In the wind . . .

John Bishop

 

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like to that above.

 

That’s one of the great old chestnuts of hymnody. Who reading those words doesn’t have that tune buzzing in their ears? Everyone knows it. Verse after verse goes by, each building on the way we depend on each other, support each other, and live with each other. It’s usually in F Major or G Major—I prefer G, or maybe start in F and modulate a couple times. Nice to step the tonic of the last chord down a major third, let that become the dominant of the new key, throw in the seventh, and start This glorious hope revives . . . up a half step!

The text is by John Fawcett, London, 1782. The tune is Dennis by Hans Nägeli (1773–1836) and later adapted by Lowell Mason (The Psaltery, 1845). It’s as familiar as they come. But did you ever stop to think that the meter (SM; 8.8.6.6.8) is that of a limerick? Everybody sing: 

 

Writing a limerick’s absurd,

Line one and line five rhyme in word,

And just as you’ve reckoned, 

Both rhyme with the second;

The fourth line must rhyme with the third.

 

To make this trick work, you may choose between including the upbeat or not, and you sometimes have to place two or more syllables on the last beat of a line. Everybody sing:

 

There once was a fellow named Beebe,

Planned to marry a woman named Phoebe,

He said, “I must see 

What the minister’s fee be,

Before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebe.”

§

Last month our friend Jim passed away. His death is a first for us—the first of close friends roughly our age to pass away—and he’s been on my mind a lot. He was a prolific organic gardener and a quintessential “foodie.” He had a great love and real appreciation for fine wine and, since a recent trip to Scotland, single malt scotch. He played guitar a little, and he and his wife Lois were frequent attenders and strong supporters of musical ensembles, especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. They traveled together frequently, especially to Italy where they spent much time and had many friends.

In addition to all this, Jim was a geologist, and he had a huge collection of minerals and ores. After his death, Lois is dealing with the dispersal of hundreds of specimens. Some are the size of a chestnut while others are huge—too heavy for one person to carry. The garage and basement are full of Jim’s rocks. Thankfully, Jim’s friends from the Boston Mineral Club have rallied to help with the task. That fellowship of kindred minds—each individual a little crazier than the last—is a tight society of people who are passionate about the variety of minerals that comprise the earth. You might say (as they often do), they have rocks in their heads. But they sure have been wonderful to our friend Lois in her sadness. Everybody sing:

 

Some people I hang with are jocks

With an aura of dirty white socks.

When they ask me to play

I say, “Maybe some day.

But my principal passion is rocks.”

§

Last summer Wendy and I launched and christened our new boat, Kingfisher. She’s a Marshall 22 built by Marshall Marine in Padanaram, which is a village of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, just across a bay from the great fishing and whaling capital of New Bedford, an easy sail in a small boat from Nantucket. She’s a broad-beamed, gaff-rigged craft of a class that was used originally for commercial fishing before boats had engines because she can carry lots of cargo and can be sailed single-handed. When I tell people she’s a catboat, they often think of those little rocketship-boats with two hulls. No, not a catamaran, a catboat. She’s only twenty-two feet long, but more then ten feet wide, with lots of space inside for hauling fish! She has a centerboard so we can go into shallow inlets, a little diesel engine to keep us off the rocks, and pretty, classic lines.

Even before we had a chance to put her in the water we joined the Catboat Association. There are about four hundred members, and annual dues are $25. Last February we attended the CBA Annual Meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Groton, Connecticut. We had such fun that we’re going again this year—we’ll miss the Super Bowl, but I’d rather talk about boats. Having been to lots of meetings of pipe organ groups, I’m used to seeing displays of combination actions, tuning tools, CDs, and published music in the exhibition room. This time it was boats on trailers, wood carvers (who could make you a bowsprit or a ribbon-shaped name board for your transom), a couple of smart guys from Yanmar (Japanese manufacturer of marine diesel engines), and monogrammed life jackets. There were workshops about sail handling, navigating, diesel engine maintenance, and lots of storytelling. This fellowship of kindred minds organizes races and other fun events. Catboats, for all their practicality and beauty, are not very fast. One wag spoke up in an open forum saying, “If you wanted to go fast, you should have bought a bicycle.” Racing catboats is a little like racing turtles. May the best man win. Everybody sing:

 

We’re gathered to talk about boats.

At our meetings, we never take notes.

We organize races

In watery places,

And officers win with most votes.

§

In the summer of 2010, Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Levitz was covering a story in Washington, D.C., when she noticed a large crowd milling about in the front yard of a church. When she realized they were all wearing nametags on lanyards she figured they were part of a convention and like any good reporter, she walked across to investigate. She was dumbfounded to learn that they were all organists attending a convention, a fellowship of kindred minds. It had never crossed her mind that organists would gather for large professional meetings so she asked a lot of questions about the current state of the pipe organ. She mentioned that she was based in Boston and someone suggested she should interview me to learn about the role of the organ in modern society. 

The result was a story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “Trafficking in Organs, Mr. Bishop Pipes Up to Preserve a Bit of History.” (See http://tinyurl.com/mc9xu2y.) The story begins, “John Bishop leaves the soul-saving to the clergy. He’s content to save the pipe organs—and even that isn’t easy.”

By the way, I suggest there are three areas of public life where puns are
a nuisance:

1. Pipe organs (organ donor, organ transplant, piping up, Swell, Great, Positiv?)

2. Boat names (Liquid Assets, A Crewed Interest, Ahoy Vey)

3. Beauty shops (Shear Delights, The Mane Attraction, A Cut Above)

Feel free to continue with new categories!

In response to Jennifer’s call, we met at Starbucks near Faneuil Hall in Boston. We chatted over lattés for an hour or so. Jennifer is a tall, quick-witted, athletic woman, and from her enthusiasm about my topic, you might have thought she had been interested in the organ all her life. But as this was her first foray into our winded world, I took her through Organ Building 101, Church Music 101, and AGO 101. When she asked what I was working on at the moment, I invited her to come with me to Cambridge, near Harvard Square, that afternoon, where I was meeting with officials of Lesley University. The school had purchased a vacant building, formerly the North Prospect Congregational Church, and planned to move the building across its lot to adjoin a planned new building where it would become part of the Art Library, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ was being offered for sale.

Jennifer’s article concluded:

 

It can take years to place an organ, but sometimes there are matches made in music heaven. Within weeks of visiting Lesley University, Mr. Bishop found a home for its organ in a church in Texas. It was loaded onto a tractor-trailer, and off it went, the victory recorded by Mr. Bishop on Facebook.

“Another one leaves town ahead of the wrecking ball,” he wrote.

 

Everybody sing (add another syllable!):

 

We’re glad to have all that publicity.

Helps preserving works of historicity.

She wrote in the paper

’Bout that tricky caper;

By writing, she joined in complicity.  

§

In 1956, Walter Holtkamp installed a revolutionary organ in the tower gallery of the chapel at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts—again, near Harvard Square. My father, a retired Episcopal priest, was instructor of Homiletics there when I was a teenager, and he introduced me to Dr. Alastair Cassels-Brown who was professor of church music there, and with whom I had my first years of organ lessons on that Holtkamp organ. 

Over a number of years I learned various tidbits about the early history of that organ; that Charles Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, that E. Power Biggs lived a few blocks away, that Daniel Pinkham as a young disciple of Biggs was always around, that organ historian Barbara Owen was a close part of that circle, and that Melville Smith (director of the Longy School of Music and organist at the First and Second Church in Boston) was strongly connected with the seminary, and friend with all those others. The Holtkamp organ—with low wind-pressures, slider-windchests (though electro-pneumatic action), baroque-inspired reeds, full principal choruses, and a Rückpositiv—was quite the statement for 1956. And that fellowship of kindred minds (Holtkamp, Fisk, Pinkham, Owen, and Smith) must have had some heady conversations as the organ was being installed.

Christ Church (Episcopal) in Cambridge is an eighteenth-century building, complete with Revolutionary War bullet hole, around the corner from the seminary chapel. Stuart Forster is the current organist, and the World War II era Aeolian-Skinner has been replaced by a stunning new organ by Schoenstein. E. Power Biggs was appointed organist there in 1932, work that coincided with his blossoming concert career. In his book All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003, page 86), Craig Whitney relates a (to us) delightful story from that era:

Juggling all this took its toll, and when the rector of Christ Church asked Biggs to read the early Sunday service in addition to his musical duties, Biggs refused. The upshot was reported by Charles Fisk, a nine-year-old member of the church’s boy choir, in a note dated January 2, 1935, in the diary his mother had given him for Christmas. “I went to choir practice,” Fisk wrote. “Mr. Biggs wasnt there.” For (at least) the second time, Biggs had been fired from a church job. The leadership of Christ Church had decided that “Mr. Biggs” was more interested in his professional concert career than he was in being a good church musician, and they were right.

Everybody sing:

 

The choirboys all had to stand,

At a wave of the organist’s hand.

But Charlie had noted

And later he wroted

That dear Mr. Biggs had been canned.

