In the wind . . .

Where’s the fire?

Throughout my organbuilding career, I’ve owned and driven large vehicles. There was an interval when I tried a mini-van. It was a nice car with lots of space inside, but it was no truck. It only lasted 185,000 miles, by far the least of any car I’ve had. The transmission couldn’t take the loads.

The current job is a black Chevy Suburban—think presidential motorcades (Wendy thinks Tony Soprano!). It has a big V-8 engine and a 31-gallon gas tank. It’s a 5,800-pound carbon footprint. I know it’s environmentally irresponsible, but I justify it because of my work as an organbuilder. As often as not, the car is loaded with ranks of organ pipes, a reservoir or two, a windchest, or at least, five or six boxes and bags of tools and supplies. It’s also great for taking organ committees on field trips to visit our past projects. Three ranks of reeds or a six-member committee takes the GVW up to nearly 7,000 pounds!

Even though the car is big and heavy, that engine has power to spare. Trusting that there are not many state troopers reading The Diapason, I confess that I routinely drive close to 80 miles-per-hour. I know I’ve exceeded 90 going downhill and not paying attention, but I’ve never “maxed out” the speed. I’m pretty sure I could pass 95, maybe even 100—but I doubt I’ll
ever try.

How fast is too fast? 

When I joined the Organ Clearing House, I knew I was taking on a travel schedule that would preclude my work as a church musician, so after thirty years on the bench, I hung up my cassock. It’s been fifteen years since I played for worship. Of course I miss it, and I may go back to it someday. But in the meantime, it’s been fun to mix having free weekends (!) with hearing other people play for worship. 

The huge repertory of music for the organ is chock-full of fast passages, and any good organist is capable of sending salvos of notes across a room faster than a speeding bullet. And good bel canto singers can dazzle listeners with fast passages. But the ordinary person in the pew is comfortable at a slower pace. Though I’m not a trained singer, I think I do pretty well, and I’m certainly familiar with most of the hymns we sing, but still I find that sometimes I have trouble keeping up. And I’m uncomfortable when I’m not given enough time to breathe. It’s easy to tell if an organist is paying attention to the words, even singing them as he plays, because he needs time to breathe also.

How loud is too loud?

Several years ago, Wendy and I attended a recital by a visiting European organist played on the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine’s City Hall. He came out on the stage to the customary applause. When he got to the bench, the audience went silent and the lights dimmed. The first chord he played was so furiously loud that we jumped, and I set my teeth against liking the rest of the program, which predictably continued in bombastic style.

My Facebook page regularly lights up with posts from organists who indignantly report to the community that a parishioner had the audacity to complain that “the organ was too loud.” No doubt, some are meant in fun—one exchange included the quip, “if they don’t like it, they can sit in the hallway.” Surely, no organist would say something like that in earnest. Would they? But I often read similar comments that I know are heartfelt.

No other musical instrument can approach the dynamic range of the pipe organ. Organbuilders tell an old joke: 

The voicer, seated at the console, cups his hands to his mouth and yells to his assistant in the distant chamber, 

“Is the Aeoline playing?” 

Barely audible, from the distance, “Yes.” 

“Make it softer!”

The Aeoline in the Echo is barely audible; with the box closed it’s but a heavenly whisper. And the full organ is mighty roar—a hurricane of sound to be used with discretion.

Of the hundreds (thousands?) of pipe organs I’ve heard and played, I’ve experienced only one that was so much too loud that there was no single stop soft enough to accompany a solo singer. There are many organs that are infamous for their power, but even they can be used with discretion. As organists, we have become inured to the mighty tones of our instruments. We sit on the bench, alone in a dark church, challenging the muses to our hearts’ content, in the thrall of the power of the tone. For many congregants, not so much.

I have to admit that when sitting in the pews, I often feel that the organ is too loud. I wonder how many of you would simmer down your registrations if you had the chance to sing to someone else’s hymn playing a couple times a year. Besides, if you’re always playing “with the pedal to the metal,” you’re making organbuilders look bad. We’re supposed to provide instruments that can challenge the Gates of Hell once in a while, but thank heaven we’re not always facing the Gates of Hell.

What’s your job?

I often ride the train between Boston and New York. It’s a beautiful route along the Connecticut coast, passing tidal inlets loaded with osprey, egrets, and herons. There’s a wonderful sensation as those trains leave a station. I’m daydreaming, gazing out the window, and suddenly realize the train is moving. There’s no sound of locomotion, or clanking as links between cars take up slack. My imagination goes next to the expert bus driver and his ability to operate the vehicle smoothly. His foot on the brake pedal is feather-light, his speed through turns is just right, and his passengers are free to enjoy the ride, knowing that they’ll arrive safely and promptly at their destination.

I know, I know, that may be a fictional driver. The New York to Boston route is crowded with budget bus companies that have terrible safety records. That’s why I take the train. But I like the image and compare it to the “hymn driver” at church. He goes fast enough that the words make sense, but not so fast that the average congregant can’t keep up.

When an organist is really focused on the words of a hymn, both pace and registration follow. The other night, Wendy and I attended a service of Evensong, and the devil made an appearance in a middle verse. The organist led us to safety, acknowledging Satan’s presence with a growling registration for those few bars, and returning to something more soothing. There’s the majesty of the organ, painting pictures with tone color.

A happy little cloud

Bob Ross (1942–95) was a teacher of painting who famously hosted a series on PBS called The Joy of Painting. He had a goofy way of chattering as he painted that I think was intended to make aspiring painters feel at ease. Make a little mistake, a slip of the brush? No problem, make it into a bird. It’s a bird now! His brush strokes were quick and easy, and he often suggested dropping in “a happy little cloud.”

The pipe organ has a greater expressive range and wider variety of tone colors than any other musical instrument, and the expressive musician uses those characteristics like a brilliant painter with a lovely palette of colors. Think of the landscapes of Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709) with those magical patches of sunlight glowing through the trees. How did he do that? I think he always included trees just so he could do his sunlight trick. I love it when the organist gives me glimpses of sunlight through the trees, or happy little clouds. If you play through all the verses of a hymn on full registrations, loud, louder, loudest, you deprive the listener/singer of the beauty of it all.

