In the wind . . .

Size matters, part two
First assignment: Please reread In the wind . . . in the May issue of The Diapason. Thank you.
Robin Hall is a very cool man. I met him in his office on West 34th Street in New York late on a February afternoon. A two-foot model of Sponge Bob Square Pants hangs from the ceiling. Kermit the Frog sits on the desk next to a DVD of Miracle on 34th Street. The walls are painted Wasabi Green. Kermit clashes with the walls—It isn’t easy being green. There’s a rack of file folders on a shelf under the window behind his desk—the folders are bright orange, obviously chosen to complement the walls. A snappy haircut, stylish eyeglass frames, and a breezy enthusiastic manner complete the picture.
Mr. Hall is a vice president for Macy’s department stores, and his office is in Macy’s flagship store on Herald Square. He heads the company’s department of Annual and Special Events. While I expect some department stores consider inventory to be the height of annual events, when you think of Macy’s you think of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. The department employs about 50 people who produce the parade, in-store flower shows, and public fireworks displays, to name a few activities. The hanging Sponge Bob is a sculptor’s model for a huge parade balloon. A few blocks away, there’s a parade studio with welders, woodworkers, and the cadre of artisans needed to build the floats and balloons for the parade, the artsy little bridges and gazebos that are installed in the store for flower shows, and all the other gizmos and gadgets that are the products of this unique division.
When I observed that he has a dream job, Robin pointed through the wall to the guy in the next office saying, “he’s the one with the great job.” He’s the one who interviews, reviews, auditions, and coordinates the high-school bands that travel to participate in the parade each Thanksgiving. You might think that job to be a nightmare of logistics, cancellations, and odd requests from hundreds of people, but Robin referred to the huge excitement of the many families traveling to New York so their kids could march in the great televised parade. Attitude matters.
Our conversation was about an hour long, ebullient, rocketing from one thing to another. At one point Robin said, “. . . more than in many other facets of modern life, passion is common in my world. I’m surrounded by passionate people doing the things they are passionate about.” (See Photo 1: a disinterested listener.)
Wouldn’t it be great if someone like this were in a position of responsibility for the care and promotion of a monumental public pipe organ?
A few years ago Macy’s merged with Federated Department Stores. The new company spun off Lord & Taylor. Lord & Taylor moved out, and Macy’s moved into a grand building on Market Street in Philadelphia, originally built by John Wanamaker to house his legendary department store, which included just that monumental public pipe organ. That’s right—the people who produce the Macy’s Parade are in charge of the Wanamaker Organ.
Last month I wrote about the history of that iconic instrument, hence the assignment for rereading. This month I share my reflections after spending 36 hours with the organ and the people around it. It was organ curator Curt Mangel who told me about Macy’s hearty support of the organ. Curt encouraged me to get in touch with Robin Hall; that referral led to my interview with him. Robin told me that when Macy’s acquired the Wanamaker properties, Melissa Ludwig, regional director of Macy’s Stores for the Philadelphia area, “sent an e-mail around” that described the relevance and reputation of the Wanamaker organ and in effect encouraged store management to be aware of the importance of the stewardship of the organ.
Robin Hall told me much about the importance of music in Macy’s heritage. He described an upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall, A Tribute to Macy’s, which would include newly commissioned songs. Each of the 80 versions of the Macy’s Parade has been a major musical event. For 40 years Macy’s has produced the July 4th fireworks on the New York waterfront in collaboration with the New York Pops Orchestra. Live music is considered an important part of any Macy’s event. Robin told me, for example, that the East Village Opera Company would be performing at upcoming corporate meetings. Special events are not a marketing tool, but central to the company’s mission. Attractions like the parade and flower shows are assets to retail activity and an opportunity for Macy’s to give back to the community. Simply put, Macy’s has always believed that music and theater are an essential part of the shopping experience. Special events enhance the brand. And emotionalism is “almost a religion.” How’s that for a corporate priority?
As Macy’s has long been devoted to musical and artistic extravaganzas, what better organization to have responsibility for the world’s greatest musical instrument? I was told how the Wanamaker Organ was a perfect fit into the portfolio of the Special Events Division, that it would “have a natural place in the Macy’s method.” Plans are under way to feature the organ in new types of programs and to enhance the listening experience in the Grand Court. And beyond mere enthusiasm is considerable tangible support. In its first years of stewardship of the organ, Macy’s has committed to the design and purchase of a new Peterson combination action (remember, there are 462 stop-tablets and 167 pistons!) and to the refinishing of the massive ornamented case of the six-manual console.
My hour in Robin Hall’s office was inspiring—how thrilling to hear of a major retail corporation wholeheartedly involved in arts and culture. It was fun—Robin is a compelling and engaging person. And it was encouraging—we live in a world dominated by bad news, in a culture that celebrates mediocrity, and my heart was warmed by the enthusiasm emanating from a corporate office in Manhattan in support of an organ in Philadelphia.
But the real thrill that day was to hear Robin talk about Peter Richard Conte, the Grand Court Organist, and L. Curt Mangel III, the curator of the organ. Robin spoke of how Peter understands the mission of the organ, that he is a serious, exceedingly skillful classical musician who knows how to balance high culture and popular populist selections, and who has a highly developed sense of fun. He spoke of Curt’s deep dedication to his work, his technical and organizational skills, his encyclopedic understanding of the instrument, and the work of keeping it in good condition. (See Photo 2: Peter Richard Conte [aka The conjurer].)
Peter Richard Conte has been Grand Court Organist at the Wanamaker Store since 1989. The hundreds of concerts he’s played at the store—along with his active touring schedule—make him one of America’s most experienced performers. In addition to what must be dozens of hours at the keyboard each week, Peter is both skilled and prolific at transcribing major orchestral repertory for his performances. His neat large-format manuscripts are peppered with colored dots indicating registration changes—the preparation time is obvious. I felt privileged to stand next to Peter while he played a noontime recital that included the “Immolation Scene” from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, César Franck’s Choral in A minor, and Robert Hebble’s intricate and sexy Danny Boy (melody in the pedal, accompaniment packed with the “ten dollar chords” described in Ted Alan Worth’s rambling, moderately literate, intensely personal recollections of Virgil Fox in The Dish). The console is bewildering. I’ve mentioned 462 stop-tablets, but you have to see it to appreciate it. There are eleven expression pedals and six keyboards. Peter’s hands are just like everyone else’s except they each have eight telescoping fingers and each finger has three knuckles that are not double but universally jointed. He flies through the most complicated passages with apparent ease, the observer having hardly a chance of comprehending the relationship between the printed score and what’s happening on the keyboards.
It sounds like a parlor trick, but it’s so much more. While the symphony orchestra comprises dozens of separate voices that are independently expressive, it’s usual for organists to think of expression as a one- or two-dimensional concept. Peter Conte playing the Wanamaker organ produces expressive effects that defy the commoner’s understanding of the pipe organ. Independent voices on three keyboards simultaneously, two pedal voices, one of which is a high-note melody, and inexplicably one voice in decrescendo with another climaxing—oh yes, remember those brass bars under the keyboards that operate the shutters, and look at those sneaky thumbs. (See Photo 3: Swell Shoes?) Amazing. A decrescendo into nothingness accomplished by running a thumb across a row of stop tablets like a line of falling dominoes. Breathtaking. A powerful burst from an array of colorful stentorian solo reeds. Thrilling. And all the while, commerce is going on. Macy’s customers are trying on shoes, sampling cosmetics, matching neckties to shirts, paying for their purchases. Peter’s abilities as an organist and performer are exceeded only by his understanding of the limitless instrument at which he sits.
The late Charles Fisk reportedly defined a “reed” as “an organ stop that needs two days of work.” This organ has 82 ranks of reeds. There are more than 30,000 pipes, each with a valve that’s a potential cipher. Heaven may or may not know how many electrical contacts there are, but Curt Mangel does. (See Photo 4: L. Curt Mangel III—The man behind the curtain.) Curt is a brisk energetic man whose gait announces his sense of purpose. He speaks with authority and precision, each sentence including an extra clause for explanation. It’s hard to ask him questions, because so much of what he says is answers. Curt has been curator of the Wanamaker Organ since March 2002. He guided me through the instrument, talking of history, challenges, dreams, and accomplishments. He told me how it’s possible, even usual, for two or three tuners to work in the organ at once, each with an assistant at a tuning keyboard, working in different divisions with shutters closed. His command of technical details reveals the diligence and intensity with which he has informed himself about the organ.
Curt showed me the newly commissioned organ workshop on the third floor of the store. Assistant curator Samuel Whitcraft and apprentice Scott Kip work with Curt to facilitate large-scale restoration projects and day-to-day maintenance. New equipment, large windows looking out at City Hall, spacious work areas, and historic photos combine to make a most agreeable working environment, space provided by Macy’s in the spirit of their positive attitude toward the future of the organ. (See Photo 5: The Wanamaker Organ Shop.)
Together and separately, Peter and Curt are enthusiastic advocates of this mammoth organ. They speak freely about their love of the instrument, their devotion to its heritage, history, and future, and of their mutual respect. They are working in a climate of collegiality and cooperation with the people at Macy’s—reveling in the opportunity to work with this special instrument with the support and encouragement of its owner. But it was not always like that. There have been long periods during which it was difficult to secure funding. There have been management teams that limited practice time because of the cost of after-hours security. There have been disputes over decibel levels during daytime performances. There have been periods during which the future of the organ was uncertain. Perhaps the greatest contribution to the organ by long-time curator Nelson Buechner was his dedication during what devotees to the Symphonic Organ might term the long dark days of the Revival of the Classic Organ.
And in the darkest of those appeared Ray Biswanger, founder and president of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ. Ray has been instrumental and effective in the advocacy of the organ to its various owners. Working with Curt Mangel, the Friends have established the Symphonic Organ Symposium, an educational effort that organizes the gathering of ten or so volunteers, all professional organbuilders, for four or five days at a time, about four times a year. Curt lays out large repair projects, lays in the necessary materials, and lays on the marching orders. This confluence of talented professionals provides an unprecedented forum for the exchange of ideas, techniques, and experiences—hence the emphasis of the symposium’s educational value. This extraordinary effort is what allows us to experience the Wanamaker organ in such wonderful condition. The Friends of the Wanamaker Organ provide lodging and meals for symposium participants who volunteer their time and pay their own travel expenses.
Recently there was a special event to unveil the new organbuilding workshop. At the same time, the newly restored chorus of Vox Humanas was introduced. Originally part of the Orchestral Organ (currently under restoration), Manual 8' Vox Humanas I–VII (originally I–VI—they added one—you can’t have enough Voxes!), Manual 16' Vox Humana, and Pedal 16' Vox Humanas I–II (count ’em, ten ranks of Voxes in the same room) have been installed in their own division in a prominent location behind the shutters that were originally for the Orchestral Organ. As the ten ranks stand neatly in pairs on windchest divisions, there are five regulators and five tremulants to “complete the bleat.” Amazingly, but after all logically, Peter asked Curt to provide “Vox divisional pistons!” Sure enough, that extraordinary chorus has its own pistons allowing Vox crescendi and Vox decrescendi. And the proof is in the pudding—what a singular effect when that thumb runs down the buttons at the end of a phrase. (See Photo 6: You don’t see this every day.)
Free of the burden of all those Voxes, the restored Orchestral Organ will be installed in a new location to the right of the main organ at the same level as the String Organ. It is testament to the community’s regard and opinion of the organ that 380 new square feet of floor space are being provided for the organ. Think how many Speedos and bikinis they could sell in that amount of commercial space. The Orchestral Organ is scheduled for installation in the spring of 2008. After that, the restoration of the Great Chorus—a separate division of large solo Diapason, Flute, and String voices—will begin in the fall of 2008.
Philadelphia is a good vacation destination. Excellent restaurants and hotels abound, historic shrines and sites are everywhere. There are dramatic vistas that include photogenic bridges and waterfronts. And for the organ nut there is immense wealth. If you want to plan a trip, look into schedules of organ performances at the new Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the new 125-rank Dobson organ) and Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania (162-rank Austin). You might also try the Girard College Chapel where there’s a 102-rank E. M. Skinner organ. Four terrific organs, 851 ranks.
In the last few years, the Organ Clearing House crew has spent considerable time in Philadelphia dismantling, packing, and later shipping the massive Möller organ from the now-destroyed Philadelphia Civic Center (it’s now at the University of Oklahoma, where it will be restored as part of that school’s new American Organ Institute). That work, along with the 2002 AGO convention, and the fact that Philadelphia is “on the way” from Boston to lots of other places, have provided me with ample opportunities to visit the Wanamaker Store. And the longer that organ, Peter Conte, Curt Mangel, and the good people of Macy’s are working together under the same ornate roof, the more reason for all of us who love the pipe organ to visit Philadelphia.
Writing about statistics, stoplists, or histories cannot do real justice to the experience of hearing this organ. You must go. There are countless opportunities—go to www.wanamaker organ.com to see the schedule of concerts, to join the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, to make a contribution to this amazing work, and to purchase a copy of Ray Biswanger’s thoughtful, balanced, and copiously illustrated book about the organ, Music in the Marketplace. Tell them I sent you. There is nothing else like the Wanamaker Organ, anywhere. Don’t take my word for it. And don’t miss the Brazilian steak house next door.

