In the wind . . .

Intelligent design
Now there’s a hot-button issue. I’m as tempted as I am unqualified to wax poetic on the opposable thumb of the panda or the flightless birds and swimming lizards of the Galapagos Islands, and I know very well that the pages of a topic-specific journal such as The Diapason are not the appropriate place. I’m thinking about the contrast between the usefulness that results from anything that was designed well and the uselessness of poor design.
Boston is both famous and infamous for the massive rehashing of its tunnels, bridges, and highways know as The Big Dig. It’s famous as an ambitious example of the significant reworking of a city, infamous for many billions of dollars in cost overruns and aggravating disruption of the city’s life for well over a decade, and for tunnels under the harbor with fatally collapsing ceilings and hundreds of leaks.

Intentional design
One component of the Big Dig is the Zakim Bridge, purported to be the world’s widest suspension bridge, which crosses the Charles River, connecting the underground Central Artery with Interstate 93 going north out of the city toward New Hampshire.
Conceived as part of the Big Dig, the Zakim Bridge in Boston is simply beautiful. Its striking lines dominate views across the city from every angle. It’s breathtaking to come out of the tunnel looking straight up the bridge. Driving from the west, looking down the Charles River, the bridge reminds one of a sailing ship. We live in Charlestown, a neighborhood across the harbor from downtown, parts of which are warrens of curving and crossing Revolutionary War-era streets. As we walk those streets we are amazed at how often you come around a corner to see a view of the bridge framed in the center of the street. It’s a wonderful design—so wonderful that I can’t recall hearing anyone criticize it.

Ignorant design
I often tell colleagues about the church that engaged me as consultant to help them acquire a pipe organ for their new sanctuary. They had instructed their architect of their intention to have a pipe organ—the building should be prepared to accommodate one. I traveled to visit the church and was surprised to see that there was no place in the room where an instrument of sufficient size could be placed. I looked at the room from every angle, thought of how an organ might be placed on a cantilevered shelf, and remembered photos I had seen of an organ located in a huge flower-pot suspended from the ceiling, but I simply couldn’t see where an organ could go in this building.
After I had been in the sanctuary for a couple hours, the organ committee and architect arrived for the meeting. The architect unrolled a drawing that showed a nice organ façade on the wall on the left side of the sanctuary. It was an outside wall. It was my unpleasant task to inform the architect in front of the committee that an organ would require six or eight feet of depth behind that pretty façade. Neither the architect nor the committee knew that. There would be no pipe organ.

Function follows form
As I’ve lived most of my life in New England, I’ve long been familiar with century- (even centuries-) old church buildings. Built before the introduction of public address systems, hung or dropped ceilings, or steel-and-drywall construction techniques, the buildings were made of real materials heavy enough to support their structures. The height of a ceiling was determined by proportion: following observations made in places like Athens more than twenty centuries ago, if a room was “so many” feet wide and “so many” feet long, the ceiling had to be “so many” feet up. It’s pretty simple math. Most people agree that the ceiling in the Parthenon was just the right height!
The majesty of a room’s acoustical properties would be a direct function of its size. The larger the building, the heavier the walls must be to support the higher roof. Place an organ of appropriate proportions on the long axis of the room and you could hardly fail. We might hear a big Hook organ in a large church and say, “those people really knew something.” But you can also say that some designers today may know too much.
We see modern worship spaces decorated like living rooms with plush carpets, and ceiling height determined by the clearance necessary to accommodate the Home Depot chandeliers. We’re given 18 feet of height for a pipe organ in a building with 450 seats. It’s destined to fail before the first note is sounded. So along with our artificial climate, artificial sound system, artificial proportions, and artificial flowers, we are doomed to using an artificial organ. And because we can, we drive the artificial organ with a stoplist suitable for a room with an 80-foot ceiling. Thirty-two-foot organ tone does not sound good in a room with an 18-foot ceiling.
Last month while shopping for Christmas presents in Harvard Square, I came across a book that I needed more than anyone on my list: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick, published in 2007 by the MIT Press. I read the entire book standing in the store before I bought it. It’s 5¼ inches tall and 7½ inches long, perfectly proportioned to present his 101 thoughts on 101 pairs of facing pages. On each right-hand page is a pearl of architectural wisdom. On each facing left-hand page is Mr. Frederick’s illustrative sketch.
Some of Mr. Frederick’s points are pretty basic and practical. Number 1 is “How to draw a line:”

Architects use different lines for different purposes, but the line type most specific to architecture is drawn with an emphasis at the beginning and at the end. This practice anchors a line to a page and gives a drawing conviction and punch. If your lines trail off at the ends, your drawings will tend to look wimpy and vague.
Oh, I get it, when you’re designing something, you should mean to do it. The facing page shows two versions of the same sketch—one anchored to the page, and one wimpy. Point taken.
Others are more theoretical. Number 11 is “Use ‘denial and reward’ to enrich passage through the built environment:”

As we move through buildings, towns, and cities, we mentally connect visual cues from our surrounding to our needs and expectations. The satisfaction and richness of our experiences are largely the result of the ways in which these connections are made.
He’s talking to me about the Zakim Bridge. See a glimpse of it as you head up one street, be denied as it disappears when you turn a corner, see it from another angle as you cross the next block, come up out of the tunnel and safely cross the river. What a reward.
Number 28: “A good designer isn’t afraid to throw away a good idea.”

Just because an interesting idea occurs to you doesn’t mean it belongs in the building you are designing.
How many buildings and how many pipe organs have suffered as they try to do and try to be too many things at once?
Number 33 is a good one: “If you wish to imbue an architectural space or element with a particular quality, make sure that the quality is really there.”

If you want a wall to feel thick, make sure it is thick. If a space is to feel tall, make sure it really is tall.

What did I just say about the thickness of walls?
Number 95: “A decorated shed is a conventional building form that conveys meaning through signage or architectural ornament.” The accompanying sketches show a small shoe-box building dwarfed by a sign saying “Drive-thru Sunday Services,” contrasting a proper looking church building with a pitched roof and a cross on top. One is captioned “meaning conveyed by signage,” the other “meaning conveyed by architectural symbol.” If it looks like a duck, it is a duck.
And number 96, a purely practical observation: “Summer people are 22 inches wide. Winter people are 24 inches wide.” Sketches—a woman in a bikini and a man in a parka passing each other in opposite directions.
On several occasions I’ve attended convention workshops for organbuilders led by architects. Each time the conversation has dwindled to a litany of horror stories—indignant organbuilders anxious to prove that architects have no idea what they’re doing. But how many organbuilders have designed instruments in which chest-bungs cannot be reached, reservoirs cannot be removed for releathering, and how many have designed organs that look too big, too small, or fail to complement the design of their buildings.
Which brings me back to Mr. Frederick’s number 86: “Manage your ego.”

If you want to be recognized for designing a good or even great building, forget about what you want the building to be; instead ask, “‘What does the building want to be?”
In the world of artistic expression through design this seems counterintuitive. Anyone who’s seen one or two buildings designed by Frank Gehry will instantly recognize another. Does Mr. Frederick imply that Frank Gehry’s success is due to successful management of his ego? Or as you walk through the various corridors and spaces inside Disney Hall, do you find that you’re moving comfortably through attractive spaces, moving logically past necessities like water-bubblers and rest rooms, or hearing music in an environment that’s both aurally and visually spectacular? I do.

