In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

A show of hands

It’s the middle of March and here in the frigid Northeast we had a little tease last week when the temperature outside went up into the fifties for a day or so. But while this is a beautiful sunny morning, it’s around twenty degrees outside, and the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. It’s bone-chilling cold and so dry that joints in floor boards are wide open, and my hands feel like baskets full of fall leaves. The almond scent of Jergens™ fills the room to no avail. 

In the last few days I’ve been working with the old-fashioned hot glue that organbuilders favor. I start with crystals of dry glue the consistency of fancy rough-grain raw cane sugar (funny how much extra we’re willing to pay for something that isn’t highly processed!) and cook them with water in my temperature-controlled glue pot. It’s a versatile glue because I can make it as thick or thin as I want. It bonds leather and other materials to wood beautifully, and fifty years later when it’s time to replace the leather again, it can be removed from the wood with hot water.

I’ve been gluing the hinges, belts, and gussets on an Aeolian-Skinner wind regulator (bellows). I spread glue on the wood and the material I’m applying, put it in place, and rub it down with a hot damp rag, squeezing excess glue out of the joint so the chemical bond is between two pieces of material, not a layer of thick glue.

I have a big double-boiler—the kind of thing from which you ladle soup in a cafeteria—to keep that rag nice and hot. It holds two gallons of water (or soup) and keeps it as hot as I can stand. I put my hands in the water, then wring the rag as dry as I can. No wonder my hands are uncomfortably dry. It has led to one of those painful splits at the corner of my right thumbnail.

But wait, there’s more. The other day I was installing a new rectifier in that same Aeolian-Skinner organ because the old one was soaked in the flood that wrecked the regulator. The wires that carry the direct current power from the basement to the console and organ chambers three floors up are about the thickness of my little finger. When I was stripping the insulation from the wires, I took a teeny sliver of copper through the skin of that same thumb. Now as I write, every time I touch the spacebar my thumb throbs. I’m a big guy and I think of myself as pretty tough, but those two little injuries are nearly all I can think about just now.

Hanging by a thread

According to USA Today, there were five major league pitchers with annual salaries above $20,000,000 in 2012. These are the cream of the crop of prime starting pitchers, so they would be starting about every fourth game. Each team plays 162 games each year, so without injury, those pitchers would start about forty games. Let’s say for argument that they pitch six innings each time they start a game, face five batters each inning, and throw five pitches to each batter. That’s 6,000 pitches in a season or $3,333.33 per pitch. Do the same math another way and it comes to roughly $500,000 per game. One of those guys gets a hangnail and each time he throws the ball he’s in agony. His accuracy suffers, and the manager puts him on the bench. Okay for him because he’s on salary. But his employers lose the benefit of $500,000 worth of his effort for each day of the hangnail.

Me, I just go back to the glue pot and put my hands in the hot water. Walk it off. You’ll be fine.

The panda’s thumb

Our hands define us. They define us as a species, they define us as individuals, and they define us as musicians. We join some of the primates including the great apes, a few rodents, and to a lesser extent, the panda, in being blessed with an opposable thumb. While the primates use their thumbs to climb trees, and make primitive tools from sticks, our thumbs have allowed us to achieve extraordinary dexterity. We use that dexterity for practical tasks and for expression.

There are twenty-seven bones in each of our hands and a complex network of muscles and nerves. It was the physical therapy I had following a bout of “Carpenters’ Elbow” (I don’t play tennis) that taught me how the tendons and muscles in our forearms are related to the bones in our hands like the strings of a marionette. Put your left hand on the beefy part of your right forearm and wiggle your right fingers, and you’ll feel those little strings moving around like manual trackers. Come to think of it, they are like manual trackers.

Keyboard musicians are defined and define themselves by their hands. I have to admit I’m amused by publicity headshots of colleagues that include their hands. The photographer has struggled to find natural looking poses to include the hands in a close-up of an organist’s face, when most of the reasons we bring our hands to our faces shouldn’t be photographed. I chuckle as I remember my grandmother chiding me and my siblings to “get your hands away from your face.”

