In the wind...

It’s all about the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Supreme refinement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s all about the wind.

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

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

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

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

Whistle a tune.

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

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

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

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And the pièce de résistance . . .

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

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

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

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

Once you’ve seen the best, there’s only the rest.

So many things, so many concepts, so many ideas today are labeled “the best” or “the greatest” that I sometimes wonder if we can still recognize real greatness. We speak in superlatives as if there was no other class. “This is the best cheese I’ve ever tasted,” lasts only until tomorrow when I get lucky enough to have a bite of something different. “Oh my God, it was the best movie ever.” And get the emphasis of punctuation: “Oh. My. God.” You set yourself up as the authority, as if no other opinion has value. Invoking the Deity is a tactic for substantiating overstatement.

“Of all time” is a common lead-in for overstatement. “He was the best quarterback of all time.” “She was the best actress of all time.” Maybe, but most of the time, I doubt it. You could make a perfectly legitimate claim a little less sweeping by starting with “I think,” as in, “I think that was a great play.” Fair enough; I’ll buy that. I think it was a great play, too, but neither of us are qualified to continue with “of all time.” “I really enjoyed that play,” isn’t forceful enough, somehow.

The search for “the best” or “the most” is a universal mantra, accompanied on television by triumphant music and the forceful voice of a male announcer. Anthony Bourdain travels the world looking for the most unusual meal. ABC Sports searches for the most dangerous ski slope. Sports Illustrated searches for the best swimsuit model. Stand them next to each other and they all look just fine.

Having worked as an organbuilder and an organist for more than forty years, I understand how people unfamiliar with the field are surprised and even baffled when they encounter it. The third or fourth exchange when you’re meeting someone for the first time at a party is “What do you do for a living?” “I’m a pipe organ builder.” “A pipe organ builder? I didn’t know there were any of you left.”

Once we get past a few pleasantries, an inevitable question is, “What’s the best organ in the world?” That’s a better question than asking after the biggest organ, which is easier to answer but usually leads to sniggering.

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Wow! What is the best organ in the world? How in the world can I answer? Is it up to me to judge? What are the criteria? What are the variables? Can I break it into subsets like the best German organ, the best French organ, the best tracker-action organ? Do we need to know the best, or can we be happy with a list of “great” organs?

To be the best, must it be the biggest?

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ is the largest “fully operational” organ in the world. According to the website of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, it has six manuals, 463 ranks, and 28,677 pipes. This compares to the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City (not fully operational, but restoration work is under way), with seven manuals, 449 ranks, and 33,114 pipes. So if you’re counting by ranks, Wanamaker wins by 14, and if you’re counting by pipes, Atlantic City wins by 4,437 (the size of an organ with more than 70 ranks!).

When I was a naïve and budding organ-guy, deep in the thrall of the tracker-action revival in Boston in the 1970s, I knew vaguely about the Wanamaker organ, touted as the largest organ in the world. I understood that it was in poor condition—that a lot of it was unplayable. Hmmph, I thought in my infancy. What can being the largest have to do with being any good? It would be years before I actually saw, heard, and experienced the Wanamaker. By the time I made its acquaintance, enormous effort had been put toward bringing that massive instrument into good condition. And now I marvel at its artistic content every time I visit, which is ever more often.

I don’t know if it’s the best, but it sure is wonderful. A tour with curator Curt Mangel is a privileged walk through countless rooms crammed with pipes. Any tuner would quail at the parades of reeds and dozens of pairs of celestes. What a responsibility. And to witness Grand Court Organist Peter Richard Conte doing his thing (you really have to see it to believe what you’re hearing) is to witness a marriage of man and machine unparalleled in the human experience. Oops, I guess unparalleled is a superlative.

…Oldest?

Am I up to date? Is the little abbey organ built around 1390 in Sion, Switzerland, really the oldest in the world? E. Power Biggs taught me that with his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. I still have those bold tones and archaic tuning in my ears. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) wrote The Canterbury Tales around 1390. In one of those delightful narratives, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the main character was

A widow, poor and somewhat advanced in years, [who] dwelt once in a little cottage . . . By managing carefully what God sent, she provided for herself and her three daughters . . . her only treatment was a temperate diet, with exercise and heart’s content. The gout never kept her from dancing, nor did the apoplexy bother her head . . . She had a yard enclosed all around with sticks and a dry ditch, and in it she had a cock called Chanticleer. In all the land there was no match for his crowing; his voice was merrier than the merry organ that goes in the church on mass-days . . . *

Remember the wonderful carol with the refrain “O the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the Kwah!” Chaucer must have been referring to contemporary British organs, so we can assume a burgeoning pipe organ industry as Europe shook itself free of the Dark Ages. An organ built in 1390 that we can still play today? What a fabulous icon of human history. It has been rebuilt and expanded several times—its history seems to read “every hundred years or so, whether it needs it or not . . . ” What a treat to play on a musical instrument that’s 624 years old! Who cares if it’s any good?

…Most majestic?

One of the most familiar images of the pipe organ world is the lion-topped façade of the 1738 organ built by Christian Müller in St. Bavo Church in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The top of the case is nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the church, and the sounds of the organ are as vital, energetic, and expressive as any modern instrument. There’s a legend saying that Mozart played on this organ, and there are dozens of modern recordings available. The instrument is the centerpiece of the International Summer Academy for Organists, founded in 1955, and continuing today as a seminal educational experience for hundreds of musicians.

With just over 5,000 pipes, the Haarlem organ must have been one of the largest in the world when it was built, but today it represents only the difference in size between the Wanamaker and Atlantic City organs!

Studying the intricate details of the design and construction of this organ, it’s hard to believe that such a thing could have been built using available technology from the early eighteenth century. Think of the state of high culture in America at that time—what the fanciest colonial architecture was like. This organ is high on the list of doozies in the organ world. Does that make it best?

…Most influential?

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll completed the rebuilding and expansion of the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris in 1862. With five manuals and a hundred stops it was one of the largest organs in the world at that time. And with its myriad complex mechanical innovations, it was an eloquent statement of technology of the day. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré combined their careers to serve this church for 101 years. The organ alone as a mechanical entity must be considered among the most elegant, expressive, and fiery instruments ever built. But when combined with its illustrious players—including present organists Daniel Roth and Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin—it’s hard to imagine another church balcony that has housed and launched more extraordinary music. 

