In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User Interface
In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, wrote about the special relationship a violinist has with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
(Regular readers here will no doubt recognize this quote, as I cited it in the July 2007 edition of this column.)
This is a beautiful image of an artist inseparably entwined with his instrument. Any thoughtful and caring musician would wish to have that kind of relationship. But Mr. Steinhardt doesn’t want to share his thrall. He continues,

    Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the timpani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say.

As I pointed out last July, the bassoonist puts the instrument in his mouth. You don’t get more personal than that. While at first read Mr. Steinhardt’s affair with his instrument is beguiling, when I think about it a little, it takes on an elitist sense that is less attractive. I’ve never been a fan of claims that one instrument is more difficult to play than another, or that one is in any sense better than another. While it’s okay for a musician to feel a little chauvinism, each instrument has its place in the rainbow of musical sound, and each has technical challenges for the player to overcome if there is to be true music-making, true art, unfettered by physical limitations.
A timpanist has just as personal a relationship with his instrument as the violinist. The orchestral timpanist caresses the skin of his instrument, puts his ear to it, fiddles with the screws that adjust the pressure of the head so the sound will be perfect when he raises its thunder at the behest of the conductor. A modern orchestral hall is likely to include a special work station for the timpanist with equipment for soaking and preparing the skins, analogous to the “reed room” reserved for those who play and fiddle with the instruments with single and double reeds.
Besides the range of technical challenges facing musicians, there are also intellectual and spiritual challenges. We get used to an instrument, learning its strengths and weaknesses, learning how to make it project best to the listeners, learning how to mold it around the music we are playing. Organists must not only master the instrument, but also the relationship of the instrument to the room. The pipe organ is a spatial instrument, one that relies on its room for resonance and projection, as well as physical beauty. And the keyboards are the connection between the instrument and the player.
User interface is a phrase recently added to our lexicon. We never thought of the steering wheel of a car as a user interface, or the tiller of a boat, the handle of a shovel, or the knobs of a radio. But as soon as computers became everyday devices, user interfaces became ubiquitous.
Our keyboards and pedalboards are the user interfaces of the organ.
I’ve made thousands of service calls in 35 years of caring for organs, and I’ve learned to notice a lot about organ consoles—especially as they reflect the habits and preferences of the local organists. Many are obvious. In churches where I’ve cared for organs for many years, I know what kind of candy or cough drops the organist prefers. Some have remarkably consistent habits over decades, the sounds echoing endlessly over those hallowed (cherry) Halls. The organist who is particular about his fingernails keeps a nail clipper next to the keyboards. Some organists are paper clip junkies—the hymnals are loaded with them, and the floor under the pedalboard is littered with them. When such an organist calls to report that two adjacent keys are sticking, I know instantly that there’s a paper clip caught between them. One organist I knew actively hated paper clips and was abusive in his comments about people who rely on them. “They make such a mess of the hymnal.”
I know which organists put sugar in their coffee—it’s unmistakable in the spills on the pedal keys, spills that are often the cause of dead notes in the pedals as the sugar retains dust that fouls the contacts.
But some of the local organists’ habits and preferences are subtler. I notice that many organists have what I call a “home key.” When sitting down to try a new instrument, they play five-note scales up and down or chords in their home key. If that organist has played on the same instrument for many years, you can see signs of the home key in the way the console is worn. That home key is usually C major. But one organist I know is focused on G, a fact made obvious by the wear of the pedal keys.
It happens that many of my favorite pieces are in E-flat and B-flat major and in F minor. Does that mean that the tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant notes of those keys are more worn on instruments I play frequently? Notice the notes that are common between those keys. I suppose I’m inclined to play the tonic and dominant notes with more élan—and I suppose that end-of-the-piece flourish wears the notes more than an everyday scale.
It’s only the most sophisticated and innovative organists who wear the top eight notes of the pedalboard as much as the bottom eight.
The Organ Clearing House is working on the relocation of a 90-year-old Casavant organ, and yesterday I took the manual keyboards to the workshop of a colleague who specializes in renovating and restoring keyboards. He produces much of the cow bone that is used in keyboards around the world, obtaining animal “quarters” from slaughterhouses, boiling and bleaching the bones, and milling them into eighth-inch-thick blanks to be turned into key surfaces. He sells some of the finished bone to those who make keyboards, and uses the rest of it in his own restoration projects. His workmanship is much sought after. Keyboards are pretty much all he does. There are keyboards everywhere in his shop, and the ambient smell is reminiscent of the dentist drilling out a cavity in your tooth.
So we talked about keyboards. He made interesting comments about how keyboards wear, mentioning as an example that the accompaniment manual on a theatre organ is likely to be especially worn in the tenor octave. We talked about pitfalls of keyboard construction—where a sharp edge or corner is liable to injure a player’s fingers. (Once playing on a new organ, I cut a finger seriously enough that I had to leave the console to find a bandage in the middle of a service.) We talked about how different materials used for the playing surfaces absorb moisture more easily. An organist with naturally oily skin will be less comfortable playing on plastic keys than on bone or ivory. And the keyboards played by an organist with naturally oily skin get dirtier faster. This is not a criticism, just an observation.
There is huge variety in the design, size, style, and feel of pipe organ keyboards. As a student at Oberlin, I often practiced on a tiny three-stop “practice machine” built by John Brombaugh. The keyboards were smaller than what I was otherwise used to. The distance between the front of the naturals and the front of the sharps seemed impossibly tiny. The edges and corners of both naturals and sharps were keen—not so as to be dangerous, but so as to be obviously different from other styles. The tracker action was precise—you might say horribly precise—the “pluck” of the keys was both distinct and delicate. While intellectually I know that “pluck” is caused by resistance of the wind pressure against the pallet with the unmistakable little “whoosh” you feel when the air rushes around the released pallet and essentially blows it open, as I play I feel it as a physical click. These characteristics of that practice organ provided a terrific pedagogic medium. The keyboards demanded exact accuracy. If you were in the least way unintentional, the notes came in clusters instead of chords and scales. If you could play a passage musically and accurately (are the two separable?) on that instrument, you could play it anywhere. Reminds me of the legend of Abraham Lincoln practicing oration with pebbles in mouth.
That’s a wonderful way for a keyboard to feel, and wildly different from the keyboards of an elegant electro-pneumatic instrument. Organs built by Ernest Skinner have terrific keyboards. They have large, even gracious playing surfaces. Sharp keys are tapered front to back, allowing plenty of space for piston buttons without having the distance between the keyboards be too great. There is a carefully constructed and regulated “pluck” known affectionately as “tracker touch.” This is created by a spring that toggles as the key travels down and up, producing an accurate and subtle “click” in the motion of the key.
In the Skinner keyboard, the pluck is mechanically unrelated to the making of the contact—the function that actually makes the organ note play—but it’s essential that the keyboard be adjusted and regulated so that the relationship between the pluck and the action point is consistent from note to note. If it’s not, your carefully issued scale cannot possibly be even.
Keyboards can be decorated with lines scored in the surfaces or polished to smooth perfection. They can have light-colored naturals and dark-colored sharps, or the reverse. The playing surfaces are typically made of exotic materials—cow bone, ivory, ebony, boxwood, fruit wood (pear is especially nice)—because of the qualities of hardness and stability that is consistent with tight and close grain. It’s amazing to think that the amount of friction that can develop between human fingers and a hard surface like ivory or ebony can cause wear, but anyone who has played on an organ that’s been used frequently over 30 or 40 years is familiar with the “dips” worn in the keys. It’s especially common in the “hymnal” range of an organ keyboard, cº–c2. In my experience, organs in seminary chapels are the most heavily used—it would be usual for there to be two or three services each day—and there I’ve seen holes worn right through the ivory key covering. And once you’ve worn through the ivory, you tear through the wood very quickly and the edges of the ivory around the hole are as sharp as knives.
Keyboards are typically made of soft, straight-grained wood—spruce and basswood are favorites. Boards are glued together to make a “blank,” a solid panel the width of the keyboard. The boards should be chosen as “slab” grain—when you look at the ends of the boards, you see that the wood is cut so the lines of the growth rings are parallel with the tops of the keys, not the sides. As wood warps away from the center of the tree, keys made with slab grain wood can only warp up and down, not side to side. Such warping affects the regulation of keyboard springs and contacts, but makes it impossible for the keys to warp into one another and bind. This matters.
The keyboard frame comprises two “key cheeks” (the side rails of the frame that protrude to form the ends of the keyboards), and usually a front guide rail and a balance rail. The keyboard blank is fitted to the frame. The layout of the keys is drawn on the board, and the positions for guide and balance pins are marked. The holes for the pins are drilled through both blank and frame. Some craftsmen drill the balance pin holes through the top of the keyboard blank and into the frame, then drill the guide pin holes through the bottom of the frame into the bottom of the keyboard blank. This keeps the guide pin holes from going through the top of the key where you would most likely be able to see a hint of them through the keyboard covering. The surfaces of the naturals are glued on the blanks, sanded flat and given a round of polishing, the keys are cut apart, the sharps are glued on, and everything is polished. Sounds simple? Trying putting wet glue between an ebony sharp and a basswood key body and then tightening a clamp to help the glue set. The glue acts as a lubricant and the ebony sharp slides sideways. Many hours of filing, fitting, buffing, regulating, and adjusting complete the picture.
A well-made keyboard is a work of art, a vehicle for the relationship between the player and the instrument. It should feel familiar and welcoming under one’s hands, and should provide smooth, accurate, and flawless response whether the instrument has mechanical or electric keyboard action.
Take care of your keyboards. When I tune your organ I can tell how serious you are by how you keep the console. Is your console a combination between desk and boudoir, loaded with personal googahs and enough office supplies to run a university? Or is it the musician’s beloved seat where the intimacy of the relationship with your instrument is fostered and nurtured? Don’t bring food and drink to the organ console. Spills will seriously affect the responsiveness of your keyboards. Crumbs will attract critters—and critters will set up house in the console making their nests from felt stolen from keyboard bushings. It is absolutely common for the organ technician to find dirty little trails left by generations of mice running across the keyboards inside the console. One pictures Daddy Mouse saying to Mommy Mouse, “If he plays that Widor one more time . . . ”
Clean your keyboards—not just the top surfaces, but the sides of the keys as well. Use a paper towel or soft cloth rag, moisten it, put a tiny bit of mild soap on it, wring it out with all the force you can muster, and wipe the keys clean. Use a second rag, slightly moist, to remove any soap film, but remember that excessive moisture may spoil the glue that holds on the ivories. You’ll feel refreshed the next time you play.
Aeolus was a mythical Greek deity who was cited by Homer in The Odyssey for giving Odysseus a bag of captured wind to help him sail back across the Ionian Sea to Ithaca. The keyboard puts the captured wind at the player’s fingertips. We may not be placing our instrument between our brains and our beating hearts and lovingly stretching our arms around its neck (does Mr. Steinhardt ever feel like strangling his beloved?). Instead, we are doing nothing less than conjuring the very wind by wiggling our fingers. Nice work.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel privileged to be involved with an instrument that has such a grand heritage and so thoroughly captivates its players, builders, and listeners. I value “shop talk,” those conversations with colleagues or aficionados that broaden our knowledge by sharing experiences--I’ve often been chided by family members for the specialized jargon that peppers those talks. But we cannot thrive on shop talk alone. We strengthen our art by developing and nourishing connections with the rest of the music world, with the broader expression of the arts, and with as many facets of our culture as possible. 

