In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Don’t blame the tools
The carpenter is finishing a house. He’s carefully measuring and mitering baseboards, windowsills, and doorjambs. He’s distracted by a mosquito, and his hammer glances the nail creating a carpenter’s rosette. The first thing he does is look at the head of the hammer—must be some glue on it or something.
The same carpenter needs to make one quick cut. He draws a square line on the board and picks up his handsaw. The saw veers to starboard. The first thing he does is look at the saw. Must be dull.
Or he measures a piece with a folding wooden ruler. He makes his mark and cuts his piece, but he didn’t unfold the ruler all the way—the inch markings skip from 13 to 26 and the piece is a foot too short. The first guy to come up with a wood-lengthener or wood-widener is going to make a fortune.
Organbuilders typically have many more tools than most tradesmen because our trade comprises so many facets. Of course, we have lots of woodworking tools, but we also have tools for leather, soft metal, hard metal, electrical work, and some ingenious rigs specific to pipe organs such as pallet spring pliers, tuning cones, toe cones and toehole reamers, and a wide assortment of nasty-looking little spades and prickers for voicing organ pipes.
When I’m working on a job site installing, tuning, or repairing organs, I carry a canvas sailmaker’s tool bag that measures about 8 by 16 inches and 12 inches high when fully loaded. It’s got 24 pockets on its sides and ends that surround a big central cavity. I like this format because you don’t need extra space to open it. Carry a steel toolbox up onto an organ walkboard and you need twice the space for the open lid. I keep it organized so that each tool has a pocket (some pockets have a half-dozen tools in them), and when I’m squeezed in a dark corner in an organ I can put my hands on many of my tools without looking at the bag. When co-workers borrow tools from me, I ask them to leave them on the floor next to the bag so my system doesn’t get messed up.
This morning I unloaded my car after a weeklong trip to one of our job sites, and all my toolboxes are on the long workbench in my shop. I wonder as I write just what’s in the favorite sailmaker’s bag, so I’ll take everything out and count. My everyday tool kit includes:
• 15 screwdrivers (no two alike, including ratchets, stubbies, offsets, straight, Phillips, or Robertson drive—I hope there’s never a screw I can’t reach)
• 2 wire cutters (fine for circuit boards, heavy for larger wires)
• 2 pairs long-nosed pliers (small and large)
• Flat-billed pliers
• Round-nosed pliers (for bending circles and hooks in wire)
• Double-acting linesman pliers (strong enough to let me bend bar steel in my hands, though the last pair broke in half when I did that)
• 1 pair slip-joint pliers
• 2 pairs vise-grips (one small, one long-nosed)
• Sears Robo-grip pliers (inherited from my father-in-law’s kit)
• 6″ adjustable wrench
• 2 sets Allen keys (English and metric)
• 2 pairs of scissors (one specially sharp, one general use)
• 6″ awl
• Tapered reamer
• 3 hemostats (two curved, one straight, for gripping tiny wires)
• Wire stripper (American Wire Gauge 16 through 26)
• 2 flashlights (large and small with spare batteries)
• 2 saws (one reversible back saw, one “harp” hack saw with replacement blades)
• 2 cheap chisels (3/4″ and 1″)
• 35-watt soldering iron and solder (for wiring)
• Electric test light
• 6 alligator clip leads
• Small hammer (my maul-wielding colleagues call it my “Geppetto” hammer)
• 2 rulers (one 35′ tape measure, one 72″ folding rule)
• 2 utility knives (light and heavy)
• 10 files (flat, half-round, round, big-medium-tiny)
• 3 tuning irons
• Pallet spring pliers
• 2.5-millimeter hex-nut driver (for Huess nuts)
• Wind pressure gauge
• 2 rolls black vinyl tape
• Sharpies, ballpoint pens, pencils
• Sharpened putty knife
• Spool of galvanized steel wire (for quick repairs)
• Bottle of Titebond glue
• Tubes of epoxy
• 5 small brushes
And there’s a canvas tool-roller with 35 little pokers, prickers, burnishers, spades, spoons, a bunch of little rods for raising languids, wire twisters, magnets, special keyboard tools, and an A=440 tuning fork.
I often ship this bag on airplanes, wrapping it in a blanket and stuffing it in a duffel bag—checked baggage, of course—and I dread losing it. It would take weeks to reconstruct this tool kit.
In the back of the car I carry three other larger toolboxes, with cordless drills, bit and driver sets, and heavier hammers, multimeter, etc., etc., etc. There’s a big plastic box with 40 dividers for wiring supplies, and another full of “organy” odds-’n’-ends like leather nuts and Huess nuts, felt and paper keyboard punchings, a few spare chest magnets, and some old piano ivories. And finally, a cardboard box full of pieces of leather and felt of almost any description—any large scrap from a workbench project goes into that box.
And I’m always missing something.

Organ transplants
Now that you know what my tool bag looks like, here’s a story that makes me wonder. I got a Saturday call from one of my clients, a large Roman Catholic church with a big organ in the rear gallery. The organ wouldn’t start and there were two Masses that afternoon. I knocked on the door of the rectory to get the key for the organ loft and was greeted by a teenage girl who was volunteering to answer the parish phones on the weekend. She called a priest’s extension and said, “The organ guy is here.”
The priest was a tall, dignified, elderly man, who came down the stairs, invited me into a parlor, and offered me a seat. I carried my tool bag with me and set it on the floor next to my chair. He asked two or three questions before I realized he thought I had something to do with a human organ donation program. I set him straight as politely as I could, asking for the keys to the organ loft while wondering what in the world he thought I was going to do with those tools!

Tool renewal
When I was first running around the countryside tuning organs, the “land line” was our only means of communication. You had to get all your service visits arranged in advance, and if a day’s plan changed because a sexton forgot to turn on the heat, I’d look for a pay phone at a gas station. Now of course we all have phones in our pockets. I usually have mine with me in an organ, not because I intend to interrupt my work taking calls, but because it has a notepad and a voice-memo system that allow me to keep notes while on the job. If I realize I’m missing a tool, I’m out of glue, or I don’t have any fresh batteries along, I make a note, and every couple weeks I spend an hour with my tools, replenishing supplies, sharpening blades, and keeping things in order.

Tool envy
There are many clever people working in tool design—every time I go into a hardware store I notice some neat little innovation: the cordless drill-screwdriver with a little headlight that lights when you pull the trigger; the 4-in-1, then 8-in-1, then 10-in-1 screwdriver (I carry one of those in my briefcase); the little rubber octagonal washer that goes on the end of the flashlight to keep it from rolling. And boy, are they tempting. I buy a ten-dollar hand tool because it’s cool and stuff it in my tool bag. Every now and then there has to be a culling. I guess it’s good news that tools break and wear out. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones.
When I was a hotshot apprentice in Ohio, I bought a fancy set of chisels by mail order. These were the Marples beauties, with maple handles, iron ferrules, and Sheffield steel blades. I paid about a hundred dollars for the set of nine—a huge amount of money for me in 1978. (Those were the years when good new large organs cost $5000 per stop!) I was enough of a beginner that my mentor teased me, saying all I needed now was some wood. But I still have those chisels, and I still have the racks I made to hang them on the wall over my bench. They’re the only workshop chisels I’ve ever owned, and while some of them are a little shorter than they used to be, they sharpen just as easily as when they were new. The iron ferrules mean you can hit the handle pretty hard with a mallet without damaging the tool. They are old friends.
By the way, also hanging on the wall over my bench in that shop was a display of my mistakes, hung there by my mentor to keep me humble. I think they’re still there.
When I started the Bishop Organ Company in 1987, I bought a Rockwell-Delta 10″ table saw—it’s known as a “Uni-Saw” and it must be one of the most popular table saw models ever made. The blade can be tilted to make angled cuts, and there’s a crosscut miter gauge that allows me to cut angled ends of boards. Over more than 20 years, I’ve cut miles of wood with it, and only last month I had the first trouble with it. The arbor bearings had finally worn out, and I found a local industrial supply company that was able to replace the bearings quickly. It was such a pleasure to use my saw again with the new bearings that I treated it to a new Freud carbide-tipped blade.

