In the wind . . .

It works for me.

After I graduated from Oberlin, we lived in a rented four-bedroom farmhouse with a huge yard in the rolling countryside a few miles outside the town. Foreshadowing fracking, there was a natural gas well on the property that supplied the house. It was a great place to live, but there were some drawbacks. The gas flowed freely from the well in warm weather, but was sluggish in cold. The furnace was mounted on tall legs because the basement flooded. All the plumbing in the house was in a wing that included kitchen, bathroom, and laundry machines, but the basement didn’t extend under the wing, so the pipes froze in cold weather. 

After a couple winters there, we had wrapped the pipes with electrified heating tape, mastered how to set the furnace to run just enough when the gas well was weak, and learned to anticipate when the basement would flood so we could run a pump and head off the mess. 

Outside, there was a beautiful redbud tree, several huge willows, acres of grass to mow, and the residual effects of generations of enthusiastic gardening. One summer, the peonies on either side of the shed door grew at radically different rates. One was huge and lush while the other was spindly. I was curious until I investigated and found an opossum carcass under the healthy one. Not that you would read The Diapason for gardening tips, but I can tell you that a dead ’possum will work wonders for your peonies!

I wanted to care for that landscape, so I bought an old walk-behind Gravely tractor with attachments. I could swap mower for roto-tiller for snow-blower, and there was a sulky—a two-wheeled trailer with a seat that allowed me to ride behind when mowing. I remember snatching cherry tomatoes off the vines, hot from the sunlight, as I motored past the garden.

I was the only one who could get the Gravely to start, at least I think so, given that I was only one who used it. It had a manual choke that had to be set just so. Then, as I pressed the starter button with my right toe, I’d move the throttle from fully closed to about a quarter open, and the engine would catch. I’d run it at that slow speed for about ten seconds, and it would be ready to work. If I did anything different, it would stall.

The bigger the toys . . .

I learned a lot about machines from Tony Palkovic who lived across the street. He had an excavating business and owned a fleet of huge machines. One weekend I helped him remove the drive wheels from his 110,000-pound Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer to replace the bearings. It involved a couple house jacks and 6-inch open-end wrenches that were eight feet long and weighed a hundred pounds. He used his backhoe to lift the wheels off the axles, not a job for “triple A.” I admired his affinity for his machines, and it was fun to watch him operate them. The way he combined multiple hydraulic movements with his fingertips on the levers created almost human-like motions, and he liked to show off by picking up things like soda cans with the bucket of a 40-ton machine.

The soul of the machine

In The Soul of the New Machine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), author Tracy Kidder follows the development of a new generation of computer technology, and grapples with the philosophical questions surrounding the creation and advances of “high-tech.” We’re beholden to it (witness the lines at Apple stores recently as the new iPhone was released), but we might not be sure if the quality of our lives is actually improved. Yesterday, a friend tweeted, “There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.” Have you ever sat on a rock, talking with a friend, dangling your toes in the water until the rising tide brings the water up to your knees?

There’s a mystical place where soul and machine combine to become a pipe organ. The uninitiated might look inside an organ and see only mechanical mysteries. Many organs are damaged or compromised by uninformed storage of folding chairs and Christmas decorations within. But the organ is a complex machine whose inanimate character must disappear so as not to interfere with the making of music.

Musicians have intimate relationships with their instruments. In Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, page 5), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writes, “When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, in a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” 

No organist can claim such an affinity, not even with the tiniest, most sensitive continuo organ. Steinhardt refers to instruments that you “play at arm’s length.” More usually, the organist sits at a set of keyboards separated from the instrument by at least several feet, and sometimes by dozens or even hundreds of feet. And in the case of electric or electro-pneumatic keyboard actions, he is removed from any direct physical or mechanical connection with the instrument he’s playing. He might as well phone it in.

A pipe organ of average size is a complex machine. A thirty-stop organ has about 1,800 pipes. If it’s a two-manual tracker organ, there are 154 valves controlled by the keys, a system of levers (multiplied by thirty) to control the stops, a precisely balanced action chassis with mechanical couplers, and a wind system with self-regulating valves, along with any accessories that may be included. If it’s a two-manual electro-pneumatic organ, there are 1,800 note valves, 122 manual primary valves (twice that many if it’s a Skinner organ), and hundreds of additional valves for stop actions, bass notes, and accessories.

But the conundrum is that we expect all that machinery to disappear as we play. We work to eliminate every click, squeak, and hiss. We expect massive banks of expression shutters to open and close instantly and silently. We’re asking a ten-ton machine in a monumental space to emulate Arnold Steinhardt’s loving caress. 

It’s a “one-off.”

Most of the machines we use are mass-produced. The car you buy might be the 755,003rd unit built to identical specifications on an automated assembly line. If there’s a defect, each unit has the same defect. But while individual components in an organ, such as windchest actions, might be standardized at least to the instruments of a single builder, each pipe organ is essentially a prototype—one of a kind. The peculiarities of an organ chamber or organ case determine the routes of mechanical actions, windlines, and tuning access. The layout of the building determines where the blower will be located, as well as the relationship between musician and machine.

The design of the instrument includes routing wind lines from blower to reservoirs, and from reservoirs to windchests. Each windchest has a support system: ladders, passage boards, and handrails as necessary to allow the tuner access to all the pipes. An enclosed division has a frame in which the shutters are mounted and a mechanism to open and close the shutters, either by direct mechanical linkage or a pneumatic or electric machine. Some expressive divisions are enclosed in separate rooms of the building with the expression frame and shutters being the only necessary construction, but others are freestanding within the organ, so the organbuilder provides walls, ceiling, access doors, ladders, and passage boards as required. The walls and ceiling are ideally made of a heavy, sound-deadening material so the shutter openings are the only path for egress of sound.

What’s in a tone?

Galileo said, “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.” While it may not be immediately apparent, mathematics is the heart of the magic of organ pipes. Through centuries of experimentation, organbuilders have established “norms” that define the differences between, say, flute tone and principal tone. The physical characteristics of organ pipes that determine their tone are defined using ratios. The “scale” of the pipe is the ratio of the length to the diameter. The “cut-up” that defines the height of a pipe’s mouth is the ratio of mouth height to the mouth width. The “mouth width” is the ratio of mouth width to the circumference. The type and thickness of the metal is important to the tone, so the organbuilder has to calculate, or guess, what material to use in order to achieve just the tone he’s looking for.

Finally, the shape of the pipe’s resonator is a factor. A tapered pipe sounds different from a cylindrical pipe, and the taper is described as a ratio of bottom diameter to top diameter. A square wooden pipe sounds different from a round metal pipe. A stopped wooden pipe sounds different from a capped metal pipe, even if the scales are identical. When comparing the scale of a wood pipe to that of a metal pipe, the easiest criterion is the area of the pipe’s cross section—depth times width of the wood pipe is compared to πr² of the metal pipe. If the results of those two formulas are equal, the scale is the same.

The reason all these factors affect the tone of the pipes is that each different design, each different shape, each different material chosen emphasizes a different set of harmonics. The organbuilder, especially the voicer or the tuner, develops a sixth sense for identifying types of pipes by their sounds. He instantly hears the difference between a wood Bourdon and a metal Gedeckt, or between the very narrow-scale Viole d’Orchestre and the slightly broader Salicional. He can tell the difference between high and low cutup just by listening. Conversely, his intuition tells him which selections of stops, which types of material, what level of wind pressure will produce the best sounding organ for the building.

The keen-eared organist can intuit all this information. Why does a Rohrflöte 8′ sound good with a Koppelflöte 4′? You may not know the physical facts that produce the complementary harmonics, but if you’re listening well, you sure can hear them. Early in my organ studies, a teacher told me not to use a Flute 4′ with a Principal 8′. Fair enough. That’s true in many cases. But it might be magical on a particular organ. Ask yourself if a combination sounds good—if it sounds good, it probably is good.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If the organ is part machine and part mathematics, and the musician is physically separated from the creation of tone, how can it be musical or artistic? How can an organist achieve the sensitivity of a violinist or a clarinetist who have direct physical control over the creation of tone? If you don’t have a good embouchure, you don’t make pretty sounds.