I have recently read (and reread) a book that I think offers a thoughtful opportunity for enrichment by considering the heritage of another musical instrument. I recommend Stradivari’s Genius written by Toby Faber (Random House, 2004).

“It’s a Strad”

Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) was the preeminent member of the revered and prolific tradition of violin-making in Cremona, Italy. His local competition included such well-known names as Amati and Guarneri, family workshops whose products are highly revered today, but Stradivari’s instruments were superior enough that he stood out among giants. Today his name is widely respected as a mark of excellence.

The evolution of music can be studied from three different points of view, that of the composer, the performer, and the instrument builder. None could advance without the others, and I think it’s interesting to note how the sway of influence has passed back and forth. Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky were composers who introduced new, imaginative, even controversial musical languages that brought the art of musical expression to new levels. Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, Vladimir Horowitz, and Yo-Yo Ma stand out as performers whose technical skill and artistic perception have influenced, even changed the way others approach the instruments.

A number of builders of musical instruments have similarly influenced the development of music. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll produced a huge number of pipe organs that included countless innovations both in tonal resources and mechanical controls. The instruments he built inspired an entire school of organ composition and playing--the music of Widor, Vierne, Franck, Tournemire, Duruflé, Dupré, and Messiaen (to name just a few) was all inspired by the work of Cavaillé-Coll. It’s hard to imagine today’s organ world without it. By the way, Cavaillé-Coll’s genius was not limited to the development of the organ--he is also credited with the development of the circular saw blade.1

American organbuilder Ernest M. Skinner is an excellent example of an instrument-maker whose work has had profound and lasting influence on the art of organ playing. The Ruckers family (Hans I, Hans II, Andreas I, Andreas II) were at the center of the famous Flemish school of harpsichord building. Remarkably, about 135 of their instruments built between 1581 and 1680 survive today, a central and profound influence on modern harpsichord makers and players.2 Steinway & Sons is certainly not the only show in town, but it is impossible to separate their brand name from the evolution of the piano virtuoso. 

Antonio Stradivari’s career spanned over seventy years, during which he produced more than 1100 instruments. Most were violins, but he also built many cellos, fewer violas, guitars, and harps. About 650 instruments built by Stradivari survive, most of which are used regularly by modern virtuosi. From the admittedly naïve point of view of an organbuilder, the construction of the violin seems simple, but Stradivari’s Genius offers rare insight into the world of instrument building and the various ways that instrument makers have influenced the evolution of musical composition and performance.

The premise of the book is made clear by the subtitle: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection. After an introductory overview of Stradivari’s life and career, the author traces the history of six individual instruments from original purchase to the present, their paths often crossing. The fact that the full history of so many Strads is known is testament to their value. Each instrument has a name (as do the majority of the extant instruments), often the name of the instrument’s most prominent owner, and each has a life story. 