I didn’t know there were any of you left.

Frequently I am invited to speak about the pipe organ to community gatherings, AGO meetings, and the congregations of churches with which we work. Those who have heard me give such a talk have likely heard the description of a hypothetical scenario: You’re meeting people in a social situation—a cocktail party for example—standing in a little circle going through predictable small-talk. Someone asks what you do for a living. One replies, “I’m a college English professor.” “I’m an investment banker.” “I’m a pipe organ builder.” “A pipe organ builder, I didn’t know there were any of you left.” This happens to me often enough to be comical. Yesterday I heard a new sarcastic twist: “That’s funny, you must be the sixth organbuilder I’ve met this week!”
Those conversations typically continue as nice opportunities to talk about our trade, and when I say that there are professional trade organizations with conventions and monthly journals, my interlocutors are again amazed.
Last month I attended the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders (AIO) in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is a great region for the pipe organ. There are a number of outstanding builders located there, and a fleet of terrific organs. The scenery is spectacular. Mt. Rainier (14,410 feet) pokes its snowy head through the clouds, the Seattle waterfront is a blend of busy international port and picturesque marketplace. The Olympic Mountains loom to the west across Puget Sound serving as host to grand sunsets. And the city itself nestles between the waterfront and dramatic hillsides. Ferryboats and seaplanes are important parts of Seattle’s transportation system. Public cultural events such as concerts and theater are scheduled to work with the ferry schedule lest a concert be disrupted by the departure of hundreds of audience members determined to catch the last boat.
An AIO convention includes plenty of visits to churches and concert halls for demonstrations and concerts on a variety of organs. The rollicking bus rides are a mainstay just as they are at conventions of the AGO or the OHS. There were lectures on a variety of subjects at the convention hotel, and many suppliers to the trade were exhibiting their wares and services in the exhibit hall, which also served as center of much of the socializing. (I treated myself to a long-coveted set of wood-handled brass tuning cones at the Laukhuff booth.)
The AIO convention was the last week of three on the road for me. The Organ Clearing House had just completed the delivery of M.P. Möller’s Opus 5819 to the University of Oklahoma. (You can read about this exciting project elsewhere in this issue of The Diapason, and I will write about it in detail next month.) Originally housed in the Philadelphia Civic Center, and given to Oklahoma by the University of Pennsylvania, the organ will be the centerpiece of the American Organ Institute directed by Professor John Schwandt.

It’s all the same to me.