A reflection of attitude
The organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook was most active in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century. There’s a legend handed down through generations of workers there that in order to be hired to work in the factory an applicant had to present his toolbox for inspection. In the days before Sears, Home Depot, Woodworker’s Warehouse, Woodcraft Supply, Duluth Trading Company, McMaster-Carr, and Grainger, a woodworker built himself a box to store and transport his tools. Remaining examples show infinite attention to detail, with special drawers and cubbies designed for each specific tool, fancy dovetail joints, and hidden compartments. The worker that could produce such a masterpiece could build anything required in an organ shop.
Recently I noticed that Lowe’s was featuring a new line of mechanics’ toolboxes. These were not the little boxes you’d carry around, but monumental affairs with dozens of steel drawers on ball-bearing slides and heavy-duty casters. Some were five and six feet wide and just as tall. Fully loaded they’d weigh a ton or more. I’ve seen things like these for years in mechanics’ service bays and I have a more modest version in my shop, but I’d never seen a toolbox with a built-in refrigerator! Not a bad idea, though.
You may have seen the traveling salesmen who peddle tools to mechanics. The companies are Snap-On, Cornwell, and Matco, among others. A heavy mobile tool showroom pulls up to a service station and the mechanics all come out to shop. The driver is a franchise owner who travels a regular route of customers. He extends credit to his customers, allowing them to make cash payments each week so the wives never learn how much money the guys are spending on tools. And the Snap-On driver is likely to be armed. He’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools that every mechanic would love to own.

A tool for every purpose
I take a lot of pleasure in my tools. I know, I know—it’s a guy thing, as my wife often mentions (though her weaving habit depends on an in-house service department!). But maintaining a comprehensive and effective tool kit is essential to good organbuilding. We say don’t blame the tools, but we cannot work without them. It’s a simple pleasure to draw a sharp knife along a straight edge to cut a neat piece of leather. I enjoy the sound and sight of plane shavings curling off my workpiece onto my hands and wrists, littering the workbench and floor with aromatic twists. It brings to mind the cute little Christmas dolls made from plane shavings in places like Switzerland—Saint Nicolas with a curly beard of cedar shavings. Moving the languid of an organ pipe to achieve good musical speech, soldering wires to a row of pins that wind up looking like a row of jewels, gluing goat-skin gussets to the corners of a reservoir are all motions repeated countless times that I don’t take for granted and can’t repeat without my tools. When I use someone else’s tools they feel funny in my hands.
Sometimes I’m asked how we can maintain patience to complete a project that might take a year or more. Easy—every day you take satisfaction in each little thing you make. A finished organ comprises thousands of those little projects blended into a unified whole. Listening to an instrument brings back the memories of each satisfying cut, each problem solved, and of course each mistake. My tools are my companions and my helpers. They’ve been with me to almost every American state and as far abroad as Madagascar. Right now they’re all spread out on my workbench for a photo shoot, but they’ll be back at work on Monday morning. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Special delivery
The Bath Iron Works (a General Dynamics Company) is about fifteen miles from where we live. Located on the shore of the Kennebec River in Bath, Maine, more than ten miles up from the ocean, they build Aegis and Zumwalt class destroyers for the United States Navy. The shipyard is unique because of its immense lifting capacity—you can see their mammoth cranes from miles in each direction. This allows them to mass-produce ships in large sections because they can lift as much as a third of a ship at once. In the company’s heyday during World War II, they launched a completed destroyer every twenty-two days. Think of the supply chain. That’s a lot of steel—tens of thousands of tons. That’s a lot of wire, windows, pipes, engines, tanks, valves, and gauges. It took about 275,000 person hours to build a ship. Twenty-two days—that’s 12,500 hours a day, or 1250 workers working ten-hour days. To stay efficient, each worker had to have the right tools and the right materials at the right time. Any organbuilder’s head would spin to think of such a management challenge. It’s hard enough to organize 200 person hours per week in a five-person workshop.
In the 1870s and 1880s, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings was building new organs at the rate of something like one a week. We know that materials were delivered at night to that workshop in Boston by horse-drawn rail cars using the same tracks that the passenger trolleys used by day. Think of the mountains of American black walnut going into the maw of that place, all to be unloaded by hand. I suppose they had a night crew of men who did nothing but unload rail cars and make sure the materials were stored in the right place. And I suppose once the lumber was stored they loaded bales of sawdust to be carted off to line chicken coops.
While we think about the work involved in organizing a flow of materials into a nineteenth-century organ shop, what about the actual work of building the organs? When I started working in organ shops, we had screwdrivers that we turned by hand—analog screwdrivers. For a while we used electric screwdrivers that had wires hanging out of the handles—wires that could flop across the pipes of the Mixture while you were taking down a bottom board of an upper chest to repair a dead note. Now we have rechargeable cordless tools. And to top that, I have a battery charger that runs on the twelve-volt power in my car so I can recharge my power tools between service calls.
I’ve joked with the hypothetical question, “if Bach had a Swell box would he have used it?” I bet Mr. Skinner would have delighted in an eighteen-volt rechargeable DeWalt screw-gun. It’s even got an adjustable clutch to keep you from stripping the threads.

Supply and demand
We live at the end of a half-mile dirt road. I have a swell little workshop at the house where I tackle portions of our projects. I’m especially fond of working on organ consoles and I have a beauty in the shop right now, built by Casavant in 1916. We are renovating the organ for a church in Manhattan and I’m spending the summer plugging away at the console. Our house is at the end of the UPS route. A couple times a week at around 5:30 in the afternoon, the big brown truck hurtles down the driveway and careens into the dooryard. Nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and goldfinches scatter in terror, groundhogs and chipmunks dash into the stone walls—only the sassy and pugnacious little red squirrels seem ready for the challenge.
With diesel engine roaring and spewing, the driver (there are two regulars) turns the truck around so it’s heading home before he’ll even look at me. He tosses a couple boxes at me and blasts off in a cloud of fumes, dust, and pebbles. (If he had to take care of a long dirt road the way I do he’d never drive like that—each time he comes to the house, five shovels of my gravel goes into the woods.) Measuring sound in decibels-per-hour, the UPS guy makes more noise in two-and-a-half minutes than I do in a week.

