In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Wind
I’m a nut for a good wind. We live by the ocean, and I never tire of the feeling of the wind coming off the water bringing fresh air and all the good tidal smells into the house. I love to open the sliding doors that face the water and a door at the other end of the house to create a wind tunnel. (It’s not always popular with other family members.)
Years ago I was active in a small inland sailing club on the shore of a lake in the center of a suburban town. The lake was less than two miles north-to-south, and less than one mile east-to-west, so you couldn’t go for very long without coming about (turning to take the wind on the other side of the boat).
Since ours was a single-class racing club, the size of the lake didn’t matter. Depending on the speed and direction of the wind, the race committee set a course using inflatable markers (yellow tetrahedrons) with anchors. The classic Olympic sailing course uses three marks labeled A, B, and C set in an equilateral triangle. A is directly upwind from the starting line, C is directly downwind, and B is to the left, so boats go clockwise around the upwind mark. The basic course is A-B-C-Finish, but you can add an extra lap or two, and we often modified it to read A-B-C-A-C-Finish. These patterns would expose all the sailors to all points of sail as they went around the course.
One drizzly afternoon I headed the race committee. The wind was northerly, so I set the upwind mark close to the northern shore. A few minutes after the start, I noticed that the entire fleet was heading in the wrong direction. These were pretty good sailors, and it would be unusual for the whole group to get the course wrong. They were following what looked like a yellow tetrahedron that was a little east of upwind—a fellow in a yellow slicker and a yellow kayak who was heading away from the mark! I flew the recall-signal flag and started the race again, but not until we had all had a good laugh.

Know your wind
To sail a small boat is to be intimate with the wind. You have telltale streamers on the sails so you can tell exactly where the “lift” is and you watch the surface of the water for the ruffles that indicate the presence of wind. When there’s an updraft on the shore, air rushes in off the water to fill the void—so hawks, ospreys, and eagles soaring can tell you something about the wind on the water. In fact, this is the cause of a “sea breeze.” When the sun heats up the land in the afternoon, air rises off the land and the cool air rushes in off the water to take its place. Where we live, you can have a quiet picnic in the boat around twelve-thirty and put your things away in time for the sea breeze to come in around two in the afternoon.
If you sail often in the same place, you get used to how the wind comes around a certain point, swirls in a cove, or rushes directly from the sea toward the land depending on the time of day. There was an old salt at that inland club who had figured out how to predict the local wind by observing which direction airplanes were traveling to and from Boston’s Logan Airport twenty miles away. During a race you’d notice him heading off alone to some corner of the lake only to pick up the strongest wind of the afternoon and shoot across to a mark ahead of the rest of the fleet. I never did figure out how that worked, but he sure won a lot of races.

§

The steadiness, reliability, and predictability of wind is a huge part of playing and building pipe organs. We compare “wobbly” with “rock-steady” wind, debating their relative musical merits. One camp hates it when the organ’s wind wiggles at all (ironically, those are often the same people who love lots of tremolos!), the other claims that if the wind is free to move a little with the flow of the music, there’s an extra dimension of life. I think both sides are right. I love good organs with either basic wind characteristic, but because they are so different it seems awkward to try to make real comparisons. The instrument with gentle wind that makes the music of Sweelinck sing does not do well with the air-burning symphonies of Vierne or Widor.
As a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time with the marvelous three-manual Flentrop organ in the school’s Warner Concert Hall. The organ was brand new at the time (dedicated on St. Cecelia’s Day of my freshman year) and is still an excellent study of all the characteristics that defined the Classic Revival of organbuilding. It has a large and complete Rückpositiv division (Rugwerk in Dutch) and a classic-style case with towers. There are independent sixteen-foot principals on manual and pedal, and the whole thing was originally winded from a single wedge-shaped bellows behind the organ. End a piece with a large registration and make the mistake of releasing the pedal note first, and the wind slaps you in the back, giving a great hiccup to the grand conclusion.
As students, we worked hard to learn to control the organ’s wind, marking in our scores those treacherous spots where the wind would try to derail you. There were no hawks there to warn about the updrafts. A little attention to the lift of your fingers or a gentle approach to the pedal keys would make all the difference, and I remember well and am often reminded that such a sensitive wind system can be very rewarding musically.

