In the wind . . .

Home entertainment
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Aeolian Organ Company established itself as the leader in the extremely high-end market for residence pipe organs. Their list of clients reads like a “Who’s Who” of wealthy industrialists and financiers: John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Frank W. Woolworth, Henry Clay Frick, Horace and John Dodge, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, to name a few. Rollin Smith’s exhaustively researched and excellent book, The Aeolian Organ, provides a wealth of information about this extraordinary company. I found the appendices to be especially good reading. One is a list of patrons, another is the opus list. I took a walking tour of mid-town Manhattan one afternoon photographing the residences that housed these fantastic organs.
I have Aeolians on my mind because I’m in the midst of installing their Opus 1014, originally built for the residence of John Munroe Longyear in Brookline, Massachusetts. We got a call from the real estate developer, who was converting that grand and opulent residence into condominiums, offering the organ at no cost providing it could be removed within the week. It could, and a purchaser appeared in short order. I have renovated the instrument, releathered the roll-playing mechanism, and I write from a California hotel room at the end of the fourth day of installation.

This is an eight-rank organ (Photo 1, half-way done). There are seven on the manual duplex chest, allowing each to be playable from either keyboard, and there is a substantial pedal Bourdon 16′. There is an ornately decorated keydesk with Aeolian’s particular style of tilting-tablet stop controls mounted obliquely on either side of the keyboards. And above the music rack is the spectacular contraption known as the spool-box. Two rows of holes in a brass bar, known as the “tracker-bar,” represent two 58-note keyboards. The bar is mounted in an airtight box with a sliding glass door. Below the bar is “take-up reel,” above it the spindles that accept the paper roll. To play a roll, you place it in the spindles, draw the paper across the surface of the bar, connect it to the take-up reel, turn on the spool-box motor, close the sliding glass door and turn on the ventil that charges the spool-box with air pressure (Photo 2, spool-box).
The pressure inside the spool-box energizes a little brass pointer that causes wonder the first time you see it, but when the blank leader of the paper has passed a red center line appears. The pointer follows the red line allowing the operator to see that the paper is tracking properly. If it wanders to one side or the other, you correct it by turning a little key under the bottom manual that moves the take-up reel to the left or right.

The next thing you see as the roll passes the tracker-bar is a suggested registration printed on the paper. You select your stops, and when the holes in the paper start appearing they allow the air pressure to pass through the holes in the tracker-bar and notes start to play. As the music progresses registration changes are suggested, and a dotted line moves back and forth across the paper indicating the position of the expression pedal (Photo 3, tracker-bar).
Behind the tracker-bar is a system of tubing that carries the little puffs of air to the spool-box contact machines, where tiny leather pouches are inflated to activate a pneumatic action that operate the contacts (Photo 4, tracker-bar tubing). The spool-box contact machines perform exactly the same function as the keyboards—both are wired in parallel to the inputs of the relay, so it’s possible to play a duet with the machine.

There’s a little lever marked “Tempo Indicator” just above the keyboards (Photo 5, tempo indicator). This is in fact not an indicator but a throttle. It operates a sliding valve that controls the amount of air flowing into the motor that turns the spindles in the spool-box. Letting in more air is the equivalent of shoveling on more coal or stepping on the accelerator—the motor speeds up and the music goes faster. Our modern ears are geared to expect the pitch to change when a recording speeds up—but not in Aeolian land. It’s a funny sensation to hear the tempo changing with the pitch staying the same. But the tempo indicator has a very important function. Of course it allows the performer to select the speed, but also gives sensitive control to the tempo, allowing ritardando, accelerando, and rubato.
If the roll is playing a piece of a significant speed that calls for frequent registration changes, you find yourself with your hands full following the leads on the paper, changing the stops, operating the swell pedal, controlling the tempo with musical sensitivity, while all the time taking care that the paper is tracking properly. If you miss the little red line moving away from the pointer you hear the music scramble as the tracking is lost.
At the risk of overusing technical jargon, here’s what happens when the player plays a single note:

1. Air blows through the hole in the paper roll, through the spool-box tubing to the spool-box contact pouch.
2. The pouch inflates, opening a primary valve that exhausts a box pneumatic.
3. As the pneumatic exhausts, it pushes up a rod that in turn pushes on a brass contact.
4. When the contact is made, electricity travels through the relay to a magnet on the windchest.
5. The magnet is energized, lifting its armature to allow a primary pouch to exhaust.
6. As the pouch exhausts, it opens the primary valve that in turn exhausts the secondary pouch.
7. The secondary pouch draws open the secondary valve.
8. The secondary valve exhausts the key-channel in the windchest.
9. As the key-channel exhausts, the interior of all the pouches for that note (one for each stop) are exposed to the atmospheric pressure.
10. A stop that is turned on has pressure in the stop channel waiting to play notes.
11. When the key-channel is exhausted, the note pouches of any stop that’s on can exhaust.
12. The exhausting note pouch opens the pipe-valve.
13. Air blows into the pipe and the note sounds.

As much as I understand how these actions work, and as much as I know that they work very fast, I’m still amazed that all of those steps working in sequence can possibly work fast enough to make any kind of musical sense—let alone work so fast as to be able produce notes repeating at 20 or 30 times a second.
An organist playing “the old fashioned way” (pushing down keys to make notes play) is limited to three or four notes in each hand and two in the pedals. And think about it, it’s not all that often that you’re really playing ten notes at a time. Turn on couplers and you might be asking the organ to produce 20 or 30 notes at once. The Aeolian player has no such limitations—some of the rolls include complicated chords and passages that could not be played by two organists at once. Stop the roll at a busy moment and count the holes in the paper from left to right—I’ve found places where there are 30 notes playing at once . . .

I’ve tried to give an idea of how the organ’s action works, but I’ve not told you anything about how the paper rolls are driven (Photo 6, spool-box motor). You know about the throttle that controls the flow of air to the motor, but the motor itself is a marvel. It contains three two-part pneumatics connected by a camshaft. On the end of the camshaft there’s a gear that drives a chain that drives a transmission that turns the spool-box spindles (Photo 7, spool-box transmission). The transmission has a feature controlled by a stopknob labeled “Aeolian Re-roll”—a rewind function that rolls the paper back onto its original spool at the conclusion of a performance.
It’s time for me to make a confession. I have added a solid-state relay with MIDI to this organ. But while confessing, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I am not using MIDI to add voices to the organ. “MIDI Out” from the organ’s relay feeds “MIDI In” of a sequencer. Play the organ either with the rolls or the keyboards and the sequencer captures the music as a data stream that can be played back. So the organ can now be played three ways. This allows the player/operator/performer/musician to rehearse a performance on a roll, master the registration changes, the subtleties of tempo and expressions, and play back the whole performance entirely automatically. And perhaps most important, it allows essentially unlimited repeat performances without exposing the fragile 100-year-old paper to wear and tear (and I do mean tear).
This organ, Aeolian’s Opus 1014, was built in 1906. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was president, Typhoid Mary was exposed in New York City, six of George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) plays were on stage in New York, and 400 people were killed in the great earthquake in San Francisco (Enrico Caruso was in town for that event, and swore that he would never return to a city “where disorders like that are permitted”).1 Automobiles were barely established as a significant mode of transportation, and the railroads were in their heyday. In this context we see how revolutionary was the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright—their first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina were accomplished in 1903.
This Aeolian organ spent last summer in the workshop attached to my house, and the summer-time guests were amazed and amused as I put the organ through its paces—each time causing a “rowdy hour” in the midst of a dinner party. Imagine how it must have astounded Mr. and Mrs. Longyear’s guests in 1906. Decades before radio and television, before stereo and compact discs, and most of a century before home movie theaters, this home-entertainment system represented the very apex of technology. Those fashionable dinner guests would have had nothing against which to compare the organ. I imagine that many were simply bewildered. Some, not all, of my friends were able to follow my explanation of how the thing works. Few of Mr. Longyear’s guests would have had technical backgrounds that would have allowed them even the dimmest comprehension.
But, boy, does it work! This was my first experience with an Aeolian player, and while I had it dismantled on my workbench, while I was cutting the tiny pouches for the spool-box contacts, while I was cleaning and assembling the spool-box tubing, I had the intellectual assurance that it would work, but it seemed improbable enough that I was purely delighted when I ran it for the first time (Photo 8, spool-box contact pouches before; Photo 9, spool-box contact pouches after). And I’ve been dwelling on the mechanical. This is above all a wonderful musical instrument. The voicing is imaginative, clear, and brilliant. The selection of voices is magical. The various combinations of stops are both thrilling and beguiling. What a fabulous appliance to add to the home that has everything.■

The start of a century

At 10:24 a.m. on October 15, 1947, Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 experimental aircraft faster than the speed of sound. That’s 761.2 miles per hour at 59-degrees Fahrenheit. It was quite a technological achievement. You have to generate a lot of power to move a machine that fast. But there was a spiritual and metaphysical aspect to that feat. Engineers were confident that they could produce sufficient power, but they were not sure that a machine would survive the shock wave generated by a machine outrunning its own noise. They supposed that the plane would vaporize, or at least shatter, scattering Yeager-dust across the landscape.