While I’ve talked about mechanisms and the mystical properties of the sound of the pipes driven by their math, we’re still missing something. Without wind, we have nothing but a big pile of wood, metal, and leather. Wind is a lively, living commodity. It has character and life. It’s endlessly variable. Outdoors in the open climate, wind is capricious. Any sailor knows that. You can be roaring along with white water boiling from under your transom, sails and sheets taut, and suddenly you fall flat as the wind dies. Or it shifts direction a few points and instead of drawing you along, it stops you dead.

Inside our organs, we harness the wind. We use electric blowers that provide a strong steady supply of wind, we build windlines and ducts that carry the wind from one place to another without loss through leakage. We design regulators with valves that regulate the wind (we also call them reservoirs because they store the regulated pressurized air), and respond to the demands of the music by allowing air to pass through as the valves open and the speaking pipes demand it, and our windchest actions operate those valves as commanded by the keyboards under the hands of the musician.

When you’re sitting on the bench, or inside the organ chamber, and the organ blower is off, the whole thing is static, inanimate. It’s like the violin or clarinet resting on padded velvet inside a locked case. I’ve always loved the moment when the blower is turned on when I’m inside an organ. You hear the first rotations of the motor, the first whispers of air stirring from the basement, and a creak or two as reservoirs fill and the springs pull taut. Hundreds of things are happening. When the blower is running at full speed and all the reservoirs have filled, the organ is alive and expectant—waiting to be told what to do. And at the first touch of the keyboard, the music begins.

Defining the indefinable

Once we’re playing, we enter the world of metaphysics. Intellectually, we understand how everything is functioning, but philosophically, we can hardly believe it’s true. Combinations of stops blend to create tone colors that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Peculiarities of acoustics create special effects heard in one location, but nowhere else. The motion of the air is apparent in the sound of the pipes, not, as a wag might quip, because faulty balance or low supply makes the wind wiggle, but because that air is alive as it moves through the organ’s appliances.

It’s that motion of wind that gives the organ soul. This is why the sounds of an electronic instrument can never truly equal those of the pipe organ. Sound that is digitally reproduced and funneled through loudspeakers can never have life. The necessary perfection of repetition of electronic tone defies the liveliness of the pipe organ. Just like the mouth-driven clarinet, it’s impossible that every wind-driven organ pipe will sound exactly the same, every time it’s played. It’s the millions of nearly imperceptible variations that give the thing life.

This starts to explain how the most mechanical and apparently impersonal of musical instruments can respond differently to the touch of different players. I’ve written several times about our experience of attending worship on Easter Sunday at St. Thomas’s Church in New York, when after hearing different organists playing dozens of voluntaries, hymns, responses, and accompaniments, the late John Scott slid onto the bench to play the postlude. The huge organ there is in questionable condition and soon to be replaced, but nonetheless, there was something about the energy passing through Scott’s fingers onto the keys that woke the gale that is the organ’s wind system and set the place throbbing. It was palpable. It was tangible. It was indescribable, and it was thrilling.

§

My friend Tony cared about his machines, not just because they were the tools with which he made his living, but because their inanimate whims responded to his understanding. We survived in that beguiling but drafty and imperfect house because as we loved it, we got to know it, and outsmarted most of its shortcomings. And I had lots of fun with that old Gravely, taking care of it, coaxing it to start, and enjoying the results of the mechanical effort.

Tony’s D-9 moved dirt—lots of dirt. But the sound of the organ moves me. And because I see it moving others, it moves me more. It’s all about the air.

In the niche of time

The history of organ building and organ music is deep and rich, but the longer I toil in those vineyards, the more I realize how small it is in the wider world. The histories of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy fill libraries and geo-political history—especially the great procession of warfare that dominates every epoch of human existence, influencing the flow of the arts and academic thought. It may seem trite to acknowledge the relative insignificance of the pipe organ, but I notice that many professionals in the field focus on the interrelation of historic and geographic subdivisions of organ history, separate from the context of more general world history. 

I’ve often mentioned the juxtaposition of the fashionable Rococo courts of Western Europe, complete with minuets and powdered wigs, and the Minuteman of Lexington, Massachusetts, scrambling behind walls and fences, trying to outsmart the British Redcoats in the early days of the American Revolution. Paul Revere (1735–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) were all contemporaries. 

Most of us have all the libraries of the world at our fingertips—a few clicks or keystrokes can call up reliable information on any subject. You can do it while you’re sitting on an organ bench. Give a Google or two to consider the composer on your music rack today—what painters, philosophers, or writers might he have met? What war was coming up or going on? How might that have influenced his thinking? Or did he scram when things got rough so he could work in peace?

Ancient roots

The history of the pipe organ spans more than 2,250 years, starting with the hydraulis created by Ctesibius of Alexandria, Egypt, in about 256 BC. Sounds mighty old, but the hydraulis didn’t come out of thin air. Panpipes are still familiar to us today and predated the hydraulis by many centuries. With a dozen or more of individual flutes lashed together, the panpipe is a sort of pipe organ, minus the mechanical valve systems and the User Interface (keyboards) of “modern organs” built after 1250 AD. You can hear live performances on panpipes (for a modest donation) most days in New York’s Times Square Metro Station.

The Chinese sheng is a little like an ocarina with vertical pipes—an obvious precursor to the organ. It’s easy to find photos online. It is a common mainstay of Chinese classical music, with ancient roots. Archeologists working in the Hubei Province in 1978 unearthed a 2,400-year-old royal tomb that contained a sheng.

Most of us learned about the supposed oldest playable organ from E. Power Biggs, who featured the organ in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Valère, Sion, Switzerland, in his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. We read on the jacket notes of that vinyl LP that the organ was built in 1390, more than a century before Christopher Columbus ostensibly discovered the New World. It’s now generally thought to have been built in 1435, 17 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was active in Florence at that time—the dome of the cathedral there for which Brunelleschi is perhaps best known was constructed right at the time of his death. Cosimo de’ Medici, the great patriarch of the fabled Florentine banking family, inherited his fortune in 1429. Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who told us that the sun is the center of the universe, wasn’t born until 1473.¹ It’s fun to note that Cosimo, Brunelleschi, and the builder of the organ at Sion lived in a world where it was believed that Earth was the center of the universe.² As a sailor, I wonder how Christopher Columbus navigated?

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621)

Sweelinck was born and died in Amsterdam. He assumed the position of organist at that city’s Oude Kerk in 1577 at the age of fifteen and worked there the rest of his life. His employment was unusual for his day in that playing the organ was his sole responsibility. That left him with plenty of time to teach, and his studio included such luminaries as Praetorius, Scheidemann, and Samuel Scheidt. So while he was born in the last years of the broadly defined Renaissance, his music and teaching formed a bridge between, let’s say, Palestrina and Buxtehude—a mighty tall order.³

One of Sweelinck’s greatest hits is Balletto del Granduca, a set of variations on a simple theme. On my desk right now is the “sheet music” edition I bought as a teenager ($1.00), Associated Music Publishers, edited by E. Power Biggs. (Wasn’t he a great educator?)

Painters Rubens and Caravaggio were Sweelinck’s contemporaries, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was completed a few years after his death. Heliocentrism (the Sun as the center of the universe) was confirmed by astronomer Johannes Kepler in his publication Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596. The Edict of Nantes was signed by King Henry IV of France in 1598, recognizing the basic rights of Protestants (Huguenots) in predominantly Roman Catholic France, including the right to freely practice their religion. Henry IV was murdered in 1610 by the radical Catholic François Ravaillac, and succeeded by his son, Louis XIII. Coincidentally, the King James Bible was published in 1611.

Sweelinck was a Calvinist, a doctrine governed by the regulative principle, which limited worship to the teachings of the New Testament. Calvin notwithstanding, Sweelinck’s creativity was encouraged by the Consistory of Dordrecht of 1598, in which organists were instructed to play variations on Genevan Psalm tunes in an effort to help the people learn them.

