In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Advent in New York
Today, as I write this column, is the third Sunday of Advent. The Organ Clearing House is installing an organ in Manhattan, and my wife Wendy came down for the weekend. We went to a Christmas choral concert last night on the Upper East Side. We’ve had a string of nice meals together. And this morning we attended the 11 am Choral Eucharist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.
That landmark church is a huge and spectacular place. It’s a true stone Gothic building, especially fascinating as its perpetual state of incompletion allows the architecture aficionado to study the construction techniques—what the massive stonework looks like under the finished limestone veneer. The place is 601 feet long inside. The ceiling is nearly 125 feet above the floor. Single rooms just aren’t that big. There’s something like 15,250,000 cubic feet of air contained inside. Don’t even think about the fuel bill. The idea that a building that large could be dedicated to worship is solid testament to the power of faith—not just American Episcopalianism, but any faith anywhere.
It’s awe-inspiring. It’s breath-taking. It’s humbling. And thinking back on the history of cathedral building, so highly developed in twelfth-century France, it’s easy to understand how people were motivated to create such elevating structures. In rural areas, the cathedral building is visible for miles. Approaching Chartres in France, for example, one sees the famous cathedral on the horizon from a great distance. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC dominates the top of a hill, so it can be seen from Route I-95 some ten miles to the east of the city. In upper Manhattan, there’s really no place that I’ve found on ground level where you can see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine from any great distance. If you approach by subway, you get off the 1-2-3 train at 110th Street, walk north to 112th, turn right, and there you see the west-end façade of the cathedral at the end of the block. Heading up Amsterdam Avenue from Midtown, you don’t see the cathedral until you’re right on it. It blends in with the hundreds of façades that line the east side of the street. When you pass 110th Street, the cathedral campus opens up to the right—a dramatic and verdant two-block oasis in that busy urbanscape.

You can’t hold a candle to it.
Worship in the cathedral was a wonderful experience for us. Although the nave can seat thousands, there were enough people in attendance for the place to feel populated. There was a raft of clergy in beautiful vestments, clouds of incense wafting to the heavens, and a brigade of acolytes. I chuckled at the sight of a pint-sized acolyte bearing a candle on a pole that must have weighed as much as he did—and in order to show up in such a vast place, altar candles need to be fifty-pounders.
Perhaps the grandest thing about the place is the sound. We usually measure reverberation in half-seconds. At St. John the Divine it’s measured in days. Walk in on a Monday morning, and yesterday’s postlude is still in the air. Close your eyes and spin around, and you can no longer tell where a sound originates. The organ chambers were 150 feet from where we were sitting. The organ’s sound is powerful and rich. Gentle individual colors are easily distinguishable. Of course, we expect always to be able to tell when a Clarinet is playing, or when it’s replaced by an Oboe, but I am somehow surprised that subtle tones carry so distinctly in such a vast space. Some of the most impressive subtle tones in a monumental organ are the quiet 32-foot stops. An 800-pound Bourdon pipe consumes a hurricane of air through a four- or five-inch toe-hole to produce a rumbling whisper. It has to be the most extravagant consumption of materials and forces in the entire world of music. But when you sit a hundred feet away in a vast interior space, it’s impossible to put a price on that quality of sound.
The grand choruses of principals and reeds create huge washes of sound. The organ is powerful enough to startle you from across the room. There’s a good variety of bold solo reeds that bring clarity to hymn tunes. And perhaps the most famous organ stop in the world is 600 feet away high on the west wall under the great rose window—the State Trumpet. It’s blown with 50 inches of wind pressure—that’s more than twice what we otherwise consider to be high pressure. And do those pipes ever sound. One would never ask, “was that the State Trumpet?” The only answer would be, “If you’ve gotta ask, that wasn’t it.”
If you’ve never been able to experience the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, go. Just go. You can get there easily on the subway from Pennsylvania Station or Grand Central Station. You can find plenty of great meals within a few blocks. There are terrific hotels nearby, especially in my experience along Broadway between 75th and 80th Streets—just a few subway stops from the cathedral.
In summer 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri completed their restoration of the cathedral’s mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. You can read about that project in detail in the November 2009 issue of The American Organist. The Organ Clearing House was engaged to assist in the installation of the organ, and it was our privilege to spend that summer hoisting and assembling thousands of organ parts in the chambers, nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the cathedral. Sometime soon I’ll write about that experience in more detail. For now, take my advice—just go.

A clean sweep
So we’re installing an organ. Sunday is over and we’re into the work week. Sometimes we work in parish church buildings in quiet little towns. There’s a big parking lot where we can leave our cars. There’s plenty of space around the building for maneuvering trucks. And the sidewalks are quiet, so it’s easy to walk around while carrying heavy loads. There’s a hardware store just up the street, next to a sandwich shop that sells great coffee in cardboard cups.
Not this time. We’re working on 74th Street in Manhattan, just east of Park Avenue. It’s a great neighborhood, but it’s very busy. Park Avenue is lined with high-end housing—high-rise condominium buildings with uniformed doormen, expensively dressed women with little expensively dressed designer dogs, and snazzy green awnings. I think the nearest business on Park Avenue is the Maserati dealer. I’ve never been inside. They don’t have anything there that I need.
Lexington Avenue is one block to the east. It’s a much more interesting street, with hundreds of shops, cafés, restaurants, groceries—and thousands of people on the sidewalks. You can buy coffee, but it’s four or five dollars a cup. The hardware store is a half-hour round-trip walk (forget about driving—you’ll never find a parking space). There are delivery people on foot and on bicycles carrying everything from flowers to groceries to meals. 74th Street is supposedly one lane wide with parking on both sides.
The north side of the street is cleaned every Monday and Thursday—the south side on Tuesday and Friday. “Alternate Side Parking” is the regulation regarding street cleaning. The big street-sweeping machines are escorted by a fleet of public works cars. They come into the street and fan out, sticking to windshields aggressively tacky stickers that scold residents for thwarting their efforts to keep the city clean by leaving their cars in violation of the sweeping schedule. Seems that they don’t need to issue citations—the stickers are so difficult to remove that they are punishment enough. One car had three weeks’ worth of stickers. I guess the owner just gave up.
There’s a nursery school in the church building. At 8:30 every morning a platoon of kids arrives in the building escorted by parents and au pairs. A lot of them come by car.
Last week we brought a large truck into the neighborhood to deliver a load of organ parts. We got it here before 6:30 in the morning because we knew there’d be a scene. It’s difficult enough to park a car on a Manhattan cross-street. Just try to parallel-park a 45-foot-long truck. It was street-sweeping day, and the garbage trucks came at the same time as the street-sweepers. The nursery-school delivery was in full swing. There’s a private school across the street—a few hundred middle-schoolers added to the mix. And the sidewalks were jammed with people hurrying to work. Professional dog-walkers with their dozen-at-a-time charges sniffed their ways along, criss-crossing their leashes like a maypole dance. Building contractors were leaning on brooms, finishing their morning coffee. We were carrying 16-foot-long wooden organ pipes (500 pounds each) out of our truck, across the sidewalk, and into the church. It was quite a spectacle. It’s amazing how little patience people can have for people doing their work.

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Once we get everything inside, the fun really starts. This organ is going into two locations in the building. The Swell, Great, and large Pedal stops are going in a high organ loft on the rear wall of the building. The Positif, Solo, and the rest of the Pedal are going in a chamber in the chancel. The Solo will be above the Positif, speaking through grilles in the arched chancel ceiling. We’re starting with the gallery organ. Today we hoisted the larger of the two Swell windchests into place. It’s about fifteen feet to the floor of the gallery and another eight or nine up to the frame where the chest sits. We have towers of scaffolding set up on the floor of the nave, with a bridge between that supports an electric chain-hoist. We can use the hoist to get the heavy parts up into the gallery, but we have to manhandle them from the gallery floor to their resting places in the organ’s framework. The 16-foot Double Open Wood pipes (those 500-pounders) are lying on the gallery floor under the organ. The organ’s floor frame is supported above those pipes. The tall legs that support the windchests are on top of the floor frame. And the 12-foot-high Swell box sits on top of all that.
The organ is a heavy industrial machine. It comprises many tons of wood along with hundreds of other materials. There are leather valves and bellows, steel springs, and every imaginable type of fastener. There are sophisticated valves for regulating wind pressure, compensating between the flow of air from the blower and the demand for air from the player and, by extension, the pipes. There are bearings that allow Swell shutters to operate noiselessly. There are powerful pneumatic motors that operate those shutters. There is a complex network of wind conductors that carry the pressurized “organ” air from blower to reservoirs and from reservoirs to windchests and various other appliances.
It can seem overwhelming as you get all that material out of a truck and into a building, then up into place. And after all that, it has to work. There are weeks of work finessing connections and adjustments, tuning, adjusting the speech and regulation of thousands of organ pipes.
The electrician is coming today to wire the blowers. That makes one more truck in the neighborhood, one more vehicle liable for citations, one more guy we’re depending on who’s liable to be held up in traffic.
It takes tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and install a pipe organ. It would be nice to be able to count and control how many times each part of the organ gets lifted—a busy organ company lifts many thousands of pounds of material every day.

