In the wind...

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

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It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

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This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

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When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.

John Bishop takes on Facebook and wonders how it applies to organists

Facebooking the music

Fifty years ago when television was a fledgling technology, it was touted as a great educational tool. That has proven true to some extent, but I wonder how many of us think that education is the primary function of television. If you took away all the sports, movies, crime dramas, sitcoms, reality shows, and talk shows, you’d be left with the Home Shopping Network and children’s television. Children’s television, carefully filtered, is not far from the only programming that’s specifically intended as educational. Even PBS nature programming has evolved into “blood and guts” television. What used to be beautifully photographed documentaries about tree frogs has become action-terror shows about sharks, crocodiles, and volcanoes with that macho-tension-danger tone of narration. What if some future inter-stellar traveler used a week of television programming to sum up modern American civilization? He would miss the pipe organ altogether.

The origins of Facebook are pretty fuzzy, especially because there are ongoing disputes about who actually came up with the idea and who stole what from whom. But it’s clear enough that one of the early iterations called Facesmash included a trick where photos of two Harvard students showed on your screen and you would vote for which was more attractive. I think I read that Facesmash founder Mark Zuckerberg set this up because he was annoyed when a girl jilted him. This did not fly well at politically correct Harvard University and Zuckerberg was called up in front of the disciplinary board. 

All this implies that Facebook wasn’t founded on high moral principles, but it sure is a medium that is missing its potential by a wide margin. When Facebook started getting popular, I was aware that members of my family were making posts about having the sniffles, or changing brands of toothpaste, and I was easily able to stay clear. But once while I was out of town sharing a nice dinner with a colleague, he talked at some length about how much he enjoyed keeping in touch with what’s going on in the organ business by “Facebooking” with his friends. He showed me how friends were sharing ideas, posting photos of organ installations, and generally carrying on the kind of trade chatter that I love.

I joined. I made it clear to family members that I intended to keep my presence on Facebook professional, and now I have about eight hundred friends, most of whom are organ professionals. Even so, you’ll not be surprised to hear that plenty of my professional friends make unprofessional posts. One guy who posts frequently seems to have nothing to say other than, “Good morning. Got my coffee.” Another friend posts photos of his cats virtually every day. Nice cats, but I get it already. And really, friends, photos of fancy cocktails and beautiful restaurant meals have a way of looking alike. I wonder how long it will take Internet engineers to develop the ability to transmit smells?

Here’s a little lecture, for what it’s worth. When you post something on Facebook, remember that anyone can read it. So choir directors, never post yourself whining about volunteer choir members. Your success as a church musician depends on your ability to recruit, nurture, and maintain volunteer singers. Imagine how dear Mabel, who sings so loud and so flat, is going to feel if she reads you complaining about having to work with her. You’re being paid to do that work. She is giving of her discretionary time for the privilege of singing under your direction as part of her worship experience. Accept that as flattery and work it out.

And organbuilders, never post yourself whining about your clients. If you care at all about your professional future, remind yourself how precious is the client that chooses a pipe organ when so many alternatives are available. We used to take them granted—there would always be organs to build. That’s not the case anymore, and we must recruit, nurture, and maintain our clients. If you feel you have to complain, do it in private.

Why are we doing this, anyway?

Several of my (Facebook) friends stand out because their posts are so constructive, informative, and celebratory. Neal Campbell is director of music and organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Darien, Connecticut, and is editor of the newsletter of the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. He is a wonderful historian, especially regarding church music in New York. He posts frequently on Facebook, sharing photos and information about those organists whose names we all know, and about whom we know nothing. He also sets a standard for how to post about a volunteer choir—sharing his pleasure with the choristers he works with. Neal’s posts are thoughtful, charming, informative, and encouraging. If I were a parishioner at St. Luke’s, Neal’s tone on Facebook might just inspire me to join the choir. It’s obviously the place to be.

Walden Moore is another Connecticut Episcopal organist who uses Facebook wonderfully. He has served Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven for nearly thirty years. He has a long history of mentoring distinguished assistant organists and organ scholars (I suppose I would too if my neighbor were the Yale Institute of Sacred Music—quite a talent pool!), and he leads three wonderful choirs in a beautiful building with a marvelous organ. Walden is a regular on my Facebook page, and his posts reflect the joy of playing the organ, working with choirs, and working with a raft of brilliant musicians. Plenty of the photos he posts show restaurant tables, but it’s not primarily about the food. What stands out is that everyone in each photo is smiling or laughing. Now that’s church music!

Yesterday I saw this post from the mother of boys who sing under Walden’s direction: 

‘Believe in yourself. Believe in yourself as much as I believe in you.’—Mr. Moore to his choirboys at rehearsal tonight as they wrestled with a rhythmically thorny passage in a Distler piece. This is why my boys sing in choirs; would that every child could have this opportunity.

You go, Walden. More of that kind of thinking, and choir practice will take precedence over soccer. If everyone used Facebook like that, the world would be a better place.

It’s not just any wind

Recently, Walden posted photos of the two organ blowers in Marquand Chapel at Yale—one for the Skinner organ, the other for Taylor & Boody. Here’s what he said to accompany those photos:

Looking forward to the first class meeting of Liturgical Keyboard Skills tomorrow. Here are two almost never-seen views of the blowers for Marquand’s two equally fine and beautiful organs, built by Ernest M. Skinner and Taylor & Boody. The two blowers pictured, just like the organs, are as different as they could be, but the difference in the wind provided is not reflected by the impact of the two organs in the chapel space. Both lead in the way in which they were designed, and each is a fine representation of the builder’s art.

A tidbit like this is food for thought. Look at these two photos and note the differences between the two machines. One is modern, sleek, and compact, and ironically enough, provides the wind for a new organ based on ancient principles. The other is a “Spencer Orgoblo,” the workhorse of the twentieth-century electro-pneumatic organ. You can easily find the specifications of the two organs online. They are similar in size, at least in number of stops. The Taylor & Boody organ has more pipes, but I bet the Skinner weighs more!

One organ has sub-semitones on all three keyboards. One has two separate expression enclosures. One has lots of pistons, one has three big wedge-shaped reservoirs that can be pumped by foot power. One is in a chamber with curtains and a discreet façade, the other is in a free-standing case built of hardwood, opulently decorated with carvings and gold leaf. In tonal structure, philosophy, intent, and mechanical systems, the two instruments could hardly be more different, but they are both pipe organs, and they share the same air space. And that same air runs through the two blowers into the wildly different mechanical entities, producing as wide a variety of tone colors as you’ll ever hear on six keyboards. (Curt Mangel and Peter Conte, you stay out of it!)