Deceptive design
The Gothic cathedral is perhaps one of the grandest repeated architectural forms we have. I’ve been fortunate to visit some of the great examples in Europe, where you marvel at what the artisans were able to do eight or nine hundred years ago. They hoisted huge stones hundreds of feet up—one of the towers is 349 feet tall and was finished in the 1140s. These workers would have been the first people in their community to be up that high—to look down on birds flying, to see the vast view across the countryside. It must have been terrifying, and it must have been hard for them to describe at home around the dinner table. But what they built is so true and so real that the building is still used daily the same way it was used when it was new. We were at Chartres on a Saturday when there was an impressive succession of weddings underway. Entire wedding parties were lined up in the square. As soon as one was finished, a man with a mobile phone called the organ loft and the next procession began.
I know several cathedral-scale Gothic-style buildings that are really concrete and steel affairs with plaster interiors molded to look like Gothic stone tracery. You know it the moment you walk inside—the sound isn’t right. There’s an aura about a building made of real carved-by-hand stones piled on top of each other to form columns and traceries that support a ceiling that’s a hundred feet up. Now that’s a building that can have 32-foot sound.

Inspirational design
Recently I was at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I’ve been there many times, and each time I’ve found new treasures that are part of the fabric and lore of the place that offer fresh inspiration. Around the doorway leading out the north transept, you can find six-inch mice carved into the stone a little above head height. There’s an alcove with a statue of Martin Luther King, commemorating the fact that he gave his last sermon in that building a few days before his assassination. There are hundreds of carvings of saints, political figures, and theologians. And there are some carvings of the stone carvers who built the building.
The windows are extraordinary. Framed in the ancient forms of Gothic arches, they feature brilliant contemporary designs. On a sunny day, the church’s interior is ablaze with colored light—a stunning and magical effect. One of the great windows on the south wall of the nave depicts stars and planets and includes a piece of rock from the moon, presented to the cathedral by the astronauts of Apollo XI. In side and lower chapels you find mosaics depicting the same classic biblical scenes found in the great ancient churches using the same ancient techniques and materials but featuring dazzling contemporary designs. It is the juxtaposition of modern expressions framed in ancient architectural forms that I find most moving about this building.
The National Cathedral stands as a great metaphor for meaningful change and progression of expression. There is something in this building for everyone to appreciate, and neither the ancient nor the contemporary overwhelms the other.
The National Cathedral is located on top of a hill where it can be clearly seen from five miles away on Interstate 95, joining the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol as high points on the skyline. In fact, the central tower of the cathedral is the tallest structure in the city. Drive through the city and catch a glimpse of it once in a while between the trees, around the corners. Arrive at the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues and be rewarded in the presence of such a massive and brilliant masterpiece. There’s not a wimpy line in the place. The space has been imbued with reality—the walls seem thick because they are thick, the interior seems tall because it is tall. The signs out front are simple and tasteful—this is no decorated shed. I doubt that Matthew Frederick had anything to do with the design of the National Cathedral, but his little book helped me understand it a little better.?

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.

Shiny side up
The work of the Organ Clearing House involves trucks. Lots of trucks. We rent trucks when we are working on projects small enough to fit into a single truck body. And we have a trucking company in Nevada that we call when we need a semi-trailer or a little fleet of semi-trailers. After many years of jumping around from one company to another, it was a relief to begin working consistently with a single firm that could meet most of our needs.
When we are dismantling an organ, loading day is heavy work. A crew runs in and out of a church building all day long carrying heavy parts down stairs and fitting them into a truck like a giant Tetris® game. When the truck is full there’s often a moment when the crew and truck driver “shoot the breeze” for a few minutes before the load hits the road. We’ve heard a few doozies. One driver mentioned that it was a good thing we weren’t sending him to Canada because he had been convicted for smuggling firearms and wasn’t allowed to drive there anymore. We had just loaded an Aeolian-Skinner organ into his trailer.
Sometimes it’s pearls of wisdom: “You can drive down that hill too slow as many times as you want. You can only drive down it too fast once.”
And the friendly greeting as he puts it in gear and lets out the clutch, “keep the shiny side up!” Good advice, especially with my organ in the back!

Skootch
In 1979 I was part of a crew installing a new European organ in Cleveland. (You historians can route out which organ that was . . .) The church’s sexton, a fifty-ish German man, was involved in setting up the scaffolding, and I as “the young guy” was up there with him. As we were putting up the last scaffold frame we ran into the pitch of the ceiling. “Hold this,” he said, handing me the scaffold frame. I was standing on a plank. He pushed against the ceiling with his hands, gave the scaffold tower a kick with both feet, and the whole thing jumped a couple inches toward the center of the room. We were up high enough to be able to put a bridge from the top of the tower across the top of the organ to another tower. It was a three-manual free-standing organ in a classic organ loft with a spiral stairway. Must have been 50 feet. After his kick the tower didn’t stop making noise for several seconds, and because I was holding that frame I couldn’t steady myself. Nothing bad happened, but as I reflect on that moment, especially watching our crews set up massive towers of scaffolding today, I can hardly believe the risk that guy exposed me to without asking. I would have said no.
In another Cleveland church my boss and I witnessed a near disaster. We walked through the nave heading for the rear gallery where we were finishing renovation of the antiphonal organ. The pews were divided into three sections across the room, so there were in effect two center aisles and no side aisles. The walls featured unusually large stained-glass windows. A couple guys from the church’s maintenance staff were changing light bulbs in the chandeliers, using the kind of scaffolding that’s made of two-inch aluminum tubes and has a two-by-six-foot footprint. They were four sections high, and had the outriggers (stabilizers) pointing up the aisles the “long way,” rather than between the pews. From inside the organ chamber we heard “that” noise and ran down the stairs to find the tower at a 45-degree angle, the bottom of the tower still in the aisle, and Mr. Lightbulb on top with his foot on the wall next to a window. A couple inches to the right and he would have gone through the glass and fallen a long way to the lawn. Telling him to hang on, we yanked the tower straight again, and I had to go up to help the guy down.
What kind of maintenance supervisor would let that happen? Oh yeah, in the first story he was the guy on top of the tower with the big feet.