You can use your palette like sunshine and clouds, and you can use it like an arsenal. The arsenal is fine with me at the right moment—that powerful Tuba giving the melody in the tenor is an awesome effect, but I don’t want to hear it in every hymn. 

Many of us are inclined to characterize the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument, as if it is common with the piano or harpsichord. In the matter of tone production, the organ has more in common with a trumpet or flute, the piano has more in common with a xylophone, and the harpsichord has more in common with a guitar. I consider the organ first to be a wind instrument. Making organ music happen is about managing air. This, simply, is why the organ is ideal for leadership of our singing—both the organ and the human voice are wind instruments. We circulate the same air molecules through the organ’s pipes and through our voices in sympathy. We’re all in it together.

You can’t play a tune on a Mixture.

Since the revival of classic organbuilding in the mid-twentieth century, many of us have had love affairs with Mixtures. They provide brilliance and clarity in polyphonic music, and their harmonic structures blend wonderfully with choruses of stops. I say this assuming that the Mixtures on your organ are well planned, well voiced, and balanced with the other voices. In my days as a student, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had an aging Austin organ. Originally, there was no Mixture, and one had been added not long before I got there. But even in my brash youth, steeped in the ethic of Northern European classic organs, I couldn’t bear to use the thing. It was just too loud, and had nothing to do with the rest of the Great division.

Mixtures in pipe organs are harmonic tricks. The typical Great Mixture comprises four ranks, meaning four pipes are speaking on every note. My organbuilding colleagues know that I’m leaving out a lot of exceptions and variations as I describe Mixtures generally, but it’s enough to say here that those four pipes each speak a different harmonic, and the harmonics “break back” each octave. It’s formulaic. At low C, those four pipes typically speak at 11⁄3′–1′–2⁄3′–1⁄2′, which are logical additions to “Principals, 8-4-2”. At tenor C, they jump back a notch: 2′–11⁄3′ –1′–2⁄3′. The 22⁄3′ pitch enters at middle C; 4′ pitch enters at “soprano” C. In the top octave, some builders omit the scratchy 51⁄3′ and jump directly to 8′.

Follow me carefully. A 4′ pitch at soprano C is the same note as 1′ pitch at tenor C. A 11⁄3′ pitch at low C is the same note as 51⁄3′ pitch at middle C. Think this through, and you’ll realize that an ordinary Mixture has pipes at soprano C that speak the same, and even lower pitches than at tenor C. Sounds like a muddle, doesn’t it? Well friends, use it wrong, and it is a muddle. Just for fun, play the melody of a hymn on Mixture alone, especially a hymn whose tune passes out of the middle octave past soprano C. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Now play all four voices of the same hymn on Mixture alone. Wacky. Absolutely wacky. Imagine that as a tool for teaching a tune to someone for the first time. Now play the same hymn on 8′ Principal alone. That’s better. What’s my point? Be sure that every hymn registration includes enough fundamental tone that the tune is easily recognizable when playing four-part harmony.

If you’re playing on a large organ, you likely have more than one Mixture on each keyboard. Listen to each one carefully, octave by octave, and try to analyze what pitches are actually playing? Use that to inform how you use them. A Principal Chorus with Mixture(s) is ideal for playing a fugue, because the graduated harmonics of the Mixture help project inner and lower voices of the polyphony. Mixtures are great with Reed Choruses, because they emphasize the rich harmonics of the Reeds. But Mixtures are like icing on a cake—they enhance, even decorate, but substance is in the batter. All icing, and your teeth will hurt. Do I sound like the parishioner who says the organ is shrill? Maybe it is. The math says so.

It’s all in the numbers.

Here are some pipe organ facts for nothing. The reason reeds sound more brilliant than flutes or Principals is that reeds have richer development of overtones—those secondary pitches present in every musical tone. 

Pythagoras (571 BC–495 BC) was the first to understand overtones. He proved that they follow the simple formula of 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, etc. That simple progression was later defined by Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170–c. 1250) as the Fibonacci series. Google that, and you’ll find terrific articles that show how the Fibonacci series describes the shell of the Nautilus, pineapples, artichokes, pine cones, and magically, the Romanesco broccoli, which I think is one of the most beautiful and delectable vegetables.

Break a head of Romanesco apart into florets, toss them in olive oil and salt, and roast them at 400° for 40 minutes (or less if want to keep some “tooth”), maybe sprinkle a little lemon juice and parmesan.

What does all this have to do with playing hymns? Pythagoras’s overtones can be defined this way. Play low C on an 8-foot organ stop, and you’ll be producing the following pitches: 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′, 11⁄3′, 11⁄7′. Recognize those? It’s nothing but a list of the most common pipe organ pitches. Accident? I don’t think so. You may find these hard to hear, and as a practical matter, lots of them are inaudible, but they’re there. 

I demonstrate this at the console using voices like Oboes or Clarinets. They have especially rich “second overtones,” which is the equivalent of 22⁄3′ pitch. Play and hold tenor C on the Clarinet. Then, on another keyboard, tap third G on an 8′ stop. (That’s the equivalent of 22⁄3′ pitch at tenor C.) That should enhance your ability to hear the 22⁄3′ pitch present in the Clarinet note. Move around to different notes, and you’ll likely hear that overtone a little better in some notes than others. Then, play and hold tenor C on the Clarinet, and on your second keyboard, tap fourth E of an 8′ stop. That’s the equivalent of 13⁄5′ pitch, and you should be able to hear the Tierce independently in the Clarinet note.

Have you ever wondered why a Nazard and a Tierce sound so good with a Clarinet or Cromorne? It’s because the Clarinet and Cromorne (those two stops are very similar in construction) both have prominent 22⁄3′ and 13⁄5′ overtones. That explains the origin of the French registrations Cornet (8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′), and by extension, Grand Jeu (Trompette 8′, Octave 4′, Cornet). Accident? I don’t think so.

Because of this, it’s often easiest to tune high mutations to reeds, assuming that the reeds are trustworthy, because the harmonics of the reed pipes are so clear. Draw 4′ Principal and 13⁄5′ Tierce, and play up the top octaves of the keyboard. Substitute a Clarinet for the Principal, and do it again. I’ll bet a tuning fork that you hear the pitch of the Tierce more clearly with the Clarinet.