What makes something great?

For three centuries now there has been a continuing debate about just why Stradivari’s instruments are so much better than others. One theory acknowledges that the shape, size, and position of the soundholes (also known as f-holes) is critical--that the master’s skill is evident in the precision with which these important features are made. Another theory focuses on the varnish used to finish the instruments. Stradivari used a unique varnish made of materials indigenous to his area that remains notably soft when cured. Would a harder finish inhibit the instruments’ resonance? Does the varnish act as a filter for certain harmonics? If so, how?3

Another interesting theory was described in an article written by Duncan Mansfield and published in USA Today on December 2, 2003.  According to that report, Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, an expert in tree-ring dating at the University of Tennessee, theorized that a “Little Ice Age” that affected Europe from the mid-fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries slowed tree growth resulting in uncommonly dense Alpine Spruce, the wood used exclusively by Cremona luthiers. This Ice Age was at its coldest between 1645 and 1715--remember that Stradivari was born in 1644. Dr. Grissino-Mayer suggested that this particularly dense wood contributed to the magic of Stradivari’s instruments:

“It just amazed me that no one had thought of this before,” said Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, “the relationship between the violins, the trees that they were made from, the climate that existed when the trees grew and how it affected wood density to create a superior tonal quality. It just started clicking, and I thought, ‘Oh, we are on to something,’” he said.4

Perhaps the superiority of Stradivari’s instruments results from a combination of these factors. I have no doubt that there are many more theories, but the fact remains that the instruments are incomparable. Faber’s book goes on to say that while Stradivari’s work was admired during his lifetime--the original purchasers knew they were getting something very special--the instruments did not achieve their potential until they had aged for decades, even as long as a century.

Faber makes major points in this delightful book that have special significance to us who study and work with pipe organs. One is that it was common for Stradivari’s instruments to be purchased by patrons and either given or loaned to the virtuosi who could show the instruments’ capabilities to best advantage. 

The virtuoso gambler

Unlike those who play orchestral instruments, organists do not have freedom to choose the instrument they play. There are those fortunate organists who are given the opportunity to participate in the planning of a new instrument on which they will be playing, and some whose choice of where to audition is influenced by the instrument involved, but even they must play on whatever instrument is available when they are away from home. And the organist is virtually never in the position of actually purchasing the instrument. The funding for these monumentally expensive works of art must be provided by a patron or by an organized group of donors. 

Early in the nineteenth century, violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini was to play a concert in a theater in Leghorn, a coastal town in Tuscany. He arrived without a violin, having pawned his instrument to pay a gambling debt. The owner of the theater was a French merchant and amateur violinist named Colonel Livron. He loaned his valuable instrument (built by Stradivari’s competitor, Guarneri del Gesù) for the concert, realized that the instrument had found “its true master,” and gave it to Paganini, saying, “Never will I profane strings which your fingers have touched; that instrument is yours.”5

A singular loaner

One of the instruments followed in Faber’s book is the incomparable cello known as the Davidoff, one of whose twentieth-century owners was Jacqueline du Pré, the brilliant cellist whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis. As her illness progressed, she changed to a modern instrument that was easier to play and the Davidoff was placed in storage with a Parisian luthier. About ten years later, du Pré’s husband, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, met the young virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma after which Barenboim and du Pré loaned Ma her instrument. After du Pré’s death in 1987 at the age of 42, Ma was the first to be offered the opportunity to purchase the cello, an offer he reluctantly turned down as both his career and his children were young and he was unable to afford such a purchase. An anonymous enthusiast heard of Ma’s decision from the luthier where the instrument was stored, purchased it, and presented it to Ma as a lifetime loan.6  This was the third time in its history that the use of the Davidoff cello had been made possible by a philanthropist.

Keep the receipt

By the way, it’s Ma’s other cello that had an extra-curricular taxi ride in 1999. He inadvertently left his 1733 Montagno (Venice) cello in the trunk of a cab but wisely kept the receipt. The NYPD tracked the cabbie’s medallion and returned Petunia to her owner within five hours. For years after you could hear Ma’s recorded voice advising you to keep your receipts when you got into a cab in New York.7

Why is all this relevant to the pipe organ? The funding of our instrument is crucial to its future. The price of an excellent pipe organ of even moderate size can easily exceed a million dollars. The church that can consider a purchase like that is becoming ever rarer. The history of our civilization is rife with wealthy donors whose vision was broad enough to appreciate the value of art and who provided funding in support of the work of the artist. It’s hard to imagine a world without the art made possible by people named Medici, Esterházy, Guggenheim, or Rockefeller. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated more than 8800 pipe organs.8 It should be the mission of modern organists, organbuilders, and enthusiasts to take every opportunity to cultivate such relationships.

Adapting and evolution

Faber made another point in his book that I thought was revelatory, stating that while so many Strads survive today, not one is in original condition. Each was modified during the nineteenth century to adapt it for modern playing. The angle of the neck was changed as were the original tapered fingerboards. The instruments were built when common pitch for “A” was around 420 Hz--some of their pitches have been raised to as high as 460 Hz to accommodate the pitches of certain orchestras. Raising the pitch necessarily increases the tension of the strings and the force the instrument must bear, requiring heavier sound posts and other modifications. Also, the design of the bow was greatly altered. The bows that Stradivari knew had about 1/4 inch of horsehair--modern bows have more like 7/16”, allowing the player to draw ever more sound from the instrument. Faber concludes, “it all presents us, however, with a supreme irony: the brilliant and powerful tone for which Strads are famous, and which is most responsible for their value, is very different from what their maker himself must have heard.”9

Even more interesting, Yo-Yo Ma enhanced his exploration of seventeenth-century music by having the Davidoff cello returned as closely as possible to its original condition including gut strings, a baroque bow and bridge. He uses a different instrument for all other music.10

This has everything to do with our modern conversation about the pipe organ. We have researched the methods of organbuilders from every period and every country. We have studied the relationships between the instruments and the music written for them and have built modern instruments in ancient styles to enhance that study. We have restored older altered instruments to their original condition. We energetically discuss the possibilities of playing one style of music on another style of instrument--sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and we often disagree.

There are countless differences between the organ and the violin. It is surely a risk to draw parallels without careful thought. But I find it interesting to learn about the approach to some of these questions as discussed by our colleagues who work with other instruments.

“It’s a Doozy”

August and Fred Duesenberg were bicycle makers in Iowa who developed an interest in gasoline engines. In 1926 they joined in partnership with Errett Cord to build the luxury J-model Duesenberg automobile, producing fewer than 500 vehicles between 1928 and 1937.11 While the Duesenberg automobile was wildly expensive, available only to the most wealthy patrons, it set such a high standard of style, quality, and excellence that we use the term Doozy today to refer to anything extraordinary or bizarre.12

If bizarre is part of Doozy, I suppose that defines the difference between It’s a Doozy and It’s a Strad. Maybe I should look up bizarre . . .

