In the wind . . .

“Won’t you be my neighbor?”

Do you associate a tune with that sentence? The cardigan sweater, the sneakers, the catchy melody, and the slightly off-pitch singing are all icons for the children of baby boomers—those who grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I picture a quiet suburban cul-de-sac with ranch houses, station wagons parked on concrete driveways, bicycles on their sides in the tree lawns, kids being sent next door to borrow a cup of sugar, and maybe a spinet piano covered with framed photos. Fred Rogers did his best to teach our children and us how to be good friends and neighbors over the airways of Public Television.
There’s an eight-rank Aeolian residence organ in my workshop right now, Opus 1014, built in 1906 for the home of John Munro Longyear in Brookline, Massachusetts. Mr. Longyear discovered huge mineral deposits in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, acquired vast tracts of land, and made a fortune bringing the ore to market. He and his wife Mary were devoted students of Christian Science, and they moved to Boston in 1901 where Mary Longyear became a close friend of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Following their deaths, their home was left to a foundation in their name that developed the building and grounds into a museum about Christian Science.1 After the museum closed in 1998, the estate was purchased by a developer who built a community of condominium residences on the site. The Organ Clearing House acquired the organ in the summer of 2005, helping the developers create space for a fitness center.
This is a terrific organ, complete with a 116-note roll-player, the famed automatic device that plays the organ using paper rolls. Spending a few months with an organ like this gives one great insight into the standards of a legendary company. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Aeolian began building a list of clients that reads like Who’s Who of the history of American corporations. Aeolian didn’t get such a good name by accident—their organs are beautifully made and uniquely conceived as the last word in personal luxury of their day. The idea that a pipe organ like this would be considered a must-have furnishing in a grand house has captivated me, and with the help of a smashing book I’ve formed a picture of a neighborhood that would knock Mr. Rogers’ socks off.
Rollin Smith’s The Aeolian Pipe Organ and Its Music was published by the Organ Historical Society in 1998 and is available through their catalogue. Go to and buy a copy or two. I took quite a bit of grief at home when my wife realized that the book I was chuckling over was about residence pipe organs, but when I read her a couple passages my point was made. Mr. Smith understands that the heritage of the Aeolian Company is something very special, and he has told us all about it. The book contains plenty of facts about the company’s history. The stories about the early twentieth-century organists who played on, composed for, and recorded on the Aeolian Organ form a fascinating picture of the styles and opinions of early twentieth-century virtuosi—many of whose names are familiar to us today. The importance of the Aeolian Organ as documentation of a school of playing is unequaled—remember that the phonograph was primitive in those days—and the Aeolian rolls are among the earliest accurate recordings of such masters as Marcel Dupré, Clarence Eddy, and Lynwood Farnam. An example of the accuracy of this musical documentation is found on page 227, where Mr. Smith provides a comparison of the first eight measures of the score of the Daquin Noël with a reprint to scale of the same passage as recorded on the Aeolian roll by Dupré. By looking at the length of the notes on the roll, an organist familiar with piece can see clearly that Dupré clipped the first note of the piece short and accented the second (fourth beat of the measure), that he added a low D in the left hand on the fourth beat of the fourth measure (not in the score!), and that he started his trills on the lower note. What a lot of historical information to get from a few dots on a page.
Mr. Smith emphasizes the importance of this documentation by quoting a statement made by Charles-Marie Widor in 1899:

How interesting it would be if it were possible for us to consult a phonograph from the time of Molière or an Æolian contemporary with Bach! What uncertainties and errors could be avoided, for instance, if the distant echo of the Matthäus-Passion, conducted by the composer, could still reach us.
Is it not truly admirable to be able to record the interpretation of a musical work with absolute exactitude and to know that this record will remain as an unalterable document, a certain testimony, rigorously true today, which will not change tomorrow—the quintessential interpretation that will not vary for all eternity?2

