In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Tan shoes and pink shoelaces . . .
You can spot him a mile away. Red checked pants, a striped shirt, paisley tie, and a cute little wool cap with a pom-pom—a veritable cornucopia. All the colors are too bright and they all clash with each other. How do we know they clash? I know there’s a physical reason—the physics of light, that is. Mix two cans of paint with the same ingredients, and put a few drops of a tint from the other end of the spectrum in one of them, and voila! They clash. But spectrographic explanations aside, I’m reminded of the comment made by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart while hearing an obscenity case in 1964: “. . . pornography is hard to define . . . but I know it when I see it.” No question, those pants and that shirt clash.

A polka-dot vest, and man, oh man. . .
Organ-folk are quick to make judgments about clashing styles or poor taste. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a friend or colleague make a knowing and snide comment about the tacky decorations of a church interior, I’d have a lot of nickels. I’m not sure I know from where this predilection comes, but it’s strong and prevailing. The funny thing is that while the comments are delivered in a sardonic tone, sometimes accompanied by a little sniff, they’re usually right. Seems that most every time I hear such a comment, I agree with the sniffer. I wonder if others hear me making comments like that.

Tan shoes and pink shoelaces. . .
You catch a glimpse of a church building out of the corner of your eye from a fast-moving train, and you know without thinking about it that the architect got the proportions wrong. Simple rules and mathematical ratios were worked out millennia ago to define good proportions. A building façade that’s twice as tall as it is wide simply doesn’t look as good as one where the width is three-fifths of the height. In round and rough terms, that’s the Golden Section—the builders of the Parthenon used it, Leonardo da Vinci drew and defined it, and Arp Schnitger used it. Frank Gehry has gone as far away from it as he could, the theory being that if all the lines are curved, proportions don’t apply. (Oops, there I go with a snide judgment—in fact, I like the looks of most of his buildings.)
A big panama with a purple hat band.1
Last week I participated in a conference presented by the City University of New York Research Center for Music Iconography, and the Organ Historical Society. “Organs in Art/Organs as Art” included many interesting discussions of how the pipe organ appears as visual art. The schedulers grouped several papers on pipe organ design into one day, providing a fascinating overview of how organbuilders struggle with design issues. In one sense, a pipe organ is a furnishing in a room. But because the organ is likely to be the largest and often the most complex design element within an architectural space, there are all sorts of possibilities for clashing designs and ideas. This struggle has been going on for centuries—there are many places where a Baroque organ was imposed on a Romanesque church, for example. And today we see modern organs with ornate classical designs placed in simple contemporary rooms. Is the mixing of architectural styles on a monumental level necessarily the equivalent of that clash of plaid and stripes?

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I’ve been reflecting on modern church buildings, especially about how many new churches are built and decorated as though they were private homes. The ceilings are low, flat, and plain, perforated in some sort of geometric pattern with recessed light fixtures—as if upside-down prairie dogs would poke out their heads to look around. Windows are plain, perhaps in wan pastel tones. Plush carpets absorb the nasty shuffling sound of the congregation coming and going along with the carefully prepared music and spoken words, so public address systems are installed to overcome the lack of resonance and the worship takes on a clangy, brash tone of voice. Door hardware is straight from Home Depot, and fancy electronic lighting controls adorn the walls by each door.
These fixtures give the place a look of utility and efficiency, completely ignoring the idea of creating a place conducive to worship. The efficient-looking fixtures are often accompanied by a squad of volunteers who run around before each service plugging in microphones and taping notes to the walls about which switches should never be touched, This means you!
From outside, the building looks like a ranch house. Steeples are made of aluminum in factories and arrive at the construction site on trucks. The spire, originally serving as a symbol of closeness to God, has become a decorative element stuck on the roof, a pro-forma icon.
Many buildings that fit this description do not have pipe organs, or even the facsimile of pipe organs. And I suppose it’s not up to me (or us) to make judgments about that. But when such a building does get a pipe organ, it can be exciting for the organbuilder to design an instrument that instills the sense of worship that the building otherwise lacks. The pipe organ makes the place be a church. And because there’s precious little in the way of architectural expression with which to clash, the organbuilder can have a field day introducing splendor without fear of upsetting the natural laws.
I know of many instances where an attractive, decorated organ case brings beauty to a plain building, creating a sense of worship in a drywall box. But above all, it’s the responsibility of the worship leaders, clergy, musicians, and lay people alike, to create that sense, whether in a thrilling stone building with Gothic arches or in a glade under a sunny sky.

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A few weeks ago I was riding the Broadway Express “1” train in New York, when a woman toting an electronic keyboard and a milk crate got on board. The doors closed with the ubiquitous New York electronic voice braying, “Stand clear of the closing door, please,” the milk crate became a podium and with an artificial boom-chicka-chick snare-brush background, that familiar strain from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 147, Jesu bleibet meine Freude filled the air. At one end of the car a cell phone rang with the opening mordents and scales of BWV 565: beedle-deeeee, duddle-duddle-dut-daaah—beedle-deeee, dut-dut-dut-daaah. Such trivialization of such magnificent music. The subway car resonated with cheapness that originated in the mind of one of music’s greatest liturgists. Another cell phone proclaimed the eight-note chaconne of the Taco-Bell Canon.
I got off the car three stops early and waited for the next train. I chide myself for sounding like an old fogey, but I really dislike the trivial use of such grand literature.
Commercial classical radio stations seem only to have a half-dozen recordings. I know it’s not literally true, but as I travel around the country tuning in to the local station in a hotel room, I get the sense that if Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, and a few war-horse piano pieces were banned, there would be no more commercial airing of good music.
Barnes & Noble is a symbol of the homogeneity of our cultural lives. There’s no denying that those big temples of literature with snazzy espresso bars and overstuffed chairs attract people to bookstores like never before. Twenty years ago we might have dreamed about a chain of 75,000 square-foot bookstores with 200-space parking lots and escalators. But the fact is, the books they stock and feature are all bought centrally, so avid readers in Washington, DC and Cheyenne, WY are seeing the same things. If the buying-gurus of the massive chains don’t think a book will sell, it may not get published. The commercialization of literature gets in the way of freedom of expression.
Likewise, I think it easy to draw the conclusion that there are only a couple dozen decent pieces of organ music. I go in and out of many church buildings and always look at last week’s bulletin to take notice of what’s being played. It’s remarkable how homogeneous the programming of church music has become. Many of us lament the trend of churches seeking alternative forms of musical expression, but repeat my exercise with commercial classical radio and remove Carols for Choirs from every music library in the country, and a mighty number of church musicians would have no idea what to do for Christmas.
Take away Purcell, Stanley, Pachelbel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner and there would be no more wedding music. I know that the bride’s mother always insists on the same music, but let’s use some imagination here. Challenge yourself. Plan an entire year of preludes and postludes without repeating a single piece. If you play Toccata and Fugue (you know the composer and the key without being told) every six weeks, you may unwittingly be contributing to the onward march of praise bands. It’s a great piece, but isn’t there something else to try?
We lament the dilution of the centuries-old tradition of the pipe organ, but we fail to champion new ideas, new expressions, or new thoughts that make the music in our church different from others.
Back to Frank Gehry with his bendy rulers. Never was an architect so imaginative as to design whole buildings with no straight lines. His Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles is a kaleidoscope of forms and shapes that challenges and delights my eye. Contrary to the traditional forms of concert halls, I find it hard to relate the shapes of the interior spaces to those of the exterior. And the organ—man alive, what a wild conception. I’m sure there are plenty who think it’s horrible, but I love the fact that he was willing to stretch the boundaries and produce a new form. During my first visit to the instrument, I was fascinated to hear colleague Manuel Rosales describe the design process—his insistence that the organ must work as a traditionally conceived musical instrument, common somehow to the experiences of a broad range of players. But while the great classics of the literature sound stunning, the phantasmagorical façade cries out for new forms of expression.
It is our responsibility to present the pipe organ, even in its most traditional forms, to the public of the twenty-first century in such a way as to inspire modern minds, which are apparently so easily satisfied by homogeneity—by Big Macs, Barnes & Noble, and, God forgive me, Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The temperamental organ
Winter was coming to an end, and at Fenway Park, fabled home of the Boston Red Sox, and the facilities manager was working down his checklist of pre-season chores. This would be the second year of the new ballpark organ, and he figured it would need tuning. He called up Fred Opporknockity, the guy who had delivered the organ, and asked if he could come to tune the organ before Opening Day. Fred replied that the organ didn’t need to be tuned—he was sure it would be fine. Mr. Facilities suggested that the organ at his church was tuned for Christmas and Easter. “No,” said Fred, “don’t you know that
Opporknockity tunes but once?”
This joins a long list of so-called jokes like the one that ends, “Is that an almond daiquiri, Dick?” “No, it’s a hickory daiquiri, Doc.” Or the one that goes . . . But I digress. (How can I digress when I’m only 160 words into it?)
In fact, the Fenway Park organ didn’t need to be tuned. It’s electronic and was tuned at the factory. But the tuning of pipe organs is a subject without end or beginning, without right or wrong, without rhyme or reason—it just needs to be in tune!
Mr. Facilities’ recollection that the church organ needs to be tuned for Christmas and Easter (notice that I capitalized Opening Day as a High Holyday!) is only half right, in my opinion. For years I scheduled big tuning routes that occupied Advent and Lent, but where I live in New England, Christmas and Easter are almost always both winter holidays, and the August brides would walk down countless center aisles straining to the strains of sorry 8-foot trumpets that made her guests pucker as if they were biting into a lemon. It’s my experience that summertime tuning problems always involve either “soprano” D, F#, or A, ruining virtually every Trumpet-Tune processional. In one wedding I played, the fourth E went dead—the trill on beat three of Jeremiah Clarke’s ubiquitous tune made me laugh. I was only quick enough to go down a half-step, a safe enough transposition because you can keep playing the same printed notes with a different key signature. It was an awkward sounding transition, but at least it gave me back my “dee diddle-diddle-diddle da-da dum de dum dum” instead of “dee doh-doh-doh da-da dum de dum dum.”
Gradually I changed my plan to define seasonal tunings as “heat-on” and “heat-off”—around here that works out to be roughly November and May—and maybe it means I found myself a little extra work because there often seem to be Easter touch-ups as well.

