In the wind . . .

We’re going in circles.

Have you noticed? I grew up in Boston in the 1960s and ’70s in what was a thrilling time for the art of organbuilding. Charles Fisk was well into his brilliant and innovative—and sadly foreshortened—career. Fritz Noack had established his company and was building the first of an impressive succession of instruments. Churches in the area were commissioning instruments from a wide variety of American and European builders, and organists and students of the organ were delving into the relationships between these “newfangled”—or was it “oldfangled”—tracker-action organs and the music of the baroque era that had inspired the concepts behind them.

The Organ Historical Society was an important part of that revolution—America’s nineteenth-century heritage of organbuilding was being rediscovered and celebrated. We recognized how many wonderful venerable instruments had been sacrificed to make way for the “new-fangled” electro-pneumatic organs of the early twentieth century. By the time I graduated from high school there were two Fisk organs in my hometown, and I was organist of a church in the next town that has a three-manual Hook organ built in 1860. I thought I knew all I needed to know.

I was a freshman at Oberlin in 1974, the year that the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. That organ has plenty of mutations, historically inspired reeds, suspended and “unbushed” tracker action. It was tuned in Werckmeister III, an historic temperament that sounds wonderful in many keys (let’s say for simplicity, up to four sharps or flats), but when I played Widor for one of my required performances and wound up in B-flat minor, I felt it in my fillings. And of course, that performance was offered without the grace or benefit of a Swell box. Forgive me, Charles-Marie.

While I was a student at Oberlin, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland received a three-manual Flentrop organ, and I was privileged to work with the team from Holland installing it. You don’t forget the first day of an installation, when the organ in parts is unloaded from a shipping container and carried up the front steps of the church. It’s heavy work. And I’ll not forget noticing a crate that contained Celeste pipes, or realizing that I was carrying a bundle of Swell shutters. I was perhaps too naïve to realize all the implications, but that sure seemed like part of a circle.

Recently I had a lengthy conversation and correspondence with several colleagues that set me to thinking about this circle and what it means to our art. The exchange started when the organbuilding firm Juget-Sinclair of Montreal announced an open house at which they would exhibit the new organ they had built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (Visit their website at http://www.cam.org/~sinc/.) The e-mails started flying between organbuilders John Brombaugh, Hellmuth Wolff, and Karl Wilhelm. John remembered that the first time he met Hellmuth and Karl was in Wellesley during the installation of that church’s Casavant organ. (It’s no secret that the Casavant was installed in 1964, so these guys were younger then than they are now!) John also told us that at the moment he was involved with the relocation of the organ he built for the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio (Opus 9, 1972). That congregation was moving to a new building and their original sanctuary had been sold to a congregation with musical priorities that did not involve a Brombaugh organ. The organ would be installed temporarily at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York (where it will presumably be available to students at the Eastman School of Music) until its permanent home at Sonoma University is ready.

When a new organ is finished, the builder might be proud of his accomplishment, relieved to be finished with particular complications, excited about moving on to the next project—but he is certainly not imagining that the organ he just finished will be replaced in thirty or forty years. Pipe organs seem permanent. I’ve had contact with many people who are surprised when they realize that an organ can be taken apart and moved. They thought it was part of the building. But isn’t an organ an expression of its builder’s current philosophy? While an organbuilder might hope that his work would never be replaced, would it be good for organbuilding in general if churches routinely purchased two new organs every century?

Because I had been involved in arranging the sale of the Wellesley Casavant to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts, I jumped into the conversation explaining that while the people of St. Andrew’s remained dedicated to the concept of tracker action, they felt they would benefit from having an instrument with more emphasis on fundamental tone. I added that the Organ Clearing House had relocated an instrument built by Hellmuth Wolff (Opus 17, 1976), installing it in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Durham, North Carolina. It was a coincidence that St. Paul’s previous instrument was a one-manual organ built by John Brombaugh—and rather than being replaced, the Brombaugh was moved to the front of the church where it is used as a liturgical organ.

As I was writing that letter I remembered an amusing and poignant story about Ernest Skinner, an organbuilder whose brilliant innovations in many ways defined the twentieth-century American organ. He who gave us pitman stop action, whiffle-tree Swell engines, French Horns, and vertical-selector combination actions, and who built instruments that emphasized fundamental tone, colorful orchestral solo stops, and shimmering strings was later criticized for failing to keep up with fast-changing trends, insisting that his instruments were the ideal and should not be changed. The story I refer to was quoted in All the Stops, the wonderful book about the twentieth-century American pipe organ written by Craig Whitney (PublicAffairs, 2003). (If you haven’t read this book yet, you’ve missed much. You can order it from the OHS catalogue: http://store.yahoo.com/ohscata log/crrwhallst.html.)


Whitney wrote:


Skinner was effectively frozen out of the company that bore his name, associated with it now in name only. But it was not only at Aeolian-Skinner that tastes were changing. To the romantic-orchestral organ that Skinner had built in the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1922, the young Cleveland organbuilder Walter Holtkamp added in 1933 something new and revolutionary—a small rückpositiv division designed along German classical lines. Though technically the term applied only to that part of a baroque organ that was detached from the rest and behind the organist’s back, typically in the gallery of a church, Holtkamp’s imitation was freestanding, playable via electro-pneumatic connections to the organ console, but its clear-speaking high-pitched stops were intended to produce a brighter tonality than the rest of the Skinner organ had. The addition produced much comment among organists and other builders, and it was seen as another blow to Skinner’s now old-hat notions that an organ should try to imitate an orchestra. At an organists’ convention, [Dorothy] Holden’s biography relates, Holtkamp saw Skinner standing alone, ignored now that he had gone out of fashion, and thought, ‘Now, this is a perfect shame! There stands one of the greatest figures in the art of organ-building, and all those sissies are afraid to go up to speak to him, for fear they might lose face among their peers!’ As Holtkamp told the story to Robert Bates, an organist friend, he went up to Skinner and said, “Mr. Skinner, I am Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland, and I just want to thank you for all you have meant and done for the art of organ-building through your splendid career.” Apparently, “Cleveland” was all that registered on Skinner, who was by then hard of hearing, and rejoined, “Cleveland! Say, you know, I have one of my best organs out there in the Art Museum, and some damn fool has come along and just ruined it.”1



I finished my letter to John Brombaugh saying: “Poor Skinner’s organ only lasted 11 years before Holtkamp got his hands on it. A Rückpositiv in 1933—who knew?” That was a pretty radical innovation for 1933. We raise the question, did Walter Holtkamp improve the Cleveland Museum’s organ? Who is the judge of that?

Should we alter works of art? We wouldn’t change a portrait by Rembrandt because Parisian clothing designers are featuring green this year or because it’s not stylish to put feathers in hats these days. We wouldn’t change a Shakespeare play because the word methinks isn’t part of every day speech now.
We would, however, alter an historic building by installing wheelchair ramps and elevators. Those instances where we condone such alterations often have to do with usefulness. You don’t have to consider the usefulness of a painting or sculpture. It is what it is. It’s a snapshot of an instant from another time. We can appreciate it (whether or not we like it) as an artist’s expression and we don’t depend on it for anything else.

Organs are different. A fine organ stands as a work of art, but it is also a tool to be used by contemporary artists to another artistic end. And, more than any other instrument, the organist is stuck with the instrument. If you are the regular organist of a church, all you do must be done with the existing instrument. If you are traveling to play a concert in a distant city, you must channel your creativity through whatever instrument you encounter.

When an organ is playing, the art of the builder, the player, and the composer are being combined to create yet another artwork, which is the performance itself—a virtual, temporary structure that thrills, moves, excites, or angers the listener, and that is gone as soon as the sound dies away. What’s more, it might thrill one listener and anger another. And each listener is responding to each component—the playing, the music, and the instrument. Does this view of performing music give the player license to propose alterations to the instrument, or more to my point, to replace the instrument with another?
There are of course many reasons why an organ might be relocated. Sometimes a parish has closed, either because its congregation has disbanded or merged with another. Sometimes an institution gets a new organist whose interests are different from those of predecessors. Sometimes, let’s face it, we are replacing an instrument that was never any good to begin with.

It is interesting to watch trends. We have spent a huge amount of energy relearning ancient skills, and developing new appreciations of early styles. E. Power Biggs and his contemporaries took us on virtual tours of older European organs (using the vinyl conveyances of the day). We assimilated, imitated, and built on the sounds we heard then. That work gave us greater ability to analyze and understand the components of sound, allowing us new ways to appreciate other styles. If we were devoted to the examples left by Arp Schnitger in the eighteenth century, suddenly we could appreciate and understand anew what Ernest Skinner was up to in 1920.

There was a wonderful moment at the convention of the Organ Historical Society in North Carolina in 2001 when on Wednesday, June 27, the convention visited the chapel at Duke University, home to three excellent and wildly varying pipe organs. There were three recitals—Mark Brombaugh played on the Flentrop organ, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played on the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played on the Aeolian. We were taken from Scheidemann to Wagner, from Liszt to Frescobaldi, from Buxtehude to Bossi all in a single day. What a dazzling display of the variety of the pipe organ and its music, and how passionately people defended their preferences as the buses took us back to Winston-Salem! I thought it would have been fun to have each of the performers play on each of the organs, but I had trouble finding supporters.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist . . .

