Twelfth International Organ and Early Music Festival, Oaxaca, Mexico, February 14–21, 2018

Robert Bates performs

Robert Parkins is university organist and professor of the practice of music at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He has specialized in early Iberian keyboard literature, and his publications include articles on performance practices in this music as well as the chapter on “Spain and Portugal” in Keyboard Music Before 1700 (Routledge, 2004). His organ and harpsichord recordings have appeared on the Calcante, Gothic, Musical Heritage Society, and Naxos labels. Parkins received his academic degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Yale University School of Music. In 1973 he was awarded a Fulbright grant to study in Vienna with Anton Heiller. Other teachers have included Gerre Hancock, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Charles Krigbaum, and Michael Schneider.

The Complete Organ Works of Francisco Correa de Arauxo: Correa in the New World, Robert Bates, organist. Loft Recordings, LRCD 1141–45 (5 CDs), $49.98. Available from www.gothic–catalog.com.

Francisco Correa de Arauxo (1584–1654) was the middle figure among “the three C’s” of early Spanish organ music, between Antonio de Cabezón (1510–1566) and Juan Cabanilles (1644–1712). Like the venerable Cabezón, Correa de Arauxo received his first major appointment in his mid-teens, serving as organist in the Collegiate Church of San Salvador in Seville (1599–1636) for most of his professional life. Later, after a four-year stint at the cathedral of Jaén (also in the southern region of Andalusia), he finished his career at the cathedral in Segovia (northwest of Madrid) from 1640 to 1653.

In 1626, while still employed in Seville, Correa de Arauxo published his Facultad orgánica (Art of the Organ), the only extant volume of Spanish keyboard music to be printed in the seventeenth century. Following an extended preface by the composer, this Book of Tientos and Discursos of Practical and Theoretical Organ Music, consisting of 67 solo organ pieces (plus two intabulated vocal settings), constitutes the whole of his known musical oeuvre. Since Correa’s purpose was partly didactic, he provided a special index that groups the pieces in ascending order of difficulty from 1 to 5.

Robert Bates has completed the daunting project of recording The Complete Organ Works of Francisco Correa de Arauxo on five different organs over a span of seventeen years (in 1997, 2001, and 2014). Three of these are eighteenth-century instruments in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, and two more are late twentieth-century organs in northern California. Subtitled “Correa in the New World,” the five-CD set purports to be the first recording of the complete organ music of Correa de Arauxo in the Americas.

The music of Correa has been said to bridge the Renaissance and Baroque eras in Spain. That assessment could also be applied to the predominant genre of early Spanish keyboard music: the tiento, which evolved from little more than an intabulation of four-voice imitative vocal polyphony in the sixteenth century to a variety of idiomatic subgenres by the early seventeenth century. Of the sixty-nine compositions in Correa’s magnum opus, sixty-two are labeled tiento or discurso, the latter term reserved for more advanced works, although he sometimes uses the two words interchangeably. Notated in Spanish number tablature, each piece is preceded by a few introductory remarks, including occasional nuggets of information on pertinent performance practice issues, such as tempo, ornamentation, rhythmic alteration, and registration. The composer’s valuable comments sometimes offer additional insights on topics already addressed in his detailed foreword.

If nearly every tiento on this recording seems to begin in an eerily similar fashion, it is not only the resemblance of the opening measures to a stile antico motet but also Correa’s directive that the organist should adorn the first note with a short, accentual ornament called a quiebro. The simpler of its two forms is equivalent to a mordent (for shorter pieces like versets), while the slightly more complex one is identical to a turn beginning with the upper neighbor. Less clear is the precise location of the ornament, although beginning the turn-like quiebro before the beat seems more consistent with the prevailing practice at the time to play the consonant main note on the beat. Bates dutifully follows the composer’s recommendation to embellish the initial note with a quiebro, but he elects to follow a more flexible approach to rhythmic placement.

A longer ornament mentioned in Correa’s preface, called a redoble, is in the form of a trill with prefix. Redobles are often indicated in the score by an “R,” sometimes with a prefix actually written out before the consonant main note on the beat. Correa admits that many other types of embellishments are possible, and a number of different redoble variants appear throughout the Facultad orgánica. Bates is not shy about adding some of his own redobles as well as other ornaments described in earlier sources (e.g., Tomás de Santa María’s Arte de tañer fantasía, 1565) in a judicious and stylistically appropriate manner.

The track list for this superb recording is organized according to venue and instrument, yielding a more randomized order rather than the original succession of pieces. Each work is identified by the number assigned when Santiago Kastner edited the first modern publication of the Facultad orgánica (Barcelona: Instituto Español de Musicología; 1948, 1952). Bates, a careful scholar as well as a first-rate performer, relied on Kastner’s edition for this project from the outset—but not without comparing it scrupulously to a copy of the original 1626 publication, now available in facsimile (Geneva: Minkoff, 1981). Two more complete editions have been published since the inception of Bates’s project, edited by Guy Bovet (Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2007) and Miguel Bernal Ripoll (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología; 2nd ed., 2013).

The organizational scheme for the recording focuses special attention on the organs as well as the music. All five instruments share characteristics in common with most seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Castilian organs. Each possesses only a single manual keyboard, all registers are divided between bass and treble stops at c1/c#1, and the tuning system is meantone temperament (either strict 1/4 comma or the more versatile 1/6 comma). Pedals are minimal or nonexistent, serving only to pull down the low bass notes of the manual when needed. Each stoplist also includes at least one horizontal reed, although Bates is sparing in his use of them since exterior trumpets were not in evidence until after the Facultad orgánica was published.

The first two CDs in this set were recorded in Oaxaca City and nearby Tlacolula, beginning with the organ in Oaxaca Cathedral. Constructed in 1712 by Matías de Chávez (with later additions in the eighteenth century, followed by a number of twentieth-century changes), it was reconstructed by Susan Tattershall in 1997. The current specification lists eight (half) stops in the bass and ten in the treble.