On closer shores, British refugees established the Colony of Virginia in 1607, French refugees established the city of Quebec in 1608, and Dutch refugees founded New York in 1612. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, two years before Sweelinck’s death.

Given that much of the migration of Europeans toward the “New World” was inspired by religious persecution, we read that Sweelinck lived in an era of dramatic international religious tension and change. It’s not much of a stretch to compare those tensions around the year 1600 with today’s religious persecution, division, and fundamentalism.

(I’ll let you do Bach!)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)

Beethoven (1770–1827) was 29 when Mendelssohn was born, and Mendelssohn was 24 when Brahms (1833–97) was born.⁴ Felix Mendelssohn was as precocious as musicians get. He wrote 12 string symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. His three piano quartets were written between 1822 and 1825 (you do the math!)—these were his first published works. I’ve long counted his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream among my favorite pieces. Its brilliant passagework, soaring melodies, sumptuous orchestration, and driving rhythms are a tour de force for modern orchestras and ferociously challenging to organists playing it in transcription. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a mature work, but it’s the product of a 17 year old. What were you doing when you were 17?

The 1820s was a decade of violent uprisings all over Europe. Italians revolted against King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, resulting in the formation of a constitutional monarchy. A colonel in the Spanish army assembled a mutiny against King Ferdinand VII, who capitulated to their demands for a liberal constitution. France answered Ferdinand’s plea for assistance by sending 100,000 soldiers, quelling the uprising, and restoring the absolute monarchy. There were revolutions in Portugal and Brazil, and in a brutal revolutionary war, Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire. The death of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1821 coincided with Mendelssohn’s prolific adolescence. In the United States in 1825, John Quincy Adams was president, the Erie Canal was opened, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, passed away.

One of Mendelssohn’s greatest hits is his Violin Concerto, completed and premiered in 1845, four years before his death. The year 1845 was a busy one around the world. Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven, Baylor University and the United States Naval Academy were founded, James Polk succeeded John Tyler as President of the United States, and the potato blight began in Ireland. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an earth-shaking work that represented several giant steps in the march toward the American Civil War.

There were many “firsts” that year: a “screw-powered” steamship crossed the Atlantic, anesthesia was used to ease childbirth, the New York Herald mentioned baseball, and the rubber band was invented in Great Britain. It has never occurred to me to associate Felix Mendelssohn with baseball, anesthesia, or rubber bands. Do you suppose Mendelssohn ever rolled up a manuscript with a rubber band?

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Widor is probably forever to be remembered by legions of organists and brides for one piece of music. But seventy-five measures of sixteenth notes in 4/2 time, followed by three of big whole-note chords in F major is a pittance when compared to the rest of his massive output of music. He wrote tons of orchestral music including symphonies, works for orchestra with organ, piano, violin, cello, harp, chorus, and various huge combinations. There are six duos for piano and harmonium, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and sonatas for violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet. There are reams of piano music, songs, and choral music, even music for the stage. But all we really know are ten organ symphonies along with a half-dozen incidental pieces for organ. And most of us only play one of his pieces. Oh yes, there’s also a doozy in G minor, but it’s a lot harder.

Widor was one of the most important teachers of his generation, succeeding César Franck as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890, later leaving that post to become professor of composition. His students included Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Schweitzer.

Widor studied in Brussels with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (lots of us play Lemmens’s Fanfare). When he finished those studies in 1868 at the age of 24, he moved to Paris where he was appointed assistant to Camille Saint-Säens at Église de la Madeleine. And in 1870, he was appointed “provisional” organist at Ste-Sulpice, the most prestigious post in France and home to the fantastic Cavaillé-Coll organ that is revered, cherished, and studied by generations of organists and organbuilders around the world. His primary advocate for that envied position was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll himself, who had been disappointed by the flippancy of the music of Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–69), the previous organist who had presided over the first years of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece. It’s rumored that Cavaillé-Coll’s agitation contributed to Lefébure-Wély’s early death. (You gotta watch out for those organbuilders!)

Daniel Roth, the current organist at Ste-Sulpice,⁵ visited New York City to play a recital at Church of the Resurrection, where I, with the Organ Clearing House, had installed a renovated and relocated 1916 Casavant organ. It was an exciting moment for us to have such a master player perform on “our” instrument, but one of the most interesting moments came not at the organ console, but walking the sidewalks of Park Avenue, when Monsieur Roth told me some of the back story surrounding Widor’s appointment in 1870.

That’s the year that the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had used brilliant and nefarious schemes to provoke a French attack on Prussia. The French Parliament declared war on the German Kingdom of Prussia on July 16, 1870, the Germans were armed and in position, and quickly invaded northeastern France. Paris fell to Prussian forces in January of 1871. In May of 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany what is now Alsace-Lorraine, and the balance of power in Europe was upset. France was determined to reclaim lost territory, Britain was nervous about the change of balance in power, and the seeds were sown for World War I.

In that harsh political climate, patriotic (and perhaps, bigoted) Frenchmen considered Belgium as German,⁶ and Widor’s detractors whispered in the ears of the priests that Widor “plays like a German.” Cavaillé-Coll prevailed, and Widor was appointed. But his appointment was never made formal. He served Ste-Sulpice as provisional organist for 64 years. Widor’s student Marcel Dupré succeeded him, and served until 1971—more than a hundred years after Widor’s appointment.⁷

Claude Monet (1840–1926) completed some of his early works while living in Paris between 1865 and 1870, when Camille Doncieux was his model for The Woman in the Green Dress, Woman in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine. Camille gave birth to their son in 1867, and they were married on June 28, 1870, less than three weeks before the start of the Franco-Prussian War. As the war started, Monet fled to England with his new wife and child, where he studied the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. How’s that for war influencing the arts?

Édouard Manet, James Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir were contemporaries of Widor. Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir were all active in Paris when Widor was organist at Ste-Sulpice. I wonder if they met? What would they have talked about?

And that organ?

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Ste-Sulpice was built in 1862, incorporating some pipes from the previous (1781) Clicquot organ. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was one of the largest organs in the world. (An additional voice was added when Widor retired.) It included pneumatic actions to assist the vast mechanical systems, a complex wind system with multiple wind pressures (all in the days of hand-pumping), a state-of-the-art whiz-bang console with arrays of mechanical registration devices, and a huge palette of tonal innovations. 

Europe had not cornered the market on war in those days. The American Civil War was in full swing when Cavaillé-Coll completed that organ. In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. Do you suppose Widor ever read Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government, Slavery in Massachusetts, or Walden? And who will be the first to include Battle Hymn of the Republic on their recording at Ste-Sulpice?

§

Maybe Felix Mendelssohn was aware of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, but it would be a reach to trace how that machine influenced Mendelssohn’s music (though there are dissertations out there that seem just as obscure). Widor had to have noticed the Prussian occupation of Paris as he was starting his epic tenure at Ste-Sulpice. He must have had terrifying walks to church past Prussian soldiers brandishing weapons. Such a sight would have influenced my improvisations. And suppose he had happened to meet Degas or Renoir at a reception. Would he have gone to the studio for coffee the next day and discussed the confluence of pictorial art and music?

In its collective history, the organ is an exquisite example of the highest of human achievements. It combines an array of crafts, it functions thanks to scientific principles, and it evokes the full range of human emotions. But it’s not a be-all or end-all. Its place in our society is the result of complex evolution, and given the complexity of today’s world and the state of today’s church, we’re passing through a time that has been less than a Golden Age.

But the range of the instrument, the breadth of its history, and the sheer power of its voice continue to keep it in the forefront. However obscure and arcane, its nearly unique status as a vehicle for improvisation equips it perfectly as an instrument of the future. What will future generations deduce from today’s organ music when they look back and consider the wide world in which we live today?

