In the wind . . .

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

§

It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

§

This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

§

When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.

Home entertainment
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Aeolian Organ Company established itself as the leader in the extremely high-end market for residence pipe organs. Their list of clients reads like a “Who’s Who” of wealthy industrialists and financiers: John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Frank W. Woolworth, Henry Clay Frick, Horace and John Dodge, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, to name a few. Rollin Smith’s exhaustively researched and excellent book, The Aeolian Organ, provides a wealth of information about this extraordinary company. I found the appendices to be especially good reading. One is a list of patrons, another is the opus list. I took a walking tour of mid-town Manhattan one afternoon photographing the residences that housed these fantastic organs.
I have Aeolians on my mind because I’m in the midst of installing their Opus 1014, originally built for the residence of John Munroe Longyear in Brookline, Massachusetts. We got a call from the real estate developer, who was converting that grand and opulent residence into condominiums, offering the organ at no cost providing it could be removed within the week. It could, and a purchaser appeared in short order. I have renovated the instrument, releathered the roll-playing mechanism, and I write from a California hotel room at the end of the fourth day of installation.

This is an eight-rank organ (Photo 1, half-way done). There are seven on the manual duplex chest, allowing each to be playable from either keyboard, and there is a substantial pedal Bourdon 16′. There is an ornately decorated keydesk with Aeolian’s particular style of tilting-tablet stop controls mounted obliquely on either side of the keyboards. And above the music rack is the spectacular contraption known as the spool-box. Two rows of holes in a brass bar, known as the “tracker-bar,” represent two 58-note keyboards. The bar is mounted in an airtight box with a sliding glass door. Below the bar is “take-up reel,” above it the spindles that accept the paper roll. To play a roll, you place it in the spindles, draw the paper across the surface of the bar, connect it to the take-up reel, turn on the spool-box motor, close the sliding glass door and turn on the ventil that charges the spool-box with air pressure (Photo 2, spool-box).
The pressure inside the spool-box energizes a little brass pointer that causes wonder the first time you see it, but when the blank leader of the paper has passed a red center line appears. The pointer follows the red line allowing the operator to see that the paper is tracking properly. If it wanders to one side or the other, you correct it by turning a little key under the bottom manual that moves the take-up reel to the left or right.

The next thing you see as the roll passes the tracker-bar is a suggested registration printed on the paper. You select your stops, and when the holes in the paper start appearing they allow the air pressure to pass through the holes in the tracker-bar and notes start to play. As the music progresses registration changes are suggested, and a dotted line moves back and forth across the paper indicating the position of the expression pedal (Photo 3, tracker-bar).
Behind the tracker-bar is a system of tubing that carries the little puffs of air to the spool-box contact machines, where tiny leather pouches are inflated to activate a pneumatic action that operate the contacts (Photo 4, tracker-bar tubing). The spool-box contact machines perform exactly the same function as the keyboards—both are wired in parallel to the inputs of the relay, so it’s possible to play a duet with the machine.

There’s a little lever marked “Tempo Indicator” just above the keyboards (Photo 5, tempo indicator). This is in fact not an indicator but a throttle. It operates a sliding valve that controls the amount of air flowing into the motor that turns the spindles in the spool-box. Letting in more air is the equivalent of shoveling on more coal or stepping on the accelerator—the motor speeds up and the music goes faster. Our modern ears are geared to expect the pitch to change when a recording speeds up—but not in Aeolian land. It’s a funny sensation to hear the tempo changing with the pitch staying the same. But the tempo indicator has a very important function. Of course it allows the performer to select the speed, but also gives sensitive control to the tempo, allowing ritardando, accelerando, and rubato.
If the roll is playing a piece of a significant speed that calls for frequent registration changes, you find yourself with your hands full following the leads on the paper, changing the stops, operating the swell pedal, controlling the tempo with musical sensitivity, while all the time taking care that the paper is tracking properly. If you miss the little red line moving away from the pointer you hear the music scramble as the tracking is lost.
At the risk of overusing technical jargon, here’s what happens when the player plays a single note:

1. Air blows through the hole in the paper roll, through the spool-box tubing to the spool-box contact pouch.
2. The pouch inflates, opening a primary valve that exhausts a box pneumatic.
3. As the pneumatic exhausts, it pushes up a rod that in turn pushes on a brass contact.
4. When the contact is made, electricity travels through the relay to a magnet on the windchest.
5. The magnet is energized, lifting its armature to allow a primary pouch to exhaust.
6. As the pouch exhausts, it opens the primary valve that in turn exhausts the secondary pouch.
7. The secondary pouch draws open the secondary valve.
8. The secondary valve exhausts the key-channel in the windchest.
9. As the key-channel exhausts, the interior of all the pouches for that note (one for each stop) are exposed to the atmospheric pressure.
10. A stop that is turned on has pressure in the stop channel waiting to play notes.
11. When the key-channel is exhausted, the note pouches of any stop that’s on can exhaust.
12. The exhausting note pouch opens the pipe-valve.
13. Air blows into the pipe and the note sounds.

As much as I understand how these actions work, and as much as I know that they work very fast, I’m still amazed that all of those steps working in sequence can possibly work fast enough to make any kind of musical sense—let alone work so fast as to be able produce notes repeating at 20 or 30 times a second.
An organist playing “the old fashioned way” (pushing down keys to make notes play) is limited to three or four notes in each hand and two in the pedals. And think about it, it’s not all that often that you’re really playing ten notes at a time. Turn on couplers and you might be asking the organ to produce 20 or 30 notes at once. The Aeolian player has no such limitations—some of the rolls include complicated chords and passages that could not be played by two organists at once. Stop the roll at a busy moment and count the holes in the paper from left to right—I’ve found places where there are 30 notes playing at once . . .