More than half of the compositions in the Facultad orgánica were written for divided stops (a new development in the latter sixteenth century), and CD 1 includes one of Correa de Arauxo’s most alluring works in this subgenre. As the composer indicates in the title, the Tiento de medio registro de tiple de décimo tono (No. 36) is a divided-register piece (in mode 10) requiring a solo registration in the treble (with a more subdued accompaniment in the bass). The imitative contrapuntal opening in “motet style,” a hallmark of the Spanish tiento, is played here on Principals 8′ and 4′. Robert Bates introduces the fourth entry, a solo for the right hand, on the brilliant Corneta, expertly guiding the serpentine melisma of sixteenth notes that emerge from the subject’s initial long notes. The third and last of the five solo entries include diminutions in triplet figures, to be played (as described by Correa elsewhere) unequally for the most “graceful” effect, “almost” like making the first note twice as long as each of the two that follow. Bates’s tempo is on the brisk side, and the rhythmic nuance becomes so subtle that the inequality is just barely noticeable until the tempo relaxes (e.g., at cadences).

The organ in the church of Santa María de la Asunción in Tlacolula was completed by Manuel Neri in 1792 (including pipework from as early as 1666). Subjected to alterations in the nineteenth century, it was restored in 2014 by Gerhard Grenzing. The result is a simple disposition (eight registers in the bass and seven in the treble) with separate ranks for the upperwork, as in contemporary Italian organs, rather than mixtures.

Tiento 55, a Discurso de dos baxones (with two solo lines in the bass), is notable for its chromaticism in the main subject, strikingly atypical for Correa. Choosing a registration for a tiento de medio registro in five voices can be problematic, but the mixtureless chorus in the bass yields a penetrating clarity without overwhelming the treble Principal 8′, or Flautado (Correa’s “default” registration for accompanying voices). Sufficiently challenging to play on an organ with a split keyboard (although apparently no problem for Bates), this discurso serves as a useful example of how complicated some divided-register pieces can become when an organist must employ two manuals and pedal to achieve the desired effect. If the two hands (mainly the thumbs) are not allowed to assist each other in managing five parts on the same keyboard, the coupled pedal must supply one of the two bass voices when needed.

Among a handful of compositions not classified as tientos in Correa’s collection is No. 65, a set of sixteen continuous variations on Guárdame las vacas (“Watch the Cows for Me”). The familiar folk tune (and chord progression) had been popular among composers of variations (diferencias) since the early sixteenth century, including Cabezón. Bates skillfully interweaves the threads of migrating diminutions (glosas) among the long notes of the harmonized cantus firmus.

CD 3 takes us to the church of San Jerónimo, Tlacochahuaya, also not far from Oaxaca City. An anonymous builder constructed the organ around 1729 (modified in 1735), and in 1991 its restoration was completed under the direction of Susan Tattershall. With seven bass stops and an equal number in the treble, this modest but beautiful instrument has a Bourdon (Bardón) at 8′ pitch rather than the usual Flautado.

No. 18, a “first level” piece intended for an undivided registration (registro entero), resembles an older style of tiento with only a moderate degree of figuration. Bates’s principal chorus is not precisely the same in the bass and treble, demonstrating that the ingredients can be tweaked a bit to produce a more satisfactory balance in the whole recipe. The organ’s unmodified meantone temperament heightens the contrast between consonance and dissonance, spotlighting in particular several prominent occurrences of an augmented triad (composed of two pure major thirds), a distinctive harmonic feature in seventeenth-century Iberian organ music. The tuning also renders simultaneous cross relations, discussed by Correa in his preface, particularly salient (as in m. 119).

No. 34, a tiento de medio registro de baxón, features a sprightly bass solo. Heeding the composer’s advice to omit the 8′ level in the bass registration occasionally for clarity’s sake, Bates assigns the left-hand solo to the Bajoncillo, a 4′ reed. Musically engaging but fairly predictable, this tiento surprises the listener near the end with a shift to septuple time, one of several instances where Correa experiments with irregular meters or rhythmic subdivisions. At one point in the 1626 print, the bass line actually crosses the “Great Divide” between c1 and c#1, one of myriad errors in the score that Bates had to confront, especially in Kastner’s modern edition.

The last three tracks on the third disc and all of CD 4 were recorded at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California, where Greg Harrold installed a Spanish-style organ in 1989. Modeled after Aragonese instruments (specifically in the area around Zaragoza, ca. 1700), it has since been relocated to Oberlin College in Ohio. With fourteen bass and sixteen treble stops, it is considerably larger than the other organs on the recording.

The fourth disc begins with Tiento 16, described by the composer as being “in the style of a chanson” (a modo de canción). After the typical opening, it becomes a mélange of contrasting textures, rhythms, and meters in the tradition of batallas (including Correa’s own Tiento 23, based “on the first part of the Batalla of Morales”) and other Spanish keyboard pastiches. Bates takes advantage of the sectional structure to make judicious stop changes, ordinarily not feasible in most of these tientos. Particularly noteworthy is a segment of eight measures in a jazzy 3+3+2 rhythm—common among other Spanish composers of the time, but rare and more fleeting in the music of Correa de Arauxo.

On the fifth and final CD, the listener arrives at the last stop on this organ tour, also in the San Francisco Bay Area. The instrument in the Mission San José in Fremont, California, was built by Manuel Rosales in 1989. Although strongly influenced by early Castilian (and Mexican) organs, it adheres somewhat less strictly to earlier historical precepts than the preceding four on this recording. Nonetheless, a fully chromatic bass (rather than a short octave) and a seventeen-note pedalboard do not violate the essential ethos of this instrument as an appropriate vehicle for the performance of Correa’s music. The manual’s twenty half stops are divided evenly between bass and treble, and the pedal enjoys the luxury of a Bardón at 16′ pitch.

Tiento 59, a medio registro de tiple, is one of eight works assigned a difficulty level of 5 and one of only four with diminutions in thirty-second notes. Bates follows Correa’s advice to use a principal chorus (lleno) for the treble coloratura above the quietly moving lower voices. The solo in the right hand exploits a number of irregular rhythmic subdivisions; in addition to the more common triplets, Correa includes groups of five, seven, and nine notes as well. The performer’s goal is to maintain a steady pulse for the long notes while controlling the improvisatory rhythmic shifts as well as the almost frenetic streams of thirty-second notes in the right hand. Bates is more than equal to the task in executing this fascinating tiento, among the longer and more complex pieces in the Facultad orgánica.