Totally turbulent
It’s interesting to note that while the older European-style organs are more likely to have unstable wind supplies, organs like that were originally hand-pumped and had more natural wind that anything we are used to today. The greatest single source of turbulence in pipe organ wind is the electric blower. Because the wind is hurried on its way by a circular fan, the air is necessarily spinning when it leaves the blower. If the organbuilder fails to pay attention to this, the organ’s sound may be altered by little tornados blowing into the feet of the pipes.
I learned this lesson for keeps while renovating a twelve-stop tracker organ in rural Maine ten years ago. Before I first saw the organ, the organist said that the sound of the Great was fuzzy and strange, but the Swell was fine. Sure enough, she was exactly right, and I was surprised by the stark contrast between the two keyboards. Every pipe of the Great wobbled like the call of a wild turkey.
This was the ubiquitous nineteenth-century American organ, with an attached keydesk and a large double-rise parallel reservoir taking up the entire floor plan. There were wedge-shaped feeder bellows under the main body of the reservoir and a well at each end to provide space for the attachment of the square wooden wind trunks. In the 1920s an electric blower was installed in the basement some thirty feet below the organ, and a metal windline was built to bring the air to the organ through a crude hole cut in the walnut case (Oof!). The easiest place to cut into the organ’s wind system was the outside face of the Great windtrunk—piece of cake. But the effect was that the Great was winded directly from the violently turbulent blower output, while the wind had to pass through the calming reservoir before it found its way to the Swell. Every wiggle and burble of the wind could be heard in the sound of the pipes. Relocating that blower windline sure made a difference to the sound.
That lesson was enhanced as I restored a wonderful organ by E. & G. G. Hook in Lexington, Massachusetts. Part of that project was to restore the feeder bellows and hand-pumping mechanism so the instrument could be blown by hand or by an electric blower. Of course, it’s seldom pumped by hand, but there is an easily discernible difference in the sound of the organ when you do.
The introduction of electric blowers to pipe organs must have been a great thrill for the organists of the day. Marcel Dupré wrote in his memoir about the installation of the first electric blower for the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, where Charles-Marie Widor was organist between 1870 and 1933. I have no idea just when the first blower was installed, but it was certainly during Widor’s tenure, and it must have been a great liberation. I suppose that for the first forty years of his tenure, Widor had to arrange for pumpers. That organ has a hundred stops (real stops!), and pumping it through one of Widor’s great organ symphonies must have consumed the calories of dozens of buttery croissants.
Since electric blowers became part of the trade, organbuilders have worked hard to learn how to create stable air supplies. A static reservoir in a remote blower room is the first defense against turbulence. We sometimes attach a baffle-box to the output of a blower—a wooden box with interior partitions, channels, and insulation to interrupt the rotary action of the air and quiet the noise of the large-volume flow.
Another source of turbulence in organ wind is sharp turns in windlines. The eddy caused by an abrupt ninety-degree angle in a windline can be avoided by a more gradual turn or by the geometry of how one piece of duct is connected to another.
Air pressure drops over distance. Run a ten-inch (diameter) windline above the chancel ceiling from Great to Swell chambers and you’ll find that four inches of pressure going in one end becomes three-and-a-half inches at the other. Drop the diameter of the windline a couple times along its length (first to nine, then to eight inches for example) and the pressure doesn’t drop. As pressurized air and pressurized water behave in similar ways, you can see this principle demonstrated in many large public rooms in the layout of a fire-suppressing sprinkler system. The water pipes might be four inches in diameter at the beginning of a long run and step down several times, so the last sprinkler head has only a three-quarter inch pipe. It’s a direct inversion of the sliding doors in our house. When four big doors are open facing the wind and one small one is open at the other side of the house, all that ocean air gets funneled into racing down the corridor past the kitchen and out the back door. If you don’t prop the door open, it slams with a mighty bang.
We measure air pressure in “inches of water.” The basic gauge (called a manometer) is a U-shaped tube filled halfway with water. Water under the effect of gravity is the perfect leveling medium—when the U-shaped tube is half filled with water, the water level is exactly the same on both sides of the tube. Blow into one end, and the water on that side of tube goes down while the other side goes up. Measure the difference of the two water levels and you have “inches of water”—we use the symbol WP.
Many of the ratio-based measurements we use are two-dimensional. When we refer to miles-per-hour for example, all we need is a statement of distance and one of time. To measure pipe organ air we consider three dimensions. The output of an organ blower is measured in cubic-feet-per-minute at a given pressure—so we are relating volume to time to pressure. Let’s take a given volume of air. There’s a suitcase on the floor near my desk that’s about 24″ x 18″ x 12″. I make it to be three cubic feet. We can push that amount of air through a one-inch pipe at high pressure or through an eight-inch pipe at low pressure. The smaller the pipe and the higher the pressure, the faster the air travels. It doesn’t take much of an imagination or understanding of physics to realize that those two circumstances would produce air that behaves in two different ways.
A mentor gave me a beautiful way to understand the wind in a pipe organ—simply, that air is the fuel we burn to make organ sound. Put more air through an organ pipe, you get more sound. To get more air through an organ pipe, you can make the mouth (and therefore the windway) wider. A pipe mouth that’s two-ninths the circumference can’t pass as much air as one that’s two-sevenths. You can also increase the size of the toe hole and raise the pressure.
I’m not doing actual calculations here, but I bet it takes the same number of air molecules to run an entire ten-stop Hook & Hastings organ (ca. 3″ WP) for five minutes as it takes to play one note of the State Trumpet at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York (ca. 50″ WP) for thirty seconds. Imagine trying to hand-pump that sucker. It was mentioned in passing that when that world-famous stop was being worked on in the organbuilder’s shop during the recent renovation of that magnificent organ, the neighboring motorcycle shop complained about the noise!
I’ve written a number of times in recent months about the project we’re working on in New York. Because it’s an organ with large pipe scales and relatively high wind pressures, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about proper sizes of windlines to feed various windchests. I use the term windsick to describe an organ or a portion of an organ that doesn’t get enough wind, as in, “to heal the windsick soul . . .”
This organ has a monster of a 16′ open wood Diapason that plays at both 16′ and 8′ pitches. The toe holes of the biggest pipes are four inches in diameter (about the size of a coffee can). If the rank is being played at two pitches and the organist plays two notes (say for big effect, lowest CCC and GGG), we have four of those huge toe holes gushing wind. If we might have as many as four of those big holes blowing at once, what size windline do we need going into that windchest? To allow for twice the flow of air do we need twice the diameter windline? Here’s pi in your eye. To double the airflow, we need twice the area of the circle, not the diameter. The area of a four-inch circle (πr2) is about 50.25 square inches. The area of a five-and-a-half inch circle is about 95 inches. The larger the circle, the bigger the difference. The area of a nine-inch circle is 254.5 square inches. Two nine-inch windlines equals 509 square inches. One twelve-inch circle is 452 square inches, almost twice the area of the nine-incher.
That Diapason plays on 5″ WP—a hurricane for each note.
You can use any liquid to make a manometer. We can buy neat rigs made of glass tubes joined at top and bottom by round fittings. A longer rubber tube is attached to a wooden pipe foot (such as from a Gedeckt). You take an organ pipe out of its hole, stick the foot of the gauge in the same hole, play the note, and measure the pressure. You can also buy a manometer with a round dial, which eliminates the possibility of spilling water into a windchest—heaven help us. Measuring to the nearest eighth-inch, or even to the nearest millimeter, is accurate enough for pipe organ wind pressure. But using a denser liquid allows for more accurate measurement.
A barometer is similar in function to a manometer, except that it measures atmospheres instead of air pressure. Because the difference between high- and low-pressure areas is so slight, mercury (the only metal and the only element that’s in liquid form in temperate conditions) is commonly used in barometers. The unit of measure is inches-of-mercury (inHg); 29.92 inHg is equal to one atmosphere. Right now, right here, the barometer reading is 29.76 inHg. According to my dictionary, the record high and low barometric readings range from 25.69 inHg to 32.31 inHg. I guess today we’re pretty close to normal.
Measuring and reading barometric pressure takes us back to my eagles and hawks. An updraft creates a low-pressure region, which is filled by air rushing in from areas of higher pressure. That’s how wind is made. Wind doesn’t blow, it’s just lots of air running from one place to another.
On July 4, 2002, Peter Richard Conte played Marcel Dupré’s Passion Symphony on the Grand Court Organ of Philadelphia’s Wanamaker (now Macy’s) Store as a special feature of that year’s convention of the American Guild of Organists. It was an evening performance, and the store’s display cases were moved aside to allow for concert seating. This was early in the great rebirth of that singular instrument, and organists and organbuilders were thrilled by its majesty. Dupré conceived this monumental work of music as an improvisation on the Wanamaker Organ in 1921. (You can purchase the live recording of Conte’s performance from Gothic Records at <http://www.gothic-catalog.com/The_Wanamaker_Legacy_Peter_Richard_Conte_…;.)
The last minutes of that piece comprise a barrage of vast chords, chords that only a monster pipe organ can possibly accomplish. When I hear an organ doing that, I picture thousands of valves of all sizes flying open and closed and the almost unimaginable torrent of air going through the instrument. I remember thinking (and later writing) that as Conte played the conclusion of the symphony, barometers all across New Jersey were falling. Must have been some eagles soaring above the store. 