§

The same year that Holtkamp installed the organ at the seminary, Rudolf von Beckerath installed a four-manual Werkprinzip tracker-action organ with sixty-five ranks at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland. You can read all about that landmark organ at its own website: http://clevelandbeckerath.org/beckerathorgan.html.

That instrument was a major step toward the revival of interest in classic styles of organbuilding. In the following few years, many more new European-built organs were imported to American churches and schools, notably the 1958 Flentrop installed at the instigation of E. Power Biggs in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall) at Harvard University. That’s the organ on which he recorded the wildly popular series Bach Organ Favorites for Columbia Records—a series that still stands as the best-selling solo classical recordings of all time. Nice going, Biggsy!

In June of 1956, G. Donald Harrison was hard at work finishing the great Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. He was working under a whopping deadline—Pierre Cochereau, organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, would be playing the opening recital on June 25 as part of the 60th national convention of the American Guild of Organists. During those weeks, New York was suffering both a heat wave and a taxi strike. After working late on June 14, Harrison walked to his Third Avenue apartment, ate dinner with his wife Helen, and sat down to watch Victor Borge present his shenanigans on television. At 11:00 p.m. he suffered a heart attack and died.

Last Christmas, and the previous two Easters, Wendy and I have worshipped at St. Thomas Church, to bask in the glorious sounds of the Choir of Men and Boys led by John Scott, who must be considered among the finest living church musicians. And, it’s a poignant thought that as I write, today is the second anniversary of the death of Dr. Gerre Hancock who led the music there with such distinction from 1971 until 2004. 

I never had a chance to meet G. Donald Harrison, but I can at least say our lifetimes overlapped—by less than two weeks. I was born on March 16, 1956!

As we think about the big changes that were going on in the American pipe organ industry, it’s fun to note other developments in the music world. On January 5, 1956, a truck driver named Elvis Presley made his first recording, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

§

Tom Gleason was Wendy’s Russian History professor at Brown University. He was a wonderful mentor, and as Wendy babysat for his kids when she was a student, Tom and his wife Sarah have remained dear friends to this day. Our daughter Meg was also Tom’s student at Brown—Tom and Sarah were hosts for Meg’s graduation party in their house and garden. And Tom and Sarah joined us for a sailing vacation around Greece’s Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. Tom and I share a fellowship of kindred minds with a love of limericks. Now, let’s face it, the limericks I’m sharing here, most of which are mine, are not the sort that we usually hear. But in the pages of this august journal, I’m not going there. Everybody sing: 

 

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In a space that is most economical.

But the good ones I’ve seen 

So seldom are clean, 

And the clean ones so seldom are comical!

The limerick is furtive and mean.

You must keep her in close quarantine.

Or she sneaks to the slums

And promptly becomes

Disorderly, drunk, and obscene.

 

(Modulate up a step, kindred minds.)

 

The next time we’re sitting at table,

And finish the sharing of fable,

We’ll pour from the jugs

And hoist up our mugs,

Sharing limericks as rude as we’re able.

John Bishop

We’re going in circles.

Have you noticed? I grew up in Boston in the 1960s and ’70s in what was a thrilling time for the art of organbuilding. Charles Fisk was well into his brilliant and innovative—and sadly foreshortened—career. Fritz Noack had established his company and was building the first of an impressive succession of instruments. Churches in the area were commissioning instruments from a wide variety of American and European builders, and organists and students of the organ were delving into the relationships between these “newfangled”—or was it “oldfangled”—tracker-action organs and the music of the baroque era that had inspired the concepts behind them.

The Organ Historical Society was an important part of that revolution—America’s nineteenth-century heritage of organbuilding was being rediscovered and celebrated. We recognized how many wonderful venerable instruments had been sacrificed to make way for the “new-fangled” electro-pneumatic organs of the early twentieth century. By the time I graduated from high school there were two Fisk organs in my hometown, and I was organist of a church in the next town that has a three-manual Hook organ built in 1860. I thought I knew all I needed to know.

I was a freshman at Oberlin in 1974, the year that the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. That organ has plenty of mutations, historically inspired reeds, suspended and “unbushed” tracker action. It was tuned in Werckmeister III, an historic temperament that sounds wonderful in many keys (let’s say for simplicity, up to four sharps or flats), but when I played Widor for one of my required performances and wound up in B-flat minor, I felt it in my fillings. And of course, that performance was offered without the grace or benefit of a Swell box. Forgive me, Charles-Marie.

While I was a student at Oberlin, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland received a three-manual Flentrop organ, and I was privileged to work with the team from Holland installing it. You don’t forget the first day of an installation, when the organ in parts is unloaded from a shipping container and carried up the front steps of the church. It’s heavy work. And I’ll not forget noticing a crate that contained Celeste pipes, or realizing that I was carrying a bundle of Swell shutters. I was perhaps too naïve to realize all the implications, but that sure seemed like part of a circle.

Recently I had a lengthy conversation and correspondence with several colleagues that set me to thinking about this circle and what it means to our art. The exchange started when the organbuilding firm Juget-Sinclair of Montreal announced an open house at which they would exhibit the new organ they had built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (Visit their website at http://www.cam.org/~sinc/.) The e-mails started flying between organbuilders John Brombaugh, Hellmuth Wolff, and Karl Wilhelm. John remembered that the first time he met Hellmuth and Karl was in Wellesley during the installation of that church’s Casavant organ. (It’s no secret that the Casavant was installed in 1964, so these guys were younger then than they are now!) John also told us that at the moment he was involved with the relocation of the organ he built for the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio (Opus 9, 1972). That congregation was moving to a new building and their original sanctuary had been sold to a congregation with musical priorities that did not involve a Brombaugh organ. The organ would be installed temporarily at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York (where it will presumably be available to students at the Eastman School of Music) until its permanent home at Sonoma University is ready.

When a new organ is finished, the builder might be proud of his accomplishment, relieved to be finished with particular complications, excited about moving on to the next project—but he is certainly not imagining that the organ he just finished will be replaced in thirty or forty years. Pipe organs seem permanent. I’ve had contact with many people who are surprised when they realize that an organ can be taken apart and moved. They thought it was part of the building. But isn’t an organ an expression of its builder’s current philosophy? While an organbuilder might hope that his work would never be replaced, would it be good for organbuilding in general if churches routinely purchased two new organs every century?

Because I had been involved in arranging the sale of the Wellesley Casavant to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts, I jumped into the conversation explaining that while the people of St. Andrew’s remained dedicated to the concept of tracker action, they felt they would benefit from having an instrument with more emphasis on fundamental tone. I added that the Organ Clearing House had relocated an instrument built by Hellmuth Wolff (Opus 17, 1976), installing it in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Durham, North Carolina. It was a coincidence that St. Paul’s previous instrument was a one-manual organ built by John Brombaugh—and rather than being replaced, the Brombaugh was moved to the front of the church where it is used as a liturgical organ.

As I was writing that letter I remembered an amusing and poignant story about Ernest Skinner, an organbuilder whose brilliant innovations in many ways defined the twentieth-century American organ. He who gave us pitman stop action, whiffle-tree Swell engines, French Horns, and vertical-selector combination actions, and who built instruments that emphasized fundamental tone, colorful orchestral solo stops, and shimmering strings was later criticized for failing to keep up with fast-changing trends, insisting that his instruments were the ideal and should not be changed. The story I refer to was quoted in All the Stops, the wonderful book about the twentieth-century American pipe organ written by Craig Whitney (PublicAffairs, 2003). (If you haven’t read this book yet, you’ve missed much. You can order it from the OHS catalogue: http://store.yahoo.com/ohscata log/crrwhallst.html.)


Whitney wrote:


Skinner was effectively frozen out of the company that bore his name, associated with it now in name only. But it was not only at Aeolian-Skinner that tastes were changing. To the romantic-orchestral organ that Skinner had built in the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1922, the young Cleveland organbuilder Walter Holtkamp added in 1933 something new and revolutionary—a small rückpositiv division designed along German classical lines. Though technically the term applied only to that part of a baroque organ that was detached from the rest and behind the organist’s back, typically in the gallery of a church, Holtkamp’s imitation was freestanding, playable via electro-pneumatic connections to the organ console, but its clear-speaking high-pitched stops were intended to produce a brighter tonality than the rest of the Skinner organ had. The addition produced much comment among organists and other builders, and it was seen as another blow to Skinner’s now old-hat notions that an organ should try to imitate an orchestra. At an organists’ convention, [Dorothy] Holden’s biography relates, Holtkamp saw Skinner standing alone, ignored now that he had gone out of fashion, and thought, ‘Now, this is a perfect shame! There stands one of the greatest figures in the art of organ-building, and all those sissies are afraid to go up to speak to him, for fear they might lose face among their peers!’ As Holtkamp told the story to Robert Bates, an organist friend, he went up to Skinner and said, “Mr. Skinner, I am Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland, and I just want to thank you for all you have meant and done for the art of organ-building through your splendid career.” Apparently, “Cleveland” was all that registered on Skinner, who was by then hard of hearing, and rejoined, “Cleveland! Say, you know, I have one of my best organs out there in the Art Museum, and some damn fool has come along and just ruined it.”1



I finished my letter to John Brombaugh saying: “Poor Skinner’s organ only lasted 11 years before Holtkamp got his hands on it. A Rückpositiv in 1933—who knew?” That was a pretty radical innovation for 1933. We raise the question, did Walter Holtkamp improve the Cleveland Museum’s organ? Who is the judge of that?