Accompanying the CD set is a sumptuous 120-page booklet (25% of which is devoted to a Spanish translation of the English text) that includes a rich selection of full-color photos. A handy “Index of Tientos,” numbered according to the original published order, matches each one with the corresponding CD track and Correa’s suggested level of difficulty. Although providing liner notes on sixty-seven individual pieces would have been prohibitive, Robert Bates offers a succinct overview on the composer and his music in historical context, as well as a brief synopsis of the Facultad orgánica.

In addition to a biography of the performer (who holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University and retired not long ago as professor of organ at the University of Houston), there are descriptions (including specifications) of the five instruments, as well as a brief essay on historical Spanish and Mexican organs in general. Following a short introduction by Bates on his “considerations” for choices of stops is a detailed list of the registrations used. Last but not least, a contribution by producer Roger Sherman on the “adventures” of recording in Mexican churches lends a lighter tone to the production notes.

Kudos to Robert Bates for this splendid contribution to the culture of early Iberian keyboard music. Although organists are now appreciably more aware of this marginalized repertoire than a few decades ago, it remains unfamiliar territory for many. Congratulations are due also to Loft Recordings for another significant addition to its continuing series of “complete works.” Beyond their sheer musical interest, these integral collections possess an undeniable documentary and instructional value.

Every music library should own this five-disc package comprising Francisco Correa de Arauxo’s Facultad orgánica, a bargain at $49.98 (when ordered directly from Loft). For individual fans of organ music, it is also available for download from the Gothic website as a complete album or as single tracks.

What’s important?

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture for the organ class at the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester, New York, Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. The following morning, I met with several Eastman students for an informal chat in one of the organ practice rooms on the fourth floor of the school. I wondered what advanced students of the organ are interested in today, what literature excites them, what their dreams and aspirations are, and I was surprised and delighted by the answer from one young man, “Beauty.” What a marvelous outlook from someone embarking on an artistic career.

As a student, I remember aspiring to the next challenging piece, to giving concerts, to holding an exciting church position, but I do not believe I was smart enough to boil the whole effort down so succinctly. I know I loved beautiful music and art, but I wonder if the quest for beauty was at the heart of my ambition? Driving home from Rochester the next day, I reflected on that comment, thinking of all the beauty that the pipe organ has brought to our world, with its vast repertory of music from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Samuel Scheidt to George Baker and Rachel Laurin, from the ebullient anonymous organs of the fifteenth century to the modern masterpieces of the twenty-first century.

Rural and urban beauty

Where we live in mid-coast Maine, the depth of winter has a rich beauty seen in the foamy salt-water ice and the crackle of snow under your feet when the temperature is below zero. We have walked the six-mile Farm Road in the state park next door on a midwinter midnight, lit by the moon alone, witnessing the noiseless swoop of a snowy owl gathering a vole. We have a transitional season here called “mud season,” when the surface of the lawn and driveway begin to thaw, but deep down everything is still frozen. You go in it up to your ankles, and our half-mile driveway is like pudding, slick and treacherous. When all this melds into spring, the forest comes alive with green, the birds return, the gardens reappear, and the air softens. As I write this, the early morning sun is reflecting off the water illuminating my office, especially magical even at twenty degrees when the wake of an oyster farmer’s boat sets the room in motion. This beauty is mirrored in the mountainscapes of our new home in western Massachusetts with melt-fed streams and rivers rushing toward the sea. In the high summer the rocky coast and active sea have inspired countless artists.

Urban beauty can be mesmerizing, like the countless architectural expressions and decorations of building façades as you walk along lower Broadway in New York City and the majestic sculptures in the city’s parks. There are the Art Deco masterpieces like the Edison and Chrysler buildings on Lexington Avenue, and the fifty-eight-story Gothic Revival Woolworth Building designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1913 at 233 Broadway. And then there are the churches. Think of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Saint Thomas Church three blocks apart on Fifth Avenue. Across the Avenue from Saint Patrick’s, one finds the Art Deco Atlas with the earth on his shoulders at Rockefeller Center.

In our new home of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church is a building designed by Charles McKim with a statue by Daniel Chester French, baptistry by Stanford White, and windows by John LaFarge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. The little church oozes beauty.

Beauty expressing horror

In the May 2017 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–17, my column was titled, “Music in terrible times.” Wendy and I had just heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Dimitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, nicknamed the Leningrad Symphony, in Carnegie Hall. Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, and began closing off all roads in and out of Leningrad, the last being closed on September 8, isolating and imprisoning three million residents. I wrote:

. . . during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Shostakovich began work on the Leningrad Symphony in September 1941. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia that October, and he finished work on the piece there on December 27. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre in Kuibyshev premiered the work on March 5, 1942. The Leningrad Symphony had been evacuated, and there were only fifteen members of the city’s radio orchestra left in town. For the Leningrad premiere, musicians were drawn from the Russian army to fill out the orchestra. I wrote:

If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

It is ironic that eighty years after the siege of Leningrad that decimated a great Russian city, the tables are turned, and the Russian army is inflicting the same misery on a neighboring country. We learn nothing from history. How many years of peace have there been during my lifetime?

In that essay, I also wrote about the bombing of Coventry, England, the destruction of that ancient cathedral, and the dedication of the new cathedral for which Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was commissioned. Britten combined the text of the Latin Requiem Mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, commander of a rifle brigade who was killed during World War II at the age of twenty-five.

I opened that issue with this quote from Leonard Bernstein, dating from the days of the Vietnam War:

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Bedazzled by the Baroque

Visiting older organs in Europe, I have been amazed by the level of decoration. During my career as an organbuilder, I have made windchests, keyboards, tower crowns, curved stop jams, impost moldings, all the many components that make up an organ, but every part of every organ I have worked on was made using power tools. Whether I was using a big stationary machine like a table saw or thickness planer or an electric hand tool like a sabre saw, router, or simply a screwdriver, it is still hard work to build an organ. When I stand near a monumental organ built in an earlier time, I think of the incredible labor and dedication it took to mill logs into lumber by human power, to make flat and smooth panels, and to build the elaborate moldings on an impost or tower crown. And as if that was not enough effort, so many of those organs are festooned with statues of lions and angels blowing trumpets, adding to what is necessary to hold up the organ, all for the sake of beauty.