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When it’s all done we sit down to play. We forget the splinters, the cuts and bruises, the sleepless nights sitting up thinking through problems. We forget the sidewalk congestion, the hassle of plowing through dense city traffic in an oversized truck. We forget the endless days of hoisting, fastening, balancing, and fitting thousands of oddly shaped and unwieldy pieces. And we forget the hundreds of hours of powerful concentration as we adjust keyboard springs and contacts and strive to eliminate the music-spoiling effects of poor mechanical operation.
We hear the magic of air-driven musical sound reverberating through the building. We feel the incomparable vibrations of immense bass pipes rumbling along the bass lines of the music. We experience the energy of the congregation’s singing, complemented and enhanced by the majesty of the organ’s tone.
Imagine a church up the street receiving delivery of an electronic organ. It comes out of a truck, gets moved inside, plugged in, speakers hooked up, and you sit down and play.
It would be much easier to find funding for pipe organs if they were the essential engines of international finance. There are bankers within blocks of me here in Manhattan whose offices cost more than the organ we’re working on. Because pipe organs are “engines” of worship and because churches are the institutions that depend most on them, there will always be a struggle between the cost of producing them and the owner’s ability to fund them. There have not been many organs built without some kind of financial constraint. If we could have raised another $30,000 we could have had that Bourdon 32′.
I’m often asked how I got involved in organbuilding. Fact is, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing. 

John Bishop is Executive Director of the Organ Clearing House.

Organs aloft
A good friend worked with me for several years as a tuning assistant. He’s a grand singer with lots of theater experience, and is music director of a nearby church where he presides over an ambitious choir program—one of those with the enviable problem of bursting the seams of the church’s building. When someone new joins the choirs, it’s hard to find her a seat. One day we were driving together to a tuning job, and I was guessing that the organ would be below pitch and we’d likely have to correct it—start over with a new “A,” a new temperament, and then tune every pipe. Using sloppy slang, I said to Mark that we would probably pitch the organ. He jumped instantly into a hilarious romp with a flawless Scottish accent in which Organ Pitching was added to the Scottish Games.
If you’re not familiar with Scottish Games, I invite you to take a look at <www.caledonian.org/usheavyevents.html&gt;. This page is from the site of the Caledonian Club of San Francisco, and describes the history and rules of games such as the Caber Toss in which competitors throw a tapered section of a tree trunk, and Weight for Height where competitors in different classes throw 28, 42, or 56 pound weights over a bar (maybe the origin of the phrase, hoisting a few). I confess that I find a comical side to what is clearly a serious competition, and I still chuckle when the phrase Organ Pitching crosses my mind—not infrequently in the work of the Organ Clearing House! Don’t know yet if we’re going for distance or height. In either event we’re likely to go akimbo—or is it a-kilter?
Sounds disrespectful I know, but there is a practical reality.

The organ loft
There’s a narrow door in the narthex of the stone building. You open it and find a tight-radius spiral stairway. The wooden door at the top of the stairs is swollen in its frame—you have to give the bottom corner a little kick, and the door makes a characteristic shuddering sound as it opens. (There’s usually a musty smell.) But your struggle is rewarded. You come around the corner to a breathtaking view down the nave. And there’s the organ console, inviting you to send majestic sounds across the abyss. I’m thinking of an enchanting morning I spent at La Madeleine in Paris about ten years ago when a sub-organist showed me the organ that had been played by Saint-Saëns and Fauré. He said he had to go to a meeting—I could leave with him or be locked in with the organ for an hour or two until the meeting was over. I chose “B.”

Lofty ideals
I know a different kind of organ loft. The hobbyist notices that a local church is closing. He has an old barn behind the house—why not nab the organ from the church and put it up in the hayloft. “I’ll fix it up and install in the loft—it’ll sound just like it did in the church.”
Two or three sweaty Saturdays later, the organ is among 80-year-old vestiges of actual farming. “That’s all the time I have right now. I’ll set it up in a couple years.” A year later, he sees a set of old wooden organ pipes at a flea market. Up into the loft they go. That’s when he notices that mice have been running around the first deposit. “Oh well, I’ll clean that up when I put the organ together.” And so on . . .
It’s easier to start a project than finish one.
Forty years later, the Organ Clearing House gets a call. “We’ve just bought a house, and there are a lot of antique tubes in the barn. Someone told us they’re worth a lot of money.” You know what, probably not. On more than one occasion, I’ve recommended that such material be discarded or sent to the melting pot of an organ-pipe maker. And on more than one of those occasions, I’ve been berated, even abused, by people who angrily inform me that they thought the Organ Clearing House was “committed to preservation.”
Rule number one: we can’t save them all.
Rule number two: we should be sure we’re working hard to save the good stuff.
Rule number three: you rarely find good stuff in a hayloft.

What can be saved?
The preservation of pipe organs is the principal activity of the Organ Clearing House. But as we are in the front line receiving news of organs being offered for sale, we know as well as anyone that it’s not practical or possible to save them all. Our warehouse is full. If we come across an instrument important enough to preserve by placing it in storage, another has to be discarded. So how do we choose?
The obvious first answer is that we try to save the best ones. But it’s not that simple. I notice that there are organs with lesser artistic content that are higher in usefulness. There are at least two basic styles of pipe-organ action that allow for more compact layouts—a good instrument in one of those styles may offer a terrific opportunity for a church that has limited space. Or a simple and non-descript electro-pneumatic organ might prove to be readily adaptable to a tricky physical situation. You can view such an organ as a kit by putting a good tonal structure on those sturdy chests. Be sure a good voicer has the chance to work his magic, and you’ll have a winner on your hands. There’s economy available in the reuse of well-made reservoirs, chests, swell boxes, and building frames, even if they’re not from a major builder.
I believe that the ubiquitous 15-rank Hook & Hastings organ on which the OCH built its reputation is one of the most pure and artistically sophisticated versions of the American pipe organ, but I’ve learned to accept that those organs can be difficult to place in new homes. Along with their thrilling tonal structures come beefcake physiques. A 12-stop organ might have a footprint of fifteen feet wide and eight feet deep—simply too much for a lot of buildings. Most organs of that style (and they’re not all by Hook & Hastings) are arranged internally with Swell-behind-Great. There’s a simple frame with four sturdy legs and two long chest bearers holding up both manual windchests with walkboard between, and the organ is pretty deep from front to back. The relatively rare “stacked” version with Swell-above-Great is typically snapped up because those instruments require less floor space—but of course they stand taller and won’t fit under the ceilings of many buildings.
Living in New England, we’re surrounded by stately older churches. These are the buildings for which the 19th-century American tracker organ was conceived, and of course there’s space for them. But today’s architecture has taken us far from the “here’s the church, here’s the steeple” kind of building. Contemporary churches can be high-end exciting buildings with creative designs and innovative interior spaces or simple buildings held up by laminated beams. In the first, perhaps the architect has not done enough homework to know how much space and what sort of acoustical environment a pipe organ needs. In the second, it’s common that the area of the floor plan is misleading because the side walls are short and the pitch of the roof starts early. Nestling an organ up against a side wall doesn’t allow the necessary height for an organ. And the rear balcony in such a building is likely to be suited for a Lilliputian choir, let alone anything resembling a pipe organ.
The standard and simple A-frame church building has been the natural breeding ground of the digital substitute for the pipe organ.