§

Why do we schedule tunings according to seasons? Simply and authoritatively because the pitch produced by an organ pipe of a given length is subject to temperature. Say a pipe plays “440-A” and say it’s 70 degrees in the church. Raise the temperature a degree and now the same pipe plays 442 (roughly). And the catch is that the reeds don’t change with temperature and the wooden pipes (especially stopped pipes) are more affected by humidity than temperature. So when there’s a temperature swing the organ’s tuning flies into pieces. You cannot define organ pitch without reference to temperature. A contract for a new organ is likely to have a clause that defines the organ’s pitch as A=440 at 68 degrees.
And here’s the other catch. My little example said it was 70 degrees in the church. But it’s never 70 degrees everywhere in the church. It may be 70 at the console, 66 in the Swell, 61 in the Choir, and 82 in the Great. If these are the conditions when it’s cold outside and the thermostat is set to 68, you can bet that summertime conditions have it more like 75 or 80 degrees everywhere in the building except any high-up area where you find organ pipes—then it’s super hot and the reeds won’t tune that high.
Conditions outdoors can have a dramatic effect on organ tuning. Imagine an organ placed in two chambers on either side of a chancel, and imagine that the back wall of each organ chamber is an outside wall. The tuner comes on a rainy Friday and gets the organ nicely in tune. Sunday dawns bright and sunny, the south-facing wall gets heated up by the sun and that half of the organ goes sharp. During the sermon the organist “txts” the tuner to complain about how awful the organ sounds. (Wht wr u doing☹) The following Thursday the organist shows up for choir rehearsal and finds the tuner’s bill in his mailbox. What would you do? Was it the tuner’s fault that it rained? Any good organ tuner pays attention to weather conditions and forecasts as if he were the mother of the bride planning an outdoor wedding.
I care for a large tracker-action organ in Boston, housed in a free-standing case with polished tin Principal pipes in the façades of Great, Pedal, and Rückpositiv cases. It’s situated in a contemporary building designed by a famous architect, who gave the congregation the gift of light from the heavens coming through a long narrow window that runs along the ridge of the roof. In the winter as the sun moves across the sky, brilliant light moves across the front of the organ, heating the façade pipes as it goes. Instantly the Great 8-foot Principal goes 30 or 40 cents (hundreds of a semi-tone) sharp. Do the math—how many hundredths of a semitone are there in a quarter-tone? Guess what time of day this happens? Eleven AM. And guess what time the opening hymn is played on a Sunday morning? The first time I tuned that organ, I felt as though I were in a carnival fun-house with mirrors distorting the world around me as the organ’s pitch followed the sun across the room.

Temperature’s rising
In order to do a conscientious tuning, we ask the church office to be sure the heat is up for when we tune. When they ask what it should be set to, I reply that they should pretend that the tuning is a Sunday morning worship service. If the heat is turned up to 68 degrees five hours before the hour of worship, then set the heat at 68 five hours before the tuning. It’s not very scientific but it seems to get the point across.
I’ve arrived many times to start a tuning to find that there is no heat in the church. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow—and the time and mileage I spent today goes on your bill. Once I showed up at the church (made of blue brick and shaped like a whale—some architects have the strangest ideas) and the sexton proudly announced, “I got it good and warm in there for you this time.” It was 95 degrees in the church and the organ sounded terrible. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow. He must have run $400 of fuel oil through that furnace in addition to my bill for wasted time. And the haughty authoritative pastor of a big city Lutheran church once said to me from under an expensively-coiffed shock of theatrical white hair, “We heat the church for the people, not the organ.”
The eternal battle of the organ tuner and the thermostat is not because we don’t like working in cold rooms. It’s not because we want the organ to be warm. It’s physics. When you chill oxygen, the molecules get closer together and it thickens to the point at which it becomes a liquid. When air warms, the molecules get further apart. When the air molecules get further apart, the air gets less dense. When the air gets less dense, sound waves need less energy and they shorten. When the sound waves shorten, the pitch increases. It’s not a matter of comfort, it’s physical law—the laws of physics.
The same laws say that the organ will be in tune at the temperature at which it was tuned. Set the thermostat at 68 on Thursday for the organ tuning, turn it down to 55, then back up to 68 on Sunday. Voila! The organ is in tune—unless the weather changed. And it’s better for the organ not to be vigorously heated all the time. Ancient European organs have survived for centuries partly because their buildings are not superheated. American churches are often guilty of “organ baking”—keeping the heat up all winter, using the argument that it’s more cost-efficient than reheating a cold building several times a week.