User interface

In 1975 and 1976 I had summer jobs in the workshops of Bozeman-Gibson & Company. I use the plural because the shop was in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1975, and during the summer of 1976 the company was moving to new digs in Deerfield, New Hampshire. These were my first forays into the craft, and those few months were full of adventure. In 1975 the company was installing an organ in Castleton, Vermont, and I thought it was great fun to be working on site. They were also starting the restoration of the very old Stevens organ in First Church in Belfast, Maine.

During the transitional summer of 1976, we worked hard moving truckloads of machines, tools, stock, and supplies to Deerfield. As I arrived in the shop at the end of the semester, a one-manual organ for the Chapel on Squirrel Island, Maine was being completed. We installed it in the crossing of Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston for use in a concert by the Handel & Haydn Society during the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. When the convention was over, we took the organ to Maine, carrying it to the island on the small private ferry. It was all very exotic.

The new workshop in Deerfield was an old barn, and we split our days between organ building and barn building, making all sorts of repairs to the place. One night there was a wicked thunderstorm, the remnants of a hurricane that worked its way up the coast, and we stayed up late moving things away from the unfinished windows.

George Bozeman and David Gibson were the partner-principals, and David and his family moved into the farmhouse that accompanied the barn. Several of us rented rooms in the house. We had a beer kitty (25 cents a bottle) on top of the refrigerator and we had communal meals. The whole thing was a great experience for a 20-year-old organ nut.

Today, the Organ Clearing House rents the workshop from George in his retirement. The plywood outfeed table I built for the table saw is still there, along with remnants of lots of other little handyman things I did. The roof above the table saw is the place where I put a hammer through the wood into a hornet’s nest while replacing shingles, and escaped by sliding off the roof into the bushes—a stunt that would kill me today! Since we occupied the shop several years ago, we’ve done lots of great work there, and it’s nice to have that connection with my past. George still lives in the little house out back, and it’s great fun to see him regularly.

Today, our house in Maine is about twelve miles from Squirrel Island, as the crow flies. I visited the organ there last summer. And First Church in Belfast is about fifty miles away. Wendy and I attended a concert there a couple years ago. It’s fun revisiting those places and those instruments that were part of my introduction to organbuilding, nearly forty (gulp) years ago.

A work in progress

As I look back across the intervening years, I realize how much has changed in the trade, and in my outlook and perception. In the seventies, I was a tracker-action firebrand. I’ve since come to appreciate and love the sounds of the expressive electro-pneumatic organ. Thirty-five years ago I scoffed at the gaudy consoles of big organs with electric actions. Those were the days when the phrase cockpit syndrome was born, and it was not meant to be complimentary. I wondered why an organist needed all those gizmos and indicator lights to make music. It seemed that the intimacy of the pure relationship between musician and instrument was compromised.

But even I had to admit that it was tricky to get your fingers between the huge ebony sharp-keys on the keyboards of a Hook organ. And speaking of that big 1860 three-manual Hook organ that I loved so much, draw two or three couplers, especially the Choir to Great sub-octave, and to repeat a common phrase, it was like driving a Mack truck. How intimate is that? And by the way, that would be a Mack truck from 1950 with a steel dashboard, twelve-speed manual transmission (without synchronized gears), a two-speed axle, and a cracked mirror—not a modern dreamboat of a truck with power steering, hydrostatic transmission, ergonomic seats, air conditioning, stereo, and GPS.

What was Ernest Skinner thinking when the only Trumpet in the organ was in the Swell box, not on the Great where God meant Trumpets to be? And forget about Trumpets, what about the Mixture? One Mixture in an organ and he put it in the Swell? Ridiculous.

Oh, wait a minute, I get it—when the most powerful voices are under expression, you maximize the range of expression. So when that full Swell is coupled to the Great with the box closed, you can “crack” it for the start of the second line, and by the end of the verse the organ is roaring, and your hands never left the keyboards. Marvelous.

Consoles

Until I joined the Organ Clearing House, I led the double life common among organ folk, that of organist and organbuilder. I recognize this as the source of my love for working on consoles. Whenever one of our projects includes rebuilding a console, I try to organize bringing it to my personal workshop at our house in Maine, where I can revel in the puzzle of how best to make the console as functional and accessible as possible.

I’ve come to realize that the well-appointed console of an expressive electro-pneumatic organ is the vehicle for the intimacy between the organist and the instrument. Longtime violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, Arnold Steinhardt, has written eloquently of the intimacy between the player and the instrument: “When I hold the violin, my left hand stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” (Violin Dreams, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, page 5.)

Steinhardt goes on to compare all this with instruments that are played “at arm’s length.” He implies that the violinist has more intimacy with the music he makes than the pianist. He overlooks the oboe, clarinet, and bassoon—those guys take the intimacy thing a step further. But I don’t think organists need to be left out of the fun. Playing a large organ in a vast acoustic is a heroic, monumental experience. Many of us know the thrill of taking our hands off the keys and reveling in that last chord as it reverberates. But the modern console allows the organist real intimacy in the control of that gigantic beast.

Think of the players of orchestral instruments as they achieve fortissimo. The trumpet player’s face becomes a roadmap of veins and muscles, the violinist sends horsehair and rosin flying, the pianist conjures power from the base of his spine and his shoulders, not unlike the major league pitcher turning his arm into a whip to hurl a ball at superhuman speeds.

Sit at the console of a large organ and draw a full registration, then quietly touch a single key. With a miniscule twitch of a muscle you emit a roar. If you saw that motion on a soundless video, it might resemble touching a lover’s hand or flicking away a mosquito. Combine hundreds of those flicks, and a cavernous space is alive with sound energy. There are 82 notes in the first measure of the Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony. Play that on a hundred stops, that’s 8,200 individual notes in about four seconds, unless you’re playing too fast. Take that, Mr. Steinhardt!

What that organ’s console allows you to do is fling those notes into space by the thousand without breaking a sweat. The flick of the organist’s finger is magnified exponentially.

I think of this as a magical intimacy. The ergonomic seats and power steering in that modern Mack truck allow the driver to manage the huge machine effortlessly and tirelessly. The ergonomic organ console allows the organist to command many tons of organ components with flicks of the fingers.

Gizmos and gadgets

I love to think of a console as a magnifier, expanding the motions of the fingers into monumental sounds. I also love to think of an organ console as a manipulator, even a conjurer, fooling the organ into doing things it didn’t know were possible. The clever use of Unison Off and related couplers make possible the redistribution of the keyboards so a solo sound might be made available on a neighboring keyboard for the “thumbing” of a few solo notes, or a lengthy melody. This is one place where “thumbs down” is a positive thing. 

And when we get into a complicated situation like that, it’s handy to have indicators that tell you where you are and remind you what you’re doing. Now, if only we could add a “rerouting” feature like that in Google Maps, which realizes when you’re gone astray, takes a moment to catch its breath, and then displays a new route home.

The organ console is our “user interface.” When we play, we have the notes in our minds, whether we’re reading a score or drawing on our memory. The organ console allows us to translate those thoughts, which are the intellectual versions of audible music into a stream of information—a data-stream. The data-stream leaves the console and enters the organ, where the data is converted to audible music at the speed of light.