Leaning to the left
I suppose that if we were at the beginning of the route, the UPS driver would have a little more time to chat, but I remember reading an article that allowed a glimpse into the company’s efficiency. As traffic increases on America’s roads, we are all aware that you can wait a long time for a chance to make a left-hand turn on a busy road. Years ago I fell into the habit of planning errands to avoid left-hand turns. If I go to the hardware store first, grocery store second, bank third, the only left turn is when I leave the grocery store. I got teased about that some, but on December 9, 2007 the New York Times published an article that I believe excused my apparent eccentricity. Titled “Left-Hand-Turn Elimination,” the story told that that UPS has a “package flow” software program that maps out routes for the drivers limiting the number of left-hand turns as much as is practical. UPS operates 95,000 big brown trucks. By limiting left-hand turns they were able to reduce their routes by 28,500,000 miles, save 3,000,000 gallons of fuel, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 31,000 thousand metric tons. (Now you know what kind of mileage a UPS truck gets.) You can read the story at <A HREF="http://www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html">www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html</A>. Makes my five shovels of gravel seem a little less important!
After the big brown truck barrels up the driveway and turns right onto the road, I go back into the shop and open the boxes. What goodies I find: silver wire for key-contacts, woven felt for keyboard bushings, snazzy little control panels for solid-state relays and combination actions, specialty wood finishes from a one-of-a-kind supplier, useful tools that you can’t find at Home Depot. It’s like a little birthday party at the end of the day.
I need a huge variety of parts and materials to complete a project like this, and I spend a lot of time on the phone, leafing through catalogues (the big industrial-supply catalogues have more than 3,500 pages) and searching online. I rely on Internet access, next-day delivery, and specialty supply houses. And I can buy just about anything. Let’s say I need some red woven felt (bushing cloth) to replace the bushings in a mechanical part. I can use an X-Acto knife to get the old cloth out of the hole, but it’s really hard to measure the thickness of a piece of felt that was made ninety years ago. So what thickness should I get? Easy. If I search carefully online I can find it in thicknesses graduated by 64ths of an inch. I order a few square feet of four different thicknesses and experiment.

Close enough?
We talk about the importance of duplicating original materials when restoring an instrument. “If Mr. Skinner used 9/64″ red bushing cloth, I’m going to use 9/64″ red bushing cloth.” But I bet Mr. Skinner wasn’t choosing between eight different thicknesses listed on a catalogue page. I think he bought the stuff that was available and made it work.
The expression shutters of this Casavant organ we’re working on turn in bearings of woven felt. There’s a quarter-inch steel pin in each end of each shutter that serves as an axle. The pins turn in holes in wood blocks—those holes are bushed with green woven felt. After seventy years of regular use and twenty years of neglect, that felt is hard and worn. Over the years, organ technicians fixed squeaks and squeals in those shutters by glopping grease, oil, candle wax, mutton tallow, and more recently silicone and WD-40 from spray cans on those bearings.
I could buy Teflon tubing of quarter-inch interior diameter (1/4″ ID) from McMaster-Carr, an industrial supply company in New Jersey. I found it on page 91 of their 3,528-page catalog. It costs $1.28 a foot and comes in five-foot lengths. I could cut it into half-inch lengths (less than five-and-a-half cents each), and drill them into the shade frames to make perfect bearings for the quarter-inch steel axles. I bet it would be a long time before they squeal or squeak. It’s not historic, it’s not good restoration practice, but I bet those shutters would work beautifully for decades. I think I’ll go ahead and make that change. I’m confident that the organists who will play on this organ will never know we did, and I trust that Claver and Samuel Casavant will forgive me. My intentions are good and my conscience is clear.

An expressive conundrum
We have some tree work going on in our yard and one of the crew is a skillful equipment operator. He’s using a light-duty excavator that’s known as a backhoe because the bucket (or shovel) comes back toward the operator as it digs. The machine’s boom has three joints, roughly analogous to the human shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and the bucket compares to the hand, as it can curl under to scoop the earth. Each of the joints is operated by a hydraulic piston—that ingenious machine that uses the pressure of oil to extend or contract. It seems counterintuitive, but the engine of this machine drives no gears at all—its sole purpose is to drive a pump that creates the oil pressure. Even the wheels that drive the tracks are turned by hydraulics. The machine’s controls are valves operated by handles—those valves conduct the pressurized oil to the appropriate pistons.
The operator, a young guy named Todd who’s anticipating the birth of his second child as he digs in our yard, has his feet on the pedals that drive the machine forward and back. He has each hand on a four-function joystick. Each push of a control operates only one function, but Todd moves his hands and wrists in quiet little circles combining the machine’s basic movements into circular, almost human motions. His understanding of his controls is intuitive. He doesn’t have to stop to think, let me see . . . if I pull this handle this way, the bucket will curl under . . . He effortlessly combines the motions to extend the boom and the bucket, sets the teeth in the dirt, and brings the boom toward him as the bucket curls under filling with dirt. He whirls around to empty the bucket on a pile, and as he turns back to the hole, the boom and bucket are extending to be ready for the next scoop, which starts without a pause, a jerk, or a wiggle. He’s operating six or seven functions simultaneously. The power that operates the machine and the nature of the motion are both fluid.
I’ve read that some revered orchestral conductors eschew the pipe organ as an inexpressive instrument because it’s not possible for an organist to alter the volume of a single organ pipe. You press a key, the pipe plays. You pull a handle in a backhoe and the bucket moves in one direction. I can hear my colleague organists gasp as I compare Todd’s backhoe with an elegant musical instrument, but isn’t there a similarity between the two machines? After all, we don’t hesitate to call the pipe organ the most mechanical of musical instruments. And when we press that key, we’re opening a valve to let pressure through to do work. (I have to admit I’m glad we’re not messing around with hydraulic oil near a chancel carpet.)
The organist intuitively manipulates the controls—playing keys, changing stops, pushing pistons, operating expression pedals—and the result is fluid crescendos, accents, beguiling delays, great oceans of sound billowing through the air. Literally, organ music is the result of thousands of switches or levers moving at the will of the organist. That organist has practiced for thousands of hours, mastering the limitations of his or her body, teaching the body to perform countless little motions with ease and grace so the music flows free, denying both the physicality of the player and that of the instrument. Because the machine and player are both well-tempered, the music is infinitely expressive.
And of course we separate the organ from the backhoe. It’s nice to be able to move a ton of dirt in a few minutes without breaking a sweat, and we admire the skill of the guy who can make that machine come alive. But I couldn’t help notice that one of the joints on Todd’s machine has an important squeak to it, enough that when I was back in my workshop or office and couldn’t see the machine, I knew when he was extending or retracting the boom. Not my swell shutters!
A pipe organ is magic when all the squeaks and squeals are gone, when each function of the machine responds effortlessly to the intuitive motions of the player. In the workshop we make thousands of little choices about what material to use, how to adjust it, how to glue it down, so the machine will not stand in the way of the music. In the practice room we hone our skills so no knuckle cracks, no muscle binds, no fingernail hangs, and nothing about our bodies will stand in the way of the music. We dress in clothes that allow us to move freely, and we make sure our shoes are less than two notes wide. Our bodies and our instruments are conduits between the composer’s ideals and the ears of the audience.
Thanks to the UPS guy for bringing all those goodies, and yes—I’m certain that Bach would have used the expression pedal, but only if the shutters didn’t squeak.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The hands of an artist
Wendy and I are just back from a vacation in Greece. Our daughter Meg has lived in Athens for three years, and we’ve visited several times. With her help, we’ve had a wonderful introduction to Greek history and culture. There are plenty of difficulties associated with living in Greece—the current economic crisis there is fueling labor strikes and deadly protests, and plenty of that was going on during our visit, just a few blocks from Meg’s apartment. But the deep history of the country is fascinating and moving. As you walk or drive around Athens you constantly rediscover the Parthenon perched high on the Acropolis. It seems there are hundreds of tiny streets that provide distant views of the majestic temple, and you can easily identify which rooftop terraces provide those views.
As you walk, you stumble across countless archeological sites hidden in quiet neighborhoods away from the bustle of the Acropolis. The city’s streets are lined with orange and lemon trees—sounds romantic and smells wonderful, until the fruit ripens and the sidewalks are littered with rotting lemons and oranges.
Greece is not a pipe organ country. There is a large organ by Klais in the Friends of Music Hall in Athens, but the dominance of the Greek Orthodox Church, which does not use musical instruments, means that there are very few organs there. Our vacation was a tour of the Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea, which form a political state whose capital is Spathi on the island of Serifos. The population of Greece is about eleven million—ten thousand are Roman Catholics, and most of them live on Serifos. There are dueling cathedrals (Orthodox and Catholic) on hilltops above the city, and sure enough, there’s a small pipe organ in the Catholic cathedral. We climbed hundreds of stairs from the port to the hilltop, and unbelievably we were not able to get into the organ loft.
It’s common in American churches to see a plaque honoring the succession of pastors. A few congregations around us in New England trace that history to the seventeenth century. Organists revere the plaque in the organ loft of the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris where organists are traced back to Nicolas Pescheur in 1601. (This has been easy to maintain as there have been only five organists there since 1863.)1 The plaque honoring clergy in the Cathedral of Serifos goes back to 343 AD. No kidding!
The island of Aegina is a touristy place near Athens, a good stopping point for boats traveling to the more distant Cycladies. It’s a major producer of pistachio nuts (we brought home a couple kilos) and home to some extraordinary archeological sites. The museum in Aegina Town includes decorated pottery from 2500 BC and shows a model of a bronze casting facility from about 1000 BC that was discovered nearby. I was captivated by the idea that such sophisticated techniques were developed so long ago (4500-year-old pottery kilns?), and as the Cycladic islands are volcanic, including a couple that are still active, I wondered what role volcanoes might have had in the development of crafts that depend on intense heat.
One of the most gifted Greek sculptors was Praxiteles. He lived from 400–330 BC, not all that old. But his work was far ahead of his time. As far as we know, he was the first to sculpt life-size female nudes from marble. There’s a legend that he had a romantic relationship with his primary model, Phryne, who came from Thespiae (origin of the term thespian) and was known as one of the most beautiful women of her time. She was the model for Praxiteles’ famous Aphrodite of Credos. Their relationship was explored by Camille Saint-Saëns in his comic opera Phryne. (How did he ever stumble on that subject?)
Praxiteles worked in Athens. His model came from Thespiae, about 150 kilometers away. He worked with marble from the Cycladic Island of Paros, more than 200 kilometers away by water. Think of the logistics of transporting a six-foot block of marble from Paros to Athens just to carve a statue of a pretty woman. It would be difficult enough now with power equipment and hydraulics. Praxiteles produced artworks of staggering beauty and unprecedented liveliness. I suppose his love for the beautiful Phryne brought out the best in him.