In his swaggering ghost-written autobiography, Yeager, he casually mentions that he had broken ribs (probably garnered in a barroom brawl) and had to rig a broomstick to close the cockpit hatch. He took off, flew the daylights out of the thing, and landed, pretty much just like any other flight. By the noise, and by the cockpit instruments, he knew he had broken the sound barrier, but to Yeager’s undoubted pleasure and later comfort, the worries of the skeptics proved untrue.

Invisible barriers

Remember Y2K? As the final weeks of 1999 ticked by, residents of the world wondered if we would survive the magical, mystical moment between December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. Of course, the world has survived some twenty-five changes of millennia since we started to count time, but this would be the first time with computers. The myth that computers would not be able to count to 2000 had us hyperventilating as we ran to ATMs to grab as much cash as we could. People refused to make plans that would have them aloft in airplanes at that horrible moment, supposing that cockpit computers would fail and planes would fall from the sky. The collapse of the world’s economy was predicted. Public utilities would cease to function. Nuclear power plants would overheat, and soufflés would fall.

As the clock ticked closer to midnight on New Year’s Eve, we waited breathlessly. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…sometimes it causes me to tremble…eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven…all good children go to heaven…four, three, two, one…

Humpf.

I have no idea how the venerable astronomers settled on how to organize the calendar and define our concept of time. I imagine a committee of bearded and wizened wise men gathered in a pub, throwing darts at a drawing of a clock. However they did it, they didn’t fool us. Cell phones, ATMs, airplanes, power plants, railroads, and thank goodness, icemakers just kept on running. However accurately that moment was defined, it was meaningless—a randomly identified milestone amongst the multitude.

Then we worried about what we call those years. The oughts? The Ohs? Shifting from ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine to oh-one, oh-two, oh-three seemed impossible. I managed, and so did you.

Centennials

The twentieth century started without the computer-induced hoopla, but I suppose that our heroes—Widor, Puccini, Saint-Saëns, Dvorák, and Thomas Edison—watched in suspense as the clock ticked past the witching hour. The real upheaval happened more than thirteen years later. On May 29, 1913, Ballets Russe danced the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Stravinsky had used traditional and familiar instruments and all the same notes that people were used to, but the way he arranged the tonalities, the maniacal organization of rhythms, the angular melodies, and the radical orchestration set the place in an uproar. The bassoon that played those haunting melismatic opening solos could have been used to play continuo in a Bach cantata the same day. Legend has it that the audience couldn’t contain itself and there was wild disturbance. How wonderful for a serious musical composition to stir people up like that. I haven’t seen people so worked up since the Boston Bruins failed to win the Stanley Cup.

Everything’s up to date in Kansas City

About five weeks before Stravinsky tried to ruin the theater in Paris, the Woolworth Building designed by Cass Gilbert was opened on Lower Broadway in New York, April 24, 1913. Like Stravinsky, Cass Gilbert used a traditional vocabulary—the prickles and arches given us by the Gothic cathedrals. But Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “gone and built a skyscraper seven stories high” was not as high as a building ought to go. Cass Gilbert went fifty-seven stories—792 feet; the building remained the tallest in the world until 1930. Gilbert hung those classic Gothic features on a high-tech structure and startled the world of architecture and commerce.

Besides the technical achievement of supporting a massive structure that tall, the building had thirty-four newfangled elevators. The engineers executing Gilbert’s design had to figure out how to get water more than 700 feet up. Just think of that: pulling up to the curb in a shiny new 1913 Chalmers Touring Car, and stepping in an elevator to go up fifty-seven stories. Those folks in Kansas City would have flipped their wigs.

The Woolworth building is still there a hundred years later. Like The Rite of Spring, it’s a staple in our lives, and it seems a little less radical than it did a century ago. After all, a few blocks away at 8 Spruce Street, by the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the new tallest residential building in the Americas (seventy-six stories and 876 feet), designed by Frank Gehry, towers like a maniacal grove of polished corkscrews. Gehry took the functional aesthetic of the glass-and-steel Seagram Building (375 Park Avenue, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, built in 1958), and gave it a Cubist ethic by twisting the surfaces to create the signature rippling effects.

How poetic that the Woolworth Building and 8 Spruce Street, opened almost exactly a century apart, stand just a few blocks apart, trying to out-loom each other. I took these photos of them while standing in the same spot on City Hall Plaza.

Frank Woolworth made a fortune in retail, the Sam Walton of his day. F. W. Woolworth stores dotted the country, making goods of reasonable quality available to residents of small towns. However, I doubt that anything sold in his stores would have been found in his houses. His principal residence, also designed by Cass Gilbert, was at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 80th Street in Manhattan, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among dozens of priceless artifacts was a large three-manual Aeolian organ. Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s prime customers, and, rare among that heady clientele, he could play the organ. 

His estate Winfield (the “W” of F. W. Woolworth) on Long Island boasted the first full-length 32-foot Double Open Diapason to be built for a residence organ. Now that would shake your champagne glasses.

Woolworth’s funeral was held in the Fifth Avenue mansion. Frank Taft, artistic director of the Aeolian Company, was on the organ bench.

The twenty-first-century pipe organ

There’s a lot going on here in lower Manhattan. South of Union Square at 14th Street, Broadway stops its disruptive diagonal path across the city, and assumes a more reliable north-south orientation, forming the border between Greenwich East Village and Greenwich West Village. On the corner of 10th and Broadway stands Grace Church (Episcopal). Three blocks west on the corner of 10th and Fifth Avenue stands Church of the Ascension (Episcopal). Both are “Gothicky” buildings—Grace is whitish with a tall pointed spire, while Ascension is brownish with a stolid square tower with finials. Both have pretty urban gardens. Both are prosperous, active places. And both have radical new 21st-century organs.

Taylor & Boody of Staunton, Virginia, is coming toward completion of the installation of their Opus 65 at Grace Church, where Patrick Allen is the Organist and Master of the Choristers. In 2011, Pascal Quoirin of Saint-Didier, Provence, France, completed installation of a marvelous instrument at Church of the Ascension, where Dennis Keene is Organist and Choirmaster.

Both of these organs have as their cores large tracker-action organs based on historic principles—and Principals. And both have large romantic divisions inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideals. Both are exquisite pieces of architecture and furniture, and both have been built by blending the highest levels of traditional craftsmanship with modern materials and methods.

At Church of the Ascension you can play the core organ from a three-manual mechanical keydesk, and the entire instrument from a separate four-manual electric console. At Grace Church, the whole organ plays from a four-manual detached mechanical console, and contacts under the keyboards allow access to electric couplers and the few high-pressure windchests that operate on electric action.

A more detailed account of the organ at Church of the Ascension has been published (see The Diapason, November 2011) and no doubt, we can expect one about the Grace Church organ—so I’ll limit myself to general observations, and let the organbuilders and musicians involved speak for themselves. I admire the courage and inventiveness exhibited in the creation of these two remarkable instruments.

I expect that purists from both ends of the spectrum will be critical, or at least skeptical of these efforts to bridge the abyss. But I raise the question of whether purism or conservative attitudes are the best things for the future of our instrument. We study history, measure pipes, analyze metal compositions, and study the relationships between ancient instruments and the music written for them. We have to do that, and we must do that. 

After finishing the restoration and relocation of a beautiful organ built by
E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 466, 1868) for the Follen Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts, I wrote an essay in the dedication book under the title, The Past Becomes the Future. In it I wrote about the experience of working on such a fine instrument, marveling at the precision of the workers’ pencil lines, and the vision of conceiving an instrument that would be vital and exciting 140 years later. I saw that project as a metaphor for a combination of eras. And I intended the double meaning for the word becomes. The past not only transfers to the future, but it enhances the future. I could carry the play on words further by misquoting the title of a popular movie, Prada Becomes the Devil! 

Another tense of that use of the word become is familiar to us from Dupré’s Fifteen Antiphons: I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem. We don’t typically use the word that way in conversation, but if you read in a Victorian poem, “she of comely leg,” you’d know exactly what it meant!

Speaking of the ballet…

Recently, renowned organist Diane Belcher mentioned on Facebook that the recording she made in 1999 (JAV 115) on the Rosales/Glatter-Götz organ in the Claremont United Church of Christ, Claremont, California, has been released on iTunes. Buy it. This is a smashing recording of wonderful playing on a really thrilling organ. It’s a big, three-manual instrument with mechanical action and a wide variety of tone color. The recording has long been a favorite of mine—I transferred it from the original CD to my iPhone and listen to it in the car frequently.

