In the wind . . .

The wind comes sweeping o’er the plain . . .

We watch our car’s odometer approach 100,000 miles. It seems like an important milestone, but we’re distracted by traffic, go into a different train of thought, and miss the great event. It reads 100,002.3 and we never felt a thing.

Ten years ago we were anticipating the start of a new millennium. As the year 2000 approached we were told that the language of computer programming did not allow for calendar years above 1999—that we should expect computers all over the world to crash at midnight on January 1. Enough people nervously withdrew money from ATMs that the banking system published concern about the supply of cash. We didn’t even know how we would say what year it was. What would we say, two-oh-oh-one, aught-one, the aughts, the Ohs? Some people planned to be in an airplane at the stroke of twelve, others assured us that the computer-driven air-traffic-control system would collapse at that moment.
And what do you suppose happened? Nothing. My computer kept working as did my alarm clock and microwave oven. I have not met a single person who has any trouble saying what year it is. Planes kept flying and landed safely and the ATM still spat out stacks of twenties. The clock struck twelve, the mouse ran down, hickory-dickory-dock.

We tend to mark our progress in big blocks. If the Baroque era ended in 1750, what did Händel (1685–1759) do for the last nine years of his life? The boundaries are muddy. We do this with the history of the pipe organ. The beginning of the 20th century brought electric action and orchestral playing. The second half of the 20th century was The Revival when some of us got excited about historic performance practices and tracker-action organs, and others felt upset and disenfranchised. A hundred years from now, what will our successors say about the beginning of the 21st century? What would we like them to say? How can we influence that? How do we assess the present state of the art? And most importantly, how do we assure its health and growth so that later generations will have something significant from our body of work to study and assess?

Eighty years ago, more than 2,000 new pipe organs were completed by American organbuilders each year. Now it’s more like 40 or 50. I don’t know how many digital instruments are installed each year now, but I suspect the number balances with the century-old total of pipe organs. We’ve noted and discussed at length the decline of the number of serious students of the organ, and we have watched in horror as venerable educational institutions close their organ departments.

The true test of the state of things is the response of the public. How many laypeople—those who are not professional organists or organbuilders—make it a point to attend organ recitals? I have sat in many a grand church listening to a great musician play a marvelous organ—sharing the thrall with only 30 or 40 other music lovers. At the height of his career, E. Power Biggs noted that twice as many Americans attended concerts of classical music than professional sporting events. Do you think that’s the case today?

All these things are related. While most pipe organs are unique, I suppose that thousands of churches may have identical digital instruments—an organ committee might opt for “no pickles,” but otherwise the choice is pretty limited. I know that many people think this is a good thing—McDonald’s and Starbucks would not be successful otherwise—but I can’t believe that such institutional sameness contributes to the growth of this or any art.

For the second month in a row I refer to the excellent article “Repertoire in American Organ Recitals 1995–2005” by Moo-Young Kim published in the October 2006 issue of The American Organist. Dr. Kim analyzed 249 recital programs totaling 1689 selections as published in TAO. Using statistics and pie-charts, he showed how limited in originality is our recital programming. Is this related to the disappointing attendance at so many organ recitals?

The performance of historic repertoire will always be central to the art of the pipe organ, and each serious player has ambitions about which pieces are next on the practice schedule. This is a good thing. But it’s the art of improvisation that distinguishes the organ. How thrilling for the first time concertgoer to hear the mighty instrument as the vehicle for the creation of new music, right here, right now. What a celebration of human genius! (I’m reminded of Gjon Mili’s time-lapse photograph of Picasso drawing a bull with a flashlight—a masterpiece of the moment—you can see it at .)

Everything’s up to date in Kansas City . . .

Ours is heralded as the age of communication. International news is instant, a CD or sweater ordered online today is in our hands tomorrow, and we have a fit if a Fed-Ex package is six hours late. We send what we think is an important e-mail and wonder why it hasn’t been answered four hours later. (Is it just possible that our correspondent wasn’t at home? What, no BlackBerry?) But if we limit our understanding of communication to these amazing technological advances, we will fail our art. You cannot communicate the art of the pipe organ by beaming between handhelds.

Here’s the good news. There may not now be many new pipe organs built each year, but most of them are glorious and unique works of art. And hundreds more projects are accomplished each year restoring older instruments to their full artistic potential. Some schools are closing organ departments, but others are revitalizing theirs. Young organists are still taught to base their playing on good scholarship, but as a foundation, not an end. After all, it is about the music. Playing the organ is not a parlor trick—it’s a thrilling vehicle for the expression of an artist and for an audience to experience and absorb.

There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.

In what sometimes seems an atmosphere of gloom, I’ve always felt that the pipe organ has a significant future in our society, and my optimism is rewarded as I recently had the privilege to make association with what promises to become an important center of the study of the organ. The University of Oklahoma (OU) has a long tradition of excellence in organ teaching—that is where Mildred Andrews Boggess taught many of today’s finest organists during her 38-year tenure. Now a fresh wind is blowing in tornado country as John Schwandt has joined the faculty of the OU School of Music to lead an exciting new teaching program.