Too many cooks
I wonder if there was anyone looking over Praxiteles’ shoulder saying, “Take a little more off the top,” or, “You’ve got the left earlobe too fat.”
We know that happened to Michelangelo as he released David from a huge block of Carrara marble. He was commissioned by the Overseers of the Office of Works of the Cathedral in Florence, and was in fact the third artist to receive the commission. The overseers were very concerned that the huge and wildly expensive block of marble (already named David) was neglected for twenty-five years, lying on its side exposed to the elements. The committee got its act back together, had the stone set upright so artists could see its potential, and went looking for someone to realize the project after the first two attempts failed. Leonardo da Vinci was interviewed, but the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo got the gig.
Not only was he hired by a committee to produce the piece, but another committee including Leonardo and his colleague/competitor Botticelli was formed to choose the location. There is record of disagreement among the members of the committee before the site by the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio on Piazza della Signoria was chosen. Apparently Leonardo didn’t get his way.2
So much for the image of the artist toiling in his studio, free to express his deepest emotions through an unlikely medium that he understands better than anyone. It’s a romantic image to be sure, but especially when there’s a lot of money involved and the artwork is for a public place, there are likely to be a lot of spoons in the soup.

I know that guy
Each month I receive several journals with photos of pipe organs on the front cover and I always try to guess the builder before I look inside. I’m often wrong, but there are a half-dozen North American organbuilders whose styles are so clearly recognizable to me that I get them right every time. As most organs are commissioned by committee, I admire those builders who can create and maintain recognizable styles.
I like to think of a pipe organ as an expression of the sensibilities of the builder. I love the process of organ design, when the concept of an instrument gets put on paper. When several companies are invited to submit proposals to a church for a new instrument, it’s interesting to see the various drawings—how each firm would meet the particular challenges of the building. And sometimes we get to see several different concepts by a single builder for a particular instrument.
Organbuilder Lynn Dobson has produced many wonderful pipe organ designs, and as his firm celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary they have created an online exhibition of many of his drawings, including designs of many organs that were never built. When you scroll through this rich display, you can see projects in various stages of design, from simple back-of-a-napkin pencil sketches to elaborate scale models. Take a look at the designs for the important organ they built for the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia (Opus 76) and you’ll see a drawing and a model (two different designs) that are radically different from the organ that was actually built. You can find this exhibit at www.dobsonorgan.com/dwg/home.html.
Dobson’s exhibition reflects his exceptional talent for design, and it implies thousands of hours of committee work as each design was presented, discussed, criticized, and altered. From first-hand experience I know well the feelings that accompany the rejection of a design by a committee member. One such meeting was held in a newly decorated church parlor, and I wondered if anyone who was speaking up against my design had been involved in creating the cacophony of clash and kitsch, which was that room.
Maybe I flatter Lynn by mentioning him in the same breath with Michelangelo, and to be honest I think Michelangelo is the larger talent, but the idea that a great artwork can be both the expression of its creator and of those who pay for and “consume” it, is one of the most interesting facets of the organbuilder’s trade. And that a personal style can transcend the whims and pressures of dozens of committees reflects both artistic integrity and conviction.

Stop, look, and listen
Visual design is only part of the job. A pipe organ is both an architectural element and a musical instrument. Ideally, there’s some relationship between an organ’s appearance and its musical content—but sometimes a building’s architecture doesn’t allow it. It’s easy to picture the stark contemporary building owned by a congregation that would be best served by an organ of classic style. Sometimes an ornate classic case looks good in such building—it’s possible to make a case for the organ to serve as the only beautiful thing in the place! But organbuilders often place organs with classic influence in contemporary buildings.
As we’re talking about Dobson, take a look at their instrument for the Church of St. Peter Claver in West Hartford, Connecticut: www.dobsonorgan.com/html/instruments/op85_westhart ford.html. The stoplist is classical, even predictable, but the case is pure contemporary. And by the way, in this design Dobson has dealt with one of the most common problems. Pipe organs are about height, and contemporary American church buildings often have low ceilings. The organ in West Hartford implies a struggle between the organ and the ceiling.
We often hear of a pipe organ that was designed by the local organist, a source of pride for a congregation. This usually means that the organist wrote up the stoplist, likely subject to discussion with the builder. If an organbuilder has a recognizable visual style, he would certainly have a signature tonal style. So how does it work if the Request for Proposal from a church includes a stoplist? What if the organbuilder doesn’t agree with the concept implied by that stoplist?
One good reason for including a stoplist in an RFP is to solicit proposals that are easy to compare. Once several proposals are studied and a builder is chosen, then it’s time to work on final specifications. So it’s back to the committee. I know of one large organ built several years ago whose stoplist was the product of many hours of conversation in a small bar across the street from the church.

