In the Wind . . .

Making things

Before we moved to New York City, Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Our building had been an electrical warehouse for the Navy Yard, which actively built ships from 1801 until 1975. It is a building that once had forklifts racing around inside, so the ceilings were nice and high. Our living room windows looked across Boston Harbor to the Coast Guard base, the Custom House, and into the heart of Boston, and we had “cocktail chairs” in front of the sixth-floor windows where for ten years of evenings we watched the Wednesday night sailboat races, foolish non-seamen in overpowered speed boats, and the constant flow of commercial shipping including the mammoth Liquid Natural Gas tankers whose captains looked us in the eye from their towering bridges.

The Navy Yard still functions formally as a military base as it is home to the USS Constitution, the Navy’s oldest commissioned warship. One of the oldest buildings in the Charlestown Navy Yard is the Ropewalk, built of heavy granite blocks and completed in 1838, where most of the rope used by the United States Navy was made until it closed in 1970. Imagine the floor plan of a building designed expressly for making rope, over 1,300 feet long and 45 feet wide. That is more than twice the length of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. One of my walking routes included the length of the building that is almost exactly a quarter mile, and I wondered what sort of machinery was used for all that twisting and winding. Take a look at this video to see an antique ropewalk in operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5mo2I2c0Q.

The Maine Maritime Museum is on the site of the Percy & Small Shipyard in Phippsburg, Maine, where dozens of wooden sailing ships as long as 444 feet were built through the nineteenth century. The museum is adjacent to the Bath Iron Works, famous for having launched a new destroyer every twenty-five days during World War II with Rosie the Riveter riveting a river of rivets. Now, the Bath Iron Works is known for producing new Zumwalt Class destroyers.¹ The museum includes a diorama of the J. T. Donnell Ropewalk in Bath, Maine, which adjoined Percy & Small and provided the shipyard with rope. When you are building six-masted schooners you need lots of rope, and the ropewalk was a wooden structure some 1,200 feet long with a stationary steam engine at one end to power the equipment. A legend by the diorama shares a quote from The Bath Times in 1883:

John D. Smith of this city, a ropemaker at the J. T. Donnell ropemaking factory, has done a large amount of walking in his life. He is sixty-four years old and has worked at ropemaking for forty-five years working as a handspinner, in which time he has spun 69,940,666 fathoms [six feet] of thread, walking ten miles a day to do this, which in the forty-five years of spinning would aggregate the enormous distance of 140,400 miles [six day weeks for forty-five years]. Of this, one-half the distance has been accomplished walking backwards . . ., the equivalent of backing a distance nearly equal to around the world three times.

Reminds me of the quip about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels. (Mr. Smith probably didn’t wear high heels.)

Color my world with a spring in my step.

Children have grown up watching Sesame Street since 1969. I was thirteen, and I had just landed my first paying job as a church organist, so I was above “strings and sealing wax,” but fifteen years later the show was a staple for my sons. As a lifelong machine geek, I loved the segments about how things are made, all of which are easy to find online. There is a humdinger about making crayons accompanied by a brilliant musical tone poem. My favorite is “Peanut Butter,” the jazzy flapper-style song written and performed by Joe Raposo that accompanies a tour through a peanut butter factory featuring smiling workers in what look like Krispy Kreme hats pushing the important looking buttons to run the machines. I especially like the shot of a broad stream of peanut butter oozing out of a press and into the pipes that lead to the jars as Raposo sings, “he keeps it pumpin’ through the pipeline like a peanut-butter-pumper should.” What great teaching.

Among the many factories I have toured are a potato chip factory (no free samples but a gift shop at the end), a major brewery (free samples), and an auto assembly plant (no free samples). When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin in the early 1980s, we were building an organ for Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia, and we planned to make the sliders in the style of Flentrop, double sliders of Masonite, the holes connected with little leather tubes, with hundreds of springs between them to press the two sliders against chest table and toeboard.

No hardware store could have supplied the thousands of identical fine coil compression springs we would need, and we found the Timms Spring Company in Elyria, Ohio, perfectly situated to supply the several large car makers in the area. The company had around twenty employees, most of whom were tool-and-die makers, and the factory was full of machines. Timms would receive an order from a car maker for a million specialized springs, and a machine would be set up to make them that would then run on its own for a week or two gobbling up coils of wire and filling bins with springs.

We brought a sample (probably borrowed from a Flentrop organ we serviced) and met Bill Timms, the third generation of the spring-making family. Bill gave us a fascinating tour around the factory explaining the purpose of each spring being made and gave us lots of free samples. We watched as a toolmaker set up a simple jig to copy our spring by hand and returned a week later to pick up our order.

Organ shops

Visiting a pipe organ workshop is a special treat, educational and eye-popping for both the layperson and the organbuilder. I have visited dozens of shops across the United States, in Great Britain, and in Europe, and while I like to think I know a lot about the building and history of organs, I always learn something fresh. It is fun to compare how different workshops approach common tasks like building windchests and reservoirs, racking pipes, or making wind connections. Different firms have particular products or processes they have developed of which they are particularly proud, different firms have thoughtfully designed console layouts that distinguish them from others, and different firms specialize in different types of windchest actions.

The organbuilding firm of Harrison & Harrison in Durham in Great Britain moved into a new well-equipped building in 1996, where one can pass from one department to another witnessing the deep skills of a venerable firm at work. Immediately upon entering the building, one sees displayed in an elegant frame a cast gold medallion and a letter from Queen Elizabeth II dated November 20, 1997: 

Prince Philip and I are delighted and deeply impressed with the marvelous work of restoration of the fire damaged area of Windsor Castle. Being anxious to show our appreciation of the skill and dedication, which you and others have devoted to it, we have this special medallion struck to mark the completion of the restoration and it comes with our grateful thanks. [Signed] Elizabeth R

The organ involved in the Windsor Castle restoration is a new instrument of seven ranks in the “Private Chapel” built in 1997. Harrison & Harrison has produced a vast list of important and well-known organs including those at King’s College, Cambridge, Durham, Ely, and Exeter cathedrals, Royal Festival Hall, Westminster Abbey, Winchester Cathedral, and Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. We have all seen several of those organs on television. I especially like the thought that the marvelous organ in Westminster Abbey was built for the coronation of George VI in 1936—imagine the feelings of nervousness, expectation, and pride those organbuilders must have felt. When I visited that workshop in 2016, the organ from King’s College was in the shop for renovation. I got a kick out of noticing the pipe crate labeled “Solo Tuba,” the stentorian tenor melody under a certain verse-six descant ringing in my ears. My visit to Durham included a tour of the H&H cathedral organ with operations manager Jeremy Maritz, setting the standard that one Double Open Wood Diapason is not enough. There’s one on each side of the choir, one of which goes to 32′.