A Brobdingnagian setting
Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) gives us satirical views of international travel. Lilliputians (the residents of Lilliput) are about one-twelfth the size of humans, while Brobdingnagians (the residents of Brobdingnag) are about twelve times our size—a neat study in reverse ratios. These contrasting imaginary nations often enter my thinking as I travel among our clients. Too frequently I run my Stanley Fat-Max® tape measure up the back wall of a church and wish I could pull out another eight feet. (The Stanley is great for this because the blade is wide and rigid, and with a little practice you can run it 25 or 30 feet up a wall—a little like balancing a ball on your nose.)
Too often the challenge of the contemporary American organbuilder is to reconcile the seating capacity of a room with its ceiling height. We can imagine or devise formulas that define number of seats-per-rank, which are spoiled when given an 18-foot ceiling. Put 300 singing congregants in a room and you really want a 16-foot Principal.
When designing a sailboat, the difference in a foot or two of overall length can mean a huge increase in weight, sail area, and cost. Go from 35 to 37 feet and you might add 12,000 pounds to the weight of the boat. An architect or engineer can tell you the difference in price between an 18-foot and a 20-foot ceiling in a new church building. The 20-foot ceiling might allow that 16-foot Principal, but the cost of the building goes up by 40 percent. (This is when the price-per-stop of an organ becomes fictional—count in the cost of the new building and the 16-foot Principal becomes a four-million-dollar stop!)
But consider the example of the 1880s New England church building. A floor plan of 90-by-50 feet calls for a ceiling height of maybe 30 feet. There’s a balcony stretching around sides and back, a seating capacity of 800, and that 40-stop organ sits comfortably up front. It’s not necessary to make the lowest notes of the 16-footer be Haskell basses, it’s not necessary to jam the Great chorus against the ceiling, and it’s not necessary to cut the maintenance access under the Swell to 18 inches. I’ve measured people’s shoulders to make that crawl-space as small as possible—that’s not a good way to ensure the long-term reliability of a pipe organ.
I’ve got two things going on here—the preservation of vintage organs and the proportions of church buildings. The organs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries are telling us something about the natural proportions of buildings. Later 20th-century advances in building techniques have altered the proportions of modern buildings. My 19th-century model church is dominant in the local skyline because of its style of construction. A given floor plan determines a ceiling height. The ceiling height determines the pitch and loft of the roof because the timbers that hold up the ceiling are directly related to height of the roof.
The builder of a new pipe organ has some flexibility in design to make a few large pipes lie down or go wider rather than taller. But if you’re interested in the preservation of a vintage organ, you have a hard time when working in modern cost-effective worship spaces.
Reinforced concrete and steel or laminated beams allow us to have lower ceilings in wider rooms. Saves money in construction, but the majesty is lost. When your church is thinking of building a new sanctuary, slip a few photos of the “real thing” on the conference table. Your organbuilder will thank you.
And as we preserve those instruments built in earlier ages, let’s be sure we’re choosing the good ones. There’s no room for mediocrity in pipe-organ building. That’s when we decide to pitch them.
While you’re reading online about Scottish Games, take the natural leap to read about bagpipes, especially the jokes. How can you tell a piper with perfect pitch? He can throw a set into a pond without hitting any of the ducks.

Servicing the awe-inspiring buildings in which we work requires that we avoid taking unnecessary risks

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Sacred spaces

Several years ago the Organ Clearing House was assisting a colleague firm installing a large renovated organ in one of our country’s great cathedrals. Halfway through the project we encountered a logistical issue requiring a hastily arranged conversation with the cathedral administration. We set up a dozen folding chairs encircling a large bronze medallion inlaid in the chancel floor, and sat there with legal pads on our laps working through the issue of the day. It was an intense and complicated conversation, but as colleagues and clients worked the problem, I was struck by the majesty of the place. The vaulted ceiling soared 120 feet above our heads. Surrounded by opulent carvings and priceless artworks, we were sitting in one of the grandest interior spaces ever built. A staccato comment, a laugh, even a cough reverberated almost endlessly. What a wonderful place for a meeting.

With the problem solved, we had a round of handshakes, a few quips, and we went back on the job with new marching orders. I was left with a strong sense of the privilege of working in such a place—sharing responsibility for the stewardship of the magnificent organ and all the other liturgical art that combines to make such a great space so special, so sacred.

When my kids were growing up, they teased me for navigating by steeples. I cared for dozens of organs in the Boston area, so if we ever lost our way in a strange neighborhood, I would catch sight of a distant steeple and head for it, knowing I’d soon be back on familiar turf. I still do that.  

A lifetime of working in and around pipe organs has meant a lifetime of working in church buildings. They’re not all as grand as that great cathedral, but most of them are wonderful in some way. Some are beautiful little antique buildings out in the country, some are big broad-shouldered affairs with Romanesque arches, some are stately, and while we can’t deny that some are dowdy or even tacky, there’s something special about sacred spaces.

Creepy corners

Once you’ve taken in the grandeur of the sanctuary, you’re likely to find little shops of horrors when you go behind the scenes. Last week we were working in a large stone building with a heavily decorated interior. To the right of the classic Protestant Platform there’s a door that leads to a little corridor that connects an outside door, sacristy, and restroom (complete with bible and hymnal!) to an awkward stairway that leads to the choir loft and a strange upstairs office. I imagine that the architect didn’t bother to draw in the stairs—he just provided a space with specified floor levels and expected the carpenter to fill in the blanks. It’s as treacherous a passage as you’d care to find—a couple angled half-stairs filling in the odd spaces, and there’s virtually no lighting. I imagine that plenty of choir members have stumbled there in the dark. It would never pass the scrutiny of a modern building inspector.

In older buildings we find hundred-year-old knob-and-tube electrical wiring still in use, hulking ancient carbon-smelling furnaces that have been converted from coal to gas, and thousand-pound bells hung in rickety wood frames directly above the pipe organ. One organ I cared for, now long replaced, was knocked out of tune every time they rang the bell. Another is plagued by the rainwater that comes down the bell rope.

Go inside the organ chamber and you find old gas light fixtures that predate Thomas Edison, even nineteenth-century batteries piled in a corner, left over from the days before Intelli-power, Astron, and Org-Electra rectifiers, even before belt-driven DC generators.

As Boston is America’s earliest center of serious organbuilding, many instruments dating from before the Civil War are still in use in rural churches around New England. I’ve seen hundred-fifty-year-old candles snugged in the tops of wood pipes, secured to the stoppers by the drip method, left from tuners of bygone eras. Imagine spending your time tuning by candlelight inside organs. How easy it would be to be distracted by a cell phone call or text message, and let the candle burn down, starting a fire in the chamber. Gives me the willies!

Many commercial and industrial buildings have purposeful departments that employ stationary engineers who plan and supervise the care of the machinery. When you have equipment such as elevators, furnaces, air conditioners, lighting controls, pumps, and pressure vessels, it makes sense to provide a maintenance budget and staff to ensure safe and reliable operation.

We find this style of operation in large and prosperous urban churches, but it’s more usual to find that a church building and its operating equipment are maintained by a volunteer property committee. If a church member who lives down the street buys a new snow-blower, he’ll be on the property committee before he can put down his gas can. It’s wonderful to see the dedication of church members who volunteer to help run the place, but there is a time and a place for specific expertise, and the scale of the equipment found in a large church building is often greater than the skills of those who are responsible.

How many times has an organ tuner encountered a local custodian who simply doesn’t understand how to operate the mighty boiler in the basement? Last week, in that church with the funky stairway, I asked the custodian to have the heat up for the two days I planned to spend tuning. He said it would be no problem—he’d just set the timer. When I showed up in the morning it was chilly in the sanctuary, so I tracked down the custodian. He scurried to the boiler room, emerging a few minutes later mumbling something about “daylight saving time.” No question about it—he had no idea what he was doing. I know that because I’ve been tuning there for almost 30 years and he’s been messing up the heat for longer than that.

The high-wire act

A large pipe organ is a magnificent structure. A beautiful architectural organ case often serves the function of a steeple—it carries one’s eyes heavenward. There’s a special sense of grandeur and spaciousness when you change keyboards between a Rückpositiv that stands on the floor of the balcony and the lofty Swell, or Oberwerk, 30 feet above. Walk around behind the organ and you’ll find a spindly series of ladders and walkways worthy of the Flying Wallendas.