I love wind. I’ve written about it frequently in these pages. I chose the title of this column because of the organ’s dependency on wind, and because, as Bob Dylan told us in his 1962 song, “The answer is blowing in the wind” is an enigmatic phrase that means either the answer is so obvious that you’re a fool if you don’t get it, or it’s as free-flowing and omni-directional as the wind. “In the wind” is the equivalent of “the grapevine”—a vehicle for the exchange of ideas and/or the proliferation of gossip.

By the way, “Blowin’ in the Wind” is number 14, and “Heard It through the Grapevine” is number 80 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Funny, I looked up the list and didn’t find a single one of Schubert’s 600. Surely “Der Erlkönig” should have made it. And what about “I Got Rhythm?” All time greatest? How are we defining a song? Dylan gets all the way through his song singing only eight different notes. And I could name that tune in one note.

I think of wind in two different ways. There is the wind I know I cannot control, and the wind I think I can control. We live on a tidal shore and the “sea breeze” is a favorite of mine. This is not just a wind that blows by the sea. It’s a specific phenomenon caused by the warm afternoon sun heating up the land mass faster than the ocean’s surface. The warm air rises off the land, and the cooler air rushes in off the ocean to take its place. It blows up the river and right through our house, and it’s the most refreshing atmosphere ever. The only way I can control that wind is by opening and closing certain doors, causing it to turn at the end of the back hall and blow into the garage, which is my workshop. Wonderful.

In that workshop, I do all kinds of things that make me think I can control wind. I build windlines, releather windchests, and replace gaskets. I releather reservoirs—those ingenious devices that receive and store air pressure generated by the organ blower, regulate it to a specific intentional level of pressure, and then distribute it to the organ’s pipes as the player demands air by playing notes that open valves. I can claim to be in control of that wind, but it’s pretty crafty, always trying to escape and rejoin the rest of its free-spinning family. We call that “wind leaks.”

Here’s a tiny organ blower that’s been on a shelf in my workshop for several years. In the trade, we call this a “pancake” blower because of its horizontal orientation. It’s what you might find in a portable continuo organ, and it would be adequate for a gentle Positiv organ of six stops or less. But it would not provide enough pressure and volume of air for even one Skinner Diapason.

And here is the huge blowing plant for the mighty organ at Woolsey Hall at Yale University, training ground for all those organ scholars at Trinity Church on the Green. These beautiful specialized machines provide all the wind pressure for nearly two hundred ranks of heavy-duty Skinner pipes, including a fleet of thirty-twos. These two machines are redundant—if one quits, the other takes up the charge. They are each 20-horsepower motors that run on 440 volts of direct current. They have two pressure outputs regulated to 12 inches and 27 inches of wind pressure. Joe Dzeda, one of the curators of this wonderful organ, tells me that they run at 900 rpm, were built in 1915 and 1916, and are among the oldest electric motors in the State of Connecticut. Anyone who has been around the students at Yale knows this is a workhorse organ—the blowers are running between 40 and 50 hours each week!

The look of the sound

Look across a modern symphony orchestra and see how many different ways moving pressurized air can be turned into musical tone. The trumpet and the bass tuba are similar in tone production even though their physical sizes are so different. Because the tone is produced by physical “mechanical” vibration (the players’ bi-labial fricative), they are roughly analogous to the reed voices in a pipe organ. The double reeds (oboe, bassoon, English horn) all act the same way, as do the single reeds (clarinet, basset horn, and saxophone). In the orchestra, the only wind instruments that do not have a physical moving part to create the tone are the flutes and piccolos. There, the player directs a carefully produced and aimed column of air across a tiny hole.

Over centuries of experimentation and development, organ builders have created a wide range of tonal colors by manipulating wind through vessels of different sizes, shapes, and construction. Assume an open organ pipe two feet long, which is middle C of an eight-foot stop. It might be the diameter of my thumb (a narrow-scale string like Viole d’Orchestre) or the diameter of a thistle-seed birdfeeder (a broad diapason). It might be made of wood or metal. It might have a narrow mouth (2/9 of the circumference)—imagine the embouchure of the flautist—or it might have a wide mouth. Years ago, a mentor gave me the clear image of air as fuel. In your car, stepping on the throttle (gas pedal) sends more fuel to the engine’s cylinders. In an organ, a wider mouth, a deeper windway, a larger toe-hole all send more fuel to the pipe’s “engine”—the upper lip of the mouth that splits the windsheet creating the vibration that generates the tone. Choosing which of these functions should send more air is at the discretion of the tonal designer or the voicer.

An organ pipe can be tapered, wider at the mouth, narrow at the top (Spitz Flute, Gemshorn) or tapered the other way, wider at the top (Dolcan—an unusual stop). And then—put a stopper in the pipe, cut its length in half, and you have the wide world of Gedeckts, Stopped Diapasons, and Bourdons. In these, a one-foot pipe gives you middle C of that eight-foot stop, and they can be either metal or wood. Drill a hole in the cap of a metal Gedeckt, solder a little tube to it and you have a Chimney Flute or Rohrflöte. I like to think that drilling that hole sets the quint free (22⁄3′ harmonic)—that’s what gives the lyrical brightness to a Chimney Flute.

I think an important test of the tonal content of an organ is to compare eight-foot flutes. A big organ might have five or six of them. Sort out which are stopped flutes and which are open, and play the same passage on each. If they are all different, individual voices, the tonal designer and voicer have done their jobs. It’s surprising how all the flutes sound alike in some large, and otherwise good organs. The wonderful Hook & Hastings organ at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, now dismantled and stored because the church closed, stood out for me as an instrument with a wide—even wild—variety of flute tone.

Let’s go back to those two blowers at Marquand Chapel. Any organbuilder would be able to tell which blower belongs to which organ by listening to a couple measures played on each instrument, or simply by looking at photos of the organs and the blowers. The type and style of the blower is analogous to the type and style of the organ. And any organbuilder could compare photos of ranks of pipes with their sounds. If you look at a Gedeckt pipe and choose the sound of a Diapason, you’re
no organbuilder!