Why is a Rohrflute brighter than a Gedeckt? Because the hole in the cap with the little chimney emphasizes the second harmonic, which is 22⁄3′ pitch. 

What does all this have to do with playing hymns? It tells us that higher-pitched stops are secondary to fundamental pitch. What is fundamental pitch? Eight-foot tone. It’s that simple. If your hymn registrations favor higher pitches, you’re back at that exercise of playing a hymn on a Mixture alone. Awareness of all this is at the heart of good pipe organ registration.

You can’t play a tune on a Mixture. It’s confusing to the singer, especially if that singer doesn’t know the tune. Suggestion? Introduce the tune on a simpler registration, and bring in bigger sounds as appropriate. If you have a variety of lovely solo sounds, use them. Play one verse on Trumpets alone. Play another with Principals but no Mixtures. Just be sure they can hear the tune. And be sure that your choice of sounds supports the words. There’s more to hymn playing than a blur of harmonics.

Gentle on the accelerator and the brakes, paint beautiful colorful pictures, “ . . . and the wheels on the bus go round and round . . .”

Once you’ve seen the best, there’s only the rest.

So many things, so many concepts, so many ideas today are labeled “the best” or “the greatest” that I sometimes wonder if we can still recognize real greatness. We speak in superlatives as if there was no other class. “This is the best cheese I’ve ever tasted,” lasts only until tomorrow when I get lucky enough to have a bite of something different. “Oh my God, it was the best movie ever.” And get the emphasis of punctuation: “Oh. My. God.” You set yourself up as the authority, as if no other opinion has value. Invoking the Deity is a tactic for substantiating overstatement.

“Of all time” is a common lead-in for overstatement. “He was the best quarterback of all time.” “She was the best actress of all time.” Maybe, but most of the time, I doubt it. You could make a perfectly legitimate claim a little less sweeping by starting with “I think,” as in, “I think that was a great play.” Fair enough; I’ll buy that. I think it was a great play, too, but neither of us are qualified to continue with “of all time.” “I really enjoyed that play,” isn’t forceful enough, somehow.

The search for “the best” or “the most” is a universal mantra, accompanied on television by triumphant music and the forceful voice of a male announcer. Anthony Bourdain travels the world looking for the most unusual meal. ABC Sports searches for the most dangerous ski slope. Sports Illustrated searches for the best swimsuit model. Stand them next to each other and they all look just fine.

Having worked as an organbuilder and an organist for more than forty years, I understand how people unfamiliar with the field are surprised and even baffled when they encounter it. The third or fourth exchange when you’re meeting someone for the first time at a party is “What do you do for a living?” “I’m a pipe organ builder.” “A pipe organ builder? I didn’t know there were any of you left.”

Once we get past a few pleasantries, an inevitable question is, “What’s the best organ in the world?” That’s a better question than asking after the biggest organ, which is easier to answer but usually leads to sniggering.

§

Wow! What is the best organ in the world? How in the world can I answer? Is it up to me to judge? What are the criteria? What are the variables? Can I break it into subsets like the best German organ, the best French organ, the best tracker-action organ? Do we need to know the best, or can we be happy with a list of “great” organs?

To be the best, must it be the biggest?

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ is the largest “fully operational” organ in the world. According to the website of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, it has six manuals, 463 ranks, and 28,677 pipes. This compares to the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City (not fully operational, but restoration work is under way), with seven manuals, 449 ranks, and 33,114 pipes. So if you’re counting by ranks, Wanamaker wins by 14, and if you’re counting by pipes, Atlantic City wins by 4,437 (the size of an organ with more than 70 ranks!).

When I was a naïve and budding organ-guy, deep in the thrall of the tracker-action revival in Boston in the 1970s, I knew vaguely about the Wanamaker organ, touted as the largest organ in the world. I understood that it was in poor condition—that a lot of it was unplayable. Hmmph, I thought in my infancy. What can being the largest have to do with being any good? It would be years before I actually saw, heard, and experienced the Wanamaker. By the time I made its acquaintance, enormous effort had been put toward bringing that massive instrument into good condition. And now I marvel at its artistic content every time I visit, which is ever more often.

I don’t know if it’s the best, but it sure is wonderful. A tour with curator Curt Mangel is a privileged walk through countless rooms crammed with pipes. Any tuner would quail at the parades of reeds and dozens of pairs of celestes. What a responsibility. And to witness Grand Court Organist Peter Richard Conte doing his thing (you really have to see it to believe what you’re hearing) is to witness a marriage of man and machine unparalleled in the human experience. Oops, I guess unparalleled is a superlative.

…Oldest?

Am I up to date? Is the little abbey organ built around 1390 in Sion, Switzerland, really the oldest in the world? E. Power Biggs taught me that with his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. I still have those bold tones and archaic tuning in my ears. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) wrote The Canterbury Tales around 1390. In one of those delightful narratives, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the main character was

A widow, poor and somewhat advanced in years, [who] dwelt once in a little cottage . . . By managing carefully what God sent, she provided for herself and her three daughters . . . her only treatment was a temperate diet, with exercise and heart’s content. The gout never kept her from dancing, nor did the apoplexy bother her head . . . She had a yard enclosed all around with sticks and a dry ditch, and in it she had a cock called Chanticleer. In all the land there was no match for his crowing; his voice was merrier than the merry organ that goes in the church on mass-days . . . *

Remember the wonderful carol with the refrain “O the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer, the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the Kwah!” Chaucer must have been referring to contemporary British organs, so we can assume a burgeoning pipe organ industry as Europe shook itself free of the Dark Ages. An organ built in 1390 that we can still play today? What a fabulous icon of human history. It has been rebuilt and expanded several times—its history seems to read “every hundred years or so, whether it needs it or not . . . ” What a treat to play on a musical instrument that’s 624 years old! Who cares if it’s any good?

…Most majestic?

One of the most familiar images of the pipe organ world is the lion-topped façade of the 1738 organ built by Christian Müller in St. Bavo Church in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The top of the case is nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the church, and the sounds of the organ are as vital, energetic, and expressive as any modern instrument. There’s a legend saying that Mozart played on this organ, and there are dozens of modern recordings available. The instrument is the centerpiece of the International Summer Academy for Organists, founded in 1955, and continuing today as a seminal educational experience for hundreds of musicians.