Those little voices
That Cleveland area organbuilder I was working with is Jan Leek of Oberlin, Ohio. I was privileged to work in his shop part time when I was a student, and then full-time for about five years after I graduated. He had learned the trade in Holland in what could best be described as an old-world apprenticeship, and as he taught me how to handle tools and operate machinery, he had a way of saying, “listen for those little voices.” If the little voice in your head says, “you’re going to cut your finger with that chisel if you do that once more,” the little voice is right. It’s a great image, and I am sure that his description taught me to conjure up those voices. I can still hear them. “The paint is going to drip on the carpet.” “The keyboard is going to fall on the floor.” “Your finger will touch that saw blade.”
The apprentice doesn’t hear the voices. The journeyman hears them and doesn’t listen. The master hears them and does listen.
An open quart can of contact cement is sitting on the chancel carpet next to the organ console. Of course it’s going to get knocked over when you stand up. The price of the glue, $4.79. The price of the carpet, $47,500.
A row of tin façade pipes is standing against the workshop wall. A worker is using a five-pound hammer to break up the crates that the pipes came in. The head flies off the hammer and dents one of the pipes, and they all fall over, one at a time in slow motion like 15-foot-tall tin dominos and there’s nothing anyone can do.
Cheery, isn’t it?
This subject is on my mind for several reasons. One is that I’ve spent the last couple days negotiating the rental of a huge amount of scaffolding and rigging equipment for a large project we will start next week, so I’ve been talking with salesmen about weight and height limits and what accessories are necessary to ensure safety. Another reason is that a locally owned small manufacturing company near us suffered a catastrophic fire last week. And as we work with scaffolding companies in New York we hear stories about the construction industry, especially relating to recent serious accidents involving cranes used in the construction of high-rise buildings.
I love the image of the organbuilder at a wooden workbench, a window open next to him providing a gentle breeze, a sharp plane in his hands, and the sweet smell of fresh wood wafting off the workpiece as the shavings curl from the blade of the plane. Or that of the voicer sitting in seclusion with beautiful new pipes in front of him coming to life under his ministrations.
But think of that majestic organ case in the rear gallery with an ornate monumental crown on the top of the center tower, covered with moldings, carvings, and gilding, and pushed up against the ceiling. Uplifting, isn’t it? It might be eight feet long, six feet wide, and three feet tall. It might weigh 500 pounds, and someone had to put it there. Making it is one thing. Getting it 50 feet off the floor and placed on those 20-foot legs that hold it up is another thing altogether. Uplifting, all right.
Organbuilders have a variety of skills. We work with wood, metal, and leather. We work with electricity and solid-state circuitry. We have acute musical ears for discerning minute differences in pipe speech and for setting temperaments. And we must be material handlers—that specialization of moving heavy things around safely.
To put that tower crown in place you need scaffolding, hoisting equipment, and safety gear to keep you from falling. How high up do you need to be before you need that gear? Easy. Ask yourself how far you’re willing to fall. Twenty feet? Thirty feet? Four years ago the Organ Clearing House dismantled the huge Möller organ in the Philadelphia Civic Center. (That organ is now under renovation in the new workshop of the American Organ Institute at the University of Oklahoma.) The organ chamber was above the ceiling, 125 feet above the floor. The demolition company (the building was to be torn down) cut a hole in the floor of the blower room big enough for the organ parts to pass through. And we were left standing on the edge of an abyss. We used full-body harnesses and retractable life lines. If you fell you’d drop about six feet and the ratchet-action of the retractable would stop you, something like the seatbelts in your car. And there you are, hanging 120 feet up.

Away aloft
A sailor hollers “Away aloft” as the halyard hoists the sail up the mast. The rigger might do the same. He ties a line around the load, hooks it to the line from the winch, and up it goes. It’s important to choose the right type of line—you don’t want chanciness caused by a line that stretches, for example. But what really matters is the knots you use. Some knots are meant to slip. Some are meant to be permanent. A favorite is the bowline, which cannot untie, but also cannot pull so tight that it cannot be undone. It was developed by early sailors to tie a ship to a dock or mooring. Think of a large sailing vessel, bow tied to a mooring, bouncing on the waves and pulled by the wind for weeks. There’s a terrific amount of force on that knot. But you give the top of the knot a push sideways and it can be taken apart easily. Beginning sailors are taught how to tie the bowline both left- and right-handed, blindfolded. I once had to tie a bowline while diving under a boat in order to repair a centerboard control.
Different knots are intended for different purposes.
A half-hitch is a great knot for securing something temporarily, but it looks a lot like a slip knot. If you don’t know the difference you might tie a slip knot by mistake. How will that work when the weight of a windchest shifts while being hoisted into the organ?
If your skill set doesn’t include three or four good reliable knots, I recommend you learn them. There are neat books for this purpose, predictably available from boating-supply companies. Some come with little lengths of line so you can practice in the comfort of your home.
When hoisting heavy parts you can also use nylon webbing. It’s available in neat pre-cut lengths with loops on each end for easy tying. The webbing is easy on the corners of the piece you’re lifting, and it’s very strong. A one-inch wide web is rated for 2,000 pounds in vertical lift. But keep a good eye on its condition. Recently there was an eerie photo in the New York Times in the aftermath of the collapse of a construction crane. It showed a piece of torn webbing dangling from a hook. That photo prompted us to purchase new webbing for our next rigging job!
In the nineteenth century, the great Boston organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook suffered two serious fires, both of which destroyed their workshops. I know of two North American organbuilders who have had bad fires in the last decade. Neither was caused by carelessness; in fact, one was caused by lightning. I thought about those two colleague firms working to rebuild their companies when we heard of a terrible fire at a boatyard near us. Washburn & Doughty is a family-owned company with about a hundred employees that builds heavy commercial vessels like tugboats, fireboats, and ferryboats. It’s quite a spectacle to see a hundred-foot tugboat under construction in a small village. And a mighty amount of steel goes into the building of such a boat. On Friday, July 11, sparks from a cutting torch ignited a fire that destroyed the building. It was routine work for a place like that, and newspaper stories told that the fire was officially accidental. They were able to save a hundred-foot tug that had been launched and was being completed at the dock—they cast it adrift! But two others that were still in the buildings were lost and 65 employees were laid off temporarily while the owners work out how to rebuild.
Ten years ago I was restoring an organ built by E. & G.G. Hook with lots of help from volunteers from the parish. We were refinishing the walnut case, and I mentioned the fire hazard of rags that were soaked with linseed oil. They must be spread out to dry. If they’re left in a heap they will spontaneously combust. One of the volunteers took a pile of the rags home and put them in a bucket in the middle of his backyard. He told us later that it had only taken about ten minutes before the bucket was full of fire!
This is a pretty gloomy subject. But I write encouraging my colleagues to look around their workplaces with a critical eye toward safety. Be sure you have the proper gear for lifting and moving the things you’re working on. Store your paints and finishes in a fire-proof cabinet. Eliminate the possibility of sparks finding a pile of sawdust and spread out those oily rags. Encourage your workers to use safety equipment. Safety glasses may look nerdy, but it’s not cool to lose an eye!
Get your hands on a good industrial supply catalogue—I have those from Grainger and McMaster-Carr on my desk. Go to the “safety” pages and leaf through. You’ll see lots of things that protect against stuff you haven’t imagined could happen! Organbuilders are precious. Let’s keep them all in good health.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Measure up
When I was an apprentice working in Oberlin, Ohio, we had a particularly bad winter, with several heavy storms and countless days of difficult driving conditions. As part of our regular work, my mentor Jan Leek and I did a great deal of driving as we serviced organs throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Jan owned a full-size Dodge van—perfect for our work as it was big enough to carry windchests, big crates of organ pipes, and long enough inside to carry a twelve-foot stepladder with the doors closed, if the top step was rested on the dashboard near the windshield. All those merits aside, it was relatively light for its size and the length of its wheelbase, and it was a simple terror to drive in the snow. There can’t have been another car so anxious to spin around.
Jan started talking about buying a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and one afternoon as we returned from a tuning, he turned into a car dealership and ordered a new Jeep Wagoneer—a large station wagon-shaped model. He wanted it to have a sunroof, but since Jeep didn’t offer one he took the car to a body shop that would install one as an aftermarket option. As we left the shop, Jan said to the guy, “I work with measurements all day—be sure it’s installed square.” It was.
Funny that an exchange like that would stick with me for more than thirty years, but it’s true—organbuilders work and live with measurements all day, every day they’re at work. A lifetime of counting millimeters or sixty-fourths-of-an-inch helps one develop an eye for measurements. You can tell the difference between 19 and 20 millimeters at a glance. A quick look at the head of a bolt tells you that it’s seven-sixteenths and not a half-inch, and you grab the correct wrench without thinking about it. Your fingers tell you that the thickness of a board is three-quarters and not thirteen-sixteenths before your eyes do. And if the sunroof is a quarter-inch out of square, it’ll bug you every time you get in the car.
And with the eye for measuring comes the need for accuracy as you measure. Say you’re making a panel for an organ case. It will have four frame members—top, bottom, and two sides—and a hardwood panel set into dados (grooves) cut into the inside edges. The drawing says that the outside dimensions are 1000mm (one meter) by 500mm (nice even numbers that never happen in real life!). The width of the frame members is 75mm. You need to cut the sides to 1000mm, as that’s the overall length of the panel. But the top and bottom pieces will fit between the two sides, so you subtract the combined width of the two sides from the length of the top and bottom and cut them accordingly: 500mm minus 75mm minus 75mm equals 350mm.
You make a mark on the board at 350mm—but your pencil is dull and your mark is 2mm wide. Not paying attention to the condition of the pencil or the actual placement of the mark, you cut the board on the “near” side of the mark and your piece winds up 4mm too short. The finished panel will be 496mm wide. Oh well, the gap will allow for expansion of the wood in the humid summer. But wait! It’s summer now. In the winter your panel will shrink to 492mm, and the organist will have to stuff a folded bulletin into the gap to keep the panel from rattling each time he plays low AAA# of the Pedal Bourdon (unless it’s raining).
You can see that when you mark a measurement on a piece of wood, you must make a neat clean mark, put it just at the right point according to your ruler, and remember throughout the process on which side of the mark you want to make your cut. If you know your mark is true and the length will be accurate if the saw splits your pencil mark, then split the pencil mark when you cut!
I’ve had the privilege of restoring several organs built by E. & G.G. Hook, and never stop delighting at the precision of the 150-year-old pencil marks on the wood. The boys in that shop on Tremont Street in Boston knew how to sharpen pencils.
Another little tip—use the same ruler throughout the project. As I write, there’s a clean steel ruler on my desk that shows inches with fractions on one edge and millimeters grouped by tens (centimeters) on the other. It’s an English ruler exactly eighteen inches long, and the millimeter side is fudged to make them fit. The last millimeter is 457, and the first millimeter is obviously too big. If I were working in millimeters and alternating between this ruler and another, I’d be getting two versions of my measurements. While the quarter-millimeter might not matter a lot of the time, it will matter a lot sometimes. I have several favorite rulers at my workbench. One is 150mm long (it’s usually in my shirt pocket next to the sharp pencil), another is 500, and another is 1000. I use them for everything and interchange them with impunity because I know I can trust them. With all the advances in the technology of tools I’ve witnessed and enjoyed during my career, I’ve never seen a saw that will cut a piece of wood a little longer. The guy who comes up with that will quickly be wealthy (along with the guy who invents a magnet that will pick up a brass screw!).
My wife Wendy is a literary agent, with a long list of clients who have fascinating specialties. In dinner-table conversations we’ve gone through prize-winning poets, crime on Mt. Everest, multiple personalities, the migration of puffins, flea markets, and teenagers’ brains (!). Her client Walter Lewin is a retired professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is famous for his rollicking lectures in the course Physics 8.01, the most famous introductory physics course in the world. On the first page of the introduction to his newly published book, For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time—A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics, Lewin addresses his class: “Now, all important in making measurements, which is always ignored in every college physics book”—he throws his arms wide, fingers spread—“is the uncertainty of measurements . . . Any measurement that you make without knowledge of the uncertainty is meaningless.” I’m impressed that Professor Lewin thinks that inaccuracy is such an important part of the study of physics that it’s just about the first thing mentioned in his book.
The thickness of my pencil lines, my choice of the ruler, and the knowledge about where in the line the saw blade should go are uncertainties of my measuring. If I know the uncertainties, I can limit my margin of error. I do this every time I make a mark on a piece of wood. And by the way, if you’re interested at all in questions like “why is the sky blue,” you’ll love Lewin’s book. And for an added bonus you can find these lectures on YouTube—type his name into the search box and you’ll find a whole library. Lewin is a real showman—part scientist, part eccentric, all great communicator—and his lectures are at once brilliantly informative and riotously humorous.
Now about that panel that will fit into the dados cut in the frame members. Given the outside dimensions and the width of the four frame pieces, the size of the panel will be 850mm x 350mm (if your cutting has been accurate). But don’t forget that you have to make it oversize so it fits into the dado. 7.5mm on each side will do it—that allows for seasonal shrinkage without having the panel fall out of the frame. So to be safe, cut the dados 10mm deep allowing a little space for expansion, and cut the panel to 865mm x 365mm—that’s the space defined by the four-sided frame plus 7.5mm on each side, which is 15mm on each axis. Nothing to it.
Now that you’ve all had this little organbuilding lesson, look at the case of a good-sized organ. There might be 40 or 50 panels. That’s a lot of opportunity for error and enough room for buzzing panels to cover every note of the scale.