Brainchild of Dr. Schwandt and his long-time friend, theatre organ specialist Clark Wilson, the American Organ Institute has been founded to lift up and celebrate American contributions organbuilding and organ playing. The philosophy behind the institute is to unite the worlds of the classical and theatre pipe organ, advancing the art by emphasizing improvisation in all genres along with the performance of the classical repertoire. A fresh curriculum will include courses in arranging, computer notation, and multiple styles of composition—a return to the classic concept of the complete organist: one-third performance, one-third improvisation, one-third composition.

An integral part of the institute will be the establishment of a fully equipped and staffed pipe organ workshop on campus. This unique facility will be home to the restoration of an important instrument recently acquired by the university for the Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall at the School of Music and will allow students the opportunity for hands-on experiences with organbuilding, even to providing pipe organ maintenance services for the general area, an area not as yet saturated with experienced organbuilders. The next generation of organ students can be well-versed with knowledge of organ history and construction, and the next generation of organbuilders can be well-versed with knowledge of organ playing and composition.

There will be three degree tracks (Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, and Doctor of Musical Arts), each allowing flexible emphasis of applied studies to include classic and theatre organ playing as well as organbuilding. Significantly, the institute enjoys the enthusiastic support of University of Oklahoma President David Boren, Dean Eugene Enrico of the OU Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, and Dr. Steven Curtis, director of the School of Music, who are working to build the foundation for this refreshing and innovative approach to the study of the organ.

The School of Music is housed in the Catlett Music Center on the north end of the campus, the entrance to which is a striking contemporary space of cathedral proportions. The Morris R. Pitman Recital Hall and the Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall both open off this grand space as does a corridor leading to the classrooms and teaching studios. This “lobby” is called the Grace B. Kerr Gothic Hall and is home to the Mildred Andrews Boggess Memorial Organ, C. B. Fisk’s Opus 111 (go to to see photos and specification). With three manuals and 45 ranks, it’s funny to think of this as a “lobby organ” but this is no ordinary lobby. The ceiling is very high with contemporary interpretations of gothic vaulting, the organ is placed in a high balcony at one end of the room, the reverberation period is 4.5 seconds, and both visual and aural effects are magnificent.

I’ve got a beautiful feeling . . .

Just a minute—that organ is already in place, and I referred to a “recently acquired organ” that will be installed in Sharp Hall. Ah, the other shoe drops. In the April 2005 and November 2006 issues of this column in The Diapason, I have written about M. P. Möller’s Opus 5819, the massive and singular instrument originally built for the Philadelphia Civic Center. Go to , scroll to the bottom and look for the two “specifications” links—you’ll get an eyeful. The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) became owner of this organ when they acquired the Philadelphia Civic Center with intention of using the site to build an important new research hospital as part of the University’s Health System. As the destruction of the 13,500-seat Art Deco hall was controversial, Penn preserved many artifacts from the building, including the organ. The Organ Clearing House was engaged to dismantle the organ, located in a 2500-square-foot, 25-foot-high chamber above the ceiling, 100 feet up.

The organ was stored next door in another large convention hall slated for demolition at a date that was suddenly and significantly accelerated by the needs of the hospital construction. This news was a shock—another demolition deadline—we were going to have to rescue the organ for a second time. In the November 2006 issue, I wrote wistfully about it sitting in storage, looking more like an industrial wasteland than a work of art. But—thanks be—I can say now that as I wrote I knew that a zephyr was over the horizon—a breath of amazing promise. John Schwandt had come over the bow looking for a significant concert organ around which to build the American Organ Institute. Oh boy—have we got the organ for you! (See photo: theatre console, classic console, automatic roll-player.)

It seemed too good to be true. Here’s a huge organ with two consoles, virtually the only large extant instrument expressly intended as both a classic concert organ and a theatre organ with “all the bells and whistles,” drums, cymbals, toys. And there’s a new venue for the teaching of organ playing of all styles.

Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry . . .

Meanwhile, the administrators at Penn were preparing to demolish their building, and engaged me in a complicated conversation about what to do with the organ. They were less than entranced with the idea of funding another moving project, but having gone to considerable—really considerable—expense to dismantle, pack, and store it, they were committed to its preservation. When Dr. Schwandt and OU came into view with the possibility of a new home for the organ where it would be properly restored and used as part of a significant educational program, there started a whirlwind of conversations between the two universities. We all have experience with large bureaucracies moving slowly, but picture this. In just four weeks, OU expressed interest in the organ, Penn agreed to make it a gift, and the myriad political and legal details were worked out. Two other important and usual hurdles were instantly checked off—funds were immediately available to move the organ, and first-class space was immediately available in which to store it. The Organ Clearing House lined up a fleet of five semi-trailers, and the 120,000-pound organ was moved to Oklahoma, two days ahead of Penn’s demolition schedule. Yikes! Go to to read an article about this stunning transaction.