But enough about the organists—it’s the patrons that got me going. One of the book’s appendices is an alphabetical list of those who purchased Aeolian organs (page 384). Another is an Opus List that includes the street addresses of Aeolian installations (page 319). Published lists don’t always make good reading, but when I started flipping back and forth between these two I started humming Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood song while in effect reading the Manhattan phone book!
With the help of these lists, I’ve imagined a walking tour of some very special residences, all home to Aeolian organs. Let’s start on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 92nd Street in Manhattan. Central Park is on the west side of Fifth. When we stand with our backs to the Park we’re looking at the home of Felix Warburg. Mr. Warburg was in the diamond business, and was one of New York’s most enthusiastic musical patrons, serving as a member of the board of directors of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic Society. In the 1930s he rescued many prominent Jews from Germany and supported the emigration of musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifetz.3 Mr. Warburg’s Aeolian organ (Opus 1054, II/22) was installed in 1909.
We walk south to 90th Street to find the residence of Andrew Carnegie. Inside is Aeolian’s Opus 895 with three manuals and 44 ranks, built in 1900.4 Mr. Carnegie, founder of the Carnegie Steel Corporation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an active philanthropist whose generosity resulted in what is now Carnegie-Mellon University. His foundation was responsible for the construction of 2,509 public libraries throughout the English-speaking world.5 And since Mr. Carnegie believed that “music is a religion,” the Carnegie Organ Fund gave millions of dollars in matching grants to help build more than 8,800 pipe organs.6 Walter C. Gale was organist to the Carnegie family for seventeen years, arriving at the house at seven o’clock every morning they were in town. Mrs. Carnegie kept a log book of their Atlantic crossings in which she wrote about their return from Liverpool on December 10, 1901, driving directly to their new home to find “Mr. Gale playing the organ and the garden all covered in snow.”7 One door south from Mr. Carnegie is the residence of Jacob Ruppert8, brewing magnate (Knickerbocker Beer) and owner of the New York Yankees. Unfortunately Mr. Ruppert’s was not the complete household—no Aeolian organ. Still heading south, we cross East 89th Street and pass the Guggenheim Museum. At 990 Fifth Avenue (at 80th Street—two blocks south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) we find the residence of Frank W. Woolworth who nickel-and-dimed himself into prominence with a chain of stores bearing his name. Mr. Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s best customers. His first instrument was #874 (II/16, 1899). In 1910 the organ at 990 5th Avenue was enlarged to three manuals and 37 ranks (Opus 1144). But why limit yourself to just a city organ? Mr. Woolworth installed Opus 1318 (II/23, 1915) in his second residence, which he called Winfield (his middle name) in Glen Cove (Long Island), New York. Winfield was destroyed by fire in 1916 but fortunately for the local trades and for the Aeolian company, it was rebuilt at three times the original cost, and Mr. Woolworth bought his fourth and largest Aeolian organ, Opus 1410 (IV/107).9 Installed in 1918, this grand organ included the first independent 32¢ Diapason in an Aeolian residence organ.10
Frank Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s few patrons who could actually play the organ. He was wholly devoted to Aeolian organs, to the company, and to the music it provided. His contract for Opus 874 included 50 rolls of his choosing and free membership in the Aeolian Music Library for three years to include an average of twelve rolls per week.11 When mentioning Aeolian rolls, it’s interesting to note that in 1904 the price of the roll-recording of Victor Herbert’s Symphonic Fantasy was $9.25 and a worker in the Aeolian factory earned $11 per week.12 Frank Taft, art director of the Aeolian Company, was one of Woolworth’s close friends. It was Mr. Taft who played the organ for Woolworth’s funeral at his home at 990 Fifth Avenue (Opus 1144) in April of 1919.13
Our tour continues six blocks south to the home of Simon B. Chapin at Fifth and 74th. I wouldn’t have recognized Mr. Chapin’s name without having had an encounter with his “country organ” several years ago. Mr. Chapin was a successful stockbroker. Among other pursuits, he invested his immense personal wealth in large and successful real estate ventures. Most notable among these was his partnership with Franklin Burroughs in the development of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina into a popular resort. The firm of Burroughs & Chapin developed the Seaside Inn (Myrtle Beach’s first oceanfront hotel), and the landmark Myrtle Beach Pavilion. The new shopping district was anchored by the Chapin Company General Store, and to this day Burroughs & Chapin is a prominent real estate development company. He built a lakefront vacation home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1898, about 75 feet from the shore. The house presents a 115-foot façade that includes a 55-foot screened porch. Aeolian’s Opus 1000 (II/18) was installed there in 1906. He must have been pleased with the instrument because that same year he purchased a two-manual instrument with 15 ranks for his home on Fifth Avenue (Opus 1018).14 One block further south on Fifth Avenue and a couple doors east on 73rd Street we find the home of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer where Aeolian’s Opus 924 (II/13) was installed in 1902. Edward Rechlin was organist to the Pulitzer family, playing from 9:30 to 10:00 each evening they were in town. He was paid $20 an evening and $25 for a family wedding.15
Keep going east on 73rd Street, turn right on Madison and walk one block south to East 72nd and you’ll find the home of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Now this guy knew something about quality of design, and the folks at Aeolian must have been very pleased when Mr. Tiffany contracted for Opus 925 (II/12) in 1902. And once again, a city organ wasn’t enough—Aeolian’s Opus 1146 (II/27) was installed at Tiffany’s second home in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1910.16
By the way, Mr. Tiffany’s appreciation of the Aeolian organ was shared by his clients. The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, started their career building automobile chassis for the Ford Motor Company. It didn’t take them long to realize that they would make more money building entire cars, and they formed the company that still bears their name. They each had large Aeolian organs in their Michigan residences. Horace’s first organ was Opus 1175 (II/15) and his second was Opus 1319 (IV/80). John’s only Aeolian was Opus 1444 (III/76). Perhaps Horace was threatened by his brother catching up because in 1920 he purchased Opus 1478. With two manuals and 16 ranks, this organ was not so impressive by itself, but its setting certainly was. It was installed in his steam-powered yacht, the Delphine. The Delphine was 257 feet long, had five decks and a crew of 58, and its interior appointments were designed by Louis Tiffany. The organ was installed across from the fireplace in the walnut-paneled music room.17 It’s fun to imagine Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Dodge sharing their appreciation of the Aeolian organs at Tiffany’s drawing board over snifters of cognac.
From Louis Tiffany’s house, we walk two blocks south on Madison Avenue, then back west to Fifth Avenue, to the home of Henry Clay Frick, another steel industrialist from Pittsburgh. The Frick family moved to New York in 1905 and rented the William H. Vanderbilt residence on Fifth Avenue at East 51st Street (no organ). During this period they built a vacation home at Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, and Aeolian Opus 1008 (III/44) was installed there in 1906. Once that house was complete, the Frick family started building their own home in Manhattan at One East 70th Street, on the corner of Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park. This home was graced by Aeolian 1263 (IV/72), which was shipped from the factory in March of 1914. Mr. Frick also donated an Aeolian organ (Opus 1334, IV/64) to Princeton University in 1915, where it was installed in Proctor Hall of the Graduate College.18
We’ve walked 24 blocks, and I’d like to show you one other organ. It’s a little too far to walk so we’ll take a cab. Charles Schwab, the first president of U.S. Steel, built his West Side home to occupy the entire block between 72nd and 73rd streets on Riverside Drive. With 90 bedrooms it was the largest residence in Manhattan, but Mr. Schwab started small in the Aeolian department—Opus 961 (1904) had only two manuals and 33 ranks. Perhaps he was inspired by his steel colleague Mr. Frick when he ordered the enlargement of the organ (Opus 1032, 1907) to four manuals and 66 ranks.19 We might imagine that Frick’s response was to up the ante with Opus 1263 (IV/72). Do you suppose that the man from Aeolian was encouraging these guys to outdo one another?
Our little tour has taken us past some of Manhattan’s grandest sites. Many of the homes I’ve mentioned have been replaced by modern high-rise luxury condominiums, but it’s fun to imagine a day when Fifth Avenue was dominated by some of the grandest single-family homes ever built. What was it about the Aeolian organ that excited the interest of this group? What extravagant home furnishings are available today that can compare to a $25,000 or $35,000 pipe organ built in 1910 or 1920? However we answer those questions, the Aeolian Company got it right for about 30 years. Then came the Great Depression.

Thar she blows—some more

While writing my column last month I ran out of space and had plenty of air left, so today I continue my stream-of-consciousness about organ wind. (You might want to reread the April typhoon first.) I ended last month with a literary reference—let’s start this month with another, this time from American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894):

The Organ Blower

Devoutest of my Sunday friends,
The patient Organ-blower bends;
I see his figure sink and rise,
(Forgive me, Heaven, my wandering eyes!)
A moment lost, the next half seen,
His head above the scanty screen,
Still measuring out his deep salaams
Through quavering hymns and panting psalms.

No priest that prays in gilded stole,
To save a rich man’s mortgaged soul;
No sister, fresh from holy vows,
So humbly stoops, so meekly bows;
His large obeisance puts to shame
The proudest genuflecting dame,
Whose Easter bonnet low descends
With all the grace devotion lends.