Wave it like it is.

Wendy has been actively involved at her alma mater, Brown University, as long as I’ve known her. She served on the Board of Fellows (she was a jolly good fellow!) for most of twenty years, as an officer of the Corporation for much of that time, and now serves as co-chair of the committee planning the observation and celebration of the university’s semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary. Last weekend we were on campus for the grand kickoff of more than a year of anniversary events including a President’s Colloquium on the Virtues of Liberal Education. One of the panel discussions that day brought four sitting state governors together with a professor of political science as moderator for a wide-ranging discussion about modern American politics. 

Two of the participants, Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont, had hands that were unusually large and expressive. They were seated in plush armchairs (brown, of course) onstage in a large lecture hall, and I was struck as I listened and watched at how much their beautiful hands added to the effectiveness of their delivery. The other two governors had good things to say, but they seemed less eloquent.

In March of 2011, Wendy accompanied her client, former United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall, to the White House as he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Among the tales with which she came home was the lengthy conversation she had with another honoree, Van Cliburn, the storied pianist who won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Along with comments on his legendary grace and regal carriage, Wendy spoke of his enormous, expressive hands.

I googled Van Cliburn and watched a few performances on YouTube. I saw the obligatory tours de force of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, but was singularly impressed by his presentation of the National Anthem at the start of the 1994 opening day game of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers in the newly completed Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. We’ve all seen the worst of so-called musicianship in such venues, not to be confused with soprano Renée Fleming’s marvelous offering at this year’s Super Bowl, but watching the sixty-year-old Van Cliburn stride on to the playing field dressed in white tie and tails, waving to the crowd, and seating himself at the piano was to witness a classy man bringing his classy act to a venue otherwise not known for my present definition of class.

And those hands. They were big as all outdoors. I marveled as I saw that left hand playing three- and four-part chords at the spread of a tenth in rolling eighth-note passages. It looked as though there was about eighteen inches between the piano’s fallboard and Van Cliburn’s wrists.

You can read about this performance and see the video at http://tinyurl.com/p6faslj. I bet you’ll agree, the Fort Worth Symphony didn’t add much to the experience, except that it was fun to see Van Cliburn stand for the second verse, place a huge hand over his huge heart, and sing. Isn’t America a great country? 

Last night, Wendy and I attended an all-Beethoven concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi. They opened with a lackluster performance of Leonora Overture Number 3, and then were joined by pianist Yefim Bronfman for the First and Second Piano Concertos. That’s pretty good work for a pianist, especially when you consider that he plays the remaining three concertos and the Triple Concerto with the same band in the next two weeks. Wow, what a lot of notes.

Mr. Bronfman does not cut a dashing figure as he crosses the stage toward the piano. But I don’t have to risk my relationship with him by describing any further because I can rely on novelist Philip Roth to do it for me. In his novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), the narrator observes the main character, the disgraced Coleman Silk, having his somewhat creepy and typically Rothian way with the fragile woman on whom he is preying during a live rehearsal at Tanglewood:

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the Brontosaur! . . . He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso . . . someone who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman . . . Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than the guy who is going to move it . . . this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew.

Philip Roth can say what he likes, because Mr. Bronfman is more than just a pretty face. He can rely on his hands to speak for him. I often marvel at how a great pianist can project the illusion of fluidity when in fact, the tone of the piano is generated by percussion. The musician’s hands allow a control that produces the image of a waterfall rather than a hammer hitting an anvil. And Yefim Bronfman sprinkled that magic all over Symphony Hall. It’s impressive that he played two concertos—I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of notes there were, and not one out of place. As I sat listening with my thumb throbbing, I marveled at the understated assurance of his hands—those amazing structures of joints, muscles, and sinews—and how they could project such torrents of expression and emotion. 

We’ve got to hand it to you.

The business of learning to play a keyboard instrument involves training the hands to perform specialized tasks. We develop those muscles in unusual ways, refining the accuracy of aim and attack, and learning to simultaneously apply different amounts of pressure so as to emphasize notes of a melody. The muscles in our hands develop their own memories for the patterns of fingering in scales and passages in the pieces we learn. Our hands grasp the unique patterns of each of the twelve major and minor keys as easily as a doorknob. It is that tactile memory that allows us to play without looking at our fingers.