While we were dismantling the organ a couple years ago, Brant Duddy (Philadelphia area organ technician who had tuned the Civic Center organ for many years) gave me a recording of the recital played on the Civic Center organ by Tom Hazleton for the 1992 convention of the American Theatre Organ Society. Along with several traditional barnburners (high on the list of favorites in Dr. Kim’s TAO article!) is Hazleton’s medley of tunes from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma. What a wonderful way to introduce a venerable organ to its new home. And a quiet aside: Once the organ was in storage, I was in touch with Mr. Hazleton to ask about his experience with it. He was enthusiastic about its preservation and promised to help find it a new home. I asked him for an interview thinking that would enhance a column someday, but before the scheduled date arrived I heard of his death.

Late one evening while the Organ Clearing House was in Norman delivering the organ, Dr. Schwandt played the Fisk organ for us, weaving a creative tapestry around Richard Rodgers’ place-appropriate theme. As the music reverberated in the darkness, I reflected on the magic of improvisation—how a mystery becomes reality, and how important that concept is to the history of organ music. Like Picasso’s bull it’s gone as soon as it’s over, perhaps to be recreated tomorrow but never to be repeated. Improvisation must be the best tool to convince the public that the pipe organ is not just a relic of an earlier age but a vital participant in today’s culture. A fresh vision, a fresh approach, and the rebirth of a renowned institution and a venerable instrument combine to bring new energy to the work of organists and organbuilders across the country.

If you think this is “just another big Möller organ,” take my word for it: There is no other organ like it. It’s simply spectacular—an American monument of artistry in concept and craftsmanship in execution. I hope you’ll join me in Norman when it’s first played there. It’s fun to imagine that future music historians will notice Opus 5819’s rebirth as a significant event. You young students of the organ, here’s the website of the Office of Admission at the OU School of Music: ''". You’ll be glad you looked.