The workshop of Taylor & Boody in Staunton, Virginia, is housed in an old public school building with huge windows and high ceilings, a spacious, airy, and well-lighted place to work. Since the firm was founded in 1979, they have built nearly ninety mechanical-action organs, developing a great reputation for excellent workmanship. Most of their instruments show the influence of the North European Baroque, with tonal schemes that allow lots of versatility. They ensure their own supply of high-quality wood by harvesting carefully chosen trees, cutting them into lumber in their sawmill, and drying them in the adjacent kiln. It is a kick to walk around the yard among stacks of lumber designated for particular opus numbers. When Wendy and I visited there in 2009, we stayed in the apartment above the sawmill and saw the huge oak logs destined to become the wonderful innovative organ for Grace Church in New York City. We have a fond memory of John Boody showing us his “free-ranging” moveable chicken coop and giving us fresh eggs for our breakfast.

Taylor & Boody is one of a number of firms that casts pipe metal to their own specifications. Watching the casting box being pushed down the long table leaving a shining pool of molten metal behind is something special to watch, especially the magic moment a few seconds later when the elixir turns into solid metal. The transformation from liquid to solid is instantly apparent. It seems like alchemy. The idea that freshly cast metal and those huge oak logs would soon be a pipe organ epitomizes the craft we celebrate.

Schoenstein & Company in Benicia, California (the gateway to Napa Valley), mirrors the dedication to quality at Taylor & Boody, building organs in a style worlds apart. They are widely respected for the sophisticated tonal structures with versatile orchestral voices, double expressions, and powerful solo voices, and their elegant consoles are superbly appointed with accessories unique to them. One look at an expression shoe and you know it is a Schoenstein organ. Schoenstein purchased their building in 2004, leaving the 1928 workshop in downtown San Francisco. They have since raised the ceiling of one room to forty-two feet, creating an erecting space, and added a wing for pipe shop, voicing room, and archives. The attention to detail is unparalleled—the company logo is stenciled on the propane tanks of the forklift. Jack Bethards and his skilled staff are working with a clear vision, strongly influenced by the fabled companies of the early twentieth century. The firm has just completed a grand organ with four manuals and seventy stops, including a 32′ metal façade, for the new Basilica of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando, Florida.

Glatter-Götz in Pfullendorf, Germany, is housed in a new facility built for them shortly after the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall organ was completed. When I was there in the fall of 2019, vast fields of sunflowers were in bloom as I drove to the little village. There is a one-story façade facing the street, effectively concealing the two-and-a-half story rear of the building. There is a huge slanted roof covered with solar panels allowing second floor offices at one end of the building and lofty open areas with plenty of space for erecting organs and handling long lumber. You enter at the end of the building where the lunchroom is to the left, the voicing room to the right, a corridor ahead to the workshops, and a long stairway to the suite of offices. All the workspaces have lots of big windows, plenty of clean bench space, storage areas for lumber, and fasteners, leather, and organ parts are neatly organized. There were two organs being assembled when I visited, one for Marietta, Georgia, and another older instrument being renovated for a music school in rural Russia. The next-door neighbor is a farm implement dealer, so a parade of tractors runs back and forth outside.

Paul Fritts & Company occupies an attractive architect-designed (craftsman style?) building in Tacoma, Washington. I visited there in April 2019 with my colleague Amory Atkins (it was Amory’s birthday) while we were installing an organ at the University of Washington. Organs for the First Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, and the Chapel of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, were standing in the shop when we visited. The Lorain organ was complete and ready for shipment. I was especially impressed by their CNC (computer numerical control) router. It is housed in a separate building to separate the considerable noise from the rest of the workshop. It is as big as a bus and capable of drilling entire windchest tables with dozens of different hole sizes, milling the many sizes of wood reed boots, and mitering wood windlines, all by programmed computer control. The machine chooses and inserts bits as necessary and calmly progresses from one task to another while the organbuilders work on other tasks in the workshop across the way. We had a birthday dinner with Paul and college pals Bruce and Shari Shull in Tacoma, then drove back to our hotel in Seattle in a wicked rain squall, crowned by a complete double rainbow. Happy Birthday!

C. B. Fisk, Inc., moved into a new purpose-built facility in 1979. That building has been expanded significantly since, with tall erecting space added, and a large wing containing several department workshops. The first organ to be built and assembled in the new shop was Opus 68, a three-manual, twenty-seven-stop instrument for the Southwick Music Complex of the University of Vermont. Close to ninety new organs have been built in that building, which, like others I have described, is superbly equipped and spacious enough for nearly thirty people to be at work with all the tools and supplies they need.

Charles Fisk founded the eponymous company in 1961 in an old ropewalk building in Gloucester, Massachusetts. C. B. Fisk “lifer” Bob Cornell, who has been with the firm for fifty years, remembers that the ropewalk was actually built for making nets for the city’s fleet of fishing trawlers. (Remember George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm.) There was a twenty-foot-high room at one end where organs could be erected, and an attached structure over 120-feet long where the nets had been made and the various workspaces for the organ company were placed. Bob remembered poison ivy growing through openings in the walls, and that the long floor slanted away from the tall building as the land sank into the nearby bog causing window frames to become trapezoidal. About ten people worked in that shop. The landmark organs for Kings Chapel in Boston (1963) and Harvard Memorial Church (1967) were built in the ropewalk.

What groundbreaking work happened in that shop as the innovative and Socratic Charlie Fisk, with a loyal group of disciples, dug into the history of organbuilding and developed the signature style that has been so influential. The company has now built over 150 organs in distinguished venues all over the world. Those fledgling organbuilders may not have walked 140,000 miles, but they sure changed the content of the industry.

Each of these companies has a well-developed website with photo galleries, opus lists, and workshop tours. Happy visiting. And buy good organs.