The wide variety of shapes and types of organ pipes means that one blower can draw air from its surroundings, blow it into the organ, and allow the organist to blend sounds like the old-master painter chose and blended colors. I suppose when you were starting out with organ lessons your teacher may have given you rules about how to choose stops. Here’s one I remember, don’t put a four-foot Flute above an eight-foot Principal. Almost fifty years later I ask, why not? If it sounds good to me, maybe the listeners will like it too.

Or will I read a Facebook whine that says, “I heard Bishop play last night and wouldn’t you know, he used a four-foot Flute above an eight-foot Principal.”

By the way, if you’re lurking about on Facebook, take a look at Andrew Gingery’s page. Andrew is a longtime member of the staff at C. B. Fisk, Inc. They’re installing a new blue organ in Japan. And while you’re at it, visit John Pike Mander of Mander Organs in the UK—he’s installing a new organ at the Anglican Cathedral in Kobe, Japan. Take their cues about what Facebook can be, and stop whining. Wonderful. 

Creative freedom

Last Wednesday I was doing a service call at a church in New Jersey, where the Organ Clearing House installed a relocated organ a couple years ago. The pastor was holding keys as I tuned the reeds—a little unusual perhaps, except that this pastor was an organist before he was ordained. It was he who conceived and drove the acquisition of the organ, and we’ve enjoyed a friendly relationship since.

It’s a real pleasure for an organbuilder when a parish appreciates an instrument he has provided and uses it well. Along with the pastor’s affinity for the instrument, that church’s organist is doing a wonderful job finding his way around the organ, and using it creatively as he leads worship for the parish.

An organ tuner can tell a lot about a local organist by the character and quality of the list left on the console, and this organist’s lists are concise, accurate, and correct. When I commented on that, the pastor waxed enthusiastic about the organist’s work, and said something to the effect that although once in a while he disagreed with a choice, he knew he had to stay out of it and let his organist be creative. Terrific. How many organists out there would quail at the idea of working with (or for) an organist-pastor?

Yes, chef

A couple days later, Wendy and I went to the movies followed by a light supper at the friendly bar at the end of the block. While Wendy’s literary pull often draws us toward weighty films, this time we saw Chef. It included some personally painful scenes about divorced parents struggling to do right by their son, but otherwise it was fun, funny, and scintillating.

Carl Casper (John Favreau) is chef of a popular and prominent restaurant in Los Angeles owned by Riva (Dustin Hoffman). They learn that the big-shot restaurant critic (played by Oliver Platt) is coming to review the place, and Casper drums up excitement among the kitchen staff planning a special knockout menu. There are fantastic scenes involving a whole pig arriving in the kitchen in a big plastic bag, and a lot of mouth-watering test cooking. When Riva gets wind of this, he storms into the kitchen brandishing the regular menu and essentially orders Casper to present the usual fare. “It’s what we’re known for.” Casper protests, referring to their agreement that Riva wouldn’t interfere in the kitchen, but to no avail.

Predictably, the critic pans the place. Enter Casper’s son, the quintessential smarty-pants kid with a smart phone, who shares the resulting Twitter traffic with his dad. The critic has thousands of followers. Casper, the quintessential social-media newbie, pours fuel on the fire by mouthing off, thinking he was tweeting to the critic, and only the critic, and the fun really starts as Casper challenges the critic to return for a “real meal.” Hearing that news, Riva repeats his insistence, adds an ultimatum, and Casper storms out of the kitchen to find himself in an adventure that includes some mouth-watering food scenes and a hilarious caper with his ex-wife’s first husband. It’s all about creative freedom.

For all the saints

Fifth Avenue in New York City is a classy address, but with the Disney Store between 55th and 56th Streets, and the NBA (National Basketball Association) store between 47th and 48th Streets, it’s not quite as elegant as it once was. It’s hard to imagine Mrs. Astor or Mrs. Vanderbilt stopping in to buy an eight-foot-tall Mickey Mouse, even though either of them would have had help to carry it home. We’ll not discuss the Dennis Rodman sunglasses.

Halfway between these two tacky icons you’ll find St. Thomas Church. It’s a wonderful place for worship, a legendary place to hear music, and a refreshing respite from the million-dollar huckstering going on elsewhere in the neighborhood. (People routinely spend more on handbags in that neighborhood than I will ever spend to buy a car!) Walk into the nave and allow your breath to be taken away.

The reredos behind the high altar includes sixty figures of carved stone. I wonder if the artist proposed sixty-five, and the vestry voted to limit the project? People often refer to the “price per stop” of pipe organs. Do you suppose there’s a “price per saint” for a reredos?

In 1499, the 24-year-old Michelangelo completed Pietà, commissioned as the funeral monument to a French cardinal who was a representative to Rome. It’s a little over 68 inches tall and nearly 77 inches wide, and it weighs about 6,600 pounds. I did a Google search and learned that the current price of Carrara marble is $2.25 per pound. (Believe it or not, even though it’s prone to stains, people use it for kitchen counters. You shouldn’t carry coffee in paper cups inside St. Peter’s.) Looking at photos of Pietà, it’s hard to tell just how much of the original block of marble is left, but let’s guess that Michelangelo took away two thirds of the material to reveal his masterpiece. If so, the original block would have weighed 19,800 pounds. At today’s price, that’s $44,550. (I don’t know if that includes shipping.) Did Michelangelo’s commission specify the maximum weight and cost of the marble? Or did they simply provide him with a block? I wonder if Michelangelo tried to hold out for a larger block? Given cost-saving devices such as laser cutting tools, hydraulic cranes, diesel engines, and railroads, I bet the cost of marble relative to other consumer items is lower than it was in 1500. Just imagine the effort involved in bringing a 20,000-pound block down a mountain and 400 kilometers to Rome using technology available in 1500 AD.

A few years later, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo worked on that project from 1508 until 1512. I wonder if the Pope established a budget. I wonder if he put a limit on the number of scenes depicted. Did Michelangelo provide sketches for the client’s approval? I wonder if Julius II stopped in once in a while to check on the progress, and if so, did he ever put in his two cents’ worth about color choices? Did he pay attention to the vibrancy of the colors? “Mickey, that blue looks pretty rich. What’s the price per tube?” Did he fuss about how slow it was going? Or did he say, “Knock yourself out. Have a blast. Don’t worry about the cost.” I doubt it.  