The convention of conventions
Conventions are big business. Tens of thousands of like-minded people gather in huge hotels and exposition halls for orgies of sales, parties, seminars, and exhibitions. Poking around the Internet, I found that the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association expects about 130,000 attendees at their 2007 convention to be held ten days from now at the Las Vegas Convention Center. SEMA (serving the specialty automotive industry since 1963) deals with custom equipment for cars and light trucks. They are planning a seminar for the 2007 convention titled Mean and Green: Bio-fuel Hummers, Fords, and off-road machines, where they will be exhibiting a 700-horsepower Hummer powered by bio-fuel. They’re not telling what the fuel mileage will be—500 bushels-per-hour? It isn’t easy being green.
In early December, the Las Vegas Convention Center will host the NFR (National Finals Rodeo) Cowboy Christmas Gift Show. They expect 20,000 attendees. Last March the Nightclub and Bar Convention & Trade Show attracted 38,000 people, and in August 13,000 people attended the convention of the American Pool Players Association at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.
Given Las Vegas hotel prices, the cost of travel and food, and the propensity of conventioneers to consume various commodities with unusual gusto, the amount of money involved in these huge shows is incomprehensible. How do they manage the logistics? Imagine the swirl at the hotel check-in desk when 50,000 people are trying to check in on the same day.
Last week the American Institute of Organbuilders gathered at the Valley Forge Conference Center and Radisson Hotel in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The Specialty Equipment Marketing Association has about a ten-year head start in membership development. Founded in 1963, their convention is now among the largest in the country. The AIO was conceived in 1973 and chartered in 1974. I don’t know the exact count, but I believe that around 250 of us attended, and to be truthful, I doubt we’ll get into tens of thousands any time soon.
This seems like a small group, but friends who are not involved in the organ world are amazed when I tell them I’m going to a national convention involving several hundred organbuilders. These are the people who say, “I didn’t know there were any of you left.” I’m feeling pretty good, how about you?
Any convention has an exhibit hall in which vendors show their wares to members of the trade. There were almost 25 firms exhibiting at the AIO convention, including companies that provide leather, specialty tools and hardware, keyboard restoration, organ pipes, console parts, and of course, solid-state control systems. The exhibits hall is open for several hours each day, especially in the evening when it becomes the locus for the convention’s social life. After dinner people swirl through the exhibits, run into old friends, make new friends, and head off to the hotel bars in small groups.
One benefit of this tradition is the dispelling of myth—I’ve been doing business with suppliers to the organbuilding trade for 30 years, and it’s fun to meet those with whom you’ve spent countless telephone hours. You get to form a personal connection with the person who answers the phone at the order desk, and to discuss technical problems in detail with the engineers who design and build the equipment. Over the years I have found great value in knowing the people I talk with on the phone. These relationships are unspeakably valuable when I’m calling from a job site where wedding limos are showing up outside and the organ is acting up.
I got active in organbuilding in the late 1970s just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were entering the market. I had my start in workshops that specialized in tracker-action organs, and my immature understanding didn’t allow much space for digital equipment. I knew many people who resisted or ignored using it. I was fortunate to work for several years along side an old-timer who had worked personally next to Ernest Skinner (in fact, I assumed the care of two Skinner organs he had helped install in the 1920s and had maintained ever since!) who said, “that stuff is for you young guys.”
In the ensuing generation, many if not most organbuilders have had at least some experience with solid-state equipment, and many use it exclusively. Years ago, I remember being easily bewildered. I would stand trembling with my hand on the switch before turning on a system for the first time and would be looking for smoke, unfairly (to both the supplier and myself) assuming that there would be smoke to see. I handled the circuit boards as though they were poisonous, and while I understood what they were supposed to do, I had no idea how they did it.
Enough time has passed that we’ve been through generations of solid-state equipment. Looking back, the earliest systems seem pretty primitive. The companies offering them went to great trouble to make the pin-boards (rows of pins where you connect the wires from the console controls to the system) look as much like traditional pipe organ equipment as possible. Later, multiplexing was introduced—logic-based systems that reduce organ music to data streams that allow the information to be passed from console to chamber using a single wire. In my memory, multiplexing was the first scary leap. Simply put, the system is based on a clock that scans all the console outputs a prescribed number of times per second and sends a code along the wire to the chamber where it is “unscrambled” by another clock. For someone who started with trackers, it was hard to imagine that it would work or that it could be reliable. At about that time, there was a Star Trek movie during which the USS Enterprise was under reconstruction and the famous Transporter was malfunctioning. When a crew member was “beamed” up or down, the machine failed to unscramble the molecules accurately, resulting in horrible scrambling of human tissue. Would this happen to our organ music?
At first bad things did happen. One system I worked with had a clock that was going too slow, resulting in herky-jerky organ music. And lightning strikes were death. I was caring for a couple large organs that had new multiplexing systems, and I sweated out thunderstorms with good reason.
Now we are getting used to software-based systems in which the organbuilder connects the console controls (keyboards, stop knobs, piston buttons, swell shoes) to rows of pins, and using software determines which pin does what. After the organ is finished, you could decide to change divisional pistons into generals by updating the software through e-mail.
It’s fun to think back a few generations to the time when electro-pneumatic combination actions and pitman chests were introduced. Any good modern organ builder knows the symptoms of trouble in a pitman chest. But when those chests were first being perfected, technicians must have sweated out mysterious problems the way I have with solid-state gremlins.
In the exhibit hall of the AIO convention, I was most impressed by the sophistication of new developments in solid-state pipe organ controls, and even more impressed by the sophistication of my colleagues, the organbuilders, who in the last 30 years have worked hard to understand the function, uses, and benefits of this equipment. I joined in conversations in which organbuilders were suggesting improvements, offering solutions to problems, and describing innovative ways they’ve found to use existing controls. I saw an institutional comfort level that can only be to the benefit of our clients. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Because I’ve been involved in some very large organ projects in recent years, I’ve noted an important way in which organ organbuilding industry has changed. Seventy-five years ago, when American organbuilders were producing thousands of organs each year, there were a number of companies that had hundreds of employees. It was much easier for such a large company to marshal the forces to erect a 32-foot Principal, or just to transport an organ of 100 ranks or more. They had people employed in experimental roles, developing combination actions, relays, and new types of voices. Today it’s rare to find a company with 100 employees, and most companies employ fewer than ten people. In this environment, the importance of the supply house is increased as we can decide independently whether or not to build pedalboards “in house,” or which solid-state control system best fits the design and function of the console we design.
I thank the people from the companies who exhibited at the AIO convention. I appreciate the hard work you’ve done developing new products. The American organ industry is strengthened by your efforts. The fees you paid for exhibition space helped make this valuable experience possible. And thanks for the candies, wine, keychains, and door prizes you provided!
Earlier this year I wrote a two-part essay about the new life of the famous, enormous, and almost indescribable organ in the former Wanamaker’s Department Store (May and June 2007, “Size Matters”). In it, I wrote that Philadelphia boasts an unusual array of very large organs. The Wanamaker organ (6/462), the Austin organ (4/167) at Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Dobson organ (4/124) at the Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) add up to 753 ranks in three organs that are within a few miles of each other. The Wanamaker Store and the Kimmel Center are within walking distance. The participants in the AIO convention had a wonderful opportunity to hear these three giant and wildly diverse instruments in two successive days.
While organ-people will no doubt always refer to the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, credit must be given to Macy’s Department Store, now the proprietor of this most grand of retail spaces. Robin Hall is an executive vice-president in charge of Macy’s Department of Annual Events, the group that produces the Thanksgiving Day Parade and July Fourth Fireworks along with numerous flower shows and musical reviews. There can be no division of a modern American corporation more enthusiastic or better equipped for the care of this most singular of pipe organs. In the brief period since their occupation of the store, they have funded extensive and expensive long-needed repairs, provided a large amount of space in the building dedicated to an organbuilding workshop, and established a collegial relationship with Curt Mangel, curator of the organ, and Peter Conte, Grand Court organist. To hear Peter and Curt talk about the people of Macy’s is to hear a gushing exceeded only by the amazing sounds of the organ itself. (Please refer to this column in the May and June issues of The Diapason for more about the Wanamaker Organ.)
Anyone who has attended an organ convention knows the bus rides—hundreds of like-minded people rattling across the countryside on a tight schedule to hear and see organs. Along with the organ demonstrations, there were workshop tours (Patrick J. Murphy & Associates and Nelson Barden at Longwood Gardens), workshop seminars on mounting toe-studs, stenciling façade pipes, and rebuilding Spencer organ blowers, and lectures in a large conference room at the convention hotel. Those lectures were on subjects as diverse as rebuilding and repairing Möller pitman chests, recovering keyboards, and conflict resolution.
Patrick Murphy, whose organbuilding workshop is in Stowe, Pennsylvania, was the chair of the convention, and the staff of his company was present throughout answering questions, guiding us as sheep on and off the buses on schedule, and providing a cheerful and welcoming presence. Randall Dyer (Randall Dyer & Associates of Jefferson City, Tennessee) is the chair of the AIO’s Convention Overview Committee. These folks deserve the gratitude of America’s pipe organ community for their contribution to the education, celebration, and advancement of American organbuilders.
I have always thought that organbuilders are a collegial bunch. Although we are competing with each other in a small market, we are typically willing to assist each other with advice and exchange of ideas, and even by sharing workers when projects get larger than a small staff can handle. But during most of the working year, we are buried in organ chambers in our own areas, seemingly out of touch with what our colleagues are doing. In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, we came out of our holes blinking in the sunlight, and shared a wonderful week of professional growth and companionship. Nice to see you all. See you in Knoxville next year.■