Notes

1. Just to show that the Navy can have a sense of humor, the first launch of the futuristic evil-looking Zumwalt class ships was the USS Enterprise commanded by James Kirk. 

Photo:

The Fisk Ropewalk, moving day to the new shop, Charles Fisk loading the van (photo credit: Robert Cornell)

Make me an instrument.

I have been involved in the world of building musical instruments since I was about twelve years old as the organist of my home church, where my father was rector, was the harpsichord and clavichord builder Carl Fudge. On occasion, he brought one of his instruments to the church for a special performance, and at that tender age I was fascinated by the concept of playing an instrument you had built yourself. I have thought about that continually in the past fifty-plus years, so my feelings and perceptions have become more sophisticated, but I know I was in awe of Carl’s skill as both instrument maker and musician. Visiting his workshop, I was further enthralled, I started taking organ lessons, and my life’s path was set.

Longtime readers of this column will recognize that one of my favorite subjects is writing about one’s relationship with one’s instrument. In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet wrote:

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, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.

Lovely, isn’t it? What a poetic description of a musical relationship. But his next sentence throws most of the rest of us under the bus.

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. . . . To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.¹

In that light, I imagine Steinhardt would equate organists with truck drivers, sliding onto the bench, flipping a switch to turn on a ten-horsepower motor, and playing the instrument by remote control, twenty, fifty, or a hundred feet away.

I hope he likes it.

Nearly thirty-five years ago, my siblings, mother, and I commissioned a local artist to paint a picture of the red barn behind our parents’ house on Cape Cod in honor of dad’s retirement. We sent her photos of the barn, and she visited there several times in secret. The painting was to be unveiled at “the party” in front of family and friends, and there was an air of excitement, but when the cloth was removed there was silence. It did not look like our barn. The proportions were akilter, and the shadow of a nearby tree fell across the grass and the barn’s wall in a way no shadow could exist under the sun. It was a stunning moment, a much better story now than an experience then.

§

I have just reread John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker (Harper Collins, 2007), which follows the commissioning and construction of a new violin for Eugene Drucker, violinist of the Emerson String Quartet. (Drucker and Philip Setzer have equal billing, swapping “first chair” duties back and forth.) Drucker had commissioned the legendary luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz of Brooklyn, New York, to build an instrument to complement the Stradivari instrument that he uses in most performances, but which has a temperamental “personality,” especially when the quartet’s travels take them from one climate extreme to another in a short period. The Strad is slow to recover.

Marchese provides plenty of background information including biographical data about Guarneri, Stradivari, and the other Cremonese luthiers. He spent countless hours with both Drucker and Zygmuntowicz, interviewing them and observing them in the workshop, teaching studio, and concert stage. As Sam chose the wood for Gene’s violin, Marchese related stories about the harvesting and aging of wood; luthiers have collections of pieces of maple and spruce that have aged fifty years since they were harvested and milled. The stability of such aged wood is essential to the luthier. We learn of Sam’s apprenticeship and education as a luthier, how he was privileged to take detailed measurements of a dismantled Strad, and how he created a detailed map of the various pieces of the fiddle, measured to the thousandth of an inch. We hear him speaking with and addressing his colleague luthiers at conferences and restaurant tables. Throughout the book, I could hear the undercurrent: “I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it.”

Spoiler alert: Sam finished the violin in time to present it at Gene’s fiftieth birthday party amid excitement and congratulations. Gene plays the instrument for his friends, uses it in concert, and practices on it. He swaps back and forth between the new instrument and his trusty Strad. He wants to love it, but just cannot get there. Ultimately Sam acknowledges that he failed to captivate Gene with the new instrument. I recommend this book to anyone who owns and cares for a musical instrument, and to anyone who builds those instruments.

A bargain at twice the price

Nowhere in Marchese’s book is the actual price of a Zygmuntowicz violin stated, but a quick internet search at least implied to me that it is around $100,000. That is about the price of a new Steinway “B,” the seven-foot piano so prevalent in teaching studios and smaller recital halls. A Steinway “B” weighs nearly 800 pounds—the instrument costs $125 per pound or about $9 an ounce. A Zygmuntowicz violin weighs about fourteen ounces, about $7,143 per ounce. By comparison, think of the $15,000,000 Strad at $1,071,429 per ounce.

As a pipe organ builder, I marvel at the idea that a fourteen-ounce violin might be worth $15,000,000. You can build a mighty pipe organ for that amount; in fact few organs have ever cost that much. And does that mighty organ weigh 100,000 pounds? It is a bargain at $150 a pound or $9.38 an ounce. Why would anyone want to buy a violin when they could have a pipe organ?

Let’s buy a pipe organ.

When an orchestral musician purchases an instrument, whether new or “experienced,” it is a personal transaction. The musician is choosing and paying privately. At Eugene Drucker’s level, the price can be a family sacrifice. That money might have gone toward a vacation home or a boat, but the serious musician cannot function without an instrument of high enough quality to inspire his creativity.

The purchase of a pipe organ is typically a community event. When an organ shows signs of failing or when people within an institution advocate for a new instrument, a committee is usually formed to study the situation. Many of these committees engage consultants to inform and advise their work. Organ companies are solicited for proposals, a budget is established, a decision is made, and the hard work begins: raising the money.

The iconic four-manual, seventy-five-rank Flentrop organ in Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, Washington, was purchased for $165,000 in 1965. In today’s economy, that is about enough money for the copper 32′ Prestant that dominates the façade. The same organ today would cost something like $2,000,000. A three-manual organ with forty stops is likely to cost $1,000,000. That is a lot of money for a congregation to raise, and regardless of the price per pound, it is a lot of money for a small community of people to pay for a musical instrument.

I like to compare that process with a tennis club deciding to build a swimming pool. A few members come up with the idea on a hot afternoon, the elected leadership gets involved, and contractors offer estimates. Perhaps the membership would be assessed to raise some of the money; perhaps members would be solicited to make donations; perhaps there would be a mortgage to be offset by increased membership dues. Whether it is a tennis club building a swimming pool or a church commissioning a pipe organ, there would likely be a parliamentary process of proposing, discussing, and voting, except in those institutions with authoritarian leadership.

I have long believed that the easy part of the process is building the organ. With decisions made and money raised, an organ builder receives some of that money and gets to work doing what he knows how to do.

I hope they like it.