And here’s a hint: your recital audience loves to hear this stuff. Of course we’re interested in the intricacies of sonata form, or the structure of a fugue (“listen for the entrances”), but the people might get more out of connecting your organ world with their history world, their literature world, their art world. It took me about seven hours to write this piece, including the deep research. It’s not a big effort, and it adds a lot. The buzz phrase in the real estate world is “location, location, location.” How about “relevance, relevance, relevance?” ν

Notes

1. A general note: In this essay, I’m tossing about lots of supposedly specific facts. As usual, I’m sitting at my desk with nothing but a laptop, and I’m gathering data from quick Google searches. Much of the data comes from Wikipedia, which we suppose is generally accurate, but cannot be relied on as absolute. I am, therefore, not citing each specific reference, and offer the caveat that any factual errors are unintentional. They are offered to provide general historical context, and discrepancies of a year or two are inconsequential for this purpose.

2. There may well be some hangers-on who still believe that the sun revolves around the earth!

3. Similarly, Haydn was eighteen years old when J. S. Bach died, just as the Baroque era was ending. 

4. I like telling people that my great-grandmother, Ruth Cheney, was seven years old when Brahms died, and my sons were present at her funeral in 1994. On her hundredth birthday she increased from one cigarette a day to two! I treasure her piano, an 1872 rosewood Steinway, passed through our family to me as the only musician in my generation.

5. Daniel Roth has just been named International Performer of the Year by the New York City AGO chapter.

6. Today, Belgium has three official languages: French, German, and Dutch.

7. It’s poignant to remember that in his memoir, Dupré wrote of the agonies of World War II. He and his wife stayed at their home in Meudon during the Nazi occupation. German officers visited their home, planning to install guns on the roof, which commanded a view of Paris. Somehow the presence of the big pipe organ in the Salle d’orgue helped them decide not to. Later, their home was badly damaged by a German bomb. For the first two weeks of the German occupation, with no other transportation available, the Duprés (then in their fifties) walked the several miles to Ste-Sulpice.

It’s all about the wind.

Wendy and I have a neat little sailboat named Kingfisher. It’s nothing fancy, just twenty-two feet long. It’s a catboat with a single sail, gaff rig, and broad beam—it’s not quite half as wide as it is long. It’s a shallow draft boat with a centerboard, so there’s no headroom below; we either crouch or sit. But sleeping on board is comfortable because of the broad beam. There’s a two-burner stove and plenty of space for storing food and drink, and maybe most important, there’s a head.

The art of sailing is a thrill. We hoist a 450 square foot sail, and adjust the angle of the sail to capture the wind. With the wind abeam (directly from the side) or abaft (from behind), the catboat is at its fastest. Where we sail along the Maine coast, sometimes the wind is steady for hours, even days at a time, and others it comes in fits and starts, puffing first from one direction and then another. Whether we set the sail and settle back for a five-mile tack, or have to fiddle constantly with lines and rudder to keep moving, the art of using the wind to make our boat go is an immense pleasure. And it’s free. Reading aloud is a great pastime for two people in a sailboat—Moby Dick is a family favorite. Keep those harpoons handy.

When we’re getting ready to go out for a few days, we think up menus, shop and cook, freeze things, and stow everything carefully in the icebox on board. Wendy is a great provisioner. We freeze plastic bottles of water, which adds to our refrigeration, and allows us to drink ice-cold water while under way—essential and delightful in full exposure to sun and wind. Goldendoodle Farley comes on board, we raise the sail, and set out across the water. We typically have an itinerary that involves anchoring in the remote coves of islands, so we sail for five or six hours, cover twenty or twenty-five miles, ease into the cove (we can go close in because of the shallow draft), and drop the hook. We row to shore to stretch our legs, and give Farley a chance to do his doggy stuff. After a half hour of that, we row back to the Mother Ship, just as the sun crosses the yardarm. No gin and tonic tastes as good as the first few sips on board after a day on the water. (We always carry fresh limes!)

It seems like a great adventure, crossing wide expanses of water. I love it when the wind blows at twelve or eighteen knots—perfect for us to have a snappy active ride, but still easy to control. The last sail of last season, taking Kingfisher to the boatyard for the winter, sons Mike, Andy, and I sailed twenty miles in twenty-five-knot wind. It was pretty wild, and I was very glad to have Mike along, young and strong, and a very experienced sailor—a lot more agile than his nearly sixty-year-old father.

We’re really not taking much risk. We’ve finished our third season with Kingfisher, but we’ve never gone more than ten miles from land. And, along with the modest comforts I’ve described, Kingfisher has two pieces of equipment that bring comfort and safety to simple sailors like us. Under a hatch in the cockpit deck, there’s a 20-horsepower Yanmar diesel engine that gets about three hours per gallon. We carry twelve gallons of fuel, enough to cruise at six knots for a day and a half when becalmed. And there’s a GPS loaded with marine charts for all the areas we go, accurate to within a few feet, and marked with all the submerged rocks, reefs, shipwrecks, and other hazards that would so quickly change our day. How’s that for wild adventure? We’re combining an ancient, simple technology with some of the latest electronic gizmos.

I often think of the earliest sailors who developed the art of sailing, and dared to cross oceans in the days when most people thought the earth was flat. Egyptian urns more than four thousand years old are decorated with pictures of sailing ships carrying cargo across the Mediterranean Sea. And think of Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521), born a hundred years before Orlando Gibbons, the Portuguese naval officer commissioned by King Charles I of Spain to look for a westward route to the Spice Islands (Maluku Islands). He discovered and named the Strait of Magellan, a snaky waterway that cuts between Tierra del Fuego and the South American mainland, and entered what he named the “Peaceful” (Pacific) Ocean. Imagine that, with no Yanmar, no flush toilet, and no GPS. He did find the western route to the Spice Islands but was killed in a sea battle and didn’t return home.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, sailing ships were 250 feet long, had more than two dozen sails, hundreds of lines and blocks to operate them, and carried crews of 800 or more. Sitting on board, out in the Gulf of Maine, I often reflect how similar the fundamentals of sailing are to the foundation of organ building—it’s all about controlling the wind!

§

Supreme refinement

Meanwhile, on dry land, engineers and tinkerers were refining another, more complex machine, a machine that not only relied on wind, but one that included a mechanism for the creation of its own wind. With tens of thousands of moving parts, the pipe organ was the most complex machine of the day.  

The greatest of these tinkerers was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Born into a family of organbuilders in Montpellier, France, in 1811, four years before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Cavaillé-Coll had little formal education. But apprenticing with his father as a teenager, it was clear that he was gifted in mathematics and physics as well as the musical arts.

From his earliest days in the workshop, he was fascinated by wind. One of the first of his many inventions was a system for controlling the wind in a harmonium, where the left foot pumped heel-to-toe to raise the wind, and the right operated a rocking pedal that would either apply lesser or greater pressure to the top of the bellows, thereby affecting the pressure. Unlike typical organ pipes, the pitch of harmonium reeds is not affected by wind pressure, so increasing and decreasing the pressure created a pure control of volume, something never before achieved in a wind-blown keyboard instrument.

In Toulouse, in 1832, the expressive capabilities of Cavaillé-Coll’s poïkilorgue attracted the attention of the great composer Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), and a year later Rossini encouraged the twenty-two-year-old organbuilder to move to Paris. I suppose he was aware that there was a competition underway to award the contract for building a monumental organ for the Basilique-Cathédrale de Saint-Denis. Cavaillé-Coll submitted a plan and was awarded the contract just a few days later.

We know very little about Cavaillé-Coll’s personal life, but from this episode, I surmise that he was an exceptionally compelling young man. He must have displayed supreme confidence without effort and must have had complete mastery of his topic.

The old-guard competitors must have been flabbergasted, even furious, but the officials making the decision were real visionaries, taking what must have seemed a huge risk by giving such important work to someone so very young with essentially no qualifying experience. Perhaps Cavaillé-Coll was so apparently able that they didn’t feel a risk.

Imagine a 22-year-old being awarded the contract to build a major cathedral organ today—consider the hubris of the applicant, and the foolhardiness of the officials. Then imagine the project complete, universally celebrated as an unqualified success, bound to endure and to influence musicians for centuries. It’s improbable in the extreme.