I’ve tried to give an idea of how the organ’s action works, but I’ve not told you anything about how the paper rolls are driven (Photo 6, spool-box motor). You know about the throttle that controls the flow of air to the motor, but the motor itself is a marvel. It contains three two-part pneumatics connected by a camshaft. On the end of the camshaft there’s a gear that drives a chain that drives a transmission that turns the spool-box spindles (Photo 7, spool-box transmission). The transmission has a feature controlled by a stopknob labeled “Aeolian Re-roll”—a rewind function that rolls the paper back onto its original spool at the conclusion of a performance.
It’s time for me to make a confession. I have added a solid-state relay with MIDI to this organ. But while confessing, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I am not using MIDI to add voices to the organ. “MIDI Out” from the organ’s relay feeds “MIDI In” of a sequencer. Play the organ either with the rolls or the keyboards and the sequencer captures the music as a data stream that can be played back. So the organ can now be played three ways. This allows the player/operator/performer/musician to rehearse a performance on a roll, master the registration changes, the subtleties of tempo and expressions, and play back the whole performance entirely automatically. And perhaps most important, it allows essentially unlimited repeat performances without exposing the fragile 100-year-old paper to wear and tear (and I do mean tear).
This organ, Aeolian’s Opus 1014, was built in 1906. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was president, Typhoid Mary was exposed in New York City, six of George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) plays were on stage in New York, and 400 people were killed in the great earthquake in San Francisco (Enrico Caruso was in town for that event, and swore that he would never return to a city “where disorders like that are permitted”).1 Automobiles were barely established as a significant mode of transportation, and the railroads were in their heyday. In this context we see how revolutionary was the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright—their first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina were accomplished in 1903.
This Aeolian organ spent last summer in the workshop attached to my house, and the summer-time guests were amazed and amused as I put the organ through its paces—each time causing a “rowdy hour” in the midst of a dinner party. Imagine how it must have astounded Mr. and Mrs. Longyear’s guests in 1906. Decades before radio and television, before stereo and compact discs, and most of a century before home movie theaters, this home-entertainment system represented the very apex of technology. Those fashionable dinner guests would have had nothing against which to compare the organ. I imagine that many were simply bewildered. Some, not all, of my friends were able to follow my explanation of how the thing works. Few of Mr. Longyear’s guests would have had technical backgrounds that would have allowed them even the dimmest comprehension.
But, boy, does it work! This was my first experience with an Aeolian player, and while I had it dismantled on my workbench, while I was cutting the tiny pouches for the spool-box contacts, while I was cleaning and assembling the spool-box tubing, I had the intellectual assurance that it would work, but it seemed improbable enough that I was purely delighted when I ran it for the first time (Photo 8, spool-box contact pouches before; Photo 9, spool-box contact pouches after). And I’ve been dwelling on the mechanical. This is above all a wonderful musical instrument. The voicing is imaginative, clear, and brilliant. The selection of voices is magical. The various combinations of stops are both thrilling and beguiling. What a fabulous appliance to add to the home that has everything.■

R. E. Coleberd, an economist and retired petroleum industry executive, writes frequently on the history and economics of pipe organ building. For research input and critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper, the author gratefully acknowledges: Wilson Barry, Larry Chase, David Harris, The Rev. B. B. Edmonds, Dorothy Holden, Ken Holden, Herbert Huestis, Paul Joslin, Alan Laufman, Charles McManis, Albert Neutel, John Norman, Barbara Owen, Robert Reich, Jan Rowland, Jack Sievert, John Speller, Robert Vaughan, and Randall Wagner.

Introduction

Students of pipe organ economics and history are continually fascinated by the wide variety of non-mechanical windchest actions developed by American organbuilders in the last century. These ingenious mechanisms speak to the resourcefulness of enterprising men eager to find an efficient and reliable system to differentiate their product and, thereby, to carve out a niche for themselves and their firm in the highly competitive marketplace for pipe organs. Windchest innovations formed the core of the nonmechanical systems. They would become a defining characteristic of American organbuilding in the first half of the twentieth century and mark its contribution to the evolution of the King of Instruments during this period. Marvels of mechanical ingenuity, they far surpassed developments on the Continent. As James B. Jamison commented: "In mechanisms they excel the Old World product so far as to make comparison unfair."1 Among the most important and far reaching innovations was the electropneumatic pitman action windchest which traces its origins to an obscure nineteenth-century Continental organbuilder, August Gern.

In writing a paper in which I remarked that Ernest M. Skinner had taken the pitman windchest to "Mount Olympus," I recalled a comment years ago by the late Dr. Homer Blanchard that August Gern was the inventor of the pitman action.2 Some years later I verified Blanchard's observation in Audsley's The Art of Organbuilding.3 I was curious about Gern and his system. At the suggestion of Barbara Owen, I phoned Professor Christopher Kent at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom who referred me to his student, Paul Joslin. Paul has researched and written on Gern's tenure in the British Isles. He kindly briefed me on Gern and sent me a copy of Gern's patent which would shed light on this question.4

Windchests

To begin, we need to review briefly the nature of a windchest and the nomenclature of the so-called "individual valve" actions. A windchest is a rectangular wooden box working in tandem with the console as a transfer mechanism, i.e., it transfers wind from the bellows to the pipes enabling them to speak. A stop action and a key action are its two essential components. Differences in the design and operation of these two actions distinguish one system from another and establish the two broad categories of nonmechanical windchest action: ventil and universal.

A ventil chest is distinguished by the fact that the individual stops are not winded unless the stop is on, i.e., pulling the stop knob opens a valve and charges the stop on the chest. Widely used in the early decades of this century, it was closely associated with the novel pull-wire ventil employed by Hillgreen-Lane, was incorporated in Kilgen organs until the firm's demise in 1958, was the mainstay of the Estey Company and was built by Tellers well into the post WWII era. Organ Supply Industries continued to list the ventil windchest in their catalog until 1982.5

A universal windchest is any system in which the wind is under all the stops at all times. The term "universal" is closely associated with the ingenious Austin patented system, in the beginning a large walk-in enclosure located directly under the pipe valve mechanism. Technically, however, a pitman action is also a universal windchest because the wind is always under all the stops. The salient feature of a pitman action is the key and stop action. As Randall Wagner, Organ Supply Industries executive, explains, a pitman action is fundamentally a fluidics mechanism, an x, y switch in which both x for stop and y for key must be "on" for the pipes to speak.6 These switches are, as Jan Rowland points out, relief valves which are activated by a motor, in modern practice a leather disc (formerly with a wooden stem) or flap, akin to a solenoid, whose movement seals or exhausts the key and stop channels.7 In the lexicon of today's computers these switches would be known as an AND gate.

By 1900 the race was on as the transition from tracker to non-mechanical action swept the American organ industry. Ten years later if you did not have a workable windchest you were either out of business (Gratian) or severely handicapped (Hinners). But if you had an efficient and competitive system, it just might be the cornerstone of a long and prosperous tenure in the industry (Austin, Wicks). The universal airchest of the Austin Company, with the familiar decal on the enclosure door, and "Built on the Bennett System" on the nameplate of the Bennett Organ Company instruments, demonstrated that firms were eager to capitalize on their innovations in the rapidly growing market for non-mechanical organs.

The pitman action gradually emerged as the odds-on favorite of American builders and organists, initially because of the overriding influence of Ernest M. Skinner, whose mechanism became the generic term for the system, but also because of its perceived advantages. By the post WWII era it had become dominant. The ventil, aside from the exceptions cited above, virtually disappeared. Skinner's contribution notwithstanding, innovations in windchest and console design and construction are, most likely, the work of individuals and firms over time in several stages of development. One is, therefore, understandably reluctant to attribute a major technological development in organbuilding to one individual. Nonetheless, if we can establish, from an analysis of his patent, that Gern's system functions like a pitman action then we are safe in saying that he is one of the pioneers of this redoubtable mechanism.