Thar she blows!

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

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

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

Shifty and puffy

It is mid-September in mid-coast Maine, and the days are getting shorter. Sunset here is about sixteen minutes earlier than in New York City, as we are as far east as we are north of the Big Apple. There are four windows facing east in our bedroom that allow us to track the motion of the sun, which is rising further south than it did a month ago. When we are on the water, we notice that the afternoon sun is lower in the sky as the sunlit water sparkles differently than in the height of summer. And the wind changes dramatically with the change of season. In mid-summer, we cherish the warm sea breeze, predominant from the south or southwest, caused by the air rising as it crosses the sun-warmed shore. All that cooler air above the ocean rushes in to fill the void, and we can sail for miles without trimming the sails in the steady and sure wind.

We had our last sail of the season last weekend in lumpy, bumpy wind from the northwest, which is never as steady as the southwesterlies. It is shifty and puffy, and it can be a struggle to keep the boat going in a straight line. Just as you get going, you get “headed” by a burst of wind from straight ahead, or you get clobbered abeam by a twenty-five mile-per-hour gust. Oof.

You have read this kind of thing from me before, thinking about sailboats when I should be writing about pipe organs, but because both are important parts of my life, and both involve the management of wind, I cannot escape it. And I am thinking about it a little more than usual because at the moment I am releathering three regulators for the organ I am working on. My method for assembling and gluing the ribs and frames of a wind regulator involves seven steps:

• Glue outside belts on the pairs of ribs.

• Glue inside canvas hinges on the pairs of ribs.

• Glue canvas hinges around regulator frames and bodies.

• Glue ribs to top frames.

• Glue ribs/top frames to body.

• Open regulator and glue gusset bodies.

• Close regulator and glue gusset tails.

It is still officially late summer as I write this, and my personal workshop is a three-car garage. Since we are on the shore, I love to have the overhead doors open to the breezes, though it is humid here. I am using the traditional flake hide glue (the stuff that is made when the old horse gets sent to the glue factory) that you cook in an electric pot with water, apply hot, and wipe clean with a hot-water rag that I keep just hot enough that I can put my hands in to wring the rag dry in the sort of double-boiler from which you scoop oatmeal at a cafeteria line. For the glue to set, the moisture must evaporate, and since the air is humid, I have to wait overnight between each step. Running fans all night keeps the humidity down and speeds the drying. In winter, when the air inside is dry, I can typically do two gluing steps in a day.

One of the regulators I am working on is thirty inches square. For that one I am using around twenty-five feet of one-inch-wide heavy canvas tape for the hinges and a comparable length of laminated rubber cloth for the outside belts. The gussets (flexible leather corner pieces) are cut from supple heavy goat skins that have a buttery texture and are impossible to tear. The key to finishing a wind regulator is finding a combination of materials that are all very flexible and strong, that are easy to cut, and that receive glue well enough to ensure a really permanent joint. If the structural integrity of a regulator is iffy, the wind will be shifty and puffy, and it will be a struggle to keep the music going in a straight line. Just as you get going, you get “headed” by a burst of wind that jiggles the music, or you get clobbered by a jolt from out of nowhere.

What’s in a name?

I am referring to these essential organ components as “regulators.” We also commonly call them “bellows” or “reservoirs.” All three terms are correct, but I think regulator is the most accurate description of the function of the thing. Taken literally, a bellows produces air. Air is drawn in when it is opened and pushed out when it is closed, like the simple bellows you have by the fireplace. The hole that lets the air in is closed by an internal flap when air is blown out.

A reservoir stores air. In an organ built before the invention of electric blowers, it was common for an organ to have a pair of “feeder bellows” operated by a rocking handle that blew air alternately into a large reservoir. The feeders had the same internal flaps as the fireplace bellows. The top of the reservoir was covered with weight (bricks, metal ingots, etc.) to create the air pressure, and the air flowed into the organ as the organ pipes consumed it. The bellows were only operated, and the reservoir was only filled when the organist was playing. Just try to get that kid to keep pumping through the sermon. . . .

With the introduction of the electric blower, it became usual to turn the blower on at the beginning of a concert or service and leave it running. That made it necessary to add a regulating valve between the blower and the reservoir. When the reservoir filled and its top rose, the valve closed, stopping the flow of air from the blower, so the system could idle with the blower turning and the reservoir full. When the organist played and therefore used air, the top of the reservoir would fall, the valve would open, and the air could flow again. Like before, there was weight or spring pressure applied to create the proper wind pressure. The addition of that valve added the function of pressure regulation to the bellows. In an organ with an electric blower, the bellows are storing and regulating the pressurized air. Calling it a regulator seems to cover everything.

The longer you go, the heavier you get.

Twice in my life, I have heard EMTs comment about my weight when lifting the stretcher, once after a traffic accident in the 1970s, and again after a fall in an organ seven years ago. But that is not what I am talking about here. We usually think of an inch as a unit to measure length or distance, so how can it refer to pressure, as in, “the Swell division is on six-inches of pressure?”

In industrial uses of pressurized air, more familiarly, in the tires or of your car, the unit of measure is pounds per square inch (PSI). I inflate the tires of my car to 35 PSI, and I use 80 or 100 PSI to operate pneumatic tools. But while my workshop air compressor gauges those high pressures, the actual flow is pretty small, something like two cubic feet per minute.