O brother with the supple spine,
How much we owe those bows of thine!
Without thine arm to lend the breeze,
How vain the finger on the keys!
Though all unmatched the player’s skill,
Those thousand throats were dumb and still:
Another’s art may shape the tone,
The breath that fills it is thine own.

Six days the silent Memnon waits
Behind his temple’s folded gates;
But when the seventh day’s sunshine falls
Through rainbowed windows on the walls,
He breathes, he sings, he shouts, he fills
The quivering air with rapturous thrills;
The roof resounds, the pillars shake,
And all the slumbering echoes wake!

The Preacher from the Bible-text
With weary words my soul has vexed
(Some stranger, fumbling far astray
To find the lesson for the day);
He tells us truths too plainly true,
And reads the service all askew,—
Why, why the—mischief—can’t he look
Beforehand in the service-book?

But thou, with decent mien and face,
Art always ready in thy place;
Thy strenuous blast, whate’er the tune,
As steady as the strong monsoon;
Thy only dread a leathery creak,
Or small residual extra squeak,
To send along the shadowy aisles
A sunlit wave of dimpled smiles.

Not all the preaching, O my friend,
Comes from the church’s pulpit end!
Not all that bend the knee and bow
Yield service half so true as thou!
One simple task performed aright,
With slender skill, but all thy might,
Where honest labor does its best,
And leaves the player all the rest.

This many-diapasoned maze,
Through which the breath of being strays,
Whose music makes our earth divine,
Has work for mortal hands like mine.

My duty lies before me. Lo,
The lever there! Take hold and blow!
And He whose hand is on the keys
Will play the tune as He shall please.

Such an eloquent daydream! Holmes was a doctor of medicine and held a chair of anatomy and physiology at Harvard for most of his working life.1 He has us in a church with “shadowy aisles,” but I picture him sitting in a white New England church with lots of clear glass, a little woozy from the bright sunlight. There’s a black-walnut organ case up front behind the pulpit, and the pump-handle sticks out the right-hand side of the case. Perhaps our dreamer missed a brilliant sermon that morning, but he seemed not to hold the preacher in high esteem: He tells us truths too plainly true, and reads the service all askew . . . Instead we get a rare glimpse at 19th-century worship in which we see the organ-pumper as a participant in the service, “scanty screen” notwithstanding. I’ve never designed or built a new organ with a manual pumping system. I would have imagined that I would try to place the pump handle out of sight so the motion wouldn’t detract from the worship, but perhaps that would deprive the congregation from deeper insight into the Word of God. The pump handles of many of the antique organs I know stick out of the side of the instrument where the motion of the pumping would have been quite a spectacle. I wonder how many worshipers made the connection between the volume of the music and the speed of the pumping?
The largest single part of most 19th-century American pipe organs is the reservoir. Recently I was inspecting a large Hook organ in New York City as the Organ Clearing House prepares to dismantle it, and I measured the reservoir at 12' x 6', double rise, with two feeder bellows underneath, each of which is half the size of the main reservoir. (In this organ, the pump handle was inside the case.) I was looking at it from a logistical point of view—the OCH crew will soon have to lift it out of the organ loft—but as I like to imagine the organ as a living, breathing entity, this enormous and heavy mechanism is one of the organ’s vital organs. If the reservoir is 12' x 6' and opens 18" when full of air, it has a capacity of about 108 cubic feet. The feeders open about a foot and are wedge-shaped—as they each take up half the area of the reservoir, each has a capacity of about 18 cubic feet. The pump-handle pivots between the two feeders—when the handle goes up, one feeder opens and the other closes so one cycle of the pump-handle (up and down) feeds 36 cubic feet into the reservoir—assuming no leaks, it takes three strokes to fill the reservoir. Right? Read on.
Fill the reservoir and then stop pumping. Play a hymn on one stop. You’ll get through a whole verse, maybe more, before the bellows is empty. Pump it up again and play the same hymn on full organ. This time you’ll run out of air before you finish the first line. You might have to pump twice a measure to keep air moving at full organ. How’s that for scientific?
With few exceptions, the case (especially the footprint) of a 19th-century organ is much larger than that of a modern organ with the same number of ranks. Why? I’ll give you one reason. Walk around the modern organ case and you’ll find the reservoir mounted on a frame behind the organ. The footprint of the 19th-century organ is established by the size of the reservoir located inside the case.
Most 19th-century instruments have a service access door at ground level which means that the first thing a visitor sees inside the organ is the reservoir. Actually, what they see is an ocean of bricks stretching into the darkness and they always ask why an organ needs bricks. The weight of the bricks creates the pressure. Forcing air into an elastic reservoir (an organ bellows with hinged ribs) will not create pressure until we add weight to the top of the reservoir. The amount of weight determines the level of pressure—add weight and the pressure increases.
One colleague of mine made it a practice to use indigenous materials to weigh the bellows in the instruments he built. One organ was near a granite quarry, another, marble. One was near old shoe-making factories so they used the cast-iron heel molds.
I said that three strokes of a 36-cubic-foot pumping cycle would fill a reservoir that holds 108 cubic feet. Wrong! To put air under pressure you compress it. So it takes many more than three strokes of atmospheric pressure to fill that reservoir. (That math is beyond me!)
Bricks used as reservoir weights are often wrapped in paper. Why go to all that trouble? Bricks are porous and can absorb moisture from the air, which increases their weight, and the paper inhibits absorption. The organ is tuned and voiced at a specific pressure. If the pressure goes up too much, the sound of the organ will be compromised. Imagine the reaction of the organ tuner when he arrives at the church and finds a stack of folding chairs stored on top of the reservoir!
The floating top frame of the reservoir with all its bricks is very heavy—you can’t budge it. But the organ’s wind lifts it effortlessly. And when it’s full, a touch at one end makes the whole thing rock gently—a wonderful illustration of both the power and the delicacy of this musical air. Our friend the organ-pumper can move mountains with his pump handle. There are few natural forces more powerful than air. An airliner overshoots the end of the runway, the landing gear collapses, and emergency workers lift the plane with huge inflatable bags placed under the wings. Air moving fast across the countryside (wind) blows the roof off a barn. You stand on the platform of a railway station and an express train roars through—the blast of air pushed aside by the locomotive almost knocks you over. Or sit in a sailboat at noon on a calm sunny day. As you glide gently along the glassy water you notice a line of rough water a thousand yards away moving toward you. The heat of the sun has warmed the land. The air above the land is rising, and the air above the cooler water is rushing ashore to fill the void. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. (A barometer measures atmospheric pressure—a falling barometer is an indication of coming wind—a fast falling barometer indicates an impending storm.) The wind is above the surface so your sail is filled before the rough water gets to you. The boat heels and the water bubbles out from under your stern as you race across the water. Does the blowing wind push the boat along? If that’s all it could do, then the boat could only move in the same direction as the wind. The curve of the sail is the exact equivalent of the curve of the top of an airplane wing, turned ninety degrees from horizontal to vertical. The plane is pushed forward by its engines. Since the curved top of the wing is a longer distance to cover than the flat bottom, the air on top of the wing moves faster. The faster moving air creates a lower pressure above the wing than below, and the plane lifts toward the lower pressure. The curve of the boat’s sail makes the wind move faster across the front of the sail than the back, and the boat is drawn forward. The racing sailor’s jargon includes the word lift which refers to a gust of wind. I got lifted to the first racing mark.
As I visit organbuilders’ workshops, I’ve noticed with both pleasure and amusement how common it is to find half-finished sailboat parts (rudders, tillers, etc.) stored under the workbenches; the employees’ weekend projects mix woodworking with wind. There is a strong correlation between sailboats and pipe organs. In my interpretation, it’s no accident that the logo of C. B. Fisk, Inc. (organbuilders in Gloucester, Massachusetts) is the masts, yards, and rigging of a square-rigged sailing ship.
When you play four verses of a hymn on a large organ you send 10,000 cubic feet of pressurized air (2500 ft3/minute x 4 minutes) out of the blower, through the reservoirs, through the pipes, and into the sanctuary converted into sound energy. I don’t believe speakers can duplicate that.
Today, we slide onto the organ bench and flip a switch. An electric motor comes on turning a fan that blows air through ducts into the reservoirs. When the fast-moving air is contained by the reservoir with weights (or springs) pushing down on its top, pressure is created, regulated, and stored until you are ready to use it by playing. In a large organ, the blower is a huge machine hidden in a remote location. It might be the size of a small car and have a 10, 20, or even 30 horsepower motor. Many people never throw the switch that turns on a machine that large. Among other industrial innovations, the development of the jet engine has resulted from research about the nature of moving air so modern blowers can be much smaller and quieter than the older monsters that lurk in church basements. It’s common for a newer blower to be installed right inside the organ. This means less work and expense building windlines, and it means that the organ pipes are sitting in the same atmosphere that’s being used to blow them. When an organ blower sits in a cold basement room, the cool air blowing through the warm pipes upsets the tuning. And remember our 10,000-cubic-feet-per-hymn; think of the waste of heating fuel when you blow that much basement air into a heated sanctuary.
The organ blower is a great convenience. Imagine if scheduling organ-pumpers were added to the more familiar chores of the modern church organist. But don’t take that blower switch for granted. Think of all that grand air rushing through your instrument, converting to sound energy as it goes through the pipes, blending with the body of air-driven sound coming from the lungs of the congregation. It’s a winning combination.
One Saturday morning I received a frantic call from the organist of a church whose organ I maintain. A wedding was about to start and the organ wouldn’t work. She could hear that the blower turned on and the console lit up the way it always does, but no sound anywhere. I rushed to the church to find limousines lined up out front, and photographers running around. The church was full, and the bagpipe was vamping (egads!) to fill the time. Sure enough, the blower was running and the console was lit (so I knew that the power supply was on), but the bellows hadn’t risen—there was no air pressure in the organ. I ran to the basement where I found a card table resting against the organ blower’s air intake. That’s all it took. No air, no music. Can a card table stop bagpipes?