Who brought the camel?
So what good comes from artworks designed by committee? You know the old saying, “A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.” If too many people, especially those who know little or nothing about organs, are involved in planning an organ, whose art is it? Or is it even art? An organbuilder can withdraw a proposal if he’s not happy with the concept the client insists on, but you can’t eat a withdrawn proposal. How many of us have produced projects we disagree with? If you have a story, send me a message at john@organclearing house.com.
Our current project was greatly influenced by the church’s organist, whose insight into what an organ console can be was an education for me. Adding a half-dozen clever and unusual controls increased the organ’s flexibility exponentially. The time we spent together planning the project before any screws were turned or leather was cut was a collegial creative process that I think enlightened us both.
We often think of the artist as independent. Of course, art of a personal scale is usually the purview of the artist. But I wonder if the celebrated portrait artist John Singer Sargent was ever told, “Just don’t make me look fat.” I bet he was, and more than once.
Monumental art, including pipe organs, is almost always a community effort. There is usually a central creative force, but when there is a committee involved to raise and spend money responsibly, they usually insist on a role in the planning. If organbuilders are competing for a project, they must decide how much they want the job and how much they are willing to compromise their vision of the ideal instrument.
It’s rare for a builder to be given a blank check and a free hand. It would be a special opportunity for a creative person—but also what a huge responsibility. Organbuilders, if this ever happens to you, make sure you build something the church can use. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Timelessness
I’ve had some nice experiences with older things in the last few days. This morning (it’s Tuesday) I saw a 1912 Cadillac on Main Street. Yesterday I tuned an organ built in 1928 by the Skinner Organ Company and made a quick service call on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1870 (#529). On Sunday my wife and I attended a recital played on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1868 (#466). And on Saturday, a colleague and I visited a restored narrow-gauge steam railway.
I’m writing on a Dell laptop that must be about 20 months old. Now that’s old. Funny how a laptop can be more rickety than a pipe organ built 140 years ago.
The Cadillac is a great-looking car (see photo). The paint job was vibrant, the leather seats had a distinctive luxurious smell, the chrome was polished, and the whole thing looked perfectly elegant. The engine ran smoothly, and the car drove regally down the street attracting attention from every direction. The owner has clearly invested a terrific amount of effort, knowledge, and money to make it look and run so beautifully, and I admire the passion behind the preservation of such an elegant artifact.
But the car had a simple cloth roof and it didn’t look as though the windows would achieve a very tight seal when closed. The windshield doesn’t completely separate the car’s interior from the wind, rain, or insects. The tires are thin and the wheels are made of wood. At the risk of offending those who have toiled and moiled preserving antique automobiles, I prefer modern cars for everyday use. I appreciate the fact that the windows of my car really close so I can choose between having the wind in my erstwhile hair and having the option to use the heater or air conditioner depending on the weather. I like the automatic transmission, the electric windows, the radio and CD player, and the cup holders. I like the windshield squirter and the multiple-speed windshield wipers. It snows a lot where we live. The large tires and four-wheel drive add a lot to our safety in the winter. And anti-lock brakes and air bags were both wonderful innovations, making cars much safer. I don’t think I’d like having to rely on a car made in 1912 the next time I have to spend a day driving in the rain. The modern car is better.
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My friend Patrick Murphy is proprietor of Patrick J. Murphy & Associates, organbuilders in Stowe, Pennsylvania. His company has produced many fine new instruments, and has renovated or restored a long list of both mechanical and electro-pneumatic organs. Take a look at <www.pjmorgans.com&gt;. He is also a train buff. He’s interested and knowledgeable in the history and operation of railroads, and he owns model trains that run on live steam. Patrick and his wife Les spent last weekend with us in Maine, and while “the wives” found something else to do, Pat and I visited the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railway in Alna, Maine (see photo: WW&F).

The WW&F had roots from the 1830s and was fully established in 1894 as a two-foot gauge railroad. In the world of trains, the gauge is the distance between the rails. Modern railroads have a standard gauge of four feet, eight-and-a-half inches (4′ 8.5″). Strange number, isn’t it? It turns out that early American trains were patterned after English trains of the early eighteenth century. Those were built using the same jigs and tools used to make carts and carriages. The width of the carriages was intended to stay consistent with the width of ancient roads so their wheels would not be worn out by ruts of different widths. So who came up with that measurement in the first place? The horsemen of ancient Rome, who else? Four feet, eight-and-a-half inches was the standard width of a Roman chariot, wide enough to accommodate the rear end of a Roman war horse. Next time you see a modern train roll by, think of Charlton Heston in a toga!
Narrow-gauge tracks are less expensive to build than those for full-sized trains, especially considering the rough terrain of rural Maine, and the curves in the tracks can be tighter, but the trains themselves are small so they have less capacity for passengers and freight. The WW&F stopped operating in 1937. Most of the rolling stock was scrapped and the rails were torn up. The land that formed the right-of-way stayed in the ownership of Frank Winter, the last president of the railway. In 1940, he transferred ownership of the land to the Winter Scientific Institutes, a company he formed for the purpose of avoiding the taxes on the land. And in 1985, Harry Percival of Alna, Maine purchased most of the land. It was his vision to restore the railroad as a museum.1
To tell an extraordinary story in a few sentences, a non-profit corporation was formed, a large membership of volunteers assembled, and today there are about two-and-a-half miles of track re-laid by hand on the old rail bed. They have acquired two historic steam locomotives, one that is operational that came from another two-foot railroad, the other originally owned by the WW&F, currently being restored on the premises. The enthusiasm and quality of workmanship of these volunteers is displayed regularly when the museum is open. A modest admission fee gets you a ride on a steam-powered train and a tour of the workshops and museum. I recommend this to anyone traveling along Route 1 in Lincoln County, Maine. Visit their website at <www.wwfry.org&gt;.
This is testament to the vision of one man and the enthusiasm of hundreds more. But while this tiny train is fun to ride, I’d hate to have to rely on it to get from Farmington to Wiscasset, Maine in February. It would be a long, noisy, cold, uncomfortable ride. Your eyes are filled with smoke and cinders, and the seats in the passenger coach are pretty small (see photo: John and Pat).