Should we alter works of art? We wouldn’t change a portrait by Rembrandt because Parisian clothing designers are featuring green this year or because it’s not stylish to put feathers in hats these days. We wouldn’t change a Shakespeare play because the word methinks isn’t part of every day speech now.
We would, however, alter an historic building by installing wheelchair ramps and elevators. Those instances where we condone such alterations often have to do with usefulness. You don’t have to consider the usefulness of a painting or sculpture. It is what it is. It’s a snapshot of an instant from another time. We can appreciate it (whether or not we like it) as an artist’s expression and we don’t depend on it for anything else.

Organs are different. A fine organ stands as a work of art, but it is also a tool to be used by contemporary artists to another artistic end. And, more than any other instrument, the organist is stuck with the instrument. If you are the regular organist of a church, all you do must be done with the existing instrument. If you are traveling to play a concert in a distant city, you must channel your creativity through whatever instrument you encounter.

When an organ is playing, the art of the builder, the player, and the composer are being combined to create yet another artwork, which is the performance itself—a virtual, temporary structure that thrills, moves, excites, or angers the listener, and that is gone as soon as the sound dies away. What’s more, it might thrill one listener and anger another. And each listener is responding to each component—the playing, the music, and the instrument. Does this view of performing music give the player license to propose alterations to the instrument, or more to my point, to replace the instrument with another?
There are of course many reasons why an organ might be relocated. Sometimes a parish has closed, either because its congregation has disbanded or merged with another. Sometimes an institution gets a new organist whose interests are different from those of predecessors. Sometimes, let’s face it, we are replacing an instrument that was never any good to begin with.

It is interesting to watch trends. We have spent a huge amount of energy relearning ancient skills, and developing new appreciations of early styles. E. Power Biggs and his contemporaries took us on virtual tours of older European organs (using the vinyl conveyances of the day). We assimilated, imitated, and built on the sounds we heard then. That work gave us greater ability to analyze and understand the components of sound, allowing us new ways to appreciate other styles. If we were devoted to the examples left by Arp Schnitger in the eighteenth century, suddenly we could appreciate and understand anew what Ernest Skinner was up to in 1920.

There was a wonderful moment at the convention of the Organ Historical Society in North Carolina in 2001 when on Wednesday, June 27, the convention visited the chapel at Duke University, home to three excellent and wildly varying pipe organs. There were three recitals—Mark Brombaugh played on the Flentrop organ, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played on the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played on the Aeolian. We were taken from Scheidemann to Wagner, from Liszt to Frescobaldi, from Buxtehude to Bossi all in a single day. What a dazzling display of the variety of the pipe organ and its music, and how passionately people defended their preferences as the buses took us back to Winston-Salem! I thought it would have been fun to have each of the performers play on each of the organs, but I had trouble finding supporters.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist . . .

A good friend of mine is a terrific singer whose husband is an astrophysicist. He works in a Smithsonian-affiliated lab at Harvard University using a telescope in Arizona that he operates remotely by computer. Once at a party Jane was asked what it’s like to live with such a brilliant person. “You know how they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist?” she replied. “There are lots of things around the house that really don’t need a rocket scientist!”

Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I know there’s a navigation trick called a gravitational slingshot that’s used to propel interplanetary probes through space. The vehicle is steered toward a planet and makes use of that body’s gravity to fling itself further into space. For example, on August 27, 1981, Voyager 2 used the gravity of Saturn to fling itself toward Uranus, where it arrived on January 30, 1986.2
I wonder if a gravitational slingshot could be used to break the circle and send the art of organbuilding to new places, new concepts, and new plateaus. It seems to me that many of the more recent innovations in organbuilding have been “returns” to one idea or another. When Craig Whitney described Holtkamp’s addition of a Rückpositiv as “new and revolutionary,” he was in fact referring to a concept that was some five hundred years old. We reach back through history to recreate the technology of the slider windchest and of voicing organ pipes on low wind pressures just as we reach back through history to understand again the glory of high-pressure reeds and air-tight swell boxes. We have incorporated computer technology to duplicate and enhance the registration equipment developed early in the twentieth century. We have built new organs using ancient architectural elements and we have modified those ancient elements to incorporate them in contemporary designs. But I suggest that no specific instrument or style of instrument, and the work of no one organbuilder can stand for the future of the instrument.

Igor Stravinsky assimilated all the tools of musical composition he had inherited and produced music that startled the world. And that music that caused riots when it was first performed is celebrated today as part of the wealth of musical expression. Is the future of the pipe organ based on the comparison between the instruments of early eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century America or can we assimilate all we’ve inherited to create new concepts for the organ, new ways to use the organ, and new ways to listen to it?

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Hometown loyalty
Local loyalty is legendary amongst native Mainers, those who have lived in Maine and nowhere else. There’s the story about the man from “away” who settled in a comfortable house with a backyard fence that separated his property from Eben’s (short for Ebenezer)—Eben had been born and grew up in that house. They were cordial neighbors for years, but our man was always aware that Eben continued to consider him an outsider. Forty years into their friendship, our man asked Eben, “We’ve been neighbors for forty years. Surely by now you must consider me part of the town.” Eben was quiet for a long moment, and then said quietly, “If the cat had kittens in the oven you wouldn’t call ’em biscuits.”
Some fifteen years ago I was renovating an organ in a small town in Maine. An elderly local organist was interested in the project and visited the church several times as I worked. He wanted me to see the organ in his church—an instrument built in the 1920s when his aunt was organist there. He had succeeded her some fifty years ago and was the proud steward of the little organ. I asked if he had lived there all his life. He replied, “not yet.”
I’ve lived in Boston all my life. Well, not really. I spent almost ten years in Ohio, first as an undergraduate and then as director of music at a church in Cleveland and working with organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin. Now although we vote in Boston, my wife and I divide our time between my hometown and mid-coast Maine, an area that I have grown to love. And I spend so much time away from home on Organ Clearing House projects (I’m coming to the end of five weeks in New York City) that I don’t seem to be at home for more than a few days at a time.
But I still consider myself a Bostonian. I’m proud of the city’s role in our country’s history. As a descendant of Paul Revere, I was brought up keenly aware of the sites of critical Revolutionary battles and the wealth of historic sites and buildings scattered throughout the area. We live a few hundred yards from the USS Constitution, familiarly known as Old Ironsides, the Navy’s frigate commissioned in 1797, now the oldest ship in the U.S. Navy. The Old North Church (“ . . . hang a lantern aloft in the North Church tower as a signal light; one if by land and two if by sea, I on the opposite shore will be ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm . . .”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride) is in our neighborhood.
I have been an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox, where until about 1990 the team was made up largely of loyal “lifers.” Carl Yastrzemski played his entire 23-year career for the Red Sox. That seems a gentler era in professional sports when a hometown hero stayed home and was admired over the decades. Dwight Evans seemed headed for such a career until the Sox released him as a free agent in 1990 after eighteen years at Fenway Park. He retired after playing one season for the Baltimore Orioles and that apparent disloyalty on the part of the Sox was the beginning of the end of my unabashed fandom. That feeling was iced followed the thrill of the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory in 2004. (They hadn’t won the World Series since 1918, the year they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 so Red Sox owner and theater impresario Harry Frazee could fund the first performances of No, No, Nanette.) No sooner had the dust settled over Fenway after the 2004 Series, than Sox hero Johnny Damon was traded to the hated New York Yankees. Don’t tell me it’s just a game!

§

Boston has always been an organ town. It was right around 1800 when the Puritans gave in to the evils of church music, and a small pipe organ was installed at King’s Chapel on Tremont Street in Boston. Within a few years, William
Goodrich and Thomas Appleton were building organs in Boston. In 1827, two young cabinetmakers from Salem, Massachusetts (the town famous for the witch trials of 1692) finished their apprenticeship with William Goodrich and opened their own organbuilding shop in Boston. Elias and George Hook started slowly, building fewer than ten organs a year for the first few years, but forty years later they were rocketing along at a fifty-five-per-year clip.
I love to think of the spectacle of a nineteenth-century workshop building that many organs. The instruments were shipped all over the country—how did they manage the correspondence for that many instruments without telephones and self-stick stamps, let alone fax machines and (God forbid) e-mail? How did they organize the flow of materials to their workshop? It takes tons of lumber, metal, and countless other materials to build an organ. The in-street trolley tracks that carried human passengers around Boston during the day were the routes of horse-drawn rail cars that brought rough materials to the workshop. The same carts transported the completed organs to barges, steamships, and railroads. Rural northern New England is pretty difficult to navigate today. There are few large roads, many hills and mountains, and lots of narrow bridges that cross treacherous rivers. It’s hard to imagine hauling a large pipe organ to northern New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine when teams of horses or oxen were the engines of the day.
And picture the rural church receiving its new Hook organ. A couple workers travel from the factory with the organ. The trip takes weeks. They enlist the help of locals for the heavy lifting and complete all facets of the installation. Since the trip took so long, they must have stayed on the job until they were sure the organ was perfect. There would be no relying on a routine two-month check-up to correct anything that went wrong with the new organ.
I suppose that before the workers left the completed installation, they would visit all the other churches nearby, offering the company’s services for more new instruments. There are Hook organs built in the 1860s and 1870s all around the country, including the Deep South. Was it awkward for the Yankees from the Hook factory to cross the Mason-Dixon Line with their organ shipments in the years following the Civil War? I imagine their wives spent sleepless nights worrying for their safety. And how did the southern organists and church committees get in touch with the sales department at Hook? Did Hook advertise in newspapers all across the country? We have copies and reproductions of the Hook catalogue and sales brochures (you can purchase them online from the Organ Historical Society).