Widor (1844–1937) was born to a family of organbuilders. Cavaillé-Coll was a family friend who arranged for Widor to study with Jacques Nicolas Lemmens in Brussels. How many of us have played Lemmens’ Fanfare how many times? Maybe it’s unfair to use one piece to stand for a musician’s life work, but it’s a long way in sophistication from that Fanfare to Widor’s Symphonie Gothique or Symphonie Romane. Along with his organ symphonies, Widor produced dozens of orchestral works including symphonies and piano concertos, chamber music, piano music, and choral works. He was a prolific teacher whose students included Charles Tournemire, Louis Vierne, Darius Milhaud, and Alexander Schreiner. Widor’s lifelong relationship with the St. Sulpice organ must be one of the most important between musician and instrument in the history of music. 

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) was also deeply influenced by Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece, and how many modern organists still living can claim to be his students and therefore students of that organ, whether in private lessons or master class. He died when I was in high school, and I never met him or heard him play. But I know he taught Jehan and Marie-Claire Alain, Jeanne Demessieux, Jean Guillou, Jean Langlais, and Olivier Messiaen. His weekly organ improvisations were legendary, raising the church of St. Sulpice to the level of organists’ pilgrimage—a tradition that remains more than forty years after his death. To this day, a knowing worshipper can quickly pick out the visiting organists, quivering and weeping in their seats.

…Most melodious?

Charles Brenton Fisk, aka Charlie, was a pioneer in the mid-twentieth century renaissance of classical styles of organ building. I was fortunate as a teenager growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, to live within two blocks in opposite directions of two new Fisk organs. And I was fortunate to know Charlie at least a little. Charlie Fisk’s organs are lively and interesting. Many are controversial, especially because of their sonic power. His thrilling Opus 82, installed in Christ United Methodist Church in Greensborough, North Carolina, must be one of the most powerful organs ever built, stop-for-stop.

Fisk’s Opus 55 is a modest three-manual organ of twenty-nine stops, built in 1971. It has a lovely case that includes architectural elements from a much older case by Boston organbuilder Thomas Appleton. It’s housed in a stately 1806 building in Boston’s West End. While its size, scope, and surroundings are nice enough, it would be an unremarkable organ except that it’s widely considered to be one of the finest organs in the world. Its solo voices and choruses combine proud fundamental tone with limpid harmonic structure to produce strikingly beautiful organ tone. 

Yuko Hayashi, the brilliant twentieth-century teacher of hundreds of important modern organists, became organist at Old West in 1973, at the suggestion of Charles Fisk. Yuko had been teaching organ at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1960 and was well known for her lyrical playing. Shortly after she started playing there, she brought the NEC organ class there for lessons, and from then until her retirement in 2001 many hundreds of our finest organists studied with Yuko on the organ at Old West Church. Since it was built, it has been one of the most heavily used organs in the country. Yuko once told me she believed that the organ sounded better the more it was played—that the passage of air through the pipes makes the pipes sound better. How’s that for spiritual?

…Most incensed?

According to Google Maps, the Church of the Advent in Boston is six-tenths of a mile from Old West Church. The Aeolian-Skinner organ at Church of the Advent, a product of the firm’s G. Donald Harrison era, is just as modest and ordinary on paper as the Fisk at Old West. It has fifty-seven stops on three manuals, and is installed in a chamber above the chancel that also speaks into the nave. Modest and ordinary, maybe, but there’s just something about it. Worshipping there with the inspired musical leadership that has always been a hallmark of the place is a Magical Mystery Tour. It would be a challenge to find another organ of this scale that could equal the seamless crescendos and decrescendos that accompany the singing of the choir. It would be a challenge to find another organ of this scale that could play so much of the organ repertory so effectively. In the intense and incensed smoke-filled room that is the Advent’s sanctuary, the architectural borders between instrument and building are as elusive as the musical borders between organ pipes and acoustics. It’s otherworldly.

If Old West Church is a mecca for beautiful organ tone, Church of the Advent is a mecca for the effect of a pipe organ on deep and sophisticated liturgically grounded worship. And you can walk from one to the other in just fifteen minutes.

…Most seminal?

I’m stuck in a rut along the Charles River in Boston, which is just a long block from Church of the Advent. (By the way, the home of Joseph Whiteford, president of Aeolian-Skinner from 1956 until 1965, faces the Charles from one of the little neighborhoods near “The Advent.” It’s the one with the tapered front door!) From there it would take about an hour and a half to walk, but only ten minutes to drive to Adolphus Busch Hall, formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and familiarly known to generations of organists and Harvard students as “The Busch.” Aeolian-Skinner had installed an experimental organ there in 1937, one that included classically inspired principal choruses, from which E. Power Biggs played many live radio broadcasts. Mr. Biggs commissioned the landmark Flentrop organ with his own money in 1958 and placed it on loan to Harvard University. He paid personally for its tuning and maintenance for the rest of his life and bequeathed the organ to the university after his death.

Like the organs at “Old West” and “The Advent,” the Flentrop in “The Busch” is of modest proportions—three manuals and twenty-seven stops. But simply to mention the extraordinary series of recordings Biggs made on that organ, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, is to acknowledge its importance. It still stands as the best-selling series of solo classical music recordings, an accurate and indisputable superlative. And while those performances are still controversial icons of the “organ wars,” his snappy and peppy readings of those classic pieces brought excellent playing of excellent organ music to the ears of millions around the world. Many of us were hearing “chiff” for the first time. To some it was clear and rhythmic, to others it sounded like hitting xylophone bars. Bach’s Jig Fugue brings popping popcorn to mind. The organ is fifty-six years old, and I love taking visiting friends to see it. They melt in its presence. 

…Most nostalgic?

I think that all of us who care about playing the organ have a favorite or two, and I, for one, have a list of organs I’ve loved since I was a kid. There are a couple in Yarmouthport on Cape Cod that I played (and practiced on) for hundreds of teenage summertime hours. There are a couple beauties by
E. & G.G. Hook that were within walking distance of my youthful home. And there are some, even those that fail to stand out as excellent examples of the art, where I had important experiences both personal and musical, where I heard great musicians play for the first time, where important milestones of my personal life and professional career are marked.

In fact, some of the worst organs I’ve seen have had the most impact on me, helping me understand in their negativity why excellence is so important.

Please don’t ask me to name the best organ in the world. If I’m lucky, I haven’t heard about it yet. And the organ to die for? It will be played at my funeral. Any takers? ν

Postscript:

While I’m always interested in good organs anywhere, in this writing I’ve focused on instruments that I think have served as more than just good organs. Each has had a special and wide influence on many musicians, and each has played a particular role in the history of our instrument. Organists go out of their way to experience them. When we think of the modern pipe organ, we can picture dozens, if not hundreds, of various forms, and each of these pivotal organs have played a part in that development. I’ve written this off the top of my head without research, so the list is in no way complete. I’m interested to hear from readers their suggestions of additions to this list. Please write me at [email protected] to share your thoughts.