A related thought: We have just finished dismantling an organ in a church where the pastor was downright unfriendly. I wonder if Julius II and Michelangelo liked each other? Early in the movie, the kitchen staff spreads the word to Chef Casper that “Riva is coming,” in sharp, explosive whispers. Think of Michelangelo’s young assistant hissing, “The Pope is coming . . . ”

You say you want a revolution…

In the early 1960s, the Beatles turned the music world upside down. The radical messages in the lyrics of their songs thrilled some people and terrified others. Old-timers fretted about the end of civilization, what with those hippie hairstyles and all. Funny, because looking at photos of the Fab Four from those days with dark jackets buttoned up, and skinny dark ties with white button-down shirts, they might as well be a quartet of congressmen—except they were too creative for that.  

Those songs were innovative and provocative. Millions of young people were influenced by them. And each of those millions has experienced the moment of hearing the Beatles for the first time in an elevator soundtrack—the music that changed the world reduced to twinkling away in the background. And what a gold mine is that twinkling. After pop-music icon Michael Jackson recorded a couple songs with former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, Jackson seized an opportunity to incense McCartney by outbidding him to purchase the rights to the Beatles’ catalogue, putting McCartney in the position of having to pay licensing fees every time he wanted to sing Hey Jude.

According to the website Mail Online (of the British newspaper Daily Mail), following Jackson’s death, copyright laws allow the rights to return piecemeal to McCartney.  A revolution at what price?

Leave the driving to us

A week ago, I was waiting for a bus in the teeming New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, listening to a nondescript Vivaldi concerto for strings over tinny public speakers. I’ve been present for plenty of serious recording sessions where microphones and music stands are set about on a wood floor. There are open instrument cases strewn about along with half-finished bottles of water. A small group of musicians is playing their hearts out to the microphones for posterity. Together they listen to playbacks of each take, discuss, and start again. Do you suppose they realize that all that effort is destined for broadcast in a bus station? Does that define commercial success for a musical ensemble? Artistic fulfillment?

The parish organist spends all day Saturday at the console preparing a blockbuster postlude for the next morning. The recessional hymn is finished, benediction and response checked off, and he launches into it. Ten minutes later, with a paper cup of coffee in the narthex, the smiling congregants tell him, “The music was beautiful, as always.” I once appreciated that feedback, but when the same person says the same words with the same inflections week after week, year after year, it gets a little hollow. Was she listening? Did she notice anything special about it this week? Or does “as always” cover it for her, taking away the responsibility to listen critically?

Classical radio stations love listener surveys, inviting their audiences to vote on their favorite music. It’s like a sprawling focus group and allows the stations’ librarians to cull all that complicated overbearing music that no one likes from their record collections. No votes for Alban Berg? Out it goes. As a teenager listening faithfully to WCRB in Boston in the 1970s, I was already aware that it was a pretty short list of music they played: a Mozart symphony (number 40 in G minor), a Vivaldi concerto (Four Seasons), something by Respighi (Ancient Airs and Dances), another Vivaldi concerto (another season down, two to go).

The Louvre in Paris is one of the world’s largest museums with over 650,000 square feet of exhibit space. It’s the most visited in the world with nearly ten million visitors a year. There are more than 35,000 objects on display, but for most visitors only one is a focus point. It’s a painting about the size of a coffee-table book, thirty inches by twenty-one inches. Because it’s so very iconic and valuable it’s pretty much buried, concealed in a transparent vault. So many people throng to see it that most only get a quick glimpse. Of course it’s an essential artwork—enigmatic, mysterious, beautiful, wistful. But you can make more of your time in those hallowed halls if you simply don’t bother. Miss Mona will be fine without you. Go the other way and see all the rest of that glorious art at your own pace.

The art of organ building

It’s fun to wax poetic about organbuilding from the point of view of the humanities. The Greek physicist and inventor, Ctesibius (ca. 285–222 BC) created the hydraulis, widely considered to be not only a forerunner to the organ, but the actual first example of one. The remains of a primitive pipe organ were found in the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Italian city destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. The organ in the Basilica of Valère in Switzerland, made famous by E. Power Biggs’s 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland, is accepted as the oldest playable organ in the world. Biggs’s jacket notes stated that the organ was built in 1390. Others now think it was more like 1435. But whether or not we need to quibble about a difference of 45 years, that’s a mighty old organ.

Twentieth-century organbuilders used sixteenth-century models as the basis for contemporary instruments around which developed a revolution in the trade. And many of those original sixteenth-century instruments survive and are played regularly, proof that such ancient ideals remain vital and relevant to modern musicians.

Organs built in the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries all combine the fruits of many skills. Take a close look at a metal organ pipe and marvel at the precision of the hand-drawn solder seams that join the various pieces of metal. Inspect the edges of leather gussets on a pipe organ bellows and see how the craftsman’s knife tapered the edge to microscopic thickness, just to ensure that there was no loose edge to get snagged and delaminate.

See the precision of the playing actions (either electro-pneumatic or mechanical)—how fast the notes repeat, how uniform is the touch and feel of the keys. And marvel at the glorious architectural casework, beautifully designed, built, and decorated to promote and project the instrument it contains, and to enhance its surroundings.

The company that built that organ is surely a collection of high-minded individuals, capable of the creation of such a masterpiece. But wait. You have no idea how many cooks might have been involved.

Art by committee

A church invites an organbuilder to present a proposal for a new instrument. He delivers a drawing or a model. Using blue tape, someone in the church marks off the space to be occupied by the proposed organ. That Saturday, the women of the altar guild arrive to prepare the sanctuary for tomorrow’s services. They see the tape outline—to them it looks like a police photo of a crime scene. They storm the rector’s office, demanding that the organ not cross a specified but imaginary line. Please don’t take offense, all you members of altar guilds. You do wonderful work and we’re grateful. But I know of one fine organ that was sorely compromised in the design stage by exactly this scenario.  

The same rector reviews the proposal. It looks a little imposing. Too fancy, too shiny. That organist has enough of an ego problem. Let’s tone it down a little.

The organist reviews the proposal. There’s no Larigot, there’s only one soft solo reed, and nothing at 32-foot. I’m not sure I can manage without a third (or fourth) keyboard. Can we beef it up a little?

The vestry/board of trustees/finance committee/session (your choice) reviews the proposal. No, our data suggests that we will not be able to raise more than…

And if the architect is still around, “How can you do this to my building?”