Johann Georg Fux completed the organ for the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, in 1736. Its thirty-five-foot-tall case is a riot of statues, gilded pipe shades, and moldings. Case panels at keyboard level are painted as faux marble. The organ’s thrilling sounds provide a huge dynamic range and variety of tone color. The instrument is placed in a second balcony thirty feet or more above the floor of the nave. It took superhuman effort just to get all that material up there. But if all that was not enough, Fux created a nameboard above the top keyboard with a marquetry pun on his name (German for fox) showing a fox stalking a goose. It must have taken him a week or more to create that image using a knife to shape pieces of wood. I marvel at the dedication to beauty behind an instrument like that.

It is fitting that the organ should be so elaborate because it is placed in a high-Baroque masterpiece of a building with explosions of carved, gilded, and painted beauty everywhere you look. Side altars sport carved spiral columns, shaped like the DNA helix. The pulpit bears a dozen carved images depicting biblical scenes, and the vaulted ceilings are covered with frescos. No effort was spared to pack the place with beauty. Christoph Hauser, organist of the Klosterkirche, has a deep appreciation for the majesty of the place, and his improvisations fill the building with the exuberant voice of the organ.

I attended Mass there in autumn 2019, and after the congregants left, Christoph showed me highlights of the building, demonstrated the organ, and allowed me to open case panels so I could admire the work of our ancestors in the craft. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of workers poured their hearts and souls into the creation of that magical place and that awe-inspiring organ. All this happened forty years before the American Revolutionary War, when American architecture was mostly limited to wood frame structures with little or no decoration.

The beauty of creativity

Beauty is central to the world of pipe organ builders. My work brings me the privilege of visiting many organ shops around the country where I witness craftspeople devoted to beauty. A beautiful architectural case takes shape on a CAD drawing. A tonal director sifts through the numbers and math that will define the organ pipes that will be ideal for the acoustics of a room and the needs of a congregation. A woodworker sorts through rough boards, choosing the right grain patterns for the best visual patterns, and mills, cuts, joins, sands, and finishes the structure, case, and decorations of the instrument. A pipe maker melts, casts, scrapes, hammers, and cuts the metal, forming the exact shapes and soldering the seams. The voicer coaxes the tone of the pipes, introducing them to their music.

In 2018, Dobson Pipe Organ Builders completed a magnificent new organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. That project included the design and construction of an unusually ornate case on the south side of the chancel. It seems a miracle that the materials, skill, and ambition still exist to create something that beautiful.

In 2013, Taylor & Boody completed a new organ for Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York City. There are two beautiful cases facing each other across the chancel, each of which includes a passageway from altar rail to side aisle allowing congregants to pass through and down a few stairs after receiving communion. A craftsman local to the builders’ workshop in Virginia was commissioned to create black iron railings to help the people down the stairs, stunning touches of beauty, elegant in their simplicity.

La Belle Époche

Ten years ago (or was it more like fifteen?) Wendy and I were in Paris, France. Before the trip, I wrote to a colleague saying I would be in town and wondered if we might meet for lunch. Her reply, “Gillian Weir is playing at Saint Sulpice on Tuesday night. Meet me in the Choir.” Nice invitation. Dame Gillian played
J. S. Bach’s partita, Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig, one of my favorites of Bach’s music, and Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte. I sat with her in the Choeur, gazing around in that huge iconic church, listening to a brilliant musician playing that rich music on the spectacular organ, wondering what could be more beautiful? And the punchline? At the end of the concert, my friend said, “In Paris, we don’t play Messiaen on the Left Bank.”

I was recently reminded of the “Intermezzo” from Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, that colorful, jocular dance that is played far less frequently than the grand and virtuosic opening movement of the symphony. It’s been a Class A earworm for me since. What a beautiful piece, and what great fun. There are many photos of Widor showing a range of facial expressions from dour to serene, but I have never seen one that shows the twinkle in the eye or hint of a smile from a humorist capable of such a frolic. Contrast photos of Widor to the many of Camille Saint-Saëns with the humor of his most bubbly piano concertos evident in his face.

Listening to Dame Gillian playing Widor’s organ all those years ago inspired my daydreams of what it must have been like to be in Paris in Widor’s heyday, the Belle Époche. Visual artists like Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gaugin were producing works of great beauty, while at the same time, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Debussy were revolutionizing the musical arts. The organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was building musical masterpieces that included technical and mechanical inventions, driving the musicians who played his organs to new worlds. We must always remember that without Cavaillé-Coll’s genius, we would not have the music of Franck, Widor, Tournemire, Vierne, and all who followed them onto those marvelous benches. It would be difficult to identify a time and place where more expressions of beauty were created.

Reading the memoir of Marcel Dupré, Recollections (as translated from the original French), gives a glimpse into what that time was like with lunchtime gatherings that included artists, musicians, and authors all outdoing each other as raconteurs. Dupré wrote of sitting in awe in the presence of Widor and his friend Camille Saint-Saëns. Wouldn’t it be grand to know what they were talking about?

§

We see rich decorations everywhere in beautiful churches. Pulpits, lecterns, pews, windows, and altars are individual works of art. It is a special challenge to add a monumental piece of furniture such as a pipe organ to those surroundings in such a way that the organ enhances and improves the building. When it does, the effect is breathtaking. The whole effect inspires worship, even before the organ blower is turned on. Add to that the rich tones of the organ, beautiful singing from choir and congregation, and the vast repertory of sacred music, and it is easy to understand what that young man in Rochester was getting at.

We train our bodies to do this magical thing, striving to overcome physical limitations so we do not stand in the way of our artistic expression. We learn to understand the most complex of musical instruments. We learn to alter its voice for each circumstance. We learn to train choirs and to choose literature appropriate for each moment so the worship of thousands will be enriched. Musical performance is momentarily bringing to life the creations of other artists recorded by notation in print or the instantaneous creation of musical forms through improvisation. The presence of beauty is so necessary in this tangled and complicated world, necessary to inspire hope, caring, and exultation. I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on why we do all this. It is worthwhile and worthy of our best.