With just over 5,000 pipes, the Haarlem organ must have been one of the largest in the world when it was built, but today it represents only the difference in size between the Wanamaker and Atlantic City organs!

Studying the intricate details of the design and construction of this organ, it’s hard to believe that such a thing could have been built using available technology from the early eighteenth century. Think of the state of high culture in America at that time—what the fanciest colonial architecture was like. This organ is high on the list of doozies in the organ world. Does that make it best?

…Most influential?

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll completed the rebuilding and expansion of the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris in 1862. With five manuals and a hundred stops it was one of the largest organs in the world at that time. And with its myriad complex mechanical innovations, it was an eloquent statement of technology of the day. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré combined their careers to serve this church for 101 years. The organ alone as a mechanical entity must be considered among the most elegant, expressive, and fiery instruments ever built. But when combined with its illustrious players—including present organists Daniel Roth and Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin—it’s hard to imagine another church balcony that has housed and launched more extraordinary music. 

Widor (1844–1937) was born to a family of organbuilders. Cavaillé-Coll was a family friend who arranged for Widor to study with Jacques Nicolas Lemmens in Brussels. How many of us have played Lemmens’ Fanfare how many times? Maybe it’s unfair to use one piece to stand for a musician’s life work, but it’s a long way in sophistication from that Fanfare to Widor’s Symphonie Gothique or Symphonie Romane. Along with his organ symphonies, Widor produced dozens of orchestral works including symphonies and piano concertos, chamber music, piano music, and choral works. He was a prolific teacher whose students included Charles Tournemire, Louis Vierne, Darius Milhaud, and Alexander Schreiner. Widor’s lifelong relationship with the St. Sulpice organ must be one of the most important between musician and instrument in the history of music. 

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) was also deeply influenced by Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece, and how many modern organists still living can claim to be his students and therefore students of that organ, whether in private lessons or master class. He died when I was in high school, and I never met him or heard him play. But I know he taught Jehan and Marie-Claire Alain, Jeanne Demessieux, Jean Guillou, Jean Langlais, and Olivier Messiaen. His weekly organ improvisations were legendary, raising the church of St. Sulpice to the level of organists’ pilgrimage—a tradition that remains more than forty years after his death. To this day, a knowing worshipper can quickly pick out the visiting organists, quivering and weeping in their seats.

…Most melodious?

Charles Brenton Fisk, aka Charlie, was a pioneer in the mid-twentieth century renaissance of classical styles of organ building. I was fortunate as a teenager growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, to live within two blocks in opposite directions of two new Fisk organs. And I was fortunate to know Charlie at least a little. Charlie Fisk’s organs are lively and interesting. Many are controversial, especially because of their sonic power. His thrilling Opus 82, installed in Christ United Methodist Church in Greensborough, North Carolina, must be one of the most powerful organs ever built, stop-for-stop.

Fisk’s Opus 55 is a modest three-manual organ of twenty-nine stops, built in 1971. It has a lovely case that includes architectural elements from a much older case by Boston organbuilder Thomas Appleton. It’s housed in a stately 1806 building in Boston’s West End. While its size, scope, and surroundings are nice enough, it would be an unremarkable organ except that it’s widely considered to be one of the finest organs in the world. Its solo voices and choruses combine proud fundamental tone with limpid harmonic structure to produce strikingly beautiful organ tone. 

Yuko Hayashi, the brilliant twentieth-century teacher of hundreds of important modern organists, became organist at Old West in 1973, at the suggestion of Charles Fisk. Yuko had been teaching organ at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1960 and was well known for her lyrical playing. Shortly after she started playing there, she brought the NEC organ class there for lessons, and from then until her retirement in 2001 many hundreds of our finest organists studied with Yuko on the organ at Old West Church. Since it was built, it has been one of the most heavily used organs in the country. Yuko once told me she believed that the organ sounded better the more it was played—that the passage of air through the pipes makes the pipes sound better. How’s that for spiritual?

…Most incensed?

According to Google Maps, the Church of the Advent in Boston is six-tenths of a mile from Old West Church. The Aeolian-Skinner organ at Church of the Advent, a product of the firm’s G. Donald Harrison era, is just as modest and ordinary on paper as the Fisk at Old West. It has fifty-seven stops on three manuals, and is installed in a chamber above the chancel that also speaks into the nave. Modest and ordinary, maybe, but there’s just something about it. Worshipping there with the inspired musical leadership that has always been a hallmark of the place is a Magical Mystery Tour. It would be a challenge to find another organ of this scale that could equal the seamless crescendos and decrescendos that accompany the singing of the choir. It would be a challenge to find another organ of this scale that could play so much of the organ repertory so effectively. In the intense and incensed smoke-filled room that is the Advent’s sanctuary, the architectural borders between instrument and building are as elusive as the musical borders between organ pipes and acoustics. It’s otherworldly.

If Old West Church is a mecca for beautiful organ tone, Church of the Advent is a mecca for the effect of a pipe organ on deep and sophisticated liturgically grounded worship. And you can walk from one to the other in just fifteen minutes.

…Most seminal?

I’m stuck in a rut along the Charles River in Boston, which is just a long block from Church of the Advent. (By the way, the home of Joseph Whiteford, president of Aeolian-Skinner from 1956 until 1965, faces the Charles from one of the little neighborhoods near “The Advent.” It’s the one with the tapered front door!) From there it would take about an hour and a half to walk, but only ten minutes to drive to Adolphus Busch Hall, formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and familiarly known to generations of organists and Harvard students as “The Busch.” Aeolian-Skinner had installed an experimental organ there in 1937, one that included classically inspired principal choruses, from which E. Power Biggs played many live radio broadcasts. Mr. Biggs commissioned the landmark Flentrop organ with his own money in 1958 and placed it on loan to Harvard University. He paid personally for its tuning and maintenance for the rest of his life and bequeathed the organ to the university after his death.