August Gern and His System

August Friedrich Herman Gern (1837-1907), a native of Berlin, Germany, was the son of a cabinet maker whose family had lived for several generations in or near Berlin and whose ancestry was traced as far back as 1415 when one Christian Gern was baptized in Zwichau. After acquiring woodworking skills, most likely from his father, Gern obtained organbuilding knowledge, probably from Carl Friedrich Buckholz, although he may have also worked with Sauer, Lang and Diese. In 1860 he migrated to France where he was employee and foreman of the celebrated Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Buckholz was a pupil of Cavaillé Coll). In 1866, after installing one of the Parisian master's instruments in the Carmelite Church in Kensington in the United Kingdom, Gern opened his own shop in London. He operated from several locations in London and, from 1872 to 1906, at Boundary Road, Notting Hill (the shop building is extant).8

On November 6, 1883 Gern filed a patent application (see diagrams) for "Improvements In Organs And Similar Wind Instruments." He described his invention as a key and stop action channel "designed to simplify the construction and operation of parts . . . and to avoid the loss of wind and objectionable sounds that often result from leakage."9 His reference to loss of wind and objectionable sounds was, perhaps, referring to the Kegellade or cone valve chest, the system then widely used by Ladegast, Sauer and other German builders. Although the key and stop channels, acting as relief valves, were the focal point of his invention, there were other far-reaching implications of his system. One was provision of two sets of relief channels to permit duplexing. Another was the use of chest wind to open the valve. In this respect his mechanism was, theoretically, similar to "Roosevelt" type actions which utilized chest wind as the operating force. Interestingly, and as if to anticipate the future, Gern asserted that "collapsible or bellows-like cells" (i.e., pouches) could also be used.

The following step-by-step analysis of Gern's patent is made with some trepidation and a note of caution. It is very difficult to comprehend the working of up to six valve positions of the mechanism in a single set of diagrams each portraying only one position. Have you ever tried reading Audsley? The diagrams are reproduced courtesy of Robert Vaughan, chief engineer of the Reuter Organ Company, who copied them from Audsley. Ironically, Audsley had discovered an apparent error in the Gern patent diagram regarding the position of the pitman.

Following the diagrams: Figure 1 is the key action. When the center-pivot key A is depressed as the note is played, the lug a on the key tail opens the leather-covered pallet B, exhausting the key channel D. When the key is released, wind from channel E pushes down on pallets C and B, charging key channel D. A closer look suggests that pallets C and B work much like a primary action in a modern pitman windchest.

Figure 2 is the stop action. As shown, the stop is "on" with channel L exhausted through slide G. When the stop is "off" slide G is moved to the right, causing wind from H to recharge channel L.

Figure 3 is the heart of the mechanism. In the Gern system the pitman "motor" is a teeter-totter, hinged in the middle and pivoting up and down at each end, shown as m1, m2. When the key channel is exhausted from Figure 1,  wind from the stop action channel L (the stop is "off") pushes m2 up and m1 down, sealing the exhausted key channel and maintaining wind pressure in cylinder n on piston N. This keeps valve O (shown open in Figure 3) seated securely against the bottom board on which the pipe stands, thus preventing the pipe from speaking.

When the key is "off" and the stop is "on," the position of the teeter-totter pitman is reversed. Then wind from the stop channel L is exhausted and wind from the key channel D pushes m1 up and m2 down, causing key channel wind to maintain pressure under the cylinder and the valve to stay closed.

When both key and stop are "on," i.e., channels exhausted, the pitman motor floats causing wind in the chest to push down on piston N and open valve O, allowing the pipe to speak. Duplexing is accomplished by a dual set of key and stop action channels D1, D2, L1, L2 as shown in Figure 4.

Gern's patent did not immediately become an innovation in the Schumpeterian sense, i.e., the commercial application of an invention, because all evidence indicates that he never used it in his work, nor did anyone else.10 Audsley laments that he has never seen a working model from which to make drawings, adding that although he was acquainted with Gern's instruments he had not examined the inside of the windchests in them.11 Gern most likely was dissuaded from utilizing his system because, in comparison with other mechanisms of the day, it proved impractical and uneconomical to build. Audsley appears to confirm this when he says:  " . . . in our estimation, it is attended by several serious drawbacks, and must, in the manner in which it is fixed in the chest, be somewhat difficult to reach for cleaning or repairs."12

It must be emphasized that Gern did not call his invention a pitman action, a term designated much later and closely associated with the work of Ernest M. Skinner who is credited with further refinements and whose model became the definitive example of the system. The term pitman is not confined to organbuilding: it has been associated in antiquity with such diverse occupations as coal mining and saw milling and in engineering to denote mechanical linkage as in a steam engine or a steering column.13

The Skinner System

The concept of the pitman windchest was revived in 1897 by C. F. Brindley of Sheffield, England in a patent for a pneumatic pouch action which Sumner comments "anticipated the actual pitman action."14 The key to developing the pitman idea into a workable system, as reflected in the Brindley patent, was the pouch valve as opposed to Gern's piston valve. The pitman concept made its American debut in a Hutchings-Votey instrument in the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn in 1899. This was during Skinner's tenure with Hutchings and after his first journey to England. Wagner points out that this instrument: "probably used their pouch and lever action similar to what EMS used in his Opus 140 at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland with pitman action in 1906. It was only later that the pitman rail was put under the pouch rail."15 Skinner recognized the pivotal role of the pouch when he wrote: "My second acknowledgment is made to Casavant Frères of St. Hyacinthe, P.Q., who brought this type of motor (sic, i.e., pouch) to the state of refinement shown in the present manual chests and which, through their gracious courtesy, was given to me."16

The term pitman is attributed to Audsley who so named it because of the design of the action motor in the prototype of his day. "The Pitman-valve consists of a disc of fine, smooth leather firmly glued and tacked to the end of a short cylindrical stem of hard wood and well black-leaded to reduce friction to a minimum," he explained.17 The stem is the man and the orifice in which it moves is the pit (see diagram). The Skinner diagram is reproduced courtesy Norm Kinnaugh of the Reuter Organ Company. The American Organist describes it: "The name means man-in-a-pit: There is no Mr. Pitman connected with it—the man happens to be, instead, Mr. Ernest M. Skinner."18 Typically, Skinner took credit for the system: "The pitman stop action valve . . . is my contribution to this important factor in the composition of the organ," he wrote.19 The pouch valve and key and stop action pitman rail under the toeboard, perfected by Skinner, became the generic term for the system. It is characterized today by either a leather disc (without the formerly used wooden stem) or a hinged leather flap which acts as the relief valve/switch in exhausting the key and stop channels. 

Summary

The triumph of the pitman action in the early decades of this century is attributable, apart from Skinner's influence, to its pronounced mechanical advantages during this period, in addition to the perceived weaknesses of the ventil system. Herbert Huestis, in an intriguing hypothesis, theorizes that organbuilding follows playing style, both then and now. In the first three decades of the twentieth century the crescendo pedal made possible the style of playing on the larger instruments characteristic of this period. This was the era of transcriptions as concert fare, and of large instruments built by Skinner, Möller, Austin and Kimball for municipal auditoriums and similar venues as well as for churches.20 As Wilson Barry comments: "Virgil Fox was Mr. Crescendo Pedal."21 The pitman windchest is optimally suited to the crescendo pedal, both in adding stops in the buildup to a powerful chorus and in reducing stops while holding a chord. Conversely, the ventil chest, with its much slower stop action, is woefully deficient in this respect. Momentary pitch variation in a ventil chest results in the transition period when wind pressure rises and falls as the ventil channel is charged and emptied. In addition, the pitman is adaptable to playing one rank as two stops; for example, a Diapason at eight and four foot pitches, and for playing a Fifteenth separately from a Mixture.