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

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

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

It’s the very Dickens.
Last week the American Institute of Organbuilders (AIO) and the International Society of Organbuilders (ISO) held concurrent conventions in Montreal. The convention was based in a large hotel adjacent to a suburban shopping mall. Montreal is a beautiful city, rich in history and cultural institutions, but the ubiquitous shopping mall is the same the world over. The hotel was efficient and comfortable enough, but I thought it was ironic for a group of people like organbuilders who are widely experienced with beautiful architecture and design to be trapped in a place like that. This is the kind of place where the patterns on the carpets are intended to mask accidents.
I wrote recently in these pages about the decline of the church and how it has affected the pipe organ. You can be sure that much of what we heard officially and discussed privately was related to that decline. Greeting an old friend, I would ask how things are going. The response was typically something like, “we’re busy, but we could be busier,” which I took as code that means, “I have no idea what’s going to happen next.” Several colleagues told me that while they were busy now they didn’t have much on the books for next year.
On the other hand, as I heard about the current and recent projects of many of my friends, I reflected that the quality of organbuilding is as good as ever, in fact perhaps better than ever. Reflecting on all this during my six-hour drive home brought to mind the opening words of the Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

While we might easily understand “the worst of times,” the other phrase seems more elusive. But the convention reminded me of how much skill and creativity there is in those two organizations. Some of the most brilliant practitioners were there. In fact, one wag suggested that should some disaster strike the hotel, organbuilding as we know it would end. Renewing friendships and making new acquaintances, I was reminded of some of the fabulous instruments produced by the firms represented.
And for me, the high point of the convention was a recital that certainly suggested the best of times. You must hear Isabelle Demers make music. This brilliant young artist is a musician’s musician. There can be no assembly more critical of organ playing than a convention of organbuilders, but the ovation that followed her performance was powerful and sincere. There was a remarkable level of energy and enthusiasm in the buses heading back to the hotel as conventioneers expressed their delight and amazement. It was said more than once that if there will be artists like Ms. Demers around to play organs, then we had better keep building beautiful instruments.

The age of wisdom
American and European organbuilding was revolutionized during the twentieth century. On both continents Victorian symphonic instruments gave way to industrialization, and by mid-century organbuilders on both continents had started a period of intense self-examination leading to the return to earlier styles of organbuilding, dramatically increasing the artistic content of the industry’s output. Today’s organbuilders are deeply immersed in the study of organ history and technology, and in the magical, mystical art of blending organ pipes with the wonderful heritage of music written for the instrument. The European Orgelbewegung and the American Revival of Classic Organbuilding have led the trade to an apex of knowledge and understanding.

The age of foolishness
While all the collective learning of the past half-century has brought us to new understanding of the art, it has also introduced a foolish aspect. When the so-called tracker revival was gaining traction in the 1960s and 1970s, the general public was drawn into the debate. The layperson who listened to organ music for the love of it found it necessary to declare preference. It didn’t seem possible to remain neutral. At first glance this might seem like an advantage—all that attention from non-professionals interested in understanding. But in fact I believe the tenor of the debate was harmful. Any potential new appreciator of the organ got dragged into the fray, and I fear that many were frightened off. Could be they would have preferred simply enjoying the music.
Also, while this movement was a true renaissance, there was no need to wait a couple centuries for historians to deduce that something interesting was going on. We all knew it at the time. We talked and wrote about it ceaselessly. And when you know you’re part of a renaissance it’s easy to let it go to your head. We presented instruments and performances that were artistically sophisticated and erudite, assuming that the public would appreciate without question. But that was a time when the public had more and more available to it. Transportation and communication was advancing, so the world was growing ever smaller. As a society, we learned to think little of teenagers traveling the world on exchange programs or sending photographs instantly through the ether. Remember when you used to have to get film developed? And we were deluged with myriad gadgets and entertainments till then unheard of. Organ recitals were among the most popular public entertainment in the 1920s. Now it seems a big deal when an audience breaks a hundred.