As miraculous as the human hand on the keyboard might be, the basic position of our hands on the keys as we play is common to many other activities. Place your hands flat on your desk and you have a pretty good start for the hand position of a keyboard player. Contrast that to the left hand of the violinist or guitarist. I grab a handful of nuts from a bowl by turning my hand over and clasping my fingers in a position similar to what I might clumsily do on the neck of a violin, but if I move my fingers I drop the nuts. The position of the violinist’s hand as he selects notes by pressing the strings against the neck is pretty much opposite that of an organist. 

Take the violinist’s tactile control a step further. It’s difficult enough to learn to play the right notes on a piano keyboard. But let’s face it, we’re given a simple choice and a relatively wide margin. If you manage to play the key that is F-sharp without touching another key, you get whatever F-sharp the instrument has to offer. On the violin, some combination of seeing, hearing, and feeling must be achieved to allow the player to seemingly randomly select an accurate note. Listen for a few seconds to a beginning violinist and you’ll know what I mean. The first four measures of Twinkle, twinkle, little star is like looking at your reflection in a fun-house mirror.

Even the guitarist has it easy because his luthier has reduced care by adding frets. But as much as the frets ease some of the difficulty of playing the instrument, our guitarist relies on the strength and evenness of the nails on his plucking hand to create his tone. No bundle of horsehair for him. A cousin of mine who lives near Paris was married to a classical guitarist who asked me to help him purchase the 800-grit sandpaper he liked to use to preen his fingernails. Snag a nail pulling open a cardboard box and you’re on the bench, sitting next to the pitcher with a hangnail.

Practice and use has another effect on the fingers of a string player. Anyone else’s fingers would get pretty sore jumping around on those strings. I think mine would be bleeding in ten minutes. But witness a great violinist playing a complex concerto and you’ll know that thousands of hours of practicing is necessary to condition those little pads of flesh to endure that abuse. Adding to the physical punishment of playing the violin is the hickey they get from the neck rest.

§

Modern carpenters are armed with pneumatic nailing machines. Walking past a construction site you hear POW POW POW at march tempo as nails propelled by air pressure slam through wood. But a good carpenter still has the old-time rhythm of placing a nail with one hand and driving it home with three rhythmic strokes of a hammer in the other. Watching a beginner start a nail in a piece of wood is like listening to that infant violinist. Many of us know the special feeling when hammer strikes and thumbnail goes black.

A potter throws a lump of clay on a wheel, wets his hands, and coaxes it into center. Then with one hand open cupping the lump and the other closed with thumb pointing down, a cup or a bowl emerges by metamorphosis. Practice allows the creation of a set of plates similar enough in size to produce a set.

A surgeon uses forceps to tie complicated knots in monofilament thread to make leak-proof joints that can contain the pressure of blood as driven by the beating heart.

A tailor or seamstress puts the end of a thread through the eye of a needle, then bonds two pieces of fabric with microscopic stitches.

The massive boom of an excavating machine responds to the touch of the operator’s fingertips on the controls, combining multiple movements into fluid, nearly human motion. 

§

As generations pass, our bodies adapt to our circumstances. We rely on clothing and central heating systems to keep us warm so we evolve toward hairlessness. The balding man takes comfort in the knowledge that he’s more advanced than his hairy friends.

Early humans had to rely on large vestigial molars to reduce plant tissue to digestible forms. Think of a cow chewing her cud. Today the plants we eat grow in convenient forms and we get a lot of our nutrition from meat that is cooked and cut into small pieces, so we have evolved smaller jaws than our ancient predecessors. But we still have those pesky vestigials, ironically called wisdom teeth, and as few of us have space on our jaws for them, out they come.

Like our hair and our teeth, our hands have evolved and adapted to operate the devices we’ve created. One quick handshake is enough to tell the difference between a carpenter and an office worker. Notice how many tiny motions we combine to button a shirt. And look across the symphony orchestra to see how many ways our hands can be used. 