The first piece on the recording, Tiento de Batalla sobre la Balletto del Granduca by Timothy Tikker, was commissioned by the organbuilder to showcase the organ’s extraordinary collection of reed voices. The piece opens with a statement of a measured dance, familiar to organists who grew up listening to the recording of E. Power Biggs, and proceeds in a dignified fashion from verse to verse. I picture a large stone hall lit by torches, with heavily costumed people in parade. But about three minutes in, things start to go wrong. It’s as though someone threw funky mushrooms into one of the torches. An odd note pokes through the stately procession—you can forgive it because you hardly notice it. But oops, there’s another—and another—and pretty soon the thing has morphed into a series of maniacal leaps and swoops as the reeds get more and more bawdy. Tikker established a traditional frame on which he hung a thrilling, sometimes terrifying essay on the power of those Rosales reeds.

New threads on old bones

• Igor Stravinsky used an ancient vocabulary of notes and sounds to create revolutionary sounds. The same old sharps and flats, rhythmic symbols, and every-good-boy-deserves-fudge were rejigged to start a revolution.

• Cass Gilbert used 500-year-old iconography to decorate a technological wonder.

• Frank Gehry gave the familiar skyscraper a new twist.

• Taylor & Boody and Pascal Quoirin have morphed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century languages into twenty-first-century marvels.

• Timothy Tikker painted for us a portrait of the march of time.

Organists are very good at lamenting the passage of the old ways. Each new translation of the bible or the Book of Common Prayer is cause for mourning. I won’t mention the introduction of new hymnals. (Oops!)

We recite stoplists as if they were the essence of the pipe organ. We draw the same five stops every time we play the same piece on a different organ. And we criticize our colleagues for starting a trill on the wrong note. 

I don’t think Igor Stravinsky cared a whit about which note should start a trill.

The end of the world as we know it

Together we have witnessed many doomsday predictions. I’ve not paid close attention to the science of it, but it seems to me that the Mayan calendar has come and gone in the news several times in the last few years. A predicted doomsday passes quietly and someone takes another look at the calendar and announces a miscalculation. Maybe the world will end. If it does, I suppose it will end for all of us so the playing field will remain equal.

But we can apply this phrase, the end of the world as we know it, to positive developments in our art and craft as the twenty-first century matures. Your denomination introduces a new hymnal—the end of the world as you know it. So, learn the new hymnal, decide for yourself what are the strong and weak points, and get on with it.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and kept flying faster and faster. On October 15, 2012, at the age of 89, Chuck Yeager reenacted the feat, flying in a brand new F-15 accompanied by a Navy captain. But imagine this: it was the same day that Austrian Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier without at airplane! He jumped from a helium balloon at an altitude of twenty-four miles, and achieved a speed of 843.6 miles per hour as he fell before deploying his parachute. Both men lived to see another day.

A Taylor & Boody organ with multiple pressures and expressions, powerful voices on electric actions, and seething symphonic strings—the end of the world as we know it. Embrace the thoughtfulness and creativity that begat it. And for goodness’ sake, stop using archaic words like comely and begat. ν

The high cost of beauty

When the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, the world went agog over the dazzling beauty of the artifacts that had been hidden since his death some 3,300 years earlier. There were large pieces of gilded furniture, ornate masks, jewelry, and lots of hieroglyphics and paintings. The level of craftsmanship was bewildering, given the degree of antiquity. Other members of Egyptian royalty were buried in similarly grand circumstances, in tombs located under the great pyramids. And who built the pyramids? Slaves.

Big-time personal money always has and always will be part of the arts world. If there had been no Medici dynasty, we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, to name just a few. How did the Medici make their money? They were bankers, the wealthiest family in Europe. They parlayed their wealth into political influence, and many family members became important politicians. The family even produced four popes in the sixteenth century. If that implies it was possible to purchase a papacy, I’m surprised that Silvio Berlusconi didn’t try it. A family tree I found online shows more than twenty generations of Medici between 1360 and about 1725. 

We’ve learned a lot about the ethics of banking and investment in recent years, where executives use their clients’ money to leverage their own fortunes, bring down institutions, and go home with bonuses that equal the annual wages of hundreds of normal workers. I’m not setting about a researched dissertation on the source of the Medici’s money, but I’m willing to bet that much of it came at the expense of others.

Heavy metal

The Carnegie Steel Company was one of the country’s first major producers of steel, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, it developed important improvements in the manufacturing process, including open-hearth smelting and installation of advanced material handling systems like overhead cranes and hoists. The result was higher production levels using increasingly less skilled labor, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck against the Homestead Steel Works. There were various waves of strikes, and at first the union prevailed. 

Henry Clay Frick ran the Carnegie Steel Company for his eponymous partner. He announced on April 30, 1892, that he would keep negotiations open with the union for thirty days, and on June 29, he locked down the plant and the union announced a strike. Frick engaged the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security, and more than three hundred armed Pinkerton agents were involved in bloody battles with striking workers. The Pinkerton force surrendered, and the governor sent in the State Militia and declared martial law. There was a failed assassination attempt against Frick. The union was broken and collapsed about ten years later. 

It was important to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to beat down the union because they had their lifestyles to maintain. Carnegie built a majestic home on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street in New York (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) in which he installed a large Aeolian pipe organ. He paid about $65,000 for the organ at the time when workers in the Aeolian factory earned about $600 a year. Hmmm. The organ cost as much as the annual wages of more than a hundred workers. Not as bad as King Tut, but sounds about right.

Henry Clay Frick installed a large Aeolian in his gracious home on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (now housing the Frick Collection, commonly known as “The Frick”). These guys really knew how to build houses. Hank and Andy must have warmed each other’s hearts living just twenty blocks apart—an easy twenty-minute walk, just long enough to smoke a hundred-dollar cigar (six weeks for that Aeolian worker). Frick also built a tremendous Aeolian in his summer home at Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts and gave a four-manual job to Princeton University. That’s four big pipe organs built on the backs of striking steel workers.

Three years before the Homestead Strike, Andrew Carnegie paid about $1,000,000 to buy the land and construct the venerable Manhattan concert hall that bears his name. The place was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925 when they sold it to a real estate developer.

I’m giving Mr. Carnegie a hard time, because at least some of his business practices were mighty ruthless, and the mind-boggling wealth that he accumulated was not a reflection on his largess. But it’s important to remember that he was also an important philanthropist and the foundation that was founded on his fortune is still a major source of grants for all sorts of educational programs, scientific research, and artistic endeavors. Visit the website at www.carnegie.org.

I served a church in Cleveland as music director for about ten years, where a four-manual Austin was installed as a gift from the Carnegie Foundation in 1917. The Bach scholar Albert Riemenschneider of Baldwin-Wallace College was organist there when the instrument was installed—the perfect organ for a performance of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.

Among many other projects, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation installed more than 8,800 pipe organs in America’s churches and founded more than 2,500 public libraries. That’s important.

Moving musical chairs.

On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Wendy and I attended a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to hear Stephen Tharp play the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra of Aaron Copland. Until about three o’clock that afternoon it was doubtful that the concert would happen because Carnegie Hall’s stagehands had struck the night before, causing the cancellation of the concert on October 2. They were striking over the rules for soon-to-be-opened educational spaces above the hall, claiming that they should have the same jurisdiction as in the great hall itself. Carnegie Hall’s management took the position that as it would be an educational venue, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees should not have such control. It’s probably not this simple, but should Theatrical Stage people control educational spaces?

The New York Times reported that Carnegie Hall employs five full-time stagehands with average annual compensations of more than $400,000 a year, with additional part-time union members brought in as needed. I know a lot of organbuilders who would make great stagehands, and Wendy was quick to say that I missed my calling.

The strike was settled in time for us to hear Stephen play with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported that the union backed off, as it seemed ridiculous to almost anyone that a teenaged music student would not be allowed to move a music stand. You can read about that strike in the New York Times at: www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/carnegie-hall-and-stagehands-sett….

It’s an exquisite irony that the October 2 concert cancelled because of the strike was to be a gala celebratory fundraiser for the Philadelphia Orchestra, recently revitalized after years of labor disputes. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was to open his second season as music director in what was billed as the triumphant return of that great orchestra to its role as a national leader.

Vänskä-daddle

On October 3, 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Osmo Vänskä had resigned from his position as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His action was anticipated. The musicians had been locked out by the Board of Directors for more than a year in a dispute that pitted the player’s requests for salary increases against the board’s decision to spend $52,000,000 renovating the concert hall while claiming there were no funds to increase salaries.

The orchestra had long planned to play a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York during the fall of 2013. Ironically, Vänskä was widely celebrated for having brought the MSO into new prominence with several seasons of brilliant performances and celebrated recordings, and the Carnegie Hall concerts were to celebrate the MSO’s bursting into the upper echelons of American symphony orchestras. Vänskä had announced that the dispute must be settled so rehearsals for those concerts could begin on September 30. If not, he would resign. It wasn’t, and he did. Former Senator George Mitchell, famous for negotiating settlements of disputes in Northern Ireland and steroid use in Major League Baseball, had been enlisted to help with the MSO negotiations—turned out that Northern Ireland had nothing on the MSO.