Thank you for reading.

* Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Translation by Gerard NeCastro, published as “eChaucer” by the University of Maine at Machias: http://machias.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/translation/ct/21npt.html.

Photo credits: William T. Van Pelt, except as noted. 

The secret of life

Donald Hall is an American writer. Because he’s Wendy’s client, I’ve met him several times. He was born in 1928 and last saw a barber or handled a razor at least ten years ago. He published an essay in the June 12, 2013, issue of The New Yorker with the title “Three Beards,” in which he chronicled his long relationship with facial hair. It begins:

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present beard is monumental, and I intend to carry it to my grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.)

It concludes: 

As I decline more swiftly toward the grave I have made certain that everyone knows—my children know, Linda knows, my undertaker knows—that no posthumous razor may scrape my blue face.

In 2011, Wendy accompanied Hall to the White House, where President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. (That’s the same day she chatted with Van Cliburn, as noted in the May 2014 installment of this column.) The neatly trimmed and dapper President met the self-styled Methuselah. 

Donald Hall lives in the New Hampshire farmhouse that was built by his grandfather, whom he helped harvesting hay. Today, hay is harvested by powerful and intricate machines that spit out neatly tied bales in the wake of a tractor. (Hay bales are legitimately held together with baling wire.) Donald Hall, then a child, and his grandfather did it with scythes, pitchforks, and horse-drawn carts. And that’s the way he writes—the old-fashioned way.

He has published dozens of books of poetry, and dozens more of non-fiction, memoirs, and collections of essays. He has written hundreds of articles of literary criticism and countless essays for many publications. And his lifelong collection of thousands of letters to and from other literary and artistic giants will be the grist of many future dissertations. He writes in longhand and dictates into a tape recorder, and leaves a briefcase on his front porch every morning for his typist who lives across the road, who in turn leaves a corresponding case of typed manuscripts.

When we were first dating, Wendy shared Donald Hall’s memoir Life Work with me (Beacon Press, 1993). At 124 pages, it’s an easy read, but when he describes his process, you feel obligated to read it again, and then again. He writes drafts. There were fifty-five drafts of that essay about beards, and there are hundreds of drafts for some of his poems. He started working on his poem Another Elegy in 1982, and put it away, disgusted, in 1988 after more than five hundred drafts. He numbers the drafts. In 1992, he picked it up again, wrote thirty more drafts, then showed it to his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, “who remembered the old one; her response encouraged me.” As he brought it toward conclusion, he woke many days before the alarm, jumping out of bed to start writing, but reminding himself that “You felt like this, about this same poem, a hundred times between 1982 and 1988.”

In Life Work, Donald Hall writes about his grandparents’ work ethics, about baseball players’ dedication to their work, and of course about his own routine, but he makes it clear that hates the phrase “work ethic.” Shortly after leaving the security of a professorship at the University of Michigan to move to the farm with Jane to support himself with his own writing, he attended his Harvard class (1951) reunion where he found himself complimented over and over about his self-discipline. He responded, “If I loved chocolate to distraction, would you call me self-disciplined for eating a pound of Hershey’s Kisses before breakfast?” He simply loves the process of moving words about, mining the English language, dog-earing his beloved Oxford English Dictionary—no matter what it takes to get it right to his own ears.

One of the principal characters in Life Work is the British sculptor Henry Moore. They met in 1959 when Hall was commissioned to write a magazine piece about Moore, and Hall was moved and inspired by Moore’s approach to his work. There was always a sketchpad at hand, there were studios scattered about the property allowing work at different stages to proceed concurrently, and when in his seventies, Moore built a new studio next to the house allowing him to spend another hour at work after dinner. The last time they were together, when Moore was eighty, Hall asked him, “What is the secret of life?” Moore’s response:

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your entire life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

Wrapped around a monument

Last week, the Parisian organist Daniel Roth played a recital at Church of the Resurrection in New York where a couple years ago, the Organ Clearing House renovated, expanded, and installed a Casavant organ built in 1915. It was a treat and a thrill to be around him for a couple days as he prepared and presented his program, and I particularly enjoyed a conversation in which he gave some deeper insight into the heritage of the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, where he has been titulaire since 1985. His three immediate predecessors were Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, Marcel Dupré, and Charles-Marie Widor—four tenures that span nearly a hundred-fifty years. 

Those four organists are identified by their relationships with that organ. Their improvisations and compositions have been inspired by its beautiful tones and enabled by the ingenious mechanical registration devices built in 1862, maintained to this day in their original condition. Roth confirmed the legend that Widor’s original appointment was temporary, and though it was never officially renewed or confirmed, he held the position for sixty-seven years. I’ve known this tidbit for years, but Daniel Roth shared some skinny.

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was a tireless champion of his own work. He was disappointed in the general level of organ playing in Paris in the late 1860s, but was enthralled by performances by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, the professor of organ at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, who first played recitals in Paris during a tour in 1850. Widor was born in Lyon into a family of organbuilders and Cavaillé-Coll was a family friend. It was he who arranged for Widor to study with Lemmens, and the twenty-five year old Widor was Cavaillé-Coll’s candidate for the vacant position at St. Sulpice.

As a reflection of the political and even racial tensions leading up to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Widor’s detractors competing for the important position claimed he played like a German! (Quelle horreur!) The rector compromised by appointing Widor for one year.

Hundreds of American organists have been treated to Daniel Roth’s hospitality at the console of that landmark organ, hearing his improvisations and compositions, and his interpretations of the immense body of music produced by his predecessors. My conversations with him last week reminded me of that quote from Henry Moore. When a great musician spends a lifetime with a great organ, does that qualify as something to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do?

Opera vitae

The mid-twentieth century renaissance in American organbuilding has given us a bevy of small companies building organs under the name of their founders. Among these, C. B. Fisk, Inc. is notable, in that the legendary Charlie Fisk passed away relatively young, and the work of his company has been continued by his co-workers—dare I say disciples? But when I think of names like Wolff, Wilhelm, Noack, Brombaugh, and the double-teaming Taylor & Boody, I think of these men, now elderly, retired, or deceased, who have had long careers personally producing many instruments with the help of their small and talented staffs. I think Fritz Noack is in the lead. His company was founded in 1960 and has completed nearly 160 organs. Nice work, Fritz, quite a fleet. Imagine seeing them all in a row. 