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When I was a teenager, I had my organ lessons on a new organ built by Fisk (First Congregational Church, Winchester, Massachusetts). I had organist duties at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which had a terrific organ by
E. & G. G. Hook, with around 30 stops on three manuals, built in 1860. My family had a summer home on Cape Cod in a town that was home to a small Hook & Hastings organ, and another by William H. Clark.
You may not have heard of William H. Clark. He had been organist of the First Congregational Church in Woburn, playing on the same terrific Hook organ as I. In the late 1860s he moved across the square to the Unitarian Church, where in 1870 he oversaw the installation of an even larger three-manual Hook organ. The Unitarian Hook is the instrument that was relocated to Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin, Germany, and so beautifully restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen. Stephen Kinsley was the chief voicer at the Hook factory—today we would call him tonal director—and the great and good friend of William Clark—good enough that Clark was able to woo him away from Hook into an organbuilding partnership. William H. Clark Company was located in Indianapolis. They built about a dozen organs, including the one I knew so well on Cape Cod, another in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio—an instrument that I helped John Leek restore in the late 1970s.
Those were all wonderful organs, but I know I took them for granted. As an incoming freshman at Oberlin, I realized that my classmates had had no such luck. One guy played a pipe organ for the first time when he auditioned at Oberlin. All his high-school experience had been on electronic instruments. I was dazzled by the then brand-new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall, but quite a few of the organs I played there were much less than what I had grown up with. Growing up in Boston, I had been fortunate to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals on “his” Flentrop organ at Busch Hall (then called the Busch-Reisinger Museum) at Harvard University. I heard the dedication concert of the Frobenius organ at First Church in Cambridge. Few people knew much about the Danish organbuilder Frobenius in the 1970s, and the organ was a knockout. I heard Fisk organs at Harvard, King’s Chapel and Old West Church in Boston, and another dozen or so in the suburbs.

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You may have noticed that all the organs I’ve mentioned so far are trackers. There is no American city where the revival (I like to say Renaissance) of the pipe organ was more active than in Boston. When I was in high school, companies like Fisk, Noack, Andover, and Bozeman were building exciting and fascinating new organs at a rapid rate. My several mentors took me to workshop open houses where I first experienced the ethic and mystery of the organbuilding shop. And skillful organists populated the area’s organ benches, playing recitals followed by receptions and parties that all helped me learn to appreciate the pipe organ, not only as a musical instrument but as a community and way of life.
It wasn’t until after I graduated from Oberlin that I had any meaningful experiences with electro-pneumatic instruments. I worked with John Leek replacing leathers in a large Aeolian-Skinner organ in Cleveland and in several other smaller instruments, notably one by E.M. Skinner in original condition. When I returned to Boston after my Ohio hiatus, I took on the care of the Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Church, Copley Square, and the Aeolian-Skinner (4 manuals, 237 ranks) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church). Being around those organs exposed me to some of the finest musicians and helped open my eyes to the range of tone and expression for which those organs are famous.
And those Skinner organs are products of Boston. Traveling on the Southeast Expressway (Route I-93 south of Boston) you can still read “Aeolian-Skinner” written on the wall of a large brick building, directly across the highway from the headquarters of the Boston Globe. The large erecting room at the south end of the building was sacrificed for the construction of the highway, precipitating the company’s move to Randolph, Massachusetts, and signaling the beginning of the end of the company. But in the “glory days,” Ernest Skinner himself worked in that building, developing the rich orchestral voices for which he is still famous. (Or we might say, after the tracker-action blitz of the 1970s, voices for which he is again famous!)
Skinner was fascinated by the ergonomics of the organ console—though I suppose the word ergonomics was not part of our language until after his lifetime. He watched organists as they played and perfected the dimensions and geometry of the console. He worked hard to lessen the distance between keyboards—no small feat given the need for piston buttons large enough to use easily (piston buttons that easily conflict with the sharp keys of the keyboard below). The design of the Skinner keyboard included tracker-touch springs, lots of ranges of adjustment for travel, spring tension, and contact point. The stop knobs had distinctive over-sized ivory faces, with names engraved in a font (another word that Skinner didn’t know) that was both elegant and easily legible. He was proud of his combination actions, and with good reason, as he developed them in the first years of the twentieth century—among the first mechanical machines that functioned as programmable binary computers.
He invented the whiffletree expression engine, inspired by the rigs developed to hitch teams of horses to a carriage. The horse-teams would perform better if each individual had freedom of motion, and each individual’s relative strength could complement the others. By extension, Skinner’s expression machine has individual power pneumatics for each stage that are hitched together using the same geometry as the team. Good observing, Mr. Skinner.

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I’ve mentioned several organbuilders who contributed to the culture of Boston. Others include George Stevens, George Hutchings, S.S. Hamill, Robert Roche, Nelson Barden, and the Spencer Organ Company. Extending the area to northern New England, you can add the names of Robert Waters, Jeremy Cooper, Stephen Russell, and David Moore. Extend the area to central Massachusetts and you can add Stefan Maier and William A. Johnson (later Wm. Johnson & Sons). Add them all up, from Goodrich to Fisk, from 1800 to 2010, and you get a total of something like 8,500 pipe organs built in Boston and surrounding areas. It’s a terrific heritage—a rich variety of musical imagination and creation that includes some of the finest organs ever built. But in sheer numbers, it pales in comparison to the world’s largest organbuilder, M.P. Möller, a single company that produced 13,500 organs in less than 100 years, all in the same town.

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It’s a beautiful town. The Italian North End has scores of terrific small restaurants. The Freedom Trail (United States National Park) is an organized walking tour of two-and-a-half miles that covers sixteen important historical sites. The Museum of Fine Arts has impressive collections of ancient Roman and Egyptian art as well as the expected glories of high European Art. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comprises the private collection of an individual, opened to the public following her death. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of James Levine is as good as a great orchestra can be, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Symphony Hall (right across the street from the Christian Science Mother Church) has recently been renovated.
There’s plenty to do on the water. Boston Harbor Cruises operates tours ranging from an evening hour or two to a full day whale-watch cruise. You can take a fast ferry to Provincetown and back in a day. And if you visit in the fall, you can add a couple days of coveted foliage-touring in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The website of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists
(bostonago.com) has a good listing of organ recitals and related events. Emmanuel Church (Episcopal) on Newbury Street is the only place in the United States where you can hear a complete Bach cantata with orchestra every Sunday presented as part of worship service. The music is presented by the resident ensemble Emmanuel Music, a highly respected and accomplished group of some of the city’s finest musicians. Visit www.emmanuelmusic.org to see their schedule of performances. As Newbury Street is the city’s high-end shopping district, you can count on finding an exquisite Sunday brunch to complement the wonderful music.
Come to Boston, the pipe organ capital of America.

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The times they are a-changin’
When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in churches. We lived in a suburb of Boston that had a large Episcopal parish (my father was the rector), two Congregational churches, Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Christian Science, and three Roman Catholic. (There aren’t that many Presbyterian churches in the Boston area.) All of them but two of the Catholic churches had pipe organs, and as an ecumenical kid and a young organist to boot, I played on most of the organs. I had a series of regular jobs playing for churches there, and I remember well that it was easy to come and go from the buildings. All of them had regular staffs and office hours. I guess I took for that for granted. In neighboring towns in each direction the situation was the same—a gaggle of big church buildings, each with a pipe organ.
That was the 1960s and 1970s and the organbuilding renaissance was in full swing in New England. Fisk, Noack, Andover, Casavant, Bozeman, and several European firms were building new organs in churches all around the area. Seems we were attending dedication recitals every few months. But the handwriting was on the wall. Aeolian-Skinner was breathing its last, and I remember clearly when the rumors started to fly that that venerable firm was closing. I was sixteen and was more than a little self-righteous when I spread the news to colleague organists before a recital at the First Congregational Church, ironically the new home of a three-manual Fisk organ (Opus 50) that had just replaced a Skinner. That church was two blocks from our house and was where I had my lessons and did most of my practicing.
In the 1970s I went to school at Oberlin, where I started working part-time for John Leek, the school’s organ technician, who did lots of organ service work on the side. Later he started his own business, now operated by his son James. Together we blasted all over Ohio and western Pennsylvania and I remember all the churches had at least a secretary and a sexton on duty. The secretary knew everyone in the parish and could anticipate what would happen next, and the sexton scrubbed and polished five days a week and was on hand on Sunday mornings making the coffee and being sure that all the light bulbs were working. You could count on the sexton to have the heat on just right in time for the organ tuning, and as we worked he was in the chancel several times, almost a nuisance, making sure we knew there was coffee in the office.
It’s different today. Many of those parishes I knew as a teenager have dwindled, 75 or 80 people spread out across 600-seat sanctuaries that were once full. Foundation plantings are overgrown, gutters and downspouts swing free, the bell can’t be rung because it’s off its rocker, the Echo division has been shut down because the roof leaked, and the secretary is in between nine and eleven, three days a week. Sexton? Forget it. A cleaning service comes in once a week, but the tile floor in Fellowship Hall never gets polished. Motors and pumps are never lubricated, heaps of ancient pageant costumes are shrouded with spider webs, and there’s an almost ghostly sense of yesterday’s glory.
And I almost forgot—the last three organists haven’t used the pedals.