The organ was completed in 1840, and is still regarded as a triumph in organbuilding. It comprises 70 stops, 88 ranks, and 4,479 pipes. There are 20 ranks of reeds, and more than a dozen harmonic ranks, both flues and reeds. There are two real 32-footers, and the Grand-Orgue includes a Principal Chorus based on Montre 32′, though the Montre “only” starts at tenor C. By most modern measures, this is an immense and sophisticated organ, but the fact that it was finished 176 years ago by a 29-year-old organbuilder is other-worldly. I mean, for crying out loud, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll went from building a one-stop harmonium to a 70-stop timeless wonder in less than ten years.

§

In 2011, in celebration of the great organbuilder’s 200th birthday, and the 150th anniversary of his uncontested masterpiece, the hundred-stop job at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, where Widor and Dupré combined for a hundred years of service, British filmmaker Fugue State Films produced a comprehensive documentary, The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll. This marvelous film comes in a boxed set of three DVDs and two CDs, with a program booklet that includes photos and specifications of all the featured organs. It’s available for $150 from the catalogue of the Organ Historical Society: www.ohscatalog.org/orofca1.html.

If you’re a serious student of the pipe organ, you should own this, and watch it more than once. Invite your friends. It’s better than a ball game! If it seems like a lot of money, compare it to a couple volumes of the Bach Organ Works, or a restaurant dinner for two. And if you buy and watch it and are not moved and impressed by the brilliance of that organbuilder and the beauty of his instruments, then probably you’re not much of a student of the organ! (Wow, did he really say that?) Of course, there are stuffy segments—most of us given a chance to talk smart about pipe organs would sound stuffy on television—but the cinematography is gorgeous, the sound quality is vibrant and lively, the playing is terrific, and the whole thing is stuffed with tons of information about an incredible musical genius.

§

It’s all about the wind.

Starting with the player-controlled variable wind pressure of the poïkilorgue when he was a teenager, and throughout his career, Cavaillé-Coll devoted huge amounts of energy and time to the control of wind in his instruments. Like the advances in the technology of sailing ships, he recognized that the ability to control the flow and pressure of wind was everything to the pipe organ. And his early masterpiece at Saint-Denis was chock-full of wind gadgets. His seminal innovation was the ventil, which draws its name from the Latin ventus, which means, simply, “wind.” (Did you ever wonder why that’s used as a brand name for an organ blower?)  

The theory is simple. He separated the stops of a division into two families placed on separate windchests. The foundation stops (principals, flutes, and strings) were on one chest that had constant winding, and the reeds, mutations, and more powerful upperwork were on a chest that was not winded until the organist pressed a pedal at the console opening a valve. The organist could then set up a basic registration of foundation stops and draw a selection of the reeds and upperwork in preparation. The 1840 organ at Saint-Denis included ventils on all five divisions, giving the organist an unprecedented expressive control over the instrument. A flick of the ankle, and tons of powerful reed pipes leap into action. (There’s a 32-footer in the Pedal!)

In the program book that accompanies The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll, those stops affected by ventils in all the featured organs are listed in red. Your fingers will just twitch as you imagine what you could do with all that power! And as they do, imagine yours as nineteenth-century fingers that have never pressed General 10, or switched on an electric blower.

In the film, Pierre Pincemaille, titulaire of the organ at Saint-Denis, shows us that the organ built at the very beginning of Cavaillé-Coll’s career (did I mention he was just 29 when the organ was finished?) is fiery, dramatic, colorful, and thrilling—even to our ears, which are accustomed to the effects of solid-state combination actions, pneumatic and electric swell motors, and the ubiquitous Sforz button, so badly and baldly overused by many.

Whistle a tune.

Another essential development pioneered by Cavaillé-Coll is the emphasis on melodic color. Responding to the relatively weak treble ranges of the organs of his day, he made two basic innovations in the interest of providing stronger melodic range toward the top of the keyboard. One was to further develop the existing concept of harmonic pipes, those pipes with double lengths that are blown extra hard to emphasize not the more delicately achieved fundamental tone of their full length, but to “overblow” the pipes to achieve the first overtone—the octave higher. Most any organ pipe will sound an octave higher if blown hard enough. (Don’t try this without the ability to retune the pipe when you’re done. Or, as they say, “I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home!”) A Harmonic Flute pipe, with a hole bored halfway up the resonator, is actually speaking an octave higher than its length implies. The hole helps “release” the overtone so the octave is achieved without the sense of excessive force. And since increased wind pressure is required to overblow a pipe, the harmonic pipes are louder.

The second trick was to divide the windchest in halves or thirds lengthwise, and providing higher wind pressures to the higher ranges of the ranks. For example, the pipes of stops on a division from low CC to tenor F# might be on three inches of pressure, from tenor G to soprano C on four inches, and five inches of pressure for the rest of the range. We can imagine that Cavaillé-Coll was thinking of orchestral wind instruments—how an oboe or trumpet player might simply blow harder to achieve the higher pitches. 

Using these two innovations provided Cavaillé-Coll’s organs with characteristic singing treble ranges. Think of the soaring melodies of the slow movements of Widor’s organ symphonies, and you’ll understand how the great organbuilder inspired the following generations of musicians. And in a passage typically played on full registrations, I think of the melody in B-flat minor toward the end of the first movement of Widor’s Fifth Symphony. Working with the huge organ built by Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in 1862, Widor was confident that the powerful tune starting on a high D-flat and continuing in the top two octaves of the keyboard would sing out over the bubbling left-hand accompaniment and solid moving half-notes in the pedal.

§

And the pièce de résistance . . .

As he progressed from one monumental organ to the next, Cavaillé-Coll was using air in greater volume and higher pressure. His organs were equipped with rows of bellows that were supplied with pressure by feeder-bellows underneath, operated by the powerful legs of human pumpers who steadied their bodies leaning on iron rails above. As the organs grew larger in physical size, the mechanical keyboard actions had greater distances to travel. And as each division would likely have two windchests, one for the foundations and one for the reeds and upperwork, the action for each individual note had to operate two pallets. The predictable result was heavier key action—intense resistance to the motion of the musicians’ fingers. To counteract this, Cavaillé-Coll incorporated the ingenious device invented by Charles Spackman Barker, known widely as the Barker Lever. It’s a pneumatic assist for the tracker action of a pipe organ, which uses the organ’s own air pressure to do the heavy work of pulling pallets open and of coupling manual actions.

We’ve all seen the photos of Dupré and Widor playing on the huge console at Saint-Sulpice, all five keyboards moving simultaneously. Without Mr. Barker’s machine, that would have been impossible. Walking through that organ, seeing the myriad trackers running every which way, and thinking of the number of pallets being opened by each finger, we realize that Cavaillé-Coll’s use of the Barker was the final touch necessary to make his monster organs go.

In The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll, there are several excellent demonstrations of the operation of the Barker Machine. It’s quite a spectacle in a complicated piece.

Let’s stop and remember that the organ at Saint-Denis was built in 1840 (did I mention that Cavaillé-Coll was only 29?), and the organ at Saint-Sulpice was completed in 1862—right in the middle of the American Civil War. Cavaillé-Coll’s genius produced these huge sophisticated machines, among the most complex ever contrived, not for making war, not for transportation, not for manufacturing, but for making music! What a worthy cause. What an essential effort. And what a great gift to the generations that followed him.

We’re working on it.

This is a lovely moment to be writing. It’s about 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting at the dining table in our house in Maine, with a nice view down the river. It’s 19 degrees and snowing, with wind from the northeast at eight-to-ten. Wendy left here yesterday for an important engagement in Providence, bugging out a day early to beat the bad weather. I’d say I’m alone in the house, except Farley the Goldendoodle is here with me. A half hour ago, I lit the dining room woodstove, so it’s nice and cozy. To complete the lovely scene, there’s a boat coming up the river. Did I mention that it’s snowing?

The Damariscotta River is a tidal estuary, 12 miles from the Gulf of Maine to the bridge between the villages of Newcastle (where we live) and Damariscotta. We’re about eight miles up from the ocean. The river is fully tidal­—the water rises and falls an average of about ten and a half feet, twice a day—and it’s renowned for aquaculture. Farmers raise mussels and oysters in large waterborne plots that they rent from the towns. Mussels grow underwater hanging from ropes, and oysters grow in half-submerged flat baskets that float on the surface, and the farmers tend them using 20 to 25 foot skiffs with outboard motors.