It’s a Zen thing.
I’ve been asked if I have perfect pitch. No—and I’m glad I don’t. A roommate of mine at Oberlin had perfect pitch, and he identified that my turntable ran slow (remember turntables?). It didn’t bother me—but he couldn’t bear it. The organ tuner with perfect pitch has to compensate for the fact that you are not necessarily tuning at A=440. If the organ is a few cents sharp or flat when you arrive to tune, chances are you’re going to leave it that way. It takes several days to change the basic pitch of most organs. And for really big organs it can take weeks.
I’ve been asked how I can stand listening to “out of tune-ness” all day. I don’t like hearing it when I’m listening to organ music or attending worship, but when I’m tuning I love it because I can change it. There’s a satisfaction about working your way up a rank of pipes bringing notes into tune. You can feel them “click” into tune—in good voicing there’s a sort of latching that I sense when I give the pipe that last little tick with my tool.
An organ tuner is something of a contortionist—he has to be able to forget about physical discomfort in the often-awkward spaces inside an organ so he can concentrate on the sounds. He often hangs from a ladder or a swell-shutter for stability. (Key holders, please keep your dagnabbit feet off the Swell pedal!) He learns to tune out little mechanical noises and defects of speech. An organ pipe might have burps and bubbles in its speech that are clearly heard when you’re inside the organ and still sound perfect from the nave or the console.
He gets into a nice quiet state and a rhythm develops: “next,” tick-tick-tick, “next,” tick-tick-tick. A couple hours and ten ranks (610 pipes) into it and the sexton comes in with a vacuum cleaner. The flowers are delivered for Sunday. A lawn mower starts up at the house next door. The pastor brings in a soon-to-be married couple. They politely assure me, “Don’t worry, you’re not disturbing us.”
Once I showed up to tune the organ at a university chapel. A couple heavy trucks full of equipment were outside and a guy was loading tools into the bucket of a cherry picker. I went up to him saying I was there to tune the organ and wondered if they’d be making noise. “Not much,” he said, “just a little hammer-drilling.”

§

As I write, the Red Sox official website says that the Opening Day game at Fenway Park starts in twelve days, eight hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three seconds. It doesn’t really matter whether the organ is tune or not—they don’t use it as a ballpark organ any more. But there was a time when the organ music was an integral part of the ballpark experience. A common question in Boston sports trivia quizzes was, “Who’s the only person who played for the Red Sox, the Bruins (hockey), and the Celtics (basketball)?” Answer—John Keilly, the organist for Fenway Park and the Boston Garden.
My father and I have been to dozens (maybe hundreds?) of games at Fenway Park. He’s had the same seats (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14) since the early 1970s. When John Keilly was at the Hammond B-3, we joked about getting to the park early so we could hear the preludes. And he had an uncanny knack for playing the right tune at the right time. When Carlton Fisk hit his now legendary “walk-off” twelfth-inning homerun to win game six of the 1975 World Series, Keilly created a secondary sports legend when he played “Hallelujah”—though not according to historical performance practices.

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Nancy Faust was organist for the Chicago White Sox from 1970 until her last game on Sunday, October 3, 2010. She missed five games in 1983 when her son was born—otherwise she played for more than 3,200 games without missing one. When she was hired, petitions were circulated by fans and sports officials offended that the White Sox had placed a woman on the team’s payroll. But she came into her own when Harry Caray became the radio commentator for the Sox. He gave her the moniker Pretty Nancy Faust, and started the tradition of leaning out the window of his announcer’s box to lead the singing of Take Me out to the Ballgame as Nancy played. She played by ear, and kept current with all the latest music through her four decades of playing so she was always ready with a current musical quip for the amusement of the fans. She was the originator of the ballpark use of the now ubiquitous 1969 Steam song Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss him goodbye), playing it when the pitcher of an opposing team was pulled out during the 1977 pennant race.
Nancy Faust was honored by the White Sox for her years of service to the team and its fans on September 18, 2010 in a pre-game ceremony. Ten thousand Pretty Nancy Faust bobblehead dolls were distributed to fans that day. My wife Wendy lived and worked in Chicago for about ten years, and as both a gifted organist and a baseball fan, she joined countless other Chicagoans celebrating Faust’s contribution to the game. We heard about her retirement on the NPR sports program “Only A Game” early one Saturday morning, and Wendy let me know how much she wanted one of those dolls. With thanks to Chicago organbuilding colleague and theatre organ guru Jeff Weiler, I found one complete with the ticket stub for the September 18 game, and it now has an honored place in our living room.
In the pages of this journal we often read about churches celebrating their retiring long-time organists. I’ve read plenty of stories about fancy concerts with reunions of dozens of past choir members, music committees commissioning commemorative anthems (bet you can’t say that three times fast!), cakes that look like pipe organs, bronze plaques, and surprise tickets for Caribbean cruises, but never bobblehead dolls. How cool is that? 

Intelligent design
Now there’s a hot-button issue. I’m as tempted as I am unqualified to wax poetic on the opposable thumb of the panda or the flightless birds and swimming lizards of the Galapagos Islands, and I know very well that the pages of a topic-specific journal such as The Diapason are not the appropriate place. I’m thinking about the contrast between the usefulness that results from anything that was designed well and the uselessness of poor design.
Boston is both famous and infamous for the massive rehashing of its tunnels, bridges, and highways know as The Big Dig. It’s famous as an ambitious example of the significant reworking of a city, infamous for many billions of dollars in cost overruns and aggravating disruption of the city’s life for well over a decade, and for tunnels under the harbor with fatally collapsing ceilings and hundreds of leaks.

Intentional design
One component of the Big Dig is the Zakim Bridge, purported to be the world’s widest suspension bridge, which crosses the Charles River, connecting the underground Central Artery with Interstate 93 going north out of the city toward New Hampshire.
Conceived as part of the Big Dig, the Zakim Bridge in Boston is simply beautiful. Its striking lines dominate views across the city from every angle. It’s breathtaking to come out of the tunnel looking straight up the bridge. Driving from the west, looking down the Charles River, the bridge reminds one of a sailing ship. We live in Charlestown, a neighborhood across the harbor from downtown, parts of which are warrens of curving and crossing Revolutionary War-era streets. As we walk those streets we are amazed at how often you come around a corner to see a view of the bridge framed in the center of the street. It’s a wonderful design—so wonderful that I can’t recall hearing anyone criticize it.

Ignorant design
I often tell colleagues about the church that engaged me as consultant to help them acquire a pipe organ for their new sanctuary. They had instructed their architect of their intention to have a pipe organ—the building should be prepared to accommodate one. I traveled to visit the church and was surprised to see that there was no place in the room where an instrument of sufficient size could be placed. I looked at the room from every angle, thought of how an organ might be placed on a cantilevered shelf, and remembered photos I had seen of an organ located in a huge flower-pot suspended from the ceiling, but I simply couldn’t see where an organ could go in this building.
After I had been in the sanctuary for a couple hours, the organ committee and architect arrived for the meeting. The architect unrolled a drawing that showed a nice organ façade on the wall on the left side of the sanctuary. It was an outside wall. It was my unpleasant task to inform the architect in front of the committee that an organ would require six or eight feet of depth behind that pretty façade. Neither the architect nor the committee knew that. There would be no pipe organ.

Function follows form
As I’ve lived most of my life in New England, I’ve long been familiar with century- (even centuries-) old church buildings. Built before the introduction of public address systems, hung or dropped ceilings, or steel-and-drywall construction techniques, the buildings were made of real materials heavy enough to support their structures. The height of a ceiling was determined by proportion: following observations made in places like Athens more than twenty centuries ago, if a room was “so many” feet wide and “so many” feet long, the ceiling had to be “so many” feet up. It’s pretty simple math. Most people agree that the ceiling in the Parthenon was just the right height!
The majesty of a room’s acoustical properties would be a direct function of its size. The larger the building, the heavier the walls must be to support the higher roof. Place an organ of appropriate proportions on the long axis of the room and you could hardly fail. We might hear a big Hook organ in a large church and say, “those people really knew something.” But you can also say that some designers today may know too much.
We see modern worship spaces decorated like living rooms with plush carpets, and ceiling height determined by the clearance necessary to accommodate the Home Depot chandeliers. We’re given 18 feet of height for a pipe organ in a building with 450 seats. It’s destined to fail before the first note is sounded. So along with our artificial climate, artificial sound system, artificial proportions, and artificial flowers, we are doomed to using an artificial organ. And because we can, we drive the artificial organ with a stoplist suitable for a room with an 80-foot ceiling. Thirty-two-foot organ tone does not sound good in a room with an 18-foot ceiling.
Last month while shopping for Christmas presents in Harvard Square, I came across a book that I needed more than anyone on my list: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick, published in 2007 by the MIT Press. I read the entire book standing in the store before I bought it. It’s 5¼ inches tall and 7½ inches long, perfectly proportioned to present his 101 thoughts on 101 pairs of facing pages. On each right-hand page is a pearl of architectural wisdom. On each facing left-hand page is Mr. Frederick’s illustrative sketch.
Some of Mr. Frederick’s points are pretty basic and practical. Number 1 is “How to draw a line:”