An explosion of creativity

We have learned to tell time according to the pandemic, separating the “before and after” times as many of us have settled into vaccinated life and relaxed our mask-wearing regimens. I did not take to the air until a quick trip to Houston in February, but I had a couple other trips this year before Wendy and I went to Greece and Italy in May. Our daughter lived in Athens for five years, and her husband is Greek, so we have deep connections with family there, and our trip was planned around the “destination christening” of our youngest grandchild. That family of four (there is a five-year-old sister) lives in Brooklyn, but his parents were eager to follow the Greek tradition of christening, which is scaled a lot like a wedding with a big catered party, so off we went.

After the family festival, we flew from Athens to Tuscany, landing in Bologna and taking a train to Florence. It was my first time in Italy, and I was excited to see the Renaissance art I had studied so eagerly in college and to learn whether all I have heard about food in Italy is true. It is. In preparation for the trip, I read Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King, a vibrant history of the building of the great Duomo in Florence, the competitions to determine the architect, and the extraordinary feat of the construction of the immense dome, which is still the largest in the world nearly 600 years after its completion.

Construction of the nave of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower) was begun in 1296 and completed in 1380, a timespan that included fifty years of slow progress due to lack of funding and a ten-year hiatus because of the Black Death. As the nave was nearing completion, there was no concept of how to build a dome whose base would be 180 feet off the ground and whose diameter would be nearly 150 feet. It seems a little funny to have built such a huge structure without knowing how to complete it, but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, architects were experimenting with the limits of structure, resulting in events like the collapse in 1284 of part of the cathedral at Beauvais in France, which was so tall and had such huge windows that the flying buttresses could not support the structure.

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1436), a goldsmith, sculptor, and architect, entered a competition along with goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) for the design of the dome. Ghiberti had earlier beaten Brunelleschi in a competition for the design of the huge bronze doors of the baptistry that shares the piazza with the cathedral. You can imagine there was no love lost between those two. Brunelleschi’s plan for the dome would involve no centering scaffold, which had never been done before, and included the invention of equipment that would hoist stones weighing up to two tons to the extreme height of the dome, 375 feet up. The main hoisting crane was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill installed in the crossing of the cathedral. Imagine the hay bale and shovel maintenance of that machine! 

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Works of the Cathedral), just across the narrow street behind the apse of the cathedral, houses Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original bronze baptistry doors, protected from the elements and replaced by brilliant replicas at the baptistry. Each door includes twenty-eight reliefs depicting scenes from the Old Testament; each door is fifteen feet tall and weighs thirty tons. It must have been quite a challenge for fifteenth-century craftsmen to hang those doors on freely swinging hinges. There is also a display of hoisting tackle used during the construction of the dome, much like the gear used on Organ Clearing House job sites. 

I recommend King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome, a fascinating read that provides vivid images of life in fourteenth-century Florence and insight into some of the brilliant minds of the Renaissance. King’s descriptions of the roads and spaces around the Duomo evoke the smells of the thirteenth-century city and are a fun prelude to walking on the same streets today. Those streets are defined by 600-year-old buildings and were not designed for modern traffic. Delivery and garbage trucks are in miniature scale, taxis are ubiquitous, and flocks of tourists cling to the edges in single file as the vehicles squeeze by.

Adjacent to the Duomo is the campanile designed and built by Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337). Many of his paintings grace churches in Florence, particularly in Santa Croce (Holy Cross), which contains a dazzling display of Renaissance art. The campanile, whose construction started in 1334, almost 700 years ago, is almost fifty feet square and nearly 280 feet tall. It houses seven bells, the largest of which is about eighty inches in diameter.

The exterior of the campanile is decorated with dozens of relief panels about eighteen inches across, some diamond-shaped and some hexagonal. The collection depicts the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon), theological and cardinal virtues, liberal arts (music, geometry, rhetoric, etc.), and the seven sacraments. Human history is depicted, along with the mechanical and creative arts (music, blacksmith, building, medicine, agriculture, etc.). These spectacular pieces were started by Andrea Pisano (1290–1348) in 1347 and completed by his workshop after his death. Like the baptistry doors, the original pieces have been removed to the museum to protect them from the elements and replaced outside on the building with replicas.

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Thirty-nine years after the death of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was born in Caprese, about seventy-two miles from Florence. I have studied, thought, and written about Michelangelo’s genius and the spectacular art he produced, but finally visiting Florence where so much of his work is preserved was the thrill of a lifetime. David is breathtaking. I had the same feeling when I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. I had heard and read so much about it and seen countless photographs, but nothing prepares you for standing in its presence in real time. Michelangelo captured the entire human condition in that piece of stone. He proved to us that people in the early-sixteenth century were just like us, not counting the last half century of Cheetos and French fries.

Michelangelo created this seventeen-foot-tall statue between 1501 and 1504 at the age of twenty-six. The exhibit hall that David dominates also includes several unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo that offer a glimpse into how a human figure is drawn from a block of stone. The finished David weighs about six tons. The original stone must have weighed at least twice that. Michelangelo started chipping away early in the morning of Friday, September 13, 1501. I suppose he worked through the weekend. It seems a miracle that he was able to pull that figure out of that stone.

So much has been written about this iconic sculpture, the youthful pose, the contemplative but tense facial expression. While many representations of David show him after his defeat of Goliath, Michelangelo’s David is shown just before the battle, after he has determined to fight. Muscles bulge with tension, and the body is slightly twisted as though he is about to spring into action. The surface of the marble shimmers, and the figure seems almost alive. We stood staring, taking a few steps to change the angle, with a sense of awe . . . amid a throng of tourists with phones in their hands. Some looked up from their phones to snap a picture, but most were nose down, immersed in their screens in the presence of one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It is a triumph of human expression, of one man’s interpretation of a legendary mythical moment in time, his squeezing life, action, and emotion from a huge piece of stone, and most of the people in the room were not present to appreciate it, taking up space while dulling their minds.

Wendy’s car has an annoying feature that nags the driver when taking eyes off the road—look to one side for a few seconds too long, and you hear a loud ding as the dashboard flashes, “Eyes on the road.” I wonder if a museum hall could have such a feature. Take your eyes off the art, and you get ejected.