A Night at the Opera

When you think of a night at the opera, what images flash through your mind? Stunning sets and costumes? Brilliant singing? Melodramatic stories transformed into staged magic? The thrill of a lifetime to witness such ambitious performances? Or do you imagine fur coats and diamonds, limousines, $200 orchestra seats, standing room lines, no late seating?
I have friends in the Boston area who make special trips to attend performances at the Met. This means traveling to New York ($100 each for the train), staying in a hotel ($300), restaurant meals (say $200), and expensive tickets ($150 each for moderate-priced seats)—a thousand dollars! How accessible is that?
The future audience for opera is today’s children, but how many families can consider such an expensive outing? And how many children can manage a three-hour commitment to sit in a seat and pay attention? What is the future of the art form if it’s not really available to young people? We who are serious about the performance of serious music are used to strict rules of etiquette at concerts. We never applaud between movements. We scorn those who arrive late or leave early; we’re openly derisive of those who leave early and then return to their seats. We focus on authentic performances of complete pieces; we take all of the repeats. We expect our listeners to accept the music on our terms, insisting that we are speaking for the composers. These are all important rules. We should stick to them. But I think we need to admit that these rules apply more to those who are already appreciators of serious music, and that they are not great tools for audience development.
In August of 2006, Peter Gelb succeeded Joseph Volpe as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Mr. Gelb began his working life as an office boy for the great impresario Sol Hurok, presenter of more than 4,000 artists including Marian Anderson, Pavlova, and Andrés Segovia. You can find his biography on the Met’s website . Realizing the importance of offering opera to children, and stating that most operas are simply too long for children, he has spearheaded a striking effort to build tomorrow’s audience. Under his leadership, the Met has created an edited version of Julie Taymor’s 2004 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte especially for audiences of children. From its typical duration of three hours and ten minutes, the production was cut to 90 minutes.
On Monday, January 1, 2007, the New York Times printed two articles about this revolutionary presentation. Times music critic Anthony Tommasini’s article, “An Opera at the Met That’s Real and ‘Loud’,” reports that “the overture and several ensembles and arias were cut. Other arias were abridged through some very deft trims.” Poet J. D. McClatchy, a lecturer in English at Yale University, created a new free English translation of the libretto. And as perhaps the most important vote of support, James Levine conducted. The matinee performance on Saturday, December 30, was sold out, and Tommasini reported, “Actually the matinee clocked in at close to two hours, but few of the children seemed to mind. The audience was remarkably attentive and well behaved. Of course one strict Met protocol—if you leave the auditorium you are not allowed re-entry until intermission—was wisely ditched for the day, so children could take restroom breaks.”
When Tommasini interviewed some children in the audience, they told him that the singing was too loud. He challenged them, “when children hear amplified music everywhere, even channeled right into their ears through headphones, how could un-amplified singing seem too loud?” They responded that it wasn’t too loud to listen to, but that they “never thought voices could do that.” Tommasini went on, “So their reaction was not a complaint about excessive volume, but rather an attempt to explain the awesome impression” made on them by the Met’s singers.
The other article about this extravaganza was written by Campbell Robertson under the title, “Mozart, Now Singing at a Theater Near You.” As if the abridged edition weren’t radical enough, the Metropolitan Opera went a step further and arranged for the performance to be simulcast live to 100 movie theaters across America, in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway. The numbers were not all in at press time, but Robertson reported that the average attendance was at 90% of capacity—of the 60 American theaters presenting the simulcast, 48 were sold out. Tickets were priced at $18. The article was full of enthusiastic responses from parents and children. I imagine Mr. Gelb was pleased.
What a radical approach to a seemingly inaccessible art form. If there were 200 seats in each of those 100 theaters and an average of 90% attendance, that’s 18,000 tickets. Add 3,800 seats and 195 standing-room places in the Metropolitan Opera House* and you get 21,995. Now that’s an audience!
This kind of radical programming is not for everyone. We have to admit that the diamonds-and-fur crowd is essential to the Met. Take a look at the program book of any major musical ensemble and you can see who gives what. I have the program from a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in my hands in which is published the list of contributors to the orchestra’s recent Capital and Endowment Campaign. There are three names in the $2,000,000 and up category, eight in $1,000,000–$1,999,999, and seven in $500,000–$999,999. Elsewhere in the same book is the list of supporters of the Higginson Society, which “embodies the deep commitment to supporting musical excellence continuing the legacy of the orchestra’s founder and first benefactor, Henry Lee Higginson.” This list is a little closer to earth with the highest gifts at around $100,000; there are 107 sponsors ($5000–$9999) and 281 members ($2500–$4999). These lists fill eight full pages.
While I’d like to imagine that many of these $2500 to $2,000,000 supporters would approve of such innovative programming as I describe from the Met, I bet that many would prefer to attend a “real” performance of Die Zauberflöte. So of course the Met continues to offer their familiar fare. Go to and you’ll see everything from Andrea Chénier to Eugene Onegin to Butterfly to The First Emperor (the premier of a very ambitious piece by Chinese composer Tan Dun commissioned by the Met, which we heard on the radio this past Saturday).
What does all this have to do with the organ? When’s the last time you saw a family with young children in the audience at an organ recital? What’s your attitude about audience etiquette at recitals presented at your church? How welcoming are the concerts presented in your community? And who will be listening to organ music in your town 50 years from now?
We could promote the simulcast trick for special recitals—something flashy from Walt Disney Hall might fill a few theaters—but there are exciting organs in many (hundreds, thousands?) locales that could attract big crowds of young people if handled right. What would you play if you were guaranteed a full audience of teenagers? Chorale preludes of Johann Gottfried Walther? Elevations by Frescobaldi? Don’t get me wrong—I love that music, I’ve played it and many other things like it. But with respect to Johann and Girolamo, it’s just not the thrall of a 21st-century kid.
Do we have to degrade the organ to make it enticing? I don’t think so, but we have to be creative. Do we cheapen our musicianship by “catering” to the masses? On the other hand, what good are we without the masses? I’ve heard colleagues refer to the lay public as “the great unwashed.” I object to this characterization. Does that make us the “great washed?” (If so, that precludes us from getting “down and dirty” with our music-making.) My objection comes from the feeling that while we certainly expect the respect of our audiences (in both sacred and secular settings), we often fail to offer reciprocal respect. And in that failing, we are shooting ourselves in the collective foot. Just as a wife might compliment her husband for his good taste in women, the organist might applaud the audience for its good taste in choosing their afternoon’s entertainment. And what better way to applaud the audience than to reward it with a thrilling, enlightening, accessible program?
I participate as a member of the board of the Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, a non-profit organization that supports, promotes, and presents the quartet in regular concerts in mid-coast Maine. In addition to some 30 concerts a year in the home region, they frequently play in distant cities, acting as musical ambassadors from the small towns in which they live. It’s a wonderful organization with a strong audience, and it’s impossible to measure the advantages of having such an institution in a small town. But there’s an inherent struggle. How do we balance the artistic ideals and aspirations of the quartet with the pressures of meeting the budget? The fact is the choice is never that clear. Of course the audience wants to hear the classic string quartet repertory. Of course the quartet wants to explore new music, new concepts, and new challenges. Of course, everyone wants to play and attend concerts of music that is beautiful, uplifting, and stimulating. And of course all of us would like to see more children attending the concerts. It’s a matter of balance.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra rewards its generous donors with “Pre-Concert Talks” presented by leading musicologists before every concert and with museum-quality displays about the composers’ life and work. An educated audience will be more receptive to the unfamiliar.
I was struck by what I read in the New York Times about the Metropolitan Opera. For such a venerable institution to undertake such a radical program should be an example to all who care about the future of the arts. Imagine the expense. A special translation, editing all those scores and parts, recasting the production to allow for a new pace of set and costume changes and lighting cues, relearning and re-rehearsing that most familiar of operas so singers were familiar with the cuts. And don’t forget the paperwork to arrange for all those theaters and organizing the simulcasts. The whole adventure must have cost a fortune, no doubt supplied by well-briefed donors. It’s fun to picture all those children running up and down the grand staircases, covering their ears at the high notes from the Queen of the Night, and going home looking forward to the next time they get to go to the Met. Or the symphony. Or a string quartet concert. Or an organ recital—now playing at a theater (or a church) near you. Make it happen.
* http://www.metoperafamily.org/met opera/about/whoweare/faq/house.aspx

John Bishop is executive director of The Organ Clearing House.

Life’s rhythm
Working with the Organ Clearing House is all about travel. Most organbuilders spend most of their time in the workshop building an instrument, and then go on the road to install it. Ours is mostly site work. The OCH crew is busy dismantling or installing organs, shipping organs and organ parts around the country, or preparing organ chambers for the installation of new instruments built by others. This means that we travel frequently—sometimes it feels like constantly. Many of our trips last two or three weeks. We arrive in a city, settle into a hotel, find our way around, and establish a temporary life rhythm of work, rest, meals, and calling home.
It’s fun to visit the sites that make a distant city special. While on business trips, I’ve visited art museums from Whitney to Walker and from Getty to Guggenheim. I’ve participated in a census of migrating whales in southern California, been to baseball games in a dozen cities, and attended a performance of A Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. I’ve worshipped in many of America’s great churches. On one notable Sunday morning, I attended the radio broadcast at the Mormon Tabernacle, a nine o’clock service at the Episcopal cathedral, and eleven-thirty at the Roman Catholic cathedral, all in Salt Lake City. I’ve visited organbuilding shops all over the country. And restaurants—sushi in Los Angeles, an Argentinean steak house in Dallas, Dungeness crab and salmon in Seattle, and I’ve mentioned before the Brazilian steak house in Philadelphia next to the Wanamaker store.