My comment about building an organ being the easy part notwithstanding, it is a complex task. Where do you start? What is it going to sound like? A point of departure is the determination of scaling of the organ pipes and the wind pressure. The length of organ pipes is pretty much given by the physics of musical tone. To produce low CC, the lowest note of the keyboard, on a unison stop, the speaking length of the pipe from mouth to tuning point is eight feet. The question is, what should the diameter of the pipe be? Are you hoping to achieve a brilliant “baroquey” sound with narrow scales, a lush romantic sound with wide scales, or something in between? Higher wind pressure translates easily into more powerful tone, though there are plenty of examples of low-pressure organs with bold voices.

You can study examples of organs in comparable buildings, measuring the scales and other dimensions of the pipes, and maybe altering the numbers for slightly smaller or broader scales. Some organ builders are brilliant at imagining the tone of a particular scale within a building and designing the rest of the voices to be compatible with the first. For a more certain study, it is increasingly common for an organ builder to bring a portable organ with wind supply and a collection of sample pipes of different dimensions allowing him to compare different scales and wind pressures. It is an expensive process involving travel, lodging, and shipping the equipment and supplies, but if the organ has a million-dollar price tag, it is a modest investment. There is no substitute for producing actual tones in the actual acoustical environment.

Think of the myriad individual projects that make up a completed organ. Artisans are building windchests, reservoirs, keyboards, consoles, wind conductors, mechanical or electric actions, casework, ladders, walkboards—the list can seem endless. And what about ornate decorations like pinnacles, pipe shades, and putti?

Like Sam Zygmuntowicz choosing the wood for a new violin, the organbuilder is on a constant search for good materials. I remember my mentor John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, in the 1970s purchasing a rare log of boxwood seven or eight feet long and eight inches in diameter for making the sharp keys of his organs and harpsichords, and gorgeous European beechwood for harpsichord bridges and nuts (the slim rail ahead of the tuning pins that lifts the strings off the pinblock). He ordered them through his friends at Flentrop Orgelbouw in Zaandam, the Netherlands, who shipped them to Cleveland in the sea-going container that delivered the brilliant Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland. Each time we set out to make a set of keyboards, we lopped a piece off that boxwood and milled it into those familiar tapered shapes.

John Boody of Taylor & Boody organbuilders in Staunton, Virginia, specializes in harvesting trees and sawing lumber for their instruments. His appreciation of the beauty of wood allows the artisans there to choose ideal boards for special places. Gorgeous woodgrain patterns on organ benches, around keytables, and casework is a hallmark of their instruments, and John’s care with quarter-sawing and drying the lumber produces especially stable material. In 2009, Wendy and I visited John and Janet Boody as part of a trip to Washington, DC, and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, Monticello. We stayed in an apartment above John’s sawmill and saw the stacks of dried oak boards that would become the case of the new organ at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City.

George Bozeman, another of my mentors, held the concept that wind is the fuel we burn to make organ tone. Any pipe organ has a complex system to produce wind pressure (the blower), transport it to reservoirs and windchests (wind ducts), and regulate it to an exact and steady pressure (reservoirs, also known as regulators). “Bellows” is a term universally used to describe reservoirs/regulators, but I understand a bellows produces wind pressure, as found in the hand-pumped organs of earlier years, or the bellows next to your fireplace. A reservoir stores pressurized air, and a regulator regulates the pressure with internal valves that allow air to flow to the windchests only when the organ is being played and wind is being consumed. Both reservoir and regulator refer correctly to those components of a modern organ wind system, as the pressure is created by an electric blower. Steady, reliable pipe speech relies on steady, reliable wind pressure.

There are two basic types of structure for pipe organs. Some instruments have interior “skeletons” of wood or steel that support windchests, reservoirs, expression boxes, and the ladders and walkboards necessary to reach them all. Others are supported by their free-standing cases. The upright styles of the lower case support the impost, the heavy frame that includes the bases of round or pointed towers. In the case of the Flentrop in Cleveland I mentioned earlier, the impost was by far the heaviest single part of the organ, and the core of its structure. The upper-case panels and styles fit into mortices in the impost and in turn supported the majestic tower crowns. The Pedaal and Hoofdwerk windchests sat on the impost.

In either type of construction, the musical stability of the instrument is a direct factor of its structural stability, especially with mechanical key action, as any motion in the structure affects the adjustment of the action. Organ pipes must be supported to stand perfectly vertically, especially when the pipe metal is soft, as gravity will grab any leaning pipe and try to pull it to the ground. Reed pipes need special support because they are skinniest and weakest at the bottom of the resonator where it intersects with the pipe’s boot. Any organ builder or technician can tell stories about larger reed pipes collapsing on themselves, sometimes breaking free of their supports and crashing down on neighboring pipes.

The proof is in the pudding.

With beautiful wood chosen, accurate actions built and adjusted, wind system regulated and free of leaks, it is time for the pipes. It is a magical moment when an organ produces its first musical tones in its new home. Sometimes we let people in the church know when we expect to sound the first notes. We have already had the excitement of turning on the blower for the first time, experiencing the organ coming to life. People gather, a rank of pipes is placed in their holes, and an out-of-tune hymn is played. After thousands of hours in the workshop, days or weeks of heavy lifting, and precise fitting, the heart of the enterprise comes clear.

What about Eugene Drucker’s reaction to his new instrument? Will the new organ be all everyone hoped for? The local organist will have the strongest reaction, the choir and other musicians who will use the instrument follow suit. The people in the pews will have their opinions. In 1982, John Leek and I installed a new organ we had built at Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The previous organ was a nondescript “asparagus patch” of exposed pipes with little stature; our instrument had a tall case of oak and walnut with classic pointed towers and moldings and shiny façade pipes. We delivered the organ on a Sunday afternoon, and by the following Sunday the case was standing, giving the impression of being complete. John and I sat in the pews as the congregation filed in, found their seats, and craned their necks to see the new organ in the rear balcony. In the quiet of the moment, a young girl cried out, “I liked the old one better.”

Notes

1. Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

“Just can’t wait to get on the road again.”¹

For over fourteen months during the extraordinary time of Covid, Wendy and I stayed at our house in Maine, leaving our apartment in virus-rich New York City vacant. Until late in 2020, Lincoln County where we live in Maine was counting fewer than twenty new cases each week, and we figured we would stay there until vaccinated. Like so many people around the country, we altered our working lives using Zoom and FaceTime instead of meeting in person. We set up our offices as “Zoom Rooms,” sometimes wearing “go to office” tops over jeans or shorts.