Considering all the effort and expertise involved in selling, planning, designing, building, and installing a pipe organ, I marvel at what Fritz and his colleagues have accomplished personally, with a lot of help from their friends. That’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

What was the question?

An old family friend is an expert in “heat transfer”—how heat moves from one mass to another, from a mass to a gas, or any other way heat moves around. One evening sitting with drinks in my parents’ living room and staring at the burning fireplace, I asked him, “Just what is fire?” He told me that it’s a chemical reaction. Yes, but what is it? I never did get an answer I could understand. I think he thought I was a bit of a prig, and I think I was asking a question that couldn’t be answered.

The more you know about the organbuilding trade, the more you realize you don’t know. Building pipe organs is a profession that remains mysterious to its most experienced practitioners. How does that air get from one place to another inside the organ? How does that thin sheet of pressurized air passing through the mouth of an organ pipe turn into musical tone? And how do those tones blend so beautifully with each other? How do we move such volumes of air silently? We have answers that refer to the laws of physics, but like my question about fire, they seem unanswerable. I’ve come to think that all you can do is know the questions and keep working to achieve better understanding of how to answer them. It’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

Go Daddy, go.

My father passed away at home on April 8, about six weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. He was born four years before Donald Hall. He had a stroke a few months before from which he had largely recovered, although the gorgeous handwriting for which he was well known was gone. A vicious headache, which may have been another stroke, was our signal that the end was near. His doctor helped us establish home hospice care, and after about a week of comforting medication and declining consciousness he was gone. My three siblings and I, and our spouses, managed to gather during that week along with lots of the grandchildren. My brother Mark and his wife Sarah, my wife Wendy, and my mother Betsy were with Dad at his moment of death. Coincidentally, I was at work in St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, where my parents were married almost fifty-nine years ago.

The Rev. John J. Bishop was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Massachusetts in 1952, and all the parishes he served were in that diocese. Everyone called him Jack. He served as rector of churches in Somerville and Westwood before he was called to be rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where he served from 1966 until his retirement in 1989. That was when my parents moved to the newly renovated and expanded family summer home on Cape Cod. After that retirement, he served as interim rector at churches in Dedham, Woods Hole, Falmouth, Provincetown, and Belmont. In December of 2012, the Parish of the Epiphany hosted a celebratory Eucharist honoring the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination.

My father grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a member of Christ Church, which is now the Cathedral of the Diocese of Southern Ohio. Our grand colleague and mentor Gerre Hancock was organist and choirmaster there in the 1960s. Dad had recordings of that church’s Boar’s Head Festival led by Gerre Hancock—the first improvisations I ever heard. As he grew up in Ohio in the 1920s and ’30s, some of the liberal causes for which he was later known hadn’t been contemplated, but before he was finished, my father had championed civil rights, social justice, the ordination of women, and
same-sex marriages.

The Rev. Jeanne Sprout was the first woman to be ordained in the Diocese of Massachusetts. Her ordination in 1977 happened at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester as she joined the staff there. And Dad chaired the steering committee that nominated Barbara Harris as the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion. As interim rector in Provincetown, he blessed same-sex unions many years before the ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that made them legal as marriages ten years ago. During his adolescence in Ohio and while serving in the United States Army during World War II, he would never have imagined such a thing.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the parish’s associate rector Michael Jupin participated in a widely reported protest on the steps of Boston’s Arlington Street Church, placing his draft card in an offering plate in the hands of William Sloane Coffin, pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, and activist and pediatrician Benjamin Spock. This created a firestorm in the then conservative parish (Winchester was cited as the town where the politics met the zip code: Zero-1890). The wardens approached my father, demanding to know “how to get rid of Jupin,” as important pledge-units left the parish in droves. Dad’s immediate answer was, “you get rid of the rector.” He told us later about that crisis in his career and the life of that church, how he sat alone in his car weeping, wondering what to do, and how he sought the council of his bishop, who encouraged him to “stand in the midst of those people and lead.”

Through all of that, Dad remained devoted to the traditions and liturgy of the Anglican Communion. He was a strong supporter of the music of the church, and during his tenures, the parishes in Westwood and Winchester both purchased organs from Charles Fisk. I remember the thrill of using my newly acquired adult voice, singing in harmony accompanied by orchestra as the adult choir presented Bach’s Cantata 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. 

Dad understood the importance of the “theater” of liturgy. My childhood friends who were acolytes laugh today about how they were terrified of “blowing it” around Rev. Bishop. He needed it to be right. He led worship and celebrated the Eucharist with enthusiasm and joy—his “church voice” was nothing like his everyday voice. The crisp cadence and musical intonation of his delivery of the Prayers of Consecration are still in my ears, and remain my ideal. He really celebrated communion.

I’ve spent many days working as an organbuilder in churches of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Often, when I’m introduced to a rector, I’ve heard, “There’s a priest in this diocese with that name,” followed by unsolicited tributes. It’s been wonderful to hear accounts of my father’s work from so many different sources. I’m grateful for Dad’s encouragement and inspiration.

What a weekend.

Today is Monday. Dad’s memorial service was Saturday. There were four bishops and twenty priests in robes up front and the pews were full of family, friends, and parishioners from across the diocese and around the world, and plenty more priests. In a piece included in the leaflet for Dad’s memorial service, I wrote, “The definition is ‘Great excitement for or interest in a cause.’ It’s from the Greek root, enthousiasmos, which came from the adjective entheos, ‘having God within.’ Enthusiasm.” That is the way he lived his life, inspiring people, encouraging them to think and grow, and sharing his love for the church, for better or for worse.

That’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

Of course I’m sad. Of course I miss him. But when a man lives such a long and productive life, has nearly sixty years of marriage, sees four children grow up, knows ten adult grandchildren, and with our grandson Ben, knew his first great-grandchild, we can only be grateful.

Yesterday, we interred Dad’s ashes. There were about thirty of us at the end of the boardwalk over the marshes that led to Dad’s favorite Cape Cod swimming hole. As the last of the ashes sprinkled into the water I blurted out, “Go daddy, go.” ν

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?

I am writing in the days just after Christmas, working through the end of a calendar year, a high point in the church year, and the juxtaposition of contrasting personal events with the peripatetic life of working in the Organ Clearing House. I’m home in Greenwich Village this morning, seven days after returning from an installation trip in northern Idaho, and six days after the funeral of a close friend. I’ve tuned seven organs since, and a few days ago we celebrated the first birthday of our first grandson.