In the 1960s, comedian Allan Sherman (Hello muddah, hello fadduh . . .) produced a hilarious parody of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in collaboration with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The recording of Peter and the Commissar was released in 1964, at the height of the Cold War—it was just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis—and using the familiar tunes and orchestrations of Prokofiev’s score (apparently no one had gotten their hands on those rights!), Sherman told in outrageous verse of how the fictional Peter had written a new tune, but had to obtain approval from the Commissars of Music before releasing it.

The Commissars had all sorts of ideas about how to improve it, including giving it the beat of a bossa nova—and gave Peter examples of their alterations to previous applications from famous composers like “Beethoven’s Fifth Cha-cha-cha,” “Brahms’ Lullaby Rock-n-Roll,” and “Pete Tschaikovsky’s Blues.” This kind of buffoonery was perfect for Fiedler and the Boston Pops. You can hear this terrific and biting romp online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFseskG8JTY.

Allan Sherman’s poetry reminds us of the stories of Julius II and Michelangelo, Riva and Chef Casper, Paul McCartney and his struggle to retain control of the artistic output of the combo that changed the world, and countless other examples in which a creator is disappointed by the influence of outside forces.  

One memorable line from Peter and the Commissar stands out: 

We all have heard the saying that is true as well as witty, 

A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. 

For the home that has everything

Many organists dream of having a pipe organ at home. It’s a great alternative to schlepping off to church to practice, especially if the church is far away, if it’s a busy building in which it’s hard to find quiet and privacy, or if the church is not heated during midweek and it’s simply too cold to sit in there for any length of time. Having worked with many clients as they purchase pipe organs for their homes, I’ve picked up some insight into what you might consider as you plan a purchase.

Pretty much every day I speak with someone about the cost of pipe organ projects, and I’ve found that the prices of new pianos can be a helpful comparison. I’ve downloaded an “Investment Brochure” from the website of Steinway & Sons that publishes the 2012 price of a new “Model B” (that’s the seven-footer) as $87,500, and the 2012 price of a new “Model D” (the nine-foot “concert grand”) as $137,400. If we round up a little to account for a couple additional years, we might say they’re at $90K and $140K. Not all of us can shell out that kind of money for a piano, but I think this is a good point of reference.

There are two basic and common types of residence pipe organs, two-manual tracker action “practice machines” with at least one voice for each keyboard, and two or three-manual electric or electro-pneumatic “unit” organs with a small number of ranks spread through switching to create a larger number of stops. The latter is typically less expensive, as engineering, construction, and materials are simpler and less expensive. But for the price of that Steinway “B” you can order a brand-new tracker-action practice organ with at least four independent stops. That’s enough organ for serious practice, and for “real” performances of organ music to add to your dinner parties.

I’m well aware of colleagues who have scored real bargains—hearing through the grapevine about an available instrument, and racing off in a rented truck to get it themselves. If you have basic mechanical skills, and if the organ is a good playable condition, you can be successful moving an organ yourself. There are even simple and inexpensive apps available that will help you tune your organ by watching a needle on the screen of your smart phone.

When planning to purchase a used car, many people arrange to take the car to their mechanic and ask him to assess it. You pay the usual hourly rate and receive a professional opinion as to whether it’s a good deal or not. Just because that gorgeous eighteen-year-old Jaguar looks like the car you’ve always dreamed of, you’ll be sorry if you find out the hard way that it has a fatal rust condition, or is running on only eleven cylinders.

In the same way, you can engage a professional organbuilder to give you advice about a purchase, to make suggestions about how to move it, to help you with the assembly at your home, and, I would add, ideally doing the tonal finishing and tuning for you. After all, those are specialized tasks and if you’ve never tuned an organ yourself, you’ll probably not achieve a really musical result.

What does it take?

Just this afternoon I received what I would call the most common type of inquiry regarding a residence organ: “I’ve always wanted to have an organ at home. Do you have anything that doesn’t need much work and doesn’t cost very much?”

I understand that personal budgets might be more limited than those of churches or other larger institutions. But if the price is your principal consideration, I doubt you have much chance for success. A fine pipe organ is a work of art, not a utilitarian machine. You should ask yourself what you hope to achieve. If you simply want two keyboards and pedal with sound coming from each key, you’ll be fine buying the cheapest thing out there. But consider these criteria:

1. If you’re serious about practicing, you should care about the “touch” of the keyboards. Some keyboards have simple spring actions that return the note just fine when you release, but have a dull, insensitive, mushy feel. That would hinder the development of the fine control of your technique. Your keyboards should have a precise clean feel, and if you’re going to develop your control, they must be regulated accurately, both in weight and contact point.

2. The response of windchest actions is just as important as that of the keyboards. Some electro-pneumatic and all-electric actions are sluggish, and while you might perceive that to be slow attack, it’s more common that it’s caused by slow release. A sluggish release hinders the repetition rate and produces a “gummy” feel. Also, some all-electric actions have a characteristic “bounce” on release that leads to actual repetition of a note on release. That will surely mess up your trills!

3. The stability of the wind supply is important to even playing. You may prefer winding that has some motion in it, but in tiny organs, this can be a real nuisance. If the original builder has squeezed a miniature wedge-bellows into the case, there might not be enough air to support the larger pipes. Also, in compact tracker organs, the scale of the windchest might be too small. If key channels and pallets are not adequate, the larger pipes in a stop will not get adequate wind, and you’ll be stuck waiting for them to speak. 

§

My colleague Amory Atkins and I are just back from a trip to Oregon and Idaho during which we finished the installation of two residence organs. The trip was quite an adventure for a couple of lifelong easterners, and while both locations were remote to the extreme, the two projects were very different. One of the organs is a two-manual tracker-action instrument built by Casavant in 1979, the other was built in 1964 by M. P. Möller—the nearly ubiquitous “Double Artiste.” Both organs came from churches for which they were too small, and both are now nicely ensconced in their new homes. And both clients are accomplished attorneys who elected to leave the big cities of California to live quietly in remote locations.

Chillin’ in Coolin

Robert Delsman recently completed building a beautifully appointed Craftsman-style house in Coolin, Idaho, located in the north-pointing “pan-handle” of the state, close to the border with Canada. We shipped the organ from New England in a rented truck. Roughly, the directions are to drive 2,800 miles west on Interstate 90 to Coeur d’Alene (Koor-dah-lane), Idaho, take a right, and drive north 150 miles. Once the organ was delivered, we flew back and forth from Spokane, Washington, which is less than two hours from Coolin by car. The town of Newport, Idaho, is between Spokane and Coolin, so it’s less than an hour’s drive to a real grocery store and the amenities of a mid-size town, but for real shopping, medical care, and other conveniences, Spokane is the nearest place. 