In the past several years, a number of important orchestras have suffered serious financial stress leading to labor disputes, including the orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

Eerily, on September 30, 2013, the same drop-dead-date for Väskä’s resignation, Norman Ebrecht of ArtsJournalBlogs reported that players in one hundred German orchestras struck simultaneously to draw attention to the increasing number of orchestras closing because of dwindling government support. There were 168 orchestras in Germany at the time of reunification in 1991, and there are 131 today. It’s a big deal to lose nearly forty orchestras in twenty years.

Do the numbers.

I love to do goofy math. In the 1970s when I lived on a farm outside Oberlin, Ohio, I wondered how much corn might grow in a day. I measured a couple dozen plants in the morning, then again in the evening, and came up with an average amount of growth. I measured and multiplied to get the number of plants in an acre, then again by the number of acres on the farm. Of course I can’t remember the numbers, but I know it added up to many miles of growth in a day. You could almost hear it while lying in bed at night.

I did that recently with the economics of a symphony orchestra. I found a list online of American orchestras with the largest operating budgets. Los Angeles tops that list at $97,000,000. Boston is second at $84,000,000. I stuck with Boston because it’s home, and I got the rest of the information I needed. The BSO plays about a hundred concerts a year—that’s $840,000 each. Symphony Hall seats about 2,600 people. The average ticket price is around $75, so ticket revenue for a full house is about $195,000. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 per concert that must be made up by private and corporate donations, campaigns, bar and restaurant revenues, and heaven knows what else—if they sell out each concert. Read the program booklet of the BSO and you’ll be surprised how many of the orchestra’s chairs are “fully funded in perpetuity,” named for their donors. Three cheers for them.

I know very well that this is bogus math. There are many variables that I’ve overlooked, and doubtless many of which I am not aware—but I think it’s a reasonable off-the-cuff illustration of the challenges of large-scale music-making in modern society. You can buy a pretty snazzy new pipe organ for the $645,000 that’s missing for each BSO concert after ticket sales.

While I was surfing about looking for those numbers, I learned that the starting salary for a musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is about $135,000. That’s pretty good when compared to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra where the starting salary is more like $48,000. I suppose that senior members of the BSO must earn over $200,000. In the business world, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe would qualify as an Executive Vice President and head of a department—worth $250,000 or $300,000, I’d say. But not as much as a stagehand. 

I guess I’m laboring under an old-fashioned concept that the artistic content should be worth more than the support staff. Big-time stagehands are hardworking people with important jobs. It’s not just anyone who can be trusted to fling high-end harps around a stage. But how many church choir directors would like to have someone else available to set up the chairs?

If the cost of operating a symphony orchestra seems high, get a load of the Metropolitan Opera. I found an article in the New York Times published on October 1, 2011, that put the Met’s annual budget at $325,000,000, of which $182,000,000 is from private donations. The Met had just passed New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the arts organization with the largest budget. (Counting baseball, New York City has three Mets.)

I found a page on the Met (opera) website that listed the administrative staff, which includes the General Manager (Peter Gelb), Musical Director (James Levine), and Principal Conductor (Fabio Luisi), along with twenty-five assistant general managers, artistic management, design, production, finance, development, human resources, house management, stage directors, stage management, carpenters, electricians—a total of more than three hundred administrative employees. Add a symphony orchestra, costumes, make-up, custodians, ticket sellers, and—oh yes—singers, and you wind up with a whopping payroll.

Since I’m not a stagehand, I pretended I was going to buy one ticket online. I chose a performance of La Bohème on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m. I couldn’t choose between a seat in Row B of the Orchestra (down front, near the stage) for $300, or one in Orchestra Row U for $250. And nearly half of the operating budget is funded by donations. If you take a date and have a nice dinner and a glass of wine at intermission, that’s pretty much a thousand-dollar night, something stagehands could afford if they could get the night off.

§

The source of much of the money that has funded the arts over many centuries is questionable, and it’s especially difficult to accept how much of has been the product of slavery. But scary as that is, I’m sure glad we had the Medicis and hundreds of others like them. It would be a barren world without the art and architecture that they funded. I have to admit that when I’m standing in a museum looking at a work of art, I’m not fretting about the suffering involved in its production.

Today’s system seems more just—concert-goers buy tickets, and corporate and individual sponsors theoretically make up the rest. That works as long as costs are reasonably controlled, and donors can be kept happy. The problem with that is how it can affect programming. 

If you listen regularly to a commercial classical radio station anywhere in the country, you would be able to list society’s favorite pieces of music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 9th, Mozart’s 40th Symphony and 23rd Piano Concerto, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances—you get the idea. Organists know how hard it is to get a bride to choose something other than the Taco-Bell Canon, or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Lots of serious classical music ensembles, from local choruses to major symphony orchestras, adjust their programming to please their patrons. The box office at Boston Symphony Hall has a long-standing tradition allowing people to pass on their subscription seats to friends. When James Levine came to town as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he increased dramatically the amount of contemporary music on the programs, and friends of ours who had long held great seats on the balcony above the stage asked if we wanted to take them over because they couldn’t take all the modern music. We did.

And, in a related matter, the players of the BSO made public the extra workload brought on by Levine’s energetic and imaginative programming. On March 17, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that orchestra players were concerned about longer concerts, extra rehearsals, and programming of exceptionally difficult music. You can read it online at www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_prove…. They cited aggravation of injuries and increased stress and negotiated with Levine to alter some of the planned programs. And the BSO Trustees created a special fund to support the cost of the extra rehearsal time. But smaller institutions with limited resources would not be able to do the same. So it’s back to the crowd-pleasing favorites at the cost of innovation.

I’ve often repeated a story about an experience Wendy and I had with artistic patronage. An exceptionally wealthy friend, now deceased, was well known in his community as a generous supporter of the arts. He lived in a city that is home to a nationally prominent repertory theater company that was mounting the premiere production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home. The play tells the story of a family’s gay son contracting AIDS, with the main dialogue happening in the family car driving home from a holiday celebration. The production was to include larger-than-life bunraku puppets that would provide the action less suited for the stage, conceived by the playwright, to be constructed by a New York-based puppeteer. Our friend was asked to fund the puppets, which were to cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He told us the story over dinner, saying that he hated the idea, was uncomfortable with the subject, but thought he should provide the funds because he knew it was important.

§

Recently organist David Enlow and harpist Grace Cloutier performed a recital at David’s home church, Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, where the Organ Clearing House installed an instrument a couple years ago. At dinner after the concert, we were discussing the instruments we play, and I noted that with the exception of pianos and high-end violins, the harp is probably one of the most expensive instruments that musicians typically own privately. Organists have to rely on the institutions for which they work to provide them with an instrument to play. And they sure have gotten expensive.

I’ve always felt that a three-manual organ with forty or fifty stops is just about right for a prominent suburban church with a sanctuary seating five hundred people or more. But a first quality organ of that size will push, and easily exceed, $1,000,000. It’s pretty hard for many parishes to justify such a whopping expenditure. I grew up in the era when it was all the rage for churches to replace fifty-year-old electro-pneumatic organs with new trackers, and many organists fell into the habit of getting what they asked for. Those days are largely over, because now that we really know how to build good organs of any description, we also know what they cost! We have to remember what a big deal it is for a church to order a new instrument.

§

I’m troubled by the striking stagehands. I believe in the concept of the labor union. They were formed to confront real injustice, and in the strange and shaky state of our economy, injustices are still firmly in place. But this is a time when they’ve gone too far. That kind of labor organizing can threaten the future of live music in concert halls.

The Organ Clearing House uses Bank of America because we work all across the country, and it’s convenient to be able to get to a bank pretty much anywhere we go. But we were not bursting with pride when Time magazine reported on November 9, 2013, that the bank was to be fined $865,000,000 for mortgage fraud related to the Countrywide Financial scandal. At the same time, our bank is a Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Alvin Ailey Dancers, and the Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcasts in public schools. We thank them for all that.

Bank of America is also a “Season Sponsor” for Carnegie Hall, supporting the Hall’s mission “to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of the legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences,” as stated on Carnegie Hall’s website.

So the concert hall that was built on the backs of striking steel workers, whose schedule was recently interrupted by striking six-figure stagehands, is now supported largely by a bank guilty of major mortgage fraud. 

May the music keep playing. Sure hope it does. The stakes are high. 