Coolin, Idaho, is located in the north-pointing panhandle of Idaho. It’s about seventy-five miles northeast of Spokane, Washington. I googled to learn the population and found a figure of 168—but when I mentioned that to the owner of the brand-new twelve-room Coolin Motel, he said simply, “There aren’t that many people here.” It’s on the shore of Priest Lake, a popular center for water sports, so the population swells dramatically in the summer. And there are four or five hundred miles of snowmobile tracks in the county, so when there’s snow, there’s another population of noisy recreational vehicles. 

The newest fad among the show-machine crowds is something called a Mountain Horse—a conversion kit that transforms a mountain bike into a cross between a snowmobile and a jet-ski. They’re scary-looking machines with motorcycle engine, transmission, frame, seat, and handlebars, a spring-suspended rear track, and a ski in front. Enthusiasts roar through forests and across frozen lakes at high speeds, giving us one more literal definition for the term break-neck.

My colleague Amory Atkins and I were there to finish the installation of a Möller “Double Artiste” on a specially designed organ loft in an elaborate and beautiful new home on the shore of the lake. The house is built around a gorgeous Craftsman-style post and beam frame complete with dovetails and hard ash pins, and finished with chest-high wainscoating of dark-stained alder, complete with raised panels, applied to all the walls including mud room, stairwells, guest bedrooms, and the powder room off the kitchen. All of the interior doors are American black walnut—any organbuilder I know would be proud to produce joinery of that quality.

The center of the house is a two-and-a-half story great room into which the organ speaks from its perch. Sitting at the console, one looks ten miles across the lake, which is surrounded by dramatic hillsides of red cedar forests plunging to the shore.

The owner is a successful attorney who lives alone. As we have a place in semi-rural Maine where the closest visible houses are a half-mile away across a tidal river, I understand the pleasures of solitude in a beautiful place. But there I can hop in the car and drive ten minutes to town where there is a very good grocery store. In our village I can buy gas, booze, and clothing, or get a haircut. There are several dentists, a couple of opticians, and a 38-bed hospital. There’s a nice bookstore, a couple of pharmacies, two good hardware stores, churches (three with lovely historic pipe organs), a movie theater, and a couple good year-round restaurants. And, we have a wonderful circle of friends, all with interesting professional backgrounds, with whom we can gather in all types of weather.

Our client’s house is twenty-eight miles up a tiny county road from the center of Coolin. There is a real grocery store in Newport, Idaho—about thirty miles from Coolin on the road to Spokane. But for medical services, haircuts, and any sort of comprehensive shopping, he has to drive the full hundred miles to Spokane. While we were there, that twenty-eight mile road was sheer ice—a scary and lonely trek from a tiny village to a remote house. And by the way, going north from Coolin past the house, it’s about forty miles to Canada. We didn’t ask if there’s a circle of friends.

If a tree falls in the forest…

Driving on that endless secluded road, I was reminded of the classic query, “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around, does it make a sound?”

This client was first in touch with us a couple years ago, sharing his plans for the house and asking about acquiring a pipe organ. Naively enough, I assumed that he had some past experience of playing the organ. Perhaps his childhood piano lessons morphed into organ lessons so he played for chapel services in prep school. But no! He doesn’t play the organ. He’s highly educated and has fantastic taste in music—during our stay he broadcast wonderful recordings through the house’s complex media system. When the organ came to life and I played Christmas carols, he stood next to me singing the tenor parts accurately, in tune, and with real phrasing. (I was at least partially right about the prep-school thing.) He explained that his daughters are musical, and told us of their real accomplishments. They would be visiting a couple times a year, and he expected they would enjoy playing the organ!

We have gone to a lot of trouble to install this organ. Joshua Wood and Terence Atkin delivered the organ by truck. The basic directions were to leave Boston driving west on Interstate 90, drive 2,750 miles, turn right at Coeur d’Alene (population 44,000), then go north 70 miles. We ate dreary meals five nights in a row at the Moose Knuckle Bar and Grill—the only place in Coolin open on weeknights. The Moose Knuckle menu includes pub food that can be prepared with fryolator and microwave. We drove that hazardous 56-mile round trip seven times. We tiptoed around the beautiful house, terrified that we would “ding” the woodwork.

But rather than the usual exercise of handing the organ over to an eager professional, I counseled this client that if the organ wasn’t played—and I mean, really played—a couple times a month, when summer comes and his daughters arrive, they will all be disappointed as the atrophied instrument wheezes back into service, full of ciphers and dead notes.

§ 

Wendy and I have enjoyed the close friendship of Jim and Lois for many years. Last spring they told us that Jim had been diagnosed with cancer, and through the summer he endured vicious sessions of chemotherapy. A complication developed in the early fall and he declined. The day before I left for Idaho, a mutual friend and I went to visit, and I knew I would not see him again. Sure enough, he died while I was away, and Amory and I returned home without finishing the project.

Jim and Lois were great “foodies” together. They were Italophiles, visiting Italy whenever they could—their last trip followed Jim’s diagnosis. Jim was a prolific organic gardener. To put his prowess in context, his wedding gift to us was a hundred pounds of fresh heirloom tomatoes that he sliced in our garage to be served at our wedding dinner. Jim and Lois befriended cooks, gardeners, and vintners in Italy, and brought those wares home in abundance. He sent me postcards of organs they happened on as they traveled.

We often cooked together, enjoying jointly prepared meals. And when Wendy and I went to their house for dinner, we loved sharing the most recent triumphs from Jim’s garden, wonderful unfamiliar wines, and not to escape mention, Lois is a terrific baker. It was strange standing in their kitchen this week with the bustle of family and friends all around without seeing Jim staking out his territory at the stove, cooking up something wonderful, and sharing tastes of exotic vegetables, “you gotta try this.”

§

The pipe organ is a public instrument. When an organbuilder conceives, designs, and builds an instrument, he intends from the beginning that it will be heard regularly by large groups of people. Attending a concert played on one of his instruments, he’s like an accomplished cook watching people eat food he has prepared. He has put a lot of thought and planning into it and he hopes they like it. He hopes they’ll enjoy familiar flavors, but be surprised and delighted by some unfamiliar ingredient or combination of flavors. He hopes they’ll go home talking about it. But above all he hopes they’ll show up to eat in the first place, and that they’ll come back often.

An orchestral instrument is a private tool used in public. The flautist selects and cares for his instrument as part of himself. He’s happy to take it from its case and share its sounds with an audience, and when the performance is over he packs it up and carries it home.