My trip included a week each in Philadelphia, Norman, Oklahoma, and Seattle. I changed planes in Atlanta and Denver. Starting and ending in Boston, that made seven flights and six airports, and the common thread was sameness. The vendors in all the airports were virtually identical. I started the trip with a book of crossword puzzles that was less than I hoped, but couldn’t find a replacement because Hudson News was carrying the same book in all its stores across the country. The culinary experience in our airports is barely worth mentioning. The sameness of the airports makes it easy to find your way around—signage, numbering systems, even layout is very similar from place to place. But a little exposure to local color would be nice. Having changed planes in Denver, one cannot say one has been to Denver.
From the air you see interchangeable real estate developments, shopping malls, industrial parks. And although the landscapes are different (to someone from the Northeast, Oklahoma sure is flat), once you get away from the airports there is much sameness. We are trained to recognize corporate logos enough to leave no doubt that you are passing Home Depot, Applebee’s, or Sears even if you are too far away to read the text on the sign. I did some shopping in Norman and, although the names of the department stores were different, the floor plans were sure familiar (you can’t get anywhere without having to walk through the cosmetics department!). A striking and unsettling example of sameness is found in the national chains of bookstores. You would think that the interests of readers would vary between regions, but the front tables in Barnes & Noble stores are identical in Boston and Oklahoma City. All of that chain’s buying is done in an office in New York by people who must know best what all Americans should be reading.
National chains of restaurants allow us to buy a predictable meal in any city. I’ve heard people say that this eliminates the risk of having a bad meal. I suggest it’s more like choosing a bad meal instead of risking a good one. Leave a hotel looking for a family-owned restaurant and you’re likely to be disappointed.
While spending time chatting with the good folks in the exhibition booths at the AIO convention, I reflected that there is a significant vein of sameness in the American organ industry. A couple generations ago, if an organbuilder wanted to include a combination action in an organ’s console, they had to build it themselves. Those were the days when many organbuilders had hundreds of employees, and we marvel at the long lists of monumental organs built by the big firms in the early 20th century (the Skinner opus list shows that Ernest Skinner built 39 four-manual organs before the end of 1915), forgetting perhaps that those shops employed hundreds of workers. Many of today’s small organbuilding firms would be hard pressed to build their own combination actions. The fact that organs built by a dozen different companies might have identical combination actions is actually an advantage. The elegant and reliable products offered by such firms as Peterson, Solid State Organ Systems, Laukhuff, Heuss, Artisan Instruments, and Classic Organ Works (among others) make it possible for the independent organbuilder to focus on the artistic content of their instruments.

Who’s driving?

It’s a well-understood fact that the organs of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) were the driving force behind an entire school of organ composition. Composers such as Franck, Widor, Dupré, Tournemire, Vierne, Messiaen, and Mulet were inspired and challenged by those grand organs that featured countless mechanical and tonal innovations. It’s not as easy to tell who was in charge in other eras of organbuilding. J.S. Bach was knowledgeable about the organs of Gottfried Silbermann, but who was teaching whom? We know Bach worked as a consultant, hired by churches to review new organs when they were completed. His comments were sometimes negative—he was especially critical of inadequate wind systems—but one can say that his music was exploring the capabilities of the organs he played. The mid-20th-century American Organ Renaissance was to some extent a collaboration between organists and organbuilders. Organists helped raise awareness of the classic traditions while organbuilders worked hard to interpret them. But the fact that organists became divided (sometimes bitterly) over the issue of tracker vs. electric implies that the organbuilders were really running the show.
During the convention, I was impressed by the number of conversations among organbuilders that focused on playing. During the 1980s there was a disappointing drop in the number of young people studying organ, and several prominent schools have recently closed their organ departments. But AGO Pipe Organ Encounters have been enormously successful, and a number of important university organ departments are thriving. There is a clear upswing in the number and quality of young organists, and our brilliant young players are demanding much of their organbuilders. In my experience, players are increasingly aware of the quality, refinement, and versatility of their instruments. They have sophisticated understandings of organ sound and highly developed personal approaches to registration, not relying on accepted standards of registration but using their ears to blend colors. They are demanding much of their instruments and much of those who build and maintain them. This is a very good thing.
While organbuilders in general have often been inclined to talk about instruments as if they were separate from the music, I observe that players are increasingly the focus. I had several conversations at the convention with colleagues who wanted to share how moved they were by hearing what a particular player brought out of an instrument. More than one expressed that the experience “made it all worthwhile.” Aha—we are building instruments for the sake of music. A layperson might see a pipe organ as a mechanical marvel (of course that’s true!), but a well-conceived and beautifully built organ in the hands of a great player transcends the mechanical.

Nothing new under the sun?

The October issue of The American Organist features an article by Moo-Young Kim that presents a study of the programming of recent American organ recitals. Using pie charts and other graphic illustrations, the frequency of performance of pieces of organ literature is analyzed. The result of the study is easy enough to predict—if you took away the top 20 or so titles you’d have little left. This reflects a dilemma. We know that audiences lean toward the familiar. (How many times have you tried to steer a bride away from Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring or Canon in D?) But finding ways to balance the familiar with new music that will challenge, inspire, and thrill the public must be one of our principal goals. We all know that the pipe organ was integral to the musical life of a community 200 years ago. What about today? What about tomorrow?
In answer to this I share thoughts about what was for me the high point of my experience in Seattle. St. Mark’s Cathedral (Episcopal) is an unusual building in a dramatic location on one of the city’s hillsides. The building was planned in 1928 combining traditional Gothic lines with newly developed poured-concrete construction. The collapse of the stock market in 1929 caused the collapse of the funding of the project, and only the crossing was completed. The cathedral’s website refers to the building as the “Holy Box.” The organ is a knockout. It was built by Flentrop in 1965, a monument of the earlier-mentioned American Organ Renaissance. It has four manuals, 58 stops, and is located in the rear gallery. I don’t have numbers to back up my observations, but to my eye the room is pretty close to a cube in dimension—the height of the ceiling is close or equal to the length and the width. The organ has a real 32' façade—flamed copper Principal pipes that are a true eyeful. The overwhelming visual impression is of immense height.
The stoplist comprises Dutch nomenclature, so familiar from my days as a student at Oberlin (a town of 8500 people that was home to more than 20 Flentrop organs in 1978), and implies a clear historically focused style of organbuilding. I’ve heard this organ on four different occasions, and each time I’ve been amazed at its versatility. The organ’s sound is brilliant and full. It’s expressive and sweet. It’s powerful enough to defy the low wind pressures. It’s simply thrilling to hear. It’s more than 40 years old and must be considered one of the monuments of 20th-century organbuilding.
Douglas Cleveland was the recitalist. Having just read the previously mentioned article in The American Organist, I noted quickly the predictability of the program: Bruhns G major, Vivaldi/Bach D minor, Schübler Chorales, St. Anne Prelude and Fugue. Nothing new under the sun—except for two important points: first, Mr. Cleveland is a stupendous player, and second, that was only the first half. His presentation of those standards of the repertory was fresh and inviting. The second half of the program included Ave Maris Stella by Pamela Decker, Pièces de Fantaisie (Deuxième Suite) by Louis Vierne, and the world premier of Four Concert Etudes by David Briggs. Perfect. In the first half, Mr. Cleveland’s playing and the Flentrop organ won me over with their classic beauty. In the second, I (and the friends around me) was dazzled by the grandeur, excitement, and the sheer sonic power of the marriage between the organ and this smashing new music. I hope that Briggs’s Four Concert Etudes will get many more readings. Mr. Briggs is himself a marvelous organist—his music reflects that deep understanding of his instrument—and Mr. Cleveland knew how to interpret it with his understanding of the terrific instrument given for his use that night, and the audience was the richer for it. More, please!

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Special delivery
The Bath Iron Works (a General Dynamics Company) is about fifteen miles from where we live. Located on the shore of the Kennebec River in Bath, Maine, more than ten miles up from the ocean, they build Aegis and Zumwalt class destroyers for the United States Navy. The shipyard is unique because of its immense lifting capacity—you can see their mammoth cranes from miles in each direction. This allows them to mass-produce ships in large sections because they can lift as much as a third of a ship at once. In the company’s heyday during World War II, they launched a completed destroyer every twenty-two days. Think of the supply chain. That’s a lot of steel—tens of thousands of tons. That’s a lot of wire, windows, pipes, engines, tanks, valves, and gauges. It took about 275,000 person hours to build a ship. Twenty-two days—that’s 12,500 hours a day, or 1250 workers working ten-hour days. To stay efficient, each worker had to have the right tools and the right materials at the right time. Any organbuilder’s head would spin to think of such a management challenge. It’s hard enough to organize 200 person hours per week in a five-person workshop.
In the 1870s and 1880s, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings was building new organs at the rate of something like one a week. We know that materials were delivered at night to that workshop in Boston by horse-drawn rail cars using the same tracks that the passenger trolleys used by day. Think of the mountains of American black walnut going into the maw of that place, all to be unloaded by hand. I suppose they had a night crew of men who did nothing but unload rail cars and make sure the materials were stored in the right place. And I suppose once the lumber was stored they loaded bales of sawdust to be carted off to line chicken coops.
While we think about the work involved in organizing a flow of materials into a nineteenth-century organ shop, what about the actual work of building the organs? When I started working in organ shops, we had screwdrivers that we turned by hand—analog screwdrivers. For a while we used electric screwdrivers that had wires hanging out of the handles—wires that could flop across the pipes of the Mixture while you were taking down a bottom board of an upper chest to repair a dead note. Now we have rechargeable cordless tools. And to top that, I have a battery charger that runs on the twelve-volt power in my car so I can recharge my power tools between service calls.
I’ve joked with the hypothetical question, “if Bach had a Swell box would he have used it?” I bet Mr. Skinner would have delighted in an eighteen-volt rechargeable DeWalt screw-gun. It’s even got an adjustable clutch to keep you from stripping the threads.