One summer, our daughter, Meg, worked for an oyster farmer. It was back breaking work, leaning out of boats to turn those baskets, and digging in the mud for the natural oysters. The farm was just down the road, so she could come home for lunch, muddy and tired, but happy with the dozen oysters she’d share with her mother. She tanned dark brown and went back to school strong and slim. But catch my key word there. Summer. If you’re going to work on the water, you might as well be out on a boat in the sunshine. The magic ends when that little boat is churning upriver against a bitter wind during a snowstorm, whitecaps breaking over the bow, covering the farmers in freezing salt spray. It’s much nicer work to be sitting by the fire, writing.

In 1993, the poet Donald Hall wrote Life Work, a slim book of musing about what it means to work at what matters to you.¹ Early in his career, Hall was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, living a suburban life of cocktail parties and dealing with the mechanics and minutia that are the workings of a large institution. His marriage failed, and he took a lifetime risk, leaving the security of tenure and pension and moving onto the rural New Hampshire farm where his grandparents had lived to focus on writing. He supported himself writing reviews, magazine articles, and several books, while working endlessly on his poetry. He describes how a brief poem would travel through scores, even hundreds of drafts. He also describes the repetitive annual routine of his grandfather’s farming—how the changing seasons drove the succession of work days through plowing, planting, harvesting, milking, haying. His grandfather’s unfailing work ethic was inspiration to a lifetime of writing.  

In Life Work, Hall wrote about his friendship with the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986). Moore is best known for monumental bronze sculptures located across the world. He worked in the abstract, creating small-scale clay models as he explored shapes, and increasing the scale as he passed through multiple “drafts” of each work before committing them to the eternity of bronze. Hall reflected on artists’ passion, as they devote their lives to their work. Creating monumental sculpture in bronze requires immense dedication, and handling the materials involved is heavy physical work. Is that harder work than the dogged pursuit of a poet, demanding of himself hundreds of drafts of an 80-word poem?

The other day, I stacked this year’s cord of firewood in the usual place along the north wall of the garage. It had been delivered by a dump truck and was in a knee-high pile near the stack site. It took me two hours to move two tons of wood from below knee level on to a stack with more than half of it above waist level.² That work was like Donald Hall’s grandfather’s chore of tossing forkfuls of hay into the loft of the barn, a necessary seasonal chore. Some of that wood is burning in the stove now.  

Henry Moore moved tons of clay from table height to the extremes of height of his largest pieces. I suppose he carried clay in buckets up ladders. His hands would have been iron-hard like those of the hay-pitching farmer.

Back to work

Michelangelo’s famous marble statue,
David, is about 17 feet tall and weighs nearly 12,500 pounds. I love the (perhaps) apocryphal quote from Michelangelo when he was asked how he accomplished such a masterpiece: “All I did was chip away the stone that didn’t look like David.” That leads me to wonder what the original stone weighed. Was it twice as much, three times as much as the finished statue? Let’s say it was 30,000 pounds—fifteen tons. First, that rascal was cut from a hillside in Carrara near Italy’s Ligurian coast, then moved almost 90 miles to Florence. That would be enough of a challenge today with heavy trucks, hydraulic lifting equipment, and modern highways. Imagine it with ox-drawn carts, levers, and muddy, rutted hilly roads.

And once that mighty stone was in place, Michelangelo had to remove 17,500 pounds of marble chips. Popeye had nothing on him for hands and forearms. He would have had stone chips in his eyes and fierce aches and pains at the end of the day. It’s meaningful to appreciate this work of art from that point of view, that the result of such extreme physical labor would be the emergence of the monumental, elegant, sensual figure taking life under the tools of the master. Just how did he know which chip was part of David and which wasn’t? There are some pretty sensitive areas there that would be a shame to whack with a chisel.³

I wonder if he knew that the immense toil of quarrying and transporting that stone and chipping away almost nine tons of marble to reveal that image would leave five centuries of viewers in awe, moved to tears by the beauty, majesty, and humanity of that image.

The work of life

When you visit the Noack Organ Company in Georgetown, Massachusetts, you’re greeted by a display of photographs of all the instruments built by the firm. They’re currently working on Opus 162 for St. Peter’s Church in Washington, D.C. Fritz Noack retired in 2015, and Didier Grassin is the active leader of the company. Didier reports that he has been responsible for the last three Noack organs, and that the first “real organ” built by Fritz Noack was Opus 9, so Fritz’s career spans 149 organs. What a remarkable achievement. Think of that in terms of tons of tin and lead, hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber, perhaps tens of thousands of sheets of sandpaper. You know why you need more sheets of sandpaper? Because you wear it out with elbow grease.

In a 50-week year of 40-hour weeks, a worker produces 2,000 person-hours. If there was an average of seven people in the Noack shop over the years, that would make 14,000 person hours each year.  Opus 9 was built in 1962, so Fritz’s career spanned 53 years during which he produced 149 organs in 742,000 person hours. Let’s guess that a quarter of those hours (185,500) were spent on service, maintenance, tuning, rebuilding, and other work not related to the numbered organs. That would mean that 556,500 hours were spent building 149 organs—an average of 3,735 hours per organ. I suppose that some took fewer than 2,000 hours, and a few probably took 10,000 or more.

That’s a staggering amount of work and a splendid heritage. The display of photos on the workshop stairway shows the development and maturation of an artist as well as the progression of styles of expression in American organ building. Nice going, Fritz.

Stop to think.

Have you ever been in the presence of a new monumental organ? Have you touched one, played one, or just sat alone in the room gazing at it? Every surface is made smooth by the hands of a craftsman. Hand-turned drawknobs gleam. Maybe there’s an exquisite bit of marquetry on the music rack, and snazzy carvings on the key-cheeks. Tilt back and look up at the tower crowns. They might be 30 feet off the floor, but every one of the myriad miter joints is perfect, ready for close-up inspection.

Have you been inside such an organ? Row upon row of gleaming pipes, each row a unique voice waiting to be called
on. Precise matrices of mechanical parts, some massive and powerful for stop actions, some feathery and light for keyboard actions. Or if the organ uses electricity in its actions, you’ll find neat bundles of wires, carefully obscured, carrying the complex signals that are the music.

I spend a lot of time around pipe organs. Some are ordinary, unremarkable, and some are downright awful. But those instruments add to my appreciation, my awe of an organ produced by true craftspeople. The Organ Clearing House is frequently engaged by other firms to assist in the installation of new instruments. We always regard that as a special statement of trust, as we are allowed an intimate look into the ways and work of the individual firm. Often the paperwork and specifications that precede a job are beautifully crafted, forming a prelude to our relationship with the instrument itself.

As thrilling as it is to see a finished organ, working with an instrument in pieces is the best way to appreciate what goes into it. Once when we were delivering a new instrument to a church, unloading thousands of components from a truck and laying them out on blankets across the backs of the pews, a parishioner commented to me, “Watching this for three minutes has told me more about why the organ is so expensive than hundreds of hours of committee meetings.”

We select organ parts in the correct order, carry or hoist them to their spot in the loft, lay them out and screw them together. Perfect. Just like it was made that way! After the many thousands of hours spent making all that stuff, it’s a touch of magic to put it all together in its final location. In 1977, I had the privilege of helping install the new Flentrop organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, a three-manual organ with Rückpositiv and a tall mahogany case perched on a beautiful loft. In those days, I was the 21-year-old brute who did some of the heaviest lifting, so I was in the thick of it as we installed the gleaming polished façade pipes. That’s a special kind of work, handling 700-pound polished pipes, 30 feet off the marble floor. Leaving the church at the end of that grueling day, we turned to look back at the instrument. The façade pipes were bathed in the deep tones of blue and red as the afternoon sun poured through the stained-glass windows, and I burst into tears. Some tough guy.

The philosophy of that organ was grounded in the heritage of eighteenth-century northern European instruments. Careful planning was involved in determining pipe scales, case dimensions, wind conveyance, and mechanical action. But don’t forget for a moment that the splash of sunlight sparkling on the polished tin and gold leaf was part of the plan. It was making music before the blower was hooked up.