The pipe organ is standing in the venue before the musician arrives. If it’s the “house” musician returning to play for the hundredth or thousandth time, she mounts the bench with familiarity—the height and position are already set. She knows the strengths and weaknesses of the instrument. She knows how to balance its sounds with those of a large congregation singing with fervor, or with the solo voice of a young child. Like the glove-box of her car, the console is equipped with the pencils, Post-its, paperclips (don’t let them fall between the keys!), and often-played responses that are the tools of her trade.

When the day is done, the last Amen played, and the last listener departed, the organist turns off the blower and the lights, locks the door, and leaves the instrument alone in the room. There it gleams until the next person enters.

If it’s a guest organist, he climbs onto an unfamiliar bench, messes around with blocks to get the height right, tries a stop or two, tries a big full sound, and wonders how to balance with other musical tones he’s never heard. The organ may present itself to him as a willing partner or an obstinate beast. But whoever is playing, the organ is a public presence. Its monumentality complements the architectural and acoustic space it occupies. 

It’s strange to place an organ in a room where you know it will be rarely played and rarely heard. It’s like a cooking a meal that won’t be eaten.

§

Yesterday Wendy and I joined a big group of members of combined families to celebrate the first birthday of our first grandson. Benjamin is the first of his generation. He turned us into grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, and aunts all at once. He’s a delight with bright shiny eyes and a ready smile, and he’s freely willing to be passed around the room by adoring relatives. He started walking about six weeks ago at just the same moment he started falling down. We all had a blast celebrating with him, enjoying each other’s company, and sampling new foods.

Our daughter-in-law and her family are Brazilian, and Alessandra has recently earned American citizenship. Chris and Alex plan to raise Ben as bilingual. Both of them are great readers, and Ben has a wonderful start appreciating the world of books. As birthday presents were being opened, it was the books that captured his attention. He sat on the floor with a book on his lap, turning the pages and studying the pictures, murmuring little statements as he went. 

He also has an affinity for touch screens. When someone pulls a phone out of their pocket or purse—which is very often—he toddles over and cranes his neck to see the screen. His index finger is pointed and at the ready, and although he has no idea what he’s seeing, he has a lovely little touch as he swipes from screen to screen. One of the gifts he received was a mock tablet with a functioning touch screen. Alex remarked with glee that it would save her iPhone.

I wonder what kind of a world will greet Ben as he grows older. Wendy and I will make every effort to expose him to music, museums, theater, and other facets of the humanities and the world of culture. And I’m equally sure that other family members will introduce him to the magic of Brazilian culture. After all, they come from the land of Mardi Gras, the samba, the bossa nova, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Brazil is a land of infinite color and beauty, and while much of the country’s cultural heritage is different from ours, it’s rich and varied—a cornucopia of forms of expression. I trust that Ben will be the richer for his exposure to two languages, and two contrasting cultural heritages.

But what will the world be like when he’s in his fifties? Will concerts by symphony orchestras be accessible? Will live theater be a thing of the past? I hope I’ll have opportunities to share my work with pipe organs and church music with him. But I’ll not be around when he’s in his fifties. Will he remember the organ as the funny thing that Grandpa did? Today we can find cobblers who can stitch and glue a factory-made heel and sole set on a pair of shoes. But can we find a cobbler who can actually make a pair of shoes from scratch?

In his novel American Pastorale (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), Philip Roth tells of the industries in his home town, Newark, New Jersey:

The most important thing in making leather is water—skins spinning in big drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If there’s soft water, good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both—big breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing work. (page 11)

Roth gives over eight pages to describing the process of making a pair of fine leather gloves by hand:

Close your hand, make a fist . . . feel how the glove expands where your hand expands and nicely adjusts to your size? That’s what the cutter does when he does his job right—no stretch left in the length, he’s pulled that all out at the table because you don’t want the fingers to stretch, but an exactly measured amount of hidden stretch left in the width. That stretch in the width is a precise calculation. (page 132)

Will Ben, who shows a nascent love of books at the age of one, enjoy the magic of devouring a book by Philip Roth—a real book with paper pages? And will he witness craftsmanship at the level that predicts confidently the amount of stretch in a hand-made glove—none the long way, and just right around the finger?

Together, Jim and Lois were enthusiastic supporters of the arts, giving to their favorite institutions at high levels, and I know Lois will continue that in her new life without Jim. We are grateful to people like them for helping to keep symphony orchestras, museums, and opera companies alive so people like Ben can experience them long after they are gone. Cultural institutions like these are for the public—for our common wealth.

It’s wonderful to witness a great orchestra presenting music of Mozart or Brahms. But enjoying the works of past centuries is not the only reason it’s important. The future of the arts, the humanities—of our entire cultural heritage—is based on our understanding of the past. Everything that is yet to come is based on the foundation of what has been. History informs the future. That means that Ben will thrive in a wider spectrum than we know today. Keep working hard. Our grandson depends on it. ν

The high cost of beauty

When the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, the world went agog over the dazzling beauty of the artifacts that had been hidden since his death some 3,300 years earlier. There were large pieces of gilded furniture, ornate masks, jewelry, and lots of hieroglyphics and paintings. The level of craftsmanship was bewildering, given the degree of antiquity. Other members of Egyptian royalty were buried in similarly grand circumstances, in tombs located under the great pyramids. And who built the pyramids? Slaves.

Big-time personal money always has and always will be part of the arts world. If there had been no Medici dynasty, we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, to name just a few. How did the Medici make their money? They were bankers, the wealthiest family in Europe. They parlayed their wealth into political influence, and many family members became important politicians. The family even produced four popes in the sixteenth century. If that implies it was possible to purchase a papacy, I’m surprised that Silvio Berlusconi didn’t try it. A family tree I found online shows more than twenty generations of Medici between 1360 and about 1725. 

We’ve learned a lot about the ethics of banking and investment in recent years, where executives use their clients’ money to leverage their own fortunes, bring down institutions, and go home with bonuses that equal the annual wages of hundreds of normal workers. I’m not setting about a researched dissertation on the source of the Medici’s money, but I’m willing to bet that much of it came at the expense of others.

Heavy metal

The Carnegie Steel Company was one of the country’s first major producers of steel, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, it developed important improvements in the manufacturing process, including open-hearth smelting and installation of advanced material handling systems like overhead cranes and hoists. The result was higher production levels using increasingly less skilled labor, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck against the Homestead Steel Works. There were various waves of strikes, and at first the union prevailed. 