I received my first vaccination shot on my sixty-fifth birthday in mid-March. Once I was on the schedule, I started planning a trip, and I hit the road sixteen days after my second shot. I visited three organ building workshops, a half-dozen organs that were coming on the market, a couple iconic organs (one can never see enough of them), and a church where my colleagues are helping install an important new organ. I drove south on a western route through Virginia and Tennessee to Birmingham, across to Atlanta, and north on an eastern route home through North Carolina and Virginia to meet Wendy for a few days on the Jersey Shore. It was my re-immersion in the craft I have been working in for more than forty-five years, and I came home refreshed and newly inspired.

Variety is the spice of life.

Pipe organs come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. We have organs that are large and small, electric and mechanical, freestanding in cases and enclosed in chambers. We have organs based on ancient European concepts and models, and organs that are purely American, and my trip spanned the far reaches of the organ world. I visited the workshops of Noack Organ Co. (Georgetown, Massachusetts), Taylor & Boody Organ Builders (Staunton, Virginia), and Richards, Fowkes & Co. (Ooltewah, Tennessee), each of which works with a small staff of dedicated artisans building hand-crafted organs in free-standing hardwood cases. Noack is currently working on an organ with sixty stops, and I was lucky to see it being loaded on a truck at the workshop followed by the beginning of its installation at the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Paul in Birmingham, Alabama. Taylor & Boody’s current project is a thirty-eight-stop job for Wheaton College in Illinois, and Richards, Fowkes & Co. is working on a thirty-one-stop organ for Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan.² Besides a tour and rich conversations in their workshop, Bruce Fowkes and Ralph Richards took me to see the spectacular four-manual organ by John Brombaugh at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee. I am heartened that during this uncertain time, these three outstanding firms are all building substantial instruments at the same time. You can see details about each organ on the builders’ websites.

These three builders are known for building tiny organs as well as instruments with sixty or more stops. Continuo or practice organs with three or four stops are the hummingbirds of pipe organs, and modest instruments with fewer than twenty stops are little gems with gorgeous, intimate voices and carefully balanced choruses, but the big bird of my trip was the behemoth all-American organ in Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, an organ with single divisions that include more than thirty stops. (See the cover feature of the November 2020 issue of The Diapason.)

In the May 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about the efforts of curator Nathan Bryson and his staff of assistants and volunteers to protect the organ during the recent demolition by implosion of the adjacent Trump Hotel and Casino, so the organ was fresh on my mind when I started planning my trip, and I invited myself for a visit. Nathan was the consummate host for my day in the largest organ in the world.

The organs at Boardwalk Hall and the Wanamaker Store (now Macy’s) have each been considered the largest in the world. Now that I have visited both with their curators as my guides, I will take the plunge and explain how an organ earns such a title. At the moment, the Boardwalk Hall Organ is about 53% playable, so the Wanamaker Organ can safely claim to be the largest fully playable organ in the world. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee that oversees the organ in Boardwalk Hall has ambitious plans to bring the organ to fully functional condition. Stay tuned. I will report it when it happens.

The Wanamaker Organ has 464 ranks while Boardwalk Hall has a mere 449, a difference of fifteen ranks, the size of a modest organ, so it wins in the category of most ranks. The Wanamaker organ has 75 independent pedal ranks with 32 pipes (29 notes fewer than manual ranks), while many of the ranks in the Boardwalk Hall Organ have up to 85 notes, accounting for extensive unification and making use of the extended lower three keyboards which have 85, 85, and 75 notes, giving the organ a total of 33,112 pipes compared to the impressive 28,750 pipes in the Wanamaker Organ. That’s a difference of 4,362 pipes, or the equivalent of a seventy-rank organ!

An 85-note rank of pipes allows a continuous scale from low CC of 8′ to high c′′′′′′ of 2′, or as in the case of several ranks in Atlantic City, from low CCCC of 32′ to high c′′′′ of 8′. Unbelievably, there is a 64′ Dulzian Diaphone with 85 notes that goes all the way to the top of 16′. Scrolling down the endless stoplist, I count one 64′ rank (85 notes), eight 32′ ranks, and sixty 16′ ranks. A count like that makes a big organ. You can count for yourself. There are comprehensive lists of ranks, stops, console layout, and pistons and controls at www.boardwalkorgans.org. It would be difficult to calculate accurately, but it is my gut feeling that the Boardwalk Hall Organ weighs a lot more than the Wanamaker Organ.

Vulgar or beautiful?

I have had a number of encounters with the Wanamaker Organ over the past twenty years, both in intimate, personal, and comprehensive visits, and in swashbuckling public performances. This was my fourth visit to Boardwalk Hall, but the first time I heard the organ.³ I was aware of both organs when I was growing up, long before either had any meaningful restoration, but as I was in the thrall of the “Tracker Organ Revival,” dutifully learning early fingerings at Oberlin, I was not creative or open-minded enough to make space for them in my musical comprehension. I assumed that they existed to take part in the biggest-loudest-fastest competitions that lurk throughout our society. How could something with more than four hundred ranks be anything more than the pipe organ equivalent of a freight train? Artistic content? Musical sensitivity? Phooey. I was wrong.

I was fortunate to have experience renovating larger electro-pneumatic organs early in my career, and when I became curator of the organs at Trinity Church Copley Square and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, I was immersed in the grandeur of super-sized organs. The Aeolian-Skinner organ at The Mother Church is huge (237 ranks and 13,500 pipes), but less than half the size of those in Boardwalk Hall or the Wanamaker Store. While the organ at Trinity Church (actually two instruments, Chancel and Gallery, playable from one console) was smaller in number of ranks, it was an important part of my understanding of large organs because of the weekly recital series there. Each Friday, I heard a different organist play the instrument. Some were bewildered, bamboozled, even defeated by its complexity, but those organists who could make it sing taught me how a large and varied organ with divisions in four separate locations could combine to produce expressive sweeps, from thundering fortissimos to shimmering echoes that melted away into the frescoed walls.

If a finely crafted organ with mechanical action brings the intimacy of chamber music to the fingers of the organist, the large romantic organ allows the musician to paint majestic landscapes. And the mega-monumental symphonic organ allows expression ranges unheard of otherwise. What do you do with an eighty-rank string division? Paint pictures.