The photo shows Patrick and me joining the engineer and fireman on board. I had the sense we might be too much for the thing! And I learned that one of the hazards of operating such small railroad equipment was that the weight of the water (to be converted to steam) carried in the tender behind the locomotive was sufficient to derail the train if the engineer took a corner too fast. The modern train is better.
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Let’s compare the organs that I’ve seen and heard in the last few days. In 1868 and 1870, Elias and George Hook were building tracker-action organs, logical enough because electricity was not to be available for decades more. (Thomas Edison first equipped the Manhattan home of J. P. Morgan with 250 electric lights on Thursday, June 8, 1882.2) Ernest Skinner was committed to the use of direct-current electricity to operate the actions of his organs by about 1904.
The two Hook organs are pretty similar (see photo: Hook #466). Opus 529 has a Great Trumpet and a Swell 2′ stop not found in Opus 466—otherwise the stoplists are identical. The voicing is brilliant and clear, and the cases are made of black walnut. The sharp keys of Opus 466 are higher and wider than those of Opus 529, as if the builders realized that they were uncomfortable to the player and changed them in the intervening two years. Both of these organs have been renovated and are in terrific playing condition (see photo: Hook #529).
The Skinner organ is about 60 years newer than those Hook organs, but 80 years qualifies it as old. It has the symphonic voicing characteristic of Mr. Skinner’s vision. Many organists agree that the sharp keys on Skinner keyboards are as comfortable as any to the player. There’s a simple combination action, a concave-radiating pedalboard, and Skinner’s very effective eight-stage whiffle-tree engine.
(Here’s our second allusion to horses—a whiffle-tree is the rig used to connect a team of horses to a carriage that allows each horse to pull independently while the horsepower of all of them is added together. Mr. Skinner’s Swell engine incorporates the whiffle-tree concept to allow the pneumatic for each stage to move the shutters independently, with the motion of all pneumatics combining to provide the full range of power and motion of the shutters. Skinner made these motors in eight- and sixteen-stage versions.)
While the Hook and Skinner organs are very different, they have in common an essential element: all three of these organs are absolutely vital and appropriate for modern use. While you can say a modern organ is different, you cannot say that it’s better. Automobiles and railroad trains have been improved immeasurably over the years, but a pipe organ that’s 80 or even 140 years old is an organ for today. It’s timeless.
It’s amazing that you can play music written a year or two ago on an organ built just after the Civil War. How did the brothers Hook conceive of instruments that would be so useful now? Did Mr. Skinner know that his organs would sound good to people living and working in the twenty-first century? (Actually, from what I’ve read about him, he may have thought that his organs would be the only instruments worth playing in the twenty-first century!)
Many modern organists prefer to play instruments festooned with lots of electric and solid-state gadgets. Pistons and toe-studs with sequencers and multiple memories, transposers, and programmable crescendos are the playthings of the modern organist. There’s no question that gear like that allows ever more flexibility of registration, and after all, registration is one of the organist’s most important expressive tools; but the three organs I’m thinking about today all have fewer than 20 ranks and each of them are easily and effectively played without sophisticated modern controls.
And by the way, these three organs are within three miles of each other in Medford, Arlington, and Lexington, Massachusetts. Let me know when you’re coming to the area and I’ll organize your visit. You history buffs will be interested to know that the addresses of these churches (High Street in Medford and Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington and Lexington) are all on the route of Paul Revere’s famous ride on April 18, 1775 (Mozart was nineteen years old), warning the militias of towns in Middlesex County of the approach of the British soldiers (“Redcoats”) in the hours before the start of America’s Revolutionary War. Your visit could include a whole range of historical interest.
I’m especially fond of an historical marker in Arlington Center that tells of an 80-year-old patriot who killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775: “. . . He was shot bayoneted beaten and left for dead, but recovered and lived to be 98 years of age” (see photo: Samuel Whittemore).
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It may not make much sense to compare the timelessness of a work of art with the advance of technology. The usefulness of a modern automobile is relevant to today’s conditions. We expect to be able to drive at 70 miles per hour for hours without stopping, no matter what the weather. But we look at a Renaissance painting and appreciate its content and composition as well as the technique and vision of the artist, even if we could produce a more authentic image of the same scene with our 8.0-megapixel digital camera.
I believe that advanced technology has generally added to our world. I’m pleased with the BlackBerry that allows me to check e-mails in a taxicab. While I’m annoyed by people who use their cell phones rudely, I sure find it a convenience to have one when I’m traveling. (Maybe rude people will be rude no matter what equipment they have.) But I believe the advance of technology in the world of the organ has led to the compromise of authenticity. Solid-state switching has added much to the art of organ playing, but in my opinion, digital sound has not. The majesty of air-powered sound in a large building or the intimacy of air-powered sound in a small room is not improved upon with digital reproduction. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the specifications of a 100-stop organ in a 100-seat room. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the pitch produced by a 32-foot pipe in a room with a 15-foot ceiling. And it is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to have an antiphonal organ with Trompettes-en-chamade in a room with a 50-foot center aisle. A bride can walk that far in about eight measures of Purcell—why make such a racket?
Digital instruments are often purchased by small churches whose members claim there’s no space for an organ. But these churches are typically trying to get a large three-manual organ into their small room. Of course there’s not enough room. A room that seats 100 people needs an organ of eight stops. Don’t tell me you can’t play Widor on an eight-stop organ. I know that. I don’t want to hear Widor in a 100-seat room.
Funny, I don’t mind rolling up the windows of the car, turning on the air-conditioner, and enjoying a cup of coffee while listening to Widor played on Widor’s organ at full volume. Keeps me off the phone!■

Technology widens the rift.

The other day while running around the house getting ready for work, I heard snips of a story on National Public Radio about the death of Australia’s last veteran of World War I. I missed the man’s name and didn’t hear how old he was, but it’s safe to guess that he was born sometime around 1900. I reflected on the dramatic march of history encompassed by his lifetime, and I recalled a conversation with my grandfather shortly after astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off a metal ladder onto the surface of the moon. That wise and lovely old man pointed out that his lifetime spanned a comprehensive history of transportation from horse-drawn carts to space travel.

As I write this afternoon, I type my thoughts into a laptop with a twenty-two gigabyte hard drive. I’m no computer historian, but I’m sure that NASA didn’t use a machine as powerful as mine to guide Mr. Armstrong’s route. In fact, I suspect that a lot of the calculating was done with slide rules. My work with the Organ Clearing House involves the management of thousands of photographs so my twenty-gig hard drive is full. I solved that problem by purchasing a sixty-gig supplemental drive. It’s the size of a Band-Aid® box and cost about $150. Navigation involves spherical trigonometry. It’s tricky enough to do those calculations on earth, crossing an ocean for example—it’s exponentially more complicated to navigate between celestial bodies when one is orbiting the other and both are orbiting the sun. How can it be that I need more computing power and memory to manage my organbuilding career than was available for celestial navigation forty years ago?

When President Richard Nixon was defending himself against an impeachment inquiry in the early 1970s, he and those around him were manipulating transcripts of the infamous taped conversations that were being used to implicate him. We read that it took a platoon of secretaries working through the night to retype a transcript in time for a court-appointed submission deadline when a passage was to be deleted in the interest of deceiving the public. This afternoon when I look back on a previous paragraph and have second thoughts all I have to do is highlight and delete. How can it be that I have more stenographic power on my desk than the collective resources of the Nixon White House?

Where are we, anyway?

When I was growing up I loved riding in the car watching the countryside go by. After a childhood and adolescence of looking out the window while your parents did the driving, you’d have a good idea of where you were going when you finally could drive yourself. But now when you shop for a new car you’re surprised to see how many models are supplied with video screens and DVD players. Of course we need those video systems to keep the kids quiet so we can talk on the phone. The logical continuation of this illogical progression is that we can anticipate a generation of new drivers who have no idea where they are going. They’ll have to be taught the meaning of a stop sign or a traffic light. They might not know the way from their home to their school. And they’ve been deprived of thousands of hours of conversation with their parents, siblings, and friends. The good news is that car makers have anticipated this problem. Long before those lost young drivers sit behind the wheel for the first time they’ll be used to satellite navigation. Why strain your eyes looking out the window when you can have a pixilated map on a dashboard screen?