Like the organs at “Old West” and “The Advent,” the Flentrop in “The Busch” is of modest proportions—three manuals and twenty-seven stops. But simply to mention the extraordinary series of recordings Biggs made on that organ, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, is to acknowledge its importance. It still stands as the best-selling series of solo classical music recordings, an accurate and indisputable superlative. And while those performances are still controversial icons of the “organ wars,” his snappy and peppy readings of those classic pieces brought excellent playing of excellent organ music to the ears of millions around the world. Many of us were hearing “chiff” for the first time. To some it was clear and rhythmic, to others it sounded like hitting xylophone bars. Bach’s Jig Fugue brings popping popcorn to mind. The organ is fifty-six years old, and I love taking visiting friends to see it. They melt in its presence. 

…Most nostalgic?

I think that all of us who care about playing the organ have a favorite or two, and I, for one, have a list of organs I’ve loved since I was a kid. There are a couple in Yarmouthport on Cape Cod that I played (and practiced on) for hundreds of teenage summertime hours. There are a couple beauties by
E. & G.G. Hook that were within walking distance of my youthful home. And there are some, even those that fail to stand out as excellent examples of the art, where I had important experiences both personal and musical, where I heard great musicians play for the first time, where important milestones of my personal life and professional career are marked.

In fact, some of the worst organs I’ve seen have had the most impact on me, helping me understand in their negativity why excellence is so important.

Please don’t ask me to name the best organ in the world. If I’m lucky, I haven’t heard about it yet. And the organ to die for? It will be played at my funeral. Any takers? ν

Postscript:

While I’m always interested in good organs anywhere, in this writing I’ve focused on instruments that I think have served as more than just good organs. Each has had a special and wide influence on many musicians, and each has played a particular role in the history of our instrument. Organists go out of their way to experience them. When we think of the modern pipe organ, we can picture dozens, if not hundreds, of various forms, and each of these pivotal organs have played a part in that development. I’ve written this off the top of my head without research, so the list is in no way complete. I’m interested to hear from readers their suggestions of additions to this list. Please write me at [email protected] to share your thoughts.

Thank you for reading.

* Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Translation by Gerard NeCastro, published as “eChaucer” by the University of Maine at Machias: http://machias.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/translation/ct/21npt.html.

Photo credits: William T. Van Pelt, except as noted. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Measure up
When I was an apprentice working in Oberlin, Ohio, we had a particularly bad winter, with several heavy storms and countless days of difficult driving conditions. As part of our regular work, my mentor Jan Leek and I did a great deal of driving as we serviced organs throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Jan owned a full-size Dodge van—perfect for our work as it was big enough to carry windchests, big crates of organ pipes, and long enough inside to carry a twelve-foot stepladder with the doors closed, if the top step was rested on the dashboard near the windshield. All those merits aside, it was relatively light for its size and the length of its wheelbase, and it was a simple terror to drive in the snow. There can’t have been another car so anxious to spin around.
Jan started talking about buying a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and one afternoon as we returned from a tuning, he turned into a car dealership and ordered a new Jeep Wagoneer—a large station wagon-shaped model. He wanted it to have a sunroof, but since Jeep didn’t offer one he took the car to a body shop that would install one as an aftermarket option. As we left the shop, Jan said to the guy, “I work with measurements all day—be sure it’s installed square.” It was.
Funny that an exchange like that would stick with me for more than thirty years, but it’s true—organbuilders work and live with measurements all day, every day they’re at work. A lifetime of counting millimeters or sixty-fourths-of-an-inch helps one develop an eye for measurements. You can tell the difference between 19 and 20 millimeters at a glance. A quick look at the head of a bolt tells you that it’s seven-sixteenths and not a half-inch, and you grab the correct wrench without thinking about it. Your fingers tell you that the thickness of a board is three-quarters and not thirteen-sixteenths before your eyes do. And if the sunroof is a quarter-inch out of square, it’ll bug you every time you get in the car.
And with the eye for measuring comes the need for accuracy as you measure. Say you’re making a panel for an organ case. It will have four frame members—top, bottom, and two sides—and a hardwood panel set into dados (grooves) cut into the inside edges. The drawing says that the outside dimensions are 1000mm (one meter) by 500mm (nice even numbers that never happen in real life!). The width of the frame members is 75mm. You need to cut the sides to 1000mm, as that’s the overall length of the panel. But the top and bottom pieces will fit between the two sides, so you subtract the combined width of the two sides from the length of the top and bottom and cut them accordingly: 500mm minus 75mm minus 75mm equals 350mm.
You make a mark on the board at 350mm—but your pencil is dull and your mark is 2mm wide. Not paying attention to the condition of the pencil or the actual placement of the mark, you cut the board on the “near” side of the mark and your piece winds up 4mm too short. The finished panel will be 496mm wide. Oh well, the gap will allow for expansion of the wood in the humid summer. But wait! It’s summer now. In the winter your panel will shrink to 492mm, and the organist will have to stuff a folded bulletin into the gap to keep the panel from rattling each time he plays low AAA# of the Pedal Bourdon (unless it’s raining).
You can see that when you mark a measurement on a piece of wood, you must make a neat clean mark, put it just at the right point according to your ruler, and remember throughout the process on which side of the mark you want to make your cut. If you know your mark is true and the length will be accurate if the saw splits your pencil mark, then split the pencil mark when you cut!
I’ve had the privilege of restoring several organs built by E. & G.G. Hook, and never stop delighting at the precision of the 150-year-old pencil marks on the wood. The boys in that shop on Tremont Street in Boston knew how to sharpen pencils.
Another little tip—use the same ruler throughout the project. As I write, there’s a clean steel ruler on my desk that shows inches with fractions on one edge and millimeters grouped by tens (centimeters) on the other. It’s an English ruler exactly eighteen inches long, and the millimeter side is fudged to make them fit. The last millimeter is 457, and the first millimeter is obviously too big. If I were working in millimeters and alternating between this ruler and another, I’d be getting two versions of my measurements. While the quarter-millimeter might not matter a lot of the time, it will matter a lot sometimes. I have several favorite rulers at my workbench. One is 150mm long (it’s usually in my shirt pocket next to the sharp pencil), another is 500, and another is 1000. I use them for everything and interchange them with impunity because I know I can trust them. With all the advances in the technology of tools I’ve witnessed and enjoyed during my career, I’ve never seen a saw that will cut a piece of wood a little longer. The guy who comes up with that will quickly be wealthy (along with the guy who invents a magnet that will pick up a brass screw!).
My wife Wendy is a literary agent, with a long list of clients who have fascinating specialties. In dinner-table conversations we’ve gone through prize-winning poets, crime on Mt. Everest, multiple personalities, the migration of puffins, flea markets, and teenagers’ brains (!). Her client Walter Lewin is a retired professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is famous for his rollicking lectures in the course Physics 8.01, the most famous introductory physics course in the world. On the first page of the introduction to his newly published book, For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time—A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics, Lewin addresses his class: “Now, all important in making measurements, which is always ignored in every college physics book”—he throws his arms wide, fingers spread—“is the uncertainty of measurements . . . Any measurement that you make without knowledge of the uncertainty is meaningless.” I’m impressed that Professor Lewin thinks that inaccuracy is such an important part of the study of physics that it’s just about the first thing mentioned in his book.
The thickness of my pencil lines, my choice of the ruler, and the knowledge about where in the line the saw blade should go are uncertainties of my measuring. If I know the uncertainties, I can limit my margin of error. I do this every time I make a mark on a piece of wood. And by the way, if you’re interested at all in questions like “why is the sky blue,” you’ll love Lewin’s book. And for an added bonus you can find these lectures on YouTube—type his name into the search box and you’ll find a whole library. Lewin is a real showman—part scientist, part eccentric, all great communicator—and his lectures are at once brilliantly informative and riotously humorous.
Now about that panel that will fit into the dados cut in the frame members. Given the outside dimensions and the width of the four frame pieces, the size of the panel will be 850mm x 350mm (if your cutting has been accurate). But don’t forget that you have to make it oversize so it fits into the dado. 7.5mm on each side will do it—that allows for seasonal shrinkage without having the panel fall out of the frame. So to be safe, cut the dados 10mm deep allowing a little space for expansion, and cut the panel to 865mm x 365mm—that’s the space defined by the four-sided frame plus 7.5mm on each side, which is 15mm on each axis. Nothing to it.
Now that you’ve all had this little organbuilding lesson, look at the case of a good-sized organ. There might be 40 or 50 panels. That’s a lot of opportunity for error and enough room for buzzing panels to cover every note of the scale.