Organ wind pressure is much lower, and we measure it as “inches on a water column.” Picture a clear glass tube in the shape of a “U” that is twenty-inches high. Fill it halfway with water, and apply pressure to one side of the U. The water goes down on that side of the tube, and up on the other. Use a ruler to measure the difference, and voilà, inches on a water column, or centimeters, or feet. You can easily make one of these using plastic tubing. The little puff it takes to raise three inches of pressure is just the same little puff it takes to blow an organ pipe you are holding in your hand. Instead of the actual tube full of water, we use a manometer that measures the pressure on a gauge without spurting water onto the reeds.

Did you ever wonder how the conversion works? One PSI equals almost 28 inches on a water column. Five inches on a water column equals about .18 PSI. And how does that relate to the organs you know? In a typical organ, it is usual to find wind pressures of three or four inches. In general, smaller organs with tracker action might have pressures as low as forty millimeters, or less than two inches. In a three-manual Skinner organ, the Great might be on four inches, the Swell on six, and the Choir on five. In a big cathedral sized organ, solo reeds like French Horn and English Horn might be on fifteen inches, while the biggest Tubas are on twenty-five. The world-famous State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on fifty inches (incredible), and in the Boardwalk Hall organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Grand Ophicleide, Tuba Imperial, Tuba Maxima, Trumpet Mirabilis are on one hundred inches of pressure, or 3.61 PSI! Stand back. Thar she blows!

Once you have determined pressure, you also have to consider volume. A twenty-rank organ at three inches of pressure might need 1,000 cubic feet per minute at that pressure to sustain a big chord at full organ. Some of the largest organ blowers I have seen are rated at 10,000 CFM at ten inches of pressure. And when you lift the biggest pipe of a 32′ Open Wood Diapason and play the note as an empty hole, you will blow your top knot off. It takes a hurricane coming through a four-inch toehole to blow one of those monster organ pipes.

All the air you could wish for

Before the introduction of the electric blower, most organs had at least two bellows. One would be in free fall, supplying pressure to the organ while the other was raised by the organ pumper. The system I described earlier with two feeders and a reservoir was a great innovation, because once the reservoir was full, the pumper could slack off a little if the organist was not demanding too much wind. The six-by-nine-foot double-rise reservoir in the heart of a fifteen-stop organ by E. & G. G. Hook or Henry Erben has huge capacity, and can blow a couple 8′ flutes for quite a while without pumping. Organs by Hook are great examples of efficiency, with pipes voiced in such a way as to produce lots of tone with very little air, and even large three-manual organs are pumped by just one person using the two-feeders-and-a-reservoir system.

The electric blower changed everything. Organbuilders and voicers could now work with a continuous flow of wind at higher pressures than were available before. New styles of voicing were invented, and along with the introduction of electric keyboard actions, organs could be spread around a building, creating stereophonic and antiphonal effects. When organs were first placed in chambers, and their sounds seemed remote, the builders raised the pressure and increased the flow of air through the pipes, driving the sound out into the room.

While modest organs with electric blowers usually have only one wind regulator, larger instruments can have dozens. In a big electro-pneumatic organ, it is common to have a separate regulator for each main windchest. That is how Ernest Skinner could have the various divisions of an organ on different wind pressures, as each individual regulator can be set up to deliver a specific pressure.

But what about wiggly?

When I mention factors that can add to the stability of an organ’s wind system, I raise the question about “wiggly wind,” or “shaky wind,” both somewhat derogatory terms that refer to the lively flexible wind supplies in smaller and mid-sized mechanical action organs with lower wind pressure. When wind pressure is low and an entire organ receives its air from a single regulator, the motion of the wind can be affected by the motion of the music. It is especially noticeable when larger bass pipes are played while smaller treble pipes are sustained. At its best, it is a delightful affect, akin to the natural flow of air through the human voice. At its worst, it is a distraction when the organ’s tone wobbles and bounces.

This phenomenon is part of the fierce twentieth-century debate concerning “stick” organs versus so-called “industrial-strength” electro-pneumatic organs. I have been servicing organs for more than forty years, and I have often thought that much of the criticism of the emerging tracker-action culture was because craftsmen were reinventing the wheel, learning the art of organbuilding from scratch. They may have measured the dimensions of an organ bellows accurately but failed to compensate for the fact that the ancient model did not have an electric blower. And let’s face it: a lot of flimsy plywood tracker organs were built in the 1960s and 1970s, enough to give that movement a bad name from the start.

The evolution of modern tracker organs toward the powerful, thrilling, reliable, sonorous instruments being built today has much to do with how much the craft has learned about the management of wind over the years. A little tracker organ built in 1962 might have key channels and pallets that did not have the capacity to blow their pipes. It might have flexible wind conductors to offset bass pipes that were too small and that jiggled when the notes were played, causing the tone to bounce. It might have bass pipes with feet that were too short, so air did not have a chance to spread into a dependable sheet before passing between the languid and the lower lip. All of these factors affect the speech of the pipes, giving the impression that the organ is gasping for air. And worse still, you might hear the pitch drop each time you added another stop. I have worked on organs where adding an 8′ Principal made the 4′ Octave sag. How do you tune a thing like that? I marvel now at how air pressure moves through the best new tracker organs, especially at the wonderful response of large bass pipes. Organs by builders like Silbermann do not lack in bass response. Once the revival movement was underway in the middle of the twentieth century, it took a few decades to really start getting it right.

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The organ I am working on today is a simple little thing with two unit action windchests. Each has its own regulator, and there is a third “static” regulator that mounts next to the blower. The blower produces seven inches of pressure; the static regulator brings it down to five inches and distributes the wind to the other two regulators, which each measure out four inches. The biggest pipes in the organ are the 16′ Bourdon, and though there are only ten ranks, it is a unit organ, and a lot of pipes can be playing at once. It is destined to be a practice instrument for a university organ program, so I know that talented and ambitious young organists will be giving it a workout as they learn the blockbuster literature we all love so much. I hope that those students never have to worry about having enough air. And perhaps Maine’s salty breezes will travel with the organ, adding a little flavor to the mix.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Aeolus
Ruler of the winds. That’s who he was. According to Greek mythology, he was son of King Hippotes and custodian of the four winds, keeping them in the heart of the Lipara Islands near Sicily. At the request of other gods, Aeolus would release gentle breezes or fierce gales, depending on the circumstances. He was something of a vendor to the gods. The Greek hero Odysseus visited Aeolus, who gave him a parting gift of the four winds in a bag to ensure his safe return to Ithaca. During the voyage, Odysseus’s crew was curious about the contents of the bag. When they were finally close enough to actually see Ithaca, Odysseus fell asleep. Members of his crew opened the bag, releasing the winds, and the ship was blown disastrously off course.1
It’s not for nothing that there was an organbuilding company named Aeolian, later merged with the Skinner Organ Company to form the august firm of Aeolian-Skinner, builder of many of America’s greatest pipe organs. The Aeolian myth is the heart of the pipe organ.