A good friend of mine is a terrific singer whose husband is an astrophysicist. He works in a Smithsonian-affiliated lab at Harvard University using a telescope in Arizona that he operates remotely by computer. Once at a party Jane was asked what it’s like to live with such a brilliant person. “You know how they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist?” she replied. “There are lots of things around the house that really don’t need a rocket scientist!”

Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I know there’s a navigation trick called a gravitational slingshot that’s used to propel interplanetary probes through space. The vehicle is steered toward a planet and makes use of that body’s gravity to fling itself further into space. For example, on August 27, 1981, Voyager 2 used the gravity of Saturn to fling itself toward Uranus, where it arrived on January 30, 1986.2
I wonder if a gravitational slingshot could be used to break the circle and send the art of organbuilding to new places, new concepts, and new plateaus. It seems to me that many of the more recent innovations in organbuilding have been “returns” to one idea or another. When Craig Whitney described Holtkamp’s addition of a Rückpositiv as “new and revolutionary,” he was in fact referring to a concept that was some five hundred years old. We reach back through history to recreate the technology of the slider windchest and of voicing organ pipes on low wind pressures just as we reach back through history to understand again the glory of high-pressure reeds and air-tight swell boxes. We have incorporated computer technology to duplicate and enhance the registration equipment developed early in the twentieth century. We have built new organs using ancient architectural elements and we have modified those ancient elements to incorporate them in contemporary designs. But I suggest that no specific instrument or style of instrument, and the work of no one organbuilder can stand for the future of the instrument.

Igor Stravinsky assimilated all the tools of musical composition he had inherited and produced music that startled the world. And that music that caused riots when it was first performed is celebrated today as part of the wealth of musical expression. Is the future of the pipe organ based on the comparison between the instruments of early eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century America or can we assimilate all we’ve inherited to create new concepts for the organ, new ways to use the organ, and new ways to listen to it?

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Aeolus
Ruler of the winds. That’s who he was. According to Greek mythology, he was son of King Hippotes and custodian of the four winds, keeping them in the heart of the Lipara Islands near Sicily. At the request of other gods, Aeolus would release gentle breezes or fierce gales, depending on the circumstances. He was something of a vendor to the gods. The Greek hero Odysseus visited Aeolus, who gave him a parting gift of the four winds in a bag to ensure his safe return to Ithaca. During the voyage, Odysseus’s crew was curious about the contents of the bag. When they were finally close enough to actually see Ithaca, Odysseus fell asleep. Members of his crew opened the bag, releasing the winds, and the ship was blown disastrously off course.1
It’s not for nothing that there was an organbuilding company named Aeolian, later merged with the Skinner Organ Company to form the august firm of Aeolian-Skinner, builder of many of America’s greatest pipe organs. The Aeolian myth is the heart of the pipe organ.

§

I love wind. We live near the ocean where the wind can have the special quality of having moved unobstructed for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Sometimes it’s gentle and refreshing, sometimes it’s bracing and challenging, and sometimes it’s downright scary—but it’s always blowing and feels like a friend to me. Maybe this is a reaction to having spent thousands of hours in the deep and dark recesses of church buildings, toiling and moiling on recalcitrant machines. Leaving a building at the end of the day, I love that wonderful feeling of air moving around me. I picture the day’s dust and debris wafting from my erstwhile hair, something like Charles Schultz’s creation Pigpen, friend and confidant of Charlie Brown.
I love harnessing the wind to make a small sailboat go. With tiller in one hand and main-sheet in the other, the feeling of owning the wind—of inviting it to draw me where I want to go—is a thrill. I can see the approach of a puff—an extra burst of wind—making tracks on the water coming towards me so I can loosen the pull of the sail at just the right moment to retain control of the boat. I know the marks on the water are a little behind the leading edge of the puff so the puff actually hits my sails before the rougher water hits the hull. If I’m sailing across or into the wind, I’m aware of its power moving past me. If I’m sailing with the wind at my stern and everything’s going right, my boat moves at close to the same speed as the wind, so it seems relatively calm.
When I was kid, I learned about the principles of lift by holding my flat hand out the car window as my parents drove. If I cupped my hand a little so my knuckles were higher than the tips of my fingers, my hand would be pulled upwards. I now know that I was simulating the curved upper surface of an airplane’s wings, causing the air above my hand to move faster than the air under it. The faster moving air created a lower pressure above my hand, causing it to lift. My curved hand gave the same effect as the curve of my boat’s sails. The sails are mounted upright—so the air moving faster across the convex curves of the front of the sail draws the boat forward. The only time the wind actually pushes the boat is if the wind is from behind. Otherwise, the boat is being pulled forward by that pressure differential.
As a student at Oberlin, I was privileged to practice, study, and perform on the school’s wonderful Flentrop organ. It was brand-new for my freshman year, right in the heart of our twentieth-century Renaissance, the revival of classic styles of pipe organ building. While many of us were used to the solid wind of early twentieth-century organs, that instrument had a flexible wind supply, terrific for supporting the motion of Baroque music, but a certain trap for the inattentive organist. Approach a big chord wrong, and the sagging of the wind would remind you of the feeling you get in your stomach going over the top of a roller-coaster hill. If you played with a firm hand on the main-sheet, watching the wind like a hawk, you’d return safely to the dock boosted by your friend the wind.
I don’t do the thing with my hand out the car window any more because I’m almost always the one driving. Judging from my neighbors on many highways, I should keep my hands free for texting, flossing my teeth, or putting on makeup. But I don’t text or brush my teeth while I drive, and I never wear makeup.

§

Harnessing the wind has been a human endeavor for millennia. There are images of sailing vessels under weigh on coins dating from about 3000 BC, and by 500 BC sailing ships had two masts and could apparently carry 200 tons of freight. The Persians developed windmills for grinding grain around 500 BC. And the earliest form of the pipe organ dated from around 250 BC.
Just as wind draws a sailboat rather than pushes it, the wind itself is usually drawn instead being “blown.” Meteorologists tell us of high- and low-pressure areas. A low-pressure area represents a lighter density of air, and high-pressure air flows toward it. A “sea-breeze” is formed by convection. If a coastal area warms up in the sun around midday, the air above the land rises and cooler air from above the water flows in to take its place. So most winds are “flowing toward” rather than “blowing away.”
The motion of air that we know as wind is one of the greatest forces on earth. If a gentle wind blowing over the table on your porch can send a plate of crackers flying, think of how much aggregate force there is across ten or twenty miles of porches. You could move a lot of crackers. This might not be the place for political or social opinions—but I’d rather see windmills than strip mines. Both are bad for birds and both interrupt the landscape, but one doesn’t lead to smog or acid rain. And let’s not even mention spent nuclear fuel rods. Spent wind is fully recyclable!
Harnessing the wind is the work of the organbuilder. We create machinery that moves air, stores it under pressure, distributes it through our instruments, and lets it blow into our carefully made whistles. The energy of the moving air is transformed into sonic energy. As one mentor said to me years ago, air is the fuel we use to create organ tone. Ever wonder why a wider pipe mouth, open toe, or open windway creates louder tone? Simple—more fuel is getting to the burner.
When I sit in a church listening to a great organ, I imagine thousands of little valves flitting open and closed, and reservoirs and wind regulators absolutely tingling to release the treasure of their stored fuel into the heavens as glorious sound. They may be machines, but when they’re doing their thing during worship, they take on what seems like human urgency.