What’s next? If our hair is getting thin and our jaws are getting smaller, think of our thumbs. Sit on a seat in the subway or a bench at the mall and watch the teenagers texting and playing hand-held games. Our thumbs will keep getting more nimble and I figure we’ll always need our fourth and fifth fingers to grasp hand-held devices. But it will take fewer than a hundred generations for our index and third fingers to wither away from disuse. So put down that phone and go practice! 

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.

Monumental intimacy
In the July 2007 issue of The Diapason, this column commented on a book by Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet. Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) is a sort of musical memoir—a great artist sharing his experiences as a child, a student, and an increasingly successful performer. He’s articulate, humorous, and just humble enough. He shares many wonderful reflections, and I’ve commented on the book several times subsequently. Early on he writes about his relationship with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
A beautiful metaphor—makes you want to run down to the church and fire up the organ. But as I commented in 2007, he’s leaving us out. He goes on:

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

Coincidentally, a friend who is violist of the DaPonte String Quartet (resident musicians in our town in Maine) recently asked me how organists relate to their instruments. She spoke of gigs she’s played in churches where she saw organists at work, wondering how you play an instrument that’s so far away from you. Of course I jumped in with these Steinhardt quotes, offering the opposite point of view. The organ is a monumental instrument. Your relationship with the instrument is as a vehicle with which you can fill a huge room with a kaleidoscope of tone colors.
I’ve always found it thrilling to hear my music come back as reverberation in a large room. I love the sensation of having a congregation barreling along with me as I lead a hymn. And I love the feeling that huge air-driven bass pipes can cause in a rich acoustic environment. So it was a gift when my wife shared this passage from I am a Conductor, the autobiography of Charles Munch (Oxford University Press, 1955):

The organ was my first orchestra. If you have never played the organ, you have never known the joy of feeling yourself music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities. Before those keyboards and pedals and the palette of stops, I felt almost like a demigod, holding in my hands the reins that controlled the musical universe. Walking [to work], opening the little door to the organ with a big old key, looking over the day’s hymns lest I forget the repeats, finding a prelude in a good key in order to avoid a difficult modulation, choosing a gay piece for a wedding or a sad one for a funeral, not falling asleep during the sermon, sometimes improvising a little in the pastor’s favorite style, not playing a long recessional because it would annoy the sexton—all this filled me with pride.

“ . . . a certain reserve built into the relationship . . .” Funny, I think some of my best moments on an organ bench have been when I was free of reserve.