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I love wind. We live near the ocean where the wind can have the special quality of having moved unobstructed for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Sometimes it’s gentle and refreshing, sometimes it’s bracing and challenging, and sometimes it’s downright scary—but it’s always blowing and feels like a friend to me. Maybe this is a reaction to having spent thousands of hours in the deep and dark recesses of church buildings, toiling and moiling on recalcitrant machines. Leaving a building at the end of the day, I love that wonderful feeling of air moving around me. I picture the day’s dust and debris wafting from my erstwhile hair, something like Charles Schultz’s creation Pigpen, friend and confidant of Charlie Brown.
I love harnessing the wind to make a small sailboat go. With tiller in one hand and main-sheet in the other, the feeling of owning the wind—of inviting it to draw me where I want to go—is a thrill. I can see the approach of a puff—an extra burst of wind—making tracks on the water coming towards me so I can loosen the pull of the sail at just the right moment to retain control of the boat. I know the marks on the water are a little behind the leading edge of the puff so the puff actually hits my sails before the rougher water hits the hull. If I’m sailing across or into the wind, I’m aware of its power moving past me. If I’m sailing with the wind at my stern and everything’s going right, my boat moves at close to the same speed as the wind, so it seems relatively calm.
When I was kid, I learned about the principles of lift by holding my flat hand out the car window as my parents drove. If I cupped my hand a little so my knuckles were higher than the tips of my fingers, my hand would be pulled upwards. I now know that I was simulating the curved upper surface of an airplane’s wings, causing the air above my hand to move faster than the air under it. The faster moving air created a lower pressure above my hand, causing it to lift. My curved hand gave the same effect as the curve of my boat’s sails. The sails are mounted upright—so the air moving faster across the convex curves of the front of the sail draws the boat forward. The only time the wind actually pushes the boat is if the wind is from behind. Otherwise, the boat is being pulled forward by that pressure differential.
As a student at Oberlin, I was privileged to practice, study, and perform on the school’s wonderful Flentrop organ. It was brand-new for my freshman year, right in the heart of our twentieth-century Renaissance, the revival of classic styles of pipe organ building. While many of us were used to the solid wind of early twentieth-century organs, that instrument had a flexible wind supply, terrific for supporting the motion of Baroque music, but a certain trap for the inattentive organist. Approach a big chord wrong, and the sagging of the wind would remind you of the feeling you get in your stomach going over the top of a roller-coaster hill. If you played with a firm hand on the main-sheet, watching the wind like a hawk, you’d return safely to the dock boosted by your friend the wind.
I don’t do the thing with my hand out the car window any more because I’m almost always the one driving. Judging from my neighbors on many highways, I should keep my hands free for texting, flossing my teeth, or putting on makeup. But I don’t text or brush my teeth while I drive, and I never wear makeup.

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Harnessing the wind has been a human endeavor for millennia. There are images of sailing vessels under weigh on coins dating from about 3000 BC, and by 500 BC sailing ships had two masts and could apparently carry 200 tons of freight. The Persians developed windmills for grinding grain around 500 BC. And the earliest form of the pipe organ dated from around 250 BC.
Just as wind draws a sailboat rather than pushes it, the wind itself is usually drawn instead being “blown.” Meteorologists tell us of high- and low-pressure areas. A low-pressure area represents a lighter density of air, and high-pressure air flows toward it. A “sea-breeze” is formed by convection. If a coastal area warms up in the sun around midday, the air above the land rises and cooler air from above the water flows in to take its place. So most winds are “flowing toward” rather than “blowing away.”
The motion of air that we know as wind is one of the greatest forces on earth. If a gentle wind blowing over the table on your porch can send a plate of crackers flying, think of how much aggregate force there is across ten or twenty miles of porches. You could move a lot of crackers. This might not be the place for political or social opinions—but I’d rather see windmills than strip mines. Both are bad for birds and both interrupt the landscape, but one doesn’t lead to smog or acid rain. And let’s not even mention spent nuclear fuel rods. Spent wind is fully recyclable!
Harnessing the wind is the work of the organbuilder. We create machinery that moves air, stores it under pressure, distributes it through our instruments, and lets it blow into our carefully made whistles. The energy of the moving air is transformed into sonic energy. As one mentor said to me years ago, air is the fuel we use to create organ tone. Ever wonder why a wider pipe mouth, open toe, or open windway creates louder tone? Simple—more fuel is getting to the burner.
When I sit in a church listening to a great organ, I imagine thousands of little valves flitting open and closed, and reservoirs and wind regulators absolutely tingling to release the treasure of their stored fuel into the heavens as glorious sound. They may be machines, but when they’re doing their thing during worship, they take on what seems like human urgency.