Architects use different lines for different purposes, but the line type most specific to architecture is drawn with an emphasis at the beginning and at the end. This practice anchors a line to a page and gives a drawing conviction and punch. If your lines trail off at the ends, your drawings will tend to look wimpy and vague.
Oh, I get it, when you’re designing something, you should mean to do it. The facing page shows two versions of the same sketch—one anchored to the page, and one wimpy. Point taken.
Others are more theoretical. Number 11 is “Use ‘denial and reward’ to enrich passage through the built environment:”

As we move through buildings, towns, and cities, we mentally connect visual cues from our surrounding to our needs and expectations. The satisfaction and richness of our experiences are largely the result of the ways in which these connections are made.
He’s talking to me about the Zakim Bridge. See a glimpse of it as you head up one street, be denied as it disappears when you turn a corner, see it from another angle as you cross the next block, come up out of the tunnel and safely cross the river. What a reward.
Number 28: “A good designer isn’t afraid to throw away a good idea.”

Just because an interesting idea occurs to you doesn’t mean it belongs in the building you are designing.
How many buildings and how many pipe organs have suffered as they try to do and try to be too many things at once?
Number 33 is a good one: “If you wish to imbue an architectural space or element with a particular quality, make sure that the quality is really there.”

If you want a wall to feel thick, make sure it is thick. If a space is to feel tall, make sure it really is tall.

What did I just say about the thickness of walls?
Number 95: “A decorated shed is a conventional building form that conveys meaning through signage or architectural ornament.” The accompanying sketches show a small shoe-box building dwarfed by a sign saying “Drive-thru Sunday Services,” contrasting a proper looking church building with a pitched roof and a cross on top. One is captioned “meaning conveyed by signage,” the other “meaning conveyed by architectural symbol.” If it looks like a duck, it is a duck.
And number 96, a purely practical observation: “Summer people are 22 inches wide. Winter people are 24 inches wide.” Sketches—a woman in a bikini and a man in a parka passing each other in opposite directions.
On several occasions I’ve attended convention workshops for organbuilders led by architects. Each time the conversation has dwindled to a litany of horror stories—indignant organbuilders anxious to prove that architects have no idea what they’re doing. But how many organbuilders have designed instruments in which chest-bungs cannot be reached, reservoirs cannot be removed for releathering, and how many have designed organs that look too big, too small, or fail to complement the design of their buildings.
Which brings me back to Mr. Frederick’s number 86: “Manage your ego.”

If you want to be recognized for designing a good or even great building, forget about what you want the building to be; instead ask, “‘What does the building want to be?”
In the world of artistic expression through design this seems counterintuitive. Anyone who’s seen one or two buildings designed by Frank Gehry will instantly recognize another. Does Mr. Frederick imply that Frank Gehry’s success is due to successful management of his ego? Or as you walk through the various corridors and spaces inside Disney Hall, do you find that you’re moving comfortably through attractive spaces, moving logically past necessities like water-bubblers and rest rooms, or hearing music in an environment that’s both aurally and visually spectacular? I do.

Deceptive design
The Gothic cathedral is perhaps one of the grandest repeated architectural forms we have. I’ve been fortunate to visit some of the great examples in Europe, where you marvel at what the artisans were able to do eight or nine hundred years ago. They hoisted huge stones hundreds of feet up—one of the towers is 349 feet tall and was finished in the 1140s. These workers would have been the first people in their community to be up that high—to look down on birds flying, to see the vast view across the countryside. It must have been terrifying, and it must have been hard for them to describe at home around the dinner table. But what they built is so true and so real that the building is still used daily the same way it was used when it was new. We were at Chartres on a Saturday when there was an impressive succession of weddings underway. Entire wedding parties were lined up in the square. As soon as one was finished, a man with a mobile phone called the organ loft and the next procession began.
I know several cathedral-scale Gothic-style buildings that are really concrete and steel affairs with plaster interiors molded to look like Gothic stone tracery. You know it the moment you walk inside—the sound isn’t right. There’s an aura about a building made of real carved-by-hand stones piled on top of each other to form columns and traceries that support a ceiling that’s a hundred feet up. Now that’s a building that can have 32-foot sound.

Inspirational design
Recently I was at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I’ve been there many times, and each time I’ve found new treasures that are part of the fabric and lore of the place that offer fresh inspiration. Around the doorway leading out the north transept, you can find six-inch mice carved into the stone a little above head height. There’s an alcove with a statue of Martin Luther King, commemorating the fact that he gave his last sermon in that building a few days before his assassination. There are hundreds of carvings of saints, political figures, and theologians. And there are some carvings of the stone carvers who built the building.
The windows are extraordinary. Framed in the ancient forms of Gothic arches, they feature brilliant contemporary designs. On a sunny day, the church’s interior is ablaze with colored light—a stunning and magical effect. One of the great windows on the south wall of the nave depicts stars and planets and includes a piece of rock from the moon, presented to the cathedral by the astronauts of Apollo XI. In side and lower chapels you find mosaics depicting the same classic biblical scenes found in the great ancient churches using the same ancient techniques and materials but featuring dazzling contemporary designs. It is the juxtaposition of modern expressions framed in ancient architectural forms that I find most moving about this building.
The National Cathedral stands as a great metaphor for meaningful change and progression of expression. There is something in this building for everyone to appreciate, and neither the ancient nor the contemporary overwhelms the other.
The National Cathedral is located on top of a hill where it can be clearly seen from five miles away on Interstate 95, joining the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol as high points on the skyline. In fact, the central tower of the cathedral is the tallest structure in the city. Drive through the city and catch a glimpse of it once in a while between the trees, around the corners. Arrive at the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues and be rewarded in the presence of such a massive and brilliant masterpiece. There’s not a wimpy line in the place. The space has been imbued with reality—the walls seem thick because they are thick, the interior seems tall because it is tall. The signs out front are simple and tasteful—this is no decorated shed. I doubt that Matthew Frederick had anything to do with the design of the National Cathedral, but his little book helped me understand it a little better.?

The sum of the parts
Spring comes late where we live. Business travel this year has treated me to springtime in California and Virginia, but here in Maine it’s about thirty degrees this morning. The ground freezes pretty deep here, so when it starts to thaw in spring the moisture cannot seep into the ground. It sits above the freeze level and produces what we affectionately call mud season. The driveway feels like taffy under the wheels of the car, and there are places in the yard where you go in up to your ankles.
Chilly nights continue for another month, so we don’t get the gardens started until mid-May, when we can sneak in the first peas and lettuce. Sounds grim to those of you who live south of us, but the trade-off is that our high summer is glorious with ocean breezes and brilliant sunshine. And by then the garden is filling the kitchen with glory.
Today is the Ides of April, that most taxing day of the year, and although the thermometer warns, it’s sunny and clear and I started the day in the garden cutting back the remains of last year’s perennial growth and raking and turning over the raised beds where we start the early vegetables. One of those beds is devoted to chives and mint, both of which grow abundantly and add much to summer meals. As I cut back the woody sticks of last summer’s mint plants, I got a good whiff of that real minty smell, and my mind went directly to a summer evening cookout, of tzatziki, that cool refreshing dressing made of yoghurt, garlic, olive oil, cucumber, and mint that goes so beautifully with grilled lamb, and of course Mojitos and Gin and Tonics. Or is it Gins and Tonic?
Those mental pictures and virtual smells brought real pleasure to the chore of turning over the soil, reminding me of why we do this work.