Fifteen years ago, I was curator of the Aeolian-Skinner organ in the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston—one of the world’s great instruments. It has more than 12,000 pipes, about 240 ranks, including 41 reeds. It’s three stories high—there’s a full-length 32-foot stop in the Swell box. When walking across the top floor of the organ from Bombarde to Hauptwerk to Great, one is treated to a magnificent view of the auditorium that seats more than 3,000 people. As organs go, the structure is pretty sturdy, but there are some places where you have to step across some big holes.  

There’s a place on the top floor of the glorious Newberry Memorial organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University where you have to hold your breath and leap through thin air. Across the top of that heroic façade you’re actually looking down on the chandeliers! It reminds me of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indiana is forced to lead the evil Donovan and Elsa across the abyss to the chamber that houses the Holy Grail. Led by the clues in his father’s (Sean Connery) notebook, Indiana comes to a huge open space, closes his eyes, and trusting the notebook, leans forward to be miraculously supported by a bridge that appears as an optical illusion. Once he has drunk from the carpenter’s cup, poured Holy Water on his father’s gunshot wound, and failed to save Elsa who falls as the temple collapses because she won’t surrender the cup, he can go ahead and tune the Solo Trumpet, Trumpet Harmonique, and the Tuba Mirabilis on 25-inch wind. Next . . . next . . . next . . . 

More than 30 years ago, I was working with my mentor on a renovation of a large organ in Cleveland. The access to the top of the organ was a tall vertical ladder nestled in sort of a four-sided chute formed by the ladder, two pipes of the 16-foot Open Wood Diapason, and the wall of the chamber—narrow enough to allow the trick of climbing down the ladder with my hands full, sliding my rump against the wall. But once, late on a Friday and eager to get on the road, I jumped onto the ladder with my hands full, missed my footing and shot straight down, landing hard on my feet.  

I was young then. There was a jolt when I landed, but I gathered my senses, loaded the car, and drove home. My teeth stopped rattling a couple days later.

Safety in the workplace

In the summer of 2010, the International Society of Organbuilders and the American Institute of Organbuilders held a joint convention in Montreal. It was a treat to participate in such a large gathering of colleagues from around the world. We heard some spectacular organs and marvelous artists, and I was especially pleased to finally have a chance to visit the workshops of Casavant Frères in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, where so many wonderful organs have been built across the turns of two centuries. It’s another sort of hallowed space.  

In one of the daily programs that took place in the hotel meeting rooms, I sat on a panel with several colleagues discussing pipe organ maintenance. Each of us had chosen a particular subject to address, with the moderator blending our presentations into an open discussion.

Mark Venning, then managing director of Harrison & Harrison of Durham, England, sat next to me on the panel. Harrison & Harrison has an impressive tour of organ maintenance that includes the care of their organs in Westminster Abbey in London, and King’s College, Cambridge—to name a couple high points! (So they tuned for Will and Kate’s wedding—remember the verger’s cartwheel?) Mark chose to discuss safety inside pipe organs. He spoke about how the ladders and walkways that allow access to the interiors of many organs are often rickety and dangerous. He encouraged his fellow organbuilders to avoid taking unnecessary risks, even if it means insisting that your clients provide budgets for the construction of new and safer access.

Throughout the twentieth century, the modern labor movement has taken great strides emphasizing safety in the workplace. The first step was limiting the length of the workday so people in reasonably good health can still be alert and focused in the later hours of the day. We have safety guards on machines, safety glasses, hearing protection, fire and smoke alarms, eyewash stations, steel-toed boots, and rubber floor mats to limit fatigue in feet, legs, and back. In fact, sometimes all the safety equipment gets in the way. If I had a nickel for each time my safety glasses have fogged up while running the table saw I’d have a lot of nickels.

Most modern organbuilders take great care to construct safe access to all areas and components of their instruments. Sturdy ladders hang from steel hooks so they cannot slip. Walkboards have handrails. But a century ago, no such standards were in place. If a candle was all you had for lighting, your attitude toward fire protection would be looser than what we’re used to today. A simple ladder might lean against the large wood pipes at the back of the organ for access to an upper-level Swell box, providing that you could clamber off the top of the ladder and climb up the pipes as if they were stairs. That all might have been okay when the organ was new, but add 140 years to the story and things might have gotten a little rickety.

We care for an instrument in Boston that was built in the early 1970s, with a snazzy contemporary case that gives a modern interpretation of the classic Werkprinzip concept. The lowest keyboard plays the Rückpositiv, located on the edge of the balcony behind the organist. The top keyboard plays the Swell, which is behind shutters just above the keydesk. And the middle keyboard plays the Great, located above the Swell. The Pedal is in a separate free-standing case. When you walk behind the main case, you see a ladder fastened to a concrete wall on which you can climb to two walkboards. The first, about five feet up, allows access to doors that open to expose the tracker action and pallet boxes of the Great. Climb up another story to the walkboard from which you tune the Great. Let’s guess it’s twelve feet up, about the height of a usual balcony rail. When you first get on, it seems wide enough—maybe two feet. But, there’s no railing. Move around up there, opening and closing the wide access doors, sitting for hours tuning the Mixture that’s buried behind two reeds, and you realize that it would be mighty easy to miss concentration and step off the edge.  

And—the entire case is coated with gray semi-gloss paint with a fine surface. The dust that collects on that painted walkboard feels like ball bearings under your feet. Are you risking your life to tune a Trumpet?

I started this ramble thinking of the awe-inspiring buildings in which we work, and it follows that sometimes we are working up against priceless fixtures. In that same great cathedral, we build a studs-and-plywood house around the ten-ton, 40-saint marble pulpit so there would be no chance of dinging a carved nose with a Violone pipe. Years ago, my first wife Pat was working on our crew as we dismantled a large organ for releathering. Suddenly she announced that she finally understood organbuilding: “Organbuilding is carrying long, heavy, dirty, unbalanced things with lots of sharp stuff poking out of them, down rickety ladders, past Tiffany windows!”

A little rule that’s common among organbuilders says that you pay attention to each step you take, especially if you’re not familiar with the organ, and especially if the organ is old. You really can’t assume that the guy who hung that ladder in 1897 was thinking about you in 2013, or that he really knew what he was doing in the first place. He had never heard of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Friday morning, my colleague Joshua Wood and I went to do a service call on a 130-year-old organ near home. The organist had noted that there was a cipher in the bass octave of the Great, so I took a couple tools and climbed to the walkboard. Josh poked around the notes and we found that several were ciphering. Because they were chromatic neighbors I guessed that it might be the adjustment of the big action rail that was causing the cipher. I retraced my steps to the ladder and stepped out on the two-by-four-ish beam on which it was leaning. I heard a loud crack, a series of rattles, and a heavy thump. The thump was me, landing flat on my back after a six-foot drop. I was Galileo’s cannonball.

I am no longer young. If it’s middle age, I guess I’ll live past 110. (The next day was my birthday.) Breath came back slowly, but pain was prompt.

I lay on the walkboard that covers the pedal tracker action—thank goodness that held—for twenty minutes or so. Before trying to stand, I wondered if we’d need to call for help, but strangely, I thought of the organ. We’ve all seen the teams of firefighters and EMTs arriving at a scene, big swarthy guys in steel-toed boots with 40 pounds of tools hanging off their belts. No way should they come pounding into that sweet antique organ. So with Josh’s support, and perhaps foolishly, I found my feet, left the organ, and lay on the floor of the choir risers until the friendly crew arrived. Funny, turned out that two of them had grown up in that church.

Wendy joined me in the emergency room for a lengthy day of poking, waiting, prodding, waiting, wondering. I got off with a titanium brace, a cracked vertebra, bruises, strained muscles, and a potent prescription. As I write now, I’m waiting for the clinic to call to give me an appointment for follow-up with the spine guy. I’m hurt, but I got off easy.

The auto mechanic two beds over? Not so much. He caught his hoodie in the turning driveshaft of a car he was working on, was flown by helicopter from Cape Cod to Boston, and was being rushed into surgery to correct his broken neck. Woof. I’ll be fine.

Note

1. The Skinner Organ Company instrument in West Medford, Massachusetts (Opus 692) was installed in 1928 by a team from the factory in Dorchester that included a 24-year-old Jason McKown. I met Jason in 1984 (he was eighty!) when I succeeded him as curator of the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square and the First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church). Jason had cared for the Trinity Church organ for 50 years, and the Mother Church organ since it was installed in 1952. He subsequently introduced me to many other churches, including that in West Medford. He told me that Mr. Skinner had personally worked on the installation of that organ. I took over its maintenance in 1984—there have been only two technicians caring for that organ for over 85 years.