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Wendy and I have been enjoying the use of an apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village that belongs to friends of my parents. Yesterday we went up to Midtown to attend an Easter festival service at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. We chose the early Mass at 8:00 because the church’s website assured us that the music would be the same as at the later version but the crowds would likely be less. Preludes with organ and brass started at 7:30, including music of Pelz, Howells, Gabrieli, Dupré’s Poème Héroïque, and Richard Strauss’s Feierlicher Enzug—a mighty amount of music for that hour of the day. The Mass setting was the premiere of John Scott’s Missa Dies Resurrectionis.
John Scott must be the greatest addition to American church music since electric organ blowers. His superb musicianship, immaculate sense of timing, welcoming leadership of congregational singing, touching rapport with the boys of the choir, concise and unobtrusive conducting, and by the way, marvelous organ playing made our two hours in that beautiful church as meaningful and memorable a musical experience as I can recall. The new Mass setting was gorgeous, moving from recognizable folk tunes to riffs reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen in the Sanctus. (Is it OK to say Messiaenic when describing Easter music?)
I love noticing the way the sound of an organ can change with different players. Dr. Scott was conducting for most of the Mass, and we were treated to the wonderful playing of associate organist Frederick Teardo and assistant organist Kevin Kwan. Dr. Scott slid onto the bench for the postlude, Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogué, and off we went. Oopah! It was my impression that Scott’s years at London’s cavernous St. Paul’s Cathedral prepared him to treat the magnificent sanctuary of St. Thomas Church as an intimate space. Such rhythm, such drive, such energy, such clarity. Wonderful.
And speaking of wind . . .
There were six extraordinary brass players (plus percussion), about 30 boys and 20 men in the choir (I didn’t count, so I’m probably not accurate), ten clergy and attendants, and maybe a thousand congregants. Quite a hoopla for eight in the morning. The Great Organ in the chancel has 159 ranks, and there’s a gorgeous Taylor & Boody organ in the gallery with 32 ranks. Add us all up and we were burning a lot of fuel. It’s beautiful to me to stand in the midst of all that sound, thinking of it in terms of wind.
The word inspiration has two distinct meanings: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative; and the drawing in of breath. These two meanings come together dramatically during festival Masses in our great churches.
When we worship in great churches like St. Thomas in New York, we are surrounded by opulent works of art. The reredos created by sculptor Lee Lawrie is 80 feet tall, 43 feet wide and contains more than 80 figures. (If we say it’s a 159-rank organ, do we say it’s an 80-saint reredos?) The stained-glass windows are spectacular, including a rose window of unusually deep colors that is 25 feet in diameter.
Most churches that own fancy stained-glass windows have to face expensive restoration projects at some point. The effects of air pollution corrode a window’s metal components, and simple weathering compromises a window’s structure and its ability to keep out the elements. I was maintaining the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston when the magnificent windows by John LaFarge were removed for restoration. There were more than 2,000 pieces of glass in some of those windows, and it was just as complicated to restore them as to restore a large pipe organ. And while I think there’s less that can go wrong with a reredos than with a window or a pipe organ, I’m sure that at least that great heap of saints has to be cleaned one in a while—a job that would involve the careful choice and use of cleaning solvents and solutions, a big assortment of brushes, a hundred feet of scaffolding, and a fancy insurance policy. Imagine the fiscal implications of dropping a bucket of water from 80 feet up in a place like that.
But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas Church replacing their windows or reredos. The original designs are integral with the building, and it would hardly cross our minds to say that styles have changed and we need to overhaul the visual content of our liturgical art every generation or so to keep up with the times. Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos. “It’s just too old fashioned . . . ”
We hardly bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ. Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians, and ostensibly more economically maintained.
Why is this? Simple. Windows and statues are static. They stay still. The sun shines through them and on them, air (and all that comes with it) moves around them, but physically they stay still. A pipe organ is in motion. When you turn on the blower, reservoirs fill, wind conductors are stressed by pressure, leather moves, the fabric of the instrument creaks and groans as it assumes its readiness to play. When you play a note, valves open, springs are tensioned, air flows, flecks of debris move around. When you play a piece of music, all those motions are multiplied by thousands. The Doxology (Old Hundredth) comprises 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. Play it on a single stop and you’ve moved 128 note valves, plus all the attendant primaries, magnet armatures, stop and relay switches. Play the same 32 chords on a big organ using 90 stops (nothing out of the ordinary)—11,520 valves. And that’s just the Doxology. I’ll let you do the math for a big piece by Bach or Widor that has lots of hemi-demi-semi-quavers. I suppose Wendy and I heard the St. Thomas organ play millions of notes yesterday in that 8:00 Mass. There would be another identical Mass at 11:00, an organ recital at 2:30, and Solemn Evensong at 3:00. A wicked workday for the musicians, and a fifty-million-note day for the organ. Just think of all those busy little valves—millions of tiny movements to create a majestic body of sound.
And the organ wears out. Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ, technicians move around through the instrument tuning, adjusting, and repairing. Musicians practice, tourists receive demonstrations, liturgies come and go. That organ blower gets turned on and off dozens of times each week. The daylight streams through the windows, but the daylights get beaten out of the organ.
I’ve been in and out of St. Thomas Church many times. I’ve heard plenty of brilliant organists play there, and I’ve never been disappointed by what I heard. But I’ve known for years that the chancel organ is in trouble. It has played billions of notes. It’s been rebuilt a number of times. And it’s simply worn out. It’s a rare church musician who would intentionally offer less than the best possible to the congregation—or to God—during worship. And musicians of the caliber one hears at St. Thomas are masters at getting water from stone. As an organbuilder with a trained and experienced ear, I’m aware of the organ’s shortcomings. But as a worshipper, I’m transported.

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I single out St. Thomas Church because we worshipped there yesterday. I know those responsible for the organ, so I know something about its real condition. And prominent on the church’s website is an appeal for gifts to support the commissioning of a very expensive new organ. There were even letters from the rector and organist inserted in the Easter service booklet repeating that appeal. An elderly woman, impeccably dressed and obviously of means (she was wearing the value of a fancy car on her fingers), arrived a little after us and joined us in our pew. When the processional hymn started, she let loose a singing voice of unusual power and beauty. I whispered to Wendy, “She’ll give the new organ.” We chuckled, but a piece of me says I could have been right. I hope so.
Our church buildings are designed with expensive architectural elements. Including steeples, towers, stained-glass windows, to say nothing of Gothic arches and carvings in wood and stone, they all add mightily to the cost of building a church. But once it’s all there, we think of it as a whole. It would be hard to look back on the history of St. Thomas Church and say the tower was actually unnecessary. Of course they built a tower.
The organ is right up there on the list of expensive indulgences. How can we say we actually need such a thing? But how can we imagine Easter without it? There’s still plenty of wind available. At least there’s no fuel bill. 

What’s in a name?

Did you ever meet someone named Smith? Ever wonder where that name came from? Ever wonder why Smith is such a common name? Your friend John Smith is descended from a blacksmith, or maybe a silversmith. Smith is a common name because centuries ago, a much higher percentage of the population was involved in actually making stuff by hand. How about Cooper? They made barrels. How about Sawyer, Taylor, Shoemaker, Brewer, or Cook? Come to think of it, my name is Bishop—but I know it’s not relevant.