§

For the last several days I’ve been measuring and recording the scales and dimensions of the pipes of a very large Aeolian-Skinner organ that the Organ Clearing House is preparing to renovate for installation in a new home. I’m standing at a workbench with my most accurate measuring tools while my colleague Joshua Wood roots through the pipe trays to give me C’s and G’s. Josh lays the pipes out for me, I measure the inside and outside diameters, thickness of the metal (which is a derivative of the inside and outside diameters—if outside diameter is 40mm and the metal is 1mm thick, the inside diameter is 38mm. I take both measurements to account for uncertainties.), mouth width, mouth height, toehole diameter, etc. As I finish each pipe, Josh packs them back into the trays. With a rank done, we move the tray and find another one. Now you know why I’m thinking about measurements so much today.
When studying, designing, or making organ pipes, we refer to the mouth-width as a ratio to the circumference, the cut-up as a ratio of the mouth’s height to width, and the scale as a ratio of the pipe’s diameter to its length. If I supply diameter and actual width of the mouth, the voicer can use the Archimedian Constant (commonly known as π - Pi) to determine the mouth-width ratio, and so on, and so forth.
Here’s where I must admit that my knowledge of organ voicing is limited to whatever comes from working generally as an organbuilder, without having any training or experience with voicing. My colleagues who know this art intimately will run circles around my theories, and I welcome their comments. From my inexpert position, I’ll try to give you some insight into why these dimensions are important.
The width of the mouth of an organ pipe means little or nothing if it’s not related to another dimension. Using the width as a ratio to the circumference of a pipe gives us a point of reference. For example, a mouth that’s 40mm wide might be a wide mouth for a two-foot pipe, but it’s a narrow mouth for a four-foot pipe. A two-foot Principal pipe with diameter of 45mm might have a mouth that’s 40mm wide—that’s a mouth-width roughly 2/7 of the circumference, on the wide side for Principal tone. The formula is: diameter (45) times π (3.1416) divided by mouth-width (40). In this case, we get the circumference of 141.372mm. Round it off to 141, divide by 40 (mouth-width), and you get 3.525, which is about 2/7 of 141. Each time I adapt the number to keep things simple, I’m accepting the inaccuracy of my measurements.
The mouths of Flute pipes are usually narrower (in ratio) than those of Principals. Yesterday I measured the pipes of a four-foot Flute, which had a pipe with the same 40mm mouth-width, but the diameter of that pipe was about 55mm. That’s a ratio of a little less than 1/4. The difference between a 2/7 mouth and a 1/4 (2/8) mouth tells the voicer a lot about how the pipe will sound.
And remember, those diameters are a function of the scale, the ratio of the diameter to the length. My two example pipes with the same mouth width are very different in pitch. The Principal pipe (45mm in diameter) speaks middle C of an eight-foot stop, while the Flute with the 40mm mouth speaks A# above middle C of an eight-foot.

§

You can imagine that the accuracy of all these measurements is very important to the tone of an organ. The tonal director creates a chart of dimensions for the pipes of an organ, including all these various dimensions for every pipe, plus the theoretical length of each pipe, the desired height of the pipe’s foot, etc. The pipemaker receives the chart and starts cutting metal. Let’s go back to our two-foot Principal pipe. Diameter is 45mm. Speaking length is two feet, which is about 610mm. Let’s say the height of the foot is 200mm. The pipemaker needs three pieces of metal—a rectangle that rolls up to become the resonator, a pie-shaped piece that rolls up into a cone to make the foot, and a circle for the languid.
For the resonator, multiply the diameter by π: 45 x 3.1416 = 141.37mm (this time I’m rounding it to the hundredth)—that’s the circumference of the pipe, so it’s the width of the pipemaker’s rectangle. Cut the rectangle circumference-wide by speaking-length-long: 141.37 x 610.
For the foot, use the same circumference and the height of the foot for the dimensions of the piece of pie: 141.37mm x 200.
Roll up the rectangle to make a tube that’s 45mm in diameter by 610 long, and solder the seam.
Roll up the piece of pie to make a cone that’s 45mm in diameter at the top and 200mm long, and solder the seam.
Cut a circle that’s 45mm in diameter and solder it to the top of the cone, then solder the tube to the whole thing. (I will not discuss how to cut the mouth or form the toehole.)
But Professor Lewin’s adage reminds us that no pipemaker is ever going to be able to cut those pieces of metal exactly 141.37mm wide. That’s the number I got from my calculator after rounding tens-of-thousandths of a millimeter down to hundredths. You have to understand the uncertainty of your measurements to get any work done.