Ideally, the console is configured to allow maximum flexible control over the machinery that is the organ. There’s a philosophical beauty present as we think of how thoughts are translated into sound.

The intimacy is magnified when we add the composer to the mix. The creation of music comes from the mystical skill of hearing melody and harmony before they have jelled into a musical phrase or composition. Our system of notation is precise enough to allow the intentions of a composer to be delivered to the brain of the musician, and it is the relationship between the musician and the instrument that allows the contemporary immediate translation and interpretation. The organ console is that relationship between musician and instrument. It’s a physical appliance that performs a metaphysical function. How cool is that?

White with blue

Most organbuilders have adopted and adapted the use of color-coded cables that were developed by telephone companies to simplify the wiring of multiple circuits. The cables come in various sizes—12 pairs, 25 pairs, 50 pairs, and the special 32-pair cables created for organbuilders that allow the 61 notes of the keyboard plus three spares.

The conductors are arranged in reversing pairs, with primary and secondary colors. The first two conductors of a standard cable have a white wire with blue stripe, and a blue wire with white stripe. Keeping white as a common, you go through a series of five colors—blue, orange, green, brown, slate. So we rattle off the sequence as white-with-blue, blue-with-white, white-with-orange, orange-with-white. When we finish the first five pairs at white-with-slate, slate-with-white, the common color shifts to red: red-with-blue, blue-with-red, etc. Sounds complicated, but after you’ve wired a hundred keyboards, stops, windchests, etc., it becomes second nature. Everyone knows that black-with-green is note 25, which is middle C. The point is that you can accurately wire both ends of a lengthy cable by yourself.

As I separate the individual conductors in a cable, and sort them into the correct order, I think of the relationship between colors and notes. Green-with-white is low F. That wire will fire the low note of the last chords of grand pieces by Widor, Bach, or Mozart. Slate-with-white is number ten—the low note of the first chord (after the fanfare) of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. How many times will that piece be played on this organ? And have you ever stopped to think of the ironic symbolism that the first note of that melody is supported by a chord that demands resolution, ‘til death do us part? Think of all those brides and grooms trembling with the increased tension of the diminished chord. It’s the second note of the melody that allows a sigh of relief. And by the way, that high C which starts the melody? Violet-with-slate.

Years ago my company installed a solid-state switching system in the grand Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Boston’s Trinity Church. One woman working for me at the time had trouble seeing the difference between the slates and violets in the color code. More than half of the high-B/C pairs were reversed!

The console is up on my workbench so I can work on the stuff below the keyboards. Those expression pedals—I’m manipulating them with my hands. Is that enough tension for operation by foot? (If you manipulate with your hands, do you pedipulate with your feet?) How long after the organ is finished before the organist hears the first squeak? What can I do to lengthen that period? Some axle grease, lithium grease, graphite paste?  

Will the light over the pedalboard shine up through the keyboards to distract the organist? It’s a movable console. When the console is placed in front of an audience, will that light distract them? If the light is shaded so it doesn’t distract the audience, can the organist see the pedal keys?

Recently we completed an organ with a complex and sophisticated console. I’m counting the indicator lights with my memory’s eye—I think there are about ten. I came up with LED (light emitting diode) bulbs with various and rich colors that are about an eighth of an inch in diameter. I drilled perfectly sized holes in the stop jambs and coupler rail and inserted the bulbs from behind so they stuck out the tiniest bit. Man, were they bright. I pushed them back in the holes, which made the light more remote to the organist, but they shone on the wall behind the console like a circus wagon, and when the console was moved to the chancel steps for a recital, those pesky lights were like laser beams in the eyes of the audience. So I used a leather punch to make little discs of black translucent plastic that I stuck in the holes in front of the LEDs. Perfect. The colors are still vivid, but not so gaudy. Where did I get the black plastic? A report cover from Staples.

The pitter-patter of little feet

When I was a student at Oberlin, I was fortunate to participate in a month-long workshop in Eurhythmics. It was organized by my organ teacher Haskell Thomson, and led by the recently retired professor of Eurhythmics and Music Theory, Inda Howland, who had studied with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva. The longer I played music after my graduation, the more I realized the value of that month—what the exposure to that discipline added to my musicianship. I was studying Bach’s Toccata in F at the time (remember that green-with-white wire), and during one of the sessions I played the piece for the class in a Robertson Hall practice room. Professor Howland’s first comment was a question: “What is my first impression?” I had the right answer—the noise on the pedalboard. “Play it again without making noise.” Hmm. Good point.

And today, I try to make the pedalboard help the player to meet Professor Howland’s standards. Here’s a pedalboard that doesn’t make much noise when I play the keys, but makes a heck of a thump when I release a note. It’s a little like playing the pedal solo on steel drums. What can I use as a bumper or cushion that won’t compress too much with use, changing the travel of the pedal key and the “pluck point” of the contacts?

All this happens in that workshop that’s so close to some of the first organs I worked on. If I had been given a 50-pair color-coded cable in the summer of 1975 I wouldn’t have understood. But those thousands of little wires have everything to do with great music-making.

I can name that tune in three colors! 

It works for me.

After I graduated from Oberlin, we lived in a rented four-bedroom farmhouse with a huge yard in the rolling countryside a few miles outside the town. Foreshadowing fracking, there was a natural gas well on the property that supplied the house. It was a great place to live, but there were some drawbacks. The gas flowed freely from the well in warm weather, but was sluggish in cold. The furnace was mounted on tall legs because the basement flooded. All the plumbing in the house was in a wing that included kitchen, bathroom, and laundry machines, but the basement didn’t extend under the wing, so the pipes froze in cold weather. 

After a couple winters there, we had wrapped the pipes with electrified heating tape, mastered how to set the furnace to run just enough when the gas well was weak, and learned to anticipate when the basement would flood so we could run a pump and head off the mess. 

Outside, there was a beautiful redbud tree, several huge willows, acres of grass to mow, and the residual effects of generations of enthusiastic gardening. One summer, the peonies on either side of the shed door grew at radically different rates. One was huge and lush while the other was spindly. I was curious until I investigated and found an opossum carcass under the healthy one. Not that you would read The Diapason for gardening tips, but I can tell you that a dead ’possum will work wonders for your peonies!

I wanted to care for that landscape, so I bought an old walk-behind Gravely tractor with attachments. I could swap mower for roto-tiller for snow-blower, and there was a sulky—a two-wheeled trailer with a seat that allowed me to ride behind when mowing. I remember snatching cherry tomatoes off the vines, hot from the sunlight, as I motored past the garden.

I was the only one who could get the Gravely to start, at least I think so, given that I was only one who used it. It had a manual choke that had to be set just so. Then, as I pressed the starter button with my right toe, I’d move the throttle from fully closed to about a quarter open, and the engine would catch. I’d run it at that slow speed for about ten seconds, and it would be ready to work. If I did anything different, it would stall.

The bigger the toys . . .