Just like those common surnames, lots of functions and devices in our world have names that are descriptive, and I think many of us seldom stop to notice how accurate those names are.

Likewise, I know that lots of people take for granted how something works. You flick a switch and a light comes on. Don’t bother me with stories about fuel sources, generating plants, transformers, distribution systems, self-burnishing contacts, correct choice of wire gauges, or tungsten filaments.

The long and short of it

After graduating from Oberlin, we lived in an old four-bedroom farmhouse in the farmlands a couple miles out of town. It was a lovely place if a little ramshackle. The rent was $225 a month, and there was a natural gas well on the property—foreshadowing the controversial fracking going on now in that area. The electrical system in the house was just terrible, and all the lights and outlets in the kitchen, utility room, and dining room were on one circuit. I was cooking dinner one night when the lights went out. There was toddler Michael, sitting on the dining room floor, a startled look on his face, a black mark on the wall around an electrical outlet, and a pair of scissors on the floor. He looked at me and said, “hurtchoo.”

What was it he did that caused the lights to go out? I know, I know, he stuck the scissors in the outlet. (Today, responsible parents put little plastic pluggy things into the outlets so that can’t happen. In those days, we did have seatbelts in our cars, but not those pluggy things.) What he actually did was shorten an electrical circuit. He tried to use the scissors as an appliance. We’re used to operating devices that are designed to consume electricity, whether it’s a motor we use to make daiquiris, a heating device we use to melt cheese on a piece of bread, or a light bulb that illuminates our world. Each of those items “burns” electricity to do its job.

The wiring in your house is all in circuits. Each circuit originates at an electrical panel, goes to whatever appliances it’s supposed to run, fuels them, and returns to the source, which is protected by a circuit breaker that shuts off the circuit if something goes wrong. (Our house in Oberlin had fuses, which have the same function as a circuit-breaker.) If something happens to connect the outgoing and incoming sides of the electrical circuit before it gets to the appliance, the result is a “short circuit.” Michael’s pair of scissors was not designed to perform a function when fed with electricity. All it could do was make a big spark. He “shorted out” the circuit. We laugh now, but bad things could have happened.

A couple more simple points. That circuit breaker I mentioned is designed to break the circuit (turn it off) when it’s overloaded by a short circuit, or by the attempt to run too much power through the circuit by plugging in a vacuum cleaner in addition to a space heater. Too much power and the wires heat up. If there’s no safety system, they start a fire. The old-time fuses have a piece of wire in them engineered to carry only a certain amount of power. When that was exceeded, the wire burned safely inside the little glass enclosure.  

And many of the circuits in our houses are actually left open in the form of outlets. A ceiling lamp is a closed circuit, but an outlet doesn’t become a complete circuit until we plug something in—not a pair of scissors, but something that includes an appliance that consumes electricity. 

Keep the pressure on

Water towers are architectural icons and infrastructure workhorses on Manhattan Island. Every building more than eighty feet high needs one, and there are a lot of buildings more than eighty feet high in Manhattan. We can see thirteen water towers from our apartment in lower Manhattan. They are necessary here because there are simply too many faucets and toilets for the municipal water provider to be able to supply pressure hundreds of feet in the air to thousands of buildings. So a building has a tank on the roof and a pumping station in the basement. Filling the tanks works something like a toilet bowl. Water is pumped into the tank. When it’s full, a ball-cock valve operated by a float turns off the pump. As water is used, the float goes down with the water level and turns on the pump to maintain the proper level.  

The water tower on an average apartment building holds around 10,000 gallons, and the pumps are capable of filling a tank in two or three hours. Larger buildings have huge internal tanks mounted high inside. The Empire State Building, which is 1,250 feet tall, has water tanks every twenty floors. Buildings that size use as much as 40,000 gallons per hour.

I imagined that the source of the water pressure from a rooftop tank would be the weight of the water as affected by gravity, and I read that in a couple news stories, but I read on a “science-fact” website that it actually comes from hydrostatic pressure, which is a factor of elevation. The higher in the air the tank is located, the greater the pressure. Shameless and unscientific rounding off of numbers I found at <www.howstuff works.com> shows that every foot of elevation produces about .45 PSI (pounds per square inch) of pressure. A tank that’s a hundred feet up produces about 45 PSI, which is the kind of pressure we’re used to when we open a spigot to take a shower or wash the dishes.

There is one way that the weight of water plays a role in this system. The tanks are built like old-fashioned barrels (built by coopers) with wooden staves held in place by iron hoops. The hoops are closer together at the bottom of a tank, and spaced increasingly further apart toward the top. The graduated spacing is similar on all the tanks, which makes me think there’s a mathematical ratio involved, something like Pythagoras’s overtone series. That provides extra strength down low to contain the great weight of water at the bottom of the tank. Water weighs about 8.35 pounds per gallon, and when you stack it up in a tank, the weight is concentrated toward the bottom. A 10,000-gallon tank holds more than forty tons of water!

There are two companies in New York City that still build water tanks: the Rosenwach Tank Company, and Isseks Brothers, both located in Brooklyn. Rosenwach builds between two and three hundred tanks each year. The tanks must be serviced annually to remove sediments from the water, and they usually last about forty years, though the Rosenwach website (www.rosenwach tank.com) says that some tanks made of redwood are still in service after ninety years. Wood is considered the best material because it is hoisted to lofty roofs relatively easily—it would cost a fortune to lift a 10,000-gallon steel tank to the roof of a twenty-story building—and because it has terrific built-in insulation qualities. Imagine if your source of cold water was a metal tank on a sunny roof. The wood is not treated with any paint or preservatives so as not to taint the water. Rosenwach uses so much lumber that they have a sawmill located in the heart of Brooklyn.

Wind regulators

The principle I described of graduating the spacing of the hoops around a water tank appears in many other ordinary facets of our life. Long runs of pipes for fire-suppression sprinkler systems are visible in the fellowship halls of many church buildings. Notice how they’re larger in diameter at the end where the water originates than at the end of the run. This accounts for the ever-smaller demand for the volume of water as you pass each sprinkler head, and maintains the appropriate amount of pressure for the last sprinkler in the line.

This exact principle exists in pipe organs that have multiple wind regulators (reservoirs). The windline is largest in diameter where it enters the organ from the blower room, and the diameter decreases as you pass the regulators, ensuring that the wind pressure is adequate at the end of a long run.