“If you got to ask, you ain’t got it . . . ”
(Fats Waller answering a fan’s question about rhythm)
Exotic and exciting to be sure, but often while traveling I miss the rhythm of life at home—chores, meals, errands, the familiarity of place. And while many evenings on the road bring thrilling new experiences, others are dull and lonely. Recently I ate alone in a restaurant in New York, where a young man was playing the piano. The food was good, service friendly, and there was a pleasant bustle in the place, but the piano playing was deadly. He sat with rigid spine, ninety-degree angle between neck and chin, never moving his head. He was playing standard crooner-type stuff as if he were an animatron in a department-store Christmas tableau. (Some- plink, plink, where- plink, plink, over the rainbow- plink . . . skies- plink, plink, are- plink, plink . . . ) Yikes.
As he went from one song to another, I reflected on rhythm, how on the one hand it’s important for musical rhythm to be firm and clear, even dependable, and on the other hand it’s essential that rhythm be flexible and alive. A listener is troubled by the unpredictability of poor rhythm. A congregation is afraid to sing if the organist’s rhythm is untrustworthy. But if it’s too rigid or too strict, it stops being music. It’s like the little girl dressed up in a starched pinafore, afraid to move.
Once at lunch with colleagues (it was the Brazilian place in Philadelphia, you really have to try it!), we were joined by a lover of organ music who was also a classic-car enthusiast. He talked about driving on a beautiful road in a terrific car, up and down hills, slowing a little before a curve and accelerating through it, taking a moment to notice a beautiful view or a particular building. He compared this with musical performance. A great musician, he said, knows how to step on the gas just enough to make a passage thrilling, how to slow slightly to notice a special sight, how to put the pressure on when things get exciting.
Listening to Mr. Plink-Plink in New York, I thought of that Philadelphia lunch where all of us around the table responded to the driving metaphor. I loved the images from that conversation. I pictured an organist wearing Great Race-style goggles, gloves, and scarf playing a snazzy toccata.
Having never owned a Porsche, I didn’t know until recently that the automaker publishes a magazine for its customers. One of our neighbors does drive a Porsche, and he thought I’d be interested in an article about a pipe organ that he read in the Porsche magazine.
In 2002, Porsche established a new factory in Leipzig, Germany, joining luminaries like Franz Liszt, J. S. Bach, Johann Goethe, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Kurt Masur as good citizens. As the firm was introducing itself to the city, it provided funding for the renovation of the great Ladegast organ at St. Nikolaikirche, the “other” church in the town where Bach made music. Hermann Eule of Bautzen, Germany, was the organbuilder, and the artists at Porsche won a major design prize for the keydesk. (See photo.) Hang on to your hats! Form follows function? Careful of your tempos. And be sure to note the company logo on the right-hand end of the keydesk.

“I got rhythm . . . ”
Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best known for the development of Eurhythmics, a study of motion as it relates to the performance of music. As a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, I was lucky to participate in a special month-long seminar in Eurhythmics, led by Oberlin’s retired professor of Eurhythmics Inda Howland, who had studied with and was a disciple of Dalcroze.
There’s a touching anecdote about how Dalcroze was led to develop this specialty. He was working with a piano student whose rhythm was poor enough that he had trouble playing even beats. Looking out his window across the campus where he taught, Dalcroze happened to see this student striding along with purposeful rhythmic footsteps. It was clear to him that the student had good rhythm at least in his walking, and Dalcroze was inspired to understand how to connect the easy rhythms found in everyday life, such as footsteps and heart beats, with musical performance.
Dalcroze exercises are tailored to emulate natural and easy forms of rhythm. You toss or bounce a ball back and forth in musical time with a partner for example, establishing a beat and letting the bounce of the ball occupy one beat, two beats, or a four-beat measure. The pace of the rhythm is defined by the arc of the bounce—it floats or soars, giving the image or feeling of freedom within rhythmic definition. If it’s a four-beat bounce, it has a life and airiness not found in the pile-driving, one-beat bounce, a great demonstration of rhythmic principles.
Where do we find rhythm in our lives? Drive on a concrete highway. There are expansion joints every fifty feet or so and the tires of your car go ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. When I was a kid these rhythms inspired family singing: “I’ve been working on the rail- (ba-dump) road (ba-dump), all (ba-dump) the live- (ba-) long (ba) day, (ba-dump) . . .” My car’s directional signals have a triplet beat to them and make me think of the subject of Mendelssohn’s C-minor fugue (Prelude and Fugue in C minor) when I sit at a traffic light: (ba-dee, ba-dah, ba-dee, ba-dah . . .).
Nowadays, carpenters often use pneumatic nail guns that are loaded with cartridges of nails or staples. But watch a skilled carpenter using an old-fashioned “analog” hammer—it’s a pleasure to see his natural rhythm as even, free strokes of the hammer send the nail into the wood in even increments. Twenty nails, a hundred strokes, no bruised thumbs, I feel another song coming on (and it’s not If I had a hammer . . . ).
We think of rhythms in larger cycles. Where we live, the ocean’s high tides are about twelve hours and twenty or thirty minutes apart. It’s not an exactly regular cycle, but high tide advances by about forty-five minutes each day. It affects the rhythm of life in subtle ways. My wife takes a water shuttle to her office. If it’s low tide at seven-thirty in the morning, the ramp to the boat is dramatically steeper than if it’s high tide—an issue in winter weather. The cycles make it be something like high tide one Monday, low tide the next Monday.
We tell time in days, weeks, and months. The tides tell time in lunar months—the tide clock on our wall counts lunar seconds. For centuries, the British Navy used tide cycles as pay periods—there are thirteen lunar months in a year so there were thirteen paychecks.
Ocean tides give us the image of ebb and flow, and we translate that into larger cycles like the rhythm of holiday seasons. As I write, Lent has just started. We’re coming out of the post-Christmas ebb, getting ready to step on the gas and accelerate into Easter with its strong jubilant rhythms (a-ha-ha-ha-ha lay-hay looo-ooo ya). Many church musicians see post-Easter ebbs, followed by special services at Pentecost, church-school Sunday, and something around high-school graduation, all of which leads into the quiet and regular pace of Pentecost through the summer, when choirs are on recess, there’s no Sunday school, services are moved to the chapel, fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high . . . one of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing, so hush little baby, don’t you cry.
I’m thrilled by the rhythm of good hymn playing. A steady and stately tempo, quick enough that the average congregant can sing a phrase in one breath, slow enough that everyone can sing all the words. Some ebb and flow of registration—not only playing each stanza on a different setting or manual, but including some Swell-box action and a knob or two to accentuate the text within the stanza. The organist who can’t think of anything special to do with stanza three of Hymn 432 in The 1982 Hymnal (O praise ye the Lord!) isn’t worth listening to:

O praise ye the Lord! All things that give sound;
each jubilant chord re-echo around;
loud organs, his glory forth tell in deep tone,
and sweet harp, the story of what he hath done.
Doesn’t that imply some pistons being pushed? (It was sung at our wedding and it gets me every time!)
Stanza three of O little town of Bethlehem gives another registration hint: How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. Please don’t tear into that with mixtures and trumpets a-popping.
Or how about Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (I know, I know, it’s not inclusive . . .), stanza five:

Breathe through the hearts of our desire thy coolness and thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
That’s one hymn I wouldn’t end on General 8.
The organist reads the words and thinks of stop combinations, rhythmic liberties, commas inviting breaths. The organbuilder thinks of quiet stop actions, fast pistons, swell shutters that don’t squeak, bass pipes that speak promptly. How can your organist play rhythmically if low C says fffffwwwaah?
And this is where the art of organbuilding really gets special. Of all the musical instruments, the organ is the most mechanical. Any medium-sized organ has thousands upon thousands of moving parts, little things pushing and pulling, huffing and puffing. Switches open and close, magnets are energized by the hundred, huge masses of wood move silently as a swell pedal is moved by the organist. A rhythmical poke at a toe stud gives a rhythmic response. No organist, chorister, or congregant has to wait or be jarred by a machine responding a split-second late. A good tracker action operates in real time. A good electric or electro-pneumatic action operates at the speed of light: 670,616,629.2 miles per hour or 186,282.397 miles per second. Let’s face it, we can argue about controlling the speed of attack but there’s no appreciable difference in response time.
The machines we build that blow air into organ pipes must support the player with instant response so the machine can vanish into the art. That achieved, the rhythm can be free, the music alive, and we can leave Mr. Plink-Plink sitting stiffly on a piano bench in New York, stifling an otherwise pleasant dinner, while we accelerate into a turn with the sun shining and the wind in our hair.?

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

A show of hands

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

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

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

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

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

Hanging by a thread

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

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

The panda’s thumb

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

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

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

Wave it like it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve got to hand it to you.

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

Thar she blows!