Flentrop Orgelbouw was founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop (1866–1950). His son, Dirk (1910–2003), grew up working for the family firm and assumed leadership control in 1940. During his tenure, the firm produced around 250 organs and restored more than 100 instruments, another wonderful example of a life’s work devoted to the organ.

Somebody play.

Once an organ is built, we need someone to play it. In the last several years, the editors of The Diapason have been recognizing rising young stars through the program “20 Under 30.” These brilliant young artists are chosen from fields of more than 100 nominations, all of which reflects the extraordinary level of musicianship and artistry from the younger generations of organists. It seems to me a thrilling upswing in this noble art, which is essential to ensuring the future of the fabulously expensive art of building organs.

Recently, Stephen Tharp posted a tidbit informing us that he had played his 1,500th organ recital. Now in his mid-40s, Stephen is a consummate artist, dazzling audiences with rich and thrilling performances. He serves as artist-in-residence at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where his full-time job is to practice many hours every day, always working on music to feature in the next tour. That work is comparable to Donald Hall’s multiple drafts of each poem—hundreds of hours of intellectual and artistic toil, always developing new pedagogic skills to further the freedom of artistic expression. It takes countless repetitions and hundreds of hours of knuckle busting nit picking to absorb and express a complex score. It takes motivation, diligence, fervor, and devotion to take a program of music from the printed page and pass it through an organ, turning it into audible art. It’s a life’s work to build a repertory and to nourish a creative soul capable of such sophisticated expression.

Recently, I watched the BBC documentary, Simon Rattle: The Making of a Maestro, an hour-long look into the development and career of that brilliant musician. (You can find this easily on YouTube: just search “Simon Rattle Documentary.”) His love and ability as a musician was the force behind the rejuvenation of an entire city. Under his leadership, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was established in a terrific new performing arts center, transforming the town and its population. What an eloquent example of the power of music.

That leaves the rest of us.

I’m no Simon Rattle. The fate of the city doesn’t hang on my success. I’m also not the old-time farmer, doggedly moving from one chore to the next at the behest of the seasons. I’m fortunate to work in a field that I care about. And I value the examples of geniuses around me, and the geniuses that came before who helped define all the expressions of humanity—the Humanities. Writers, painters, sculptors, philosophers—artists in general have collaborated to form the human condition.

Sometimes the organ seems to us to be the center of the universe, and for many of us, it is the center of our universe. But in reality, it’s an eloquent part of a much larger whole, perhaps using its noble voice to speak for other artists. We are not living in normal times, and we are not the first society to have that experience. In response, we are called to “hold fast to that which is good,” to proclaim the necessity of the arts in our lives. We do that by living artistic lives in whatever capacity we can.

Leonard Bernstein famously said, “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Substitute strife, confusion, injustice, or anger for the word “violence,” and follow the great artists who have paved the way for us. And be sure you’re paving the way for those who follow in any way you can.

Notes

1. Published by Beacon Press.

2. I know it was two tons because I guessed three, Wendy doubted it, and I googled it!

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo).

A century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively

As it was in the beginning

Every student of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach learns early how much more there is to it than meets the untrained ear. There’s no contesting that he was a genius of melody and harmony, but when you start digging into the mathematical structure of his music, you quickly get the sense that the depth is infinite. We might take for granted the seamless counterpoint between the obbligato and the chorale tune in the ubiquitous Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Cantata 147), Nun danket alle Gott (Cantata 79), or Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Cantata 140), but if we think it through even superficially, we’re baffled by how the harmonic progression of the obbligato anticipates the relative cadences at the end of each phrase of the chorale.

We learn about the Fibonacci series, a simple and infinite progression of equations that starts with zero and one, and continues so that each successive number in the series is the sum of the previous two (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3 . . . 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). Use that series to chart the entrances of a fugue subject.¹

Or use the formula of numbering the letters of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.). Add up BACH and you get 14. Add up
J. S. BACH and you get 41. Look for those two numbers recurring in Bach’s music—how many notes in a fugue subject, how many measures, etc.? Start digging and you’ll find you’re figuratively sweeping a beach. There’s no end. I haven’t tried it with Anna Magdalena, but I’ll bet it’s a gold mine. Maybe a good pick for the lottery.

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester with Bach’s Magnificat in D (BWV 243), writing a nicely researched paper and leading the church choir I directed through a performance. I was amazed to chart the sequence of movements and find the architectural symmetry, and the piece has been with me ever since. It includes some very nice examples of “word painting,” where the music illustrates the text. One of those beauties is the last chord of the alto aria. The text is Esurientes implevet bonis, et divites dimisit inanes (He hath filled the hungry with good things, the rich he hath sent away empty). The alto soloist is accompanied by basso continuo and two flutes in a beautiful duet with lots of parallel sixths. The figures repeat many times (maybe a Fibonacci number?) with a lovely cadence at the end of each, but at the closing cadence, the flutes leave out the last resolving note, sending the rich away hungry with a wafted dominant-seventh chord.

The opening movement is a rollicking jubilation with full orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani like only Bach could do—bouncing chords and driving rhythm. As the piece nears its end, there’s a boisterous reprise of the opening figure driving toward the final Amen. The text for the reprise is Sicut erat in principio (As it was in the beginning)—terrific.

Turn, turn, turn

Another part of my undergraduate days was the purity of the music we were focused on. The resurgence of interest in organs with mechanical action was in full swing— there were dozens of companies around the country digging in the history of the trade and creating wonderful new instruments with mechanical action and low wind pressures, and we as students of playing were in the thrall of the quest for authenticity in our performances. When we laid out a concert program, we were careful to consider the progression of keys, and the juxtaposition of historical styles and epochs. Including a transcription of a romantic orchestral piece was unthinkable. We considered them decadent. And the symphonic electro-pneumatic organs on which they were played were considered decadent. As I look back on those days, I see how easy it is to dismiss something about which you know nothing.

Chickens and eggs, smoke
and fire, and trees falling in
the woods

César Franck (1822–1890) is generally considered to be the first of the composers of Romantic French organ music, the father of the style. His melodic and harmonic languages exploited the resources of the organs of his day, and his use of tone color foreshadows the voluptuous orchestral intentions of the great masters who followed him. 

Consider this incomplete list of Franck’s successors:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937)

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971)

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939)

Louis Vierne (1870–1937)

Henri Mulet (1878–1967)

The span between Franck’s birth and Dupré’s death is nearly 150 years. The lives of all these revered composers were intertwined. Two of them were born in the same year, and three of them died in the same year. They were each other’s teachers and students. They lived near each other. They must have heard each other play. Think of the Sunday evening dinner after someone’s recital, a festive bistro table with cheese, wine, and cigars, and Pierné and Tournemire arguing about Widor’s registrations. I don’t know enough of the personal relationships between these men to certify such a possibility, but it’s fun to imagine. I’ve been at quite a few of those post-concert tables, at which no one is in doubt! 

Keeping in mind those organist-composers, consider the genius organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll who lived from 1811 until 1899. Monsieur Cavaillé-Coll was eleven years old when Franck was born, and Tournemire and Vierne were twenty-nine when he died. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cavaillé-Coll was putting magnificent organs under the hands of a bevy of marvelous composers. He was the constant among them, and his mechanical and tonal genius influenced that entire epoch of music. From one monumental organ to the next, he gave his colleague musicians new voices to try, new registration aids, and radical concepts like progressive wind pressures that increased as you went up the scale. The highest notes of Cavaillé-Coll’s Trumpets and Harmonic Flutes soared across the vast stone naves like little comets. What would Widor’s music have been without those heart-rending trebles?

Some of the more rewarding moments of my career have been those spent with clients brainstorming about the capabilities of an organ console as it relates to the tonal resources of the organ. What if the Solo French Horn could be played from the Great, and if so, what if there were divisional pistons under the Great keyboard that affected the Solo stops?