In retrospect, a ventil windchest is less complicated in layout and, with fewer borings, is less expensive to build than a pitman, although with the separate enclosure required for the stop action it is somewhat larger. The exception was the venerable Estey windchest, which could accommodate a 43 scale Diapason on the chest, and was even smaller than  a pitman. Another drawback of the  ventil is having wind on only one side of the leather stop action valve which seriously shortens its life. Only a small percentage of the time does a pitman pouch have wind on just one side. Furthermore, as Robert Vaughan points out, in former times when the blower was customarily located in the furnace room of the church, coal dust would be drawn into the organ action. Leather is permeable and as the wind filtered through the leather, as in a ventil stop action, the acidic compounds inherent in coal would be deposited in the leather hastening its demise. Finding organ leathers blackened with coal dust was a common experience of servicemen of yesteryear.22

The respected firms mentioned above continued to build the ventil windchest long after it was technically obsolete because they felt comfortable with it and, logically, took pride in their work and their innovations in the evolution of windchest action. The Kilgen key action, particularly when measured on a unit chest, has long been recognized by experts to be among the fastest key actions ever developed.23 These builders believed that whatever differences existed in stop action speed versus the pitman were either non-existent or minimal and, therefore, were of no consequence in the marketplace. As Huestis points out, they were builders of comparatively small instruments where the crescendo pedal was not a pivotal factor.24 Lacking personnel familiar with alternative systems they were fearful of failure. Windchest systems existed side by side in the organ industry because windchest cost is only a fraction of the total cost of building an instrument and, therefore, is not a determining factor. Otherwise, if windchest cost had been dominant, the Austin mechanism, so economically superior in design and manufacture, would have driven out the rest of the industry and monopolized the market.

August Gern, a relatively unknown and long-forgotten figure in nineteenth- century Continental organbuilding, deserves a small niche in the pantheon of notable organbuilders for his seminal contribution to the pitman action. His concept of using chest wind as the activating force was a milestone in the evolution of the pipe organ windchest and his uncanny switching mechanism laid the foundation for the highly successful pitman electropneumatic system.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The truth about holes
Almost thirty years ago my wife and I were expecting our first child. I was working for organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, and we were in the midst of building an organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. I was drilling the holes in rackboards—those horizontal boards mounted on windchests that support the pipes about six inches above the toeboards.
It wasn’t a large organ, only eleven stops on the manuals, so including the Mixture, there were about 760 holes to drill. That’s not quite 14 ranks times 56 notes, but some were in the façade, and some others were tubed off the main chests and mounted on the inside walls of the case.
You determine the sizes of the holes using a jig that is a mock-up of a toeboard-rackboard assembly with holes drilled in the rackboard to match all the appropriate drill sizes. You move each pipe among the holes in the jig until you find the right size, then write the drill size on the rackboard by the mark for the pipe hole. That being finished, I had laid out all the marked rackboards on a table near the drill-press and was going through all the boards with each change of the drill-bit. I start with the smallest holes in the remote chance that I might drill one extra hole of a given size. If you make a mistake, it’s easier to drill a hole bigger than smaller!
I suppose I would have been using around 30 different bits for this job, starting with something like 7/32″, graduating by 32nds to one inch, by eighths to two inches, and by quarters to three. I guess it took about a day-and-a-half, and all the while I was expecting that call from home. I was sure it wouldn’t be on Wednesday. It would have to be Thursday, because that would mean I’d have to cancel choir rehearsal, an ice storm was predicted, and the hospital was an hour away in Cleveland. Sure enough, Michael joined us on Thursday afternoon. A couple days later I went back to finish the rackboards. I have no specific recollection, but I bet there were a few mistakes.
If you’d like to know something about this organ, go to <A HREF="http://www.stalbansva.org/">www.stalbansva.org</A&gt;, click on “Ministries,” then click on “Music.” You’ll see photos of the organ and its stoplist.

On with the show
The same number of holes must be drilled in the toeboards, the sliders, and the windchest table in order for the notes to play. That makes about 3,200 holes. But wait, I almost forgot to mention that the toeboards were laminated with interior channeling because the spacing of the slider holes is closer together than that of the pipe holes—so add another 780 holes.
We drill holes in the ends of squares and roller arms to accommodate the tracker action. We drill holes in the keyboards for balance and guide pins. We drill thousands of screw holes to hold the whole thing together. In an electro-pneumatic organ there are rows of holes that serve as pouch wells, pitman wells, housings for primary and secondary valves, and miles of channeling drilled through various windchest components to connect the interior of the pouch wells to the atmosphere, allowing pneumatics to exhaust when actions are activated. Counting on my fingers, I guess that there would be something like 7,000 holes in a ten-stop pitman windchest. Really!
You might say that the art of organbuilding is knowing where to put the holes, and what size each should be.
Drill baby, drill!

Just a little bit
There are hundreds of drill-bits in any organbuilding workshop. There are multi-spur bits that have center points for drilling larger holes. There are Forstner bits that are guided by the outside edge rather than by a center point, handy if you need to “stretch” a hole by cutting another half-moon. There are twist drills with 60º bevels on the points for drilling smaller holes such as screw holes. These are also used to drill holes in metal. There are countersinks that chamfer a screw hole so the flat head of a flat-head screw is flush with the surface of the wood. There are airplane bits, which are twist drills 16 or 18 inches long. I don’t know why they’re called airplane bits. Drilling holes in airplanes wouldn’t require a very long bit.
Any organ shop will sport an impressive rack with rows of bits arranged in order of size. The smallest might be around one-hundredth of an inch, the largest would be something like three inches.

Twist-and-turn
You need a variety of machines to turn those bits. The workbench workhorse is now the rechargeable drill. I have had a long habit of calling the electric hand drill a “drill-motor” much to the annoyance of at least one of my co-workers. In my mind this distinguishes the machine from the bit. You use a drill-motor to turn a drill-bit. I think that if you just say “drill” you could be referring either to the motor or the bit. Let’s be specific. I know I got that habit from someone else, but I don’t remember who. Terence, I didn’t make it up.
We have electric hand drills with half-inch chucks that can handle the larger multi-spur bits, but there is a lot of torque involved in drilling large holes, and if you are bearing down on the thing with your shoulder to cut through the wood you run the risk of getting whacked in the chin by the handle of the drill motor when the bit gets caught in the wood. It’s never actually happened to me but I’ve read about it! (But notice I said “when,” not “if.”)
The workshop workhorse is the drill-press. It’s a stand-up machine with a motor at eye level that’s connected to the arbor with a series of belts. The belts are arranged on stacks of pulleys—you can move the belts to different-sized pulleys to change the speed of the drill. There’s a sheet metal hood over the pulleys to protect the worker. We use slower speeds for drilling through metal—the harder the metal, the slower the speed—and if you’re drilling through a piece of steel, it’s a good idea to have a can of oil with you to lubricate the hole every few seconds. But be careful not to get oil on the surface of any of your wood pieces, as that will foil your attempts to glue pieces of wood together, or to put nice finishes on the wood when the piece is complete.
There’s a spoked handle that you turn to drive the drill-bit into the piece of work. There’s a table which is normally square to the drill-bit, but that can be adjusted if you need to drill a hole at an angle. We stand at the drill press, one hand holding the work firmly against the table, the other working the handle to move the drill-bit into the wood. If you have long hair and you’re not careful, you can get it caught in the pulleys and lose a tuft. If you have loose clothing or, God forbid, a necktie, you can get reeled violently into the machine like a big dull catfish being reeled into a boat.