Wikipedia says that Coolin has about 210 residents. When I mentioned that to the proprietor of the Coolin Motel, he said, “Oh no, there aren’t that many people here.” Once you’re in the village, you drive twenty miles further north to get to Robert’s house. The twisting and pitching road is a nice drive in the summer time with plenty of sunlight and fragrant forest and mountain air, but when we were there last winter for the physical setup of the organ, there were two or three inches of hard ice on the road, giving us a difficult white-knuckle drive back and forth to town. Add to that excitement the large population of deer and elk, and you have a lot of chances to get in trouble. The local guys in the Moose Knuckle Bar and Grill told us that the spooky place with treacherous curves high above the surface of Priest Lake is actually the deepest place in the lake.

Robert’s house is on the shore of Priest Lake, with stunning views of forested mountains. It’s beautifully appointed inside with black walnut doors and alder paneling that would be the pride of any organbuilder, all held up by an internal timber frame complete with mortise-and-tenon joints, graceful curves, dovetails, and bow-tie shaped “keys” holding joints together. The organ is in the Great Room, with the console on a balcony facing the two-and-a-half story window overlooking the lake, and the two organ cabinets on nice perches on either side of the console. The blower, static reservoir, and power supply are located about twenty feet away in a lovely hardwood cabinet in the closet of Robert’s bedroom, with windlines laid down and cast into the cement slab that forms the second floor. It’s a beautiful installation, made classy by the skill of the architect and contractor.

The scheme of the Double Artiste is just what the name implies—two independent Möller Artistes, one for each keyboard, played from a two-manual console. Unlike most two-manual unit organs, the two divisions are discrete from each other, with the exception in this case that the Gemshorn of the Swell is also playable on the Great. The Great comprises a Diapason, Rohrflute, and a two-rank Mixture. The Gedeckt is extended to sixteen-foot pitch playable on both Great and Pedal, and each rank is playable at several pitches. The Swell comprises Gedeckt, Viola, Spitzflute, Gemshorn, and Trumpet. The Trumpet extends to 16-foot pitch playable on both Swell and Pedal and again, each rank is playable at several pitches.

Those organists toiling in the vineyards of symphonic music will benefit greatly from having two independent expression enclosures in their home practice organ.

Entering Enterprise

Stephen Adams lives in Enterprise, Oregon, the seat of Wallowa County. With over 1,900 residents, Enterprise is a much larger community than Coolin, but it’s more remote. It’s about a four-hour drive across prairie and ranch land from Spokane, and just as far from Boise, Idaho. Lewiston, Idaho, and Clarkston, Washington (get it, Lewis and Clark?) are on the Snake River just about halfway from Spokane to Enterprise, but that’s it. Leaving Lewiston on our way to Stephen’s house, we followed a nearly empty school bus on a forty-five minute route across that rugged terrain.

Stephen’s home is less than ten minutes outside town, but since the town is so remote, the place is in the middle of nowhere. It’s an old established farm/ranch with a Music House right by the gravel road, and the main house isolated by trees and landscape, up on a hillside remote from the road. The Casavant organ, with eleven stops and fourteen ranks, came from a closed Roman Catholic Church in Wyoming, Pennsylvania (near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre). It endured its own long ride on Route 90, and the ride from Lewiston to Enterprise includes a particularly challenging road from high elevations to river valleys including dramatic switchback curves and steep grades. Organ Clearing House drivers had a special challenge to “keep the shiny side up” that time.

The Music House was already home to two Steinway pianos. The Casavant organ replaces a unit organ by Balcom & Vaughan, completing the fleet for Stephen, who is, later in life, a very serious student of keyboard playing. He travels to the east coast for “binge” sessions of organ lessons, and practices many hours a day, working to satisfy a lifelong goal. He has a strong interest in the music of the Baroque era and earlier, and this fine tracker-action organ with precise, sensitive key action and sprightly voicing is just the ticket.

Be your own boss.

In 1987, I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts. It was a nice place to work—a large, airy space with wood floors in an old mill building with lots of equipment. While I was there, we had a deep pit dug through the concrete floor of the large lower room, which increased the available height for erecting organs by about eight feet. It was an unusual setup in that you had to climb down to work on keydesk and ground-level action, but it was fun to “walk the plank” across from the main floor to the impost level of the organ. Loading pipes into an organ was a breeze.

We completed several fun projects in my three years there, and I have lasting friendships with co-workers, but the fun ended in 1987 when Daniel Angerstein accepted the appointment as tonal director for M. P. Möller, Inc., and decided to close the workshop. As I had been doing much of the organ maintenance work for the company, Daniel and I made a deal allowing me to continue that work as an independent organ builder. The service work continued without interruption for the clients, and I was off on my own.

§

Loyal readers of The Diapason will remember that I’m a fan of the genre of historical fiction involving the exploits of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. My favorites are the epic tales by Patrick O’Brien known as the Aubrey/Maturin series comprising nineteen novels, and the eleven book series by C. S. Forrester known as the Hornblower novels. I love the accurate description of the techniques of handling and equipping those ships, and am fascinated by the deep character development possible in such extended stories.

I have all of them as audio books, and just as some people listen to the same recording of music repeatedly, I enjoy listening again, sometimes to a particular passage, sometimes through a whole series from beginning to end.

Forrester’s Captain Horatio Hornblower seems to be modeled after Lord Viscount Admiral Horatio Nelson, the heroic real-life officer responsible for Britain’s great naval victory at Trafalgar. Throughout the series, Hornblower struggles against his personal weaknesses, from seasickness (which affected Nelson horribly in real life) to fear and trepidation—all characteristics unbecoming a naval officer. As my relationship with Captain Hornblower has developed, I’ve singled out two contradictory quotations that define the responsibilities of authority, and by extension resonate deeply with me as a self-employed worker.

In one installment, Hornblower is in a French prison after his ship, The Sutherland, was defeated in a battle in which it had been outnumbered four-to-one by ships of the French navy. He imagined that he would be executed by Napoleon, and in the agony of this confinement he relives an earlier period of imprisonment that had occurred before he reached the rank of Captain: 

“In those days, too, he had never known the freedom of his own quarterdeck, and never tasted the unbounded liberty—the widest freedom on earth—of being a captain of a ship.”