Imagine the conversation between organist and organbuilder involving “what-ifs” like that, before there had been a full century of whiz-bang electric and solid-state gizmos for organ consoles. If you had only ever drawn heavy mechanical stop actions by hand, how would you like an iron pedal that would throw on the principal chorus with one heave of the hips?

Or this: 

Cavaillé-Coll: “We could place the reeds and mixtures of the Swell on a separate windchest that you could turn on and off with a lever next to the pedalboard. Any stops you had drawn on that chest could be accessed at once. We could call it a Ventil² because it turns the air on and off.” 

Saint-Saëns: “Yes, please.”

There’s a famous portrait of Franck seated at the console of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ at Ste. Clotilde in Paris, his left hand poised with raised wrist on the (I assume) Positif manual, and right hand drawing a stopknob. Take a look: http://www.classicalarchives.com/composer/2536.html. Man, that knob travels far. It’s out about five inches and it looks like he’s still pulling. Franck’s face wears a thoughtful expression—maybe he’s wondering how far does this dagnabbit knob move, anyway? Reminds me of the Three Stooges pulling electrical conduits out of the wall.  

During his lifetime, Cavaillé-Coll introduced dozens of state-of-the-art gizmos. You can bet lunch on the fact that the drawknobs on the famous organ console at St. Sulpice (built in 1862) don’t move that far. For images of that spectacular console, take a look at
www.stsulpice.com.

Let’s skip forward 50 or 60 years. Ernest Skinner installed a new organ with four manuals and 77 voices at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City, the same year that T. Tertius Noble was appointed organist. New York’s Grand Central Station was opened that year ten blocks from St. Thomas (the centennial has just been celebrated), as was the Oyster Bar Restaurant, which is still located in the station. I imagine a power lunch at the brand new Oyster Bar during which Skinner and Noble argued about whether the 16-foot Swell reed should be available independently on the Pedal at 4-foot. They must have disagreed about something, and it must have been quite a show.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s widely understood that Cavaillé-Coll was the great innovator, creating marvelous new devices and watching what the musicians could do with them. I think that the early twentieth-century version was more a collaboration between organist and organbuilder—they took turns influencing each other. Americans were being introduced to new technological marvels every day. I can picture a client asking, “If J. P. Morgan can have electric lights in his mansion on Madison Avenue, why can’t I have one on my music rack?” Think of the lucky organist who was the first to have one!

From our twenty-first century perspective, one of the most remarkable but overlooked facts about the huge body of nineteenth-century French organ music is that it was all conceived, composed, practiced, and performed on hand-pumped organs. They may be hundred-stop jobs, but they were hand-pumped. It must be that the electric blower was the single most important innovation in the history of the organ. Widor started his work at St. Sulpice in 1870. I do not know precisely when the first electric blower was installed there, but let’s guess that Widor played that instrument for 35 years relying on human power to provide his wind-pressure. At five Masses a week—again, I’m just guessing—that would be 8,750 Masses. Kyrie eleison.

All the photos I’ve seen of Widor show him to be serious, even dour, and the little herd of pumpers in the next room must have been a distraction, snickering and shirking. But I imagine he cracked a smile the first time he turned on the new blower and sat down to play in that great church, alone with his thoughts and imagination. Having the luxury to sit at the console for hours in solitude must have been a revelation. Organists on both sides of the Atlantic were freed to exploit their imaginations and their instruments.

Step right up . . . 

Since the beginning of civilization, people have been flocking to share the latest in entertainment. In the fifth century B.C., a stadium was built at Delphi, high in the Greek mountains. It could seat 6,500 spectators, had a running track that was 177 meters long. There’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater on the same site, built in the fourth century, B.C. I doubt they would have gone to the trouble if people weren’t going to come. Today we crowd into IMAX theaters, elaborate cruise ships, and huge arenas. We’ve been celebrating the “latest thing” for hundreds of generations.

In 1920, a monumental antiphonal pipe organ was the latest thing. Today we joke about “cockpit syndrome”—teasing each other that our consoles look like the cockpits of airplanes. But there was no airplane to compare to the cockpit of a 1915 Skinner organ with four keyboards, a hundred stopknobs, and dozens of buttons, switches, and lights. Think of the impression it must have made to a parishioner, alighting from a horse-drawn carriage onto a cobblestone street, and encountering that gleaming organ console in the chancel. It could have been the most complicated and bewildering thing he had ever seen.

The organist must have been revered as a conjurer, a certified operator of one of the most complex devices in existence. They were the technical equivalents of today’s air traffic controllers, nuclear power engineers, and voodoo software writers, but they were musicians first. It’s no wonder that we read about thousands of people cramming huge municipal auditoriums to hear organ recitals. Attending concerts of a symphony orchestra was expensive, reserved for the elite. At City Hall, or in the church, one wizard could play an overture by Beethoven with grand effect, and no one was sent away empty.

And play them they did. With the electric blower grinding away for endless hours and an ever-increasing array of clever console controls, those organists could experiment with fingerings, and learn to access complicated registrations that were changing continuously, bringing complex orchestral scores alive single-handedly. And as a twenty-year-old I had the nerve to dismiss it as decadent. I hang my head.

Last Monday, the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists presented their annual President’s Day Conference. The subject was Transcriptions Alive! (Many thanks to my friends and colleagues who were involved in the planning.) On Sunday evening, theatre organist Jelani Eddington played a recital on a large Wurlitzer in Brooklyn. And on Monday, Michael Barone, Peter Conte, and Jonathan Ambrosino presented talks about various aspects of the art, hosted by the Riverside Church. The day concluded with a recital by Thomas Trotter played on the great Aeolian-Skinner organ of the Riverside Church, the home bench to Virgil Fox, Frederick Swann, John Walker, and so many others.

Michael Barone must be the best deejay the serious organ world has ever had.  Using a nicely chosen string of recorded examples, he made the point that organists have been playing transcriptions of other types of music for some 450 years. Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) played choral music on the keyboard, and Barone’s demonstration flicked cleverly back and forth between the sung and played versions. Tempo and pitch were consistent, the differing factor being the tempered scale of the organs’ keyboards. Good choirs sing in pure intervals.

J. S. Bach transcribed his own orchestral music for the organ, along with concertos by colleague/rival composers such as Vivaldi, Ernst, and Walther. I reflect that while I was ready to dismiss playing transcriptions of orchestral music on the organ, I surely was learning the sprightly stuff that Bach himself transcribed. It was good enough for Bach, but apparently not good enough for me. Point taken. I hang my head.

The terraced dynamics of Bach’s organs were perfect for the terraced dynamics of the Baroque concerto grosso. A couple centuries later, the marvelous expressive capabilities of the symphonic pipe organ were equal to the expressive demands of complex Romantic orchestral scores, chock full of contrasting simultaneous solos (which are not synonymous with duets), and crescendos and diminuendos of all speeds and scopes.

We as organists are blessed with the wealth of literature written especially for our instrument. It comes in all shapes and sizes. It has national inflections and accents that are instantly recognizable to us. You may never have heard the piece, but the instant you hear that Grand Jeu you smell soft ripe cheese and the taste of rich red wine wafts through your imagination. But that doesn’t have to keep us from playing any music on the organ. Any music that sounds good is fair game.

Transcribing orchestral and choral scores to organ keyboards is as old as the instrument itself. Technological advances in organ building between 1875 and 1925 allowed the art of transcription to reach new heights. Later, we spent some fifty years reflecting on the past—that which came before all that innovation, and went to great lengths to resurrect old ideas of instrument building and playing. Sicut erat in principio. And a century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively. Sicut erat in principio. Cue trumpets.

Notes

1. Fibonacci gave us the system of numerals we use today (0,1), finding them easier to use and more flexible for complex computation than the older Roman System (I, V, X, etc.). The Fibonacci series applies to many aspects of nature, from the breeding of rabbits to the structure of the Nautilus shell. A quick Google search will give the interested reader a lot to think about.

2. Ventil comes from the same root as vent—the French and Latin words
for “wind.”

Keeping up appearances

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

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

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

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

What you see is what you get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hamburger Schnitger

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

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

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

What window?

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

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

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

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

A new way to look at it

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

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

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

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

§

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

§

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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