§

For the last several days I’ve been measuring and recording the scales and dimensions of the pipes of a very large Aeolian-Skinner organ that the Organ Clearing House is preparing to renovate for installation in a new home. I’m standing at a workbench with my most accurate measuring tools while my colleague Joshua Wood roots through the pipe trays to give me C’s and G’s. Josh lays the pipes out for me, I measure the inside and outside diameters, thickness of the metal (which is a derivative of the inside and outside diameters—if outside diameter is 40mm and the metal is 1mm thick, the inside diameter is 38mm. I take both measurements to account for uncertainties.), mouth width, mouth height, toehole diameter, etc. As I finish each pipe, Josh packs them back into the trays. With a rank done, we move the tray and find another one. Now you know why I’m thinking about measurements so much today.
When studying, designing, or making organ pipes, we refer to the mouth-width as a ratio to the circumference, the cut-up as a ratio of the mouth’s height to width, and the scale as a ratio of the pipe’s diameter to its length. If I supply diameter and actual width of the mouth, the voicer can use the Archimedian Constant (commonly known as π - Pi) to determine the mouth-width ratio, and so on, and so forth.
Here’s where I must admit that my knowledge of organ voicing is limited to whatever comes from working generally as an organbuilder, without having any training or experience with voicing. My colleagues who know this art intimately will run circles around my theories, and I welcome their comments. From my inexpert position, I’ll try to give you some insight into why these dimensions are important.
The width of the mouth of an organ pipe means little or nothing if it’s not related to another dimension. Using the width as a ratio to the circumference of a pipe gives us a point of reference. For example, a mouth that’s 40mm wide might be a wide mouth for a two-foot pipe, but it’s a narrow mouth for a four-foot pipe. A two-foot Principal pipe with diameter of 45mm might have a mouth that’s 40mm wide—that’s a mouth-width roughly 2/7 of the circumference, on the wide side for Principal tone. The formula is: diameter (45) times π (3.1416) divided by mouth-width (40). In this case, we get the circumference of 141.372mm. Round it off to 141, divide by 40 (mouth-width), and you get 3.525, which is about 2/7 of 141. Each time I adapt the number to keep things simple, I’m accepting the inaccuracy of my measurements.
The mouths of Flute pipes are usually narrower (in ratio) than those of Principals. Yesterday I measured the pipes of a four-foot Flute, which had a pipe with the same 40mm mouth-width, but the diameter of that pipe was about 55mm. That’s a ratio of a little less than 1/4. The difference between a 2/7 mouth and a 1/4 (2/8) mouth tells the voicer a lot about how the pipe will sound.
And remember, those diameters are a function of the scale, the ratio of the diameter to the length. My two example pipes with the same mouth width are very different in pitch. The Principal pipe (45mm in diameter) speaks middle C of an eight-foot stop, while the Flute with the 40mm mouth speaks A# above middle C of an eight-foot.