Start with the basics
Having my hands in the dirt early this morning reminds me of a sense I like to keep alive in our workshop. There might be a Swell engine on someone’s workbench—a complicated, even goofy-looking contraption with puffers and pullers that was seemingly and improbably inspired by the gear used to hitch up horses. The person at the bench can scrape off old leather and glue on new, lubricate the mechanical parts, clean up the finish and get it ready for new wiring and installation without ever really knowing what the thing is for. I like to be sure that our crew gets to hear organs often enough that they can have some idea of how a machine is used—what it’s for. If while you’re scraping off the leather you can hear in your mind’s ear a processional hymn with swell shutters opening in front of the reeds as the choir reaches the chancel steps, perhaps the machine you’re working on will work a little better when you’re done. It’s the same as smelling that mint on a frosty morning—the tzatziki you make in August will be that much better because you had it in your mind in mid-April.
By the way, The New Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin 2000) defines “whiffletree” as “The pivoted horizontal crossbar to which the harness traces of a draft animal are attached and which is in turn attached to a vehicle or an implement.” The horse-and-cart whiffletree was the inspiration for Ernest Skinner’s famous Whiffletree Swell Engine. It’s a good thing Ernest was working in the days when you still might see horses hitched to a carriage or we might have Swell motors that incorporate trailer balls.

It’s all in the ingredients
I love to cook. I love thinking about what we’ll have for dinner, being sure that we have everything we need, and firing up the kitchen at quitting time. It’s fun to clean, scrape, chop and combine those ingredients and apply heat to them in just the right way. Will we grill or broil the meat? Will we steam or sauté the vegetables? Should it be dill or tarragon? And the meal is made or broken by the quality of the ingredients you start with. Forty years ago, Julia Child told us not to use that cheap jug wine in your cooking—if you wouldn’t choose to drink it, why would you want to eat it? Since Julia encouraged Americans to feel free to cook well, we’ve lived in a revolution of understanding how important it is to start with the right ingredients. It’s okay to put leftover vegetables in a stock pot, but not rotten ones.
The organbuilder chooses his materials with the same care a chef might use squeezing tomatoes in the market. The chef doesn’t decide on the menu until he’s been to the market. With all the talk about combining flavors to create a finished dish, one of the best tasting things I’ve ever eaten is the hot-in-the-sun cherry tomato snagged off the vine while driving by on a lawnmower. Think of the salad inspired by that flavor. It’s a better salad than the one that’s made because you know there should be lettuce, onion, tomato, and dressing. Make the salad by how each ingredient tastes, not by a standard list.
It’s a little like the organist who automatically draws eight-four-two-mixture without listening, or without thinking of trying it with a soft flute added, a gentle sixteen-foot reed, or leaving out the two-foot to make the sound a little more transparent. Registrations chosen by listening will always sound better than those chosen by list.
The organbuilder comes across a special piece of wood—beautiful grain pattern, unusual colors—sees what it should be made into, and sets it aside for the perfect music rack, name board, bench top, or pipe shade. Fifty years later, the organist sits through the thousandth sermon admiring that beautiful grain pattern. (When I left my last church position to join the Organ Clearing House, I calculated that in seventeen years I had listened to something close to 800 sermons and led close to 2300 hymns. Makes my fingers hurt.)
Remember Michelangelo choosing his piece of marble and removing everything that didn’t look like a saint? The chef starts with a carrot and takes away everything that doesn’t belong in the soup. We chose not to eat the bitter skin or the tough top raw, so why would cooking it make it better?
Likewise, the organbuilder puts a skin of leather on a light table and marks the imperfections with a Sharpie® so he can avoid everything that shouldn’t be part of an organ. A little pinhole in the leather will leak a tiny bit of air and make that pouch move just a touch slower. Will the organist notice that when playing a quick scale or trill? He might not be able to put his finger on it, but there’s something not quite right. And by the way, that pinhole is a weakness in the leather—that pouch will be the first one to fail seventy-five years from now. Maybe it would be five more years before the next one failed. That little pinhole had a noticeable effect on the lifetime of the organ.
The sheep had a run-in with a barbed-wire fence and the resulting scar is a little tough spot in the skin. The pouch made of that piece of leather might open the valve a little cock-eyed. One time in ten thousand, that valve will catch on the edge of the toe-hole and cause a cipher. The same pipe is played three sixteenth-notes later and the cipher goes away, but the observant organist had a split second of wondering what was going on. And it happened so fast that she couldn’t keep track of it and couldn’t write it down after the service. It happens again the next Sunday. This time it doesn’t go away and the cipher interrupts the service, all because the scar stayed in the pouch. It’s like finding a little stone in a beautiful dish of risotto.
We drop a peach in boiling water for a minute or so, and the skin comes off easily. It’s an extra step, you might scald your fingers on the hot peach, but there’s no fuzzy mouthful of skin interrupting the experience of eating the tart. Ptooey!
Before the Swell motor goes back in the organ we clean the pins by scraping with a knife or rubbing with some emery cloth. This guarantees a good connection when the new wire is soldered on. It will never be that a stage of the motor fails to work because of a dirty solder joint. After all, what good is a fifteen-stage Swell motor? That choir mounting the chancel steps wouldn’t notice that stage number 7 didn’t work, but the effect was lessened just a tiny bit. (I get a funny picture in my mind of a couple of indignant choir members confronting the organist after the service complaining that the Swell box didn’t sound just right!) If it’s good enough for government work, is it good enough for God?

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right
I’ve participated in dozens, maybe hundreds of meetings with church committees discussing the sale and purchase of pipe organs. Often enough there’s one guy (it’s always a guy!) who says, “We’ve got a roof that leaks, a parking lot with potholes, the city is making us install an elevator and ramps, and the organist says we need a new organ. What can we do to save some money on this unit?” (It’s the word “unit” that gets me.) I respond, “All those projects are important, but I don’t think that the organ is on the same list as parking lots and elevators. I think it’s on the list with communion silver and stained-glass windows. It’s liturgical art, not a ‘unit.’”
By far the vast percentage of money I’ve earned during my career has been donated money—those cherished funds, prayerfully raised by the faithful of the congregation. On one hand, it’s hard to say that you shouldn’t go with the lowest bidder when purchasing a pipe organ. But in fact, if the organ is liturgical art, doesn’t it somehow transcend money? I know that’s not a practical point of view, but without such thinking how did the great cathedrals get built? Certainly there was a cheaper way to build a huge church than festooning it with vaulted ceilings, and why do you need a three-hundred-foot tower if only to hold up a bell? Those buildings are expressions of faith. The twenty-million-dollar tower is a symbol of faith, forming a physical connection between heaven and earth as if a community were holding its hands to the heavens. You didn’t need that huge stone tower. You didn’t need the simple wooden steeples you see on country churches throughout New England. You didn’t need the expensive stained-glass windows, the carved saints, or the marble altar. And you didn’t need the magnificent pipe organ.
But we have those things, we care for those things, we respect those things because of how effectively they express our faith. The building committee of the First Baptist Church in Damariscotta, Maine didn’t pay for the steeple when the church was built in 1862 because it would look good on twenty-first century postcards, they built it because it would stand as a symbol expressing their faith to their community. It’s at the top of the Main Street hill. You can see it from a couple miles down the river, and you can see it from the highway that bypasses the town. That building committee got their money’s worth. Today the steeple is sitting somewhat forlornly on the lawn next to the church. It was leaning a little to the left and the town participated in a fund-raising drive to rebuild it. No one could imagine the town without it.
So we justify the cost of a pipe organ. As we discuss the specifications and the related costs, we are continually reminded of the need to economize. But can we also inspire that committee to think beyond the nuts and bolts of the price and think of the instrument as the fulfillment of a vision? It’s not a “unit,” it’s an expression of faith. It will be there seventy-five years later for the weddings of their grandchildren. It will be built by craftsmen who know how important it is to scrape those pins, mark those pin-holes, choose those boards. No fifteen-stage Swell engines here.
A carpenter building a house might grab the next two-by-four off the pile and nail it in. It takes a little more time for the organbuilder to set aside that special burl and turn it into a music rack.
The moment when the congregation really understands why the organ would cost so much is the moment it comes out of the truck and its parts are laid out across the backs of the pews. Thousands of parts, each beautifully made. The congregants walk around the room thinking in terms of what they’ve paid for a dining table or a credenza, and the whole thing starts to make sense. Shortly after the Organ Clearing House started installing an organ in Virginia last fall, there was an evening event to which the congregation was invited. More than a hundred people came to see the organ half assembled, to see the parts and pipes spread around the room, and to hear something about how the organ works, how parts are made, how we care for our craft. I like to think that they went home knowing they were getting their money’s worth. I recommend such an evening as part of every installation.
And afterwards, sit down to a meal beautifully prepared from the freshest and finest ingredients, no stones in the risotto, no cheap wine in the sauce, and no fuzz in the tart. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Now that I’ve finished writing, it’s time to go to the market.