We can compare the wind system of a large pipe organ with the water system in Manhattan. A rooftop water tank is both a reservoir and a pressure regulator, kept full and ready for use by a pump, and equipped with a valve that fills the reservoir as water is used. An organ regulator is kept full of air by a pump (the blower), regulates the pressure through the use of weights or springs, and has a valve that keeps it full as pressure is used. The valve is typically a curtain valve that works something like a window shade, connected to the top of the regulator with string or chain that runs across a system of pulleys. In a water system, pressure and volume is used when we fill a teakettle. In a pipe organ, pressure and volume is used when we play a hymn.

Electricity in pipe organs

You walk into the chancel, change your shoes, open your briefcase, put something up on the music rack, slide onto the bench, and turn on the organ. What’s happening? You have started a big electric motor, and if your organ has electric action, you’ve also turned on a rectifier. The motor turns a fan (the organ blower), which blows air through the organ’s windlines to the reservoirs, which inflate to a controlled height, and create stored wind pressure. Until you play a note, the organ is idling, sitting still at a constant pressure.

Did he say rectifier? What’s a rectifier? What needs to be rectified? Is there something wrong? We use electricity in two basic forms, AC (alternating current) and DC (direct current). Electricity is polarized—one side is positive (+), the other is negative (–). In direct current, the polarization is constant—positive is always positive, negative is always negative. In alternating current, the sides alternate, swapping positive and negative back and forth at a rapid rate. We refer to 60-cycle current because standard AC power swaps sides 60 times a second. Fluorescent light tubes emit a 60-cycle hum.

Our household (and church-hold) electricity is AC power at 120 volts (volts is a measure of power), but pipe organ actions are designed to operate on DC power at around twelve volts. A rectifier is an appliance that converts 120VAC to 12VDC, rectifying the discrepancy. (While the voltage of house current is standardized, the DC voltage in pipe organs varies, usually between 12 and 16 VDC.) How does it work? A rectifier contains a transformer—an appliance that transforms AC power to DC power.

George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison were both pioneers of the industrial and residential use of electricity, and both are credited with the invention of many related devices and processes. They both found financial backers who supported the construction of neighborhood-wide systems to light houses—J.P. Morgan’s house on Madison Avenue in New York was the first to be illuminated by Edison. Edison was a DC man, and Westinghouse focused on AC power. Neither was willing, or perhaps able, to promote both. As the public was learning to accept the concept of having this mysterious power in their homes, there was a debate comparing the relative safety of the two systems, and Westinghouse and Edison each went to great lengths to try to discredit the work of the other by publicizing levels of danger. When the first electric chair to be used for executions of prisoners was built using DC power, Westinghouse and AC power gained traction in the public eye. If DC could kill people, we don’t want it in our houses. It was political. Today, when we hear of a construction worker getting electrocuted, it’s proven to us that AC power can kill, too. Michael was lucky.

Pipe organ wind

When I talk about pipe organ wind, I keep mentioning reservoirs and regulators. Don’t I really mean bellows? Like the short circuit, and the circuit breaker, I suggest we use the name that best describes what the thing is actually doing. A bellows produces a flow of air. A blacksmith uses a bellows to blow on the fire in his forge just as we use a bellows at our living room fireplace.  

A reservoir is a storage device. A rooftop water tower is a reservoir. In modern pipe organs, the bellows have been replaced with electric blowers, so what we might call a bellows under the windchest of the organ is actually a reservoir. But the reservoir also regulates the wind pressure. We use weights or spring tension to create the pressure. The more weight or the heavier the springs, the higher the pressure. But in order to create pressure, we also have to limit how far the thing can open—that’s another function of the curtain valve. The organbuilder sets it so the valve is closed when the reservoir is open far enough. Otherwise it would inflate until it burst, which is the air pressure equivalent of a short circuit. So the balancing of weights, springs, and limit of travel determines the wind pressure. And, the curtain valve I mentioned earlier opens to allow more air in as you consume air by playing. So I think the most accurate term to describe that unit is “regulator.” Reservoir is correct, but incomplete. The rooftop water tank is also a regulator, though the regulation of pressure happens automatically as a function of physics—remember that hydrostatic pressure. Hydro means water, static means “lacking in movement.” You get pressure regulation without doing anything!

Stop and think about it

Many of the common names for organ stops are descriptive, even definitive. “Prestant” comes from the Latin, prestare, which means “to stand before.” So a Prestant, by definition, is an organ stop that stands in the façade. Many organs have misnamed Prestants. A Chimney Flute is a capped pipe (usually metal) that has a little chimney sticking up from the cap. The purpose of the chimney is to emphasize the third overtone (22⁄3′ pitch). That’s why a Chimney Flute is brighter than a Gedeckt.

I don’t need to say much about Clarinets, Oboes, Trumpets, or Flutes. But a Harmonic Flute is special because the pipes are twice as long as Principal pipes, and the characteristic hole halfway up the resonator breaks the internal sound wave in half, so the double length produces normal pitch, but with a much richer harmonic structure.

Diapason is a mysterious word, until you look it up. I found two good applicable definitions: “a rich, full outpouring of sound,” and “a fixed standard of pitch.” Go to <www.diapason-italia.com&gt; and you find an Italian manufacturer of high-quality audio speakers—“a rich, full outpouring of sound.”

Quint = fifth. A 22⁄3′ Quint speaks the second overtone above fundamental pitch—one octave plus a fifth. A Quintadena emphasizes that overtone—that’s why it’s brighter than a Bourdon. 

Tierce = third.  A 13⁄5′ Tierce speaks the fourth overtone—two octaves plus a third.

A Resultant is a tricky one.  Turns out that if you play 16′ and 102⁄3′ pitch together, your mind’s ear is tricked into thinking that you’re hearing 32′ pitch, because 16′ and 102⁄3′ are the first two overtones of 32′. The result is that you imagine you’re hearing a 32′ stop.  Hah!  Fooled you!

By the way, why does blowing on a fire make the fire bigger? Simple. Fire uses oxygen as fuel. Throwing a blanket over a fire cuts off the oxygen supply, as does the acolyte’s candle-snuffer. Blow air on a fire and you increase the oxygen supply. Poof! S’mores, anyone?