§

You can imagine that the accuracy of all these measurements is very important to the tone of an organ. The tonal director creates a chart of dimensions for the pipes of an organ, including all these various dimensions for every pipe, plus the theoretical length of each pipe, the desired height of the pipe’s foot, etc. The pipemaker receives the chart and starts cutting metal. Let’s go back to our two-foot Principal pipe. Diameter is 45mm. Speaking length is two feet, which is about 610mm. Let’s say the height of the foot is 200mm. The pipemaker needs three pieces of metal—a rectangle that rolls up to become the resonator, a pie-shaped piece that rolls up into a cone to make the foot, and a circle for the languid.
For the resonator, multiply the diameter by π: 45 x 3.1416 = 141.37mm (this time I’m rounding it to the hundredth)—that’s the circumference of the pipe, so it’s the width of the pipemaker’s rectangle. Cut the rectangle circumference-wide by speaking-length-long: 141.37 x 610.
For the foot, use the same circumference and the height of the foot for the dimensions of the piece of pie: 141.37mm x 200.
Roll up the rectangle to make a tube that’s 45mm in diameter by 610 long, and solder the seam.
Roll up the piece of pie to make a cone that’s 45mm in diameter at the top and 200mm long, and solder the seam.
Cut a circle that’s 45mm in diameter and solder it to the top of the cone, then solder the tube to the whole thing. (I will not discuss how to cut the mouth or form the toehole.)
But Professor Lewin’s adage reminds us that no pipemaker is ever going to be able to cut those pieces of metal exactly 141.37mm wide. That’s the number I got from my calculator after rounding tens-of-thousandths of a millimeter down to hundredths. You have to understand the uncertainty of your measurements to get any work done.

§

As I take the measurements of these thousands of organ pipes, I record them on charts we call scale sheets—one sheet for each rank. I reflect on how important it is to the success of the organ that this information be accurate. I’m using a digital caliper—a neat tool with a sliding scale that measures either inside or outside dimensions. The LED readout gives me the dimensions in whatever form I want—I can choose scales that give inches-to-the-thousandth, inches-to-the-sixty-fourth, or millimeters-to-the-hundredth. I’m using the millimeter scale, rounding hundredths of a millimeter up to the nearest tenth. As good as my colleagues are and as accurately as they might work, they’re not going to discern the difference between a mouth that’s 45.63mm wide from one that’s 45.6mm.
And as accurately as I try to take and record these measurements, what I’m measuring is hand made. I might notice that the mouth of a Principal pipe is 16.6mm high on one end and 16.8mm high on the other. A difference of .2mm can’t change the sound of the pipe that much—so I’ll record it as 16.7. I know the uncertainties of my measurements. I adapt each measurement at least twice (rounding to the nearest tenth and adapting for uneven mouth-height) in order to ensure its accuracy. Yikes!

§

Earlier I mentioned how people who work with measurements all the time develop a knack for judging them. I’ve been tuning organs for more than 35 years, counting my way up tens of thousands of ranks of pipes, listening to and correcting the pitches, all the time registering the length of the pipes subconsciously. With all that history recorded, if I’m in an organ and my co-worker plays a note, I can reach for the correct pipe by associating the pitch with the length of the pipe.
π (pi) is a magical number—that Archimedes ever stumbled on that number as the key to calculating the dimensions of a circle is one of the great achievements of the human race. How can it be possibly be true that πd is the circumference of a circle while πr2 is the area? Here’s another neat equation. A perfect cone is one whose diameter is equal to its height. The volume of a perfect cone is exactly half that of a sphere with the same diameter. How did we ever figure that one?
There are no craftsmen in any trade who understand π better than the organ-pipemaker. When you visit a pipe shop, you might see a stack of graduated metal rectangles destined to be the resonators of a rank of pipes. The pipemaker knows π as instinctively as I can tell that the first millimeter on my ruler is too big. Imagine looking at a tennis ball and guessing its circumference!

§

When you’re buying measuring tools, you must pay attention to accuracy. Choose an accurate ruler by comparing three or four of them against each other and deciding which one is most accurate. Choose an accurate level by comparing three or four of them. You’ll be surprised how often two levels disagree. Just as mathematics gives us the surety of π, so physics gives us the surety of level. There is only one true level!
I’ve been showing off all morning about how great I am with measurements in theory and practice, so I’ll bust it all up with another story about van windshields. I left the shop to drive to the lumberyard to pick up a few long boards of clear yellow pine. They had beautiful rough-cut boards around thirteen feet long, eight and ten inches wide, and two inches thick. Each board was pretty heavy, and as they were only roughly planed, it was easy to get splinters from them. I put the first one in the car, resting the front end on the dashboard right against the windshield. Perfect—the door closed fine, let’s get another. I slid the second one up on the first, right through the windshield. Good eye! 

The show must go on.

Each month, The Diapason sports a flashy color photo of a pipe organ on the front cover. (So do the other guys.) These photos show the glamorous side of the trade—exciting new instruments and important renovation projects. The “centerfold” articles typically include statements by the organbuilder, the local musician, the pastor, and chair of the organ committee. Each is testament to a bold adventure in which a local church or educational institution commits a lot of effort and a ton of money to the commissioning and building, or rebuilding, of a musical instrument.

Once an organ is installed, and the celebration is past, it’s important to maintain it so it will always sound its best, and the owners’ investment is protected. I’ve just spent a week in Boston doing service calls, reflecting on how that work has changed over the years, and enjoying those long relationships with the instruments and their buildings.

Job one

Tuning, cleaning, and repairing of dead notes and ciphers make up the bulk of the routine of pipe organ maintenance, but I think the most important part of the job is being sure the organ is safe. Countless organs have been damaged or destroyed by fire, roof leaks, vandalism, and other forces. This past August, an early organ built by John Brombaugh was lost when the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, was destroyed by fire, and I have been corresponding with a church in North Carolina that lost a fine Schantz organ to fire early this year. I know that the parish in North Carolina had proper and adequate insurance coverage, so they will be able to rebuild and to replace their pipe organ. I hope the same for the people in Lorain, but Brombaugh’s Opus 4 is surely irreplaceable.

The careful organ technician should encourage the owner of a pipe organ to review their insurance policies to be sure that the organ is properly covered. It’s common for people to find that the organ is insured for its original purchase price—fine if the organ is a few years old, but you’re going to lose big if your four-manual E. M. Skinner organ is insured for the same $27,000 that bought it in 1928. It’s usual for an insurance company to require an assessment of the organ. This can be provided by your organ technician, the company that originally built the instrument, or by any knowledgeable and reputable organbuilder. The assessment report should include photographs of the organ, inside and out, to document its complexity, accurate specifications, the history of any rebuilding projects or major repairs, and mention of any prominent musicians who have performed on it. And the figure stated as “replacement value” should include consideration of quality of construction, description of the degree of ornamentation of an organ case, gold leaf, and any special voices included that are particularly expensive or difficult to obtain. For example, an original Skinner Harp is worth a truckload of Tierces!