Henry Clay Frick ran the Carnegie Steel Company for his eponymous partner. He announced on April 30, 1892, that he would keep negotiations open with the union for thirty days, and on June 29, he locked down the plant and the union announced a strike. Frick engaged the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security, and more than three hundred armed Pinkerton agents were involved in bloody battles with striking workers. The Pinkerton force surrendered, and the governor sent in the State Militia and declared martial law. There was a failed assassination attempt against Frick. The union was broken and collapsed about ten years later. 

It was important to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to beat down the union because they had their lifestyles to maintain. Carnegie built a majestic home on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street in New York (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) in which he installed a large Aeolian pipe organ. He paid about $65,000 for the organ at the time when workers in the Aeolian factory earned about $600 a year. Hmmm. The organ cost as much as the annual wages of more than a hundred workers. Not as bad as King Tut, but sounds about right.

Henry Clay Frick installed a large Aeolian in his gracious home on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (now housing the Frick Collection, commonly known as “The Frick”). These guys really knew how to build houses. Hank and Andy must have warmed each other’s hearts living just twenty blocks apart—an easy twenty-minute walk, just long enough to smoke a hundred-dollar cigar (six weeks for that Aeolian worker). Frick also built a tremendous Aeolian in his summer home at Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts and gave a four-manual job to Princeton University. That’s four big pipe organs built on the backs of striking steel workers.

Three years before the Homestead Strike, Andrew Carnegie paid about $1,000,000 to buy the land and construct the venerable Manhattan concert hall that bears his name. The place was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925 when they sold it to a real estate developer.

I’m giving Mr. Carnegie a hard time, because at least some of his business practices were mighty ruthless, and the mind-boggling wealth that he accumulated was not a reflection on his largess. But it’s important to remember that he was also an important philanthropist and the foundation that was founded on his fortune is still a major source of grants for all sorts of educational programs, scientific research, and artistic endeavors. Visit the website at www.carnegie.org.

I served a church in Cleveland as music director for about ten years, where a four-manual Austin was installed as a gift from the Carnegie Foundation in 1917. The Bach scholar Albert Riemenschneider of Baldwin-Wallace College was organist there when the instrument was installed—the perfect organ for a performance of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.

Among many other projects, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation installed more than 8,800 pipe organs in America’s churches and founded more than 2,500 public libraries. That’s important.

Moving musical chairs.

On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Wendy and I attended a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to hear Stephen Tharp play the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra of Aaron Copland. Until about three o’clock that afternoon it was doubtful that the concert would happen because Carnegie Hall’s stagehands had struck the night before, causing the cancellation of the concert on October 2. They were striking over the rules for soon-to-be-opened educational spaces above the hall, claiming that they should have the same jurisdiction as in the great hall itself. Carnegie Hall’s management took the position that as it would be an educational venue, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees should not have such control. It’s probably not this simple, but should Theatrical Stage people control educational spaces?

The New York Times reported that Carnegie Hall employs five full-time stagehands with average annual compensations of more than $400,000 a year, with additional part-time union members brought in as needed. I know a lot of organbuilders who would make great stagehands, and Wendy was quick to say that I missed my calling.

The strike was settled in time for us to hear Stephen play with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported that the union backed off, as it seemed ridiculous to almost anyone that a teenaged music student would not be allowed to move a music stand. You can read about that strike in the New York Times at: www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/carnegie-hall-and-stagehands-sett….

It’s an exquisite irony that the October 2 concert cancelled because of the strike was to be a gala celebratory fundraiser for the Philadelphia Orchestra, recently revitalized after years of labor disputes. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was to open his second season as music director in what was billed as the triumphant return of that great orchestra to its role as a national leader.

Vänskä-daddle

On October 3, 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Osmo Vänskä had resigned from his position as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His action was anticipated. The musicians had been locked out by the Board of Directors for more than a year in a dispute that pitted the player’s requests for salary increases against the board’s decision to spend $52,000,000 renovating the concert hall while claiming there were no funds to increase salaries.

The orchestra had long planned to play a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York during the fall of 2013. Ironically, Vänskä was widely celebrated for having brought the MSO into new prominence with several seasons of brilliant performances and celebrated recordings, and the Carnegie Hall concerts were to celebrate the MSO’s bursting into the upper echelons of American symphony orchestras. Vänskä had announced that the dispute must be settled so rehearsals for those concerts could begin on September 30. If not, he would resign. It wasn’t, and he did. Former Senator George Mitchell, famous for negotiating settlements of disputes in Northern Ireland and steroid use in Major League Baseball, had been enlisted to help with the MSO negotiations—turned out that Northern Ireland had nothing on the MSO.

In the past several years, a number of important orchestras have suffered serious financial stress leading to labor disputes, including the orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

Eerily, on September 30, 2013, the same drop-dead-date for Väskä’s resignation, Norman Ebrecht of ArtsJournalBlogs reported that players in one hundred German orchestras struck simultaneously to draw attention to the increasing number of orchestras closing because of dwindling government support. There were 168 orchestras in Germany at the time of reunification in 1991, and there are 131 today. It’s a big deal to lose nearly forty orchestras in twenty years.

Do the numbers.

I love to do goofy math. In the 1970s when I lived on a farm outside Oberlin, Ohio, I wondered how much corn might grow in a day. I measured a couple dozen plants in the morning, then again in the evening, and came up with an average amount of growth. I measured and multiplied to get the number of plants in an acre, then again by the number of acres on the farm. Of course I can’t remember the numbers, but I know it added up to many miles of growth in a day. You could almost hear it while lying in bed at night.

I did that recently with the economics of a symphony orchestra. I found a list online of American orchestras with the largest operating budgets. Los Angeles tops that list at $97,000,000. Boston is second at $84,000,000. I stuck with Boston because it’s home, and I got the rest of the information I needed. The BSO plays about a hundred concerts a year—that’s $840,000 each. Symphony Hall seats about 2,600 people. The average ticket price is around $75, so ticket revenue for a full house is about $195,000. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 per concert that must be made up by private and corporate donations, campaigns, bar and restaurant revenues, and heaven knows what else—if they sell out each concert. Read the program booklet of the BSO and you’ll be surprised how many of the orchestra’s chairs are “fully funded in perpetuity,” named for their donors. Three cheers for them.

I know very well that this is bogus math. There are many variables that I’ve overlooked, and doubtless many of which I am not aware—but I think it’s a reasonable off-the-cuff illustration of the challenges of large-scale music-making in modern society. You can buy a pretty snazzy new pipe organ for the $645,000 that’s missing for each BSO concert after ticket sales.