§

As I take the measurements of these thousands of organ pipes, I record them on charts we call scale sheets—one sheet for each rank. I reflect on how important it is to the success of the organ that this information be accurate. I’m using a digital caliper—a neat tool with a sliding scale that measures either inside or outside dimensions. The LED readout gives me the dimensions in whatever form I want—I can choose scales that give inches-to-the-thousandth, inches-to-the-sixty-fourth, or millimeters-to-the-hundredth. I’m using the millimeter scale, rounding hundredths of a millimeter up to the nearest tenth. As good as my colleagues are and as accurately as they might work, they’re not going to discern the difference between a mouth that’s 45.63mm wide from one that’s 45.6mm.
And as accurately as I try to take and record these measurements, what I’m measuring is hand made. I might notice that the mouth of a Principal pipe is 16.6mm high on one end and 16.8mm high on the other. A difference of .2mm can’t change the sound of the pipe that much—so I’ll record it as 16.7. I know the uncertainties of my measurements. I adapt each measurement at least twice (rounding to the nearest tenth and adapting for uneven mouth-height) in order to ensure its accuracy. Yikes!

§

Earlier I mentioned how people who work with measurements all the time develop a knack for judging them. I’ve been tuning organs for more than 35 years, counting my way up tens of thousands of ranks of pipes, listening to and correcting the pitches, all the time registering the length of the pipes subconsciously. With all that history recorded, if I’m in an organ and my co-worker plays a note, I can reach for the correct pipe by associating the pitch with the length of the pipe.
π (pi) is a magical number—that Archimedes ever stumbled on that number as the key to calculating the dimensions of a circle is one of the great achievements of the human race. How can it be possibly be true that πd is the circumference of a circle while πr2 is the area? Here’s another neat equation. A perfect cone is one whose diameter is equal to its height. The volume of a perfect cone is exactly half that of a sphere with the same diameter. How did we ever figure that one?
There are no craftsmen in any trade who understand π better than the organ-pipemaker. When you visit a pipe shop, you might see a stack of graduated metal rectangles destined to be the resonators of a rank of pipes. The pipemaker knows π as instinctively as I can tell that the first millimeter on my ruler is too big. Imagine looking at a tennis ball and guessing its circumference!

§

When you’re buying measuring tools, you must pay attention to accuracy. Choose an accurate ruler by comparing three or four of them against each other and deciding which one is most accurate. Choose an accurate level by comparing three or four of them. You’ll be surprised how often two levels disagree. Just as mathematics gives us the surety of π, so physics gives us the surety of level. There is only one true level!
I’ve been showing off all morning about how great I am with measurements in theory and practice, so I’ll bust it all up with another story about van windshields. I left the shop to drive to the lumberyard to pick up a few long boards of clear yellow pine. They had beautiful rough-cut boards around thirteen feet long, eight and ten inches wide, and two inches thick. Each board was pretty heavy, and as they were only roughly planed, it was easy to get splinters from them. I put the first one in the car, resting the front end on the dashboard right against the windshield. Perfect—the door closed fine, let’s get another. I slid the second one up on the first, right through the windshield. Good eye! 

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

James Kibbie is perhaps best known through his position as professor of organ at the University of Michigan, where he has served on the organ faculty since 1981. Also quite active as a performer and clinician, Kibbie is at present involved in a project to record all of J. S. Bach’s organ works, with the recordings to be made available, free of charge, through Internet distribution rather than CDs (see www.blockmrecords.org). A portent of this is Kibbie’s own website (www-personal.umich.edu/~jkibbie/), where the professor has presented a yearly “Christmas card” of a downloadable performance, recorded on the Létourneau instrument at his home. We talked with James Kibbie during a visit he made in May 2007 to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to present a recital and masterclass.

Joyce Robinson: Let’s begin by asking how you got “the bug.”
James Kibbie: I’m from Iowa! A lot of organists are from Iowa, and the way I got interested in the organ was the way that every single organist does, by hearing it played in church. It is a really valuable thing for churches to allow young musicians access to the organ. That was the case in the congregation where I grew up, and I think that experience is what creates organists.

JR: Did you come from a musical home? Were your parents musicians? Did they encourage your musical studies?
JK: My mother was a pianist, and I begged her to teach me to play. She was a school teacher, and she knew kids pretty well. She was smart enough not to try to force me to practice. Instead, the rule was that either I practiced regularly, or I had to give up completely and never touch the piano. That was enough motivation (sometimes just barely). My father was also a teacher, and he believed fervently that young people should pursue their own dreams and goals, wherever that led them. He always encouraged me, though I think it was a surprise to him to have a musician for a son.

JR: I notice you are wearing a POE shirt!
JK: This is from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a couple of years ago. I am so hot on this idea of pipe organ encounters! They have been enormously successful. I’ve taught at a number of them with somewhat different formats, and it turns out that any format for the POE works, because if you just bring young people together with the organ, the instrument sells itself.

JR: AGO statistics don’t show college enrollments going up. By now POEs should have had an effect, but they don’t seem to be increasing enrollment in organ programs.
JK: We’re doing well with enrollment at the University of Michigan. Not just in numbers, but in terms of quality—phenomenally gifted students, particularly undergrads. We routinely see now on résumés from students who are applying that they have as high school students attended at least one, many times more than one, POE. We definitely see the results—not just in numbers, but in the level of preparation for students.

JR: That’s reassuring. Now where did you get your bachelor’s degree?
JK: What at that time was called North Texas State University. It’s now the University of North Texas. I got bachelor’s and master’s there, with Donald Willing.