I learned a lot about machines from Tony Palkovic who lived across the street. He had an excavating business and owned a fleet of huge machines. One weekend I helped him remove the drive wheels from his 110,000-pound Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer to replace the bearings. It involved a couple house jacks and 6-inch open-end wrenches that were eight feet long and weighed a hundred pounds. He used his backhoe to lift the wheels off the axles, not a job for “triple A.” I admired his affinity for his machines, and it was fun to watch him operate them. The way he combined multiple hydraulic movements with his fingertips on the levers created almost human-like motions, and he liked to show off by picking up things like soda cans with the bucket of a 40-ton machine.

The soul of the machine

In The Soul of the New Machine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), author Tracy Kidder follows the development of a new generation of computer technology, and grapples with the philosophical questions surrounding the creation and advances of “high-tech.” We’re beholden to it (witness the lines at Apple stores recently as the new iPhone was released), but we might not be sure if the quality of our lives is actually improved. Yesterday, a friend tweeted, “There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.” Have you ever sat on a rock, talking with a friend, dangling your toes in the water until the rising tide brings the water up to your knees?

There’s a mystical place where soul and machine combine to become a pipe organ. The uninitiated might look inside an organ and see only mechanical mysteries. Many organs are damaged or compromised by uninformed storage of folding chairs and Christmas decorations within. But the organ is a complex machine whose inanimate character must disappear so as not to interfere with the making of music.

Musicians have intimate relationships with their instruments. In Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, page 5), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writes, “When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, in a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” 

No organist can claim such an affinity, not even with the tiniest, most sensitive continuo organ. Steinhardt refers to instruments that you “play at arm’s length.” More usually, the organist sits at a set of keyboards separated from the instrument by at least several feet, and sometimes by dozens or even hundreds of feet. And in the case of electric or electro-pneumatic keyboard actions, he is removed from any direct physical or mechanical connection with the instrument he’s playing. He might as well phone it in.

A pipe organ of average size is a complex machine. A thirty-stop organ has about 1,800 pipes. If it’s a two-manual tracker organ, there are 154 valves controlled by the keys, a system of levers (multiplied by thirty) to control the stops, a precisely balanced action chassis with mechanical couplers, and a wind system with self-regulating valves, along with any accessories that may be included. If it’s a two-manual electro-pneumatic organ, there are 1,800 note valves, 122 manual primary valves (twice that many if it’s a Skinner organ), and hundreds of additional valves for stop actions, bass notes, and accessories.

But the conundrum is that we expect all that machinery to disappear as we play. We work to eliminate every click, squeak, and hiss. We expect massive banks of expression shutters to open and close instantly and silently. We’re asking a ten-ton machine in a monumental space to emulate Arnold Steinhardt’s loving caress. 

It’s a “one-off.”

Most of the machines we use are mass-produced. The car you buy might be the 755,003rd unit built to identical specifications on an automated assembly line. If there’s a defect, each unit has the same defect. But while individual components in an organ, such as windchest actions, might be standardized at least to the instruments of a single builder, each pipe organ is essentially a prototype—one of a kind. The peculiarities of an organ chamber or organ case determine the routes of mechanical actions, windlines, and tuning access. The layout of the building determines where the blower will be located, as well as the relationship between musician and machine.

The design of the instrument includes routing wind lines from blower to reservoirs, and from reservoirs to windchests. Each windchest has a support system: ladders, passage boards, and handrails as necessary to allow the tuner access to all the pipes. An enclosed division has a frame in which the shutters are mounted and a mechanism to open and close the shutters, either by direct mechanical linkage or a pneumatic or electric machine. Some expressive divisions are enclosed in separate rooms of the building with the expression frame and shutters being the only necessary construction, but others are freestanding within the organ, so the organbuilder provides walls, ceiling, access doors, ladders, and passage boards as required. The walls and ceiling are ideally made of a heavy, sound-deadening material so the shutter openings are the only path for egress of sound.

What’s in a tone?

Galileo said, “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.” While it may not be immediately apparent, mathematics is the heart of the magic of organ pipes. Through centuries of experimentation, organbuilders have established “norms” that define the differences between, say, flute tone and principal tone. The physical characteristics of organ pipes that determine their tone are defined using ratios. The “scale” of the pipe is the ratio of the length to the diameter. The “cut-up” that defines the height of a pipe’s mouth is the ratio of mouth height to the mouth width. The “mouth width” is the ratio of mouth width to the circumference. The type and thickness of the metal is important to the tone, so the organbuilder has to calculate, or guess, what material to use in order to achieve just the tone he’s looking for.

Finally, the shape of the pipe’s resonator is a factor. A tapered pipe sounds different from a cylindrical pipe, and the taper is described as a ratio of bottom diameter to top diameter. A square wooden pipe sounds different from a round metal pipe. A stopped wooden pipe sounds different from a capped metal pipe, even if the scales are identical. When comparing the scale of a wood pipe to that of a metal pipe, the easiest criterion is the area of the pipe’s cross section—depth times width of the wood pipe is compared to πr² of the metal pipe. If the results of those two formulas are equal, the scale is the same.

The reason all these factors affect the tone of the pipes is that each different design, each different shape, each different material chosen emphasizes a different set of harmonics. The organbuilder, especially the voicer or the tuner, develops a sixth sense for identifying types of pipes by their sounds. He instantly hears the difference between a wood Bourdon and a metal Gedeckt, or between the very narrow-scale Viole d’Orchestre and the slightly broader Salicional. He can tell the difference between high and low cutup just by listening. Conversely, his intuition tells him which selections of stops, which types of material, what level of wind pressure will produce the best sounding organ for the building.

The keen-eared organist can intuit all this information. Why does a Rohrflöte 8′ sound good with a Koppelflöte 4′? You may not know the physical facts that produce the complementary harmonics, but if you’re listening well, you sure can hear them. Early in my organ studies, a teacher told me not to use a Flute 4′ with a Principal 8′. Fair enough. That’s true in many cases. But it might be magical on a particular organ. Ask yourself if a combination sounds good—if it sounds good, it probably is good.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If the organ is part machine and part mathematics, and the musician is physically separated from the creation of tone, how can it be musical or artistic? How can an organist achieve the sensitivity of a violinist or a clarinetist who have direct physical control over the creation of tone? If you don’t have a good embouchure, you don’t make pretty sounds.

While I’ve talked about mechanisms and the mystical properties of the sound of the pipes driven by their math, we’re still missing something. Without wind, we have nothing but a big pile of wood, metal, and leather. Wind is a lively, living commodity. It has character and life. It’s endlessly variable. Outdoors in the open climate, wind is capricious. Any sailor knows that. You can be roaring along with white water boiling from under your transom, sails and sheets taut, and suddenly you fall flat as the wind dies. Or it shifts direction a few points and instead of drawing you along, it stops you dead.

Inside our organs, we harness the wind. We use electric blowers that provide a strong steady supply of wind, we build windlines and ducts that carry the wind from one place to another without loss through leakage. We design regulators with valves that regulate the wind (we also call them reservoirs because they store the regulated pressurized air), and respond to the demands of the music by allowing air to pass through as the valves open and the speaking pipes demand it, and our windchest actions operate those valves as commanded by the keyboards under the hands of the musician.