A lucky stroke during our visit to Florence was to visit the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo just as it opened in the morning. Ghiberti’s bronze doors are among the first things you see as you enter, but deeper into the museum is another masterpiece of Michelangelo, The Deposition, the same scene as his famous Pietà in Rome, Jesus being removed from the Cross. It is smaller in scale than David, the figures are roughly life-sized, but like David across town, it is exquisite. Michelangelo worked on this piece between 1547 and 1555, when he was in his seventies. It is supposed that the figure of Nicodemus standing behind Christ is Michelangelo’s self-portrait. We were lucky because we were alone in the room with The Deposition for over fifteen minutes. I did take some photos, but I did not check email, send a text, or order dog food to be delivered before we got home.

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The lives of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi encompass the earliest days of organ building. There are different theories about the age of the organ in the Basilica at Sion, Switzerland, made famous by E. Power Biggs’s recording from the 1960s. His jacket notes claimed it was built in 1390, while scholars and historians have suggested 1435. In any event, that instrument is from the same time as Ghiberti’s doors and Brunelleschi’s dome—all three artworks are tributes to the skill, ingenuity, and creativity of the day. The organ in the Koorkerk van Middelburg, Utrecht, the Netherlands, dates from 1479, and the organ in the Grote Kerk in Oosthuizen was built in 1521.

Andrea Gabrieli (1532–1585) was appointed organist of San Marco in Venice in 1566, two years after Michelangelo’s death. Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594) was born when Michelangelo was fifty-seven. Di Lasso and Gabrieli met in Munich in 1562, exchanging musical ideas that surely advanced the art of music during the Renaissance. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) was born in Deventer in the Netherlands two years before Michelangelo’s death. It is interesting to note that all this dazzling creativity was going on in Europe 200 years before the American Revolution. Sweelinck died the same year that British colonists landed at
Plymouth, Massachusetts.

To the hills

We rented a car in Florence and drove to Camaiore, thirty minutes northeast of Lucca, near the coast of the Ligurian Sea, where we spent four nights in a hilltop villa owned by a wine merchant friend in New York. The house was a lofty eighteenth-century place with thirteen-foot ceilings, marble floors, and feral cats. The bathtub was Carrara marble, as was the three-foot-wide kitchen sink. Our friend directed us to the local butcher, coffee shop, and pasta house. We had lunches in the pasta restaurant and cooked dinners at “home” for the nights we were there using the home-made pasta, treats from the butcher, and produce from a fruit and vegetable shop. 

From Camaiore we took day trips to Lucca where we visited Puccini’s birthplace and Carrara to see the quarry that was the source of the stone provided to Michelangelo for the masterpieces we had seen in Florence. We were there on a Sunday, so there was no work going on, but we saw hundreds of heavy trucks lined up at the nearby port loaded with stones marked in the tens of thousands of pounds. It is a dramatic mountain drive to the quarry itself, and we marveled at the skill and determination of fifteenth-century workers who managed to separate those huge blocks of marble from the mountain and transport them eighty-five miles to Florence. We got out of the car at the gated entrance to a quarry yard full of heavy equipment to soak in the view, and I pocketed three plum-sized chunks of marble that now sit on my desk as inspiration.

Mangia

We drove to Bologna, turned in our car, and took to the streets. After finding our hotel, we met a guide we had engaged for a personal food tour of the old city. Books have been written about experiences like that (I know because I’ve read them), but to walk from shop to shop for three hours with that charming woman sharing her passion about the city’s culinary culture was a highpoint of the trip, not to offend Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Meat preserved and presented in hundreds of ways is everywhere. The care and pride that goes into the whole gamut of raising, processing, presenting, selling, and consuming food is obvious as people with gleaming smiles offered us samples and described their lives. We were taken to a “laboratory” associated with one of the finest pasta shops where a dozen women were making pasta of all descriptions. I was especially enchanted by Consuela who was making tortellini, taking a pinch of the pork filling from a pouch, and twisting little squares of pasta into the classic shape. They offered us a sample, gently boiled with a little Bolognese sauce. I have nothing to add.

Spectacular meals with exquisite wines (we came home with a new appreciation for Sangiovese), lots more art including Michelangelo, and driving rain completed our short stay in Bologna. It is a city of porticoes, long colonnades that line many of the city’s streets, more than twenty-four miles of them. They originated in the Middle Ages, some dating from before 1100, and were developed to increase the interior space of the upper floors of houses, leaving space for pedestrians at ground level. Most of them have vaulted ceilings, many of which are decorated with frescos. However much they increased the square footage of a city apartment, they sure were handy during four days of steady rain. We were feeling a little grumpy about the constant rain until we learned while checking out of our hotel that thirty inches of rain had fallen in just a couple days north of Bologna, terrible flooding was ruining crops and destroying houses, and more than eighty people had died. Desk clerks and taxi drivers were distraught about the regional calamity.

We flew to Zürich from Bologna where we changed planes to fly home to Boston. I was working on my iPad during the first flight and put it in the pocket of the seat in front of me when a meal was served, and got off the airplane without it. We had left the plane on the tarmac and were bused to the terminal, so I knew there was no hope of getting back to the plane, and I started an online claim for the lost article. As we were taking our seats in the next plane, an airport worker in a reflective vest handed me the iPad. They found it while cleaning the plane and traced our seat numbers. Fly Swiss Air.

§

We were enriched by our ten-day immersion in Renaissance art, and I kept thinking about how the history of the organ and its music developed concurrently with the work of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) was born sixty-three years after Andrea Gabrieli. Dieterich Buxtehude’s lifespan (c. 1637–1707) overlapped with Scheidemann’s by forty-two years, and Johann Sebastian Bach was born forty-eight years after Buxtehude. That succession of great musicians who nourished the art of the organ takes us from the time of Michelangelo to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).

The Renaissance was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness that covered the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Art, architecture, music, and science increased exponentially. I have mentioned some of the giants, but each of the great museums we visited is chock full of the work of dozens of other artists.  

We’re living in a time of political mayhem and ecological disasters. Take an afternoon to visit a museum and be reminded about what’s good about human expression, and draw the lines that connect the organ and its history to the wide world of arts and humanities.