Supply and demand
We live at the end of a half-mile dirt road. I have a swell little workshop at the house where I tackle portions of our projects. I’m especially fond of working on organ consoles and I have a beauty in the shop right now, built by Casavant in 1916. We are renovating the organ for a church in Manhattan and I’m spending the summer plugging away at the console. Our house is at the end of the UPS route. A couple times a week at around 5:30 in the afternoon, the big brown truck hurtles down the driveway and careens into the dooryard. Nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and goldfinches scatter in terror, groundhogs and chipmunks dash into the stone walls—only the sassy and pugnacious little red squirrels seem ready for the challenge.
With diesel engine roaring and spewing, the driver (there are two regulars) turns the truck around so it’s heading home before he’ll even look at me. He tosses a couple boxes at me and blasts off in a cloud of fumes, dust, and pebbles. (If he had to take care of a long dirt road the way I do he’d never drive like that—each time he comes to the house, five shovels of my gravel goes into the woods.) Measuring sound in decibels-per-hour, the UPS guy makes more noise in two-and-a-half minutes than I do in a week.

Leaning to the left
I suppose that if we were at the beginning of the route, the UPS driver would have a little more time to chat, but I remember reading an article that allowed a glimpse into the company’s efficiency. As traffic increases on America’s roads, we are all aware that you can wait a long time for a chance to make a left-hand turn on a busy road. Years ago I fell into the habit of planning errands to avoid left-hand turns. If I go to the hardware store first, grocery store second, bank third, the only left turn is when I leave the grocery store. I got teased about that some, but on December 9, 2007 the New York Times published an article that I believe excused my apparent eccentricity. Titled “Left-Hand-Turn Elimination,” the story told that that UPS has a “package flow” software program that maps out routes for the drivers limiting the number of left-hand turns as much as is practical. UPS operates 95,000 big brown trucks. By limiting left-hand turns they were able to reduce their routes by 28,500,000 miles, save 3,000,000 gallons of fuel, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 31,000 thousand metric tons. (Now you know what kind of mileage a UPS truck gets.) You can read the story at <A HREF="http://www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html">www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html</A>. Makes my five shovels of gravel seem a little less important!
After the big brown truck barrels up the driveway and turns right onto the road, I go back into the shop and open the boxes. What goodies I find: silver wire for key-contacts, woven felt for keyboard bushings, snazzy little control panels for solid-state relays and combination actions, specialty wood finishes from a one-of-a-kind supplier, useful tools that you can’t find at Home Depot. It’s like a little birthday party at the end of the day.
I need a huge variety of parts and materials to complete a project like this, and I spend a lot of time on the phone, leafing through catalogues (the big industrial-supply catalogues have more than 3,500 pages) and searching online. I rely on Internet access, next-day delivery, and specialty supply houses. And I can buy just about anything. Let’s say I need some red woven felt (bushing cloth) to replace the bushings in a mechanical part. I can use an X-Acto knife to get the old cloth out of the hole, but it’s really hard to measure the thickness of a piece of felt that was made ninety years ago. So what thickness should I get? Easy. If I search carefully online I can find it in thicknesses graduated by 64ths of an inch. I order a few square feet of four different thicknesses and experiment.

Close enough?
We talk about the importance of duplicating original materials when restoring an instrument. “If Mr. Skinner used 9/64″ red bushing cloth, I’m going to use 9/64″ red bushing cloth.” But I bet Mr. Skinner wasn’t choosing between eight different thicknesses listed on a catalogue page. I think he bought the stuff that was available and made it work.
The expression shutters of this Casavant organ we’re working on turn in bearings of woven felt. There’s a quarter-inch steel pin in each end of each shutter that serves as an axle. The pins turn in holes in wood blocks—those holes are bushed with green woven felt. After seventy years of regular use and twenty years of neglect, that felt is hard and worn. Over the years, organ technicians fixed squeaks and squeals in those shutters by glopping grease, oil, candle wax, mutton tallow, and more recently silicone and WD-40 from spray cans on those bearings.
I could buy Teflon tubing of quarter-inch interior diameter (1/4″ ID) from McMaster-Carr, an industrial supply company in New Jersey. I found it on page 91 of their 3,528-page catalog. It costs $1.28 a foot and comes in five-foot lengths. I could cut it into half-inch lengths (less than five-and-a-half cents each), and drill them into the shade frames to make perfect bearings for the quarter-inch steel axles. I bet it would be a long time before they squeal or squeak. It’s not historic, it’s not good restoration practice, but I bet those shutters would work beautifully for decades. I think I’ll go ahead and make that change. I’m confident that the organists who will play on this organ will never know we did, and I trust that Claver and Samuel Casavant will forgive me. My intentions are good and my conscience is clear.

An expressive conundrum
We have some tree work going on in our yard and one of the crew is a skillful equipment operator. He’s using a light-duty excavator that’s known as a backhoe because the bucket (or shovel) comes back toward the operator as it digs. The machine’s boom has three joints, roughly analogous to the human shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and the bucket compares to the hand, as it can curl under to scoop the earth. Each of the joints is operated by a hydraulic piston—that ingenious machine that uses the pressure of oil to extend or contract. It seems counterintuitive, but the engine of this machine drives no gears at all—its sole purpose is to drive a pump that creates the oil pressure. Even the wheels that drive the tracks are turned by hydraulics. The machine’s controls are valves operated by handles—those valves conduct the pressurized oil to the appropriate pistons.
The operator, a young guy named Todd who’s anticipating the birth of his second child as he digs in our yard, has his feet on the pedals that drive the machine forward and back. He has each hand on a four-function joystick. Each push of a control operates only one function, but Todd moves his hands and wrists in quiet little circles combining the machine’s basic movements into circular, almost human motions. His understanding of his controls is intuitive. He doesn’t have to stop to think, let me see . . . if I pull this handle this way, the bucket will curl under . . . He effortlessly combines the motions to extend the boom and the bucket, sets the teeth in the dirt, and brings the boom toward him as the bucket curls under filling with dirt. He whirls around to empty the bucket on a pile, and as he turns back to the hole, the boom and bucket are extending to be ready for the next scoop, which starts without a pause, a jerk, or a wiggle. He’s operating six or seven functions simultaneously. The power that operates the machine and the nature of the motion are both fluid.
I’ve read that some revered orchestral conductors eschew the pipe organ as an inexpressive instrument because it’s not possible for an organist to alter the volume of a single organ pipe. You press a key, the pipe plays. You pull a handle in a backhoe and the bucket moves in one direction. I can hear my colleague organists gasp as I compare Todd’s backhoe with an elegant musical instrument, but isn’t there a similarity between the two machines? After all, we don’t hesitate to call the pipe organ the most mechanical of musical instruments. And when we press that key, we’re opening a valve to let pressure through to do work. (I have to admit I’m glad we’re not messing around with hydraulic oil near a chancel carpet.)
The organist intuitively manipulates the controls—playing keys, changing stops, pushing pistons, operating expression pedals—and the result is fluid crescendos, accents, beguiling delays, great oceans of sound billowing through the air. Literally, organ music is the result of thousands of switches or levers moving at the will of the organist. That organist has practiced for thousands of hours, mastering the limitations of his or her body, teaching the body to perform countless little motions with ease and grace so the music flows free, denying both the physicality of the player and that of the instrument. Because the machine and player are both well-tempered, the music is infinitely expressive.
And of course we separate the organ from the backhoe. It’s nice to be able to move a ton of dirt in a few minutes without breaking a sweat, and we admire the skill of the guy who can make that machine come alive. But I couldn’t help notice that one of the joints on Todd’s machine has an important squeak to it, enough that when I was back in my workshop or office and couldn’t see the machine, I knew when he was extending or retracting the boom. Not my swell shutters!
A pipe organ is magic when all the squeaks and squeals are gone, when each function of the machine responds effortlessly to the intuitive motions of the player. In the workshop we make thousands of little choices about what material to use, how to adjust it, how to glue it down, so the machine will not stand in the way of the music. In the practice room we hone our skills so no knuckle cracks, no muscle binds, no fingernail hangs, and nothing about our bodies will stand in the way of the music. We dress in clothes that allow us to move freely, and we make sure our shoes are less than two notes wide. Our bodies and our instruments are conduits between the composer’s ideals and the ears of the audience.
Thanks to the UPS guy for bringing all those goodies, and yes—I’m certain that Bach would have used the expression pedal, but only if the shutters didn’t squeak.