The sum of the parts
Spring comes late where we live. Business travel this year has treated me to springtime in California and Virginia, but here in Maine it’s about thirty degrees this morning. The ground freezes pretty deep here, so when it starts to thaw in spring the moisture cannot seep into the ground. It sits above the freeze level and produces what we affectionately call mud season. The driveway feels like taffy under the wheels of the car, and there are places in the yard where you go in up to your ankles.
Chilly nights continue for another month, so we don’t get the gardens started until mid-May, when we can sneak in the first peas and lettuce. Sounds grim to those of you who live south of us, but the trade-off is that our high summer is glorious with ocean breezes and brilliant sunshine. And by then the garden is filling the kitchen with glory.
Today is the Ides of April, that most taxing day of the year, and although the thermometer warns, it’s sunny and clear and I started the day in the garden cutting back the remains of last year’s perennial growth and raking and turning over the raised beds where we start the early vegetables. One of those beds is devoted to chives and mint, both of which grow abundantly and add much to summer meals. As I cut back the woody sticks of last summer’s mint plants, I got a good whiff of that real minty smell, and my mind went directly to a summer evening cookout, of tzatziki, that cool refreshing dressing made of yoghurt, garlic, olive oil, cucumber, and mint that goes so beautifully with grilled lamb, and of course Mojitos and Gin and Tonics. Or is it Gins and Tonic?
Those mental pictures and virtual smells brought real pleasure to the chore of turning over the soil, reminding me of why we do this work.

Start with the basics
Having my hands in the dirt early this morning reminds me of a sense I like to keep alive in our workshop. There might be a Swell engine on someone’s workbench—a complicated, even goofy-looking contraption with puffers and pullers that was seemingly and improbably inspired by the gear used to hitch up horses. The person at the bench can scrape off old leather and glue on new, lubricate the mechanical parts, clean up the finish and get it ready for new wiring and installation without ever really knowing what the thing is for. I like to be sure that our crew gets to hear organs often enough that they can have some idea of how a machine is used—what it’s for. If while you’re scraping off the leather you can hear in your mind’s ear a processional hymn with swell shutters opening in front of the reeds as the choir reaches the chancel steps, perhaps the machine you’re working on will work a little better when you’re done. It’s the same as smelling that mint on a frosty morning—the tzatziki you make in August will be that much better because you had it in your mind in mid-April.
By the way, The New Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin 2000) defines “whiffletree” as “The pivoted horizontal crossbar to which the harness traces of a draft animal are attached and which is in turn attached to a vehicle or an implement.” The horse-and-cart whiffletree was the inspiration for Ernest Skinner’s famous Whiffletree Swell Engine. It’s a good thing Ernest was working in the days when you still might see horses hitched to a carriage or we might have Swell motors that incorporate trailer balls.

It’s all in the ingredients
I love to cook. I love thinking about what we’ll have for dinner, being sure that we have everything we need, and firing up the kitchen at quitting time. It’s fun to clean, scrape, chop and combine those ingredients and apply heat to them in just the right way. Will we grill or broil the meat? Will we steam or sauté the vegetables? Should it be dill or tarragon? And the meal is made or broken by the quality of the ingredients you start with. Forty years ago, Julia Child told us not to use that cheap jug wine in your cooking—if you wouldn’t choose to drink it, why would you want to eat it? Since Julia encouraged Americans to feel free to cook well, we’ve lived in a revolution of understanding how important it is to start with the right ingredients. It’s okay to put leftover vegetables in a stock pot, but not rotten ones.
The organbuilder chooses his materials with the same care a chef might use squeezing tomatoes in the market. The chef doesn’t decide on the menu until he’s been to the market. With all the talk about combining flavors to create a finished dish, one of the best tasting things I’ve ever eaten is the hot-in-the-sun cherry tomato snagged off the vine while driving by on a lawnmower. Think of the salad inspired by that flavor. It’s a better salad than the one that’s made because you know there should be lettuce, onion, tomato, and dressing. Make the salad by how each ingredient tastes, not by a standard list.
It’s a little like the organist who automatically draws eight-four-two-mixture without listening, or without thinking of trying it with a soft flute added, a gentle sixteen-foot reed, or leaving out the two-foot to make the sound a little more transparent. Registrations chosen by listening will always sound better than those chosen by list.
The organbuilder comes across a special piece of wood—beautiful grain pattern, unusual colors—sees what it should be made into, and sets it aside for the perfect music rack, name board, bench top, or pipe shade. Fifty years later, the organist sits through the thousandth sermon admiring that beautiful grain pattern. (When I left my last church position to join the Organ Clearing House, I calculated that in seventeen years I had listened to something close to 800 sermons and led close to 2300 hymns. Makes my fingers hurt.)
Remember Michelangelo choosing his piece of marble and removing everything that didn’t look like a saint? The chef starts with a carrot and takes away everything that doesn’t belong in the soup. We chose not to eat the bitter skin or the tough top raw, so why would cooking it make it better?
Likewise, the organbuilder puts a skin of leather on a light table and marks the imperfections with a Sharpie® so he can avoid everything that shouldn’t be part of an organ. A little pinhole in the leather will leak a tiny bit of air and make that pouch move just a touch slower. Will the organist notice that when playing a quick scale or trill? He might not be able to put his finger on it, but there’s something not quite right. And by the way, that pinhole is a weakness in the leather—that pouch will be the first one to fail seventy-five years from now. Maybe it would be five more years before the next one failed. That little pinhole had a noticeable effect on the lifetime of the organ.
The sheep had a run-in with a barbed-wire fence and the resulting scar is a little tough spot in the skin. The pouch made of that piece of leather might open the valve a little cock-eyed. One time in ten thousand, that valve will catch on the edge of the toe-hole and cause a cipher. The same pipe is played three sixteenth-notes later and the cipher goes away, but the observant organist had a split second of wondering what was going on. And it happened so fast that she couldn’t keep track of it and couldn’t write it down after the service. It happens again the next Sunday. This time it doesn’t go away and the cipher interrupts the service, all because the scar stayed in the pouch. It’s like finding a little stone in a beautiful dish of risotto.
We drop a peach in boiling water for a minute or so, and the skin comes off easily. It’s an extra step, you might scald your fingers on the hot peach, but there’s no fuzzy mouthful of skin interrupting the experience of eating the tart. Ptooey!
Before the Swell motor goes back in the organ we clean the pins by scraping with a knife or rubbing with some emery cloth. This guarantees a good connection when the new wire is soldered on. It will never be that a stage of the motor fails to work because of a dirty solder joint. After all, what good is a fifteen-stage Swell motor? That choir mounting the chancel steps wouldn’t notice that stage number 7 didn’t work, but the effect was lessened just a tiny bit. (I get a funny picture in my mind of a couple of indignant choir members confronting the organist after the service complaining that the Swell box didn’t sound just right!) If it’s good enough for government work, is it good enough for God?