Breathtaking

My father was, among many other things, an ardent and slightly kooky baseball fan. He grew up in Cincinnati watching the Reds at Crosley Field and started a lifelong relationship with the Boston Red Sox when he was in seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was eleven years old in 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream, when the Red Sox won the American league pennant behind the bat and fielding of Carl Yastrzemski. I think it was that summer that Dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time.

I will never forget my glimpse of all that beautiful green grass as we entered the stands from the scrum in the tunnels beneath. After watching dozens of games on black-and-white television it was breathtaking, and as I write that word, I imagine that I can feel the gasp. It took my breath away. A couple days ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about Iranian women being allowed to watch a live soccer match for the first time in forty years. (Google “Iranian women soccer,” and you will find a slew of stories.) One woman interviewed brought a tear to my eye when she mentioned “all that green grass.” I knew just what she was feeling, except that I have always taken my access to major league sports for granted.

I had the same sort of feeling the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live in Symphony Hall. I had never heard anything like those double basses. My breath was taken away again when I stepped into a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night in real time. It looks great on a coffee mug or a t-shirt, but that is not the same.

A couple weeks ago I spent a week in Germany visiting an organbuilder’s workshop to discuss a future project. An American colleague was also visiting to give first lessons in voicing organ pipes to a bright young apprentice. And while I was there, I visited three historic organs. Two were iconic eighteenth-century masterpieces, gleaming away in their natural habitat. The third was a beauty built in Boston in 1930 for a church in Passaic, New Jersey. What are you doing in Germany?

A glass of wine, Herr Gabler?

The Basilica of Saint Martin is perched on a hill in eponymous Weingarten, the principal town in a region known for growing grapes and producing wine. I had my first glimpse of its towers as I turned a corner passing Burger King. It is a town of about 24,000 people with a long and complicated history of changes of government and processions of Lord Mayors and Abbots. The exterior of the huge building is simple enough, and it is surrounded by the dormitory-like buildings of what was one of the largest monasteries in Germany.

I first saw photos of the organ built by Joseph Gabler when I was a kid, most likely after that first baseball game because my organ lessons started when I was twelve. Visually, it is at the top of the list of all-time greats, on a par with and wildly different from the Müller organ at Haarlem, you know, the red one with the lions. Enormous organ cases decorated with faux-marble swirl around six huge round windows, everything festooned with putti, moldings, carvings, and virile statues to Rococo extremes. I entered the Basilica of Saint Martin from the west end, under the organ, so my first view of the place was down the three-hundred-foot nave, across a fantasyland of decoration. The arched ceiling, nearly a hundred feet up, is adorned with murals in which painted drapery crosses borders to become real drapery.

When I turned around to look at the organ for the first time, I had two quick impressions. In spite of the 32′ façade pipes, it is up so high that it does not look very big, and its magnificent gaudiness cannot possibly be captured in a photograph. There is so much going on visually that I could not take my eyes off it. It is when you climb the many stairs (I forgot to count) to the organ loft that you find out how big it is. You can hardly see the top of the organ. The biggest façade pipe is 32′ DDDD (the two largest are inside the cases). The loft must be fifty feet across, and you could imagine that there are three or four independent organs up there until you realize that the console is up six steps on a platform that allows tracker action to run every which way, and the floor boards between the base of the console platform and the two cases on the gallery rail have iron rings so they can be lifted to access the mechanics.

I visited Weingarten with the three colleagues from the workshop. Stephan Debeur, organist at the abbey, had only limited time coinciding with my visit, so he invited us to join him at the organ while he played for Mass on Friday evening. The steps to and from the organ console were especially squeaky, making me nervous about distracting the worship, but Stephan assured us that he regularly had visitors while playing, and because of the size of the place, it was not an issue. In the lapses between playing, he led us around, opening access doors so we could see interior pipes and action. He kept his ears on the action downstairs and darted back to the console at appropriate moments. I was amused as he played the role of cantor, braying without amplification down the length of the immense church while accompanying himself on that spectacular organ.

He made a point of demonstrating the Vox Humana, an iconic stop in an iconic organ, a stop of such beauty that a legend grew around it. Joseph Gabler experimented with countless combinations of metal and wood, striving to build the pipes that would perfectly imitate the human voice and failing frequently to his disappointment. The legend has him approaching Satan to exchange his soul for the perfect piece of metal, and that idyllic voice was born. Stephan played “Ich ruf’ zu dir” from J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40), alternating the solo voice up and down by octaves in subsequent lines. Gorgeous.

The organ has many singular features. Every façade pipe is a speaking pipe, even the teeny ones lofted above the high center window. Gabler had planned to have an entire division in that location but settled for running long tubes to conduct wind to those pipes from a windchest far below. There is a stop called La Force (The Power), which plays forty-nine pipes simultaneously on low C of the pedalboard. I was sorry not to hear it, as it is apparently not conducive for use in a simple evening Mass. I guess I will have to go back.

There is a voice in one of the Positiv cases with twenty pipes of solid ivory. Take a look at your lathe, remove the motor, and pump the thing with a foot lever, and try to make an ivory organ pipe without chipping it. And while you are at it, note that the massive drawknobs and their square shanks are also solid ivory. There is elaborate marquetry everywhere you look, on banisters, newels, and console panels. There is hardly a square inch that lacks added ornamentation.

Every time I hear an instrument built in another age, I am struck by the timelessness of the sound of a pipe organ. The organ at Weingarten predates American Guild of Organists console standards by more than 150 years, and it is an awkward sit at first whack. But Stephan ably demonstrated that a modern organist can easily play a modern Mass, changing stops like a conjurer, sending beautifully balanced voices across the immense space. Perched on that six-step platform, he has a spectacular view to the altar, surrounded by mammoth organ cases. It is thought to be the first pipe organ built with a detached console.

When Gabler completed the organ in 1750, the delighted monks presented him with a bonus—enough wine to fill the largest pipe. Assuming that 32′ DDDD has a diameter of twenty inches and dusting off my π, that is about 22,600 cubic inches, which is almost ninety-eight gallons. A standard pour for a glass of wine is five ounces. Herr Gabler could entertain a lot of friends with 2,500 five-ounce glasses.¹

Follow the Fox to Munich.