Anything you can do, I can do better
What’s really going on between Arnold Steinhardt and Charles Munch? Is it like a playground spat that winds up with did-not, did-too? Or is it the childish idea that one instrument is more difficult to play than another? I’ve certainly heard people admire the complexity of playing the organ—all that dexterity with hands and feet. But can’t you also argue that the organist is only pushing buttons?
The violinist has to create an even and convincing tone through the manipulation of the bow against the strings while making the notes happen at the same time. And, while the organ produces notes that are in tune or not in tune no matter what the organist does (as long as he’s hitting the right notes), the violinist has to put the finger on the fingerboard in exactly the right place. (No worries. They leave the fretting to the guitarist.)
The flautist adds breath control to all the complexities of manual dexterity. The trumpeter has a finicky relationship with a mouthpiece. A trumpeter with a cold sore is like Roger Clemens with a hangnail. Neither can go to work that day. And singers? Let’s not even get started with singers!
No matter what instrument you’re playing, once you’ve mastered the physical technique you can get down to making music. As I get older, I notice that on the printed page I can track the development of my technique. I still play some of my favorite pieces from the same scores I had when I was a student, hopelessly marked up with teachers’ comments and registrations for dozens of different organs. Each time I get reminded of the physical crises of 30 or 35 years ago as I play past those passages that I just couldn’t get at 20 years old. You might say it’s the reward of a lifetime to be able to breeze past those danger zones—a lifetime of practice, that is.
Learning to drive a musical instrument is a barrier between you and artistic expression. Whether you’re learning the “pat your head and rub your tummy” thing about playing the organ, developing the finger strength and control to pluck harp strings, or the incredible muscle control of the mouth of the oboist, all you’re doing is teaching your body the physical tricks necessary for it to become a conductor between your mind and the sonorities of the music.
It’s the actual music that’s so difficult to do right. Shaping notes and phrases, placing the notes in time and tempo, and following your instincts to express the architecture of the music form the essence of the art of music. And you get a whiff of that essence when the physical act of operating the machine that is your instrument doesn’t distract you.
§
There is an aspect of the art of organ playing that most other musicians don’t necessarily experience. A clarinetist might own the same instrument for most of his career, seldom playing on another. That is a very personal relationship that like any intimacy includes inherent danger. Imagine the master player who discovers a crack in his instrument moments before an important performance. Or worse yet, what if the treasured instrument is lost or destroyed in a fire? I suppose more than one musical career has ended simply because the musician couldn’t face starting over with a new instrument. Yo-Yo Ma famously left a treasure of a cello in a New York taxicab. It was later recovered because he had bothered to save his receipt and the cab could be tracked down. When you get into a New York cab you hear a gimmicky automatic recording—the voice of a celebrity giving safety tips. Along with Jessye Norman reminding you to fasten your seat belt, there’s one with Yo-Yo Ma advising you to keep your receipts!
The organist is at the mercy of whoever hires him. How many of us have arrived in town to prepare a recital, only to sit down at a mediocre instrument in terrible condition? You can refuse to play, or you can recognize that it’s the only instrument the local audience knows and accept the challenge of doing something special with it. “I’ve never heard this organ sound like that!”
§
Busy organists might be playing on dozens of instruments each year, but there are also many examples of life-long relationships between players and their “home base” organs. Marcel Dupré played hundreds of recitals all over the world, but he was Organiste Titulaire at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 until 1971. He succeeded Charles-Marie Widor, who had held the position since 1870. So for more than a century that great Cavaillé-Coll organ was played principally by only two brilliant musicians. What a glorious heritage. Daniel Roth has been on that same well-worn bench since 1985. I first attended worship in that church in 1998 and vividly remember noticing elderly members of the congregation who would remember the days when Dupré was their parish organist. I suppose there still may be a few. I wonder if any of them cornered Dupré after church to complain that the organ was too loud!
§
It’s the real thing, baby
My work with the Organ Clearing House often takes me to big cities where I get the thrill of hearing important organists playing on mighty instruments. Both the organist and the organ have a relationship with the church building—the sound rings and rolls around the place, the organist has the knack of timing the echo, and the effect is dazzling.
But most of our organists are playing on instruments of modest size in “normal” church buildings. The effect of the beautiful pipe organ in a small country church is just as dazzling as that of the 200-rank job roaring away in a room with a 150-foot ceiling. There’s such magic to the combination of the sound of wind-blown organ pipes and human voices, even in the setting of a small country church. The sounds meld together, exciting the collective air that is the room’s atmosphere. The organ has a physical presence in the room, letting us know before a note is played that there’s something special coming. We decorate church buildings with symbols of our faith. The organ joins pictorial windows, banners, and steeples as one of those symbols.
We plan a dinner party. On the way home from the supermarket we stop at the florist to get something pretty to put on the table. Likewise, we place flower arrangements on the altar on Sunday morning. In church, do we do that simply for decoration, or are those flowers a celebration of God’s creation—of the beauty of nature? Are there candles on the altar for atmosphere like that dining room table, or is there another loftier reason? Does a choir sing an anthem to cover the shuffling of the ushers as they take up the offering, or is the anthem a true part of the experience of worship? (If so, why don’t they take up the collection during a scripture reading, or during the sermon? Why all this tramping around while the music is playing? But that’s a rant for another month!)