§

Wendy and I have been enjoying the use of an apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village that belongs to friends of my parents. Yesterday we went up to Midtown to attend an Easter festival service at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. We chose the early Mass at 8:00 because the church’s website assured us that the music would be the same as at the later version but the crowds would likely be less. Preludes with organ and brass started at 7:30, including music of Pelz, Howells, Gabrieli, Dupré’s Poème Héroïque, and Richard Strauss’s Feierlicher Enzug—a mighty amount of music for that hour of the day. The Mass setting was the premiere of John Scott’s Missa Dies Resurrectionis.
John Scott must be the greatest addition to American church music since electric organ blowers. His superb musicianship, immaculate sense of timing, welcoming leadership of congregational singing, touching rapport with the boys of the choir, concise and unobtrusive conducting, and by the way, marvelous organ playing made our two hours in that beautiful church as meaningful and memorable a musical experience as I can recall. The new Mass setting was gorgeous, moving from recognizable folk tunes to riffs reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen in the Sanctus. (Is it OK to say Messiaenic when describing Easter music?)
I love noticing the way the sound of an organ can change with different players. Dr. Scott was conducting for most of the Mass, and we were treated to the wonderful playing of associate organist Frederick Teardo and assistant organist Kevin Kwan. Dr. Scott slid onto the bench for the postlude, Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogué, and off we went. Oopah! It was my impression that Scott’s years at London’s cavernous St. Paul’s Cathedral prepared him to treat the magnificent sanctuary of St. Thomas Church as an intimate space. Such rhythm, such drive, such energy, such clarity. Wonderful.
And speaking of wind . . .
There were six extraordinary brass players (plus percussion), about 30 boys and 20 men in the choir (I didn’t count, so I’m probably not accurate), ten clergy and attendants, and maybe a thousand congregants. Quite a hoopla for eight in the morning. The Great Organ in the chancel has 159 ranks, and there’s a gorgeous Taylor & Boody organ in the gallery with 32 ranks. Add us all up and we were burning a lot of fuel. It’s beautiful to me to stand in the midst of all that sound, thinking of it in terms of wind.
The word inspiration has two distinct meanings: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative; and the drawing in of breath. These two meanings come together dramatically during festival Masses in our great churches.
When we worship in great churches like St. Thomas in New York, we are surrounded by opulent works of art. The reredos created by sculptor Lee Lawrie is 80 feet tall, 43 feet wide and contains more than 80 figures. (If we say it’s a 159-rank organ, do we say it’s an 80-saint reredos?) The stained-glass windows are spectacular, including a rose window of unusually deep colors that is 25 feet in diameter.
Most churches that own fancy stained-glass windows have to face expensive restoration projects at some point. The effects of air pollution corrode a window’s metal components, and simple weathering compromises a window’s structure and its ability to keep out the elements. I was maintaining the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston when the magnificent windows by John LaFarge were removed for restoration. There were more than 2,000 pieces of glass in some of those windows, and it was just as complicated to restore them as to restore a large pipe organ. And while I think there’s less that can go wrong with a reredos than with a window or a pipe organ, I’m sure that at least that great heap of saints has to be cleaned one in a while—a job that would involve the careful choice and use of cleaning solvents and solutions, a big assortment of brushes, a hundred feet of scaffolding, and a fancy insurance policy. Imagine the fiscal implications of dropping a bucket of water from 80 feet up in a place like that.
But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas Church replacing their windows or reredos. The original designs are integral with the building, and it would hardly cross our minds to say that styles have changed and we need to overhaul the visual content of our liturgical art every generation or so to keep up with the times. Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos. “It’s just too old fashioned . . . ”
We hardly bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ. Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians, and ostensibly more economically maintained.
Why is this? Simple. Windows and statues are static. They stay still. The sun shines through them and on them, air (and all that comes with it) moves around them, but physically they stay still. A pipe organ is in motion. When you turn on the blower, reservoirs fill, wind conductors are stressed by pressure, leather moves, the fabric of the instrument creaks and groans as it assumes its readiness to play. When you play a note, valves open, springs are tensioned, air flows, flecks of debris move around. When you play a piece of music, all those motions are multiplied by thousands. The Doxology (Old Hundredth) comprises 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. Play it on a single stop and you’ve moved 128 note valves, plus all the attendant primaries, magnet armatures, stop and relay switches. Play the same 32 chords on a big organ using 90 stops (nothing out of the ordinary)—11,520 valves. And that’s just the Doxology. I’ll let you do the math for a big piece by Bach or Widor that has lots of hemi-demi-semi-quavers. I suppose Wendy and I heard the St. Thomas organ play millions of notes yesterday in that 8:00 Mass. There would be another identical Mass at 11:00, an organ recital at 2:30, and Solemn Evensong at 3:00. A wicked workday for the musicians, and a fifty-million-note day for the organ. Just think of all those busy little valves—millions of tiny movements to create a majestic body of sound.
And the organ wears out. Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ, technicians move around through the instrument tuning, adjusting, and repairing. Musicians practice, tourists receive demonstrations, liturgies come and go. That organ blower gets turned on and off dozens of times each week. The daylight streams through the windows, but the daylights get beaten out of the organ.
I’ve been in and out of St. Thomas Church many times. I’ve heard plenty of brilliant organists play there, and I’ve never been disappointed by what I heard. But I’ve known for years that the chancel organ is in trouble. It has played billions of notes. It’s been rebuilt a number of times. And it’s simply worn out. It’s a rare church musician who would intentionally offer less than the best possible to the congregation—or to God—during worship. And musicians of the caliber one hears at St. Thomas are masters at getting water from stone. As an organbuilder with a trained and experienced ear, I’m aware of the organ’s shortcomings. But as a worshipper, I’m transported.

§

I single out St. Thomas Church because we worshipped there yesterday. I know those responsible for the organ, so I know something about its real condition. And prominent on the church’s website is an appeal for gifts to support the commissioning of a very expensive new organ. There were even letters from the rector and organist inserted in the Easter service booklet repeating that appeal. An elderly woman, impeccably dressed and obviously of means (she was wearing the value of a fancy car on her fingers), arrived a little after us and joined us in our pew. When the processional hymn started, she let loose a singing voice of unusual power and beauty. I whispered to Wendy, “She’ll give the new organ.” We chuckled, but a piece of me says I could have been right. I hope so.
Our church buildings are designed with expensive architectural elements. Including steeples, towers, stained-glass windows, to say nothing of Gothic arches and carvings in wood and stone, they all add mightily to the cost of building a church. But once it’s all there, we think of it as a whole. It would be hard to look back on the history of St. Thomas Church and say the tower was actually unnecessary. Of course they built a tower.
The organ is right up there on the list of expensive indulgences. How can we say we actually need such a thing? But how can we imagine Easter without it? There’s still plenty of wind available. At least there’s no fuel bill. 

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.

Did you say millions?
It’s like making sausages. You might enjoy the finished product but you don’t want to know what went into it. Each month I sit to write, often after the official deadline has passed. If I’m lucky, I start with an idea that I’ve been chewing on for the past couple days. I’ve written a few notes on the index cards I keep in my briefcase and car, maybe I’ve even recorded a couple audio notes on my cell phone as I walk the trails in the park next door. The paragraphs are flowing before I get to my desk.
More usually, I sit down and stare at a blank screen waiting for inspiration. I play a recording of organ music, trusting that I’ll agree or disagree with something I hear or that the music will bring up a thought that I can spin into an essay. I type the usual heading, and there I sit. It’s like staring at your closet wondering what to wear to dinner. If only that shirt was clean I’d be all set. I fidget. I clean my glasses, I clean the screen of my laptop, I organize the piles of paper on the desk, allowing myself to be distracted by details I’d better get done first. I change the recording and try again. (Some of you have gotten e-mails from me commenting on your recordings—e-mails written as I get traction on my subject du jour (I don’t know the French word for month!)
When I have finished writing a column, re-read it several times, and shared it with my editor-wife for her observations and input, I attach the Word.doc to an e-mail addressed to my friend Jerome Butera, tireless editor of this journal, and press <send>. Often I hear from Jerome within minutes—there’s never any waiting before I know his reaction.
E.B. White was a celebrated writer for The New Yorker magazine and award-winning writer of children’s books (Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web). Shortly after his second marriage to Katherine Sergeant Angell in 1929 (an editor at The New Yorker) he moved his family from Manhattan to a farmstead in rural Maine and continued his weekly writing for the magazine. Let me be quick to say I draw no personal comparisons to Mr. White, whose writing I admire and enjoy enough to justify periodic re-reading. But I can imagine the anguish and insecurity he felt waiting the days and weeks it took for the 1929-style U.S. postal service to get his manuscripts to New York and his editor’s responses back to Brooklin, Maine. (I know he had those feelings because he wrote about them—thank you, Jerome, for your dependable quick responses.)
Once a piece is in the hands of the editor, a new set of anxieties crops up. You know the thing about a tree falling in the forest—if there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course, we know it does—a sound wave is a physical thing that results from a transmission of energy, whether it’s a tree falling or air blowing through an organ pipe. You can’t stop physics. But it works as a rhetorical question: if no one reads what I’ve written, there’s no exchange of information. So once I’ve pressed <send> I wonder where my thoughts will wind up.

§

In mid-April this year when I wrote for the June issue of The Diapason, Wendy and I were fresh from Easter services at St. Thomas’ Church in New York. I was the one in the congregation scribbling notes on the bulletin and I knew exactly what I wanted to write. I could hardly wait to get home—but wait I did, because after a Midtown lunch we had matinee tickets for a play at the Manhattan Theater Club on East 55th Street in which the son of good friends was a cast member.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I wrote about the majesty and beauty of festival worship in that great church, about the brilliance of John Scott, St. Thomas’ organist and director of music, and about the public appeal from rector and organist for funding to support the commissioning of a (very costly) new organ. I wrote about how organs are likely to be replaced as styles change, even as organists succeed one another, and how the other artwork (reredos, windows, etc.) in places like St. Thomas’ Church is seldom changed.
This is one time that the tree made noise when it fell. Even before I received my mailed copy of the June issue, I had received e-mails and phone calls from friends commenting on what I had written, and in the next weeks Jerome forwarded two thoughtful letters he received from readers of The Diapason. Several important points were raised, and I thought it would be worthwhile to respond directly by way of continuing the conversation.
First, your assignment: re-read this column in the June 2011 issue of The Diapason.
Arthur LaMirande, concert organist from New York City, wrote:

It is with interest that I have read “In the wind . . . ” by John Bishop (The Diapason, June 2011). In particular: his remarks with regard to the Arents Memorial organ at St. Thomas Church, New York City.
Opines he: “We scarcely bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ.”
Is he serious? He goes on to say: “Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences [italics mine] of current musicians…”
He continues: “Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ . . . ” [italics mine].
Now, Mr. Bishop surely must be aware that there are hundreds of organs in Europe that are fully functioning and that have been in existence and in use for centuries! (Never mind mere decades!) Even the organ at Notre Dame, Paris, which has been rebuilt several times, contains pipes that go back to the 18th century.