Several years ago my son participated as a crew member competing in a popular annual sailboat race from Cape Cod to Bermuda. There were around a hundred-eighty boats from many different classes so the race officials used a handicap system to level the field, allowing slower boats a mathematical advantage. A further feature of the handicapping system allowed an advantage to those skippers who navigated by the stars without the aid of global positioning satellites and other sophisticated devices. Imagine using a sextant to figure out where you are in mid-ocean when for a few hundred dollars you can have an electronic gizmo that would do it for you. If you’re going to go to all that trouble to know how to do something, shouldn’t you be rewarded for it? (By the way, Mike was in a boat with a sextant!)
In an Op-Ed column in the New York Times of Sunday, October 16, 2005, Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Edmund Morris commented on the recent discovery of the original manuscript of Beethoven’s transcription for piano, four hands of his Grosse Fuge, originally written for string quartet. Mr. Morris began the column by saying that his first reaction to hearing this news was
an aching desire to see it. . . . Beethoven’s manuscripts are revelatory, because he was an intensely physical person who fought his music onto the page, splattering ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process. Not for him the serene penmanship of J. S. Bach, whose undulant figurations sway like ship masts over calm seas, or the hasty perfection of Mozart, or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. Their writing is the product of minds already made up.


As he continues, Mr. Morris laments society’s progress away from the authentic process of creating art:
It is already a given that many young architects can’t draw, relying on circuitry to do their imaging for them. . . . Recently my wife and I bought a country house designed by just such an architect. It looked great until we discovered that the main floor sagged in the middle because it lacked the kind of central support that a child, 40 years ago, would have sensed was necessary in the foundation.


Forty years ago, I could have been that child. I credit much of my understanding of load-bearing support, hoisting and rigging, and mechanical advantage to Christmas packages that contained Erector Sets®, Tinker Toys®, Lincoln Logs®, or Legos® just the way I base my knowledge of local geography and my sense of direction on looking out the window of the car when I was child. (Now my wife accuses me of navigating by steeples because I can find my way through unfamiliar neighborhoods using as landmarks the distant steeples of churches where I have worked.) Have you heard about the structural principal of the triangle as a rigid physical form? Assemble a square using four Erector Set® beams of equal length, four bolts, and four nuts. You’ve made a form that you can easily collapse into something like a straight line. Add another piece to form a diagonal across the square. Now it’s two triangles and you can’t collapse it. Simple. (The same grandfather showed me that when I was little.) You don’t need an engineering degree or a computer with a CAD (computer-aided-design) program. You learned it the simple way and you’ll never forget it. Drive past a construction site where there’s a tall crane at work and wonder how it holds itself up. Easy—it’s nothing but a long string of triangles. Arrange your triangles into a succession of three-dimensional forms, and voila: a geodesic dome with thanks to Buckminster Fuller—a simple-to-build roof that can support a load of snow.

They don’t build ’em like they used to.

I know, I know—I sound like an old timer (I really did walk two miles to school every day!). But we who have built our lives around the pipe organ have a unique opportunity to rub shoulders with the good old days. I’ll always appreciate the lessons learned working on a venerable antique organ. While restoring an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook, I was particularly impressed by the clarity of the workers’ pencil marks. Those pencils were so sharp that there was no discernable width to the line they left. Mark a mortise on a piece of wood with a pencil you’ve sharpened to a one-molecule point and you’ll certainly cut it just as clean with a chisel. In a modern organ shop, the same oilstone used to sharpen the knife that’s used to sharpen the pencil that’s used to mark the mortise is also used to sharpen the chisel that’s used to cut that mortise. That’s the way it used to be and that’s the way it is!
In fact, they do build them like they used to. Organbuilders commonly celebrate the completion of an organ in the workshop with a party—an “open house.” If you don’t happen to live near an organbuilder, plan ahead when you’re thinking of planning a vacation. Call several organ shops to ask if they have an open house coming up and plan your trip around it. If you’d like some hints, give me a call. You’ll be rewarded not only by seeing a brand-new instrument and meeting other organists and organbuilders, but you’ll certainly be able to get a sense of how ancient honored methods and traditions have been brought into the twenty-first century.

Remember the fundamentals.

When you attend that open house, you might learn the importance of reading the grain of a piece of wood before making it into part of the organ. Look at the end of a piece of wood and you’ll see the pattern we call end-grain. Sometimes you can see the circle of the tree’s rings, sometimes you see a flat pattern where the lines of the grain are parallel with the wide surface of the board, sometimes those lines are perpendicular to the wide side of the board. Draw a cross-section picture representing a tree’s growth rings with concentric circles, draw lines across it that represent boards cut out of the tree, and you’ll be able to figure how a raw tree can be milled to achieve a certain pattern. Why does this matter? Wood warps with the growth rings. In other words, when the end-grain pattern is parallel with the wide side of the board, the board will warp toward the wide side. Consider the keyboards and pallets of an organ with slider chests. If you as the organist could choose, you’d surely prefer to have keyboards warp up-and-down so the individual keys wouldn’t warp into each other and bind, and you’d surely prefer to have the pallets warp side-to-side leaving the gasketed surface flat against the windchest grid avoiding ciphers.

You can choose. Your organbuilder should make the keyboards using wood with the flat grain (often called slab grain). Pallets should be made using wood whose end-grain is perpendicular to the surface of the windchests. Your keyboards won’t stick, and your pallets won’t cipher. Remember the fundamentals.

Those thoughts on end-grain offer a glimpse into the art of making a pipe organ. Organbuilders combine natural and synthesized materials, adapt ancient forms and ideas and combine them with new. They work out the structural requirements of the instrument, computing how its weight is distributed and supported. They fill in the right number of squares with diagonals to make the triangles that keep the instrument’s structure from wobbling or falling. Perhaps their drawings look like Beethoven’s scores, rife with erasures, crossing-out, conflicting ideas. Or do they achieve “undulant figurations” (à la Bach), “quasi-mathematical constructs” (à la Webern) or, God forbid, “hasty perfection” (à la Mozart, whose mind was already made up)?

There’s a big gap between taking the long route and avoiding short cuts—and the right way is somewhere in between. Creating works of art—novels, plays, paintings, statues, musical performances, musical instruments—is strengthened by remembering the fundamentals. All are made possible by the pedagogy, the drudgery, and the excitement of early learning. There’s no substitute for learning the fundamentals. You cannot develop a credible view of the world and your place in it while watching DVDs in the back of the car.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Semantic antics and a few rhetorical questions