It was the epoch of belief.
I believe that the industries of organ building and playing have the opportunity for a fresh start along with the twenty-first century. We’re far enough into the millennium to be comfortable saying the date. I remember that during the nineties we wondered what we could call a year. Would it be two-thousand-four, aught-four, oh-four? We’re over that now. Although technology still advances with staggering determination, we’re used to that, too. We believe that the Internet is an effective tool for communication and the dissemination of information. We’re used to air conditioning, sophisticated automobiles, and high-definition television. We expect rapid innovation but I don’t think we need to be distracted by it anymore.
The organbuilding revivals have progressed through the vitriolic stage to that in which good organs of any type are generally appreciated. There are few of us left who insist on hearing or playing only tracker action. It’s a good time for another organ renaissance in which we shift our emphasis to communication with the audience; so instead of assuming that the public will automatically adore us for the fruits of our half-century of collective research, we set out with purpose to reintroduce them to the glory of the instrument, to the wide range of expression possible from a good organ, to the fun and excitement of hearing the world’s greatest music presented on the King of Instruments.

It was the epoch of incredulity.
It’s incredible that the pipe organ exists at all. I’m not saying I’m surprised it has survived this far, but that it ever developed in the first place. As we go through the extreme effort of building monumental organs, we reflect how unlikely, how incredible, how downright ridiculous it is to produce a 20- or 30-foot-tall whistle for the purpose of playing one note of one tone color at one volume. We might think that organs are priced by the rank, but an octave of 32-foot Principal pipes might cost $100,000—that’s $8,300 per note!
As we work in a church, a visitor comes in, curious about what’s going on. A ten-minute tour of the organ and its parts leaves him speechless, except to say, “I had no idea people still did this kind of work.” The pipe organ is one place in our modern world where “analog” is impressive. To create a machine driven by huge electric blowers with pressurized air passing through hundreds of feet of conductors, with thousands of hand-crafted specialized whistles, with miles of wire or tracker material, all to allow a single musician to command the acoustics of a vast room is incredible.
It’s incredible but we can do it.

It was the season of Light.
I’m not going to address the issue of organ cases covering windows. I’m thinking about Light (Dickens capitalized it) in reference to faith and inspiration. The pipe organ is the original instrument of the church. It has been central to our expressions of faith in public worship for hundreds of years. Let’s not forget that 500-year-old organs are still in service in Europe. I wonder if we (and I use the word “we” collectively to describe organists and organbuilders) have gotten so involved in the craft, history, and art of the instrument that we’ve overlooked the visceral reaction of the people in the pew when the organ sings out. I’m enough of a sap that I often find it difficult to sing hymns because I’m choked up by the effect of the organ.
We are well aware of the physics, the math, the nuts and bolts that comprise the organ, but we should put first the emotional impact of the instrument. Everyone in the room should be choked up.

It was the season of Darkness.
(Dickens’ cap again.) I visit a church to inspect an organ that’s being put on the market, and notice first the drum sets, amps, and microphone stands in the choir loft. “We want to get rid of the organ so we have more space for our musicians.” Through my work with the Organ Clearing House I may be the guy who hears the most reasons for “getting rid” of a pipe organ:
• Our new pastor introduced a new style of worship.
• The last guy to tune the organ said it needs a $100,000 repair.
• We may be closing the parish and putting the building up for sale.
• We can’t afford an organist. Or,
• We can’t find anyone who knows how to play it.
• It seems so old fashioned.
The list goes on.
There may not be much we can do about these things. But one thing we can do is to help our clients control the cost of owning and caring for an organ. As I’ve traveled around the organ world, I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about “what the organ needs.” We revere the instruments and know that they function best when every part is in the best condition. But we may be shooting ourselves in the foot if we insist on too much.
It’s not necessary to tune all the pipes every time you visit. In fact, it’s often better to pick out the lulus and leave the rest alone. A good tuner can keep a simple organ in tune with an hour or two of tuning each year. We and our clients have gotten used to thinking that an organ should be tuned for Christmas and Easter. It goes on the list with sending greeting cards and dyeing eggs. But where I live, that means the organ is getting tuned twice during winter weather, sometimes less than three months apart. Do we always need both tunings?
It’s nice to keep an organ clean, but it’s not necessary to remove the pipes for cleaning every generation. And while it can be profitable to replace an organ’s console or blower, I think that many churches have been convinced to pay for such projects unnecessarily. It is the duty of the modern organ technician to avoid suggesting work that is not necessary for the continued use of the organ. It’s essential to be sure that organ blowers are lubricated and in safe operating condition. It’s important to be sure that the organ doesn’t embarrass the player or the tuner. And it’s important that the organ be in good enough condition to sound well to the ear of the layperson. But the fact is, when a church’s music committee sees a bill for piano tuning for a hundred dollars and a thousand-dollar bill for organ tuning, the reaction is now frequently to stop tuning the organ.