While I was surfing about looking for those numbers, I learned that the starting salary for a musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is about $135,000. That’s pretty good when compared to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra where the starting salary is more like $48,000. I suppose that senior members of the BSO must earn over $200,000. In the business world, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe would qualify as an Executive Vice President and head of a department—worth $250,000 or $300,000, I’d say. But not as much as a stagehand. 

I guess I’m laboring under an old-fashioned concept that the artistic content should be worth more than the support staff. Big-time stagehands are hardworking people with important jobs. It’s not just anyone who can be trusted to fling high-end harps around a stage. But how many church choir directors would like to have someone else available to set up the chairs?

If the cost of operating a symphony orchestra seems high, get a load of the Metropolitan Opera. I found an article in the New York Times published on October 1, 2011, that put the Met’s annual budget at $325,000,000, of which $182,000,000 is from private donations. The Met had just passed New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the arts organization with the largest budget. (Counting baseball, New York City has three Mets.)

I found a page on the Met (opera) website that listed the administrative staff, which includes the General Manager (Peter Gelb), Musical Director (James Levine), and Principal Conductor (Fabio Luisi), along with twenty-five assistant general managers, artistic management, design, production, finance, development, human resources, house management, stage directors, stage management, carpenters, electricians—a total of more than three hundred administrative employees. Add a symphony orchestra, costumes, make-up, custodians, ticket sellers, and—oh yes—singers, and you wind up with a whopping payroll.

Since I’m not a stagehand, I pretended I was going to buy one ticket online. I chose a performance of La Bohème on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m. I couldn’t choose between a seat in Row B of the Orchestra (down front, near the stage) for $300, or one in Orchestra Row U for $250. And nearly half of the operating budget is funded by donations. If you take a date and have a nice dinner and a glass of wine at intermission, that’s pretty much a thousand-dollar night, something stagehands could afford if they could get the night off.

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The source of much of the money that has funded the arts over many centuries is questionable, and it’s especially difficult to accept how much of has been the product of slavery. But scary as that is, I’m sure glad we had the Medicis and hundreds of others like them. It would be a barren world without the art and architecture that they funded. I have to admit that when I’m standing in a museum looking at a work of art, I’m not fretting about the suffering involved in its production.

Today’s system seems more just—concert-goers buy tickets, and corporate and individual sponsors theoretically make up the rest. That works as long as costs are reasonably controlled, and donors can be kept happy. The problem with that is how it can affect programming. 

If you listen regularly to a commercial classical radio station anywhere in the country, you would be able to list society’s favorite pieces of music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 9th, Mozart’s 40th Symphony and 23rd Piano Concerto, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances—you get the idea. Organists know how hard it is to get a bride to choose something other than the Taco-Bell Canon, or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Lots of serious classical music ensembles, from local choruses to major symphony orchestras, adjust their programming to please their patrons. The box office at Boston Symphony Hall has a long-standing tradition allowing people to pass on their subscription seats to friends. When James Levine came to town as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he increased dramatically the amount of contemporary music on the programs, and friends of ours who had long held great seats on the balcony above the stage asked if we wanted to take them over because they couldn’t take all the modern music. We did.

And, in a related matter, the players of the BSO made public the extra workload brought on by Levine’s energetic and imaginative programming. On March 17, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that orchestra players were concerned about longer concerts, extra rehearsals, and programming of exceptionally difficult music. You can read it online at www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_prove…. They cited aggravation of injuries and increased stress and negotiated with Levine to alter some of the planned programs. And the BSO Trustees created a special fund to support the cost of the extra rehearsal time. But smaller institutions with limited resources would not be able to do the same. So it’s back to the crowd-pleasing favorites at the cost of innovation.

I’ve often repeated a story about an experience Wendy and I had with artistic patronage. An exceptionally wealthy friend, now deceased, was well known in his community as a generous supporter of the arts. He lived in a city that is home to a nationally prominent repertory theater company that was mounting the premiere production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home. The play tells the story of a family’s gay son contracting AIDS, with the main dialogue happening in the family car driving home from a holiday celebration. The production was to include larger-than-life bunraku puppets that would provide the action less suited for the stage, conceived by the playwright, to be constructed by a New York-based puppeteer. Our friend was asked to fund the puppets, which were to cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He told us the story over dinner, saying that he hated the idea, was uncomfortable with the subject, but thought he should provide the funds because he knew it was important.

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Recently organist David Enlow and harpist Grace Cloutier performed a recital at David’s home church, Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, where the Organ Clearing House installed an instrument a couple years ago. At dinner after the concert, we were discussing the instruments we play, and I noted that with the exception of pianos and high-end violins, the harp is probably one of the most expensive instruments that musicians typically own privately. Organists have to rely on the institutions for which they work to provide them with an instrument to play. And they sure have gotten expensive.

I’ve always felt that a three-manual organ with forty or fifty stops is just about right for a prominent suburban church with a sanctuary seating five hundred people or more. But a first quality organ of that size will push, and easily exceed, $1,000,000. It’s pretty hard for many parishes to justify such a whopping expenditure. I grew up in the era when it was all the rage for churches to replace fifty-year-old electro-pneumatic organs with new trackers, and many organists fell into the habit of getting what they asked for. Those days are largely over, because now that we really know how to build good organs of any description, we also know what they cost! We have to remember what a big deal it is for a church to order a new instrument.

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I’m troubled by the striking stagehands. I believe in the concept of the labor union. They were formed to confront real injustice, and in the strange and shaky state of our economy, injustices are still firmly in place. But this is a time when they’ve gone too far. That kind of labor organizing can threaten the future of live music in concert halls.

The Organ Clearing House uses Bank of America because we work all across the country, and it’s convenient to be able to get to a bank pretty much anywhere we go. But we were not bursting with pride when Time magazine reported on November 9, 2013, that the bank was to be fined $865,000,000 for mortgage fraud related to the Countrywide Financial scandal. At the same time, our bank is a Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Alvin Ailey Dancers, and the Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcasts in public schools. We thank them for all that.

Bank of America is also a “Season Sponsor” for Carnegie Hall, supporting the Hall’s mission “to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of the legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences,” as stated on Carnegie Hall’s website.

So the concert hall that was built on the backs of striking steel workers, whose schedule was recently interrupted by striking six-figure stagehands, is now supported largely by a bank guilty of major mortgage fraud. 

May the music keep playing. Sure hope it does. The stakes are high.