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right
I’ve participated in dozens, maybe hundreds of meetings with church committees discussing the sale and purchase of pipe organs. Often enough there’s one guy (it’s always a guy!) who says, “We’ve got a roof that leaks, a parking lot with potholes, the city is making us install an elevator and ramps, and the organist says we need a new organ. What can we do to save some money on this unit?” (It’s the word “unit” that gets me.) I respond, “All those projects are important, but I don’t think that the organ is on the same list as parking lots and elevators. I think it’s on the list with communion silver and stained-glass windows. It’s liturgical art, not a ‘unit.’”
By far the vast percentage of money I’ve earned during my career has been donated money—those cherished funds, prayerfully raised by the faithful of the congregation. On one hand, it’s hard to say that you shouldn’t go with the lowest bidder when purchasing a pipe organ. But in fact, if the organ is liturgical art, doesn’t it somehow transcend money? I know that’s not a practical point of view, but without such thinking how did the great cathedrals get built? Certainly there was a cheaper way to build a huge church than festooning it with vaulted ceilings, and why do you need a three-hundred-foot tower if only to hold up a bell? Those buildings are expressions of faith. The twenty-million-dollar tower is a symbol of faith, forming a physical connection between heaven and earth as if a community were holding its hands to the heavens. You didn’t need that huge stone tower. You didn’t need the simple wooden steeples you see on country churches throughout New England. You didn’t need the expensive stained-glass windows, the carved saints, or the marble altar. And you didn’t need the magnificent pipe organ.
But we have those things, we care for those things, we respect those things because of how effectively they express our faith. The building committee of the First Baptist Church in Damariscotta, Maine didn’t pay for the steeple when the church was built in 1862 because it would look good on twenty-first century postcards, they built it because it would stand as a symbol expressing their faith to their community. It’s at the top of the Main Street hill. You can see it from a couple miles down the river, and you can see it from the highway that bypasses the town. That building committee got their money’s worth. Today the steeple is sitting somewhat forlornly on the lawn next to the church. It was leaning a little to the left and the town participated in a fund-raising drive to rebuild it. No one could imagine the town without it.
So we justify the cost of a pipe organ. As we discuss the specifications and the related costs, we are continually reminded of the need to economize. But can we also inspire that committee to think beyond the nuts and bolts of the price and think of the instrument as the fulfillment of a vision? It’s not a “unit,” it’s an expression of faith. It will be there seventy-five years later for the weddings of their grandchildren. It will be built by craftsmen who know how important it is to scrape those pins, mark those pin-holes, choose those boards. No fifteen-stage Swell engines here.
A carpenter building a house might grab the next two-by-four off the pile and nail it in. It takes a little more time for the organbuilder to set aside that special burl and turn it into a music rack.
The moment when the congregation really understands why the organ would cost so much is the moment it comes out of the truck and its parts are laid out across the backs of the pews. Thousands of parts, each beautifully made. The congregants walk around the room thinking in terms of what they’ve paid for a dining table or a credenza, and the whole thing starts to make sense. Shortly after the Organ Clearing House started installing an organ in Virginia last fall, there was an evening event to which the congregation was invited. More than a hundred people came to see the organ half assembled, to see the parts and pipes spread around the room, and to hear something about how the organ works, how parts are made, how we care for our craft. I like to think that they went home knowing they were getting their money’s worth. I recommend such an evening as part of every installation.
And afterwards, sit down to a meal beautifully prepared from the freshest and finest ingredients, no stones in the risotto, no cheap wine in the sauce, and no fuzz in the tart. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Now that I’ve finished writing, it’s time to go to the market.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The temperamental organ
Winter was coming to an end, and at Fenway Park, fabled home of the Boston Red Sox, and the facilities manager was working down his checklist of pre-season chores. This would be the second year of the new ballpark organ, and he figured it would need tuning. He called up Fred Opporknockity, the guy who had delivered the organ, and asked if he could come to tune the organ before Opening Day. Fred replied that the organ didn’t need to be tuned—he was sure it would be fine. Mr. Facilities suggested that the organ at his church was tuned for Christmas and Easter. “No,” said Fred, “don’t you know that
Opporknockity tunes but once?”
This joins a long list of so-called jokes like the one that ends, “Is that an almond daiquiri, Dick?” “No, it’s a hickory daiquiri, Doc.” Or the one that goes . . . But I digress. (How can I digress when I’m only 160 words into it?)
In fact, the Fenway Park organ didn’t need to be tuned. It’s electronic and was tuned at the factory. But the tuning of pipe organs is a subject without end or beginning, without right or wrong, without rhyme or reason—it just needs to be in tune!
Mr. Facilities’ recollection that the church organ needs to be tuned for Christmas and Easter (notice that I capitalized Opening Day as a High Holyday!) is only half right, in my opinion. For years I scheduled big tuning routes that occupied Advent and Lent, but where I live in New England, Christmas and Easter are almost always both winter holidays, and the August brides would walk down countless center aisles straining to the strains of sorry 8-foot trumpets that made her guests pucker as if they were biting into a lemon. It’s my experience that summertime tuning problems always involve either “soprano” D, F#, or A, ruining virtually every Trumpet-Tune processional. In one wedding I played, the fourth E went dead—the trill on beat three of Jeremiah Clarke’s ubiquitous tune made me laugh. I was only quick enough to go down a half-step, a safe enough transposition because you can keep playing the same printed notes with a different key signature. It was an awkward sounding transition, but at least it gave me back my “dee diddle-diddle-diddle da-da dum de dum dum” instead of “dee doh-doh-doh da-da dum de dum dum.”
Gradually I changed my plan to define seasonal tunings as “heat-on” and “heat-off”—around here that works out to be roughly November and May—and maybe it means I found myself a little extra work because there often seem to be Easter touch-ups as well.

§

Why do we schedule tunings according to seasons? Simply and authoritatively because the pitch produced by an organ pipe of a given length is subject to temperature. Say a pipe plays “440-A” and say it’s 70 degrees in the church. Raise the temperature a degree and now the same pipe plays 442 (roughly). And the catch is that the reeds don’t change with temperature and the wooden pipes (especially stopped pipes) are more affected by humidity than temperature. So when there’s a temperature swing the organ’s tuning flies into pieces. You cannot define organ pitch without reference to temperature. A contract for a new organ is likely to have a clause that defines the organ’s pitch as A=440 at 68 degrees.
And here’s the other catch. My little example said it was 70 degrees in the church. But it’s never 70 degrees everywhere in the church. It may be 70 at the console, 66 in the Swell, 61 in the Choir, and 82 in the Great. If these are the conditions when it’s cold outside and the thermostat is set to 68, you can bet that summertime conditions have it more like 75 or 80 degrees everywhere in the building except any high-up area where you find organ pipes—then it’s super hot and the reeds won’t tune that high.
Conditions outdoors can have a dramatic effect on organ tuning. Imagine an organ placed in two chambers on either side of a chancel, and imagine that the back wall of each organ chamber is an outside wall. The tuner comes on a rainy Friday and gets the organ nicely in tune. Sunday dawns bright and sunny, the south-facing wall gets heated up by the sun and that half of the organ goes sharp. During the sermon the organist “txts” the tuner to complain about how awful the organ sounds. (Wht wr u doing☹) The following Thursday the organist shows up for choir rehearsal and finds the tuner’s bill in his mailbox. What would you do? Was it the tuner’s fault that it rained? Any good organ tuner pays attention to weather conditions and forecasts as if he were the mother of the bride planning an outdoor wedding.
I care for a large tracker-action organ in Boston, housed in a free-standing case with polished tin Principal pipes in the façades of Great, Pedal, and Rückpositiv cases. It’s situated in a contemporary building designed by a famous architect, who gave the congregation the gift of light from the heavens coming through a long narrow window that runs along the ridge of the roof. In the winter as the sun moves across the sky, brilliant light moves across the front of the organ, heating the façade pipes as it goes. Instantly the Great 8-foot Principal goes 30 or 40 cents (hundreds of a semi-tone) sharp. Do the math—how many hundredths of a semitone are there in a quarter-tone? Guess what time of day this happens? Eleven AM. And guess what time the opening hymn is played on a Sunday morning? The first time I tuned that organ, I felt as though I were in a carnival fun-house with mirrors distorting the world around me as the organ’s pitch followed the sun across the room.

Temperature’s rising
In order to do a conscientious tuning, we ask the church office to be sure the heat is up for when we tune. When they ask what it should be set to, I reply that they should pretend that the tuning is a Sunday morning worship service. If the heat is turned up to 68 degrees five hours before the hour of worship, then set the heat at 68 five hours before the tuning. It’s not very scientific but it seems to get the point across.
I’ve arrived many times to start a tuning to find that there is no heat in the church. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow—and the time and mileage I spent today goes on your bill. Once I showed up at the church (made of blue brick and shaped like a whale—some architects have the strangest ideas) and the sexton proudly announced, “I got it good and warm in there for you this time.” It was 95 degrees in the church and the organ sounded terrible. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow. He must have run $400 of fuel oil through that furnace in addition to my bill for wasted time. And the haughty authoritative pastor of a big city Lutheran church once said to me from under an expensively-coiffed shock of theatrical white hair, “We heat the church for the people, not the organ.”
The eternal battle of the organ tuner and the thermostat is not because we don’t like working in cold rooms. It’s not because we want the organ to be warm. It’s physics. When you chill oxygen, the molecules get closer together and it thickens to the point at which it becomes a liquid. When air warms, the molecules get further apart. When the air molecules get further apart, the air gets less dense. When the air gets less dense, sound waves need less energy and they shorten. When the sound waves shorten, the pitch increases. It’s not a matter of comfort, it’s physical law—the laws of physics.
The same laws say that the organ will be in tune at the temperature at which it was tuned. Set the thermostat at 68 on Thursday for the organ tuning, turn it down to 55, then back up to 68 on Sunday. Voila! The organ is in tune—unless the weather changed. And it’s better for the organ not to be vigorously heated all the time. Ancient European organs have survived for centuries partly because their buildings are not superheated. American churches are often guilty of “organ baking”—keeping the heat up all winter, using the argument that it’s more cost-efficient than reheating a cold building several times a week.