It was the spring of hope.
This one is easy. I hope that the economy improves, making available funding for more interesting projects. I hope that our collective work continues to improve and to thrill congregations and audiences. I hope that pipe organs are still a valued part of our worship and cultural lives 50 years from now.

It was the winter of Despair.
I won’t say I despair. I’ll stay optimistic. But I have a growing sense that the future of the instrument is up to us. There was a time when organbuilders could assume that people would always be buying organs. The responsibility of the sales department was to be sure their firm got the job instead of the competition. Today it is the responsibility of the sales department to help sustain the future of the instrument itself. If we forget that, we’re doomed.

We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
It’s up to us.

We were all going to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Again, it’s up to us. But I wonder if a lifetime tuning organs is rewarded by an eternity tuning harps. And if so, which way is that? ■

Photos of cats

Read recently on Facebook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

Homogeneity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human resources

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

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

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

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

The comfort of commonality

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

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

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

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

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

The top of the world

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

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

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

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Let’s get personal
When I was a student at Oberlin in the mid-1970s, I kept my meager checking account at the Lorain National Bank, where there were two cheery tellers. I enjoyed talking with them enough that I can remember their names and faces more than 30 years later. I can also remember the day that the bank christened its first ATM. When I needed cash, I was relegated to standing outdoors on the sidewalk poking the buttons of an alien machine. I worried about losing my card to the machine. I worried that it would shortchange me and I wouldn’t be able to prove it. And I missed the nice chats with the tellers. Today, after thousands of successful ATM transactions, I have to admit that I’ve never been shortchanged by a machine, I’ve only lost a card once (my card had expired), and because the tellers at the bank I frequent now are a pretty grumpy lot, I’m perfectly happy with the beeps and whistles of the ATM. And of course, 24-hour access to cash is a convenience to me as I’m almost as likely to be in a California airport in the middle of the night as in the bank branch near my home in Boston.
My first encounter with an ATM was pretty much concurrent with my entry into the organ-maintenance business. There were no cell phones or e-mail, so it was a common routine to spend a couple hours on the phone every few weeks making appointments for service calls. Most of those calls were to church offices where a secretary would answer the phone. Church secretaries were so devoted to their jobs that they never left their desks, and always answered the phone on the second ring. She ate her lunch (tuna fish on white with the crusts cut off, cut diagonally into four triangles) at her desk. The ubiquitous church secretary knew everything about the church—she (it was always a woman!) knew the organist’s schedule, the reliability of the sexton (for turning heat on for winter tunings), and whether there was a parade or festival in town that would make it hard for me to park.
As I got busier in the tuning business, I learned where I could find a decent phone booth—one that was away from noisy traffic, that had a functioning door, that had a place where I could put down a piece of paper to write on. It seemed there was always a traveling salesman with a car full of samples, standing outside the booth with arms crossed, tapping his feet (it was always a man!), waiting to use the phone. My first cell phone liberated me from all that. I could sit in the privacy and comfort of my car and make as many calls as I wanted. Great.
It was Isaac Newton, he of the dropping apple, who observed that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The freer I became to place calls to church offices at my convenience, the fewer of those calls were answered in person. Today, many churches have limited their office hours to three mornings a week, and the full-time sexton has been replaced by a weekly cleaning service. The chairman of the property committee would turn up the heat, but he’s in Florida for the winter.
In most cases this works out fine. I leave a phone message or send an e-mail and get a reply the next morning. The church has an electronic thermostat that can be programmed weeks ahead. Even though I miss the personal contact, I’m glad to be doing the tuning.
Today’s instant communication means that a church can save some money. The church office phone can be forwarded to someone’s house, and I can make phone calls and send e-mail and text messages from my car. But is the fact that the church no longer really needs (or cannot afford) to maintain office hours an indication of the decline of the institution?
The Organ Clearing House has moved many wonderful pipe organs out of churches in New England. When I visit one of those old New England churches to assess an organ, I’m likely to find a fleet of mike stands and amplifiers, drum sets behind plexi-glass barriers, and miles of cables festooned across the choir loft. Often it’s an Asian, Hispanic, or African-American congregation that purchased the building 30 years ago. Many of those are thriving—jam-packed sanctuaries several times a week, lots of exciting fellowship, chicken-beans-and-rice dinners—I’ve had many lovely encounters with clergy and parishioners who are excited about their church’s growth and devoted to its work. It’s simply that their style of worship never has and never will involve pipe organs of any description.
Many of those New England organs have been relocated to thriving churches in the Southeast or Southwest—ironically following the “snow-bird” property committee chairman who is no longer available to turn up the heat for organ tuning. I wonder how many more generations of retirees there will be to support those churches, and where the organs will go next.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How many church committee members does it take to change a light bulb?