In the arena

When I first arrived at Boardwalk Hall, Nathan “fired up” the organ using files made by Peter Richard Conte, the Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Organ, along with several other creative players, and stored in the playback system. Peter is unusual among organists because of his affinity for these exceptional organs. While most of us are used to registering a chorale prelude with a cornet for the solo line and a few soft flutes and a Subbass for accompaniment, Peter is a sonic wizard with thousands of stop tabs and hundreds of other controls that allow him to command the dozens of divisions scattered about in the vast room. Sometimes he throws on a big row of stop tablets as if he was playing a glissando on the keyboard, but more usually, he programs pistons with intricate combinations using stops by the hundreds.

Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long and 310 feet wide with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that peaks at 137 feet. Its seating capacity is over 15,000, and it is regularly used for rodeos with bull-riding competitions (they truck in enough dirt to simulate a prairie), indoor auto racing, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, and even college football. It was the site of the first indoor helicopter flight, and it is home to the Miss America Pageant. It was surreal to stand alone on the empty floor of the semi-lit hall listening to the organ do its thing with the help of Peter’s bytes. The two main organ chambers are separated in space by the hundred-foot-wide stage. The chamber lights were on, and great swaths of expression shutters were in full view, swishing and fluttering like sensuous thirty-foot eyelashes. This was not “All Swells to Swell.” The many sets of shutters were moving in contrary motion, each responding to the rises and falls of individual voices in the complex arrangements. Waves of sound ebbed and flowed like the surf on the sandy beach on the other side of the iconic boardwalk, cascades of notes morphed into fanfares, melodies were “soloed out” as if by a platoon of trombones or by four dozen violinists playing pianissimo in unison. This is the very essence of the symphonic organ, its dazzling array of controls allowing the single musician to emulate the actual symphony orchestra.

Sweeping a beach

The Aeolian-Skinner at The Mother Church taught me what is involved in caring for a large organ. “Touching up the reeds” can take all day—there are forty-one of them. But that organ lives in a building with perfect climate control. When you have more than 450 ranks in a building that is also home to rodeos and auto racing, you have a hefty tuning responsibility. Curator Nathan Bryson manages a team of professionals and volunteers who are methodically moving through the organ rebuilding blowers, releathering windchests, refurbishing organ pipes, while maintaining the organ for daily recitals and many special events.

The Boardwalk Hall Organ was built by Midmer-Losh of Merrick, Long Island, New York, during the Great Depression at a cost of over $500,000 and was completed in December of 1932. It is housed in eight chambers: Left Stage, Right Stage, Left Forward, Right Forward, Left Center, Right Center, Left Ceiling, and Right Ceiling. You can see the layout in a photo accompanying this column in the May 2021 issue. Getting a handle on which stops and which divisions are located in which chamber is the first challenge of learning one’s way around the vast instrument. The two Stage Chambers comprise what I perceived to be the main organ. They are huge and jammed with some of the largest organ stops in the world. There are stops on wind pressure of 100 inches on a water column, an absolute hurricane of air.

When the organ blowers are turned on and the instrument fills with wind, windchests expand visibly, as if the doctor told you to “take a deep breath.” The fifteen-foot-long walls of the pressurized room that houses the organ’s main electro-pneumatic switching equipment move so dramatically that I squinted, wondering why the thing does not burst. During renovation, several of the windchests on 100-inch pressure were replaced using more robust engineering, informed by the difficulty of building a wooden vessel to contain such high pressure.

Tuning those gargantuan ranks is a three-person job, one at the console, one in the middle of the hall where it is possible to hear pitches and beats, and the third (with industrial hearing protection and audio headphones) manipulating the pipes. You could try using a starting pistol to signal “next,” but you wouldn’t be able to hear it.

Beyond the endless work of restoring, renovating, tuning, and maintaining this organ, perhaps the most difficult and important work has been reintroducing the city and state governments to the ongoing stewardship of the instrument. A vast auditorium with such an unmusical array of uses seems an unlikely home for a pipe organ, and the people who have been working with and on the organ have been effective ambassadors, sharing the unique qualities of the largest organ in the world. If you would like to help, visit that website and look for the “Donate Now” button.

Look to the future.

After fourteen months at home, it was a joy to be back on the road. My thanks to Didier Grassin of the Noack Organ Company, Ralph Richards, Bruce Fowkes, John Boody, and Nathan Bryson for sharing their work and philosophies with me, and above all, for sharing the joy and pleasure of “knocking around about pipe organs.” Three cheers for all the wonderful work underway on organs both old and new. If this is a taste of the new normal, I am ready to ride.

Notes

^1. Willie Nelson.

^2. By coincidence, one of Wendy’s cousins is on the organ committee at Saint Andrew’s.

^3. In 2010, the Organ Clearing House built the “Blower Room” set for the Saint Bartholomew funeral scene in the spy-thriller movie, Salt, starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Philip Noyce. All the sets including the barge, the presidential bunker, and the CIA offices were constructed in retired Grumman aircraft hangars in Bethpage, New Jersey, where the Lunar Excursion Module was built. Our set included a couple big Spencer blowers that we had in stock and a huge electro-pneumatic switching machine borrowed from the “other” organ at Boardwalk Hall (a four-manual Kimball in the adjacent theater). I transported the machine in both directions in rental trucks. The set decorator thought the rig was complicated enough that I should be present for filming. I stood around while Ms. Jolie jumped through walls dozens of times, until I heard over the PA system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.” The leading lady greeted me with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I described that she should shoot the regulating chain to make the bellows go haywire and cause the mass cipher that would disrupt the funeral. (We provided the hardware, and special effects provided the action.) She said, “I can’t shoot that.” I replied, “I’ve seen you shoot.” I watched the single take on Mr. Noyce’s monitor and had the honor of shouting “Action!” at his signal, my twelve seconds in Hollywood, another chapter from the life of an itinerant organ guy. Curious? You can stream it on Netflix. And the nice thing about building a movie set? They don’t require a warranty.

Photo caption: Seven keyboards and 1,235 stop tablets, as big as they get. Midmer-Losh organ, Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Manuals I and II have 85 notes, Manual III has 75 notes, and manuals IV, V, VI, and VII have the usual 61.) (photo credit: John Bishop)

Humble π

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”

Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.