Careful of blowout
When you’re drilling holes with multi-spur bits, you have to drill from both sides of the wood, or the bit will tear the opposite surface as it goes through the board. It will also tear up the table of the drill-press. So the location of the hole is marked with a smaller bit, say one-eighth, that goes through the board. You drill in a little way with the big bit, then turn the board over and drill from the other side. Doesn’t that double the number of holes you’re drilling?

The saw, the hole-saw, and nothing but the saw
A hole-saw is a specialty tool that’s turned by a drill-motor or drill-press. It’s a circular saw blade with the teeth pointing downward, something like an aggressive cookie-cutter. There’s a smaller twist drill-bit mounted in the middle that guides the center of the hole. They come in sets graduated by the quarter-inch, nestled inside one another like those Russian Babushka dolls. Hole-saws are relatively easy to handle up to six inches in diameter. Bigger than that and they get to be rambunctious. Hole-saws are great for cutting wind holes in reservoirs and windchests. Take a look at this McMaster-Carr page: <http://www.mcmas ter.com/#hole-saw-sets/=9qqoqp>.

Circle cutters
If you need a hole larger than three inches, use a circle cutter (http://www.mcmaster.com/#adjustable-hole-cutters/=9qqq0f). It has a twist drill-bit to center the hole, and a cutter mounted on an adjustable arm. You can set these up to cut holes nearly eight inches in diameter. But be sure to set the drill-press on the slowest speed, and use clamps to hold your work piece to the drill-press table. These tools are pretty scary. They can jam in the track they cut, and the holes often burn during drilling. And if you don’t tighten the set-screw that fastens the adjustable arm, it can get flung across the shop by the motion of the machine.

Oops
What happens if you put a hole in the wrong place? (Never happened to me.) You can glue in a piece of dowel and cut it flush, but the grain will be running in the opposite direction. Better to use a plug-cutter. With this neat tool you can drill into the face of a piece of wood and produce a cross-grained dowel about an inch long. Drill out your mistake with the correct size bit, and glue in your plug. Sand it off and you’ll have a hard time finding it again: <http://www.mcmaster.com/#wood-plug-cutters/=9qqszb&gt;.

The twist
Twist drill bits come in many sizes. I have three basic indexes of twist drill-bits near my drill-press. One goes from one-eighth to one-half an inch, graduated by 64ths. One is an industrial wire-gauge numbered set—the numbers go from 1 (.228″, which is a little less than a quarter-inch) to 80 (.0135″, which is very tiny!). And the third is “letter-gauge” that goes from A (.234″, or .006″ larger than the number 1) to Z (.4130″, or a little smaller than 7/16″).
I have a chart hanging on the wall nearby that shows all three sets graduated by thousands-of-an-inch. If you’re going to drill axle holes in action parts you choose the material you’re going to use for the axle (let’s say it’s .0808″ phosphorous bronze wire), then choose a drill-bit that’s just a little larger. The 3/32″ bit is way too big at .0938″. The #45 bit is .082″ and the #44 bit is .086″. Here the choice would be between the #45 and the #44, so I’d drill one of each and try the wire in the hole. But wait! I have one more trick—a set of metric twist drill-bits graduated by tenths-of-a-millimeter. The 2.2-millimeter bit is .0866″. That’s .0006″ larger than the #44 but I bet it’s too large. The 2.1-millimeter bit is .0827″. That’s only .0019″ larger than the wire—would be a pretty close fit—probably too tight.
If you’d like a glimpse at what these sets of bits look like, go to <http://www.mcmaster.com/#catalog/116/2416/=9qg6xs&gt;. This is page 2416 of the catalogue of McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply Company, an absolute heaven for the serious hardware shopper. The “Combination Set” at the top of the page has the 64ths to 1/2″, numbers 1–60, and 1–13mm graduated by half-millimeters–—total of 114 bits for $286.54. But be reasonable—this is not the perfect Father’s Day gift for every home handyman. A simple set that goes from 1/8″ to 1/2″ graduated by 32nds to 1/4″ and 16ths to 1/2″ will be plenty, available for about twenty bucks from your Home Depot or Lowe’s store. (I prefer the
DeWalt sets.)

Why the fuss?
You might wonder why I would spend so much energy choosing the right drill-bit, and spending so much money to have at hand an appropriate variety of bits from which to choose. (I bet I have more than $5,000 worth of drill-bits.)
A pipe organ is a musical instrument. It’s a work of art. It’s a work of liturgical art. It’s a very special creation. But look inside an organ—any type of organ—and you see machinery. You see thousands of parts and pieces all hung together to make a whole. Some organs look downright industrial inside. That defines a conflict. How can a ten-ton pile of industrial equipment be considered artwork?
The answer is simple. If it’s built to exacting specifications so the sense of the machine melts into the magic of musical response to the fingers and feet of the musician, then it’s artwork. No question, there is such a thing as a pipe organ that’s little more than a machine, but that is not the ideal which our great artist-organbuilders strive to achieve.
If I spend an extra hour making sure that the axle-holes I drill in the set of squares I’m making are exactly the right size, then that keyboard action will feel good to the organists’ fingers, there will be no slop or wobble in the feel of the keys, and the machine I’m making will not impose itself between the musician and the music. (Squares are those bits of tracker action that allow the action to turn corners.)
And remember, if I’m making squares for an organ, I’m making enough of them for each note on the keyboard, and if it’s a larger organ with several keyboards and actions that turn several corners, I might be making 500 squares for the single instrument. While I’m doing that, as long as I think there will be another organ to build, I might as well make a bigger batch—let’s say I’ll spend a week making 2,500 squares. Each has an axle hole, and each has an action hole at the ends of its two arms. That’s 7,500 holes. And those holes are so small that I’ll produce only enough sawdust to fill a coffee can. (I don’t know why I say sawdust when I’m talking about drilling holes, but I’ve never heard anyone say drilldust, and neither has my spellchecker.)

§

The other day I was in a meeting with people from a church who are in the very early stages of dreaming about acquiring a pipe organ. One fellow was really surprised by the cost of organ building—“how can it possibly cost that much to build an organ? You’re going to have to convince me.” I answered him by talking about thousands of person-hours, tons of expensive materials, a workshop equipped with a wide variety of industrial machinery and tools, and collective lifetimes of careful learning and experience forming our staff.
I also told the group that the moment the doubters in a congregation finally really understand why organbuilding is so expensive is the day the new organ is delivered to the church, and the entire sanctuary is filled with exquisitely crafted parts. I’ve been present for the delivery of many new pipe organs, and I’ve often heard the comment, “Now I see why it cost so much.”
As I drove away from that church, my mind took me on this romp about fussing with drill-bits, a reflection on the care, thought, precision, and resourcefulness that I so admire amongst my colleague organbuilders. So I ran back to my hotel room and started to write. I can do the same with lots of other kinds of tools. Want to come see my saws? ■

When it’s time, it’s time.