Change? Change? That light bulb doesn’t need to be changed. My grandmother paid for that light bulb.
I think this is funny because it’s true. I served as music director at a church with a beautiful white frame building with a steeple on a well-kept village green—the quintessential New England setting. What set it apart from other such nearby settings was that it was a new sanctuary—built after a fire in the 1970s. The clever building committee made sure that there was an electric outlet directly under each of the large sanctuary windows so the electric candles could be plugged in easily at Christmas.
The steeple had a Westminster chime that rang on the quarter-hour and that played hymns at noon and six pm. Trouble was, the hymns were in four-part harmony—that’s right, a bong-a-tron. I’ve always been an acoustic guy, and those faux bells annoyed me. One Sunday at coffee hour, a member asked me what I thought about the tower chimes, and I told him. I said that I was committed to acoustic musical instruments, and it irked me that electronic bells “rang” from the tower where I was the resident musician. He replied, “That’s too bad. I donated them.”
Yikes. That was quite a lesson.
By long-standing tradition, that church presented a Candlelight Carol Service on the first Sunday of Advent, complete with O Come, All Ye Faithful, Silent Night, and a Christmas Tea. The same woman had presided over the spigot of the silver tea urn for a generation.
After a few years of toiling to present Christmas music in the week after Thanksgiving, I raised the question to the pastor at a staff meeting. There was no midnight service on Christmas Eve, so I suggested we move the beloved candle lighting “Ceremony” to a new midnight service and present a special musical service on the afternoon of the Fourth Sunday of Advent. I was pleased that the pastor was receptive, and we worked hard to plan that way for the next year. On the First Sunday of Advent (which would have been the day of the Carol Service), a member stood up during the announcements and read a manifesto entitled “Death of a Friend” about the loss of the carol service.
Yikes. That was quite a lesson.
There was a lot of grumbling that Advent. I got a couple letters from parishioners who were disappointed with the change, and had my ears figuratively boxed a number of times at coffee hour. But the midnight service was well attended, the carol singing was moving, and the heavens showed approval by providing a beautiful light snowfall. (As I grew up in the Northeast, I’ve always associated Christmas with snow, though I doubt that snow played any part in the first Christmas.) We repeated the controversial plan the next year, and by the third year it was a new and inviolable tradition. It’s been ten years since I left that church—I sure hope they haven’t messed with “my” tradition!
§
Establishing a midnight service on Christmas Eve isn’t exactly innovation. In fact, I was so used to that tradition from other churches in my experience that it felt funny not to have one. But if there is to be a future for what I might call the “traditional” church—the church of pipe organs, Thursday night choir rehearsals, and Candlelight Carol services—we must find new ways to celebrate and present the magnificent music that is our heritage. There will always be a few great central (big city) churches that offer Evensong in the English Cathedral tradition, but they rely in many ways on the suburban church that feeds on the music of the past for the development of choristers, the breeding (if you will!) of organists, and the sustenance of organbuilding firms that can produce and maintain those wonderful instruments.
It is the responsibility of the musicians and instrument makers to be on a constant prowl for new ways to look at this that means so much to us. It’s already true that churches in remote areas cannot find qualified musicians to lead their worship. Why is that?
I like to repeat that one of things I like best about my work with Organ Clearing House is the continuing opportunities to visit and work with dozens of churches around the country. I have frequently observed that I am aware of sameness—that the Sunday bulletin of a church in Seattle is very similar to one in Maine. But one thing I know for sure, those churches that have the most vibrant “traditional” music programs are those that are led by musicians who participate fully in the life of the church. When you see the organist wearing an apron making sandwiches to be sold at the church fair, dropping in on the soccer games to see a youth choir member score a goal, or bothering to attend the high school musical to hear a choir member sing “I’m just a girl who cain’t say no,” you can bet that the choir rehearsals are rollicking and fun. There’s no rule that says only the pastor can visit parishioners in the hospital.
When I was active as a parish organist, I felt it was my responsibility and prerogative to play the great literature as preludes and postludes. But when I observe a brilliant and respected musician inviting a talented high-school student to play a prelude on the piano or flute, I know I am seeing effective ministry. I’m sorry I was so stubborn as to favor my rendition of a Bach prelude and fugue over providing a performance opportunity for a young person.
None of this means that you shouldn’t strive to offer the very best readings of the very best music in worship. There is no better way to feed the faith of loyal choir members than by challenging them with spectacular music, helping them develop their God-given talents, giving them the opportunity to bring something special to worship. Have you ever started a choir rehearsal by saying, “let’s just bring out this old thing . . .”?
I’ve gotten to know a congregation that recently purchased a significant organ by a well-known builder. The organist and director of music are both fine, high-spirited women who are enthusiastic about their work. And the organbuilders, much to their credit, are valued and appreciated as important members of the church family. The resident musicians have celebrated the instrument so the parishioners know that they have acquired something special. And though the organbuilders live and work a thousand miles away, they are present both to and for the church, bothering to attend performances and worship services, even making the effort to show up for an important birthday.
In these ways, our music will live.
When in our music God is glorified.
And adoration leaves no room for pride,
It is as if the whole creation cried Alleluia!
Let every instrument be tuned for praise!
Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise.
And may God give us faith to sing always Alleluia!