The organ, that instrument that makes us “music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities,” stands in our churches declaring our devotion. The pipe organ is testament to the wide range of the skills with which we humans have been blessed. We’ve been given the earth’s materials and learned to make beautiful things from them. And for centuries the pipe organ has been part of our worship, monument to our faith, and symbol of the power of the Church.
But with the advance of technology we are deluded by dilution. We settle for plastic flowers. We buy cheap production hardware for the doors of our worship spaces. We substitute artificial sound enhancement for real acoustics. And we substitute arrays of circuits for those majestic organ pipes.
Walk through a museum and look at sculpture made of gold, jade, or ivory. Don’t tell me you can’t tell it’s special. When we experience something special, we know it’s special. Walk through a jewelry store and try to tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the fake costume stuff without looking at price tags. You will never be wrong. Of course we know the difference. If your fiancée is not a jeweler, don’t bother with a real diamond. She won’t know the difference. (Oh boy, are you in trouble.)
And buy a digital instrument to replace the pipe organ. “After all, I’m not a musician. I can’t tell the difference.” Baloney. Of course we can tell the difference. And our churches and we deserve the best.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Don’t blame the tools
The carpenter is finishing a house. He’s carefully measuring and mitering baseboards, windowsills, and doorjambs. He’s distracted by a mosquito, and his hammer glances the nail creating a carpenter’s rosette. The first thing he does is look at the head of the hammer—must be some glue on it or something.
The same carpenter needs to make one quick cut. He draws a square line on the board and picks up his handsaw. The saw veers to starboard. The first thing he does is look at the saw. Must be dull.
Or he measures a piece with a folding wooden ruler. He makes his mark and cuts his piece, but he didn’t unfold the ruler all the way—the inch markings skip from 13 to 26 and the piece is a foot too short. The first guy to come up with a wood-lengthener or wood-widener is going to make a fortune.
Organbuilders typically have many more tools than most tradesmen because our trade comprises so many facets. Of course, we have lots of woodworking tools, but we also have tools for leather, soft metal, hard metal, electrical work, and some ingenious rigs specific to pipe organs such as pallet spring pliers, tuning cones, toe cones and toehole reamers, and a wide assortment of nasty-looking little spades and prickers for voicing organ pipes.
When I’m working on a job site installing, tuning, or repairing organs, I carry a canvas sailmaker’s tool bag that measures about 8 by 16 inches and 12 inches high when fully loaded. It’s got 24 pockets on its sides and ends that surround a big central cavity. I like this format because you don’t need extra space to open it. Carry a steel toolbox up onto an organ walkboard and you need twice the space for the open lid. I keep it organized so that each tool has a pocket (some pockets have a half-dozen tools in them), and when I’m squeezed in a dark corner in an organ I can put my hands on many of my tools without looking at the bag. When co-workers borrow tools from me, I ask them to leave them on the floor next to the bag so my system doesn’t get messed up.
This morning I unloaded my car after a weeklong trip to one of our job sites, and all my toolboxes are on the long workbench in my shop. I wonder as I write just what’s in the favorite sailmaker’s bag, so I’ll take everything out and count. My everyday tool kit includes:
• 15 screwdrivers (no two alike, including ratchets, stubbies, offsets, straight, Phillips, or Robertson drive—I hope there’s never a screw I can’t reach)
• 2 wire cutters (fine for circuit boards, heavy for larger wires)
• 2 pairs long-nosed pliers (small and large)
• Flat-billed pliers
• Round-nosed pliers (for bending circles and hooks in wire)
• Double-acting linesman pliers (strong enough to let me bend bar steel in my hands, though the last pair broke in half when I did that)
• 1 pair slip-joint pliers
• 2 pairs vise-grips (one small, one long-nosed)
• Sears Robo-grip pliers (inherited from my father-in-law’s kit)
• 6″ adjustable wrench
• 2 sets Allen keys (English and metric)
• 2 pairs of scissors (one specially sharp, one general use)
• 6″ awl
• Tapered reamer
• 3 hemostats (two curved, one straight, for gripping tiny wires)
• Wire stripper (American Wire Gauge 16 through 26)
• 2 flashlights (large and small with spare batteries)
• 2 saws (one reversible back saw, one “harp” hack saw with replacement blades)
• 2 cheap chisels (3/4″ and 1″)
• 35-watt soldering iron and solder (for wiring)
• Electric test light
• 6 alligator clip leads
• Small hammer (my maul-wielding colleagues call it my “Geppetto” hammer)
• 2 rulers (one 35′ tape measure, one 72″ folding rule)
• 2 utility knives (light and heavy)
• 10 files (flat, half-round, round, big-medium-tiny)
• 3 tuning irons
• Pallet spring pliers
• 2.5-millimeter hex-nut driver (for Huess nuts)
• Wind pressure gauge
• 2 rolls black vinyl tape
• Sharpies, ballpoint pens, pencils
• Sharpened putty knife
• Spool of galvanized steel wire (for quick repairs)
• Bottle of Titebond glue
• Tubes of epoxy
• 5 small brushes
And there’s a canvas tool-roller with 35 little pokers, prickers, burnishers, spades, spoons, a bunch of little rods for raising languids, wire twisters, magnets, special keyboard tools, and an A=440 tuning fork.
I often ship this bag on airplanes, wrapping it in a blanket and stuffing it in a duffel bag—checked baggage, of course—and I dread losing it. It would take weeks to reconstruct this tool kit.
In the back of the car I carry three other larger toolboxes, with cordless drills, bit and driver sets, and heavier hammers, multimeter, etc., etc., etc. There’s a big plastic box with 40 dividers for wiring supplies, and another full of “organy” odds-’n’-ends like leather nuts and Huess nuts, felt and paper keyboard punchings, a few spare chest magnets, and some old piano ivories. And finally, a cardboard box full of pieces of leather and felt of almost any description—any large scrap from a workbench project goes into that box.
And I’m always missing something.