Old friends from New Haven came to New York for an overnight visit on Friday, April 13. We heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play at Carnegie Hall that night, and spent Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were taking the train home in the afternoon and had luggage with them, so we took my car to the museum, and I found a lucky parking space on East 79th Street. After lunch, we returned to the car to learn that I had misread the signs and had been treated to a bright orange envelope tucked under my windshield wiper. Oh well. It was in the mid-seventies that day, so I turned on the air conditioning. Nothing. We drove down Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Terminal with the windows open.

New York is a great place to live, but as we have the luxury of a house in Maine, there are a few things we try to do only in Maine to avoid the city surcharge. Among others, our dentist, veterinarian, and dog groomers are in Maine. (Besides the exorbitant cost, you should see some of the fru-fru rainbow jobs that come out of Greenwich Village Doggie Spas!) Groceries and staples like paper products and cleaning supplies are far cheaper in Maine, with many items at half the city price. And car repairs. Sitting in the waiting room of a Manhattan garage, you just know that creepy stuff is going on behind the scenes. I waited until I got back to Maine to have the air conditioning checked.

I drive a 2008 Chevy Suburban, that big black job used by the Secret Service, FBI, and Tony Soprano. It has three rows of seats, so there are two air conditioners. Can you tell where this is going? The service manager came to the waiting room with bad news. It would cost $2,500 to fix the AC, and the check engine light was on, which meant another $850 for a pressure sensor in the fuel tank.

Traveling back and forth between New York and Maine, and thousands of miles visiting churches, organ shops, and job sites, I surpass the mileage limits of any auto lease, and a lot of that driving happens with heavy loads in the car, sometimes towing trailers. I use cars very hard. I have long figured that it is best for me to buy a car a year or two old with low mileage, letting someone else use up the high retail value of a brand new car, then drive it until it will not go any further. Since about 1980, I have driven six cars over 225,000 miles, two of those over 275,000. About halfway through that list, I experimented with a Dodge Grand Caravan—a mistake because although with seats out I could carry loaded eight-foot pipe trays, it was not a truck, and the transmission left at around 189,000. That is a lifetime total of over 1,500,000 miles, or an average of 43,000 miles a year.

The Suburban had just 225,000 miles on it, but I could not see spending over $3,300 on repairs, so I went shopping. Now I am in a 2017 Suburban, silver this time, so people will not think I am the limo they ordered and climb into the back seat. Gotta love New York.

Parts is parts.

As I went in and out of car dealerships over the last couple weeks, I was thinking about the business of car repair and replaceable parts. Henry Ford really had something there, figuring that any item that you might sell a lot of could be made of carefully designed and manufactured parts, identical in every separate unit. Every dealership I visited had a little van with “Parts Shuttle” written on the sides. I do not know how many different models of cars Chevrolet makes and could hardly guess how many parts there are in each one, but I imagine that each dealership needs access to hundreds of thousands of different parts. Some things are closer to universal. Maybe they only need to stock six different oil filters, and the 5.3 liter V8 engine in my Suburban is used in pickup trucks and vans as well as SUVs, so hundreds of engine parts overlap ten or twelve models. But it’s still a lot of parts.

There are plenty of differences between a Chevrolet, a Ford, and a Toyota, but if you saw a piston from an engine by each maker, you would have to be an expert to tell them apart. Windshield wipers are pretty close to universal, with their overall length being the biggest difference. In fact, as the designers of vehicles seek the perfect aerodynamic shape, cars built by many different companies look more and more alike.

Recently, a colleague posted a photo of a broken organ part, asking if anyone knew how to replace it. I recognized it immediately. It was a Bakelite lever used in the console combination actions of Casavant organs in the 1950s and 1960s, about six inches long, with an axle hole in the middle, and forks at each end that “click” into place. They transfer the motion of the drawknobs between levels of the combination action, moving the traces that carry the toggles that allow the stops to be set on pistons. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly . . .) When one breaks, the stop cannot be set on or off any piston, and the stop action won’t turn on.

I recognized it because in about 1980, my mentor Jan Leek and I faced just such a repair in an organ in Rocky River, Ohio. It was an organ technician’s nightmare. The console was tightly surrounded by carpenter-built choir risers that had to be substantially dismantled to reach the access panels, and once we were inside, it took a couple days to wrestle the broken part out. The axle was common to about fifteen of the levers, and it was less than an inch from the framework of the console side. We happened to have some Bakelite in the workshop, and even knew where it was, so we were able to make a half dozen replacements. That repair must have taken sixty or seventy hours.

Early in the twentieth century, the Austin Organ Company developed a distinctive style of “modern” organ console. They are easily recognizable with two rows of stop keys above the top keyboard, unique piston buttons on stems like lollipops, curved maple expression pedals, and shallow-dip keyboards whose keys are about twelve inches long and pivoted in the center. The combination action is in a tray at the top of the console, with a horizontal trace for each piston that carries toggles that click up or down when you move the stop keys to create settings. When you press a piston, a double contact system activates a pick-magnet that pulls up a little pivoted lever at the end of the trace and fires a huge solenoid that moves a bar that engages the lever and pulls the trace. The toggles on the trace move the stop tabs according to the setting. (. . . that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her . . .) The action of that solenoid provides the signature “ka-thump” sound of a piston firing in an Austin console.

The general construction of these Austin consoles is also unique. There is a simple steel frame that supports the table on which the keyboards sit. The side case panels, which include the track for the rolltop, screw to those frames, the back-panel screws to cleats on the side frames, and the top sits on top of it all. Voila! The traces, toggles, pick magnets, and springs of the combination action are all interchangeable. It is a very simple system. I wish that Casavant console in Rocky River had removable side panels.

But there is something funny about Austin consoles. A Massachusetts organ technician, William Laws, thought that design was just about perfect, and he waited until the original Austin patents expired, and immediately started producing “Austin Clones.” I learned this innocently enough thirty years ago, calling the Austin factory to order a new solenoid. In spite of the Laws nameplate, I assumed it was an Austin console. It was Gordon Auchincloss who took my call, and asked, “Is it an Austin or a Laws?”

Ernest Skinner was famous for his beautiful consoles. He worked incessantly developing the geometry of his consoles, striving for complete comfort for the musician. He used elegant materials, and machined controls were all specifically intended to have a signature feel to them. The half-inch travel of a stop knob, the quarter-inch motion of a piston button, and the superb action of the keyboards were all part of the experience of playing a Skinner organ. A Skinner combination action produces a unique “Phhht” at the press of a button, nothing like the Austin ka-thump. Harris Precision Products in California has developed two sizes of electro-magnetic drawknob motors that duplicate the feel of the Skinner drawknob, but gone is the pneumatic Phhht of the piston action. Even when a hundred knobs are moving at once, there is a minimal bump at the touch of a piston.

The funny thing about Harris drawknobs is that they are so well made, so easy to install, so reliable, and so quiet that many organbuilding companies use them. That is great for the organists because the knobs work perfectly, but gone is the individuality of different companies. Any experienced organist could tell the difference between a Skinner and an Austin console blindfolded, but Harris drawknobs are everywhere.

It’s the pipes.