The world according to nuts

Years ago I read an essay by Andy Rooney in which he claimed he would always rely on a nut for a description about what the nut is nuts about. It’s inspiring to meet someone who is crazy about something—the church member who has been giving tours of the building at noon every Sunday for 30 years, the baseball fan who really understands the bunt, the fisherman who chooses self-tied flies depending on light and tide conditions, or the oenologist who can actually explain the difference between fruity and sassy! I recall a lovely encounter with a woman who lived next to the famed Concord Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts (By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.1), who considered it a privilege to live there and her responsibility to tell visitors all she could.
In this sense, the word nut is synonymous with buff. Ever meet an organ buff? Most of my colleagues are organ buffs, and come to think of it, most of them are also some other kind of buff. I know organ nuts who are gardening buffs, wooden-boat buffs, steam-railroad buffs, antique-car buffs, even beer buffs.
In this sense, the word buff is synonymous with the word aficionado. I know organ people who are aficionados of opera, baseball, silent movies, and jazz.
Nuts, buffs, and aficionados are interested in subjects that have deep histories and lots of technical facts to master. I’ve gone bleary-eyed on more than one occasion listening to a colleague recite and compare stoplists wondering whether, for the sake of a given conversation, it really matters if the 8¢ Flute on the Great was a Melodia or a Clarabella (yes Virginia, there is a difference!). Likewise, while participating in a sailboat race I met an old salt sitting on a dock bench who demanded that passers-by give him compass headings so he could show off by giving the recip-rocal course. We all know that South (180º) is the reciprocal of North (0º) but we have to stop and think before stating that the reciprocal of North-by-northeast-a-half-east (33.75º) is the reciprocal of South-by-southwest-a-half-west (213.75º). The guy on the bench had a good point. Any serious blue-water sailor should master that information—you must be able to steer a reciprocal course when someone falls overboard in the middle of the night. But the recitation did not make interesting conversation. I expect I would have learned more had Salty talked about hidden ledges or tidal currents in the local waters, or what to expect of the wind when the day heated up. And if I were a novice and he was hoping to win me over, he should have taken an entirely different tack.
I mentioned a hypothetical baseball fan. Any experienced fan can rattle off statistics. Sitting with my father in section 26 at Fenway Park in Boston (he’s had Sec. 26, Row 4, seats 13–14 since the 1970s), I’ve heard people recite Red Sox starting lineups from the 1950s. That’s a fun interchange between serious fans, but a terrible way to introduce someone to the game.
In spite of criticism of overpaid and chemically enhanced players, professional baseball seems to have a pretty strong foothold in popular culture. How does the strength of the organ’s foothold compare? Church membership is generally in decline, electronic substitutes have grown in convenience, availability, and popularity, and many churches with strong active memberships are focusing on contemporary worship formats that don’t involve stopknobs at all, whether controlling pipes or digital voices.
The Grammy Awards were announced last weekend, recognizing recordings in 108 categories. The first category to mention “classical” music (whatever that means) is number 94, Best Engineered Album, Classical. This comes after things like Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal (the winner: My Humps, sung by The Black Eyed Peas), Best Hawaiian Music Album (the winner: Legends Of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar—Live From Maui, Various Artists, Daniel Ho, George Kahumoku, Jr., Paul Konwiser & Wayne Wong, producers), and Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media (the winner: Walk The Line, Joaquin Phoenix & Various Artists). This is not to mention Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package or Best Surround Sound Album. (Don’t believe me? Look at .)
Yikes! If this is popular culture, what’s the future of the pipe organ? I note that there is not a single Grammy category that even mentions the organ. If the Grammies are so genre-specific, why isn’t there at least a category for Best Baroque Album (the winner, Four Seasons with the Red Priest, Various Artists)?
I am not suggesting that the pipe organ will ever compete with hip-hop, rap, ska, reggae, R&B, or soul. (Twenty years ago I was asked to play reggae at a wedding. I have to admit that was the first time I heard of it, but realizing now that was barely 20 years after the genre was invented I don’t feel so bad—I told them no.) I am suggesting—and not for the first time—that we must be paying attention to how we present the organ to our audiences. How do you popularize the music of Buxtehude in a world that celebrates dozens of musical genres that are less than a generation old? The other side of the question is what happens if you don’t? Or, how do we introduce a novice to the organ without boring them with details?
Join me in celebrating the organ as high culture in the modern age. Look for ways to make the organ, its history, and its music relevant and exciting to your listeners. Let’s aim for the day when Grammy category 109 is announced, Best Classical Performance On The Pipe Organ. Why not?

Many happy returns (or Canned Nuts)

I’ve seen lots of creative strategies for raising funds for organ projects, but here’s one for the books. The Episcopal Church of St. Mary of the Harbor in Provincetown, Massachusetts, needed an organ, and an elderly couple was determined to make it happen. Ernie and Bob collected return cans and bottles until there was enough to purchase a three-rank organ built by Bedient Pipe Organ Company. I don’t know what the exact price of the organ was, but I know that a beer can returned is worth five cents in Massachusetts—it takes 200,000 cans to equal $10,000. Those nuts must have collected at least 500,000 cans to pay for the organ. I think I did pretty well earlier with the mathematics of reciprocal courses so let’s try for the cubic volume of 500,000 cans. I have an empty can on my desk (cranberry-lime seltzer as it’s about one in the afternoon), and I have my handy-dandy organ-pipe-scaling ruler from Organ Supply Industries. The can is roughly 21⁄2" in diameter and 43⁄4" tall. Using π = 3.14, the volume of the can is 23.3 cubic inches. 500,000 cans take up 11,650,000 cubic inches or 6742 cubic feet—the equivalent of a 30' x 30' room with a 71⁄2' ceiling full of cans.

Sibling rivalry for more than peanuts

As I have been working with the relocation and renovation of an Aeolian residence organ, I’ve enjoyed getting to know something about the history of that company and its illustrious clients. Fabulously wealthy music-lovers spent crazy amounts of money installing opulent instruments in their luxurious and enormous homes.
Brothers John (1864–1920) and Horace Dodge (1868–1920) were inseparable from early childhood, sharing common employment throughout their careers. Early on they both worked for a manufacturer of marine boilers in Detroit, Michigan. Later, on the strength of an improved ball bearing patented by Horace, they built a successful business manufacturing bicycles. The mammoth Dodge Motor Company was the result of logical progression. John was the more volatile of the two, Horace was a passionate music lover (he was an early and important patron of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra).2 Horace built a tremendous house at 17800 Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, and like many music-loving industrialists contracted with the Aeolian Organ Company for their Opus 1175 (II/15), which was installed in 1911.
He “upgraded” in 1916, ordering #1319b (IV/80). John responded by installing #1444 (III/76) in his home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan—perhaps justifying the smaller specification by recognizing that, after all, Horace was the music lover. Horace ended the debate by ordering a more modest instrument (#1478, II/16) for a grand location without fixed address—his 258-foot steam yacht, The Delphine. The rivalry ended somewhat unrequited as Horace’s death meant that #1319b was never installed. Although his death also preceded Delphine’s launching, his widow Anna (along with her second husband, the actor Hugh Dillman) was left to enjoy that grand vessel launched in 1921. Delphine burned and sank at New York City’s 95th Street Pier on September 21, 1926, and Anna ordered it to be refloated and refitted, including Aeolian #1639 with specification identical to its predecessor except for the addition of a Duo-Art Player.3
Amazingly, the age of such sea-going luxury is not over. Built by Hodgdon Yachts of East Boothbay, Maine, and launched in 1999, the 126-foot sloop Antonisa features a five-rank, one-manual, tracker-action pipe organ in its main salon. Built by Stefan Maier of Athol, Massachusetts, enhanced with carvings in scallop-shell motifs, and epoxied into its home, the organ undoubtedly relies on the constant high humidity of its location to counteract the effects of the open fireplace in the same cabin! (Somehow the fireplace on the boat seems nuttier than the organ.) You can see photographs and read specifications and articles about the organ and the boat at .

Another floating nut

New York City is home to dozens, even hundreds of performance venues, none more unusual than Bargemusic, a floating recital hall tied up at the Fulton Ferry Pier at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Cross the gangway onto the barge, step inside to take one of about 150 seats. Behind the stage is a wall of large plate-glass windows through which you see the skyline of lower Manhattan. The acoustics are bright and clear, there’s a fine Steinway piano, and a fireplace crackles on the port side. Our Bargemusic experience involved performances by the DaPonte String Quartet, an excellent permanent ensemble that lives and works in our neighborhood in mid-coast Maine.
The nut behind all this is Olga Bloom, founder and chairman of Bargemusic. Olga is elderly and slight, a gracious hostess, and a true music lover. She is stationed right inside the door greeting the audience as they come and go. It’s fun to imagine her moving up and down the New York waterfront shopping for a barge—she told us that the barge was purchased for $800. Her vision was the origin of this unique place. The website tells how the barge was originally used in the mid-20th century for transporting sacks of coffee beans to and from the tracks of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. It goes on,
Our present cargo in this small floating room is sound: potent, ephemeral and magical. We respond to it like a bird, which, suddenly released from restraining hands, flutters in upward flight towards reality. Next time you’re in New York, plan to visit Bargemusic. An extensive calendar of concerts is published on the website. The views from the site, both inside and outside, are spectacular. There are excellent restaurants nearby along with a specialty ice cream store. You’ll love it.
At the close of the concert, a member of the audience collapsed. He had been sitting in the front row so he fell onto the stage. Dozens of cell phones dialed 911, the EMTs arrived. Turned out the fellow was overcome by the warmth and closeness but was otherwise okay. Lying on his back on the stage floor surrounded by the New York Fire Department, he turned to the quartet’s cellist and said, “It was a knock-out performance.”