Photos of cats

Read recently on Facebook:

“We each have in our hands an instrument with nearly limitless computing power that gives me instant access to worlds of information, and we use it to publish photos of cats.”

My iPhone is sitting on my desk. It’s seldom more than a few feet away from me. It’s my link to the world. I get nervous when the battery is low. Imagine how awful it would be if the phone went dead while I was on the subway in the middle of a game of solitaire. I’d have to sit there and stare at a carload
of nutcases.

The iPhone (or any so-called “smart phone”) is a fantastic tool. It enables me to stay in touch with co-workers and clients when on the road. The ability to take a photo and send it away instantly is a fantastic aid when sorting out mechanical issues at projects. Need to send the specs of a blower motor to a repair shop? Take a photo of the engraved plate. Poof. I can make and change airplane, train, and hotel reservations. I keep my calendar and contacts organized. I can access bank accounts to transfer funds and pay bills. I can create and send invoices for service calls as I leave the church. You’d think that such a gizmo would have nothing but positive effects.

But there’s a hitch. They’ve turned us into a race of navel gazers. On any street corner you’ll see people standing still, staring into their phones. People stop suddenly while walking to go into their phones. The other day on the street, I was hit in the shoulder by a woman who was gesticulating while arguing with someone on the phone. And another tidbit from Facebook—a friend posted a photo of a woman dressed in yoga togs on the down escalator from New York’s Columbus Circle to the Whole Foods store, balancing a huge stroller laden with toddler with one hand, the other hand holding the phone to her ear. Sounds like child neglect and endangerment to me.

People talk on the phone at restaurant tables with friends, they talk on the phone at the cashier in a grocery store, they talk on the phone in the middle of a business meeting. Do those phones help us get more done, or do they keep us from getting anything done?

And worse, if we let them, our phones will affect the flow of human thought in generations to come. I did perfectly well without a smart phone until I was in my forties, but my kids have pretty much grown up with them. And our grandson Ben, at eighteen months old, is adept at managing touch screens—giggling as he swipes to change photos, touching icons, all the while staring intently at the thing. Thank goodness his parents read to him, and I hope he grows up learning conversational skills that seem to be eroding today. 

Innovation

The last century has been one of innovation. Many of the most important developments have come with significant downsides. The automobile has given us unlimited mobility, but it has torn up the landscape and poisoned the skies. The technological revolution has given us connectivity that we could not have imagined a generation ago, but it has compromised good old-fashioned face-to-face human contact. Image a guy breaking up with his girlfriend by text message. It happened in our family! Suck it up and face the woman, bucko.

Also, mass production and mass marketing has led to homogeneity. People in Boston and Tucson buy the same candlesticks at Crate and Barrel, as if there were no cultural differences between those regions.

These concepts apply to our world of pipe organs. In that world, the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by a debate about innovation. We argued in favor of the imagined purity of historic instruments and wondered exactly how they sounded when played by the artists of their day, or we argued in favor of the convenience of registration devices, the effect of expression enclosures, and the flexibity of organ placement made possible by electric actions. Both sides made cases about how unmusical were the instruments favored by the other camp. 

The result of the decades-long debate is generally a positive one. It’s true that many wonderful historic organs, especially early twentieth-century electro-pneumatic organs, were displaced and discarded by new tracker organs. But after all, that trend was a simple repeat of one sixty years earlier, when hundreds of grand nineteenth-century instruments were discarded in favor of the newfangled electro-pneumatic organs in the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Described in terms of the history of organbuilding in Boston, we threw out Hook organs in the 1910s and 1920s to install Skinners, and we threw out Skinners in the 1960s and 1970s to install Fisks and Noacks. What goes around, comes around.

Homogeneity

Until sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, each organbuilder’s work was unique. Any serious organist, blindfolded, could tell the difference between a Skinner console and an Austin console. The profile of the keycheeks, the weight and balance of the keyboards, the layout of the stop controls, the sound of the combination action, and the feel of the pedalboard were all separate and distinct.

I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague one night in a bar, during which we discussed the evolution in organbuilding toward homogeneity. Supply houses have become increasingly important to us, which means, for example, that our consoles have that “Crate and Barrel” syndrome. For example, there’s one brand of electric drawknob motors widely favored in the industry. They work beautifully and reliably, and they’re easy to install. So many firms building both electric and mechanical action organs use them on their consoles. They’re great, but they smudge the distinguishing lines between organbuilders.

There are several firms that supply keyboards to organbuilders. There is a hierarchy of quality, and builders can make choices about which organs should have what keyboards. If you’re renovating the console of an indistinct fifty-year-old organ, it doesn’t make much sense to install fancy keyboards at ten-thousand a pop, when a thousand-dollar keyboard will work perfectly well. But when comparing organs of high quality, we notice when different builders are using keyboards from the same sources. Again, the lines are smudged.

But here’s the thing. If a basic component of an organ is developed at high quality and reasonable cost by a specialist, the organbuilder can cross that off his list knowing that it will function perfectly and reliably, freeing him to put his effort into another part of the instrument. Ideally then, each hour saved by the purchase of ready-made parts can be put into voicing and tuning.

Ernest Skinner put lots of time and resources into the development of his famous Whiffle Tree expression motor. Today, there are three or four suppliers who manufacture electric expression motors with digital control systems. They use the motors developed for wheelchairs, and the controls allow the organbuilder to program the speed and distance of each stage. When shutters are opening, it’s great when the first step can be a tiny one, with the subsequent stages getting larger and larger. And even Mr. Skinner knew that it was an advantage when closing the shutters, for the last stage to be slower than the others to keep the shutters from slamming. He did it by making the exhaust valve smaller in the last stage so the power pneumatic wouldn’t work as fast. We do it by programming a slower speed.

When organbuilders get together, you hear chat about who uses which drawknobs, which expression motors, which solid-state relays and combination actions. We compare experiences about the performance of the machines, and the customer support of the companies that sell them.

Human resources

A fundamental difference between today’s organbuilding companies and those of a century ago is the size of the firms. Skinner, Möller, Kimball, Hook & Hastings, and others each employed hundreds of workers. The American church was powerful, and as congregations grew, new buildings were commissioned by the thousands. There were decades during which American organbuilders produced more than two thousand organs each year. And because the market was so strong, the price points were relatively higher than they were today. So when Mr. Skinner had a new idea, he could put a team of men on it for research
and development. 

Today there are a couple firms with more than fifty employees, but most organ companies have fewer than ten. A shop with twenty people in it is a big deal. In part, this is the result of the ethic of hand-craftsmanship championed during the twentieth-century revival. “Factory-built” organs had a negative stigma that implied that the quality of the artistic content was lower in such an instrument. And there can be little argument that in the mid-twentieth century, thousands of ordinary little work-horse organs were produced.

But the other factor driving the diminishing size and number of independent companies is the decline of the church. Congregations are merging and closing, and other parishes are finding new contemporary forms of musical expression. Electronic instruments now dominate the market of smaller churches. And it’s common to see congregations of fifty or sixty worshipping in sanctuaries that could seat many hundreds. Century-old coal-fired furnaces equipped with after-market oil burners gulp fuel by the truckload. And an organ that would have cost $50,000 in 1925 now costs $1,500,000. That’s a lot of zucchini bread at the bake sale.

I think these are compelling reasons in favor of the common use of basic components provided by central suppliers. Ours is a complicated field, and it’s unusual for a small group of people to combine every skill at the highest level. When I talk with someone who has done nothing but make organ pipes all his life, I marvel at his depth of understanding, the beauty of his drawn solder seams, and his innate sense of π, that mathematical magic that defines circles. He can look at a rectangle of metal and visualize the diameter of the tube it will make when rolled and soldered. The organ will turn out better if he doesn’t also have to make drawknobs.