At another moment in his career, he is thinking about his coxswain Brown (we never learn Brown’s first name). Hornblower admires and envies Brown for his powerful physique, his natural cheerfulness, and his unbridled courage—all attributes that Hornblower lacks. He reflects on the relative ease of the life of an ordinary sailor (tar, swab), who is subject to the absolute authority of his superiors, and “never knows the indignity of indecision.”

I’m amused and perhaps informed by the idea that serving as a naval captain, or being the owner of a business, is either an incredible freedom, or the road to ignominy. Truth is, it’s a mixture of the two, see-sawing from day to day and from project to project. What a ride. 

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like to that above.

That’s one of the great old chestnuts of hymnody. Who reading those words doesn’t have that tune buzzing in their ears? Everyone knows it. Verse after verse goes by, each building on the way we depend on each other, support each other, and live with each other. It’s usually in F Major or G Major—I prefer G, or maybe start in F and modulate a couple times. Nice to step the tonic of the last chord down a major third, let that become the dominant of the new key, throw in the seventh, and start This glorious hope revives . . . up a half step!

The text is by John Fawcett, London, 1782. The tune is Dennis by Hans Nägeli (1773–1836) and later adapted by Lowell Mason (The Psaltery, 1845). It’s as familiar as they come. But did you ever stop to think that the meter (SM; 8.8.6.6.8) is that of a limerick? Everybody sing: 

Writing a limerick’s absurd,

Line one and line five rhyme in word,

And just as you’ve reckoned, 

Both rhyme with the second;

The fourth line must rhyme with the third.

To make this trick work, you may choose between including the upbeat or not, and you sometimes have to place two or more syllables on the last beat of a line. Everybody sing:

There once was a fellow named Beebe,

Planned to marry a woman named Phoebe,

He said, “I must see 

What the minister’s fee be,

Before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebe.”

§

Last month our friend Jim passed away. His death is a first for us—the first of close friends roughly our age to pass away—and he’s been on my mind a lot. He was a prolific organic gardener and a quintessential “foodie.” He had a great love and real appreciation for fine wine and, since a recent trip to Scotland, single malt scotch. He played guitar a little, and he and his wife Lois were frequent attenders and strong supporters of musical ensembles, especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. They traveled together frequently, especially to Italy where they spent much time and had many friends.

In addition to all this, Jim was a geologist, and he had a huge collection of minerals and ores. After his death, Lois is dealing with the dispersal of hundreds of specimens. Some are the size of a chestnut while others are huge—too heavy for one person to carry. The garage and basement are full of Jim’s rocks. Thankfully, Jim’s friends from the Boston Mineral Club have rallied to help with the task. That fellowship of kindred minds—each individual a little crazier than the last—is a tight society of people who are passionate about the variety of minerals that comprise the earth. You might say (as they often do), they have rocks in their heads. But they sure have been wonderful to our friend Lois in her sadness. Everybody sing:

Some people I hang with are jocks

With an aura of dirty white socks.

When they ask me to play

I say, “Maybe some day.

But my principal passion is rocks.”

§

Last summer Wendy and I launched and christened our new boat, Kingfisher. She’s a Marshall 22 built by Marshall Marine in Padanaram, which is a village of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, just across a bay from the great fishing and whaling capital of New Bedford, an easy sail in a small boat from Nantucket. She’s a broad-beamed, gaff-rigged craft of a class that was used originally for commercial fishing before boats had engines because she can carry lots of cargo and can be sailed single-handed. When I tell people she’s a catboat, they often think of those little rocketship-boats with two hulls. No, not a catamaran, a catboat. She’s only twenty-two feet long, but more then ten feet wide, with lots of space inside for hauling fish! She has a centerboard so we can go into shallow inlets, a little diesel engine to keep us off the rocks, and pretty, classic lines.

Even before we had a chance to put her in the water we joined the Catboat Association. There are about four hundred members, and annual dues are $25. Last February we attended the CBA Annual Meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Groton, Connecticut. We had such fun that we’re going again this year—we’ll miss the Super Bowl, but I’d rather talk about boats. Having been to lots of meetings of pipe organ groups, I’m used to seeing displays of combination actions, tuning tools, CDs, and published music in the exhibition room. This time it was boats on trailers, wood carvers (who could make you a bowsprit or a ribbon-shaped name board for your transom), a couple of smart guys from Yanmar (Japanese manufacturer of marine diesel engines), and monogrammed life jackets. There were workshops about sail handling, navigating, diesel engine maintenance, and lots of storytelling. This fellowship of kindred minds organizes races and other fun events. Catboats, for all their practicality and beauty, are not very fast. One wag spoke up in an open forum saying, “If you wanted to go fast, you should have bought a bicycle.” Racing catboats is a little like racing turtles. May the best man win. Everybody sing:

We’re gathered to talk about boats.

At our meetings, we never take notes.

We organize races

In watery places,

And officers win with most votes.

§

In the summer of 2010, Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Levitz was covering a story in Washington, D.C., when she noticed a large crowd milling about in the front yard of a church. When she realized they were all wearing nametags on lanyards she figured they were part of a convention and like any good reporter, she walked across to investigate. She was dumbfounded to learn that they were all organists attending a convention, a fellowship of kindred minds. It had never crossed her mind that organists would gather for large professional meetings so she asked a lot of questions about the current state of the pipe organ. She mentioned that she was based in Boston and someone suggested she should interview me to learn about the role of the organ in modern society. 

The result was a story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “Trafficking in Organs, Mr. Bishop Pipes Up to Preserve a Bit of History.” (See http://tinyurl.com/mc9xu2y.) The story begins, “John Bishop leaves the soul-saving to the clergy. He’s content to save the pipe organs—and even that isn’t easy.”

By the way, I suggest there are three areas of public life where puns are
a nuisance:

1. Pipe organs (organ donor, organ transplant, piping up, Swell, Great, Positiv?)

2. Boat names (Liquid Assets, A Crewed Interest, Ahoy Vey)

3. Beauty shops (Shear Delights, The Mane Attraction, A Cut Above)

Feel free to continue with new categories!