The musical heart of any pipe organ is its pipes. That may seem a simple thing to say, but while it is easy to focus on knobs and keyboards, music rack lights, and blower switches, an organ is there to produce musical tone, and it does that by blowing air through pipes. We all know that an organ voice comprises a set of pipes, one for each note on the keyboard. Each pipe is unique with different length and diameter. It is possible to make identical sets of pipes. In fact, though I was never in the Möller factory while it was in operation, I am pretty sure they had identical “stock” ranks. I have worked on enough Möller Artistes to conclude that.

But when you make a rank of pipes, you cut sixty-one rectangles to make the cylindrical resonators, sixty-one pie-shaped pieces to make the conical feet, and sixty-one discs to make the languids. Each successive piece is a different size, the dimensions calculated using elegant mathematics. Three ratios make up the math of an organ pipe: the ratio between diameter and length (scale), the ratio between mouth width and circumference, and the ratio between mouth width and mouth height (cut-up). Even at its most mechanized, pipe making is a personal thing. I know of no robotic substitute for the pipe maker’s soldering iron. The quality of the pipe and ultimately its tone are the result of the mathematics and the skill of the pipe maker. The saying, if it looks good it will work properly, is nowhere truer than in the making of organ pipes. If the languid is loose inside the pipe, the speech will be poor. Because of all that, two ranks of pipes built to identical dimensions can never sound exactly alike.

There are many other factors that determine the sound of an organ pipe besides those three ratios. The composition of the metal is critical. Most metal pipes are made of a mixture of tin and lead. The most common spotted metal pipes are in roughly the range of 40%/60% to 60%/40% tin and lead. Go to 70%/30% or 30%/70% and you will have a different sound. The thickness of the metal is important to the quality of speech. A pipe made of thick metal will speak more reliably and more profoundly than one made of foil.

While the pistons from a Chevy or Ford look very much alike, the pipes from an Austin or a Holtkamp organ look nothing alike. And the pipes in organs by “handcraft firms” like Fritts, Richards-Fowkes, Fisk, or Noack look very different. I admit that I say that with over forty years of experience tuning organs by every builder you can think of, my eyes are as experienced as my ears. But the individual ethic, habits, tools, and philosophy of each pipe maker are different enough that no two craftspeople can make identical pipes.

What’s the difference?

Any good organ is a teacher, guiding a musician’s expression, inviting each musician to explore sounds and effects. Most organists participate in the choice of a new organ only rarely, if ever. And some organists only ever play on one instrument, whatever organ is owned by the church where they work. I get to play on many different organs in the course of any working month. It is one of the fun things about my work. I love experiencing and comparing different organs, gleaning what each organbuilder had in mind, mining the instrument for the richest sounds, the brightest colors, the most mystical effects.

I often refer to my tenure as curator of the organs at Trinity Church in Boston, the venerable pair of Skinner/Aeolian-Skinners matched with the magical LaFarge interior of the H. H. Richardson building. An important feature of the music program of that church continues to be weekly organ recitals, and as curator, I suppose I heard eighty or a hundred different people play that organ. For each player, the organ was different. Sometimes, the organ was victor and the experience was not so great. People could get eaten alive by the big unwieldy antiphonal beast. But the difference in the sound of the instrument as different masters played it was remarkable. Understanding how different organists could draw different things from a single instrument was one of the more important experiences of my organ education.

Likewise, I have heard single organists playing on many different instruments. That allows a glimpse into the musical personality and philosophy of the musician. Some seem to do the same thing with each instrument they play, while others bend their style and approach toward the instrument of the day.

I do not drive anywhere near as many different cars as I do organs. I drive Wendy’s car once in a while, and I drive rental cars when traveling on business, but almost all the driving I do is in that Chevy Suburban. Unlike the organ, I am not looking for means of expression when driving a car whether it is mine or not. When I mentioned to my colleague Amory that I was shopping for a car, he said, “Buy a Ford.” He drives a snazzy and beefy Ford pickup truck that’s perfect for his work. But I really liked my black Suburban. It was comfortable, quiet, and sturdy, all important for someone who has driven one-and-a-half-million miles. It is great for carrying tools and organ components, and for the boating side of my life, our eight-foot rowing dingy fits inside with the doors closed. Like a Skinner console, the geometry of the driving position fits me beautifully. (I know, I know, that’s a little romantic.) If all goes well, I will be driving the new one for 250,000 miles over eight or ten years. Come to think of it, it may be the last work car I buy.

John Bishop, executive director of the Organ Clearing House, graduated from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a degree in Organ Performance. He has had a 30-year career as a church musician, most recently serving for 17 years as director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. His activities as an organ builder started with summer jobs as a teenager with Bozeman & Associates, and include nine years with J.G.P. Leek of Oberlin, Ohio, three years with Angerstein & Associates of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and the last 14 years as President of the Bishop Organ Company, Inc. As an organ builder, he has purchased several organs through the Organ Clearing House, with the assistance of longtime director, the late Alan Laufman. He is active in the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. For the past four years, Mr. Bishop was the author of the monthly column, “Miscellanea Organica,” in The American Organist.

The pipe organ gives us all a lot to talk about. We can trace its history back to the panflutes of the sixth century B.C. The hydraulis, the earliest real pipe organ we know of (complete with keyboard, a mechanical action controlling valves, pipes blown by air, and a regulated wind supply) was created by Tsebius of Alexandria in about 246 B.C. It’s depicted so accurately in an ancient mosaic that modern working reconstructions have been built using that image as a guide. We study the history of the instrument, comparing musical styles, voicing techniques, and mechanical innovations between regions and eras. We debate whether a certain organ is suitable for the performance of a particular piece. The organ is the subject of many scholarly books rife with numbers, charts, and appendices—comprehensible and interesting to organbuilders, but no more accessible to most organ lovers than celestial navigation or ancient Greek.

We need this minutia. Without it we would not be able to understand and appreciate the richness of the instrument. But beyond that, the instrument is a marvel, a source of joy and inspiration, in one sense un-understandable. I’ve worked in organbuilding since I was a teenager and I love those studies of numbers, history, and style. But it wasn’t the numbers that first attracted me to the organ. When you participate in a grand hymn in a great acoustic your spirit soars, not because of your awareness of the organbuilder’s proclivity with the numbers but because there is something magic about how all that sound comes from moving all that air.

It’s indescribable.

To be sure, it’s indescribable in part because we’ve done such a good job describing it—making it technically possible, but if the description overshadows the mystery we’ve lost a special something. It’s breathtaking because it’s founded on breath.

Takes your breath away

I’ve loved Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night for as long as I can remember. An art history professor at Oberlin College helped me understand it a little better than I could have just by seeing it on T-shirts, mouse pads, or coffee mugs. But I’ll not forget the first time I saw the painting itself, exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rounding a corner into a gallery I was stunned, gasping, weeping. It did not take my breath away because I could say something erudite about brush strokes or color contrasts. It simply took my breath away.

I am excited to have this opportunity to share thoughts about our grand instrument with you. I feel honored to share these pages with the many scholars who help us better understand the instrument and its music. And I hope you will join me using that understanding as a tool for ever better communication between us inside the organ world and the public of lay people upon whom we depend as both consumers and patrons—those who appreciate our playing and our instruments, those who fund the purchase and maintenance of this most wildly expensive of instruments and upon whom we depend for its presence in future generations.