The comfort of commonality

When Wendy and I travel for fun, we sometimes stay in quaint bed & breakfast inns, enjoying their unique qualities, and chuckling about the quirks and foibles of the innkeepers. But when I’m traveling for business, trying to maximize each day on the road, I prefer to stay in brand-name places. I want to check in, open my luggage, and know that the plumbing, the television, the WiFi, and the heating and air-conditioning will work properly. I want to find a functioning ice machine, and I expect a certain level of cleanliness. Besides, I like amassing rewards points.

Likewise, I’ve come to understand that traveling organists benefit from finding the same few brands of console equipment wherever they go. If you’re on a concert tour, taking a program of demanding music from church to church, you get a big head start when you come upon an organ with a solid-state combination system you’re familiar with. 

Peter Conte, Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, played the dedicatory recital on the Casavant we installed at Church of the Resurrection in New York, and I took him to the church to introduce him to the organ. Seconds after he sat on the bench, he was delving through the depths of the menus of the Peterson combination system, setting things the way he wanted them. He knew much more than I about the capabilities and programmability of the organ.

Recently I was talking with a colleague who was telling me about the installation of a new console for the organ he has been playing for nearly forty years. He told me how he had to relearn the entire organ because while it had much the same tonal resources as before, he was able to access them in a completely new way. It was a succinct reminder of how sophisticated these systems have become, and how they broaden the possibilities for the imaginative organist.

So it turns out that for many, the homogeneity of finding the same combination systems on multiple organs allows organists a level of familiarity with how things work. It takes less time to prepare complex registrations, which is ultimately to the benefit and delight of the listener.

The top of the world

Many of us were privileged to hear Stephen Tharp play the massive and magical Aeolian-Skinner organ of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston as the closing event of this year’s national convention of the American Guild of Organists. The majestic building was crammed with thousands of organists and enthusiasts. I suppose it’s the most important regularly recurring concert of the American pipe organ scene. And what a night it was. The apex, the apogee, the zenith —the best part—was his performance of his transcription of Igor Stravinski’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). It’s a wildly complex score, but luckily, Stephen is a complex and wild performer! He didn’t play as though it were a transcription, he played as though it were an orchestra. He made 243 registration changes in the course of about thirty-three minutes. That’s roughly 7.4 changes a minute, which means thumping a piston every 8.1 seconds. Try that with two stop-pullers on a big tracker-action organ! For that matter, try that on a fancy electric console with all the bells and whistles. If there ever was an example of how a modern organist is liberated by the possibility of setting thousands of combinations for a single concert, we heard it that night.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty…

Last May, Daniel Roth, organist at the legendary church of St. Sulpice in Paris, played a recital on our Casavant organ in New York. Besides the thrill of hearing such a great artist play our instrument, a very deep part of that experience for me was a conversation with Mr. Roth about his research into the life and work of his predecessor, Charles-Marie Widor. It’s a lovely and oft-repeated bit of pipe organ trivia that Widor was appointed as temporary organist there in 1870, and retired in 1937 having never been given a permanent appointment. I don’t know when the first electric organ blower was installed there, but let’s assume it was sometime around 1900, thirty years into his tenure.

There are 1,560 Sundays in thirty years. So Widor played that organ for thousands of Masses, hundreds of recitals, and countless hours of practice and composition while relying on people to pump the organ’s bellows. I’ve seen many photographs of the august Widor, and I don’t think he shows a glimmer of a smile in any of them. He must have been a pretty serious dude. But I bet he smiled like a Cheshire Cat the first time he turned on that blower and sat down for an evening of practice by himself. ν

How is it made?
We’re driving on a highway and a flat-bed truck with WIDE LOAD banners whips by in the other direction. The trailer is carrying a machine, big as a house and covered with a tarp that taunts as its corners flap in the wind. Aloud, I wonder what it’s for, and my wife smiles—or is it smirks? There’s a gap in the fence around a city construction site, and I stop to peer through to see what’s going on. Or I’m waiting in an airport (that’s what airports are for—I think they should call them waitports) amid hundreds of fellow waiters deep in laptop DVDs and MP3s. Important businessmen are having loud imaginary conversations on their iPhones, but I’m captivated by the panorama of activity outside. Each airplane is surrounded by a fleet of odd-looking trucks. By now, I think I know what each one is for, only because I’ve spent so much time watching them.
I’m fascinated by factories. I’ve seen steel, beer, automobiles, railroad cars, earth movers, and cigarettes being made. I’ve seen dollar bills, postage stamps, and newspapers fly through enormous printing presses at incomprehensible speeds. In the seventies, I rented a house from a guy who was a tool maker in an auto assembly plant. One December day, he invited me to a company Christmas party. We walked in to the din of the assembly line, and I quickly realized that the party was unofficial. Cars were being made by workers who were more focused on holiday cheer than the task at hand. I was secretly glad I was not planning to order a car that week.
Sesame Street was a staple in our house when our kids were young, and I loved the many segments of the show taking viewers on factory tours. Joe Raposo (brilliant composer of the show’s theme song, along with such classics as It’s not easy being green) wrote It takes a lot of little nuts to make a jar of peanut butter, a catchy tune that accompanied video shots of peanuts cascading down chutes into massive grinders and gooey paste blurping into jars as they shot along conveyor lines. Watching soda pop going into bottles at two or three a second, you might expect to hear the clanking of glass, but they shoot along obediently with only the whirr of the machines.
Organ builders spend much of their careers learning how to make little widgets one at a time, and figuring out how to make them better and more economically. I don’t say cheaper, because it’s a rare organbuilder who looks for cheap. Making a pipe organ part economically implies some kind of continuum that includes cost of material, time for manufacture, and artistic content. Just because you built a tremolo for less money doesn’t mean it’s going to “trem” musically. If you’ve developed a part that you know you’ll need by the thousand, you develop the ability for mass production. A tracker organ might need two or three hundred squares—if you’ve got a good design, why not spend a week making enough for the next ten organs? Or if someone else makes them in greater numbers for less money per piece, why not buy them and use them in your organs?
Another case in point is the huge parts that comprise a large organ. Building just one 32-foot wood pipe is a huge undertaking that takes hundreds of board feet of lumber, hundreds of clamps, and plenty of person-power. Just turning a pipe to wipe off the glue takes several people. At the Organ Clearing House, we know that a 32-foot wood stop automatically makes a second semi-trailer necessary. Think of the floor space you need to make something like that.
Wal-Mart tops the list of Fortune 500 companies with 1,800,000 employees. Compare that to the city of Philadelphia with 1,500,000 residents. Ford and General Motors both top 300,000. I do not have exact statistics at hand, but I’m pretty sure that no modern organ building company employs more than 150 people. Off the top of my head and counting on my fingers, I can think of fewer than ten American firms that employ more than twenty people. By far, most modern organ companies comprise two or three workers.
A big early twentieth-century firm like Austin, Hook & Hastings, Skinner, Möller, Reuter, or Schantz had dozens, in some cases hundreds of workers. The factories were divided into small shops that specialized in windchests, actions, consoles, or pipes. The woodworking shop built casework, made wood pipes, and provided milled pieces for the console and reservoir shops. A factory superintendent managed a production schedule that called for all the components of a given organ to arrive on the erecting floor where the instrument was assembled and tested before being shipped, and an installation team would meet the shipment and install the organ.
So a worker at Hook & Hastings might have spent his entire working life making keyboards. He wouldn’t be considered an organbuilder by modern standards. He might not have had any idea how a windchest works. But boy could he make keyboards. One of my colleagues talks about having tracked down one of the legendary, now very elderly women who glued pouches in the Skinner factory. While he was undoubtedly looking for hints about what machines and jigs and they used, she seemed to say that they just glued them. I doubt that she could tune an organ pipe, but boy could she glue a perfect pouch, and boy could she do it hundreds of times each day.
Which is the better organ? Is it the one that’s made from stem to stern by two or three dedicated “all-round” organbuilders, or is it the one that’s conceived by a salesman, designed by a team of engineers, endowed with standards and procedures established by the genius who founded the company, and built by a large group of people, each an expert and specialist in one facet of the trade? History has proven that both scenarios can produce wonderful organs.