But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr² (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.

Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.

Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.

Achimedes’ mental model

Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:

When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

The last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr³. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr²h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.

My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.

I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.

Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.

If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.

Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.¹ The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.

An American renaissance

As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.

There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.

A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.

In a nutshell

The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.

In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.

Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.

I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.

He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.

I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

Fire in the steeple

Writing for a monthly journal is no place to be commenting on today’s news. A momentous story will develop during the six weeks between submission and publication leaving the telling of the event, which seems so fresh and urgent at the moment of writing, little more than a heap of yesterday’s news.

Today is April 17, 2019. Two days ago, the world watched in horror as Notre-Dame de Paris burned. Dramatic photos in the hundreds were provided by still photographers, television cameras, helicopters, and fire department drones. We all speculated as to the extent of the damage. One aerial photo convinced me that the great Cavaillé-Coll organ at the west end of the cathedral was ablaze.

Yesterday we learned with relief that most of the stone fabric of the great church remained intact and that many priceless artifacts had been whisked out of the building by heroic firefighters forming a bucket brigade. And to the joy and relief of the world’s community of organists, both organs remained intact. As of today, it seems that the Choir Organ suffered significant water damage but can be restored. But miraculously, the Great Organ stood above the fray. It is nestled between the two towers like a brute in a too-tight sport jacket, and it is under a pitched roof that is lower than the main roof that was destroyed. The heat of the fire, which we might have expected would reduce the brilliant instrument to a puddle of molten lead, dissipated into the night air far above the organ.

By the time you read this, we may know the cause of the fire and the actual condition of the building and its contents. I hope the blame does not get pinned on one person. Perhaps the organ and rose windows will have already been removed to safe storage, and committees of engineers, historians, and artisans with impressive credentials will have been formed to plan how to spend the billions of euros that have accrued. While I am tempted to write lots of detail of what I know or think I know from the safety of New York City, I think I will sit back and wait with the rest of you to know the situation as of the first of June.

Many of the stories I have read and heard have spoken of the integrity of the 850-year-old building. The medieval architects and craftsmen who built it had such foresight and skill. Could they have imagined that their work would be robust enough to sustain such an event so far in the future?

In 1973, David Macaulay published Cathedral (Houghton Mifflin), a delightful romp through the construction of a fictional medieval cathedral told in prose and dozens of intricate pen-and-ink drawings. It is technically a children’s book—it won the Caldecott Medal that celebrates illustrated books for children—but any adult will enjoy and learn from this spirited book. The author introduces you to the workers who built the cathedral, the tools they used, how they gathered the vast bulk of materials, and the methods of construction. He describes and draws the huge wheel, similar to what you would find in a gerbil’s cage but large enough for two men to walk inside in an endless loop, coiling the rope that lifts fabulously heavy stones hundreds of feet.

Central to the structure of any Gothic cathedral, whether ancient and modern, is the system of flying buttresses (repeatedly called “trusses” by a CNN commentator) and vaulted stone ceilings that counteract each other to hold the whole thing up in an exquisite demonstration of engineered balance. That balance is essential to allowing the high walls to be perforated by enormous windows. The combination of the soaring fluted columns and the windows letting sunlight in through acres of stained glass gives an impression of weightlessness to a structure that weighs thousands of tons. Anyone who has wandered into a great cathedral and had their gaze drawn upward deserves a read through this vivid description of how in the world such a thing could be accomplished when the only available industrial power was supplied by mammals.

David Macaulay’s Cathedral is available through your favorite independent bookstore, or if you must, amazon.com.

Medieval cathedrals, old and new

Three years ago, Wendy and I had a wonderful trip to Great Britain. She attended the London Book Fair for a few days while I explored London’s ecclesiastical buildings and their organs. I also found a gobsmacking whole hog roast at Borough Market adjacent to Southwark Cathedral and had a life-altering sandwich. “Do you want crispies on that, mate?” We took the train to Durham, where I had invited myself for a visit at the workshops of Harrison and Harrison and where we stayed in a rickety bed and breakfast above an ancient pub called the Victoria Inn. I picked up a rental car the next morning (shifting gears with my left hand) and mentioned where we had stayed to the clerk. “Oh, the Old Vic. You take your life in your hands when you go in there.”

A friend from the Harrison & Harrison workshop gave us a splendid visit to the organ at Durham Cathedral (why have one 16′ Double Open Wood when you can have two, one on each side of the choir, one of which goes all the way down to 32′ low CCCC?), and we drove to York. This time we stayed at a very swank inn with views of York Minster from our room, and after a ponderous “Full English Breakfast,” we toured the Minster. Durham Cathedral is really old as medieval cathedrals go, built between 1093 and 1133, and its stone fabric is dense and heavy. I have not done a lot of research, but I assume that it was built before flying buttresses were invented, because instead of that lacy weight-defying tracery, Durham Cathedral is built with some of the thickest stonewalls in Christendom. Even the windows seem load bearing. It holds itself up by sheer bulk. By contrast York Minster, started in 1220 and completed in the full glory of the high Gothic, sports huge windows, a magnificent vaulted ceiling, and the elaborate system of buttresses that help such massive buildings seem weightless.

What a terrific place. York is one of the really big ones, a hundred feet longer inside than Durham Cathedral and twenty-five feet higher. Although the sky was overcast during our visit, the building seemed light and airy inside. The organ sits high on the screen that separates the choir from the nave, commanding both the east and west views, and its 32′ Diapason, metal this time, stands in full-length splendor in the ambulatory. It is disguised with circular ridges of some kind of putty and painted to resemble the lofty stone columns. Incredible.

There was no sign, no informational kiosk, and no trace of the fire that ravaged York Minster in July of 1984. The wood structure of the roof burned in similar fashion to this week’s fire in Paris. Firefighters contained the blaze to the transept by intentionally collapsing the roof with tens of thousands of gallons of water. The investigation that followed suggested that the fire was likely caused by a lightning strike, but there was at least some chance it was caused either by arson or an electrical fault. Conservative Anglicans supposed that the fire was God’s response to the recent consecration of David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham, with whose policies and philosophies they vehemently disagreed. ’Twas ever thus . . . .

The good news is that the damage was fully repaired. That triumph of recovery has been cited as a potent example proving the possibility and feasibility of returning Notre-Dame de Paris to its original condition.