I’ve heard colleagues refer to that public as “the great unwashed.” Does this imply that we are somehow better, cleaner, than those who are not familiar with the intricacies of the organ, who think that Toccata and Fugue in D minor was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, or who commit the unthinkable and unpardonable by applauding between the Prelude and the Fugue? Fully aware of our superiority we knowingly shake our heads, driving away a future organ lover with each successive wag. What’s wrong with a little misplaced enthusiasm?

A Möller’s impact

It should be our mission to share our enthusiasm with others. Last fall the Organ Clearing House was preparing to dismantle a monumental organ built by M. P. Möller in Philadelphia in the Civic Center, a truly mammoth building built in 1930 with 13,500 seats slated for demolition to make space for the expansion of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The organ was housed in chambers above the ceiling of the auditorium, 120 feet high, and had not been played in public since a convention of the Organ Historical Society in 1996, before that, not since the American Theatre Organ Society convention in 1990. By the time we were there surveying the organ, the building was full of hard-hats working on asbestos abatement, salvage operations, and the myriad details that precede the demolition of such a place. Because we were to have the support of several of the contracting firms involved for rigging, scaffolding, building crates and the like, many of these workers were aware that something was up with the organ.

Of course, we had to try to make the organ play. With the help of Brant Duddy, the Philadelphia organ technician who had for many years worked on the maintenance and renovation of the organ, we got the blowers running and the rectifiers turned on. We spent a few minutes pulling pipes to stop ciphers (there was a doozy in the bass of the 16’ Diaphone that must have been audible in Scranton) and, son-of-a-gun, it played! The consoles were on the two-acre floor of the auditorium (the same floor on which Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers had played) in front of the stage (the same stage on which Franklin Roosevelt accepted his nomination for a second term as President in front of the 1936 Democratic National Convention), below the tiers of thousands of seats (from which audiences had heard the likes of The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and The Metropolitan Opera). As I played there came a procession of more than a hundred hard hats through the many doors into the auditorium and down the aisles toward the console as though I was accompanying some huge and bizarre Christmas pageant. It would have been perfect had they been carrying candles—we settled for flashlights and electric hand tools. They came to experience this acoustic-mechanical magic. I played the National Anthem and some measures of Widor. Someone asked for The Phantom of the Opera. I played Bach.

As our work progressed over the following weeks, many of these men and women visited us in the organ, expressing their amazement at the spectacle of all that material (16 semi-trailers full) adding up to a musical instrument. You don’t need to be in such an outlandish setting to make an impression. Show a good pipe organ to someone who has never been near one, and you’re sure to make a big impression.

What an organ.

It has 86 ranks of pipes. Twenty of them are reeds. Four of those are Tubas! Who ever heard of an organ with four independent Tubas? Three of the Tubas are in the Solo Division—Tuba Profunda, Tuba Sonora, and Tuba Mirabilis. Really! There’s a 32’ Double Open Wood Diapason that’s twenty-five inches square at CCCC and a 32’ Contra Bombarde that’s twenty-two inches in diameter—some of the largest (and heaviest) organ pipes I’ve ever seen. The lowest wind pressure is 10≤. There’s a windchest in the Great with 22⁄3’, 2’, 13⁄5’, 11⁄3’ 11⁄7’, and 1’—on ten inches of pressure! Tuners, how do you like that thought?

Did you catch the plural when I mentioned consoles? On the floor in front of the left-hand end of the stage was an elegant four-manual drawknob console. At the right-hand end, a four-manual theatre console with more than two hundred stop tablets in a variety of colors arranged on horseshoe-shaped stop rails. Because of the immense distance between consoles and pipes, and the unusual power of the organ, there is an independent tuning keyboard in each of the four chambers complete with stop controls. Added up, this is surely the only twelve-manual organ Möller ever built! (See photo: “A Twelve-Manual Organ.”)

A bipolar Möller

The drawknob console, known as the classic console, controls a very powerful and colorful straight organ with fully developed principal choruses, lots of strings and celestes, beautiful flutes, and a wide range of reed tone. Only one of the ranks of pipes in the complete roster is not included in the classic specification—an 8’ Kinura of seventy-three notes. (A Kinura is a reed stop something like a Trumpet without resonators that produces a characteristic bleating tone commonly found in theatre organs.) To get at that, you have to move to the theatre console where you also find all the toys and gadgets you could hope for, including but not limited to Song Birds I, Song Birds II, Sleigh Bells I, Sleigh Bells II, Auto Horn, Telephone Bell, Fire Gong, Steamboat Whistle, Locomotive Whistle, Siren, Factory Gong, Surf, Door Bell, Aeroplane, Chinese Gong, Persian Cymbal, Grand Crash, Glass Crash. There are a half-dozen different drums that can either tap or roll, and an array of percussions like castanets, tambourines, and Chinese Block (tap or roll). Top it off with four different tuned percussions (Harp, Celesta, Glockenspiel, Orchestral Bells) and a piano with a vacuum-powered player-piano style action, and you’ve got quite a sandbox to play in.

Before we dismantled this mighty organ I spent ten days studying it. If all goes well we will put it back together someday so we needed to learn as much as we could about it. We preserved the electro-pneumatic relays as a Rosetta stone for making the organ work again. Those automobile-sized machines that filled an entire room were the key to how the engineers at Möller made it possible for one organ to have two personalities. It’s enough of a trick for an organbuilder to conceive of a cohesive instrument—one in which choruses blend with themselves and with each other and in which reeds can both contrast and complement flues. It’s a much greater achievement to produce a single instrument that allows two styles of playing that are so radically different. I value highly the recording made by Tom Hazleton provided to me by Brant Duddy which juxtaposes Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique with Hazleton’s own Oklahoma Medley. Individually each sounds terrific—comparing the two seems nearly improbable. You can hardly imagine that both are played on the same organ.

The theatre console plays nineteen ranks of the organ--those ranks with unit actions. There are sixteen different tremolos that turn on singly or in combination. For example, a tablet on the theatre console marked Woodwinds Vibrato turns on 5 tremolos in four different chambers. The piano plays at various pitches on every keyboard. There are toe studs that control the piano’s damper and sostenuto pedals, and pistons, tablets and toe studs that play all the percussions and toys. There’s a piston (duplicated with toe stud) engraved “Change Title,” part of the razzmatazz of accompanying movies.

It took something like four hundred fifty person-days to dismantle, pack, and store this organ. Remember, every piece had to be lowered more than a hundred feet to the floor. This was all made possible by the University of Pennsylvania as part of their effort to preserve something of the heritage of this heroic building.

The organ is safely stored. The floor of the organ chamber was 120 feet above the floor of the auditorium. The organ did not speak directly into the hall, but toward the front of the hall away from the audience, above the stage, into a tone chute 100 feet wide, 17 feet deep, and 45 feet high. The organ’s sound came down that tone chute through grillework in the ceiling in front of the proscenium arch, projecting back under the organ, a change of direction of 180 degrees. From that disadvantage it filled the 400’ x 175’ x 120’ room. Eighty-six ranks make a good-size organ, but not a behemoth. This organ is a behemoth. It would be a rare church that could house it. It’s unbelievably loud. How about a baseball stadium?  I already know the National Anthem.