When you’re sitting on the bench, or inside the organ chamber, and the organ blower is off, the whole thing is static, inanimate. It’s like the violin or clarinet resting on padded velvet inside a locked case. I’ve always loved the moment when the blower is turned on when I’m inside an organ. You hear the first rotations of the motor, the first whispers of air stirring from the basement, and a creak or two as reservoirs fill and the springs pull taut. Hundreds of things are happening. When the blower is running at full speed and all the reservoirs have filled, the organ is alive and expectant—waiting to be told what to do. And at the first touch of the keyboard, the music begins.

Defining the indefinable

Once we’re playing, we enter the world of metaphysics. Intellectually, we understand how everything is functioning, but philosophically, we can hardly believe it’s true. Combinations of stops blend to create tone colors that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Peculiarities of acoustics create special effects heard in one location, but nowhere else. The motion of the air is apparent in the sound of the pipes, not, as a wag might quip, because faulty balance or low supply makes the wind wiggle, but because that air is alive as it moves through the organ’s appliances.

It’s that motion of wind that gives the organ soul. This is why the sounds of an electronic instrument can never truly equal those of the pipe organ. Sound that is digitally reproduced and funneled through loudspeakers can never have life. The necessary perfection of repetition of electronic tone defies the liveliness of the pipe organ. Just like the mouth-driven clarinet, it’s impossible that every wind-driven organ pipe will sound exactly the same, every time it’s played. It’s the millions of nearly imperceptible variations that give the thing life.

This starts to explain how the most mechanical and apparently impersonal of musical instruments can respond differently to the touch of different players. I’ve written several times about our experience of attending worship on Easter Sunday at St. Thomas’s Church in New York, when after hearing different organists playing dozens of voluntaries, hymns, responses, and accompaniments, the late John Scott slid onto the bench to play the postlude. The huge organ there is in questionable condition and soon to be replaced, but nonetheless, there was something about the energy passing through Scott’s fingers onto the keys that woke the gale that is the organ’s wind system and set the place throbbing. It was palpable. It was tangible. It was indescribable, and it was thrilling.

§

My friend Tony cared about his machines, not just because they were the tools with which he made his living, but because their inanimate whims responded to his understanding. We survived in that beguiling but drafty and imperfect house because as we loved it, we got to know it, and outsmarted most of its shortcomings. And I had lots of fun with that old Gravely, taking care of it, coaxing it to start, and enjoying the results of the mechanical effort.

Tony’s D-9 moved dirt—lots of dirt. But the sound of the organ moves me. And because I see it moving others, it moves me more. It’s all about the air.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

It’s a colorful world
A couple years ago I was driving across Virginia to visit a church whose people were hoping to acquire a pipe organ. My destination was a tiny hamlet across the Rappahannock River from Tappahannock (nice ring to it). I left Richmond on Route 360, passing through Mechanicsville and Central Garage, Virginia. I drive a red SUV with Massachusetts plates, and I drive pretty fast (there are so many organs to sell!), and I think I brightened the day of the state trooper who showed up behind me, lights a-flashing. After he was so thoughtful as to award me with a little certificate, a memento of my visit to the Old Dominion State, I drove away reflecting that he must have thought me to be as stereotypical as I found him—a beefy, red-faced, tobacco-chewing, drawling Bubba in a Smokey-the-Bear hat, and a bearded, fast-talking Northerner (worse, an Easterner), in a big hurry in a bright red car. In this age of maturing political correctness we are cautioned about profiling—but I know that both of us were profiling that day.
Later that afternoon, after I met with the good people of the little church, I came back across the Rappahannock (a beautiful active river) and was disappointed to be joined by another vehicle with flashing lights. I was relieved of the temptation for further profiling when this time the Smokey-the-Bear hat was topping an attractive young woman with a star on her chest. (Wait a minute, I guess that noting that she was attractive gets me in more profiling trouble!) This was a much more pleasant encounter for me, but the result was the same—another little award requiring future attention. And by the way, after all that, no sale. Too bad, because I had just the organ for them.
Academia brings us two more conflicting stereotypes. There’s the absent-minded professor whose command of his subject is unassailable but who is otherwise so scattered-brained that he’s likely to forget to wear socks to class, and there’s the authoritarian, autocratic professor who terrifies his students into learning—they never forget what they’ve learned, but for years after they lie awake at night reliving the horror of being called upon in class. My mother tells of a family member, a distant cousin of several generations ago and Harvard professor of mathematics, whose speech pattern featured what we generally call a “Lazy-Ell.” He had an expensive gold pocket watch that hung on a gold chain from his vest pocket, and while lecturing it was his perpetual habit to twirl the watch vigorously around his fingers on the end of its chain. Predictably, the watch took flight one day, soaring across the classroom and smashing into pieces on the floor. The professor calmly said, “Gentlemen,” (profiling aside, there were only gentlemen studying mathematics at Harvard in those days) “that was an example of a puh-fect peh-wah-boh-wa.”1
As a student at Oberlin, I had both types of professors. The two extremes were a professor of physics and a professor of music theory. One memorable physics class had this teacher sharing thoughts about the transfer of energy from one mass to another. There was a golf ball on a little tee on the heavy desk in front of the class. He grabbed a five-iron, stepped up on a chair and climbed onto the desk (he did have socks on). As he nattered on about energy, he nonchalantly approached the golf ball, made a wicked back-swing, and took out the fluorescent light fixture over his head. He sure did transfer energy from the club, and I still wonder if he did it on purpose, exploiting the humor of the unexpected.
The music theory professor did have a funny side, but not if you were the one he was teasing. He was diminutive and elderly, completely bald, and sarcasm dripped from every word he said. My first encounter with him was the two-semester powerhouse, “An Introduction to Four-Part Harmony.” He was the author of the textbook and the course was an Oberlin institution. Without question, what I learned from him that year is still the foundation of my understanding of the structure and motion of music, but at what expense? Early in the course I figured I had it made when the professor announced that he thought organists were “theory-prone” because the bass-line of a piece of music drives the harmonies, and organists are all about bass lines. At the same time, this guy had it out for singers who he freely maintained were barely musicians. He started one class by attacking a tenor (who incidentally now has an impressive international career, appearing in all the great opera houses of Europe) whom he had seen in the library listening room with headphones on, accusing him of learning his scores from recorded performances. The poor kid was humiliated—I have no doubt that he remembers the incident more clearly than I do.
My triumph in that class came when he was returning a graded exam. A week before the exam, he had offered one point of extra credit for each composer’s life-span dates we could write down. I had the highest grade—95% for the exam plus forty-five composers. This runs in my family—my father can recite all forty-four American presidents both in chronological and alphabetical order.
I’ve never forgotten that comment about bass lines. Right now I’m listening to a recording of Widor’s Sixth Symphony played by André Isoir. What majesty comes from the bass line in the opening measures! And in that narky place where the main melody in the manuals is accompanied by bouncing octaves in the pedals, the bass line gives an entirely different feel. Think of the depictions of storms in romantic orchestral music (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Rossini’s William Tell)—those thundering bass lines evoke visual images of boiling, murderous storm fronts rolling across the sky.
The power of the bass line was never clearer to me than when I played a recital with brass players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. It was First Night, Boston’s fantastic city-wide New Year’s celebration. There were more than 2500 people in the church. The organ is by Aeolian-Skinner—it has more than 235 ranks, and I figured I was the king of the hill. But when Chester Schmitz first put his tuba to his face I knew I had a tiger by the tail. It was exhilarating to be riding in Chester’s bus. We played a predictable program of brass-’n-organ favorites (Fireworks, Voluntaries, Canzonas), and the wind was blowing in my hair the whole time. Chester could generate enough energy through his instrument to dwarf the thirty-horsepower blower of the mighty organ. His tone was clear and present, his intonation perfect, his sense of the motion of music breathtaking.