Organ transplants
Now that you know what my tool bag looks like, here’s a story that makes me wonder. I got a Saturday call from one of my clients, a large Roman Catholic church with a big organ in the rear gallery. The organ wouldn’t start and there were two Masses that afternoon. I knocked on the door of the rectory to get the key for the organ loft and was greeted by a teenage girl who was volunteering to answer the parish phones on the weekend. She called a priest’s extension and said, “The organ guy is here.”
The priest was a tall, dignified, elderly man, who came down the stairs, invited me into a parlor, and offered me a seat. I carried my tool bag with me and set it on the floor next to my chair. He asked two or three questions before I realized he thought I had something to do with a human organ donation program. I set him straight as politely as I could, asking for the keys to the organ loft while wondering what in the world he thought I was going to do with those tools!

Tool renewal
When I was first running around the countryside tuning organs, the “land line” was our only means of communication. You had to get all your service visits arranged in advance, and if a day’s plan changed because a sexton forgot to turn on the heat, I’d look for a pay phone at a gas station. Now of course we all have phones in our pockets. I usually have mine with me in an organ, not because I intend to interrupt my work taking calls, but because it has a notepad and a voice-memo system that allow me to keep notes while on the job. If I realize I’m missing a tool, I’m out of glue, or I don’t have any fresh batteries along, I make a note, and every couple weeks I spend an hour with my tools, replenishing supplies, sharpening blades, and keeping things in order.