I don’t think I was opining, rather simply reporting. Plenty of perfectly good pipe organs have been replaced at the urging of a newly hired organist or because the church across the green got a new and larger instrument. It’s true, Europe is rich with hundreds of venerable instruments, and we can celebrate that their artistic content and historic value is recognized, allowing them to stay in situ and in service. And there are many wonderful historic instruments in this country that have survived the ravages of innovation and fad. Equally, I know many churches where early organs by E. & G.G. Hook were replaced by new-fangled Skinners in the 1920s that were in turn replaced by “revivalist” tracker-action organs in the 1970s—a new organ every fifty years whether you need it or not. When I was starting my career, an older colleague gave me this sage advice: never build an organ for a wealthy church. You’ll put your heart into your magnum opus and they’ll replace it during your lifetime.
States Mr. LaMirande:

On May 1st this year, I gave a recital on the Arents Memorial organ at St. Thomas Church. The major work on that program was the rarely performed Chaconne by Franz Schmidt . . . For an organ that “is on the verge of catastrophic collapse” [from the brochure passed out at St. Thomas Church to which Mr. Bishop makes allusion], it seemed to work extraordinarily well for me. With the exception of one cipher on a (non-essential) stop during rehearsal, I had no problems whatever with this organ. It succeeded in doing everything that I demanded of it. And that for a massive work calling for numerous changes of registration!

We might take exception to the phrase catastrophic collapse as used by St. Thomas’ Church. After all, assuming the organ hasn’t collapsed physically into the chancel wiping out the altos in the choir, what’s the big deal if an organ ciphers? (Organists: sorry to say, but there is no such thing as an organ that will never cipher.) Mr. LaMirande experienced a cipher while practicing for his recital, usual enough for any instrument. And if an organ ciphers during worship in a suburban parish church, we might shrug and chuckle, climb the ladder to pull the pipe, and go on with the show.

Keep your pants on.
I’ve found a delightful video on YouTube showing a significant wedding faux pas in which the best man’s pants fall down just as the couple starts to exchange their vows. As you might expect, the groom found that to be pretty funny—hilarious, in fact. The bride joined in, and the church was full of real, honest laughter for quite a while. The minister was a trooper, acknowledging the humor of the situation. You can find the video at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26a8JITwImQ&gt;. You’ll love it. It’s easy to say “things happen” and enjoy the moment. There’s a nice-looking pipe organ in the church. If any of you recognize it, let me know.
But we have a fresh international example of worship and religious festival in which one would not chuckle at the slightest glitch. On April 29 many (most?) of us watched Will and Kate’s wedding. Lovely couple, weren’t they? Her dress and hair were just right. He had a nice twinkle in his eye, and I enjoyed his little quips to his brother and his new father-in-law. Good thing Prince Harry’s pants didn’t fall down. The television coverage allowed us glimpses into the personal level of the occasion. But this was a big occasion. Heads of state were omitted from the guest list because of ongoing political and military circumstances. The dignity of the nation’s royal family was on display at a time when many Brits are wondering about its future. Heaven only knows how much money was spent. If you include all that was spent by the news media in the weeks leading up to the wedding, the total certainly surpassed the gross national product of many countries. As far as we can tell, it went without a hitch. And the pressure on the staff and officials of Westminster Abbey was made obvious in another wonderful moment immortalized on YouTube when a verger expressed his relief by turning cartwheels across the nave when the whole thing was over. I know I’m giving you a lot of research to do, but don’t miss this one either: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Obpxf_pd8&gt;.

Off with his head.
The four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ in Westminster Abbey has 84 stops and was installed in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI. How’s that for pressure on the organbuilder—miss that deadline and you’re in the dungeon. Had that organ ciphered during Will and Kate’s wedding, it would have been reported all over the world. Imagine that service grinding to a halt while some technician raced to the chamber. Seventy-five chefs at Buckingham Palace would have panicked. Think of the soufflés. The Queen’s lunch would be in ruins. I wonder what Katie Couric and Barbara Walters would have said. The pipe organ universal would have a big black eye. And it would not have been a non-essential stop. There can be no doubt that it would have been the 32-foot Double Ophicleide or the Tuba Mirabilis. Vox Angelicas don’t cipher when the pressure is on, and if it had during all that hoopla no one would have noticed. There’s an apocryphal story about a team of voicers (I think they worked for Skinner) finishing an organ. The man at the console shouted, “Is the Vox Angelica on?” From the chamber, “Yes!” “Make it softer.”
While it may be okay for an organ to cipher or a participant’s pants to fall down somewhere else, it is not okay at Westminster Abbey. And St. Thomas’ Church shoulders a similar responsibility for dignity, grandeur, eloquence, and perfection, inasmuch as perfection is humanly possible. The much-altered Aeolian-Skinner organ there is not the artistic equal of the famed and fabled St. Thomas’ Choir, and while the brilliant musicians who play on it don’t miss a beat, we can only imagine what it will be like to experience worship there when the new organ is complete. The musicians there can almost taste it. And the responsibility born by the leadership and membership of that church is heightened by the simple fact that in an age when a pipe organ of average size installed in a “usual” church can cost more than a million dollars, an instrument for such a place as St. Thomas’ absolutely costs many millions.
Samuel Baker of Alexandria, Virginia wrote:

In the June issue, John Bishop suggests that perfectly good pipe organs are discarded and replaced with instruments more in tune with current trends and more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians because pipe organs are in motion, whereas windows and statues are not replaced because they are static; physically they stay still.
Despite Bishop’s claim that seldom if ever are original design elements integral to the style of the building itself subject to change because they are considered old fashioned, many examples are easily found in my neck of the woods of Federal-style churches being “Victorian-ized” or Victorian-style churches receiving neo-whatever treatments.
And certainly organs are replaced because styles of organbuilding and preferences of musicians change but, rather than ascribe the reason that windows and statues are safe but organs are not to the premise that one is in motion and the other isn’t, I would propose that many more pipe organs are replaced because they were poorly designed, built with sub-standard materials, received little or no voicing, and were wholly unsatisfactory installations in the first place. The same fate awaits stationary items of poor quality and artistic merit with equity.
I agree fully with everything Mr. Baker says here. I appreciate his interest in including these thoughts in this debate. I’ve been in and out of hundreds of church buildings (actually probably thousands, but that sounds specious) and I’ve seen countless examples of beautiful liturgical and architectural appointments that have been discarded in favor of newer, lesser “looks,” and I’ve seen less-than-thrilling original equipment replaced to great benefit. However, what I wrote (page 12, fourth column, second paragraph) is, “But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas’ Church replacing their windows or reredos.” The key word is “like.”
I wrote, “Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos.” The allusion is to the vestry and rector at St. Thomas’ Church, not the Second Congregational Church in Newcastle, Maine. On Easter Monday I was writing with tongue in cheek—but it’s fun to revisit the image. I don’t know any of them personally, and I haven’t been in their meeting rooms, but I imagine it would be an august group of accomplished, insightful, and influential people sitting at an elegant table in a grand room. And they would be stunned. Images of that reredos have been published on calendars, record jackets (remember those old black LPs?), CD jewel-cases, postcards, and publicity photos for generations. The choir, resplendent in scarlet and white, stands in the chancel with that heap of saints in the background. Replace the reredos? No, Father. It’s staying.
The Aeolian-Skinner organ was famously revised by G. Donald Harrison in 1956, converting the 1913 four-manual E. M. Skinner instrument (91 stops) from symphonic to neo-classical in style. Harrison was personally working on the project, hurrying toward completion in time for the AGO national convention that year. Taxi drivers were on strike and Harrison had to walk many blocks in city heat to get home. He died of a heart attack on the evening of June 14 (93 days after I was born) while watching Victor Borge on television. The organ has subsequently been revised several times. It’s 98 years since Ernest Skinner finished the organ, which has now been altered just about every generation with diminishing degrees of success.

When there’s so much need in the world . . .
Mr. LaMirande’s letter ends:

Incidentally, I can’t resist pointing out that while St. Thomas Church is prepared to spend the extraordinary sum of $8 million the homeless and destitute are ensconced on the front steps of this church every night of the week! . . . How many homeless and destitute could be fed, clothed, and housed for that $8 million?

This is one of the most difficult questions we face as we propose, plan, and create pipe organs for our churches. Of course, it’s the mission of the church to care for homeless, destitute people—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It’s also the mission of the church to provide and present worship experiences at every level. The Royal Wedding was cause for national and international celebration, but Oliver Twist and his cronies still haunt the back streets of London. Without the church’s need for illustration of religious texts, tenets, and principles, we would not have the sculpture or painting of Michelangelo, the organ music of Bach, the choral music of Mozart and Haydn, or the Gothic cathedrals. If it had developed at all, without the influence and resources of the church, the pipe organ would be a wholly different entity. And the majesty of our great churches as they serve as figureheads and examples for all worshipful expression supports and inspires the work of the church at all levels and in all places. Those who toil in suburban and rural vineyards travel to the big city to experience “big city” worship in “big city” buildings, just as we marvel in the great museums, theaters, orchestras, and other institutions that can only be supported in a city like New York. I care a lot about the homeless and I try to do all I can to support them, but I don’t go to St. Thomas’ Church to hear a sub-standard organ any more than I want to see plastic flowers on the altar in front of that reredos.
All this talk about expensive art leads us to the world of philanthropy. Any church that plans to acquire a new pipe organ will rely on the availability of a few large gifts to make it happen. I’ve long assumed and often witnessed that those individuals who are capable of making a major gift in support of an organ project do so because of their personal interests. But I’ve been privileged to witness another level of philanthropy that has informed and affected me deeply. Wendy served on the board of a major university for nearly twenty years. During that tenure we became friends with a lovely couple of immense wealth. They are dedicated to philanthropy—she focuses on social and humanitarian projects and he supports the arts. Their names are at the top of donor lists for every show in town. Several years ago during dinner at our house, the husband told us how a repertory theater company had approached him asking for a significant grant to support the production of a controversial play that tackled some of our thorniest social issues. He disagreed with a lot of the content and was uncomfortable with most of it, but he thought it was his responsibility to make the gift anyway. He said something to the effect of, “I knew if I gave them the money I’d have to go see the play.”
I was impressed and moved by this story, and in the years since I’ve often reflected on the nature of philanthropy and how much we all benefit from it. Whether it’s a church organ, a statue in the park honoring a public servant, an academic building, or a shelter for the homeless, the world relies on philanthropy. The trick is to be sure that all the bases are covered. 