What does it mean to restore an organ?
If you start with a simple ordinary pipe organ in poor condition, releather windchests, add a few stops, revoice a few more, and install a fancy solid-state combination action, have you restored the organ? Many practitioners would say no. A strict literal interpretation of the word implies that you would use nothing that had not been part of the original organ. This interpretation implies that while you might be exactly faithful to the work of the original builder, you almost certainly leave behind an organ that cannot be played. You didn’t replace any worn leather, any broken trackers, or any missing ivories.
When a museum conservator prepares a newly acquired chair for exhibition, it’s possible and logical to use the literal approach. No one expects to be able to sit in a chair from Marie Antoinette’s boudoir so there’s no need for strengthening the frame or replacing the upholstery. It’s safely placed behind velvet ropes and as long as it can hold itself up, it’s fine. But, except in the rarest situations, when we restore an organ we certainly do intend to play it as if it were a new instrument.
It’s common therefore for organbuilders to take the word restore with a grain of salt. We restore the instrument to its original playable condition, replacing leather and other parts and materials. We make concessions so the bench won’t collapse and so we don’t have to hand-pump the organ every time it’s played. But again, we have a literal translation. If the original builder used sheepskin, we don’t use goatskin. We match the colors and composition of the felt, the hand-made metal hardware, the chemistry of the wood finish.
When you finish a true restoration, you’ve left nothing in the organ that came from a hardware store or a supply catalogue. Instead of paying thirty dollars for a gallon of stain, you’ve paid a chemist $250; instead of buying threaded wires from a catalogue for twenty dollars per hundred, you’ve paid a machine shop seventy-five plus a $200 set-up fee. And for each of those transactions you’ve spent fifteen hours researching who could do the work for you and making the necessary arrangements. You’re perilously close to the legends of military purchasing—the land of the $10,000 toilet seat. Or the cost of the fish you catch from a new boat—the first fish costs $10,000 or $20,000 a pound and it takes a long time and a lot of fish before it averages into anything reasonable! The cost of the authentic restoration is greater than the price of the comparable new organ.
Another loaded word in the conservator’s lexicon is preservation. In a project completed last year, Old Salem (the wonderful museum village at Winston-Salem, North Carolina) oversaw the restoration of a marvelous organ built by David Tannenberg in 1800. The organ had been dismantled a century earlier and stored in the attic of a church building. Taylor & Boody Organbuilders of Staunton, Virginia accomplished this exacting important work. The project was celebrated and discussed in great detail at a symposium held at Old Salem in March 2004. Historians, preservationists, and restorers gave papers discussing the theories of restoration from different points of view. One concept mentioned was that the purest way to handle the preservation of this important artifact of American heritage would be to catalogue the parts and preserve them intact—façade pipes left flat, keyboards missing, parts and pipes in a shambles.
That concept of preservation was compromised as Taylor & Boody, guided by officials at Old Salem (notably Paula Locklair), appropriately restored the organ to playable condition. They built new keyboards according to models from other surviving Tannenberg organs, they rounded out the façade pipes, they lengthened other pipes to make the pitch established by those façade pipes, and they used the tuning system described by Tannenberg. That description was in itself a masterpiece of preservation. Several years after the organ was built, the church asked Tannenberg to return to tune it. He refused, but instead sent a letter that described in careful detail how to set the temperament and tune the organ. The Moravian Archives at Old Salem has preserved the letter and it was on display during the symposium. What a treasure.
By restoring the organ to playable condition, Taylor & Boody and Old Salem have provided an unparalleled opportunity for us to understand the work of David Tannenberg. Without the handling and working of those precious organ parts, we would not know the sound, the essence of the instrument. In the interest of preservation, taking advantage of technology available to us, the artisans at Taylor & Boody documented everything by photograph and measurement.
Here’s a hypothetical twist: An organbuilder is engaged to restore an important organ. During the initial study of the instrument, the organbuilder comes across original parts of the organ that failed over time because they were not designed and built to take the mechanical strain they were subjected to. The restorer (in all humility) realizes the reason for the failure and can easily see how to redesign the offending part so it will not fail in the restored organ. But is that restoration? Technically no. It’s a modification to the intent and product of the original builder. In this case, you could say that a literal restoration would be a recipe for failure. Does that justify making the change, ensuring that the “restored” organ will last longer than the original?
And here’s another twist: Five years ago the Organ Clearing House “rescued” a beautiful organ built by William A. Johnson of Westfield, Massachusetts in 1883. It has two manuals and twenty-seven stops, a beautiful Victorian case, and its historic value is high because it had never been altered. It was in a church building in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York that was scheduled to be razed. With the financial assistance of many members of the Organ Historical Society, we dismantled and packed the organ, and shipped it to our warehouse in New Hampshire. There it sits.
Many potential purchasers have expressed interest in the organ, but each described plans to add an electric stop action and combination action to the organ. I’d hate to see that organ altered. After all, much of the reason we put so much effort into the organ was that it is such a rich, unaltered example of an important era of American organbuilding. But what’s the point of preserving an organ if it’s going to languish in storage? We can walk around it in the warehouse, admiring it in pieces, and patting ourselves on the back for what a wonderful job we did (and pay another month’s rent on the space). And, as I did recently, we can drive past the site in Brooklyn and see that the organ’s original home is gone. But we can’t hear the organ.
This raises a question much discussed among organbuilders who restore, renovate, refurbish, rebuild, or otherwise rehash pipe organs—a question that is relevant when discussing organs of some historic importance and especially when discussing relocating an instrument when there is need to adapt it to fit the space: Are “reversible” modifications appropriate? Maybe the original specification does not include a pedal reed, or maybe there is a lack of upperwork on the secondary manual. It’s technically possible to add a pedal reed to an organ in such a way that it could be removed later leaving little or no trace for the sake of historic purity. Would that compromise the integrity of the instrument? Is it presumptuous of us to imply that we know better than the original builder?
Returning to my example of the stored Johnson organ, suppose we found a way to add electric slider-motors to the organ, to replace the keyslips with new ones equipped with piston buttons (of course, preserving the originals with all their hardware), and to install a solid-state combination action, all in such a way that the whole thing could be reversed, returning the organ to its original condition. We would have necessarily made some screw holes, and there would surely be holes in the frame of the keyboards to accommodate the pistons. But if that meant that the organ was taken from storage and put back into use, are the changes so bad?
In 1870, E. & G. G. Hook built a large three-manual organ for the First Unitarian Church of Woburn, Massachusetts. When the parish disbanded, the organ was sold to a church in what had been East Berlin, Germany. The organbuilding firm of Hermann Eule in Bautzen, Germany was selected to “restore” the organ and install it in the Church of the Holy Cross (Kirche zum heiligen Kreuz) in Berlin. By the way, Bautzen is a lovely picturesque town, about two hours’ drive east of Dresden, near the border of Czechoslovakia. In Woburn, the organ was installed in a chamber behind a proscenium arch. The opening of the arch was much smaller than the organ so the organ’s sound was confined. In Berlin, the organ was installed free-standing in a spacious balcony—the case was expanded and the façade redesigned.
In one sense, this organ was restored. Its stoplist and tonal personality are unchanged. But the organ is fundamentally different. In Woburn, the organ was hidden, and the acoustics of the room were terrible. In Berlin, the organ is in the open, and the acoustics are spectacular. In that sense, it couldn’t be more different. I have seen and played the organ in both locations and I much prefer it in Berlin. Some colleagues grumbled about the way the façade had been altered, but what was so special about the original façade? Sitting in the church in Berlin listening to the organ, a colleague leaned over to me and said, “now they have one of our organs, it’s our turn to import some of their churches!”
If we’re doing a large-scale project on an instrument, how much can we change it and still call it a restoration?
Can we justify changes in the interest of making an instrument more useful?
How do we choose which instruments should be truly restored? Does an organ have to be beautiful to be considered for restoration? And who decides what’s beautiful?
Can we justify making changes to an instrument to correct what we perceive to be defects in the original? Who are we to decide what is defective?
Some historic instruments have short pedal compasses and secondary manuals with many “treble-only” stops. Many modern players will see these as constraints, limiting the usefulness of the instrument. Is it good stewardship for the owner of the instrument to commit to an expensive restoration?
These are questions for the restorers and the owners of the instruments alike. It’s common for the owner to feel that the instrument is worthy of special attention while the organbuilder thinks it has little merit. And of course, the opposite is true—it’s just as common for an organbuilder to work hard to convince the owner of an instrument to commit to an expensive restorative or preservative project when the owner finds the expense hard to justify or the explanation hard to understand.
I’ve had conversations like this with many organbuilders and curators. I’m not offering answers, just framing questions. I welcome your comments at . We’ll take this up again sometime.