It takes four to play a trio
Small baroque ensembles are usually “music plus one.” A piece might be scored for two violins and “basso continuo”—the “basso” comprises a bass instrument (usually viola da gamba or violoncello, sometimes bassoon) and keyboard (usually harpsichord, sometimes organ). The keyboard player doubles the bass line and fills in harmony above. There are thousands of pieces like this—duets, trios, quintets—all with those elaborate bass lines, written by Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini, Telemann, Bach, Handel, you name ’em.
Last night we went with friends to a small local jazz café to hear our friend Bert Seager play with his trio (piano, bass, drums). It was a shabby little room with a low ceiling on the ground floor of a strip-mall bank building, next door to a beauty salon—a far cry from the wedding-cake opulence of the Mother Church. The food was ordinary, the drinks okay (they didn’t have the bourbon I asked for), the music fantastic.
A trio like that has, in a sense, three bass instruments. In some jazz trios, the piano is primarily rhythm and accompaniment. In this piano trio, the instrument has many functions as soloist, accompanist, percussionist, and of course, lots of bass. The bass fiddle (mostly pizzicato) gives a rolling bass with lots of intervals filled in to become scales. And the drums (in this case played by an inventive young Peruvian) were a vibrant presence above, below, and through the music. I was struck by the functional similarities between this and the baroque basso continuo.
The work of these guys is nothing like the standard barroom Girl from Ipanema kind of jazz that accompanies the swilling of whiskey sours. Their music is unique, innovative, colorful, and poly-rhythmic. Though we’ve heard Bert play jazz standards in other venues, most of what they played last night was his original music. One started as a sort of 5/4 version of a Bach prelude (Well-Tempered Clavier), morphed into a complex driving thing in which each player had a significant solo, then returned to the relative simplicity of the beginning. You can find Bert’s music at <www.bertseager.com&gt;. The website opens with a perfectly beautiful classically inspired piece called Three Candles.

Color my world
If organists are theory-prone, they are also (or should be) color-prone. Our instruments offer us rich palettes of tonal color. Like a painter mixing colors to show the cathedral in fog or in sunshine, so we draw stops, figuratively mixing paints to anoint each piece with exactly the right hue. My experience as an organbuilder allows me to connect the physical shape, construction, and material of an organ pipe with its tone. I’ve created associations between the look of a Gemshorn pipe and the sound I hear from it, and I’m fascinated by how the slightest alteration of dimensions or metal thickness can alter that sound.
John Leek of Oberlin, Ohio, was my mentor in the craft of organbuilding. He also built wonderful harpsichords, and I recall my fascination when I realized how different the tone of a string could be depending on how far from the nut the plectra hit the string. (The nut is the wood rail attached to the pinblock that lifts the string away from the tuning pins—the other end of the speaking length of the string from the bridge, which is glued to the soundboard.) If the point of pluck was close to the nut the tone was more nasal, further away it would get rounder, fuller. (It’s awkward to describe tone colors, like arguing whether a certain wine is fruity or nutty.) In a harpsichord with two eight-foot “ranks,” the contrasting tone colors resulted from the fact that the rows of jacks were necessarily in different spots along the length of the strings.
Watch a guitarist carefully—watch his fingers on the strings go closer or further away from the bridge and hear how that affects the tone. Watch a cellist or violinist—again, the closer to the bridge, the more bright or nasal the tone.
Last night in the jazz café, I was mesmerized watching the drummer pulling different timbres from his instruments. It would be a sorry generalization to assume that each drum has one sound—smack it with a stick and sound comes out. But here those principles of tone production from harpsichord and violin strings were right in our faces. He could work a single snare drum with two sticks, moving from the center of the head to the edge, to the rim, to the hardware on the side, and draw out a rainbow of colors.
I noticed that one of his cymbals had three little holes drilled in it, seemingly in random locations, and wondered if they had to do with attempts to perfect its tone. Was there a nasty little zing to the sound that a skilled craftsman could eliminate by drilling a hole? And as he played on that cymbal I noticed how different the tone was at the center than at the edge. If he did a light roll starting in the middle and moving to the perimeter he produced a subtle kaleidoscope of tone.
The bassist gave a great account of himself—always rhythmic, always exploiting and driving the direction of the harmonies, often filling in intervals with colorful ruffles of notes, sometimes stepping forward to play and improvise on the melody. He would lean forward, seemingly embracing the instrument, to reach high notes and put his pizzi-fingers closer to the bridge. He would stand straight, throwing his head back to let free the full sound of instrument. And the three of them were in constant contact with each other, celebrating a sneaky unexpected move with a grin or a wink or showing a moment of disbelief as one took off toward new horizons.
All this talk of color reminds me of a brief scene in my favorite story, the twenty-one volume epic tale of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, ship’s surgeon and secret agent Stephen Maturin, written by Patrick O’Brian, a story that spans more than twenty years of the Napoleonic Wars. Jack plays the violin, Stephen the cello, and as they sail the oceans of the world they play their own versions of the great works of chamber music. In Post Captain, the second novel of the series, Jack has been injured in a battle and Stephen has prescribed some nasty medications. It was a stunning battle in which Jack’s ship roundly defeated a French squadron, and as a result Jack was promoted from Commander to Post Captain. Jack and Stephen had attended a party at the home of an Admiral whose wife (known to Jack as “Queenie,” a sort of nanny from his youth) was showing off a recently acquiring breezy, somewhat salacious painting of an “as of yet unrepented” Mary Magdalene:

[Jack] had gone to bed at nine, as soon as he had swallowed his bolus and his tankard of porter, and he had slept the clock round, a sleep full of diffused happiness and a longing to impart it—a longing too oppressed by languor to have any effect. Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the ’cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!2

What a lovely image—perhaps for Jack the result of too much marsala, but for organists an inspiration to exploit the depths of the instrument. You will fill the seats at your recitals if the audience knows they can expect the unexpected. A little musical wink as a humorous note or two gets soloed out, a zig when it might have been a zag, a hint of the pompous, the shy, the frightened, the regal. Your scholarship is the foundation of your music-making, not its principal purpose. Organbuilders are on a constant quest to create the sounds, to squirt the paint from the tubes onto the palette—the organists draw those squirts of paint together, blending the colors, scooping them out of the organ case or chamber, and applying them to the canvas, which is the acoustics of the room and the ears of the listeners. Make the most of it.