The good old days
In recent weeks I’ve had two telling experiences with these “former glory” parishes in my area: one that cancelled the service contract I’ve had for 25 years, saying they don’t use the organ any more, and another where the insurance settlement for water damage to the organ was used for something else. I’ve been reflecting on what it must have been like in the twenties when all those buildings were new and all the pews were full. Those were the days when American organbuilders were producing 2,000 organs a year. Most of the venerable firms that contributed to that staggering output are gone. This is off the top of my head, but it’s a fair guess based on experience that the lofty club of 20th-century 20-organs-a-year firms included Skinner, Aeolian-Skinner, Hook & Hastings, Kimball, Kilgen, Schantz, Reuter, Wicks, and Austin. Don’t mention Möller with dozens of hundred-organ years, and even many organ-a-day years. Unbelievable.
And by the way, at least two of the most prolific American organbuilders were mostly in the secular world—Wurlitzer built thousands of organs for movie theaters and all sorts of other venues, and Aeolian built more than a thousand instruments for the homes of the rich and famous. Frank Woolworth, the Five & Dime king, had the first residence organ to include a full-length 32-foot Open Wood Diapason. You really have to stop and think just what that means. The biggest twelve pipes of that stop would fill half a modern semi-trailer. Big house. And by the way, it was his country house. He also had a big Aeolian in his city house at 990 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nice address. In an age when there was no central air conditioning, no heated swimming pools, no surround-sound home movie theaters, Mr. Woolworth had a 30-horsepower organ blower in his basement.
I don’t know whether the American organ industry has had any 100-organ years in my lifetime. Probably, because Möller lasted into the 1990s, but I think you get the point. It’s less than that now.

The coal miner’s heritage
Yesterday I visited a Roman Catholic parish in central Pennsylvania that is offering an organ for sale, built by M. P. Möller in the nineteen-teens. It has 26 stops on two manuals. There’s a 16-foot Open Wood in the Pedal, a lovely 16-foot metal Diapason on the Great, and four reeds. I would have expected a dull and heavy sound, but the organbuilder who renovated the instrument about eight years ago described the organ as having a brilliant and exciting tonal character, enhanced by the spacious acoustics of its large and vertical Gothic building. I might not have bothered to visit if he hadn’t spoken so passionately about what a beautiful organ it is. Let’s face it, there are plenty of lukewarm Möller organs on the market.
It’s a coal-mining town—there are lots of coal towns in that area. It was a family-owned mine with as many as 20,000 employees. The ruling family had built housing, schools, a hospital, and many church buildings. Trouble is, the mine stopped operating 50 years ago. There’s a factory that builds high-end stoves, but it’s about to close. The only remaining business of any size is a meat-packing firm that employs around a hundred people. The junior high and high school have closed and are boarded up—the kids are bused nine miles to the next town. Twenty-two hundred people live there, and there’s not much for them to do. The movie theater is in the same town as the schools. A shopping mall ten miles away stripped downtown of all its businesses. And the jobs? A lot of them must be further away than that.
My host was the priest of the Catholic parish. He drove me around town, telling me the local lore and history. He said the owners of the mine were Episcopalians. We drove past their house and saw that “their church” was next door. Though the congregation had always been small, the Episcopal church was exquisite. We didn’t go in, but he told me that all the windows are by Tiffany. And although there are fewer than ten parishioners now, the place is funded in perpetuity, and I’d guess the building had been painted within the last year. The only two people who are buried on church grounds in the town are the mine owner and his wife. The company had provided land for six cemeteries. No schools, no jobs, six cemeteries.
There was one small and exclusive Episcopal church in town, but there had been four bustling Roman Catholic parishes: one Slovak (St. John Nepomucene), one Polish (St. Casimir), one Irish (St. Anne’s), and one Italian (St. Anthony’s). Because they all were founded by and for first-generation immigrants in the early 20th century, each had a distinct cultural and ethnic character. Four years ago, the diocese directed that the parishes should merge. Oof. Did you hear that? Four years ago. Remember I said the organ had been renovated eight years ago? That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. My visit had started at the rectory where the priest lives. When we went outside to get in his car for our tour, he introduced me to his neighbor across the street who told me he remembered when they “came around collecting for the organ project. So much money and then they close the place.”
A significant part of the priest’s job is to divest the merged parish of redundant properties. As we drove he pointed out the recently sold vacant lot where the first building of the Irish parish had been, decrepit rectories, and crumbling church and school buildings.
The building where the organ is (by the way, it’s the Slovak one) stands in a residential neighborhood on a side street that slopes gently up from south to north. That means the morning sun had shone through the St. Cecilia window every day baking the back of the organ until the organbuilder who renovated it recommended that the window be closed. The priest asked if that had been necessary and I replied that since people started building organs in churches there have been conflicts between organs and windows. It’s both a shame to bake the organ and to lose the window.
I was impressed and moved by the relationship this priest has with his community. It seemed as though each time we turned onto a different street he beeped and waved to someone, sometimes calling out the window. We ate lunch in a pizza shop where he was obviously well known, well loved, and very comfortable. A troop of motorcycles thundered by, inspiring a whole series of hoots back and forth through the open door as neighbors (they must have been parishioners) expressed their reactions. I suggested maybe they were looking for the Catholic church. After all, it was Saturday and there would be a Mass in a couple hours.

Let’s get together and be all right
Funny to quote Bob Marley when discussing the Poles, the Slovaks, the Italians, and the Irish. They’re all Roman Catholics (the last four I mean), but they were surely not ready to be one parish. St. Anne’s had built a new building in the sixties. Because it was in the best condition, it would be retained. But because it was built in the sixties, it was not the most lovely. Skylights were popular then, so the ridge of the cruciform roof is glass. There’s no air-conditioning, so it’s terribly hot inside whenever the sun shines. There’s dingy industrial carpet, tacky ceiling fans, and straight, plain pews with crumbling varnish. Imagine a life-long parishioner of St. John’s (that’s the Slovak parish) leaving the arched Gothic ceilings, gorgeous windows, colorful statues, and renovated pipe organ and going to Mass the next Sunday amidst that sixties kitsch.
I asked the priest how in the world you preside over the forced and unwanted union of such diverse ethnic and cultural communities. There was plenty of anger, and lots of people left the church altogether. Most of them grudgingly made the adjustment, but it wasn’t easy. My host had been a seminary student just after the Second Vatican Council, and told me how as a young priest he had been involved in the removal of statuary from church buildings as part of that “new time.” But as he started his ministry in this coal town, he found himself moving statues and icons from the other three buildings to adorn the otherwise blank slate of St. Anne’s building, itself a product of the austerity of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. They moved memorial plaques, a tabernacle, the Stations of the Cross, a pulpit, and a heavy “priestly” chair, among many other things.
When I say moving statues, I mean personally moving statues. He’d get together a couple guys and they’d load these things into station wagons and pickup trucks. The Sunday after they moved the life-size statue of St. Anthony into the narthex, an elderly Italian woman came home from the 7:30 Mass and starting making lasagna in celebration of the appearance of “her” saint. Her middle-aged daughter called the priest to share the family’s delight.
They even tried to achieve parity by moving the same number of things from each building, a formula that only works if you count “The Stations” as one! Now I’ve got to admit, this is a mighty various collection of stuff. There’s no artistic or stylistic connection in the collection. It looks a little like a saintly yard sale. But while I doubt it calmed all the storms and salved all the wounds, it was a great thought and it obviously means a lot to this diminished and altered community.