Glück Pipe Organs,
New York, New York

St. John’s of Lattingtown Episcopal Church,
Locust Valley, New York

An historic idyll

The hamlet of Lattingtown, a sub-enclave of Locust Valley on New York’s Long Island, is named for the locust trees that forest the terminal moraines left by receding glaciers. The land was purchased from the Algonquin-speaking tribe of the Lenape nation in 1667, and during the late nineteenth century, the region became known for its quiet serenity while enjoying proximity to New York City, where many of the area residents also kept city homes and offices for their business interests.

By the 1920s, society architects such as Delano and Aldrich; Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue; McKim, Mead, and White; Cass Gilbert; and Carrère and Hastings designed resplendent residences for privacy-seeking industrialists and financiers in the Glen Cove region, whose names may still be unfamiliar to most. The imposing estate houses were (and are) known by name rather than by street address, including attorney William Dameron Guthrie’s vast property, “Meudon,” named for Château de Meudon in the Parisian suburb where Marcel Dupré kept a house fitted up with a Mutin-Cavaillé-Coll organ.

In the bucolic Locust Valley–Glen Cove region, about a dozen houses in the “neighborhood” were furnished with pipe organs by the Aeolian Company, including the II/27 in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s “Laurelton Hall,” the IV/63 in Nicholas F. Brady’s “Inisfada,” and the colossal IV/107 in Frank W. Woolworth’s “Winfield Hall.” Yet it was the wife of sulfur baron Henry Devereux Whiton who is listed as the client for the II/13 Ernest M. Skinner organ of 1919 for their house “up the road” from St. John’s. It was this little organ, with roll-playing mechanism, which appears to have influenced the church’s choice of Skinner to build his Opus 447 when the church was reconfigured for its reopening in 1924. The church organ was a smaller affair of eleven ranks, built in Skinner’s Westfield shop. 

Neither of the small Skinner organs remains intact. Frieda Frasch Whiton divorced Henry in 1921, married Count David Augustus Constantini the following year, and upon the count’s death in 1937, married Baron Carl Gottlieb von Seidlitz, to whom she remained married until her death in 1951. The fate of the house organ appears lost to history.

The commission

Ten years ago, Eric Milnes, director of music, approached me about building a new organ for St. John’s, which I assumed would be a mechanical-action organ in historic style and temperament, as Mr. Milnes has earned an internationally celebrated reputation as a conductor and historical keyboard artist specializing in the historically informed performance of Baroque keyboard, instrumental, and choral music with period instruments. Yet to my delight, he envisioned a powerful, multifaceted, colorful adjunct to the Episcopal liturgy that could authentically interpret the concert repertoire. The use of electropneumatic action opened the door to a world of tonal possibilities in which the two of us could scratch our academic itches free from the strangulation of purist dogma. The challenge was not to acquiesce to bland “eclecticism,” but to devise an enchanting chameleon without spawning a generic creature devoid of character and personality.

The musical formula

The Latin multum in parvo, or “much in little,” often is used to assess the useful content-to-thickness ratio of short, highly informative books, whether technical or historical. It was co-opted by the speculative and operative arms of organbuilding to describe service-playing instruments of small scope and grand effect, most associated with English builders of the past 150 years, although the French have been parallel adepts. The criteria for this appellation remain nebulous, and the label has been adhered to organs of between 18 and 40 ranks, two or three manuals, French, English, or American, with mechanical or assisted action. 

In designing this 20-rank instrument for St. John’s, I chose to focus upon what the substantive literature demands of the organ. Thousands of American instruments have harbored lovely stops, but could never honor the wishes of the composers who wrote organ music. Since concert literature was written by church organists for the instruments they played in church, I always choose to work backwards from the score to create instruments with the required voices at the right pitches, properly grouped and usefully juxtaposed. Desirable elements in an organ of this limited size are an anchoring principal chorus, warmly and elegantly voiced with a clear, silvery mixture of sensible composition; a collection of flutes of diverse structure and material; a tierce combination for solo work; a pair of vibrant strings of authentically cutting, exceptional character; the three primary reed colors (Trumpet, Oboe, and Clarinet, the last of which must play in dialogue with the cornet); and a pedal division producing a very clean pitch line that can be heard moving clearly beneath and through the manual textures. No wasted space, no wasted metal.

By good fortune, the Skinner Salicional and Voix Céleste, as well as the Pedal 16′ Bourdon, survived the onslaught of the Orgelbewegung, so some heritage pipework, renamed, lives on in the organ. The new metal pipes are built of a spotted alloy of 50% tin (including the hefty resonators of the Swell 16′ Basset Horn). New timber pipes are poplar with walnut caps. Because this is a two-manual instrument, some solo stops are duplexed between the manuals, and some extension work is included. Of note are the variably scaled 16′ Pedal extension of the Skinner string and the 24-pipe downward extension of the Great 2′ Gemshorn as the Pedal 8′ Spitzflöte and 4′ Choral Bass. Although it is my policy to avoid unification of any manual rank at adjacent pitches, opting for a two-octave separation, the Chimney Flute appears twice in the Great department, charming at the unison, beguiling at the octave. The short-but-useful-compass 8′ Herald Trumpet is voiced on the same pressure as the rest of the organ. Its distinction comes from its scaling, shallot style, and voicing, its tone warmer and rounder than its name implies.

Expression: upstairs, downstairs

The Great and some of the Pedal fluework are unenclosed above the impost, and the remainder of the organ’s resources are under expression, including the Herald Trumpet and four of the five 16′ stops: the Violone, a downward extrapolation with a broadening scale of the 8′ Viole de Gambe, with Haskell re-entrant tubes; the Bourdon, extended from the 8′ Stopt Diapason; the Bombarde, an extension of the Trumpet; and the Basset Horn. This is accommodated by a two-story expression enclosure, with upper and lower banks of shutter blades. The knob engraved “Lower Shutters Off” disables and closes the shutters at the choir-loft level while permitting the entirety of the enclosed organ to speak through the controllable upper set behind the Great, using the nave’s ceiling as a sounding board. The Great 16′ Double Diapason is also enclosed, yet has no pipes of its own, being derived from the Swell 4′ Principal from C25 to G56, and the bass taken from the 16′ Bourdon/8′ Stopt Diapason unit. The addition to the ensemble is one of nobility and gravity without muddiness. The Pedal 16′ Subbass provides significant punch, never shared by, or extended from, its manual brethren.

The organ case

The remarkable oak casework was carved by William and Alexander Clow of Edinburgh to the designs of Sir Robert Stodart Lorimer, and was the gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Pierpont Morgan. The Clow brothers had completed the carved figures in the Chapel of the Knights of the Order of the Thistle at St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, in 1911 and were a perfect team to work on a small summer church of this stature. The organ case was part of a much larger decorative program by Sir Robert and financed by Morgan; the entirety of St. John’s is pavé with exuberant carving in this style. 

The case was altered to accommodate the Skinner instrument, and again in the 1970s. In the course of decades, carved panels were discarded, crockets cut down, and a brash horizontal trumpet stop installed. Carvings were desiccated and cracked, and the case had settled after structural elements were removed during the last campaign of alterations. Our mission was to structurally stabilize and restore the case to the spirit of the Skinner era, with new components respecting the aesthetic sensibility of Morgan’s gift. There could be no stylistic infelicities.

For the first time since the church was built, the organ chamber is thermally insulated, and the façade bears speaking pipes of the Great 8′ Open Diapason. The original façade was composed of dumb pipes without winded toeboards, so the new façade pipes are given breath through the back of the foot via a tube of pipe metal.

The console

The elaborately inlaid and carved keydesk was inspired by the South German rococo work of Joseph Gabler from the second quarter of the 18th century. The morphology is his, but the console is dressed in Tudor clothing to match the exceptional work of the Clow brothers. Linenfold panels surround the entire console, including the back, and the astonishingly detailed corbels that support the key bed are just as intricately carved on their inside surfaces as they are where visible. As with all of our consoles, contrasting species of wood are used for everything from “skunktailing” the key cheeks to differentiating toe studs by function. Keyboard compasses are 56/30, accommodating the majority of the repertoire, anthem accompaniments, and robust hymnody. All measurements and relationships comply with AGO standards, and the organ is tuned in equal temperament.

The organ was dedicated and blessed during the morning service on September 7, and the inaugural recital performed by Eric Milnes on September 28.

The family of artisans at Glück Pipe Organs is grateful to have been invited to design and build this jewel in a jewel box. We appreciate the trust of the parish and their patience during the decade of study, design, construction, and finishing. Our longstanding accomplices in engineering and craftsmanship—OSI, A. R. Schopp’s Sons, Peterson Electro-Musical Products, and Harris Precision Products—continue to work with the dedicated members of the Glück team: General Manager Albert Jensen-Moulton, Joseph DiSalle, Dominic Inferrera, Peter Jensen-Moulton, Daniel Perina, and Robert Rast.