I know I share with many organbuilders the sense that the organ is alive. Stand inside an organ chamber when the blower is off and all is silent—unliving. Turn on the blower. The reservoirs fill, the swell shutters give a little twitch, and the instrument seems to quiver expectantly, ready to sound. We normally don’t notice air. We don’t bump into it when we walk. We don’t feel its resistance when we gesture with our hands. But we do notice it when it’s in motion—we call that wind. Reflecting on the nature of wind, we typically refer to blowing wind, as in “it’s blowing a gale out there.” But a sailor knows that the effect is often just the opposite. If there’s a low pressure cell up north, all the high pressure air south of us rushes by to fill the gap. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. Another interesting case is the classic sea breeze that occurs when coastal land is heated by the midday sun causing updrafts. You can’t have a vacuum without an enclosure, so when all that air rushes skyward, the cooler air over the water rushes ashore to take its place. Again, the wind is caused by air being drawn.
Wind n. 1a. Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air, parallel to or along the ground. b. A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan . . .1 The organ is all about wind—air in motion. Because the organ and the piano have similar keyboards, many people assume that they are a lot alike. In fact, they could hardly be more different. The tone of the piano is created by a hammer striking a metal string. The vibration of the string creates the sound, the length and tension of the string determine the pitch, and the impact of the hammer causes the attack. The fact that a great pianist can produce cascades of notes without the sensation of hammering is at the heart of the art—the art of both the instrument and the player. I’ve often marveled during piano performances when a scale or arpeggio gives the impression of falling water rather than hundreds of hammers hitting strings. Here the art surpasses the mechanical—or the mechanical enables the art.
In nature, wind is caused by air being drawn. Of course, the wind in a pipe organ emanates from a blowing device, usually a rotary blower. But when I play, I think it’s fun to imagine the air as being drawn out from the top of the organ’s pipes, originating in my body, leaving my fingertips to make the sound. That imagined sensation is the heart of the player’s phrasing. Remember your teacher encouraging you to breathe with the music? Once again the art surpasses the mechanical. The huge mechanical entity that is the pipe organ in effect vanishes, leaving only the player and the sound of the music.
The sound of the organ is produced by columns of air vibrating in the organ’s pipes—or in the case of a reed stop, by the vibration of a brass reed or tongue. The physical production of those sounds is analogous to the flute whose sound is produced by the player blowing across an open hole (like the top of a bottle), or a clarinet whose sound is produced by the vibrating reed. Whether you are vibrating a column of air by splitting a sheet of air against the edge of a hole or with a vibrating tongue, you need air in motion to do it.
We measure organ air pressure in inches using a manometer. In its simplest form, a manometer is a U-shaped tube filled with water so the level of the water is even on both sides of the tube (gravity does a good job of leveling). When you apply air pressure to one end of the tube, the water in that end is blown down forcing the other side up and you use a ruler to measure the difference. If an organbuilder forgets to bring a manometer to a job, he can make one using flexible plastic tubing as found in a fish tank, a rough piece of wood, and a few staples.
The other measurement we take of organ air is volume—considered as a factor of an amount of air in a specified period of time. In the case of a pipe organ it’s meaningless to say, for example, 1,000 cubic feet of air, because when described that way our thousand cubic feet is sitting still and won’t make a peep. Instead we say 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM), which describes a volume of air in motion. And, 1,000 CFM doesn’t mean much unless you also assign a pressure value. So you might purchase an organ blower that can produce 2,000 CFM at 4? WP. That would be adequate for an organ of about 25 stops with low wind pressure. If you needed 2,000 CFM at 10? WP, you would need a more powerful blower. Some organbuilders use the term windsick to describe an instrument in which the wind supply is not adequate for the job. Now you’re an expert.
I’m inspired to write about organ air by the engraving that hangs over my desk. It’s reproduced from L’Art du Facteur d’Orgues, the 18th-century French treatise on organbuilding written and illustrated by the good monk Dom Bedos de Celles—it depicts a large organ in cross-section. On the left side of the image, which is the back of the organ, there is a young gentleman working a set of three large manually operated multi-fold bellows. He walks down the row, pushing down each lever, in turn raising each bellows. The bellows are connected together with a tripping mechanism—when one nears empty, the next one starts to fall, and the young gentleman circles back around to fill the first again. He’s wearing a jacket with some 20 buttons, breeches that buckle at the knee, and stockings that cover his calves from the top of his buckled shoes.
Back then you couldn’t play a note on an organ without someone to pump. I imagine that there were plenty of very bored organ-pumpers. But remembering that mechanical or electric organ blowers are essentially a 20th-century invention—how many of us would have volunteered hours to pump while Buxtehude, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, or Widor was practicing? Maybe rival organists tried to infiltrate “enemy” organ lofts by embedding their choir boys in the other’s pumping squad: “What’s that Bach up to this week?”
The great Cavaillé-Coll organ in the church of St. Sulpice in Paris was built in 1862. It has about 100 stops—a very large organ by modern standards and downright huge for the days of hand-pumped organs. Charles-Marie Widor’s tenure as organist there started in 1870 and ended with his retirement in 1934 (he was hired as a temporary fill-in and never given a permanent appointment!), so we can assume that there was a magical Sunday when Widor played the organ for the first time supported by an electric blower. That must have been liberating for the organist.
