He asked about Earth Blood Reprise and wanted to hear more of the story. At the same time, he said that the piece spoke to him before knowing the story. Hearing the story served to deepen his experience.

How it is different composing for the carillon in comparison to the piano, the organ, or even the harpsichord. What is unique about the carillon specifically?

Fewer notes can be played at once on the carillon compared to other keyboard instruments. I think of composing for the carillon often as a Schenkerian reduction that happens before the bigger or more expanded piece is actually written. Writing for the carillon must be sparse. I think about the strong minor third partials and not having dense chords especially in the tenor-bass range because then the resonances cancel each other out as they vibrate for so long. If there are two voices close together in thirds, for instance, they really need to be in the treble. But those are technical details.

I mentioned my work with journalist Marielba Núñez to tell stories via music about the humanitarian crisis due to an authoritarian government in Venezuela. Journalist Eileen Truax and filmmaker Diego Sedano reported on the untenable conditions people fled from in Mexico and the issues they face due to unjust U.S. immigration policies. I’m starting to write an oratorio based on those stories. A former TV news anchor and filmmaker from Belarus joined in a CIC piece that demonstrates how an authoritarian head of state forces the media to tell lies to the people. One journalist, Tracie Mauriello, reported on school shootings in the U.S.: gun violence. Another journalist, Ana Avila, reports on misogyny and gender violence in Mexico. Dutch journalist Jet Schouten and I collaborated in a pandemic response, Healing Bells, which was premiered simultaneously by carillonists in fourteen countries. Healing Bells contains an arrangement of Plyve Kacha, a Ukrainian lament.

I return to your question about how we collaborate. When I meet with a journalist in person, I can take them to a carillon, just as happened with Marielba and Jet Schouten. Then I actually ask them to play the feeling of their story on the carillon while they’re telling the story to me a second time around. First, we just sit like this across a table and talk. And then, the second time, even if they haven’t had music lessons before and I might say, play just the black keys and then everything you play will sound good. I get them started with pentatonic modes, so that they can stay focused on the affect of the story. Inevitably they come up with a really interesting theme. And then I build on their theme and use that as a unifying theme throughout their piece.

You say it is people who don’t know music. But everyone kind of intuits that these are the low keys and these are the high keys. For the carillon it’s playing with your fists. You strike the keys, and you might depict your frustration by playing on low keys or reflect your high points on the high keys, and then you might play in the middle of the keyboard. It is an interesting way to get them to express their internal story in an alternative way.

It is so important to the journalists to be able to tell these stories first of all, and with censorship for some of them, these are stories they haven’t been able to tell. And secondly, they feel really strongly that it is important—as an archivist, you’ll appreciate this—to preserve these stories. Otherwise, those stories are erased. They have been erased now in the present, but if they’re also erased in the future then these atrocities from authoritarian governments resulting in humanitarian crises will never come to light.

You said you work with the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and they’re at the University of Michigan?

Yes.

Is that relationship between the two entities—the carillon and the Knight-Wallace Fellows—something formally recognized by the university?

Lynette Clemetson, the director of the Wallace House, approaches me from year to year to ask whether I would present for the fellows. University of Michigan Carillon Professor Tiffany Ng has fully supported this, which has greatly helped to facilitate our CIC initiatives. From carillon presentations, the fellows themselves find out about our CIC way of telling stories. Then they are free to just approach me and say, “I’d love to do something. Can you collaborate?” It starts out rather informally and grows from there.

We at CIC are applying for grants. We really need some funding to create some short and full-length documentaries about our work so that these stories get preserved in music scores and film to reach wider audiences. We’d like to tour to a number of sites to integrate with communities who connect personally with the stories and places where no one knows about these stories and then to culminate with CIC performances. I usually compose a CIC first for carillon. Now, I’m developing CIC works for organ, chamber ensembles, orchestra, choir, soloists, etc. Our CIC team feels passionate about what we’re doing because it meets a need. It is cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and is dealing with a lot of social-justice issues. We’re going to find a way to continue.

To continue telling the stories that people need to share.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you for your time and for sharing what you’ve learned and your methodologies with me. I appreciate it.

Thanks so much for your invitation, Sam, it is really kind.

Bok Tower Gardens library website: boktowergardens.org/library/

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s website: pamelaruiterfeenstra.com