Supply and demand
I’ve been thinking about organ shops large and small because I just returned from a delivery tour that included visits to two large companies that are important suppliers to the pipe organ industry. The Organ Clearing House is involved in two projects that involve renovation and installation of historic organs, and these companies are adding their vast resources to our work. A. R. Schopp’s Sons of Alliance, Ohio, is an important supplier of new organ pipes. They also produce windchests, wind regulators and reservoirs, casework, and swell shutters. Organ Supply Industries of Erie, Pennsylvania (known across the trade as OSI), does all of that. In addition, OSI fills an essential niche as suppliers of widgets and doo-dads—the countless catalogue numbers refer to chest magnets, leather nuts, voicing tools, organ blowers, leather, wiring supplies, specialty lubricants, valves, and the squares I mentioned earlier. It is the rare American organ builder who does not rely on OSI for something.
I drove a truck filled with large components from the two organs, loading in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and Melrose, Massachusetts, on a Tuesday morning, and driving (in accordance with Department of Transportation rules) through heavy rain as far as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I spent the night. What had been rain in Pennsylvania was ice in Ohio, so Thursday brought a drive through rural countryside festooned with beautifully crafted ice formations, and low-hanging tree limbs slapping the side of the truck body. I spent Thursday afternoon with the people of A. R. Schopp’s Sons, and drove on to Erie, where I spent the night before visiting OSI on Thursday morning. Early morning television revealed the wisdom (or luck) of the schedule—northeast Ohio was blanketed with heavy snow on Thursday, and I spent the rest of the trip leading the storm east. And here’s a comment on the cost of doing business: my 1,800-mile trip consumed nearly $700 worth of diesel fuel.
I had substantive conversations at both factories that gave me new insight into the importance of their role in our trade. The phrase “supply house” can stir up negative connotations. I’ve used it myself to imply cheapness: “They replaced it with a supply-house console . . . .” Plenty of organs have cheap replacement “after market” consoles, but that’s not a fair way to judge the contemporary work of such important companies.
Let’s talk about the electro-pneumatic chest magnet. A century ago, much of organ building was prototypical. Most organs were incorporating the new-fangled electro-pneumatic action. In fact, at that time, the application of electricity was new throughout the industrial world. So naturally, organbuilders developed their own versions of the electric chest magnet. Some had one-piece cast-metal housings, while some were assemblies that combined punched brass plates, drilled maple blocks, and wood screws and tacks. Over the ensuing decades, the best features of each style were slowly combined, until today, most new electro-pneumatic organs incorporate chest magnets from one source.
The modern small organbuilding shop is challenged by the struggle between artistic content and commercial reality. No client purchasing an organ will agree to a price “to be determined.” Any organbuilder is expected to state a price before work starts. It makes no sense for a small shop to mess around developing the ideal chest magnet to complement their artistic philosophy when a century of research and development provides a universal model with space-age specifications at mass-market prices with the help of FedEx.
But there is another side to this issue. You can go into a Crate & Barrel store in Texas and buy a half-dozen beautiful wine glasses, take them home and enjoy them as part of your home, and then with a pang of disappointment see the same glasses on the table of a friend in Seattle. Or notice that the books featured on the front table at Barnes & Noble on Union Square in New York are identical to those in a shopping mall in suburban Phoenix—as if tastes in reading would be the same in any two places. It’s a natural impulse for an organbuilder to make his products unique—you feel a little pang when you see the same stuff you use in an organ built by another firm.
Is the magnet the artistic core of the organ? How many other little parts could be uniform through a variety of organ companies before the instruments all blended into one? How do we define the parameters for performance of the pats in an organ? One way to judge the performance of an electric or pneumatic organ action is the repetition rate—how fast can the note repeat? (The real key to fast repetition is quick release, not fast attack.) A standard answer is sixty repetitions per second, a speed faster than an organist can go, faster than a pipe can speak—in short, fast enough so the magnet would never be the weak link. Would it be worth the time and expense to spend a couple months developing a new magnet that could do sixty-five? Would the player be able to tell?

While the two companies I visited last week have different priorities and personalities, in my judgment they share a common philosophy. Because they work in large volume, they can afford sophisticated modern automated equipment that is beyond the reach of a small shop. But what they really offer is service. An organbuilder can choose to purchase a mass-produced reservoir from a list of sizes in the catalogue, or order one that’s custom built to specifications for a particular organ. And a small organ shop can view a supplier as an annex capable of providing anything from a box of screws to a complete organ.
These venerable companies employ engineers who advise their customers about the use of their products. They can help with the design of custom parts and components. And they work very hard to be sure that the quality of their products is high enough to complement the quality of the work of their customers, the American organbuilders.
Last year the Organ Clearing House completed the renovation of a three-manual Casavant organ. Because the organ was being moved to a totally different architectural environment, we provided a new case with new façade pipes. The case was built by another supply company, QLF Pipe Organ Components of Rocky Mount, Virginia. OSI supplied the polished pipes. Before and after photos show what “supply house” really means. (See “Here & There,” The Diapason, April 2008, p. 10.) It’s the next best thing to running a company with a hundred cars in the parking lot and a roster of specialty departments.?

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Decisions, decisions
We are rebuilding an organ. It’s about 90 years old. It has electro-pneumatic action. The main manual windchests have ventil stop action. It has three manuals and 33 ranks. It was built as the “downstairs” organ in a large Roman Catholic church—a common layout for the quintessential huge Catholic parish that allows Masses to be celebrated concurrently. In our work at the Organ Clearing House we’ve been involved in the relocation of quite of few “downstairs” organs as parish leaders find it attractive and useful to redevelop those huge spaces into reception rooms, classrooms, offices, rehearsal space, and of course to create spaces that can generate rental income.
The organ has been purchased by a church that has a strong liturgical tradition and an elaborate music program, located in a big city. Over the course of a year or so, the church’s organist and I developed a plan that includes adding six ranks of pipes and a couple 16′ extensions to existing ranks. Originally the Great and Swell divisions each had two windchests, one for lower pressure, one for higher. The high-pressure Great chest will become the Solo division playable independently on Manuals I and II. Because we will be able to incorporate some good-quality 16′ ranks left from the church’s previous organ, our 39-rank specification will include eight 16′ ranks including three open ranks, two reeds, and three stopped wood ranks. There will be seven ranks of reeds, two on high pressure. The only reed not under expression will be the Pedal Bombarde.
In the last few weeks I have been designing the technical specifications of the project, working with suppliers and our client to make decisions about which materials and which equipment will make up this organ. We have faced quite a few complicated technical choices, and the nature of this project means that there are some philosophical questions to answer.

Restore, rebuild, renovate
It’s easy to say we’re restoring an organ—but I think the word restore is overused. I prefer to use that word literally. When we restore an organ to its original condition we don’t add or subtract any pipes. We don’t introduce modern materials. We don’t even change the color of the felt around the drawknobs. It’s impossible to restore an organ if you’re using a solid-state combination action (unless the organ originally had an identical system!). Using this definition, I’d say there are very few real pipe organ restorations completed in the world today. The argument can be taken so far as to say that a restoration cannot include new trackers (even if the old ones are hopelessly broken)—in other words, literally restoring an organ can result in an instrument that cannot be played.
The word rebuild when used to describe an organ project is much more general and not very limiting—a “rebuild” of a pipe organ is a philosophical free-for-all. We buy or make materials and parts that will “do the job.” We want the organ to perform well, that all the notes work correctly and the tuning is stable. We want the job to be both economical for the client and profitable for the organbuilder, a seemingly oxymoronic goal. But we are not necessarily making an artistic statement.
I prefer the word renovate. It comes from the Latin root “nova” which simply means new. My dictionary gives the word novation as a legal term describing the substitution of a new obligation for an old one—I’m no attorney, but I presume that describes a contract that has been renegotiated or an agreement that has been cancelled and replaced by a new one. In organbuilding, I use the word renovation to describe a project that focuses philosophically on the work and intentions of the original organ builder. It allows for the addition of ranks, especially if the original specification was obviously limited by constraints of space or budget. It allows us to modify an instrument to better suit a new home. And it forces us to make myriad decisions with the ethic of the original instrument in the forefront of our minds.
Our current project is a long way from a restoration. We have chosen to replace large and important components. We are adding several ranks. We are including a sophisticated combination action. We expect that the result will be an instrument with plenty of pizzazz, extensive expressive capabilities, and a wide range of tone color. There will certainly be plenty of bass and fundamental tone. We intend for the console to be welcoming to the player, expecting that the organ will be played by some of our most accomplished organists.
In this and other professional publications, we are accustomed to reading descriptions of completed projects. As I work through this long list of decisions, I thought it would be fun (and useful to my process) to discuss them in broad terms as the project begins.