A modern historic organ

John Brombaugh installed his Opus 4 in the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lorain, Ohio, in 1970. Professor of organ at Oberlin David Boe, then in his twenties, was organist at the church and had much to do with the creation of that remarkable instrument. As one of the first modern instruments built in the United States using ancient European principles and given its proximity to the teeming community of budding organists at Oberlin, that organ caused quite a sensation and was revered by countless musicians as a milestone of the art. The Organ Historical Society awarded the instrument a historic citation, one of the few occasions when the OHS has honored a modern instrument for its historical importance.

On August 28, 2014, the church building and its contents were destroyed by an arsonist. A new building was completed in 2017, and a new organ by Paul Fritts & Company will be installed later this year.

A couple weeks ago, my colleague Amory Atkins and I were in Seattle installing an organ at the School of Music of the University of Washington, and we took the opportunity of proximity to take a field trip to Tacoma to visit Paul Fritts’s workshop. It was Amory’s birthday, and it was fun to have a reunion with friends there as we had all worked together on a large project, a couple years earlier, and Bruce Shull (who works there) and his wife Shari were my pals at Oberlin in the 1970s. We saw the beautiful new instrument for First Lutheran in Lorain, pretty much complete and playable in the workshop. It was poignant to note how far the concept of the modern American tracker-action organ has come in the past fifty years.

Organs built by Paul Fritts are elegant, expressive, and impressive, and the craftsmanship is impeccable. Complex joints and multifaceted moldings are brilliantly accomplished. Embossed polished façade pipes gleamed in the late afternoon sun.

The Fritts workshop sports a tantalizing juxtaposition of modern and ancient techniques. A sophisticated CNC (Computer Numeric Control) router the size of a small bus lurked in a separate building, exiled along with its specialist operator from the peace and tranquility of the rest of the workshop. It is capable of converting digital drawings into finished wood projects from windlines with complex miters to reed boots with compound tapers. Another room houses the centuries-old technology of a melting pot and casting table, where metal becomes liquid and is cast into sheets from which the parts of organ pipes are cut. Paul shared that casting sheets on sand rather than cloth or marble produces metal with a crystalline structure that springs to life under the hands of the voicer like none other. Once the sheets are cast, they are hammered to increase their density and planed smooth. While the casting table is the same technology shown in eighteenth-century prints like those by the good monk Dom Bédos, the metal hammer and drum plane are monster industrial products of the modern age.

First Lutheran in Lorain has built a new building on a new plot of land. Visit their website, www.firstlutheranlorain.org, to see photos of the new building, photos, specs, and history of the Brombaugh organ, and photos of the new Fritts organ. It is a great example of the phoenix, rising from the ashes.

The death of an old friend

In 1984, I went to work for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, where one of my responsibilities was to participate in the firm’s active organ maintenance business. One of the organs I visited regularly from the beginning was the twenty-rank instrument built in 1872 by E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings (Opus 635) for the First Baptist Church of Wakefield, Massachusetts. Three years after I joined Angerstein & Associates, the owner Dan Angerstein closed the business to accept the position of tonal director at M. P. Möller. That turned out to be a short-term appointment as Möller closed its doors a few years later, but it was a great opportunity for me to take on Dan’s maintenance contracts and start my own company.

About three years after that, I moved the Bishop Organ Company into a sunny building in an industrial neighborhood in Wakefield, just blocks from the Baptist Church. There is a two-mile-long lake right in the center of town, and one of my employees had grown up in the little sailing club on its western shore. It did not take long for me to get involved there, to buy a boat from him, and start my sailing career in earnest. I helped start a junior sailing program, teaching children how to sail; my son Michael became an earnest competitor in the club’s weekly races, and I was elected commodore. Michael and I share the passion for sailing today thanks to our years in Wakefield.

I enjoyed the proximity of the workshop to the Baptist Church and occasionally went there to practice, just for the pleasure of playing on that beautiful historic organ. Along the way, the leather gussets and canvas hinges on the huge double-rise reservoir failed, and my crew and I removed the wildly heavy assembly to the workshop, including two feeder bellows, stripped off all the old material, and restored it to original reliable working condition.

The First Baptist Church fit the stereotype of the quintessential New England Protestant church. Its soaring spire dominated the landscape of the town, and its grand 800-seat sanctuary was as large a room as one might imagine being built with a wood frame and no supporting columns inside. The way the structure of the building worked was that the ceiling and walls were suspended by the steeply pitched superstructure that supported the roof, another ingenious approach to building large structures that defy their own weight.

There was a second pipe organ in the chapel downstairs, a one-manual tracker built in the 1970s by the Andover Organ Company, just like the instrument that had been owned by Daniel Pinkham and used in his famous recording of Antonio Soler’s concertos for two organs. The other organist on that recording was the brilliant E. Power Biggs playing “his” Flentrop organ in Harvard University’s Busch Hall, formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The chapel was decorated with ornate oak carvings including pews, chancel furnishings, and an elaborate screen, all relocated from a downstairs worship space at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel.

For more than thirty years I made maintenance visits to the organ, knowing all along that it was the home church of my colleague and friend John Boody, principal at Taylor & Boody Organbuilders. John’s grandfather had been pastor of the church. Often during one of those visits, I would send John a photo of the organ just to say hello, and we talked fondly about it whenever we met. The church’s pastor (it was the same guy for more than thirty years) had a big candy habit, and we knew we could expect him to provide little baskets or bags fit for the season. Once I went there to tune during Holy Week and found the pastor sporting a Crucifixion necktie, complete with images of three crosses with an “Elvis on black velvet style” sunset. Hope I never see another like it.

In the evening of Tuesday, October 23, 2018, the spire was struck by lightning, and the building burned. A portion of the front wall facing the street was all that remained. The church’s safe, jam-packed with 150 years of historic documents, fell through four stories of burning floors into six feet of water. Both organs were incinerated. The E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ, built by some of history’s finest organbuilders, inspiration for one of the finest of twentieth-century American organbuilders, present for more than 7,500 Sunday mornings and countless weddings and funerals, 146-years-old and still going strong . . . gone.

Photo caption: First Baptist Church, Wakefield, Massachusetts, 1872 E & G. G. Hook Opus 635 (photo credit: John Bishop)