It’s a Zen thing.
I’ve been asked if I have perfect pitch. No—and I’m glad I don’t. A roommate of mine at Oberlin had perfect pitch, and he identified that my turntable ran slow (remember turntables?). It didn’t bother me—but he couldn’t bear it. The organ tuner with perfect pitch has to compensate for the fact that you are not necessarily tuning at A=440. If the organ is a few cents sharp or flat when you arrive to tune, chances are you’re going to leave it that way. It takes several days to change the basic pitch of most organs. And for really big organs it can take weeks.
I’ve been asked how I can stand listening to “out of tune-ness” all day. I don’t like hearing it when I’m listening to organ music or attending worship, but when I’m tuning I love it because I can change it. There’s a satisfaction about working your way up a rank of pipes bringing notes into tune. You can feel them “click” into tune—in good voicing there’s a sort of latching that I sense when I give the pipe that last little tick with my tool.
An organ tuner is something of a contortionist—he has to be able to forget about physical discomfort in the often-awkward spaces inside an organ so he can concentrate on the sounds. He often hangs from a ladder or a swell-shutter for stability. (Key holders, please keep your dagnabbit feet off the Swell pedal!) He learns to tune out little mechanical noises and defects of speech. An organ pipe might have burps and bubbles in its speech that are clearly heard when you’re inside the organ and still sound perfect from the nave or the console.
He gets into a nice quiet state and a rhythm develops: “next,” tick-tick-tick, “next,” tick-tick-tick. A couple hours and ten ranks (610 pipes) into it and the sexton comes in with a vacuum cleaner. The flowers are delivered for Sunday. A lawn mower starts up at the house next door. The pastor brings in a soon-to-be married couple. They politely assure me, “Don’t worry, you’re not disturbing us.”
Once I showed up to tune the organ at a university chapel. A couple heavy trucks full of equipment were outside and a guy was loading tools into the bucket of a cherry picker. I went up to him saying I was there to tune the organ and wondered if they’d be making noise. “Not much,” he said, “just a little hammer-drilling.”

§

As I write, the Red Sox official website says that the Opening Day game at Fenway Park starts in twelve days, eight hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three seconds. It doesn’t really matter whether the organ is tune or not—they don’t use it as a ballpark organ any more. But there was a time when the organ music was an integral part of the ballpark experience. A common question in Boston sports trivia quizzes was, “Who’s the only person who played for the Red Sox, the Bruins (hockey), and the Celtics (basketball)?” Answer—John Keilly, the organist for Fenway Park and the Boston Garden.
My father and I have been to dozens (maybe hundreds?) of games at Fenway Park. He’s had the same seats (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14) since the early 1970s. When John Keilly was at the Hammond B-3, we joked about getting to the park early so we could hear the preludes. And he had an uncanny knack for playing the right tune at the right time. When Carlton Fisk hit his now legendary “walk-off” twelfth-inning homerun to win game six of the 1975 World Series, Keilly created a secondary sports legend when he played “Hallelujah”—though not according to historical performance practices.

§

Nancy Faust was organist for the Chicago White Sox from 1970 until her last game on Sunday, October 3, 2010. She missed five games in 1983 when her son was born—otherwise she played for more than 3,200 games without missing one. When she was hired, petitions were circulated by fans and sports officials offended that the White Sox had placed a woman on the team’s payroll. But she came into her own when Harry Caray became the radio commentator for the Sox. He gave her the moniker Pretty Nancy Faust, and started the tradition of leaning out the window of his announcer’s box to lead the singing of Take Me out to the Ballgame as Nancy played. She played by ear, and kept current with all the latest music through her four decades of playing so she was always ready with a current musical quip for the amusement of the fans. She was the originator of the ballpark use of the now ubiquitous 1969 Steam song Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss him goodbye), playing it when the pitcher of an opposing team was pulled out during the 1977 pennant race.
Nancy Faust was honored by the White Sox for her years of service to the team and its fans on September 18, 2010 in a pre-game ceremony. Ten thousand Pretty Nancy Faust bobblehead dolls were distributed to fans that day. My wife Wendy lived and worked in Chicago for about ten years, and as both a gifted organist and a baseball fan, she joined countless other Chicagoans celebrating Faust’s contribution to the game. We heard about her retirement on the NPR sports program “Only A Game” early one Saturday morning, and Wendy let me know how much she wanted one of those dolls. With thanks to Chicago organbuilding colleague and theatre organ guru Jeff Weiler, I found one complete with the ticket stub for the September 18 game, and it now has an honored place in our living room.
In the pages of this journal we often read about churches celebrating their retiring long-time organists. I’ve read plenty of stories about fancy concerts with reunions of dozens of past choir members, music committees commissioning commemorative anthems (bet you can’t say that three times fast!), cakes that look like pipe organs, bronze plaques, and surprise tickets for Caribbean cruises, but never bobblehead dolls. How cool is that? 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

A material world
It happens to me all the time. A word or phrase comes up in conversation and a song pops into my head. I can’t help it, and I’m often stuck with that song for days and days. The insipid nature of some of the songs startles me—how can I justify the use of my Random Access Memory on such drivel?

Five passengers set sail that day…
polished up the handle of the big front door…
no gale that blew dismayed her crew…
the soda water fountain…
many a mile to go that night before he reached the town-oh, the town-oh, the town-oh…

And let’s not forget the jolly swagman, the girl named Fred, the mule named Sal, and the glorious, sonorous, stentorian Pirate King. (Dear readers, if you know all of these songs, let me know—honor system—and I’ll send you an autographed manuscript of this column.)
We are in the last few weeks of a busy and exciting organ installation. I’m spending a lot of time with supply catalogues, shepherding the flow of materials to the jobsite, trying to keep ahead of the energetic crew as we navigate the final glide-path. (The job is in New York City, and as I come and go, I drive along Manhattan’s western shore on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Speaking of free association, “glide-path” makes me think of Captain Sullenberger’s heroic goose-inspired glide-path over the George Washington Bridge, landing a US Airways jet on those choppy waters.)
But it’s the materials I’m thinking about these days, and I’m stuck with material girl… So sings the ubiquitous and peripatetic Madonna in a song I don’t know. The fact that I don’t know the song doesn’t stop it from circling menacingly between my ears. Material Girl must be second only to Michael Jackson’s Bad in songs in which the highest proportion of the lyrics is the actual title. (You can find the complete words of both at www.azlyrics.com.) I spent $1.29 to download Material Girl from the lyrics is the actual title. (You can find the complete words of both at www.ilike.com as part of my research preparing for this column. (I’ve filed the e-mail receipt for tax purposes!)
My catalogues each have more than 3,000 pages and the consistency of bellows weights. They offer everything from sponges to forklifts, from welders to furniture polish, from pulleys to lubricants to fasteners to shelving to eyewash stations. A list gets shouted down from the organ loft, and a rattles-when-you-shake-it box arrives the next day.
As I unpack the boxes, I reflect on the huge variety of stuff that goes into a pipe organ. It’s part of what’s wonderful about the instrument. We use geological materials (metals and lubricants), vegetable materials (wood), animal materials (ivory, bone, leather, and glue), chemical materials (glues, solvents, finishes)—and I think most organ builders have intimate and personal relationships with many of them.