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Paul Jacobs is no stranger to anyone who knows the organ world, and of late he is gaining exposure to a broader audience through the mass media. The subject of numerous newspaper, professional journal, and public radio interviews (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Choir and Organ, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, to name just a few), Jacobs is a musician of passionate and devoted intensity. One of the first mentions of him in these pages was as the college division prize winner of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see The Diapason, November 1998); his Messiaen Marathon performance in Chicago was chronicled by Frank Ferko in The Diapason in May 2002, and his numerous achievements and honors have often been reported here. Jacobs’ current high media profile is due in part to his position as head of the organ department at Juilliard—at age 26 he became the school’s youngest department chair ever. He has also garnered attention for his Bach and Messiaen marathons, though these certainly are serious and concentrated encounters with the music of these composers and not to be considered stunts.
A native of Washington, Pennsylvania, Paul Jacobs studied organ with George Rau, John Weaver, and Thomas Murray. His teachers attest to his intelligence, great capacity for learning, and hardy work ethic; these were noticeable even as he began his organ studies. George Rau, Jacobs’ first organ teacher, remembers that even at his first lesson, his talent was obvious; he learned very quickly, and worked very hard.
I knew that his was an extraordinary talent, and also not only that, he works harder than any musician that I know; and having the two—not only this great talent, but also this great work ethic—really, you just knew that he was going to go far.1
By age 15—when he took his first church position—he had learned much of the standard repertoire and was working on larger Bach works. Jacobs studied with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music; Weaver’s first impression noted the “security of his playing and the musicianship.” Weaver also commented that

Certainly one of his strengths was a great seriousness, which is still a hallmark of his playing, and of his personality. He really is deeply devoted to excellence in performance. What did he need to work on? Well, he was not at the top of his form in the social graces. Not that he was inappropriate, but I think he was a little nervous about conversing with people; and interacting with people was a skill that he had not developed terribly well at that point, but that he now has more than compensated for.2
At Rau’s suggestion, Jacobs began mastering early on the skill of memorization.

I would always tell him that it’s a skill that if developed now, you’ll have it for the rest of your life, and it’s a skill that you want to develop young, so that it becomes a natural part of your playing.3

Rau’s nudging to memorize was taken to heart; John Weaver elaborates:

The tradition at the Curtis Institute that goes back to the days of Lynwood Farnam and was maintained for many years by Alexander McCurdy, and I inherited and maintained, [was] that each student shall play a new piece from memory in organ class each week. And nothing like this exists any place else in the world, as far as I know. Paul wasn’t fazed by this at all. But after he’d been at Curtis, oh, perhaps six weeks or so into his first year, he came to me and said, “well, would it be all right”—he was very timid about this—“do you think it would matter, would people be upset, would it be all right if I were to play TWO pieces each week?” (laughter) And so I thought that would be just fine, and told him so, and so he did. From that time on, for the rest of his four years at Curtis, he played at least one new piece each week, plus another piece and sometimes repeating a piece from another time. Well the interesting thing is, it wasn’t very many weeks after that, one of his fellow students who’d become equally notorious in the organ world, Ken Cowan, wasn’t about to be upstaged. He started memorizing two pieces each week too! (laughter) It was quite a class—to have Paul Jacobs and Ken Cowan both studying at the same time.4

Following Curtis, Jacobs went on to study at Yale. His teacher at Yale, Thomas Murray, found Jacobs to be “a genuinely modest and seriously committed artist.” 5

Perhaps the greatest strength a musician can have is to be truly individual, and that surely describes Paul and the way he approaches everything. He identifies the music of specific composers as being the most enduring and ennobling, and then devotes himself to that music without reservation. In Paul’s case, that has meant Bach and Messiaen especially. By the time he left Yale with his Artist Diploma and Master of Music degree in 2003, he was adding Brahms and Reger to his agenda. With this as his core repertoire, he is fastidious about what he adds for “lighter music.” He knows how to popularize the organ in other ways. In fact, he was a very effective “pied piper” while at Yale, intentionally drawing large numbers of undergraduates and non-concert-going people to his programs. Much of that he does with a personal, one-to-one, friendly rapport. When he played his E. Power Biggs Memorial Recital at Harvard, for example, he calmly greeted members of the audience as they arrived! So in large measure, his approach has not been on the well-trod path of competitions or with showy music.6

Phillip Truckenbrod, whose agency manages Jacobs’ engagements, first heard of Paul Jacobs via his playing at an AGO convention and subsequently when Jacobs won the college division award of the Albert Schweitzer competition. Truckenbrod has mentioned how Jacobs has been noticed by the broader musical community, remarking that

A lot of the kudos which have come his way are not from organ sources, they’re from critics who don’t usually do much with organ, and people who have simply recognized a real talent—a talent comparable to some of the best talents in other fields of classical music. Resonating is one of the favorite words today—but he’s sort of resonating on that level.7

We wished to discover for ourselves a bit of what makes this fervent musician tick, and also to explore some of his views on the role of the organ and its music in the face of the popular culture juggernaut that challenges us all.

JR: In your very full life you have teaching at Juilliard, and recitals to play, which involve a good deal of travel. How do you balance these many demands?
PJ: I look to the life of George Frederick Handel for inspiration. Handel was not a man of leisure—he was very much married to his art. There are not enough hours in the day, and I feel obligated to my work, which is so fulfilling. Actually this ties in with my not owning a television, too. Who has the time? While I’m home visiting my mother and family in Pennsylvania, of course I do occasionally watch television. And you know, the more stations there are, the less that’s worthwhile. I actually have encouraged people to get rid of their television and get out there and live. Live deliberately!

JR: I’ve read that you first heard organ music when you were young, at church—a nun was playing and it inspired you. Prior to that, were you already listening to serious music? What sort of family culture do you come from?
PJ: Surprisingly, I do not come from a musical family, nor from a musical community, for that matter. As you know, I’m from Washington, Pennsylvania. My father is deceased; my mother is a nurse, and, while not musical herself, she did all that she could to support my fascination with music. She recognized early on that I possessed a very strong attraction to music. Even when I was three, she noticed that I would listen to classical music, or if there was a conductor on television, an orchestra concert, I was entranced. And I expressed interest at age five to study the piano. All of that led way to more serious study of music.

JR: And you began piano study when you were about six?
PJ: Yes, at six, and continued that through my first year at Curtis. Thirteen was when I began playing the organ. And I was fortunate in a relatively small town to have both a first-rate piano teacher and an organ teacher who nurtured my zeal for music and my musical education.

JR: Is that how your practice habits got a good start?
PJ: Yes, I would say so. For a young person to have strong feelings for classical music in the United States is generally not held in high regard by the young person’s peers.

JR: Indeed! I take it that you were not on three or four sports teams?
PJ: Not only that—I’m as unathletic as one could be. But you know, I didn’t really have any friends, growing up. I had difficulty, even through most of my time at Curtis, because I was an intense introvert. I’ve lightened my personality a bit over the last several years. And I don’t regret any of this, by the way—but I had no time for taking part in the banalities of life; and partying, or drinking, or just idle talk—it was of no interest to me. I would much prefer to be playing and studying beautiful music. Friday nights, even through Curtis, were spent practicing, late into the night, not out with friends. One has to become the music. You have to want it to become part of you, you have to go through an incredibly intense, rigorous lifestyle to get to this point, to earn the right to confidently express yourself.

JR: That’s a very interesting idea—that as an introvert you would bypass social opportunities, so that you could dig in deeper and express yourself publicly through music.
PJ: Oh, I think that’s absolutely the case. I think keyboardists tend to lead the most insular existences—pianists, organists, because our instruments are so complete. But the nature of being a serious musician demands a lifestyle that is centered around not only musical analysis but also self-analysis, and self-reflection—all of these things are intertwined. If one is to have a love affair, shall we say, with music, one must become as intimate with it as possible, and that demands many hours of the day—hours that could be spent doing other things with other people. I suppose it’s an abstract point, but it’s a very important point—musicians need that solitude. My solitude has always been very important to me, because it has allowed me to become very close with the art. It’s not necessarily loneliness—it can be, at times, but solitude doesn’t necessarily equal loneliness.

JR: Yes—alone is not equal to lonely. But I think of you as quite gracious. At the 2004 AGO convention you were at the door greeting people as they entered the church for your recital. That seemed very open and confident, not what I would associate with someone who was an introvert.
PJ: Yes, I feel genuinely obliged to thank people and to be gracious to them because they’re giving of themselves. Good musicians want to become vulnerable to an audience. You get out there and pour your heart and soul out, and you hope an audience will do the same: that they will allow the barriers to come down—emotional barriers, spiritual barriers, intellectual barriers, and just be there in the moment. It has to be this mutual vulnerability; everyone must be very giving and human and sensitive to what’s going on. So it’s important that the performer be approachable and not aloof. Again, I don’t think I’m contradicting myself. One can still have the solitude and not be aloof—you can still relate to people.