Is it real?
Fifteen or twenty years ago there was an ad campaign for Memorex® cassette tapes in which various setups were created to compare “live” music with recorded music to see whether both would break a piece of fancy stemware. A popular singer would be featured offering a terrible, powerful high note, and inevitably the glass would shatter.
What did it prove?
I’ve heard some singers who could make me cringe, but how plausible is it that the actual, acoustic human voice would break a glass? Conversely, I wonder if any other recorded sound played back with enough wattage would break the glass—a hummingbird’s wings for example or a cat on a hot tin roof. I think the Memorex demonstration was at least a little bit disingenuous, and of course we heard the whole thing through whatever speakers came with our television set. Television advertisements for televisions imply that what you see on the screen may be better than real life, but again, your appreciation of the ad is limited by the quality of your present TV.
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000) defines the word virtual: “1. Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name . . . ” and “2. Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.”
I introduce the word virtual in this context of what I might call the “unreality of reality.” In recent years we’ve been given the phrase virtual reality, defined in the same dictionary as “a computer simulation of a real or imaginary system that enables a user to perform operations on the simulated system and shows the effects in real time.”
An oxymoron is not a person addicted to painkillers, it’s a “rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined.” To my ears, virtual reality is an oxymoron.

Let’s be real.
We might imagine that Bach would have stopped at 175 cantatas if he had been subject to phone calls from the clergy, or Mozart’s 30th symphony would have been his last had he been distracted by television, or—God forbid—video games. But simple things like hot water in the house and electric lights are taken for granted, and more complicated things like computers have become something close to necessities. I’m in favor of technology. The other day I stumbled over a box of detritus stored in an organ chamber by a long-gone organist. I was amused to see a 56K compact disc. 56K? How Stone Age. There’s a half-used 100-pack of 700MB CDs on my desk. Big deal. I replaced my previous 2GB laptop with a 60GB job because of the number of photos I carry around. There’s a 2GB memory card in my camera. What’s next? Remember NASA engineers using slide rules during Apollo flights? (I know that’s true because I saw it in a movie.) With a $400 GPS we have more navigation ability in a 20-foot motorboat than the entire British Navy had during the Napoleonic wars. How much more computing speed or data-storage capacity do we need?
Apply that same question to cameras (mine has more mega-pixels than yours), automobiles (mine has more horsepower than yours), or cell phones (mine’s a camera, a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock . . . ). How much more can they offer before they stop getting better?
Many of us in the organbuilding world are devoted to the pipe-organ-technology of the early 20th century—what Ernest Skinner considered adequate console equipment should be good enough for anyone. But let’s remember that hundreds of terrific Hook organs were replaced by Skinner’s new-fangled electric things where the organist was 40 feet away from the instrument. What makes the early electro-pneumatic pipe organ the ideal? How many organbuilders and organists disdained Skinner’s innovations as superfluous or unnecessary? “If God had intended us to push pistons we would have been all thumbs.” At what point in the development of any technology does one take a snapshot and declare the ideal, after which there’s no need for further development?

Electronics in the worship space
It’s more than 50 years since churches began purchasing electronic organs to replace pipe organs. I think many, even most of us will admit that the 30- and 40-year-old models that are still laboring along are pretty poor. While they have pipe organ names on their stop tablets, they never did sound like organs. They were cheaply made and not durable. A church I served as music director had a 20-year-old electronic in the chapel that wasn’t in tune, according to the technician couldn’t be tuned, and needed parts that weren’t available. Have you ever tried to get a three-year-old computer repaired?
While it’s always risky to generalize, it seems to me that the average church that was once proud of owning a modest pipe organ is inclined to buy an electronic console that emulates a 60- or 70-stop “real” organ. What sense does it make to have an “organ” with 32¢ sounds, batteries of reeds, and secondary and tertiary choruses in a sanctuary that seats fewer than 200 people? Is it so you can play music that was intended for buildings ten times the size? It’s a violation of scale, an anomaly, and artless expression. As I wrote a couple months ago, “the Widor” doesn’t work in every church.