When organs were pumped by hand, organists were acutely aware of how much wind they were using. The more stops you drew, the more air you used and the faster the pumper had to work. Surely more than one young gentleman quit in protest. Think of Bach’s pumpers dealing with those huge arpeggiated diminished chords midway through the Toccata in D Minor that start with bottom D of the pedalboard, the third biggest wind-consuming note of the organ. Imagine the master playing those soon-to-be famous chords with arms outstretched and head thrown back, reveling in the sonic experience, while the pumpers raced from bellows to bellows, trying to keep up with the demand: “Nice work,” he said, “here’s an extra ducat for your trouble.”
I have had personal experience with this phenomenon. At the time I graduated from Oberlin College I was working with an organbuilder in Ohio named Jan Leek, a wonderful man who was trained in the Netherlands and who shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with me. We restored a 19th-century organ in a church in Bethlehem, Ohio—a project that included the restoration of the original hand-pumping equipment. Garth Peacock, a member of Oberlin’s organ faculty, played the dedication recital, which included some pieces and a hymn to be played with the organ pumped by hand—and I was the pumper. The pump handle stuck out of the right-hand side of the organ case where pumper and player could see each other. As we got into the hymn, Peacock caught my eye and winked. He drew stop after stop, filled in manual chords, then added doubling in the pedals, using all the wind he could, chuckling as I flailed the pump handle up and down. I know he did it on purpose.
My other favorite organ-pumping story happened after I completed the restoration of the 1868 E. & G. G. Hook organ (Opus 466) for the Follen Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. That project also included the restoration of the hand-pumping gear, and more than one parishioner felt clever commenting that the organ could be played even during a power failure. And sure enough, one of the first times the restored organ was played in concert there was a power failure and someone from the audience volunteered to go forth and pump.
Those who know me well—and probably some casual acquaintances—know that I love the epic series of novels about the brilliant captains of the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, especially captains Horatio Hornblower (written by C. S. Forester) and Jack Aubrey (written by Patrick O’Brian). Many a turnpike toll-taker has chuckled as my lowering car window emits a hearty “belay there” (audio books have accompanied me for tens of thousands of miles of pipe organ adventuring). Both epics are full of musical allusions, such as when Captain Hornblower rounds Cape Horn in a gale after lengthy adventures in the Pacific, and the groaning of the timbers of his ship Lydia “swelled into a volume of sound comparable to that of an organ in a church.”2
Captain Jack Aubrey, an accomplished amateur violinist as well as a brilliant fighting sea captain, shared hundreds of evenings making music with his closest friend, the equally able cellist and ship’s surgeon (and prolific intelligence agent) Stephen Maturin while traveling through 360º of longitude and twenty novels. Their evening concerts (typically enhanced with toasted cheese and marsala) pepper the active story with allegory while giving the reader a chance to understand the musical tastes of the day. It’s a delight to read how these determined warriors reveled in playing chamber music or improvising on favorite melodies as they sail around the world. On several occasions they discuss the effect of all that damp salt air on their instruments, and Jack Aubrey is smart enough to leave his precious Amati violin at home, distinguishing it from his seagoing fiddle.
In Post Captain, the second book of the series, Captain Aubrey returns to shore at a dramatic and complicated moment in his life. Heavily in debt, badly wounded after a violent sea battle, and thrilled with his new promotion to post-captain as a result of his victory, he is confined to the Duchy of the Savoy in London, a sanctuary where debtors were protected from arrest. After learning the boundaries of the Savoy from his innkeeper, he goes out walking:

Wandering out, he came to the back of the chapel: an organ was playing inside, a sweet, light-footed organ hunting a fugue through its charming complexities. He circled the railings to come to the door, but he had scarcely found it, opened it and settled himself in a pew before the whole elaborate structure collapsed in a dying wheeze and a thick boy crept from a hole under the loft and clashed down the aisle, whistling. It was a strong disappointment, the sudden breaking of a delightful tension, like being dismasted under full sail.
“What a disappointment, sir,” he said to the organist, who had emerged into the dim light. “I had so hoped you would bring it to a close.”
“Alas, I have no wind,” said the organist, an elderly parson. “That chuff lad has blown his hour, and no power on earth will keep him in. But I am glad you liked the organ—it is a Father Smith.3 A musician, sir?”
“Oh, the merest dilettante, sir; but I should be happy to blow for you, if you choose to go on. It would be a sad shame to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind.”
“Should you, indeed? You are very good sir. Let me show you the handle—you understand these things, I am sure . . . ”
So Jack pumped and the music wound away and away, the separate strands following one another in baroque flights and twirls until at last they came together and ran to the final magnificence . . . ”4

The next day while writing a letter to Stephen to share the news of his promotion, Captain Aubrey recognized the depth of his humor:
. . . in the Savoy chapel I said the finest thing in my life. The parson was playing a Handel fugue, the organ-boy deserted his post, and I said “it would be a pity to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind,” and blew for him. It was the wittiest thing! I did not smoke it entirely all at once, however, only after I had been pumping for some time; and then I could hardly keep from laughing aloud. It may be that post-captains are a very witty set of men, and that I am coming to it.5
That reminds me of E. Power Biggs’s quip after recording Handel’s organ concerti in the 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the instrument that Handel played in St. James’ Church, Great Packington, Warwickshire, when he recalled “handling the handle Handel handled.” I’m long-winded today. I’ve got lots more to say about organ wind, and I’m running out of space. So join me here next month for Thar she blows—some more.