JR: Yes! Do you routinely greet people before a performance?
PJ: It varies, depending on how I feel. I like to, but not always. Quite frankly, oftentimes I like to take a walk—depending on where the venue is. One time, last season, the church was located in a wonderful neighborhood—it was very scenic. And I wanted to take a walk about an hour before. And—I got lost! I didn’t get back into the church until about two minutes before the concert. People were concerned!

JR: During your training years, what would be a typical amount of practice in a given day? I know you emphasize not merely the quantity but also the quality of it, but quantity needs to be there too.
PJ: Sure, absolutely, it does, and that’s an important point—you do have to have the quantity as well. I would like to get in between six to eight hours a day if I could.

JR: And I would imagine now that’s not as possible as it used to be?
PJ: It sometimes is not, that’s right, especially during the school year. However, this relates to organists, because we as organists often have to wear many hats—I should say those of us who are church musicians. One sometimes has to work with choirs, prepare music, and be an administrator, all of these sorts of things—and practice is neglected. And practice needs to be a crucial part. I might even say that practice needs to be THE crucial part of an artist’s life—a significant priority—every day, just as eating, sleeping, breathing.

JR: Prior to Curtis, were you musically active in your church or at that point were you focused on being an organist? Were you in your church choir?
PJ: Well, I actually became the organist of my home church when I was 15, and that was a very large church. The position was quite demanding; I had to play for six Masses a weekend, over 60 weddings a year—this was a parish of over 3500 families. And I had to accompany the choir; I was not the choir director, but I was there for all choir rehearsals, interacting with people much older than I was. But I loved it! I was in my element.

JR: Did you also have a church job in New York?
PJ: I did. And I still do. I was organist and choirmaster at Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church for two years; however, I became artist in residence beginning in the fall, mainly because I’m seldom there due to my performance schedule. I’m very fond of the people there, though, and I very much enjoy playing for services; it just is something I’m unable to do regularly. Being artist in residence and playing a few times a year seems to work well.

JR: You have done Bach and Messiaen marathons. What made you want to play their entire works for organ?
PJ: I see Bach and Messiaen as perhaps two incomparable composers for the organ. They also happen to be perhaps two of the most overtly religious composers in Western history, if you think about it. That has always been an enormous source of stimulation, and that element alone has attracted me to their music. Then on a purely compositional level they are two of the greatest composers to have lived—every note of Bach and Messiaen is in its proper place. They never waste a note; it’s music that is perfectly crafted. It is music that is as close to God as we could possibly experience in this life, and I wanted to become intimate with as much of it as I could—and that meant the entire canons of these composers.

JR: You have said that you like to just enjoy nature. That makes me think of Messiaen—what an amazing mind there, so far-reaching: Greek music, Indian modes, birdsong, other sounds in nature, that play into his concept of music. Do you incorporate any of this into your approach to Messiaen’s music?

PJ: Very much! Messiaen had the soul of a poet, there’s no question about that. And we as musicians need to have this insatiable desire, to be drawn to beauty. It’s not enough to sit down and play the organ well—and then go about life. Playing music should be an end in itself, not a means to an end. When I sit at the organ and play the Book of the Blessed Sacrament of Messiaen, the Livre du Saint Sacrement, it’s the end of the world, in the most glorious sense. One forgets about time, one forgets about all of these things—and there’s a purity of nature, a reality. As much as I adore the culture of the city, it’s artificial, on one level, because it’s all man-made. But nature is made directly by God.
You know, I did recently take one day off to go to Valley Forge Park, which I adore, and just walk and hike up the mountains and through the fields and into the woods. And it was balmy and humid and hot and quite cloudy as well. About halfway along my walk, the heavens opened up, and it started to pour. I didn’t have an umbrella, and I got soaked; but it wasn’t long before I realized that this is something to relish! It wasn’t a thunderstorm, I wasn’t in any danger of being struck by lightning; but just being showered upon, it was actually very wonderful; it was a beautiful experience. I always have a deep yearning to spend time in nature; that never ends.
Recently I was in Australia. I encountered some glorious birds and birdsong—in particular, on one SPECTACULAR occasion, I confronted a lyre-bird. My first introduction to the lyre-bird was through Messiaen’s symphonic work, Illuminations of the Beyond, the Éclairs sur l’au-delà. It’s the third movement that’s called “The Superb Lyre-Bird.” I was taking a walk with two of my hosts in a wooded area outside of Sydney; to encounter this lyre-bird, that inspired Messiaen, was an immensely moving experience.

JR: What are you working on now in terms of adding to your repertoire? What would you like to focus on in the future?
PJ: Even though I haven’t programmed much German Romantic repertoire—Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann—in the last few months, it’s music of the highest quality. I have become quite attracted to Reger’s music. I think that it is sorely underestimated, because it is difficult, not only for the player, but sometimes for the audience, and even music historians. It’s difficult to comprehend technically and musically, and it’s often played in a heavy-handed way that can make it unattractive, and this need not be the case.
I have broad interests in music—I play contemporary art music. I do have an interest in 20th-century music, not just with Messiaen, but also Hindemith, Langlais, Duruflé, Alain, and others. It is also important to support the creative spirit of contemporary times and I intend to commission works from several modern composers. I also delight in music earlier than Bach—Buxtehude, Couperin, De Grigny—exquisite music! I rejoice in playing the whole canon of the organ repertory. I would never want to be labeled a specialist; my interests are too extensive for that. I savor the ability to play a vast array of music.

JR: Do you read about the composers whose music you play? What do you do besides study scores?
PJ: Absolutely. Attempting to understand the personality behind the music is fascinating and illuminating. You want to understand everything you can about what you’re pursuing, not just sit down and crank out notes.

JR: Yes, and if you can understand the person and their time, it really helps shed light on the music, or the music shed light on the time.
PJ: That’s right! And not necessarily in a stylistic sense, although it can sometimes. I’m revisiting some older repertoire now, and I think I’m going to program some Franck this season or next. One of the first pieces I learned was the Prelude, Fugue and Variation—it’s a gorgeous work. And I might do some different things; I’m conceiving of the piece in a different way, perhaps with some different articulations, colors and sounds. If one were playing a Cavaillé-Coll, one could follow exactly what Franck indicated, and it’s wonderful. But there’s nothing wrong, too, with developing a different, even unorthodox concept of a piece, as long as the playing is expressive and compelling. That’s really the ultimate goal—it’s not about right and wrong, or what one should or shouldn’t do. Rule No. 1 is to MOVE the listener, and if the subsequent rules need to be broken to serve this first rule, so be it.

JR: How do you prepare a piece? Do you have any specific practice techniques? Transferring your knowledge of how to play on one instrument to another, in a very short span of time—is there anything specific you do?
PJ: Well, one needs to sleep with the score. That is to say, you need to study it away from the keyboard. Know it inside and out—live with the music. Understand what the music means on spiritual levels, philosophical levels, aesthetic levels—one needs to be able to look at music in so many ways. I do a lot of work at the piano, particularly much of the preliminary work—phrasing, or learning notes, things such as that. And sometimes one can discover new ideas about how to interpret a piece on a different instrument, then transfer those concepts to the other instrument. And one isn’t distracted, too, by all of the gadgets on the organ. When sitting at a piano or harpsichord, any instrument is sparse compared to the pipe organ. I think it is easier to focus with the piano or the harpsichord than it is with the organ, because there’s so much to consider: not only notes, but also registration, and all the other technical and mechanical aspects.

JR: But at some point, the organ’s gadgets will require your attention. How do you memorize registrational changes on an unfamiliar instrument, when you have very little time? How do you remember that on this instrument “I need to hit the Great to Pedal toe stud” and on the next instrument there is none? How do you remember all the mechanics, since you don’t use a registrant?
PJ: Well, that’s a bit of an enigma to me. Obviously, I become familiar with the instrument before the concert—then I associate the sound with my muscles—I don’t really know!
It MIGHT BE a little bit psychological, particularly if you can memorize notes. I find that students can usually do far more than they think they can. There are teachers who unintentionally beat students down, even intimidate, and have them frightened to take risks or challenges, or be creative, but I try to pull out the potential of students. Nothing is more rewarding than when they’re surprised about what they CAN do—for instance, memorization. I have some students who say, “Oh, I just can’t memorize,” and some students that it comes easy to. Well, there are ways to work at this—there aren’t short cuts, it’s difficult—but there are ways that one can improve.

JR: I remember being told that you have to practice the button-pushing as much as the key-pressing.
PJ: I focus with students on playing the organ beautifully. Not only the music, but the instrument, the console. You watch pianists or violinists—the grace with which they play! And many organists sit up there looking rather rigid and stiff. Particularly with consoles that are more visible these days, we have to physically be confident when we play. We don’t want to be overwhelmed by the organ, we want to be in perfect alignment with it. And you’re right—the idea of practicing pushing pistons, and pushing them at the right time—these technical things have to be practiced. But when you actually play them, you want the timing to be musical. You want to push them gracefully. All of these things have to serve the music; they can’t just be technical exercises.