The Virtual Pipe Organ
Trinity Church (Episcopal), Wall Street, New York, is a prominent, beautiful, historically significant edifice that houses a large and vibrant parish with an extraordinary music program. According to the church’s website , the parish was founded “by charter of King William III of England in 1697.” The present Gothic Revival building, designed by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated on May 1, 1846. The website includes an Historical Timeline that tells us that some of the church’s vestrymen were members of the Continental Congresses, that the parishioners were divided politically as the Revolutionary War progressed, but that the clergy sided with the crown. An American patriot, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Provoost, was appointed rector in 1784, and the New York State Legislature “ratifie[d] the charter of Trinity Church,” deleting the provision that asserted its loyalty to the King of England.
In 1770, just 28 years after Georg Frederick Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, Ireland, it received its American premiere at Trinity Church. Today’s spectacular and highly regarded Trinity Choir is heard on many recordings. Their annual performances of Messiah are legendary throughout the city. Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote, “All the ‘Messiah’ outings to come in the next two weeks will have to work hard to match this one.” And in 2005, the Times called Trinity’s performance of the great oratorio, “the ‘Messiah’ to beat.” (Now there’s an image!) What a wonderful heritage.
On September 11, 2001, Trinity Church assumed an essential national role by chance of place. Located adjacent to the World Trade Center, the church and its people were thrust into the center of that tragic story. St. Paul’s Chapel, part of Trinity’s “campus” and located a couple blocks away, became an inspiring comfort station for firefighters and other emergency workers. Through the ensuing months, as the rubble was unraveled, the chapel was staffed by the people of the church who provided food, refreshment, and a resting place for the rescue workers. The response of the clergy, staff, and parishioners to that national catastrophe was as inspirational as it was essential.
At the moment of the attack, a service was in progress in Trinity Church, the organ blower was running, and the great cloud of dust that filled the entire neighborhood found its way into the organ. It was later determined that the organ could not be used without extensive cleaning and renovation. A temporary solution was offered. Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, dealers of Rodgers organs in New England, had been developing the “Virtual Pipe Organ,” using a technology they named PipeSourced® voices. A large instrument using this technology was installed at Trinity Church as a temporary solution while the church researched the condition of the Aeolian-Skinner.
A year or so after the Virtual Pipe Organ was installed, I attended a service to hear the instrument and was impressed by the volume and intensity of the sound. The massive building was filled with the sound of an organ. There was no distortion. People were singing, and I’m willing to bet that many of them were well satisfied, even thrilled by the sound. I had not expected to be convinced that the Virtual Organ would really sound like a pipe organ. In fact I’m not sure how I could eliminate the bias of a lifetime as an “acoustic organ guy.” As full and intense as the sound of the Virtual Organ was, it was not the sound of a pipe organ. It lacked the essential majesty of presence, the special physicality, the particular “realness” of the sound of a great pipe organ.
The experience of listening to the Virtual Organ might be compared to listening to a recording of a great pipe organ, as the sound of both comes from speakers. I understand that sampling technology is not the same as recordings, and I expect that proponents of the virtual organ will object to my analogy, but it’s those speakers that make the essential difference. Sound coming from a speaker will always be distinguishable from sound coming from organ pipes.
I can recall the depth of my impressions when as a young teenager I first heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing in Symphony Hall. I think I expected the huge volume of sound and the intensity of the differences of the timbres, but I had no way of anticipating the presence, the majesty, the physicality of all that acoustic sound as enhanced by the magnificent room. Oh, those double basses!
There are few musical presentations more expensive than a symphony orchestra (except opera and ballet in which the symphony orchestra is combined with the theater). A hundred serious musicians on stage in a 300-million-dollar concert hall require important organization to sustain, but we don’t hear a move to replace that experience with digital sampling. We want to hear the real thing. The symphony orchestra and the pipe organ are special in our culture because they’re so expensive. I don’t mean that the money itself is impressive—but that the money represents how majestic the expression is.
In conversations with church members I frequently hear people say that the sound of a digital instrument is “good enough” for the untrained ear. One might respond, unless your fiancée is a jeweler, why bother with a real diamond? She’ll never know the difference.
I don’t want to eat a chemically produced substitute for lobster. I want the real lobster, and for goodness sake, don’t mess with the butter!
I read on Marshall & Ogletree’s website (www.marshallogletree.com) that they sample complete pipe organs: “PipeSourced® sounds, which are skillful note-by-note, stop-by-stop recordings of famous pipe organs (90% of them vintage Aeolian-Skinners), contribute unprecedented virtual reality to Marshall & Ogletree instruments, as well as to its combination organs and custom additions for new and existing pipe organs.” That’s a long, long way from the previous generation of sampling techniques, and proverbial light-years from the early rounds of tone-generators on which the development of the electronic instrument was founded.
There have been a number of articles written in praise of the Virtual Pipe Organ, including Allen Kozinn’s review of a recital played by Cameron Carpenter published in the New York Times on July 7, 2007, with the headline: “A ‘Virtual’ Organ Wins New Converts at a Recital.” And Dr. Burdick has written an apologia defending the church’s decision to sell the dismantled Aeolian-Skinner, retain the Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Organ, and to commission another virtual instrument for St. Paul’s Chapel, which concludes,
Trinity Church is proud of its role in developing the “virtual pipe organ,” which could only exist in this new century because of the continuing exponential growth of computer speed and memory. Without the brilliance of Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, whose research began in 1997 to develop an entirely new approach to the digital organ, we could never have achieved an instrument such as this. Furthermore, without Trinity Church having taken advantage of its historic opportunity by daring to consider such an interim instrument, the music world would not now have this dramatic new 21st century success: like an automobile with horsepower but no horses, a virtual pipe organ with musical potentials beyond anyone’s imagination.

There’s little doubt that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was not as distinguished as many other instruments produced by that firm. (It’s at least a little ironic that there’s agreement that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was less than great, but it’s replaced by something based on sampling “vintage Aeolian-Skinners.”) There’s no doubt at all that the Virtual Pipe Organ represents but a fraction of the cost of commissioning a Real Organ. After all, we live in the age of the seven-figure organ. There’s no doubt that Trinity Church has realized a significant short-term economy by eliminating the immense maintenance budget required by a large pipe organ. In fact, Dr. Burdick reports that they had been spending $56,000 annually to care for the Aeolian-Skinner—a specious argument in that there are many much larger and much older organs that are maintained effectively for less money. The organ world rumor-mill, that most active of subcultures, has reported many different numbers representing the cost of the Virtual Organ. I don’t know what the actual price was, but it’s safe to guess that it was a significant number of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Is it true stewardship of a church’s resources to spend such a volume of money on artifice? For centuries, Christians have given their all trying to make their worship spaces approach their respect for their faith. Huge treasures were spent in 12th-century France building cathedrals that still inspire us. Fortunes have been spent on stained-glass that fills church interiors with magical, mystical light. Trinity Church Wall Street is a spectacular edifice with beautiful vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, carved wood architectural elements and furniture. Hundreds of important preachers, humanitarians, and politicians have spoken there. To walk inside is to respect the care and vision with which the place was created. To walk inside is to find respite from a frenetic city and inspiration from all that has happened there. To walk inside is to worship. This is not a place for artifice.
As I’ve spoken about Trinity Church, I encourage you to read about St. Paul’s Chapel at www.saintpaulschapel. org/about_us/. Built in 1766, it’s the oldest public building in Manhattan that’s been in continuous use. Here’s an excerpt from that website:

George Washington worshiped here on Inauguration Day, April 30, 1789, and attended services at St. Paul’s during the two years New York City was the country’s capital. Above his pew is an 18th-century oil painting of the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782.
Directly across the chapel is the Governor’s pew, which George Clinton, the first Governor of the State of New York, used when he visited St. Paul’s. The Arms of the State of New York are on the wall above the pew.
Among other notable historical figures who worshiped at St. Paul’s were Prince William, later King William IV of England; Lord Cornwallis, who is most famous in this country for surrendering at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781; Lord Howe, who commanded the British forces in New York, and Presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and George H. W. Bush.

St. Paul’s Chapel stands as a shrine for all that happened in that neighborhood and to this country on September 11, 2001. This is also not a place for artifice.
In his Apologia, Dr. Burdick reports, “Because of insurance matters after 9/11, there was no question that we’d have to wait five to seven years for a decent replacement pipe organ, during which time I felt that we’d be starving for good organ sound.” Fair enough. That’s why the purchase of the Virtual Pipe Organ for temporary use was a good solution. But I am sorry that such a church in such a place with such a history would miss their opportunity to add not to the virtual world, but the real world of the pipe organ.

John Bishop is Executive Director of the Organ Clearing House.

Organs aloft
A good friend worked with me for several years as a tuning assistant. He’s a grand singer with lots of theater experience, and is music director of a nearby church where he presides over an ambitious choir program—one of those with the enviable problem of bursting the seams of the church’s building. When someone new joins the choirs, it’s hard to find her a seat. One day we were driving together to a tuning job, and I was guessing that the organ would be below pitch and we’d likely have to correct it—start over with a new “A,” a new temperament, and then tune every pipe. Using sloppy slang, I said to Mark that we would probably pitch the organ. He jumped instantly into a hilarious romp with a flawless Scottish accent in which Organ Pitching was added to the Scottish Games.
If you’re not familiar with Scottish Games, I invite you to take a look at <www.caledonian.org/usheavyevents.html&gt;. This page is from the site of the Caledonian Club of San Francisco, and describes the history and rules of games such as the Caber Toss in which competitors throw a tapered section of a tree trunk, and Weight for Height where competitors in different classes throw 28, 42, or 56 pound weights over a bar (maybe the origin of the phrase, hoisting a few). I confess that I find a comical side to what is clearly a serious competition, and I still chuckle when the phrase Organ Pitching crosses my mind—not infrequently in the work of the Organ Clearing House! Don’t know yet if we’re going for distance or height. In either event we’re likely to go akimbo—or is it a-kilter?
Sounds disrespectful I know, but there is a practical reality.