The careful organ technician will also encourage the organ’s owner to inspect the roof and walls that surround the organ, and the condition of heating, ventilation, and plumbing equipment that may pass through the organ chambers. Recently, a lovely Aeolian-Skinner organ in my care suffered significant damage to the static reservoir and Spencer blower located in the basement of the church, caused by the rupture of a frozen water main. The lower level of the building was flooded—lots of flooring, carpeting, and furniture were destroyed, and the repairs to the organ were fully covered by the comprehensive scope of the insurance policy.

One bad shingle, one missing piece of flashing, and the right storm can wreck an organ.

Hygiene

In my home parish in the 1960s the sexton was an old gent from the back woods of Maine, complete with the authentic accent and the salty talk. My father, the rector, kept a running list of Don Wilkins’s colorful turns of phrase and when Don retired, published a pamphlet recalling them. Don organized the care of the building’s “systems,” kept the floors clean, and wearing an old white Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled up and a skinny dark tie, made and served the Sunday morning coffee. Forty and fifty years ago, the standing equipment in a building like that wasn’t as sophisticated or complicated as it is now, and Don knew how to keep the place humming and sparkling.

It’s common now for churches not to have sextons, but to hire cleaning contractors instead. The volunteers on the property committee look after the physical plant, and simply put, I’ve seen some pretty big mishaps resulting from well-meaning, volunteer oversight. 

My dictionary has two definitions for the word oversight:

1. An unintentional failure to notice or do something.

2. The action of overseeing something.

Definition 2 describes the well-meaning committee member. Definition 1 describes the inevitable result of uninformed supervision. 

It’s too bad when failing to change a filter leads to a mechanical disaster. Hiring professional cleaners while relying on volunteer mechanical maintenance is a false economy. It would be better to have volunteers cleaning, and hire a stationary engineer to look after the equipment. A two-hour visit each month would do it. He would create a schedule for maintenance of the HVAC and elevator motors, alarm systems, and other necessary equipment. He would recommend contractors and oversee their work.

Over years of writing reports for consultation clients, I’ve used the term Institutional Hygiene. I use it to describe the general condition of a building as it affects and influences the care of the equipment. Using mechanical areas for general storage is the perfect example. Decades-old Christmas decorations stacked around and against a furnace is the next thing to arson. In one client church, I have to pass through an attic to reach the organ chamber. During a tuning, I noticed a “Manger Hay Bale” piled with the artificial Christmas trees. There was vapor, some combination of steam and smoke, coming from the bale—composting for Christ. I schlepped it down the ladder and mentioned it to the administrator in the church office, then went to lunch. When I got back, the hay bale was back in the attic, smoking away. Bad hygiene.

There was the frantic call on a Saturday morning: the church is full, the bride has arrived, and the organ won’t play. “I turned on the blower switch and the lights came on, but no sound.” I raced to the church, arriving to the din of vamping bagpipes, to find a card table sucked up against the air intake for the organ blower. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist who said she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. I found a stack of folding chairs on the reservoir, doubling the wind pressure. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist of the church with the card table, saying she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. This one was out of their control. The Public Library across the street was being demolished, and they were using dynamite to move stone so the foundation for the new building could be deeper. Every capped pipe and every reed pipe had the daylights knocked out of it!

There’s another level of hygiene that’s a little more sensitive to discuss because it involves your personal habits. A cup of coffee (especially with sugar) or a can of soda is a terrible thing to introduce to your organ console. Maybe it’s sitting innocently on the stop jamb and seems pretty safe, but there have been two episodes in my career when such a quaff has fallen onto the keyboards. Felt bushings, silver contacts, even the glue that holds the ivories to the keys can be compromised and the repair can cost many thousands of dollars.

I’m lucky enough to have a vintage rosewood Steinway at home that came to me through generations of my family. We have a sign next to it that says, “Nothing on the piano, please.” I do not hesitate to speak up when a guest places a drink on my rosewood. It’s not about the wood—there’s an impervious finish on it. It’s about the sensitive, delicate, balanced action inside, made of wood, and bedecked with felt and various fine metals. It’s one instance when a martini is not a preservative.

Many organists don’t like to be called on this issue, so take this as a quiet and anonymous hint. The damage caused by such a spill is not worth the cost of a cup of coffee.

Second to a sugary drink, paperclips are the enemy of the organ’s keyboards. They can cause keys to jam together, and they can wind up on the contacts causing wild cross-ciphers.

And there was the call…

There are a lot of things an organist can do to help the tuner/technician, and many of them are based in common sense. It’s not always easy to tell where a problem is coming from, and mishaps like ciphers can be intermittent. If an organist calls to say there was a cipher on Sunday, but it went away, there’s nothing I can do. If in the heat of battle, you hear a cipher but can’t stop to locate it, there are a few clues that might help recreate it.

Maybe you’re sharp enough to tell me which note of which stop ciphered. If you were playing a trumpet tune as a wedding march, I bet a dollar that the cipher happened when you trilled between F# and G on the Great Trumpet. But if it was more elusive, you can give me a hint.

As soon as you finish the hymn, anthem, or response during which the cipher occurred, jump for your Organ Notebook (don’t tell me there’s no organ notebook on the console!), and write down the piece you were playing, and what registration or piston you were using. Leave the music on the console with a note saying on what page, on what line, in what measure the cipher occurred. If I play the same music with the same registration, the cipher might reappear. If I hear it, I’ll fix it. You can even narrow down the division. While you’re hearing the cipher, make up an excuse to use the Swell pedal. You’ll know right away if the cipher was in the Swell. That may not seem like much, but a clue is a clue. If I know you had a cipher in the Swell strings, I’ll stand in the Swell box while my assistant runs up and down the keyboard. Maybe I’ll hear a little whimper. If I hear it, I’ll fix it!

And there was the call from the organist who left a message on the answering machine saying, “The F-key sounds funny.” (True story.) Hmm. There are twenty-five stops on two keyboards, and eight stops in the pedals. That makes 274 “F-keys” in the organ. And maybe it’s not a single pipe that sounds funny. I’m not sure of which equation to use to compute the number of possible of combinations, but let’s say I square 274. That’s 75,076 possibilities. You can be specific (Great Melodia, #30, F above middle C, etc.), or you can help me find it (Hymn 242, third line, second measure, General 3). I’ll find it.

And there was the call from the cathedral organist. That organ has more than eighty stops on four manuals, and it’s more than an hour away. He called in a panic: “The organ is wildly out of tune.” I know very well that unless there has been some big event, like the dynamite at the library, a huge organ in a big stone church doesn’t just fly out of tune. But I jumped in the car, and raced to the cathedral. One pipe in the Pedal Clarion was out of tune. To be fair, it was way out of tune, but to this day, I can’t imagine why he didn’t poke around for a moment to identify it. Was it worth my losing a Saturday afternoon with my family? I think he would have been fine without the Pedal Clarion.

And there was the call from the organist of a church on Martha’s Vineyard. If you’re not familiar with “The Vineyard,” all you need to know is that it’s a quiet little sand-spit of an island offshore from Cape Cod in Massachusetts that morphs into an elite playground for the rich and famous during the summer. U.S. Presidents go there to play golf. Senators keep their lavish wooden yachts there. The summer social life on Martha’s Vineyard is transplanted directly from Embassy Row in Washington.