What in the world is next for our world?
I left this town and this experience for the three-hour drive to Manhattan to continue work on our project there. Three became four as I realized I was not the only guy who thought of driving through the Lincoln Tunnel on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I had plenty of time to reflect on my day. I had left home that morning at the militaresque oh-dark-hundred to drive 400 miles to see a 90-year-old Möller. Who would have thought? I found a cheerful instrument beautifully renovated, but suffering at the hands of four years of unheated neglect. I lifted a façade pipe and put a photocopied psalm between toe and toe-hole to silence a cipher. The pedal contacts were full of dust and other stuff causing so many ciphers that I didn’t play the pedals at all. Drawing a pedal knob was enough to show the weight and presence of the impressive bass stops. I played for 20 minutes to get the hang of it, figured out a few tricks to navigate around ciphers, and made a ten-minute recording. When I went downstairs, there was a group of former parishioners standing in the street with the priest. They had come when they heard the organ through the open door, the first time it had been played in three years.
The Gothic-inspired case is made of quarter-sawn oak, with lots of beautiful carved and formed details. The drawknob console is comfortable and well appointed. It’s nestled in an alcove of the case. The player sits under the impost and façade, looking down the aisle to the altar. There are heaps of white plaster dust on the pews. There are empty pedestals from which the saints migrated across town. Wrought-iron votive-candle stands are heaped in the narthex. The choir loft has pews to accommodate at least 50 singers. There is still a tray of paper clips, a basket of sharp pencils, a stack of photocopied psalms now one fewer, and a glass canister of Hall’s and Ricolas. But there are no people.
You can sense the decades of rites of liturgy and rites of passage, all the celebrations, sounds, smells, and sights of a century of worship in a vibrant community. One can hardly grasp the number of First Communions with pretty little girls in frilly white dresses, weddings, and funerals, to say nothing of tens of thousands of Masses. There are 5,000 weekends in a century. I bet it’s an understatement to say that there were at least five Masses a week for many years, 20 in the Glory Days. All that’s left is an organ that needs a new home. It’s got a lot of miles on it. Good care. No rust. Only driven by a little old lady on Sundays . . . and Saturdays, and Mondays . . . Take a look at <A HREF="http://www.organclearinghouse.com">www.organclearinghouse.com</A&gt;.
And to you all, my colleagues and friends in the world of the pipe organ, we have a special art that needs special care in this particular and transitory moment. 

John Bishop

Give it your life

For many people, a job is just a job. I’ve seen film clips of people working in industrial-scale meat packing facilities, flailing away at a relentless marching army of animal carcasses, videos that often accompany news stories about occupational injuries. Near where we live in Maine, there is a long tradition of monotonous food processing in the seafood business. If it was your job to shuck clams in a busy cannery, you were likely to put a knife through your palm at least once in your career.

Forty years ago, I had a landlord in Ohio who worked in the nearby Ford factory. Paul was an ebullient, fun-loving guy whose job was a means to an end. His skilled position came with a high hourly wage that enabled his muscle-car hobby. He played an aggressive game of poker and approached his fun at full throttle. He seemed proud to be the only one in his circle of friends who had flipped a car end-over-end in his driveway. His son had paid a high price for that lifestyle, confined to a wheelchair as the result of a teen-age sledding accident that involved adult beverages used childishly. That Ford factory was not the pride of Paul’s life. He did not consider his work there as his life’s mission. It simply allowed him to support his family and have fun.

My father was an Episcopal priest. Because of his service on Guam in World War II, he was not ordained until he was nearly thirty, but he was a priest every day of his life until his death a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday. That was his calling, and he was faithful to it through his last breath.

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who helps writers prepare their manuscripts and sell them to publishing companies. Her work brings richness to my life as I am exposed to her clients, sharing meals with them, and learning about their passions. A university professor who is passionate about Civil War history is just as devoted to his trade as any musician or instrument builder I have known. He puts down his fork, and with arms waving, describes a slavery document he has discovered, demonstrating its significance to concurrent events. When two or more are gathered, it is comparable to the table full of organbuilders talking earnestly into the night about mixture compositions or the best brass for reed tongues.

Some of the writers I have met are not devoted for life to a particular study but to the art of storytelling, whether fiction or non-fiction. One of Wendy’s clients, environmental journalist Katherine Miles, has written books about an Irish famine ship, celebrated because not a single immigrant died on board in ten years of constant voyages; about Super Storm Sandy and the inadequacies of weather forecasting in the United States; and about earthquakes. Did you know there is a nuclear power plant, built on a geological fault line, twenty-four miles north of Manhattan? What could happen? Google “Explosion at Indian Point Power Plant” and you will find newspaper stories with headlines like, “Explosion closes Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City; no danger of radiation leak.” (New York Post, November 8, 2010). Kate’s next book is in the mill right now. Bet you’re interested to know what it is about.

 

A modern Renaissance

I am thinking today about people who are passionate about their work because two colleagues, seniors in the field of organbuilding, are traveling together in Morocco, posting photos on Facebook as they go. Gene Bedient and John Brombaugh, two berets in a land of fezzes, are seen at an olive market, in the Medinah of Marrakech, at the Grand Mosque in Casablanca, and returning from an evening at Rick’s Café. One photo shows John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back. I commented, “I’ve had jobs like that.”

John apprenticed with Charles Fisk and Fritz Noack and worked as a journeyman for Rudolf von Beckerath. In 1971, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to study historic European organs. He founded his fabled firm, John Brombaugh & Company, in 1968 in Germantown, Ohio. In 1977, the firm was reorganized as John Brombaugh & Associates, Inc., and moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he continued building trend-setting instruments until his retirement in 2005.

Gene Bedient founded the Bedient Organ Company in 1969. When he retired in 2010, it was reorganized as the Bedient Pipe Organ Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, LLC, and continues to produce fine instruments with some of Gene’s former employees at the helm.

The Noack Organ Company, founded in 1960, and C. B. Fisk, Inc., founded in 1961, were among the first of a wave of new firms founded by young men passionate about the pipe organ, especially as it was built in Northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with Brombaugh and Bedient, other firms that followed included Hellmuth Wolff (1968), Karl Wilhelm (1966), and Bozeman-Gibson (1971).

Some of the earliest work on tracker-action organs in the United States was accomplished by the Andover Organ Company, founded in 1948 at the very cusp of “The Movement,” operated and owned for several years by Charles Fisk, and continuing seventy years later as prominent builders and restorers of pipe organs. Fisk founded his eponymous firm in nearby Gloucester, Massachusetts, close to his family’s summer home, and Noack came from Germany to work with Fisk, so the early location of the Andover Organ Company can be traced as a principal reason why so much mid-twentieth-century activity in the pipe organ world was centered in Boston. The proximity of the New England Conservatory of Music added to the excitement with its vibrant community of young organists arriving in town every year.

Here are a few more regional tidbits. E. Power Biggs lived on Highland Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became organist of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Harvard Square in 1932. He was famously fired from that position because the rector felt that his concert career was detracting from his work at the church. On January 2, 1935, Charles Fisk, a boy chorister there at the time, noted in his diary “I went to choir practice, Mr. Bigs [sic] wasn’t there.”¹ As an apprentice with Walter Holtkamp, Fisk worked on the 1956 installation of the organ at St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (my father’s alma mater and the site of my first organ lessons). Melville Smith, the director of the neighboring Longy School of Music and organist for the seminary, was an early proponent of the resurgence of tracker organs.  

There must have been a moment when Smith, Biggs, Holtkamp, and Fisk were together in that cramped loft, discussing one of the first modern Rückpositiv divisions. It would have been around that time when Biggs commissioned the now-revered organ by Flentrop for installation at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall), as the organ was installed in 1957. C. B. Fisk was founded just four years later.

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If you made a list of every American organbuilding firm founded in the United States between 1960 and 1975, and a list of all the people who worked for them and tried to draw lines to connect all the relationships, it would look like the Etch A Sketch^® you got for Christmas in 1966 after you tried to color in the whole screen. Take it back a step: Charles Fisk apprenticed with Walter Holtkamp in the mid 1950s, John Brombaugh worked with both Noack and Fisk before starting his firm, George Bozeman worked with Otto Hoffman in Texas, then with Noack. Fritz Noack once said he figured that most organ guys in the United States whose first name is John worked for him at one time. That list would include Brombaugh, Boody, Dower, and Farmer (but not me!).

A new wave of firms emerged during the 1970s, including Taylor & Boody (who both worked with Brombaugh) and Richards-Fowkes (who both worked with Brombaugh), you get the picture.

Because of a few posts on Facebook, I am painting a picture of a dramatic movement within the worlds of arts and humanities. While it is hard to pin down exactly who started it, E. Power Biggs is a good guess. Between 1942 and 1958, Biggs hosted a weekly radio program on the CBS Radio Network, using the experimental, trendsetting Aeolian-Skinner organ at Busch Hall, the organ replaced by the new Flentrop in 1958. The radio broadcasts were abruptly cancelled shortly after the installation of the Flentop organ. His revered recording, Bach: Organ Favorites was released in 1961, the same year as the founding of C. B. Fisk.

Unlike the chairperson of the fund-raising dinner whose life is ruined for leaving someone off the list of people to thank, I know very well that I am unable to name everyone who has been important to this movement. But as I look at the photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, I reflect on how that grand generation of inquisitive masters has passed the baton to their successors.

Charles Fisk died of cancer in 1983 at the age of fifty-eight. As someone who is just turning sixty-two, I admire Charlie’s profound contribution to the world of the organ, and the wider world in general. His company’s website (www.cbfisk.com) includes a beautifully written biography of Charlie and of his philosophies. The bottom of that page bears a quote from him: “The organ is a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to seem to be alive.” That philosophy stands as mantra for that generation of organbuilders and all who follow them. One might say, a mantra for a Montre.