When I asked my friend Stephen Tharp which organs stand out in the neighborhood I was visiting, he all but blurted out Fürstenfeld. The organ in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck was completed by Johann Georg Fux in 1736. The church, though smaller than that in Weingarten, is still immense, and sports the same degree of fantastic opulent decoration. There are side altars with spiraling columns in every bay, angels with sunbursts, carvings, and murals everywhere. Once again, the organ is placed so high in the church that it looks small at first. But though it has fewer than thirty stops, it has a 32′ façade. The tallest pipes are mounted on the impost that is well out of reach from the floor. I guess the organ is over forty-five feet tall.

With Stephen’s help, I met the organist Christoph Hauser after Mass on Sunday morning, so I attended Mass to hear the organ well from the floor. It was dazzling. Christoph’s playing was colorful, thoughtful, rhythmic, and inspirational. It was all improvised excepting the hymns and congregational responses, and that ancient organ filled the room with the liveliest tones, both delicate and charming, and full ablaze.

After Mass, I returned the hymnal to the rack and wandered about keeping my eyes on the rear of the room, assuming that Christoph would appear there. A few moments later, I noticed a dapper gent at the front of the room, looking exactly like an organist (you bet I was profiling). Turns out that the stairs start in a sacristy next to the chancel. And such stairs. Once again, I forgot to count, but this organ is in a second balcony, and there were plenty of them. We passed the antique mechanism of the tower clock, the size of a small car with counterweights as big as oil drums hanging from cables high above. The stairs changed from stone to wood, the stairwell grew narrower, and my tuner’s knees along with all they support was barely a match for the thirty-something spry organist I was chasing. We arrived into a gallery that spanned the length of the room, passing through narrow arches at each bay, until we reached the organ. The organ loft is about ten steps down from the gallery allowing a grand view of the side of the organ case, but it was not until I got down those stairs to stand on the same floor as the organ that I could appreciate its size. The 32′ façade pipes are topped by ornate crowns laden with putti, carvings, and more sunbursts, and are mounted on an impost that is well out of reach.

If Weingarten has the oldest detached console, does Fürstenfeld have the tallest two-manual organ?

Speaking of AGO standards, the Fux organ has “short and broken” bass octaves. Both keyboards and the pedalboard are missing the lowest C#, D#, F#, and G#. What looks like E is actually C. What looks like passing from F# to G is actually D to G. Christoph agreed that it took some adjustment, and now that he is used to it, he has to think twice when moving to more usual keyboards. After lots of digging, he determined that Bach’s Dorian Toccata is the only large piece by Bach with a big pedal part that he can play on the organ. I invite and encourage you to type “Hauser Fux Dorian Toccata” into your YouTube search bar. Hang on to your hats: it is a thrilling ride.

Mr. Skinner goes to Ingelheim.

In 2008, the Organ Clearing House sold Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 823 (1930) to the Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany. The church’s organist Carsten Lenz had long intended to import a Skinner organ to Germany, and this exciting transaction happened after four years of conversations, lots of touring around the eastern United States, and a frightening heap of paperwork. The organ was shipped to Klais Orgelbau in Bonn where it was releathered, renovated, and reconfigured under the supervision and with the advice of Skinner experts Sean O’Donnell and Nelson Barden.

The church in Passaic, New Jersey, where the organ was originally installed, had been purchased by a new congregation, and the decorated façade pipes were to stay in place, so Klais produced a new case of contemporary design including new pipes to replace the original speaking façade pipes from 16′ and 8′ Diapasons. The organ was originally placed in deep chambers in a large room with plaster walls, carpeting, and lovely pew cushions. The new setting has the organ placed in a new shallow case in a high balcony on the center axis of a brick and stone room. The thoughtful installation included placing the large wood pedal pipes in front of the exposed Great division to control the egress of tone. Even with that precaution, it was still necessary to hang heavy sheets of felt in front of the Great to balance the tone in the lively acoustics.

I was delighted to see the shellac, ink lettering, distinctive racking styles, and beefy expression shutters we know so well from long experience with Skinner organs. I was delighted to hear the distinctive tones of Mr. Skinner’s specialty voices so far from home. And I was delighted to hear Carsten describe how German audiences have responded to the unique sounds of the Skinner organ.

We have heard criticism about exporting American organs, expressing the feeling that they should stay at home. I have two thoughts to share. Skinner #823, like many of the instruments we have shipped overseas, was on the market for five years before the church in Ingelheim purchased it. Better to be sent overseas than never to be heard again. And for the last seventy years, American organists and organbuilders have been influenced by European traditions. Reciprocity is a good thing. Germany has a five-hundred-year history of building pipe organs, but no one in Germany has ever built a Skinner organ. There is nothing else like it. Seems we can teach them a thing or two, especially, according to Carsten, when American organists come to play!

§

It is impossible to fully describe the experience of visiting a single fine pipe organ, writing a paragraph about each individual voice or chorus, describing the feel of different keyboards, the intricacies of design, the quirks, the chirps, and the foibles. In the mid-eighteenth century when the Weingarten and Fürstenfeldbruck organs were built, there was no other machine made by humans quite as complicated as a pipe organ. With more than seven-thousand pipes, the Weingarten organ is large by modern standards, and its console placement is visionary.

Returning to AGO standards, or what we are used to in organs, the twenty-nine-stop Fürstenfeld organ has only one reed, 16′ Trompas² in the Pedal (prominently displayed in Christoph Hauser’s recording of the Dorian Toccata). How can you play an organ with no manual reeds? Shut up and sing, that’s how. And by the way, most of the mixtures include tierces, and full organ sure sounds as though there are manual reeds.

I shared my thrill and thrall on Facebook after each of these visits and received a comment about Weingarten that stood out. “I’ve always thought that organ was a little soft in the church. I’m sure Gabler did his best.” Oof. Herr Gabler’s worst is far better than the best of most organbuilders, even after 2,500 glasses of wine.

Notes

1. You can see the specification of the Gabler organ at Weingartern here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_the_Basilica_of_St._Martin_(Wein….

2. Yes, it really is 16′ Trompas. You can see the specifications of the Fux organ at Fürstenfeldbruck here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgeln_der_Klosterkirche_Fürstenfeld.