But this call was off-season. It was Maundy Thursday, and the organ was ciphering. Early the following morning, Good Friday, of course, I drove the hundred miles to the ferry slip, paid $90 for a round-trip ticket, enjoyed the hour-long passage to the island, drove to the church, fixed the cipher, and went home. The whole adventure took ten hours, and included two hundred miles of driving plus the cost of the ferry. I sent an invoice for nearly a thousand dollars. The organist was furious. “You were only in the church for ten minutes.” True enough, but I fixed your cipher on Good Friday, and it took all day. (By the way, I had my own service to play that night.) 

The tuner is coming this week.

There is a short list of things that you, the organist, can do to prepare for my visit. I’m sure my colleagues in this important work will have things to add, and I look forward to hearing from them.

1. Clean up around the console. The tools of your trade include hymnals, organ music, octavo scores, empty coffee cups (tsk!), paper clips (tsk!), cough drops, Kleenex (fresh and used), nail clippers and files, Post-Its, rolls of tape, hair brushes, etc. I can move them for you, but the meter is running, and I’ll never be able to put things back where they were. I’ve used my cell phone camera to document the piles of music, but it’s a nuisance. If you know I’m coming, take a half hour after the service to straighten things up.

2. Be sure the heat or air conditioning will be on. The rule is simple: We want to tune the organ in the same conditions for which it’s used in public. If the heat is turned up to 68˚ two hours before the service, turn the heat up to 68˚ two hours before the tuning. There was the time when after three or four visits to a certain church with the heat forgotten each time, the sexton announced to us joyfully, “I’ve got it good and hot in there for you this time.” That didn’t help!

3. Leave me a note. I trust that you’ve been writing things down in the notebook. (Don’t tell me there’s no notebook!) But take a minute to share your observations and concerns. You can call, text, e-mail, or leave an “analog” note on the console. If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll do my best, but I may not stumble across what’s bothering you most.

4. Follow up. Please don’t call me ten weeks later saying, “Ever since you were here …” The organ changes character when the temperature changes, it’s affected by humidity—especially rain—or extreme dryness. If I missed something, or if something jumped out of tune, let me know that week.

If you don’t know the rules, let me clean the keyboards. A heavy spray of detergent and a lot of scrubbing will cause damage. 

Above all, it’s best if you and I know each other. We should have lunch together once in a while, or at least a good chat in the choir loft. I’d like to hear you play, to see how you sit at the keyboards. I can tell a lot by studying your piston settings, but the more I know about how you use the organ, the better. Feel free to ask me about the organ. The more you know about the organ, the better. Let’s keep that thing sounding good. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Can it be fixed?
I love to cook. Wendy says I have a lot to show for it. I usually don’t follow recipes but I enjoy reading cookbooks to learn how successful chefs think about food, how they blend and enhance flavors, what techniques they enjoy. As an organbuilder I’ve spent a lifetime learning about tools, handling tools, trying to choose the right tool for the right job. My attitude and affinity toward tools spills over into my pleasure in the kitchen.
One of my favorite implements is a Weber four-burner propane grill that has lived on the back deck of our house in Maine for more than eight years. I know purists only barbeque with live fire, and of course we have a couple charcoal grills and a smoker, but that slick gas grill is a versatile, reliable, and convenient tool. The four-burner design allows me to cook with “indirect” heat—turn on the outer two burners, and whatever is in the center of the grill is not directly over the flame. I often roast a chicken in a cast-iron frying pan (breast down) over the center of grill. We roast vegetables and potatoes, and of course grill meat. I use it all year unless we’re away from the house through a couple snowstorms and the deck gets away from me.
Last month the burners gave out. Though they are made of stainless steel, eight years of weather and cooking heat was about all they could take. I checked at the hardware store where I bought the grill and saw that replacing it with the current similar model would cost most of nine hundred dollars. But the grill-guy at the store suggested I contact Weber with the serial number and see if it was still under warranty. Sure enough, a friendly woman answered the phone, verified that the ten-year warranty was still in effect, and sent a kit with four burners and two igniters at no charge.
I set aside a Saturday morning for the chore, expecting a greasy and smelly ordeal of rotted screw heads and caked-on cooking residue all over everything. What I found was four stainless-steel screws in near perfect condition, simple construction, and everything except the burned-out burners in terrific shape. It took about twenty minutes to take it apart, slip out the old burners, put in the new ones, clean all the parts, and put it back together. It worked perfectly. I was delighted—and had to dream up another chore to complete the morning. Or maybe I went off to the cooperative butcher thirty minutes up the road to prepare for the rededication.
This experience led me to reflect on the importance of “repairability,” a concept critical to the life of a pipe organ. Repairability is one of the by-products of mass production. Thousands of identical automobiles are produced using interchangeable parts, so assuming a good distribution system, it’s easy to repair your car by replacing an alternator, a timing belt, ball joints, even a transmission or engine. Some components of pipe organs can be mass-produced with good effect, but even if thousands of Skinner keyboards are more or less the same, the complete organ is most often a “one-off,” comprising a catalogue of components in unique combination. It reflects well on an organbuilder when a technician expects a repair to be difficult and is pleasantly surprised by how easy it is.
Ernest Skinner intended his organs for indefinite life. He knew that pneumatic leather would fail eventually, though I know of two organs in the Boston area built in the 1920s by Mr. Skinner that are still working on their original leather—imagine, 90-year-old pouch leather! His windchest design provides for future releathering. If a Skinner windchest is releathered two or three times it will be necessary to plug and re-drill many screw holes, but otherwise, it’s a snap to get the chests apart.
The keyboards in most electro-pneumatic consoles are designed so a technician can easily reach tracker-touch springs, contacts, and various adjustment points. In Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner consoles, for example, you remove two screws from under the keytable, the keyboards slide out in a stack, then each keyboard can be hinged up for access to the contacts. In the console of an electro-pneumatic organ by Casavant, the keyboards are usually removable. They are positioned accurately by heavy steel pins—you just lift them off their dowels and out they come.
We all know of those installations where the console is built into the choir risers. The organist who plays on a big three- or four-manual organ has great sightlines that way. But what if something goes wrong inside the console? I remember vividly a repair I made to the combination action of a big three-manual Casavant organ. It had the standard-issue electro-pneumatic-mechanical combination action prevalent in Casavant organs of the 1940s and ’50s—the console was jam-packed with intricate mechanical gizmos. The design of the console allowed for access to accomplish the repair, but we couldn’t get to the console panels. It took two days to take apart the choir risers, and even longer to put them back together—a week’s work for two guys because a piston wouldn’t set correctly. That was an expensive repair.