John Brombaugh, Karl Wilhelm, Fritz Noack, and George Bozeman are in their eighties. Gene Bedient, John Boody, George Taylor, and Manuel Rosales are in their seventies. Collectively, these masters and their peers are responsible for the creation of hundreds of individual instruments. But there is so much more. Along with luminary performers like Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and John Eliot Gardiner, they changed the world of music. Through their intensive studies of instruments built by earlier masters, they brought a new vitality to our instrument, and inspired generations of musicians to explore the symbiotic relationships between historic repertory, the people who played it, and the instruments they played it on.

I do not intend this to be read as though the classically inspired tracker-action organ is the way, the truth, and the life. I like to think that the “organ wars” of the 1970s and 1980s are over. I am often asked which type of organ I prefer, and I always answer that I prefer good organs. My favorite organ is the best organ I have heard today. An important result of the narrowly named “tracker organ revival” is that the emphasis on excellent craftsmanship inspired new understanding of the work of geniuses like Ernest Skinner, who built organs in a comparatively huge factory with hundreds of workers but maintained a level of quality and history of innovation that allow his century-old organs to sing like Fisk’s ideal as a living organism. It has been nearly forty years since the Organ Clearing House first added a Skinner organ to the list of available instruments, joining the seemingly endless list of organs by Hook & Hastings, Hutchings, and Jardine.

That revived awareness has led to the heritage of firms like Schoenstein, Lively-Fulcher, and Nichols & Simpson who specialize in building high-quality electro-pneumatic organs with deep artistic content. Likewise, we are blessed with a generation of young organists who are comfortable playing on any style of instrument, placing the beauty of the music above bias regarding the medium. If an artist can revel in playing the music of Bach on an organ by Silbermann or Paul Fritts, so can an artist revel in playing her own transcription of a Wagner overture on an organ by Skinner or Schoenstein. The Skinner organ informs the performance of the transcription as fully as the Silbermann informs Bach.

§

There is a historic building in our little village in Maine that has been home to a fine fresh seafood market on the left side of the ground floor. The symmetrical right side housed a leather shop until recently—the two businesses share a set of three central steps up from the sidewalk. A couple years ago, August Avantaggio, a local young man who is the son of the beloved, now deceased area surgeon, fulfilled his lifelong ambition of opening a butcher shop in the space next to the fish market. He was joined right away by two thirty-something guys who are as passionate about their work as any lifelong organbuilder is about our instrument. They source the meat they sell from local organic and free-range farmers, and they cut and package it expertly. I was in the store one afternoon (those who know me can easily guess that I am in there frequently) looking for something good for supper, and spent a few extra minutes watching Ryan take apart a side of beef. I asked him to narrate for me, and when he started with the Latin names of the various muscles, I knew I was talking with someone who cares about his work.

The Riverside Butcher Company is the antithesis of the punishing and cruel industrial meat packers I mentioned at the outset. They offer the finest products using the finest materials, and the apex of craftsmanship. You could almost be describing an organbuilding shop. Of course, things are a little a more expensive there. But one bite of that $7 per pound whole chicken, perfectly roasted, provides a symphony of sensations. It just is that much better. Last fall, Wendy and I hosted a reunion of her father’s extended family. They are all of German heritage and we thought a sausage cookout with a tub of sauerkraut would be a big hit. August pointed me to a website with hundreds of recipes for sausages, and I conferred with Ross to choose just the right ones. What fun it was to pick up fifty pounds of custom-made sausages and run the grill that evening.

There are lots of ways to criticize the impact Facebook has had on our culture, but when I see a photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, and another of Gene Bedient standing in a picturesque Moroccan square, I felt a fun connection to the band of people who are my colleagues in this unique compelling field. My work with the Organ Clearing House is special to me because it brings me into direct contact with so many of you—you who have elevated the art through life-long dedication.  

Building a single pipe organ is an expression of ambition and joy mixed with moments of confusion, questioning, anxiety, and uncertainty. Building a hundred pipe organs expands all that exponentially. Working together with a band of like-minded people, all working in parallel, produces more than just a lot of organs, more than a trade, more than a movement. It is an expression of the best of the humanities. And it comes at a time in our history when celebrating the best of humanity is heartwarming, reassuring, and necessary.  

Good work, friends. Keep it up, pass it on, and feed the monkey.

Notes

1. Craig Whitney, All the Stops, Public-Affairs, 2003, p. 86.

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Whenever I’m demonstrating, playing, selling, or moving an organ, people ask, “How did you get into this?” I’m pretty sure every organist and organbuilder has fielded a similar question.