From the forest
Most organbuilding workshops include plenty of woodworking equipment. The overwhelming smells come from wood—an experienced woodworker can tell by the smell what variety of wood was milled last. It’s impossible to mix up the smell of white oak (burning toast) with that of cedar or spruce (grandmother’s closet). And the working characteristics of various woods are as different as their smells.
White oak is very popular among organbuilders. It can be milled to produce myriad grain patterns, it has great structural qualities, and it takes finishes beautifully. But it’s a difficult material to work with. In 1374 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in Troilus and Criseyde, “as an ook cometh of a litel spyr [sapling].” We now say, “mighty oaks from little acorns grow,” referring to great things coming from small beginnings. The mighty oak tree is a symbol of strength and stability and of the witness of many passing generations. How many memoirs or novels include the enduring oak tree as the observer, commentator, and guardian of generations of family members?
There was a magnificent and massive oak tree in the yard of my great-grandmother’s house that was known as the “roller-skate tree” by generations of my family. It was so bulky and heavy that several of the major lower limbs had settled to rest on the ground—the ultimate climbing tree for kids, as you could simply walk from the grass to a great height. Some imaginative arborist conceived of building heavy iron-wheeled skids under those limbs so the natural motion of the tree would not harm them as they dragged on the ground.
As the white oak tree is such a massive presence, so it yields its beauty reluctantly. The rough-cut lumber is uncomfortable to handle. It’s heavy—the weight-per-board-foot is higher than most other woods. When the truck arrives from the lumberyard, you’re faced with an hour of heavy and prickly work. And when the mighty tree is felled and milled, the apparent inherent stability transforms into a wild release of tension. As the wood passes through the saw it twists and turns, scorching itself against the spinning blade, and producing the characteristic smell. (By the way, a French government website claims that master Parisian organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was the inventor of the circular saw.)
As you look at a standing tree, you can tell a great deal about the wood inside. If the bark shows straight, even, perpendicular lines, you can assume that there’s plenty of nice, straight lumber in there. If the bark is twisted, spiraling around the tree, you know you’re going to be fighting for each useful board.
Red oak is a poor substitute for white oak. The grain patterns are not as attractive, and red oak doesn’t take finishes as well. And it’s not as strong. Cut a piece of red oak a half-inch square and four inches long. Put it in your mouth and blow through it into a glass of water. You can blow bubbles—there are longitudinal capillaries in the wood that deny it the structural strength of its mighty cousin. Try the same experiment with white oak and the sharp edges will cut your lips.
White oak saves its final insult: splinters. The hardness of the wood combines with that tendency to move to produce angry splinters. And like the woods from tropical rainforests whose survival depends on producing gallons of insecticide in the form of sap, there’s a chemical content to a piece of white oak that fosters festering—the wounds from the splinters easily get infected. So a contract for a new organ with a case made of white oak should include a supply of aloe-enriched hand lotion.
The opposite end of the hardwood spectrum is basswood. It’s from the genus Tilia and is also referred to as Linden, the source of Franz Schubert’s song, Der Lindenbaum. It’s a large deciduous tree, as tall as a hundred feet, with leaves as big as eight inches across. And the wood is like butter. It smells sweet coming through the saw, it is easy to mill straight, and once it’s straight it stays there. It’s ideal for making keyboards, because keyboards are about the last part of an organ where we can tolerate warpage. And it’s ideal for carvings, statues, and pipe shades. A sharp tool coaxes even and smooth shavings—you can’t call them chips. It reminds me of the butter molded into little pineapples in trying-to-be-fancy restaurants.
With all the pleasant qualities of basswood, it’s not very strong—no good for structural pieces—and it’s so soft that if you look at it wrong there will be a ding in the surface. While it looks beautiful unfinished, it does not have the attractive grain patterns we look for when we use clear finishes like stain, lacquer, or varnish. On the other hand, it takes paint and gold leaf very well indeed.
I place poplar right between white oak and basswood. It’s strong, relatively hard, mills and sands easily, and smells good. Its grain is not pretty enough to recommend it for use as casework with clear finish, and although poplar is essentially a white wood, it has broad swatches of dark olive-green heartwood. But all its other qualities make it ideal for use building windchests and other components, including painted cases.

From the farmyard
While woodworking is common to many arts and crafts besides organbuilding, leather (at least in any large volume) is more specific to our field. Besides its industrial uses (shoes, clothing, and car seats), leather is used only in small quantities. So, while there are plenty of skilled woodworkers producing furniture and household or office appointments like cabinets and bookshelves, organbuilders stand pretty much alone as large-scale consumers of leather. And those industrial users don’t care much about how long the leather will last. After all, except for the decades-old and beloved leather flight jacket, most of us don’t expect shoes, clothes, or car seats to last more than five or ten years.
Ten years would be a disastrously short lifetime for organ leather, and organbuilders have made effective and concerted efforts to ensure a good supply of leather, tanned according to ancient methods, that will have a long lifetime.
A busy organ shop routinely stocks the tanned hides of cows, horses, goats, and sheep. Cowhide can be produced with a hard slick finish (useful for action bearing points and rib belts on reservoirs) or as soft and supple material for small pneumatics and reservoir gussets (the flexible corner pieces). We also often use goatskin for those gussets. I think goatskin is tougher than cowhide, perhaps an opinion reflecting my comparison of scrappy pugnacious goats and relatively docile cows. Goatskin is supple even when it’s very thick, which makes it ideal for applications requiring plenty of strength and flexibility at the same time.
Horsehide is very strong, but it’s spongy and not supple at all, so its principal use is for gaskets between joints that we expect to be opened for maintenance of an organ. Cutting it into strips and punching out the screw holes prepares it for making gaskets for windchest bungs, removable bottom boards, and reservoir top panels. It’s a good idea to apply a light coating of baby powder or light grease (like Vaseline) to the leather before screwing down the panel to keep it from absorbing oils and resins from the wood, which act as unwelcome glue.
I use more sheepskin than anything else. Our supplier is equipped to plane it to various thicknesses, a process that produces splits as “useful waste.” The raw skin might be a tenth of an inch thick, and we might want leather for pouches and small pneumatics to be one or two hundredths of an inch thick. That leaves us with leather eight or nine hundredths thick, fuzzy on both sides, relatively inexpensive because it’s technically waste, and useful for plenty of things like light gaskets and stoppers of wooden pipes.
As I cut the hides of any of these creatures into organ parts, I’m aware of the animal’s anatomy. When a hide is laid flat on a workbench, you clearly see the neck and legs of the animal, and to make good reliable pneumatics you need to be careful of the natural stretching of the armpits, the belly, and the rump—those places where our skin grows in tight curves and stretches every time we move. When I cut long strips, I cut parallel to the spine to ensure relatively even thickness through the piece. If you cut a piece from belly-edge to belly-edge, it will go from thin to thick to thin again.
When releathering reservoirs, we cut miles of strips of leather or laminated rubber cloth that are around an inch-and-a-half wide. I remember keeping a dedicated straight piece of wood as a cutting surface and a long wooden straightedge as a rule for cutting these strips. I sharpened and honed my favorite knife as though I meant to shave with it. With that set-up, it took plenty of skill and care to produce straight pieces of material. The knife wanted to follow the grain of the wood, and after a few cuts my cutting board was scored, providing more opportunities for my knife to stray. Today, we have rubbery-plastic cutting surfaces, plastic and aluminum straightedges marked in inches or centimeters, and laser-sharpened rotary knives with retractable blades. With proper care, the cutting surface can be maintained blemish-free indefinitely. The knife blades are replaceable, and it’s easy to cut hundreds of near-perfect strips. All this special gear is available in fabric stores. I’m usually the only man in the store when I go in to buy replacement blades. I have to navigate aisles of unfamiliar stuff essential for quilting, sewing, decorating, scrapbooking (an activity described by a verb that can’t be more than a few years old), and countless other arts and crafts activities.
A recent side effect of this quest was my discovery of monster pipe-cleaners of every size and description, up to two feet long and an inch in diameter, perfect for stopping off pipes as I tune mixtures. Between those and the fantastic laser-sharpened cutting tools, I can’t imagine how I ever did organbuilding without fabric stores.
We’ve done forest and field—someday soon we’ll talk about mines and quarries. As the technology of tools develops, we are able to work with an ever-wider variety of metals. We’re used to the tin-lead alloys we use to make most of our organ pipes, but we find more steel and aluminum used for structural elements, action parts, even casework decoration. All the skills required to work this wide range of materials complement those skills related to the organ’s music—voicing, tuning, acoustic planning—and the planning of the projects in the first place—architecture, and yes, politics. Now there’s a subject for another day.