In response to Jennifer’s call, we met at Starbucks near Faneuil Hall in Boston. We chatted over lattés for an hour or so. Jennifer is a tall, quick-witted, athletic woman, and from her enthusiasm about my topic, you might have thought she had been interested in the organ all her life. But as this was her first foray into our winded world, I took her through Organ Building 101, Church Music 101, and AGO 101. When she asked what I was working on at the moment, I invited her to come with me to Cambridge, near Harvard Square, that afternoon, where I was meeting with officials of Lesley University. The school had purchased a vacant building, formerly the North Prospect Congregational Church, and planned to move the building across its lot to adjoin a planned new building where it would become part of the Art Library, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ was being offered for sale.

Jennifer’s article concluded:

It can take years to place an organ, but sometimes there are matches made in music heaven. Within weeks of visiting Lesley University, Mr. Bishop found a home for its organ in a church in Texas. It was loaded onto a tractor-trailer, and off it went, the victory recorded by Mr. Bishop on Facebook.

“Another one leaves town ahead of the wrecking ball,” he wrote.

Everybody sing (add another syllable!):

We’re glad to have all that publicity.

Helps preserving works of historicity.

She wrote in the paper

’Bout that tricky caper;

By writing, she joined in complicity.  

§

In 1956, Walter Holtkamp installed a revolutionary organ in the tower gallery of the chapel at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts—again, near Harvard Square. My father, a retired Episcopal priest, was instructor of Homiletics there when I was a teenager, and he introduced me to Dr. Alastair Cassels-Brown who was professor of church music there, and with whom I had my first years of organ lessons on that Holtkamp organ. 

Over a number of years I learned various tidbits about the early history of that organ; that Charles Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, that E. Power Biggs lived a few blocks away, that Daniel Pinkham as a young disciple of Biggs was always around, that organ historian Barbara Owen was a close part of that circle, and that Melville Smith (director of the Longy School of Music and organist at the First and Second Church in Boston) was strongly connected with the seminary, and friend with all those others. The Holtkamp organ—with low wind-pressures, slider-windchests (though electro-pneumatic action), baroque-inspired reeds, full principal choruses, and a Rückpositiv—was quite the statement for 1956. And that fellowship of kindred minds (Holtkamp, Fisk, Pinkham, Owen, and Smith) must have had some heady conversations as the organ was being installed.

Christ Church (Episcopal) in Cambridge is an eighteenth-century building, complete with Revolutionary War bullet hole, around the corner from the seminary chapel. Stuart Forster is the current organist, and the World War II era Aeolian-Skinner has been replaced by a stunning new organ by Schoenstein. E. Power Biggs was appointed organist there in 1932, work that coincided with his blossoming concert career. In his book All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003, page 86), Craig Whitney relates a (to us) delightful story from that era:

Juggling all this took its toll, and when the rector of Christ Church asked Biggs to read the early Sunday service in addition to his musical duties, Biggs refused. The upshot was reported by Charles Fisk, a nine-year-old member of the church’s boy choir, in a note dated January 2, 1935, in the diary his mother had given him for Christmas. “I went to choir practice,” Fisk wrote. “Mr. Biggs wasnt there.” For (at least) the second time, Biggs had been fired from a church job. The leadership of Christ Church had decided that “Mr. Biggs” was more interested in his professional concert career than he was in being a good church musician, and they were right.

Everybody sing:

The choirboys all had to stand,

At a wave of the organist’s hand.

But Charlie had noted

And later he wroted

That dear Mr. Biggs had been canned.

§

The same year that Holtkamp installed the organ at the seminary, Rudolf von Beckerath installed a four-manual Werkprinzip tracker-action organ with sixty-five ranks at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland. You can read all about that landmark organ at its own website: http://clevelandbeckerath.org/beckerathorgan.html.

That instrument was a major step toward the revival of interest in classic styles of organbuilding. In the following few years, many more new European-built organs were imported to American churches and schools, notably the 1958 Flentrop installed at the instigation of E. Power Biggs in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall) at Harvard University. That’s the organ on which he recorded the wildly popular series Bach Organ Favorites for Columbia Records—a series that still stands as the best-selling solo classical recordings of all time. Nice going, Biggsy!

In June of 1956, G. Donald Harrison was hard at work finishing the great Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. He was working under a whopping deadline—Pierre Cochereau, organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, would be playing the opening recital on June 25 as part of the 60th national convention of the American Guild of Organists. During those weeks, New York was suffering both a heat wave and a taxi strike. After working late on June 14, Harrison walked to his Third Avenue apartment, ate dinner with his wife Helen, and sat down to watch Victor Borge present his shenanigans on television. At 11:00 p.m. he suffered a heart attack and died.

Last Christmas, and the previous two Easters, Wendy and I have worshipped at St. Thomas Church, to bask in the glorious sounds of the Choir of Men and Boys led by John Scott, who must be considered among the finest living church musicians. And, it’s a poignant thought that as I write, today is the second anniversary of the death of Dr. Gerre Hancock who led the music there with such distinction from 1971 until 2004. 

I never had a chance to meet G. Donald Harrison, but I can at least say our lifetimes overlapped—by less than two weeks. I was born on March 16, 1956!

As we think about the big changes that were going on in the American pipe organ industry, it’s fun to note other developments in the music world. On January 5, 1956, a truck driver named Elvis Presley made his first recording, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

§

Tom Gleason was Wendy’s Russian History professor at Brown University. He was a wonderful mentor, and as Wendy babysat for his kids when she was a student, Tom and his wife Sarah have remained dear friends to this day. Our daughter Meg was also Tom’s student at Brown—Tom and Sarah were hosts for Meg’s graduation party in their house and garden. And Tom and Sarah joined us for a sailing vacation around Greece’s Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. Tom and I share a fellowship of kindred minds with a love of limericks. Now, let’s face it, the limericks I’m sharing here, most of which are mine, are not the sort that we usually hear. But in the pages of this august journal, I’m not going there. Everybody sing: 

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In a space that is most economical.

But the good ones I’ve seen 

So seldom are clean, 

And the clean ones so seldom are comical!

The limerick is furtive and mean.

You must keep her in close quarantine.

Or she sneaks to the slums

And promptly becomes

Disorderly, drunk, and obscene.

(Modulate up a step, kindred minds.)

The next time we’re sitting at table,

And finish the sharing of fable,

We’ll pour from the jugs

And hoist up our mugs,

Sharing limericks as rude as we’re able.

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