The organ loft
There’s a narrow door in the narthex of the stone building. You open it and find a tight-radius spiral stairway. The wooden door at the top of the stairs is swollen in its frame—you have to give the bottom corner a little kick, and the door makes a characteristic shuddering sound as it opens. (There’s usually a musty smell.) But your struggle is rewarded. You come around the corner to a breathtaking view down the nave. And there’s the organ console, inviting you to send majestic sounds across the abyss. I’m thinking of an enchanting morning I spent at La Madeleine in Paris about ten years ago when a sub-organist showed me the organ that had been played by Saint-Saëns and Fauré. He said he had to go to a meeting—I could leave with him or be locked in with the organ for an hour or two until the meeting was over. I chose “B.”

Lofty ideals
I know a different kind of organ loft. The hobbyist notices that a local church is closing. He has an old barn behind the house—why not nab the organ from the church and put it up in the hayloft. “I’ll fix it up and install in the loft—it’ll sound just like it did in the church.”
Two or three sweaty Saturdays later, the organ is among 80-year-old vestiges of actual farming. “That’s all the time I have right now. I’ll set it up in a couple years.” A year later, he sees a set of old wooden organ pipes at a flea market. Up into the loft they go. That’s when he notices that mice have been running around the first deposit. “Oh well, I’ll clean that up when I put the organ together.” And so on . . .
It’s easier to start a project than finish one.
Forty years later, the Organ Clearing House gets a call. “We’ve just bought a house, and there are a lot of antique tubes in the barn. Someone told us they’re worth a lot of money.” You know what, probably not. On more than one occasion, I’ve recommended that such material be discarded or sent to the melting pot of an organ-pipe maker. And on more than one of those occasions, I’ve been berated, even abused, by people who angrily inform me that they thought the Organ Clearing House was “committed to preservation.”
Rule number one: we can’t save them all.
Rule number two: we should be sure we’re working hard to save the good stuff.
Rule number three: you rarely find good stuff in a hayloft.

What can be saved?
The preservation of pipe organs is the principal activity of the Organ Clearing House. But as we are in the front line receiving news of organs being offered for sale, we know as well as anyone that it’s not practical or possible to save them all. Our warehouse is full. If we come across an instrument important enough to preserve by placing it in storage, another has to be discarded. So how do we choose?
The obvious first answer is that we try to save the best ones. But it’s not that simple. I notice that there are organs with lesser artistic content that are higher in usefulness. There are at least two basic styles of pipe-organ action that allow for more compact layouts—a good instrument in one of those styles may offer a terrific opportunity for a church that has limited space. Or a simple and non-descript electro-pneumatic organ might prove to be readily adaptable to a tricky physical situation. You can view such an organ as a kit by putting a good tonal structure on those sturdy chests. Be sure a good voicer has the chance to work his magic, and you’ll have a winner on your hands. There’s economy available in the reuse of well-made reservoirs, chests, swell boxes, and building frames, even if they’re not from a major builder.
I believe that the ubiquitous 15-rank Hook & Hastings organ on which the OCH built its reputation is one of the most pure and artistically sophisticated versions of the American pipe organ, but I’ve learned to accept that those organs can be difficult to place in new homes. Along with their thrilling tonal structures come beefcake physiques. A 12-stop organ might have a footprint of fifteen feet wide and eight feet deep—simply too much for a lot of buildings. Most organs of that style (and they’re not all by Hook & Hastings) are arranged internally with Swell-behind-Great. There’s a simple frame with four sturdy legs and two long chest bearers holding up both manual windchests with walkboard between, and the organ is pretty deep from front to back. The relatively rare “stacked” version with Swell-above-Great is typically snapped up because those instruments require less floor space—but of course they stand taller and won’t fit under the ceilings of many buildings.
Living in New England, we’re surrounded by stately older churches. These are the buildings for which the 19th-century American tracker organ was conceived, and of course there’s space for them. But today’s architecture has taken us far from the “here’s the church, here’s the steeple” kind of building. Contemporary churches can be high-end exciting buildings with creative designs and innovative interior spaces or simple buildings held up by laminated beams. In the first, perhaps the architect has not done enough homework to know how much space and what sort of acoustical environment a pipe organ needs. In the second, it’s common that the area of the floor plan is misleading because the side walls are short and the pitch of the roof starts early. Nestling an organ up against a side wall doesn’t allow the necessary height for an organ. And the rear balcony in such a building is likely to be suited for a Lilliputian choir, let alone anything resembling a pipe organ.
The standard and simple A-frame church building has been the natural breeding ground of the digital substitute for the pipe organ.

A Brobdingnagian setting
Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) gives us satirical views of international travel. Lilliputians (the residents of Lilliput) are about one-twelfth the size of humans, while Brobdingnagians (the residents of Brobdingnag) are about twelve times our size—a neat study in reverse ratios. These contrasting imaginary nations often enter my thinking as I travel among our clients. Too frequently I run my Stanley Fat-Max® tape measure up the back wall of a church and wish I could pull out another eight feet. (The Stanley is great for this because the blade is wide and rigid, and with a little practice you can run it 25 or 30 feet up a wall—a little like balancing a ball on your nose.)
Too often the challenge of the contemporary American organbuilder is to reconcile the seating capacity of a room with its ceiling height. We can imagine or devise formulas that define number of seats-per-rank, which are spoiled when given an 18-foot ceiling. Put 300 singing congregants in a room and you really want a 16-foot Principal.
When designing a sailboat, the difference in a foot or two of overall length can mean a huge increase in weight, sail area, and cost. Go from 35 to 37 feet and you might add 12,000 pounds to the weight of the boat. An architect or engineer can tell you the difference in price between an 18-foot and a 20-foot ceiling in a new church building. The 20-foot ceiling might allow that 16-foot Principal, but the cost of the building goes up by 40 percent. (This is when the price-per-stop of an organ becomes fictional—count in the cost of the new building and the 16-foot Principal becomes a four-million-dollar stop!)
But consider the example of the 1880s New England church building. A floor plan of 90-by-50 feet calls for a ceiling height of maybe 30 feet. There’s a balcony stretching around sides and back, a seating capacity of 800, and that 40-stop organ sits comfortably up front. It’s not necessary to make the lowest notes of the 16-footer be Haskell basses, it’s not necessary to jam the Great chorus against the ceiling, and it’s not necessary to cut the maintenance access under the Swell to 18 inches. I’ve measured people’s shoulders to make that crawl-space as small as possible—that’s not a good way to ensure the long-term reliability of a pipe organ.
I’ve got two things going on here—the preservation of vintage organs and the proportions of church buildings. The organs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries are telling us something about the natural proportions of buildings. Later 20th-century advances in building techniques have altered the proportions of modern buildings. My 19th-century model church is dominant in the local skyline because of its style of construction. A given floor plan determines a ceiling height. The ceiling height determines the pitch and loft of the roof because the timbers that hold up the ceiling are directly related to height of the roof.
The builder of a new pipe organ has some flexibility in design to make a few large pipes lie down or go wider rather than taller. But if you’re interested in the preservation of a vintage organ, you have a hard time when working in modern cost-effective worship spaces.
Reinforced concrete and steel or laminated beams allow us to have lower ceilings in wider rooms. Saves money in construction, but the majesty is lost. When your church is thinking of building a new sanctuary, slip a few photos of the “real thing” on the conference table. Your organbuilder will thank you.
And as we preserve those instruments built in earlier ages, let’s be sure we’re choosing the good ones. There’s no room for mediocrity in pipe-organ building. That’s when we decide to pitch them.
While you’re reading online about Scottish Games, take the natural leap to read about bagpipes, especially the jokes. How can you tell a piper with perfect pitch? He can throw a set into a pond without hitting any of the ducks.