—Sebastian M. Glück

President and Artistic & Tonal Director

For more information about Glück pipe organs, video presentations, compact discs, workshops, and lectures, please visit gluckpipeorgans.com. 

Photo credit: All photos by Albert Jensen-Moulton

Regarding Sebastian Glück’s Opus 18

Upon my return from conducting Bach at the Tage für Alte Musik early music festival in Regensburg, Germany, I made the decision about a new organ for St. John’s, where I have been director of music and organist for 34 years. My career outside of the church has resided mainly in the period-instrument realm, conducting productions of Monteverdi through Mozart, and performing on historical 17th- and 18th-century keyboards and modern replicas. It was perhaps a paradoxical realization, when imagining a dream instrument for my church, that I longed for the more eclectic instruments of my youth, when I was a student of Gerre Hancock, John Weaver, and Vernon de Tar. What would make that dream a reality would be an electropneumatic instrument through which I could luxuriate in the French and German Romantic legacies, the great post-Victorian Anglican tradition, and the magnificent repertoire that has followed.

Sebastian Glück’s tonal and architectural insights and Albert Jensen-Moulton’s technical capabilities combined to fully divine my desire to return to those musical roots, and to conceive a plan that would ultimately satisfy completely. Their ability to express poetically, as well as in succinct and accessible technical terms the mysteries of concept, design, construction, and installation made the leap from imagination to implementation feel attainable. They equipped me well with the descriptive tools to guide a searching congregation through the process with assurance and anticipatory exhilaration. Their excitement about a freshly conceived instrument, their commitment to historical fealty and tonal integrity, and their respect for the mission of music in worship make for a wonderfully responsive and interactive collaboration with the church musician and the worshipers. We at St. John’s felt shepherded and fully participatory at all stages of the process as our musical dream became the longed-for voice of praise in our parish.

St. John’s chancel is a marvel of intricately embellished woodcarving in a heritage edifice preserving the extravagant preferences enjoyed by the privileged of the Gilded Age. The organ case in particular is a splendor to behold, and required the most loving care in its conservation and adaptation to a new instrument. Sebastian Glück’s distinction in the field of architectural restoration was of no small interest to the stewards of St. John’s legacy. His workshop’s treatment of the organ case, and his design of a complementary, luxurious console, have brought us transcendent joy. Albert Jensen-Moulton’s exquisite lighting plan has revealed to us the grandeur of the reimagined organ case, and we believe that the organ had not been fully illuminated since the Skinner organ was installed almost 100 years ago. Every craftsman member of the firm brought uncommon care to protect and restore the beauty for all to appreciate, present and future.

Having just celebrated the dedication and blessing of the new organ at St. John’s, the glorious sounds (first heard at this occasion) have filled us with inspiration and delight. We perceive the individual character of each exquisitely voiced rank, the kaleidoscope of a multitude of ensembles, blended, rich, warm, full, and thrilling in the unique acoustic of the sanctuary. A twenty-rank organ, conceived, built, and voiced by the caring (and compulsive!) hands of master builders, has been richly appointed to express the enormous range of a broad and diverse repertoire. Our church has received the gifts of exhilaration, inspiration, wonder, and mystery in support of praise and prayer.

Our deepest gratitude is expressed to Sebastian, Albert, and all the artisans of Glück Pipe Organs.

—Eric Milnes
Director of Music & Organist

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The Centennial Sentinel
America’s heaviest president, William Howard Taft (cousin of Frank Taft, art director of the Aeolian Organ Company), was inaugurated on March 4, 1909. Apache Chief Geronimo died on February 17. Isaac Albéniz died on May 18, and organist Dudley Buck died on October 9. Giacomo Puccini was fifty-one years old, Claude Monet was sixty-nine, and Camille Saint-Saëns was seventy-four (he would live twelve more years).
Author Eudora Welty was born on April 13, and inventor of the electric guitar Leo Fender was born on August 10. George Gershwin, Louis Vierne, and Charles-Marie Widor still had twenty-eight years of life ahead of them—all three died in 1937. Gustav Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde, Richard Strauss wrote Elektra, and Will Hough and Frank Adams wrote I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. The City of San Francisco banned the residential ownership of cows.1
And on December 1, 1909, the first edition of The Diapason took newsstands by storm. The lead article praised the new Casavant organ at Northwestern University: “Canada has shown that if it is in any way behind United States enterprise, it is not in the field of organbuilding. . . . Casavant Brothers claim the proud distinction of never having built an unsatisfactory instrument in the fifty years they been in business.” (Wow! I wonder what Ernest Skinner thought when he read that! “Dear Editor: Please cancel my subscription.”)
Twelve hundred issues. The October 2009 issue is on my desk. The masthead proclaims “One Hundredth Year: No. 10, Whole No. 1199.” The heritage of the pipe organ covered in the magazine’s early days is the stuff of today’s legends. On page twelve, I read snips from seventy-five years ago (1934) under the heading “Looking Back.” The death of Edwin Lemare is mentioned, as is the work of T. Tertius Noble, David McK. Williams, and Pietro Yon. I suppose one had to choose between Sunday Evensongs at St. Thomas’s, St. Bartholomew’s, and St. Patrick’s, those great New York churches where Noble, Williams, and Yon held forth.
After church you could have dinner at Alexandra (8 East 49th Street: serves a champagne cocktail with dinner; price $1.10 to $1.50), something a little fancier at The Tapestry Room (Ritz Tower, Park Avenue at 57th St.: a small, intimate, charming place to lunch or dine; dinner $2.50 to $3), or go whole hog at Iridium Room and Maisonette Russe (Hotel St. Regis, Fifth Ave. at 55th St.: home of “High-class entertainment”; dinner $3.50 to $4).2 Note the convenience of my travelogue—all three churches and all three restaurants are within five blocks of each other. In three weeks you could attend each service and eat at each restaurant. You’d be out less than ten dollars a head, not counting what you put in the offering plate.
What about the organbuilders? It seemed that all important American organbuilders had showrooms in midtown Manhattan. Leave St. Thomas Church and find the Skinner Organ Company showroom across the street (Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street). One block north was Welte-Mignon (Fifth and 54th, across from the Hotel St. Regis). The Aeolian Organ Company had three Fifth Avenue addresses (at 54th across from Welte, at 42nd, and at 34th), which allowed easy access to the famed Aeolian Music Library. Aeolian patrons could borrow rolls from the library—some organ contracts included extensive “complimentary” library rights. It made sense to have a showroom every twelve blocks.
The Estey showroom was at Fifth and 51st, and the Los Angeles Art Organ Company was at Fifth and 34th, the same intersection as the southernmost Aeolian showroom. M. P. Möller was a block east in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at 49th and Park, no coincidence as there was a Möller theatre organ in the hotel’s ballroom. Each of these showrooms had at least one organ.3 You could walk past all these addresses in half an hour.

A trusted companion
The Diapason has chronicled a very active century. Its history spans almost the entire lives of both E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) and Virgil Fox (1912–1980), who together personified the two sides of a great twentieth-century debate. It includes the last fifteen years of Hook & Hastings, almost all of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner, the last eighty-three years of Möller, the entire history of the Organ Historical Society (founded 1956), and all but thirteen years of the American Guild of Organists (founded 1896).
In the last century, the American pipe organ industry has gone from building more than 2,000 new instruments a year to fewer than one hundred. Attendance at Christian churches has plummeted.
E. Power Biggs spoke of the time when more Americans attended performances of live classical music than professional sports events. Today the pressure for ice time has decimated youth choir programs, as it seems more important to many families (at least here in New England) that the kids be playing hockey at six on a Sunday morning rather than getting ready for choir practice. Non-profit organizations are struggling to survive. Countless technologies have been created and evolved to distract the public from the fine arts. And technologies have been created and evolved to supplant the pipe organ. It’s a pretty grim picture. So what’s to celebrate?