JR: You spoke of people who are stiff sitting at the organ. Have you ever had a problem with muscle tension?
PJ: Well, I haven’t, other than maybe practicing. When one does a lot of practicing, fatigue can set in, muscles can become a little sore. There are organists who think that you have to sit completely still, that you have to be able to balance a glass of milk on your hand, you don’t want any unnecessary movements. Well, some people are naturally quieter at the console, and some people are a little freer, they move more. And that’s ok! You have to do what is comfortable.
Certainly with beginners you have to be very careful about extraneous motion and movement. At a more advanced stage, you develop your own musical personality, and your physical personality when you’re playing, and it’s ok to move. Just move the body! Just as long as you’re relaxed. And if being relaxed means being still, so be it. If it means moving, that’s fine too. But there are many organists that sit almost as if they’re frightened to move, they’re intimidated by pushing buttons, making sure everything’s right on. If you don’t revel in what you’re doing, if the technical demands of playing the organ are overwhelming you, you won’t enjoy it. And you need to enjoy! It seems so obvious and logical—you need to not only musically and mentally enjoy the music, but you need to physically enjoy the music while you’re playing. There’s nothing wrong with that.

JR: Our culture trivializes music—for the most part, it’s considered background noise, playing while one does something else. People prefer music that is short, simply constructed, and any melody must be very simple and accessible. Given this, how can we as organists reach people? Schools are eliminating music instruction; serious organ music is scarcer in churches—there are a lot of organists who can’t play it, or won’t; and fewer people are going to church. So the opportunities for exposure to things like Bach and Messiaen are fewer and fewer. How do we react to that? What can we do?
PJ: Anyone who says that he or she cares about music or values it has an obligation to take action. And what I have found is that many people do acknowledge these problems—at least those of us who play music and listen to music. So what is the next step? I see most of popular culture as extremely corrosive to what we try to accomplish as musicians. And I think we organists first need to put ourselves in a larger context, and start thinking in broader terms. I do find that our profession is far too isolated. We organists need to get out of the loft and listen to operas, listen to chamber music, go to hear the symphony—we need music, in all of its manifestations. It is, however, possible to really like music and to be intrigued by it at a high level, without being passionate about it. Those of us who are passionate about music need to challenge those who are merely intrigued by it, to make them even more sensitive. This is what we have to do: build an army of individuals who possess an unwavering commitment to the creation of a musically literate society.
Popular culture is extremely destructive to beauty because it serves the opposite purpose of what true music and art serve—and that is, it numbs us. Because music is in the background and not the foreground, one is not expected to listen to it with this full spirit, being, mind—whatever term you wish to use. And that essentially desensitizes. Art music is supposed to make one more sensitive to beauty and life. That is to say, we learn how to listen carefully and deliberately—for there are so many alluring details in the music that desire our full undivided attention.

JR: If we say we care, then we have an obligation to take action.
PJ: And that is to say, to challenge the culture. I see my obligation as an artist—I should say, one facet—is to challenge aggressively this corrosive popular culture. What does that mean? Write letters to newspapers and other organizations, make noise about what you do. If you care, do you care enough to share what you profess to care about? Do you want to share it with someone else? If we value something, and we see the good in something, isn’t it logical to want to share it? I’ve become dismayed because I see quite clearly the enormous potential of a society which truly values music—the potential is there, and we see it on an individual level; we see what happens when a young person discovers the power of music in a very real and profound way. It’s something to celebrate. I have NO faith in the popular culture, but I have boundless faith at the individual level. I think that keeps me going, keeps me inspired, and wanting to continue living.

JR: Well, all right. If an audience member heard a serious program, and wasn’t used to that, how would you respond if they said they wanted to hear something that was easier to listen to?
PJ: Well, I would have a conversation with that person, first of all. I would be very patient initially. If the person said “I don’t understand that,” or “I don’t appreciate that,” that’s a fair statement, and it’s not making a judgment. It’s even fair to say “I don’t care for that.” But judging something that you don’t understand isn’t fair, and I guess I would attempt to help the person see this.
I remember having an interview for NPR’s Morning Edition, last year before my Messiaen program. And it was very clear to me that the person who interviewed me did very little preparation for the interview. I think she knew practically nothing about the organ, knew even less about the composer. And she said to me, “There are those who don’t like the organ. I’m wondering what you might say to that.” And my feeling was, you know, we live in a culture that sits back and says, “Prove to me that this is worthwhile”—that X is worthwhile, or that this has value, or that I should do this. Prove to me, show me—and they don’t take any initiative. And my feeling is, pick up a book yourself and read. Or take an organ or piano lesson. YOU have to take some initiative. You’re right, we’re so used to diluting everything these days. I find it troubling that many organists don’t seem to possess this zeal, this call to action. They possess it at some level, there’s some awareness of it, but it doesn’t determine their behavior, or their actions, or their everyday conversations with people, I don’t know how else to say it. There’s no fire in the belly—there has to be.

JR: You mentioned that we organists need to get out and listen to other musical forms, such as the symphony. What other music do you listen to?
PJ: We could be here all night! I will say quite clearly, I do not listen to popular entertainment. I have no interest in that sort of thing. I see that as corrosive, and as an artist and a musician, I feel obligated to challenge what our culture accepts as music. What do I listen to? I listen to six centuries of music—from plainchant and Ockeghem through Dallapiccola and Debussy. Recently, I’ve been listening a great deal to Mozart, perhaps more than I ever have in my life—specifically to the piano concerti and the sonatas. This summer I’ve rediscovered this music—specifically Ashkenazy playing the piano concerti, DeLarrocha the sonatas. And I’m very fond of the great Romantic repertoire—Mahler’s symphonies, Verdi’s operas, and Brahms’s chamber music. In the twentieth century, I find Alban Berg’s music quite voluptuous. But yes, I have very broad tastes, with the exception that I’m not fond of most popular music. I maintain that Western art music is the pinnacle. But of course, that would be challenged by more and more people today.

JR: During your time at Yale and at Curtis, what were you able to learn? I have the feeling that you were already technically skilled by the time you got to Curtis, so you didn’t need to work on technique. Is that correct?
PJ: No, not really. Certainly I would consider registration part of technique. That was something that I learned a great deal from both John Weaver and Thomas Murray—with regards to console control, and how to bring out the best from an instrument. Both John Weaver and Thomas Murray allowed me to be my own musical voice; they didn’t try to impose their own style upon me. And that is something that I have taken from them, and applied to my own style of teaching. I’m very grateful to both of them.

JR: How are you enjoying teaching at Juilliard?
PJ: Very much. And I should add that with the current situations of schools—such as Northwestern and of course the New England Conservatory—the situation at Juilliard could not be any better. The president of Juilliard, Joseph Polisi, has been extremely supportive of my vision for the department. And the talent that exists in the department is formidable. During a visit last year to organ class, Michael Barone referred to the department as a “hot shop!”

JR: You have indicated that the department would not really be growing in numbers, that it would be limited to a certain size. Is that correct?
PJ: It fits in with the school, because the school itself is small. Juilliard prides itself on being a small school, and our department is the size of some of the wind departments—flute, oboe—relatively similar in size. Ten organ majors is generally a good number for the Juilliard community. It could be bumped up a little, I suppose, and it might be, but not much.

JR: Do you find any difference either in outlook or ability or approaches between your students and those that you work with in master classes?
PJ: With master classes, one can be all over the map; there’s such variety. One thing that I insist on with each of my students is that they develop their own musical signature, right from the start. We don’t want any clones in the department—and there are none. I think if one visits the school and hears the department play, one will encounter rich variety and imagination in playing and in styles. And I encourage this—I insist upon it. I believe that a teacher at Juilliard needs to be quite demanding with the students, but the students are highly motivated and always rise to the occasion. I’m very proud of them.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned? Any more marathons, any more things of that nature?
PJ: I performed the Messiaen cycle again in Los Angeles, at the end of October, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels. But with regards to something different, I look forward to pursuing new repertoire. Actually I am considering offering a Reger marathon, a Reger cycle—but not in the immediate future!

JR: Will you be making any more recordings?
PJ: Oh, yes, yes! I’ve neglected recording, simply because of other projects and such. But I am very keen on recording Messiaen and Reger in the near future.
I want to concentrate on other things right now, these being performing and certainly learning other repertoire. The snowball keeps growing larger, but I love it. This work provides such joy and fulfillment in my life, and meaning.