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Thanks to a lifetime of recreational cooking and some input from the gene pool of a family populated with tall people with big bones, there are places inside some organs where I can’t go. I’ve had many an unpleasant afternoon slithering my “dainty little body” across a filthy floor trying to reach the leather nuts of a pedal action. I especially enjoy the encounters with broken light bulbs on those dirty floors. The other day I visited a church that’s home to an 1868 W.B.D. Simmons organ. (Lovely organ, by the way, and about to go on the market.) I climbed a very rickety 143-year-old ladder inside the organ and crossed a walkboard behind the Great windchest so I could get a look through the Swell shutters. I walked as though on eggshells, knowing that if I fell through I’d wreck the tracker action behind the keyboards.
At a recent convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, I sat on a panel with several colleagues discussing the maintenance of pipe organs. Mark Venning (then managing director of Harrison & Harrison Ltd., organbuilders in Durham, UK) spoke eloquently about the dangers of organ maintenance, suggesting that it’s the responsibility of the technicians to insist on safety in the organs they service. One instrument I maintain has a tall freestanding case with the Great division at the top. There’s a wooden walkboard against the back of the case about eighteen feet up, on which you stand to reach through the case doors to tune the Great. The walkboard is painted to match the case—a hard and glossy paint. The dust that collects on that slick surface feels just like ball bearings under my shoes. I really should ask the church to let me build a railing.
In the late 1970s I was working with John Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. (John’s son James now runs that neat little company.) We cared for a large Hook & Hastings organ in the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Cleveland, where we also did a lot of large-scale renovation work. One Friday afternoon, thinking of rush-hour traffic (if you know Cleveland, you’ll know “Dead Man’s Curve” on I-71!), I was hurrying across the top of the Swell box, arms full of tools, to the ladder that would get me twenty feet to the floor. I jumped on the ladder in the usual cavalier fashion (when you get used to the geometry of a particular ladder you can get careless), missed a step, and down I went. It was a narrow little chute surrounded by façade pipes, swell box wall, and some pedal pipes, so there was no option but to stay upright. I landed hard on my feet and my breath was knocked out. My ankles and lower back were sore for days. If that happened to me today I doubt I’d escape uninjured, although in 1589 on the famous leaning tower by the cathedral in Pisa, Italy, Galileo used different sized cannonballs to prove that I wouldn’t fall any faster today than I did in 1979! Oof. But come to think of it, this story is about me more than about the design of the organ.
It has been my privilege to be shown through the magnificent and immense Newberry Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University by my friend and colleague Joe Dzeda, who with Nick Thompson-Allen serves as curator of that mighty instrument. Now that’s a big organ. It has 197 ranks and it goes from way over there to way over the other way. And it’s tall. There’s a spot up on the top level of the organ that is not for the faint of heart—you step out across an abyss where you can look down through multiple layers of the instrument. Your heart skips a beat and over you go. Oopah! Reminds me of photos I’ve seen of the suspension bridge made of rope in the Himalayas.
While there are lots of organs where you open a door and go inside, there are also many instruments, especially those in shallow freestanding cases, where all the maintenance work is done by reaching into the case through panels and doors. These organs are typically very crowded inside. And if the organ is large enough that the case is deeper than the reach of the technician, things can get very difficult. If a bass pipe in the far corner is not speaking properly, you can find that you have to remove ten reed pipes and ten mixture notes so you can stand on a walkboard—tricky and cumbersome if you’re working from a narrow walkboard high off the floor—you hate it when a Trumpet rolls off the edge of the walkboard. (That never happened to me—I’ve just heard that it’s possible!) A simple tuning can become a multiple-day event.
I care for an organ on Cape Cod built in the 1980s that has tracker action, a freestanding case for the Great, and a second case behind for Swell and Pedal. I’m sure that when the organ was being planned, a musician or member of the clergy insisted that the organ couldn’t project forward toward the nave past a certain point—the result being that the space between the two cases is narrow enough that I can get on the Great walkboard only if I remove all the case panels, my belt, wallet, and strip to my tee-shirt. Then I can just wriggle past the posts of the case. Looking at the organ now, it’s hard to imagine that there couldn’t have been just an inch or two more space—that wouldn’t have changed the floor plan for the choir and clergy a bit. But the way it is, it’s terribly difficult to tune that organ or to reach the tracker action that runs between the two cases. It’s as if the builder didn’t want anyone getting inside the organ.
Another organ, also on Cape Cod, is so tight inside that I make a point of wearing “sacrificial” tee-shirts when I go there. It’s one step worse than the last organ I mentioned because I know I can’t get inside the organ to tune without tearing my shirt on the iron hooks that hold the windchest bungs closed.
Another problem in maintaining organs in shallow cases is that opening doors or access panels changes the acoustics inside the case and the tuning is altered. In other words, a pipe that’s in tune when the doors are closed goes out of tune when they’re opened. The first time I encountered that as a fledgling tuner in the late 1970s was in a Flentrop organ in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. The only way to get pipes properly in tune was to listen, open a panel and tap a pipe, then close the panel and listen again. You can sometimes figure out that opening a door on the C-side of the organ doesn’t change the C#-side tuning, so you can reach across, but then you have to be careful that your body heat doesn’t change the organ’s internal temperature. Oh, and be sure you’re not holding on to a brass tuning cone for too long, because the tool heats up in your hands and changes the temperature around the pipe you’re tuning. Whose idea was all this, anyway?
And while we’re talking about temperature, what about all those incandescent light bulbs inside the organ?

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Most pipe organs seem pretty sturdy at first glance, but there are lots of ways that a poorly designed structure can interfere with the care of the organ. I know of a very large organ in which the walkboard for access to the Great is in contact with the wind system. When a tuner stands on the walkboard, the wind-pressure increases—this makes tuning theoretically impossible.
I know of another organ in which the Great rollerboard (a major component of the tracker action) is suspended from the Great walkboard. When you stand on the walkboard the action sags, the pallets (pipe valves) close partially, and the wind to the pipes is diminished—another instance where tuning the Great is theoretically impossible.

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If an organ is easily serviceable, it will have a longer life. If components of an organ cannot be reached, they cannot be maintained. If an organ is difficult to get around in, the well-meaning technician cannot do a good job. I care for a few instruments that are difficult and uncomfortable to manage, and I admit that’s on my mind when I’m on way to one of them. I wake up in the morning thinking, “Yuck. I have to go there today.” You struggle all day to tune, knowing that the organist won’t be able to tell that you did anything.
On the other hand, a well-designed organ is a pleasure to care for. You can spend a day doing mechanical adjustments and repairs and tuning, and leave knowing that you’ve made a difference. You know the organist will be pleased, and the church’s money is well spent.
Here are some of the factors common to organs that are well designed, well built, and easily maintained:
Only high-quality materials are used.
• If a console is full of cheap plastic parts, the technician can hardly help breaking things.
• If a windchest is full of cheap parts, it will not stay reliable through changes in weather and climate, and the technician cannot help breaking things.
Every part of the organ can be reached by a person of at least average size.
• I admit I’m on the large side—but too much of too many organs can only be reached by teeny people, if they can be reached at all.
• If you can’t reach a pipe you can’t tune it.
• If you can’t reach a pipe, you can’t correct its speech.
• If you can’t reach a leather nut, you can’t adjust the action.
• If you can’t reach a keyboard spring, you can’t replace it.
• If you spend time taking things apart to reach that pipe that’s not speaking, the tuning bill skyrockets.
The organ’s structure should be sturdy and rigid.
• If a windchest can move, the action will always be changing.
• If a technician’s weight on the walkboard changes any function of the organ, tuning is theoretically impossible.
• If a ladder is flimsy or unstable, the technician is either in danger (as is the organ) or the technician may choose not to climb up. (I’m not going up to the Swell until I can install a new ladder—life is short enough without taking industrial and personal risks to tune the Oboe.)
The organ’s interior is well lit.
• If I can’t see it, I can’t fix it.
• Maybe I should start billing my clients for tools that I lose when I can’t see inside the organ.
If you’re ever in the position to participate in the conception of a new or relocated pipe organ, consider starting from the tuner’s point of view. You want your tuner to look forward to visiting your church. Then after a pleasant day of making the organ sound and function better, he can pick up a nice piece of meat on the way home to throw on the grill.