Adding ranks
If this instrument was originally a “downstairs” organ, I think it’s fair to say that it was a secondary instrument. In fact, the church it came from has a magnificent and much larger organ in the main sanctuary. Our instrument was not decked out with some of the fancy stops that are appropriate, even required for the sort of use it will get in its new home. The voices we’re adding include French Horn, Tuba, and Harmonic Flute. We’re adding a second chorus mixture (there was only one). We’re adding a second Celeste (there was only one). We’re adding 16′ extensions to a soft string and an Oboe, as well as a couple new independent sixteen-footers. Most of these additions are being planned based on the scaling of the rest of the organ. And a couple of the fancier additions will be based on the work of a different organbuilder whose specialty stops are especially prized.
I believe that many additions are made to pipe organs based on nomenclature instead of tone color. If the last organ you played regularly had a Clarion in the Swell, the next one needs one too. I think it’s important to plan additions with your ears rather than your drawknob-pulling fingers. Some specialty stops stand out—an organ with a good French Horn can do some things that other organs can’t. But describing an organ by reciting its stoplist does not tell me what the organ sounds like. An organ without a Clarion 4′ can still be a wonderful organ.
The additions we’ve chosen come from many long conversations concerning what we hope the organ will be able to do. And these additions are intended to transform the instrument from its original secondary character to one suited for all phases of high liturgy and the performance of the organ repertory.

Windchests
Ventil stop action is one in which each rank is mounted over a discrete stop channel. When the stop is off, the organ’s air pressure is not present in the channel. The stop knob controls a large pneumatic valve that allows air pressure to rush in to fill the channel. This is one of the earliest types of pneumatic stop action, invented to allow for the transition away from the slider chests of the nineteenth century. Both electro-pneumatic and tubular-pneumatic organs were equipped with ventil windchests. When they are in perfect condition and perfectly adjusted, they operate quickly and efficiently, but there are some inherent problems.
The nature of the large valve (ventil is the word for a pneumatic valve) means that there’s a limit to how fast the air pressure can enter the stop channel when the stop is turned on, and a limit to how fast the air pressure can exhaust, or leave the channel when the stop is turned off. To put it simply, sometimes a ventil stop action is slow. It’s especially noticeable when you turn off a stop while holding a note or a chord—you can clearly hear the tone sag as the air leaves the channel. Pitman chests introduced the first electro-pneumatic stop action in which the stops are controlled at the scale of the individual note. Turn on a stop, air pressure enters a channel in the Pitman rail, the row of 61 Pitman valves move, and each note is turned on individually and instantly.
Another disadvantage of ventil stop action comes from the fact that electro-pneumatic actions work by exhausting. A note pouch at rest (not being played) has organ air pressure both inside and out. Play the note and the interior of the pouch is exposed to atmosphere. The air pressure surrounding the pouch collapses it, carrying the valve away from the toe hole. In a Pitman chest, a hole in a pouch means a dead note, annoying but not disruptive. In a ventil chest, a hole in a pouch means a cipher, annoying and disruptive. The cause of the cipher is air pressure exhausting from the interior of pouches of stops that are on into the stop channels of stops that are off—the exhausting happens through the holes in pouch leather of stops that are off. It’s easy to diagnose because the cipher will go away when you turn on the stop. In other words, a hole in a pouch in the Octave 4′ will allow the pouches of the other stops to exhaust through it into its empty stop channel. Turn on the Octave 4′ and the Principal 8′ can no longer exhaust that way so the cipher goes away—but the note in the Octave is dead!
With the revival of interest in Romantic music, cathedral-style accompanying, and symphonic organ playing, instant stop action is critical. We have decided to convert the stop action in our instrument from ventil to Pitman.

Console
The console is the place where we’ve faced the most choices. In the early twentieth century, the great heyday of organbuilding, each builder had specific and unique console designs. Each manufactured their own drawknob mechanisms, their own keyboards, their own piston buttons. Each had a particular way of laying out stopjambs. An experienced organist could be led blindfolded to a console and would be able to identify the organbuilder in a few seconds.
Most of those organs were built by companies with dozens or even hundreds of workers. A factory would house independent departments for consoles, windchests, wood pipes, metal pipes, casework, structures, and wind systems. Components were built all around the factory and brought together in an erecting room where the organ was assembled and tested before it was shipped. Today, most organ workshops employ only a few people. There are hundreds of shops with two or three workers, a small number of dozens of shops with between ten and twenty workers, and a very few with more than twenty.
When building small tracker-action organs, it’s not difficult to retain a philosophy of making everything in one workshop. Without distraction, two or three craftsmen can build a ten- or fifteen-stop organ in a year or so, making the keyboards, pipes, action, case—everything from “scratch” and by hand. When building large electro-pneumatic organs, that’s pretty much impossible. Too many of the components must be mass-produced using metal, too many expected functions of such an organ (like combination actions) are so complicated to build by hand, that it’s simply not economical to do it with a “build everything here” philosophy.
That means that a few organ-supply companies provide keyboards, drawknobs, combination actions, piston rails, and other console controls and appointments for the entire industry. It’s something of a homogenization of the trade—just like you buy the same books in a Barnes & Noble store in New York or in Topeka, and a McDonald’s hamburger tastes the same in Fairbanks as in Miami, so the drawknob action is identical in the consoles built by dozens of different firms.
The upside of this conundrum is that the companies that produce these specialized and rarified controls (you can’t go to Home Depot to buy a drawknob motor) have the time and ability to perfect their products. So while the drawknobs we will install in the console for this organ will be the same as those on many organs in that city, they are excellent units with a sturdy old-style toggle feel, beautifully engraved knob faces, and of course, compatibility with today’s sophisticated solid-state combination actions.
This week we placed the orders for new drawknobs identical to the original (we’re expanding from 33 to 60 knobs), drawknob motors and tilting tablets for couplers, new keyslips with many more pistons than the original layout, and engraved labels for indicator lights and the divisions of stops and pistons.

Combination action
It used to be “ka-chunk” or “ka-thump.” One of the factors of that blindfolded test would be pushing a piston. Compare in your mind’s ear the resulting sound in a Skinner console with that of an Austin. If you’re familiar with both builders you know exactly what I mean. The sounds are as distinctly different as are the diapasons of each builder. In many renovation projects, a solid-state combination action is installed to operate the original electro-pneumatic drawknobs—a nice way to preserve some of the original ethic of an organ. But when the specification of an organ is changed as part of a renovation project, it’s not easy to adapt the original knob mechanisms by adding knobs. In fact, it’s typical for there to be plenty of space in a chamber to add all kinds of new ranks, but no way to add the controls to the console without starting over. It’s no good to add a stop to the organ when you can’t include the knob in the combination action.
There are a half-dozen firms that produce excellent solid-state controls for pipe organs. They each have distinct methods, the equipment they produce is consistent, and each different brand or model combination action has myriad features unheard of a generation ago. Programmable crescendos, piston sequencers, manual transfers, expression couplers, melody couplers, pizzicato basses, the list seems endless. Multi-level systems have been with us for long enough that we’re no longer surprised by hundreds of levels of memory.
But when we’re renovating a console, we face the challenge of including lots of new controls for all those, dare I say, gimmicky functions. We build drawers under the keytables so the flashing and blinking lights and readouts are not part of our music-making, and the organists complain that they whack their knees when they get on the bench. We add “up and down” pistons to control memory levels and sequencers. We have bar-graph LED indicators for expression pedals. And we even install USB ports so software upgrades and MIDI sequencing can be accomplished easily. I suppose the next step will be to update a combination action by beaming from your iPhone. It’s easy to produce a console that looks like a science lab or an aerospace cockpit, and it’s just as easy to fall into thinking that the lights, buttons, and switches are more important than the sound of the organ.
It’s our choice to keep the “look” of the console as close as possible to its original design—it is a very handsome console. But keeping that in mind, you will want some modern gizmos close at hand.
There are lots more things to think about. Are we holding up bass pipes with soldered hooks or with twill-tape tied in knots? Are we making soldered galvanized windlines or using PVC pipe or flexible rubber hoses? It’s relatively easy to make a list of all the right choices for the renovation of a fine organ built by a great organbuilder. But the challenge is to retain the musical and artistic qualities of the organ, renovate an organ using the same level of craftsmanship as the original builder and produce an instrument that thrills all who make music and worship with it, while keeping in mind that the future of the pipe organ is ensured by the appropriate balance between artistry and expense. Thoughtful organbuilders face that question every time they pick up a tool.