Tool envy
There are many clever people working in tool design—every time I go into a hardware store I notice some neat little innovation: the cordless drill-screwdriver with a little headlight that lights when you pull the trigger; the 4-in-1, then 8-in-1, then 10-in-1 screwdriver (I carry one of those in my briefcase); the little rubber octagonal washer that goes on the end of the flashlight to keep it from rolling. And boy, are they tempting. I buy a ten-dollar hand tool because it’s cool and stuff it in my tool bag. Every now and then there has to be a culling. I guess it’s good news that tools break and wear out. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones.
When I was a hotshot apprentice in Ohio, I bought a fancy set of chisels by mail order. These were the Marples beauties, with maple handles, iron ferrules, and Sheffield steel blades. I paid about a hundred dollars for the set of nine—a huge amount of money for me in 1978. (Those were the years when good new large organs cost $5000 per stop!) I was enough of a beginner that my mentor teased me, saying all I needed now was some wood. But I still have those chisels, and I still have the racks I made to hang them on the wall over my bench. They’re the only workshop chisels I’ve ever owned, and while some of them are a little shorter than they used to be, they sharpen just as easily as when they were new. The iron ferrules mean you can hit the handle pretty hard with a mallet without damaging the tool. They are old friends.
By the way, also hanging on the wall over my bench in that shop was a display of my mistakes, hung there by my mentor to keep me humble. I think they’re still there.
When I started the Bishop Organ Company in 1987, I bought a Rockwell-Delta 10″ table saw—it’s known as a “Uni-Saw” and it must be one of the most popular table saw models ever made. The blade can be tilted to make angled cuts, and there’s a crosscut miter gauge that allows me to cut angled ends of boards. Over more than 20 years, I’ve cut miles of wood with it, and only last month I had the first trouble with it. The arbor bearings had finally worn out, and I found a local industrial supply company that was able to replace the bearings quickly. It was such a pleasure to use my saw again with the new bearings that I treated it to a new Freud carbide-tipped blade.

A reflection of attitude
The organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook was most active in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century. There’s a legend handed down through generations of workers there that in order to be hired to work in the factory an applicant had to present his toolbox for inspection. In the days before Sears, Home Depot, Woodworker’s Warehouse, Woodcraft Supply, Duluth Trading Company, McMaster-Carr, and Grainger, a woodworker built himself a box to store and transport his tools. Remaining examples show infinite attention to detail, with special drawers and cubbies designed for each specific tool, fancy dovetail joints, and hidden compartments. The worker that could produce such a masterpiece could build anything required in an organ shop.
Recently I noticed that Lowe’s was featuring a new line of mechanics’ toolboxes. These were not the little boxes you’d carry around, but monumental affairs with dozens of steel drawers on ball-bearing slides and heavy-duty casters. Some were five and six feet wide and just as tall. Fully loaded they’d weigh a ton or more. I’ve seen things like these for years in mechanics’ service bays and I have a more modest version in my shop, but I’d never seen a toolbox with a built-in refrigerator! Not a bad idea, though.
You may have seen the traveling salesmen who peddle tools to mechanics. The companies are Snap-On, Cornwell, and Matco, among others. A heavy mobile tool showroom pulls up to a service station and the mechanics all come out to shop. The driver is a franchise owner who travels a regular route of customers. He extends credit to his customers, allowing them to make cash payments each week so the wives never learn how much money the guys are spending on tools. And the Snap-On driver is likely to be armed. He’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools that every mechanic would love to own.

A tool for every purpose
I take a lot of pleasure in my tools. I know, I know—it’s a guy thing, as my wife often mentions (though her weaving habit depends on an in-house service department!). But maintaining a comprehensive and effective tool kit is essential to good organbuilding. We say don’t blame the tools, but we cannot work without them. It’s a simple pleasure to draw a sharp knife along a straight edge to cut a neat piece of leather. I enjoy the sound and sight of plane shavings curling off my workpiece onto my hands and wrists, littering the workbench and floor with aromatic twists. It brings to mind the cute little Christmas dolls made from plane shavings in places like Switzerland—Saint Nicolas with a curly beard of cedar shavings. Moving the languid of an organ pipe to achieve good musical speech, soldering wires to a row of pins that wind up looking like a row of jewels, gluing goat-skin gussets to the corners of a reservoir are all motions repeated countless times that I don’t take for granted and can’t repeat without my tools. When I use someone else’s tools they feel funny in my hands.
Sometimes I’m asked how we can maintain patience to complete a project that might take a year or more. Easy—every day you take satisfaction in each little thing you make. A finished organ comprises thousands of those little projects blended into a unified whole. Listening to an instrument brings back the memories of each satisfying cut, each problem solved, and of course each mistake. My tools are my companions and my helpers. They’ve been with me to almost every American state and as far abroad as Madagascar. Right now they’re all spread out on my workbench for a photo shoot, but they’ll be back at work on Monday morning. 

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.