JR: Well, Paul, I will let you go get a cup of tea! Thank you so much for your time.
PJ: It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Timelessness
I’ve had some nice experiences with older things in the last few days. This morning (it’s Tuesday) I saw a 1912 Cadillac on Main Street. Yesterday I tuned an organ built in 1928 by the Skinner Organ Company and made a quick service call on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1870 (#529). On Sunday my wife and I attended a recital played on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1868 (#466). And on Saturday, a colleague and I visited a restored narrow-gauge steam railway.
I’m writing on a Dell laptop that must be about 20 months old. Now that’s old. Funny how a laptop can be more rickety than a pipe organ built 140 years ago.
The Cadillac is a great-looking car (see photo). The paint job was vibrant, the leather seats had a distinctive luxurious smell, the chrome was polished, and the whole thing looked perfectly elegant. The engine ran smoothly, and the car drove regally down the street attracting attention from every direction. The owner has clearly invested a terrific amount of effort, knowledge, and money to make it look and run so beautifully, and I admire the passion behind the preservation of such an elegant artifact.
But the car had a simple cloth roof and it didn’t look as though the windows would achieve a very tight seal when closed. The windshield doesn’t completely separate the car’s interior from the wind, rain, or insects. The tires are thin and the wheels are made of wood. At the risk of offending those who have toiled and moiled preserving antique automobiles, I prefer modern cars for everyday use. I appreciate the fact that the windows of my car really close so I can choose between having the wind in my erstwhile hair and having the option to use the heater or air conditioner depending on the weather. I like the automatic transmission, the electric windows, the radio and CD player, and the cup holders. I like the windshield squirter and the multiple-speed windshield wipers. It snows a lot where we live. The large tires and four-wheel drive add a lot to our safety in the winter. And anti-lock brakes and air bags were both wonderful innovations, making cars much safer. I don’t think I’d like having to rely on a car made in 1912 the next time I have to spend a day driving in the rain. The modern car is better.
§
My friend Patrick Murphy is proprietor of Patrick J. Murphy & Associates, organbuilders in Stowe, Pennsylvania. His company has produced many fine new instruments, and has renovated or restored a long list of both mechanical and electro-pneumatic organs. Take a look at <www.pjmorgans.com&gt;. He is also a train buff. He’s interested and knowledgeable in the history and operation of railroads, and he owns model trains that run on live steam. Patrick and his wife Les spent last weekend with us in Maine, and while “the wives” found something else to do, Pat and I visited the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railway in Alna, Maine (see photo: WW&F).

The WW&F had roots from the 1830s and was fully established in 1894 as a two-foot gauge railroad. In the world of trains, the gauge is the distance between the rails. Modern railroads have a standard gauge of four feet, eight-and-a-half inches (4′ 8.5″). Strange number, isn’t it? It turns out that early American trains were patterned after English trains of the early eighteenth century. Those were built using the same jigs and tools used to make carts and carriages. The width of the carriages was intended to stay consistent with the width of ancient roads so their wheels would not be worn out by ruts of different widths. So who came up with that measurement in the first place? The horsemen of ancient Rome, who else? Four feet, eight-and-a-half inches was the standard width of a Roman chariot, wide enough to accommodate the rear end of a Roman war horse. Next time you see a modern train roll by, think of Charlton Heston in a toga!
Narrow-gauge tracks are less expensive to build than those for full-sized trains, especially considering the rough terrain of rural Maine, and the curves in the tracks can be tighter, but the trains themselves are small so they have less capacity for passengers and freight. The WW&F stopped operating in 1937. Most of the rolling stock was scrapped and the rails were torn up. The land that formed the right-of-way stayed in the ownership of Frank Winter, the last president of the railway. In 1940, he transferred ownership of the land to the Winter Scientific Institutes, a company he formed for the purpose of avoiding the taxes on the land. And in 1985, Harry Percival of Alna, Maine purchased most of the land. It was his vision to restore the railroad as a museum.1
To tell an extraordinary story in a few sentences, a non-profit corporation was formed, a large membership of volunteers assembled, and today there are about two-and-a-half miles of track re-laid by hand on the old rail bed. They have acquired two historic steam locomotives, one that is operational that came from another two-foot railroad, the other originally owned by the WW&F, currently being restored on the premises. The enthusiasm and quality of workmanship of these volunteers is displayed regularly when the museum is open. A modest admission fee gets you a ride on a steam-powered train and a tour of the workshops and museum. I recommend this to anyone traveling along Route 1 in Lincoln County, Maine. Visit their website at <www.wwfry.org&gt;.
This is testament to the vision of one man and the enthusiasm of hundreds more. But while this tiny train is fun to ride, I’d hate to have to rely on it to get from Farmington to Wiscasset, Maine in February. It would be a long, noisy, cold, uncomfortable ride. Your eyes are filled with smoke and cinders, and the seats in the passenger coach are pretty small (see photo: John and Pat).

The photo shows Patrick and me joining the engineer and fireman on board. I had the sense we might be too much for the thing! And I learned that one of the hazards of operating such small railroad equipment was that the weight of the water (to be converted to steam) carried in the tender behind the locomotive was sufficient to derail the train if the engineer took a corner too fast. The modern train is better.
§
Let’s compare the organs that I’ve seen and heard in the last few days. In 1868 and 1870, Elias and George Hook were building tracker-action organs, logical enough because electricity was not to be available for decades more. (Thomas Edison first equipped the Manhattan home of J. P. Morgan with 250 electric lights on Thursday, June 8, 1882.2) Ernest Skinner was committed to the use of direct-current electricity to operate the actions of his organs by about 1904.
The two Hook organs are pretty similar (see photo: Hook #466). Opus 529 has a Great Trumpet and a Swell 2′ stop not found in Opus 466—otherwise the stoplists are identical. The voicing is brilliant and clear, and the cases are made of black walnut. The sharp keys of Opus 466 are higher and wider than those of Opus 529, as if the builders realized that they were uncomfortable to the player and changed them in the intervening two years. Both of these organs have been renovated and are in terrific playing condition (see photo: Hook #529).
The Skinner organ is about 60 years newer than those Hook organs, but 80 years qualifies it as old. It has the symphonic voicing characteristic of Mr. Skinner’s vision. Many organists agree that the sharp keys on Skinner keyboards are as comfortable as any to the player. There’s a simple combination action, a concave-radiating pedalboard, and Skinner’s very effective eight-stage whiffle-tree engine.
(Here’s our second allusion to horses—a whiffle-tree is the rig used to connect a team of horses to a carriage that allows each horse to pull independently while the horsepower of all of them is added together. Mr. Skinner’s Swell engine incorporates the whiffle-tree concept to allow the pneumatic for each stage to move the shutters independently, with the motion of all pneumatics combining to provide the full range of power and motion of the shutters. Skinner made these motors in eight- and sixteen-stage versions.)
While the Hook and Skinner organs are very different, they have in common an essential element: all three of these organs are absolutely vital and appropriate for modern use. While you can say a modern organ is different, you cannot say that it’s better. Automobiles and railroad trains have been improved immeasurably over the years, but a pipe organ that’s 80 or even 140 years old is an organ for today. It’s timeless.
It’s amazing that you can play music written a year or two ago on an organ built just after the Civil War. How did the brothers Hook conceive of instruments that would be so useful now? Did Mr. Skinner know that his organs would sound good to people living and working in the twenty-first century? (Actually, from what I’ve read about him, he may have thought that his organs would be the only instruments worth playing in the twenty-first century!)
Many modern organists prefer to play instruments festooned with lots of electric and solid-state gadgets. Pistons and toe-studs with sequencers and multiple memories, transposers, and programmable crescendos are the playthings of the modern organist. There’s no question that gear like that allows ever more flexibility of registration, and after all, registration is one of the organist’s most important expressive tools; but the three organs I’m thinking about today all have fewer than 20 ranks and each of them are easily and effectively played without sophisticated modern controls.
And by the way, these three organs are within three miles of each other in Medford, Arlington, and Lexington, Massachusetts. Let me know when you’re coming to the area and I’ll organize your visit. You history buffs will be interested to know that the addresses of these churches (High Street in Medford and Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington and Lexington) are all on the route of Paul Revere’s famous ride on April 18, 1775 (Mozart was nineteen years old), warning the militias of towns in Middlesex County of the approach of the British soldiers (“Redcoats”) in the hours before the start of America’s Revolutionary War. Your visit could include a whole range of historical interest.
I’m especially fond of an historical marker in Arlington Center that tells of an 80-year-old patriot who killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775: “. . . He was shot bayoneted beaten and left for dead, but recovered and lived to be 98 years of age” (see photo: Samuel Whittemore).
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It may not make much sense to compare the timelessness of a work of art with the advance of technology. The usefulness of a modern automobile is relevant to today’s conditions. We expect to be able to drive at 70 miles per hour for hours without stopping, no matter what the weather. But we look at a Renaissance painting and appreciate its content and composition as well as the technique and vision of the artist, even if we could produce a more authentic image of the same scene with our 8.0-megapixel digital camera.
I believe that advanced technology has generally added to our world. I’m pleased with the BlackBerry that allows me to check e-mails in a taxicab. While I’m annoyed by people who use their cell phones rudely, I sure find it a convenience to have one when I’m traveling. (Maybe rude people will be rude no matter what equipment they have.) But I believe the advance of technology in the world of the organ has led to the compromise of authenticity. Solid-state switching has added much to the art of organ playing, but in my opinion, digital sound has not. The majesty of air-powered sound in a large building or the intimacy of air-powered sound in a small room is not improved upon with digital reproduction. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the specifications of a 100-stop organ in a 100-seat room. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the pitch produced by a 32-foot pipe in a room with a 15-foot ceiling. And it is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to have an antiphonal organ with Trompettes-en-chamade in a room with a 50-foot center aisle. A bride can walk that far in about eight measures of Purcell—why make such a racket?
Digital instruments are often purchased by small churches whose members claim there’s no space for an organ. But these churches are typically trying to get a large three-manual organ into their small room. Of course there’s not enough room. A room that seats 100 people needs an organ of eight stops. Don’t tell me you can’t play Widor on an eight-stop organ. I know that. I don’t want to hear Widor in a 100-seat room.
Funny, I don’t mind rolling up the windows of the car, turning on the air-conditioner, and enjoying a cup of coffee while listening to Widor played on Widor’s organ at full volume. Keeps me off the phone!■