Roots
I got interested in the pipe organ as a pup. When I sang in the junior choir as an eight-year-old kid, the director was Carl Fudge, a harpsichord maker and devoted musician. When my voice changed and I joined the senior choir, I sat with other members of Boston’s community of musical instrument makers. I took organ lessons, found summer jobs in organbuilders’ workshops, studied organ performance at Oberlin, and never looked back. It’s as if there was nothing else I could have done.
As I’ve gone from one chapter of my life to the next, I’ve gathered a list of people who I think have been particularly influential in the history of the pipe organ, and who have influenced my opinions and philosophy. I could never mention them all in one sitting, but I thought I’d share thoughts about a few of them in roughly the order of their life spans. This is not to be considered a comprehensive or authoritative list, just the brief recollections of their role in the work of my life.
Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was a prolific organbuilder active in Germany and the Netherlands. He was involved in the construction of well over a hundred organs—more than forty of them survive and have been made famous through modern recordings. As a modern-day organbuilder, I marvel at that body of work accomplished without electric power, UPS, or telephones. Schnitger’s work burst into my consciousness with E. Power Biggs’ landmark Columbia recording, The Golden Age of the Organ, a two-record set that featured several of Schnitger’s finest instruments. I was captivated by the vital sound, especially of the four-manual organ at Zwolle, the Netherlands, on which Biggs played Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto from L’estro armonico. His playing was clear, vital, and energetic, and I remain impressed at how an organ completed in 1721 could sound so fresh and brilliant to us today.
Schnitger’s organs all sport gorgeous high-Baroque cases and some of the most beautiful tonal structures ever applied to pipe organs. Many of the most influential organists of his day were influenced by Schnitger’s work, which was a centerpiece of the celebrated North German school of organbuilding and composition.
In my opinion, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) is a strong candidate for best organbuilder, period. No single practitioner produced more tonal, mechanical, or architectural innovations. Among many other great ideas, he pioneered the concept of multiple wind pressures, not only in a single organ but also in a single windchest. Big organs in large French churches had the perennial problem of weak trebles, especially in the reeds. That’s why the Treble Cornet was so important to Classic French registration—if you wanted to play a dialogue between the bass and treble of a reed stop, accompanied by a Principal, you used the Trompette for the bass and Cornet for the treble (remember Clérambault 101!). Cavaillé-Coll used one pressure for bass, slightly higher pressure for mid-range, and higher still for the treble. This required complicated wind systems that would be no problem for us today, but remember those were the days of hand-pumping. Imagine that for more than half of Widor’s career at St. Sulpice, the 100-stop organ had to be pumped by hand. Those poor guys at the bellows handles must have hated that wind-sucking Toccata!
Cavaillé-Coll’s organs created vast new possibilities for composers through tone color and snazzy pneumatic registration devices. It’s safe to say that without his work we wouldn’t have the music of Franck, Vierne, Widor, Dupré, Tournemire, Messiaen, Saint-Saëns, Pierné, Mulet, or Naji Hakim, to name a few. A pretty dry world . . .
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was a Scottish-born industrialist who built great companies in nineteenth-century America for the production of steel and many other products. The rapid expansion of the railroads formed a lucrative market for Carnegie’s products, and he built a vast fortune. He once stated that he would limit his earnings to $50,000 a year and use the surplus for the greater good. He gave millions of dollars for the establishment of great universities, notably Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and countless library buildings were built throughout the United States with his money. He loved the pipe organ and was a loyal customer of the Aeolian Organ Company, commissioning several instruments for his homes. His love of the organ did not carry across to religious devotion—he was cynical enough about organized religion that as he gave money for the commissioning of new organs for churches he said that it was his intent to give the parishioners something to listen to besides the preaching. In all, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation contributed to the purchase of more than 8,000 pipe organs. During the time I was a student at Oberlin and for several years after my graduation, I was organist of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, where there was a large Austin organ donated by Andrew Carnegie.
Dudley Buck (1839–1909) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Trinity College, and studied organ at the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany. He was organist at Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York, for many years, was a prolific composer and an active concert artist. His studies in Europe formed him as one of a group of American musicians who brought European virtuosity to the United States. This in turn inspired the transition of the nineteenth-century American organ from the simple, gentle, English-inspired instruments of the early eighteenth century with primitive Swell boxes and tiny pedal compasses to the instruments more familiar to us, with significant independent pedal divisions, primary and secondary choruses, and powerful chorus reeds. The first American organ Renaissance was under way.
Ernest Skinner (1866–1960), one of America’s most famous organbuilders, was a pioneer in the development of electro-pneumatic keyboard and stop actions, and in the tonal development of the symphonic organ. His brilliantly conceived combination actions gave organists convenient, instant, and nearly silent control over the resources of a huge organ. Those wonderful machines can fairly be described as some of the first user-programmable binary computers, built in Boston starting in about 1904, using wood, leather, and a Rube Goldberg assortment of hardware. Mr. Skinner devoted tremendous effort to the creation of the ergonomic organ console, experimenting with measurements and geometry to put keyboards, pedalboard, stop, combination, and expression controls within easy reach of the fingers and feet of the player. He was devoted to the highest quality and was immensely proud of his artistic achievements. He lived long enough to see his organs fall out of favor as interest in older styles of organbuilding was rekindled, and he died lonely and bitter. He would be heartened, delighted, and perhaps a little cocky had he witnessed the reawakening of interest in his organs some twenty-five years after his death.
E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) was central to the second American organ Renaissance. He was born and educated in England and experienced the great European organs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before coming to the United States. Disenchanted with mid-twentieth-century American organbuilding and empowered by the introduction of the long-playing record (remember those black discs with the holes in the center?), he traveled Europe with his wife Peggy, recording those venerable instruments, handling the heavy and bulky recording equipment himself. He produced a long series of recordings of historic European organs, each of which focused on a single country or region and featured performances of music on the organs for which it was intended. This vast body of recorded performances brought the rich heritage of the European organ to the ears of countless Americans for the first time. Biggs’s recordings were an early example of the power of the media, made in the same era of fast-developing technology in which the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race was so heavily influenced by that mysterious new medium, television.
The response from organists and organbuilders was swift and enthusiastic. Dozens of small shops were established and important schools of music shifted the focus of their teaching to emphasize the relationship of organ music and playing to those marvelous older instruments.
In 1956 Biggs imported a three-manual organ built by Flentrop, which was installed in Harvard’s Germanic Museum, later known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum, now known as Busch Hall. Using that remarkable instrument, Biggs produced his record series released on Columbia Records, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, which became the best-selling series of solo classical recordings in history. Especially through the wide distribution of his recordings, Biggs was enormously influential, introducing a new world-view of the organ to the American public.
Virgil Fox (1912–1980) was a contemporary of Biggs, equally widely known and respected, who represented a very different point of view. He was champion of a romantic style of playing, celebrating organs with symphonic voices, lots of expression boxes, and plenty of luscious strings. His virtuosity and musicianship were without question, his lifestyle was flamboyant, and he was outspoken in his opinions, especially as regarded his artistic rival Biggs. Fox was determined that the “new” approach to organs and organ playing as borrowed from earlier centuries in Europe would not overshadow the romantic symphonic instruments that he so loved.
The rivalry between Biggs and Fox formed a fascinating artistic portrait and could well have been a healthy balance, but at times was vitriolic enough to become destructive. We had tracker-backers and “stick” organs on one side and slush buckets and murk merchants on the other. Those members of the public who were not interested enough in the organ to know how to take sides often simply walked away.
Jason McKown (1906–1989) was a right-hand man to Ernest Skinner, born in the same year as Mr. Biggs. It was my privilege to succeed Jason in the care of many wonderful organs in the Boston area when he retired, including those at Trinity Church, Copley Square (where Jason had been tuner for more than fifty years) and the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) that is home to an Aeolian-Skinner organ with 237 ranks. We overlapped for six months at the Mother Church to allow me a chance to get my bearings in that massive instrument. With forty-one reeds and more than a hundred ranks of mixtures, that organ was a challenge to tune. Jason had helped with the installation of several Skinner organs in the area in the 1920s that he maintained until his retirement, leaving me as the second person to care for organs that were sixty years old. He had prepared organs for concerts played by Vierne and Dupré, and though he never drove a car, he dutifully cared for dozens of organs throughout the Boston area, taking buses wherever he went. Jason’s wife Ruth was a fine organist and long-suffering key-holder. She had been a classmate and lifelong friend of former AGO national president Roberta Bitgood. I attended Jason’s funeral at his home church, Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, home to a 1971 Casavant organ. When that parish disbanded, the Organ Clearing House relocated Jason’s home organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia. Jason was a gentle, patient, and humble man who spent his life making organs sound their best.
Sidney Eaton (1908–2007) was an organ pipe maker and the last living employee of the Skinner Organ Company. He was Jason McKown’s co-worker and a long-time resident of North Reading, Massachusetts, where I lived for about ten years. I got to know Sidney when he was very old and quite crazy—I think he lived alone long enough to stop disagreeing with himself, and when he lost himself as his final filter he could say some outrageous things. One day I stopped by his house on my way to say hi and he came to the door in his birthday suit. Nothing weird, he had just forgotten to get dressed. Sidney told me about working next to Mr. Skinner as he dreamed up the shimmering Erzähler, the beguiling English Horn, and Skinner’s most famous tonal invention, the French Horn. Though it was often a challenge to find the line between fact and fantasy, I felt privileged to have had an opportunity to hear first-hand about some of our most famous predecessors. In his last years, Sidney road around town on an ancient Schwinn bicycle with balloon tires, a wire basket on the handlebars, and a bell that he rang with his thumb. He would lift his right hand and give a princely wave and a toothless smile to anyone driving by, whether or not they were an organbuilder.
Charles Fisk (1925–1983) began his musical life as a choirboy at Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where E. Power Biggs was the oft-truant organist. He studied physics at Harvard and Stanford, worked briefly for the Manhattan Project in New Mexico under Robert Oppenheimer, and rescued himself to become an organbuilder. He apprenticed with Walter Holtkamp in Cleveland, Ohio, became a partner in the Andover Organ Company, and later formed the venerable firm of C. B. Fisk, Inc. My father, an Episcopal priest now retired, was involved in the purchase of two organs by Fisk. When I was growing up, we lived equidistant (about three blocks) between two Fisk organs, one in my home church and one in the neighboring Congregational church, where I had my lessons and did most of my practicing through high school. I didn’t know Charlie well but I did meet him several times and attended workshops and lectures that I remember vividly. I consider him to be the Dean of the Boston School of revivalist organbuilders—that fascinating movement that was well underway as my interest in the organ developed.
Brian Jones (still very much alive and active!) was director of music and organist at Trinity Church in Boston when Jason McKown retired and I took on the care of the complicated and quirky organ there. Complicated because it is in fact two organs in three locations, with a fantastic relay system and sophisticated console, quirky because it was first a Skinner organ, then an Aeolian-Skinner organ, and then continuously modified by Jason in cahoots with George Faxon, long-time organist there, and much beloved teacher of many of Boston’s fine organists. Brian understood the central position of that church in that city—a magnificent building designed by H. H. Richardson, decorated by John LaFarge, and home to some of the great preachers of the Episcopal Church—and the music program he created reflected the great heritage of the place. He brought great joy to the church’s music as he built the choir program into a national treasure. Otherwise polite-to-a-fault Back Bay Bostonians would draw blood over seats for the Candlelight Carol Service (now famous through the vast sales of the twice-released Carols from Trinity), and the 1,800-seat church was packed whenever the choir sang. I remember well the recording sessions for the second professional release, which took place in the wee hours of stifling June and July nights, the schedule dictated by the desire for a profitable Christmas-shopping-release. It was surreal to lie on a pew in 90-degree weather, tools at hand, at two in the morning, listening to the third take of I saw three ships come sailing in.
My Trinity Church experience included tuning every Friday morning in preparation for the weekly noontime recital. The opportunity to hear that great organ played by a different musician each week had much to do with the evolution of my understanding of the electro-pneumatic symphonic organ that I had been taught to consider decadent. And the weekly communal lunches that followed each recital at the Thai place across the street introduced me to many of the wonderful people in the world of the pipe organ.
My wife, Wendy Strothman, was organist of the Follen Community Church (Unitarian Universalist) in Lexington, Massachusetts, and chair of the organ committee when we met. I was invited to make a proposal to the committee for the repair and improvement of the church’s homemade organ for which there seemed to be little hope, but whose creator was still present as a church member. A spectacular 14-rank organ by E. & G.G. Hook fell from the sky as a neighboring U.U. church closed and offered the organ. With lots of enthusiastic volunteer help, we restored and installed the organ. I marveled at Wendy’s commitment to her weekly musical duties as she managed the rigors of her day job—executive vice-president at a major publishing house in Boston. When the organ was complete, the church commissioned Boston composer Daniel Pinkham to compose a piece for this wonderful organ. He responded with a colorful and insightful suite called Music for a Quiet Sunday, published by Thorpe Music. It includes about a half-dozen tuneful, attainable pieces and a partita on the tune Sloane. Daniel had sized up Wendy’s dual life and produced a marvelous collection of pieces aimed at the skillful dedicated amateur who worked hard to squeeze out enough practice time from a life filled with pressing professional responsibilities, not to mention raising a family. I write often about the brilliant big-city organists who I am privileged to know—their deep dedication, and virtuoso skills. Daniel’s reading of Wendy’s situation was a third-person insight for me into the joy of playing the organ in church as a sideline to a professional career.
There are dozens of you out there who know you’re on my list. Stay tuned. We’ll do this again.