A mid-century renaissance
I have written frequently about the Revival of Classic Principles of Organbuilding (caps intended), which roughly parallels my lifetime. The year of my birth saw the founding of the Organ Historical Society and the death of G. Donald Harrison. The Flentrop organ in the museum formerly known as Busch-Reisinger at Harvard was installed in 1958. At the same time, Charles Fisk was working with Walter Holtkamp as Holtkamp installed an organ with a Rückpositif (on a pitman windchest) at the school formerly known as the Episcopal Theological School in Harvard Square. Since then C. B. Fisk, Inc. has completed more than 130 organs, many of them monumental in scale. Sounds like a lot for a half-century of work, but it pales in comparison to Möller producing five or six thousand organs in fifty years earlier in the twentieth century. (Fisk has built their organs with around twenty-five workers—Möller had hundreds.)
By the time I caught the pipe organ bug, the revival was in full swing. Growing up in Boston, I heard E. Power Biggs play many times, most often at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. I was surrounded by the new organs of Fisk, Noack, Bozeman, and Andover. There were new tracker organs by foreign builders such as Casavant, Flentrop, and Frobenius. And of course there was the nineteenth-century heritage of organs by Hook, Hutchings, and Johnson, among many others. I was mentored and encouraged by the people who built, played, and envisioned all those instruments. There was one fascinating restaurant dinner (at The Würsthaus, formerly in Harvard Square) at which it was noted that nine of the people present were organists at churches with new Fisk organs. My lessons and all my after-school practice were on Fisk organs, and my first real job as a church organist placed me at a three-manual Hook built in 1860.
Ironically, it wasn’t until I was a student at Oberlin that I played regularly on an organ with electro-pneumatic action (a Holtkamp practice organ and the Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, since replaced by Fisk). But at Oberlin I was exposed to the international movement of early performance practice that was breathing new life into the music of J. S. Bach and his seemingly countless predecessors. We practiced scales using the middle three fingers of each hand. We limited registration changes to follow the major architecture of the music. We didn’t think twice about the absence of expression shutters. And we played the masterworks of Romantic organ music on unequal temperaments.

May the force be with you
I’ve alluded to the “Organ Wars” of the twentieth century. Vitriol was commonplace in the pages of The Diapason and The American Organist (the magazine formerly known as Music/AGO—we all said Music-A-go-go). The battle could roughly be described as “Biggs vs. Fox,” or the light side versus the dark side—and your version of chiaroscuro depended on your point of view. On one side were those musicians devoted to the new wave of old styles (tracker actions, early fingerings, crystal-clear registrations); on the other, the “comfortable” world of electro-pneumatic organs (multiple expression boxes, sliding thumbs soloing internal melodies). What one called bright, clear, and cheerful, the other called shrill and screechy. What one called smooth and expressive, the other called mushy and lugubrious. Cross-the-aisle name-calling was commonplace and nasty.
But it was a true renaissance. The entire industry was being renewed. Every tenet and tenon, every principle and Principal was being examined and questioned. We worked hard to develop historic justification for everything we did. We relearned the value of craftsmanship over mass production. We programmed recitals for scholarship over musicianship. And we installed pipe organs for the sake of the music rather than the liturgy.
As a large tracker organ with a classic French specification was installed in an important Episcopal church, the organ committee wrote that their study convinced them that the Classic French organ was ideal for the leadership of Anglican worship. It reminds me of a parishioner in my home parish upset over the introduction of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, who stated, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!”4
As we passed from the 1980s into the ’90s and watched attendance at organ recitals dwindle, it seemed to me that organists and organbuilders were finding themselves in ivory towers. I believe it was by default rather than intention. Our pride in our newly acquired corporate knowledge blinded us to the pleasures of our audiences: “You will sit there and listen to this historically informed recital played correctly on this historically informed instrument. You will not applaud unless or until I say so. It is through my enlightenment that you will enjoy yourself. Y’all come back now . . .”
This idea developed in my mind over several years, and I knew I was treading on dangerous ice, or was it thin ground? In essence, I was criticizing three decades of the thought and work of every one of my colleagues, not to mention myself. With care I began expressing it. I would lob it in the air between sips of brandy at the end of a long lubricated dinner. I would share it with those I was sure would agree. I would share it with people I supposed I could sway. Each time I knew I was expressing something controversial. When I realized that no one was disagreeing with me I grew bolder, sharing my thoughts and watching eyebrows arch.
A performance is enhanced by the historical awareness of the performer, just as we understand more about a Renaissance painting valued at ten million dollars when we realize that the artist died penniless and destitute. But it’s the audience’s response that matters the most, as it is the audience’s response that creates the ten-million-dollar value of that old picture. We rely on a large and appreciative audience to inspire our expression, to ask us back to play again, to fund the frightfully expensive organs on which we rely, and yes, even to appreciate our unusual skills. Our audiences are thrilled when we give them music they know and love, and tunes they can whistle and sing as they make their way home, as well as music that will expand and inspire them.
Of close to 1,100 violins built by Antonio Stradivari, some 650 are still in use, inspiring modern players and thrilling modern audiences. But not one is in original condition. Each has been given a new stronger neck, each has modern strings, each has been boosted to sound forth in the cavernous rooms in which we listen to music, and not one plays at its original pitch. Why should organists and organbuilders limit themselves to sounds of the past, sounds that are curious to the ears of modern listeners, ears that are jaded by stadium roars, jet airplanes, steel wheels on steel rails, and honking horns on Fifth Avenue?5
I was encouraged to find support for this thought in an editorial letter published in The Diapason:

Dear Sir: After many years’ association with the trade, the writer is inclined to the belief that pipe organ manufacturers, as a class, err in taking themselves seriously.
To listen to the tales of our adventures in this field of labor one might easily be convinced that all the knowledge of the past ages had become focalized upon our respective intellects, and that upon our demise the building of organs would become one of the lost arts . . .
Now, it is because of this, and the unresponsive attitude naturally following, that the commercial status of the trade as a whole is not resting upon a higher level. We have managed badly in many respects. Each has assumed that he is the only person in the world who can build a perfectly good pipe organ. We have ‘knocked’ each other, and have at least permitted our representatives to educate the public in the gentle art of ‘knocking.’ [The public’s] reaction we refuse to recognize as our own . . .
Every organbuilder knows that, compared with other industries of like responsibilities and risks, this is about the least remunerative. Started in a monastery, a work of love and devotion, it has never risen above that level sufficiently to classify the owners of factories as ‘capitalists.’
We really desire a remedy, and to most of us the nature of the remedy is obvious, but up to this time not one of us has taken the initiative. . . . The other builder, whose work we decry, can build a good organ—he probably does—and he would gladly build a better one if the conditions imposed by committees whom you have helped educate to demand almost impossible things did not prevent.
The trade CAN unite to PERMIT clean, remunerative business. No one should desire a union for the enforcement of anything.
Let’s get together. Who will make the first move?

This sounds like a time when the organ world started to come to its senses. It sounds like about 1988, when the Organ Historical Society held its convention in San Francisco and featured electro-pneumatic organs by Murray Harris, Austin, and Skinner (but no cows). Thomas Hazleton played music of Tchaikovsky, Guilmant, Howells, and William Walton on the four-manual Skinner at Trinity Episcopal Church, and the OHS presented the church with a plaque honoring the historic organ. A cross-section diagram of a complex electro-pneumatic action was published on the front cover of the convention booklet, taking the place of the ubiquitous ten-stop tracker organ.
It sounds like about 1992, when the monumental Fisk organ was inaugurated at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, an instrument universally celebrated as a successful orchestral powerhouse in spite of its tracker action.
It sounds like about 2004, when the indescribable masterpiece of commercial public organs in the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia (now Macy’s) was regaining its deserved status as one of the great organs in the world, even though it has eleven expression pedals.
Wrong. This passionate plea for honesty and unanimity in the organ business was published on the front page of the seventh issue of The Diapason, June 1, 1910, the same issue that announced that the annual meeting of the American Guild of Organists elected Frank Wright as Warden, William C. Carl as Sub-Warden, and Clarence Dickinson as one of the councilors. In that issue, the AGO membership committee reported 1,000 members, and the treasurer reported a balance of $551.87.
The year The Diapason first published an editorial calling on organbuilders to lighten up was the year the Boy Scouts of America was founded, when the U.S. Senate granted former President Teddy Roosevelt a pension of $10,000, when the Union of South Africa was founded as a union within the British Empire, when German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich announced a definitive cure for syphilis, and when Alva Fisher patented the first complete, self-contained electric washing machine.

Back toward the middle
Shortly after I graduated from Oberlin, I was involved in releathering a large organ by Aeolian-Skinner. I was intrigued by its expressive capabilities, but didn’t understand them and certainly didn’t know how to use them. And shortly after that graduation, I was involved in the installation of a large Flentrop organ—a glorious looking thing with polished façade, gilded pipe shades, and of course mechanical action. A shipping container (arriving in Cleveland on a Greek ship delightfully named Calliope) was delivered to the church. It was a full day’s work to unload the container, each piece of the organ being carried up the large stone stair from the street, and I’ll not forget the significance of noticing that the hundredth or so load I carried was a stack of Swell shutters. A few trips later, a box of pipes labeled Celeste.
Thirty years later, I’ve realized that the real reason we worked so hard not to use our thumbs when we played was that we’d need them to push pistons.
Let’s celebrate good organs. Good organs are machines that have wind supplies and beautifully voiced pipes. They have valves that allow musicians to run air through those beautifully voiced pipes. I don’t care if those valves are opened by levers, magnets, pneumatic motors, or sheer will power. What goes around comes around. Never throw out a necktie.
What will they write on the first page of issue 2400 of The Diapason, December 2109? If there are pipe organs to celebrate in 2109, it will be because we got it right today.