JR: And then you went on to Michigan, and you studied with Marilyn Mason—who’s now your colleague!
JK: Yes. I was really lucky—I had those two master teachers, who are very different as musicians and as people, but they were both so kind to me. And it turned out later that they were both exactly the right teacher for me at that particular time in my development.

JR: You went on to win some competitions—the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Prague competition. You had recorded and played music of Czech composers—Ropek, for example—was that an outgrowth of the competition?
JK: This was in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, so it was a very different place than the Czech Republic is now. After the winner’s recital at Dvořak Hall in Prague, Jiří Ropek came up and introduced himself and invited me to have dinner with him and his family. He was professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory and also organist at St. James Church, which is a historic church in the Old Town section of Prague. That started a long, warm friendship. In fact, one of the pieces I’m playing tonight is his variations on Victimae Paschali—he gave me a copy of the score to those variations at that first dinner, and said that he hoped maybe I would learn them and perform them, and I have performed them many times over the years. He passed away in 2005.
During the first years that I knew him, we corresponded—though not too often, because he said if he received too many letters from the West, it was a red flag to the Communist authorities, and he got in trouble, because he was a known opponent of the Communist regime, so it was certainly easier for him after the fall of Communism. He had earned a doctorate at the Carolinian University in Prague, but the Communist government had prevented it being awarded. Finally, in 1990, when Communism ended, the university could officially award him the doctorate that he earned over 40 years earlier. It’s remarkable!

JR: You’ve been at the University of Michigan now for over a quarter of a century!
JK: That’s right, 26 years. I love it! I get up most mornings looking forward to most of the things I’m going to do that day. I realize that’s a gift that not everyone has.

JR: Over the course of over a quarter of a century you must have noticed some changes, both in the program and in the students.
JK: There have been big changes in the field of church music, and all of us are either working as church musicians, or teaching students who will work as church musicians, so it’s central to everything that we do. I don’t think anyone of us could have foreseen all of the ways that church music has changed over the past 25 years. That means we can’t foresee how it’s going to change in the next 25 years.
I’ve been thinking about this—how do I prepare my students when I can’t foresee exactly all of the ways they’re going to need to change and adapt professionally? The answer must be to return to core values—to teach the commitment to excellence. If I can communicate to students that there’s one standard of music-making for everything that we do—our best effort—that is the thing that will serve them well no matter how the field changes.
If I’m coaching how you play an ornament in Bach, or how you achieve a legato line in Franck, I’m not just dealing with that repertoire, I’m modeling for the student this attention to detail and integration of all of the elements of performance that they’re going to have to rely on to create music in ways that I might not be able to imagine right now.

JR: Do you talk with your students about the job situation in church music?
JK: Yes, and without apology, we position our students to compete for the jobs at the top end. There the situation is quite favorable—salary, working conditions, the artistic content of the jobs—can be very satisfying. Where our profession is really struggling is in the part-time positions, particularly in some communities where there is not a tradition of paying well for church musicians. Those aren’t the kind of jobs necessarily that our graduates from the University of Michigan apply for, but they’re the jobs that the majority of our professional colleagues nationally are holding.

JR: Have any of your prior students been in touch with you and communicated that a church job they were in was starting to go in the “happy- clappy” direction?
JK: Oh my, yes, sure! (laughter) But if nothing else, we can take Johann Sebastian Bach as our model—if things don’t go well in a church job, you look for another one, but you don’t quit the present job until you find the new job first, which is what he did!

JR: Can you discuss the imbalance of today’s high level of talent, yet fewer college teaching positions and fewer upper-rank positions for church musicians?
JK: I recall something that I heard about the American jurist Daniel Webster. When he was a young man, he apparently wanted to become a lawyer. He went to his father and said, “I’m interested in the law as a profession, but it’s very crowded. I’m not sure about the job prospects.” His father said, “Remember—there’s always room at the top.” I’ve told that story to my students countless times. The answer for them is that they have to position themselves in terms of their abilities and their résumé and their preparation to compete at the top.

JR: How has your teaching changed over the last 25 years? Do you use different method books now?
JK: The longer I’ve taught, the more comfortable I’ve become communicating my own point of view. That’s what students come to their teacher for, and ultimately it’s all the teacher has to offer. I’ve used several method books successfully, but I keep coming back to The Organist’s Manual (love the pun) by Roger Davis. It has a superb selection of repertoire and just the right amount of technical exercises and explanations. If students balk at the price, I explain how expensive it would be to buy all of the repertoire separately.
When I was a freshman organ major, I assumed I’d study the “canon” of great organ music. Most organ students still expect that today, but there has to be room in our canon for great, noble music by living composers, including women, and music from many cultures and traditions—African-American composers, for example.

JR: At the University of Michigan there is a scholarship fund established in your name. How’s that going?
JK: It’s going very well! It’s endowed permanently, so we award it in perpetuity every year. It’s one of a number of named scholarships that we have and it is so necessary. You know that the costs of education are far beyond many families’ ability to pay, and church musicians don’t have the potential for large income after graduation the way some other fields do, so we have to have scholarship funding for our students. It’s essential.

JR: That’s quite a tribute. It was your students who set that up.
JK: They did, and it was done at the conclusion of the complete Bach works series that I played in 2000. It was announced at the final concert of that Bach series. They “passed the hat” at that concert, and then one of my alums, Dr. Edward Maki-Schramm, led the fund-raising, and it’s done very well since.

JR: As musicology evolves there’s always something new in performance practice. Do you keep integrating this with your teaching?
JK: I do, and particularly for older music—Bach and Buxtehude—there are so many questions that all of us have that must be answered just to play the piece. That’s what I concentrate on—the practical performance-based decision-making that performers must face. I have gradually come to understand that some of those questions—for example, in Bach’s time—had a precise answer. Whether or not I can discover it after more than 250 years is another question. Some of those questions never had a single answer. There was a range of possibilities open to the performer, and the individual performer was expected to make personal choices from that range of what was possible or appropriate.
That’s what resulted in a unique personal performance, which is so vital to all music, especially Baroque music. Performing Bach or Buxtehude is more of a partnership between the composer and the performer than is true of music of some later generations. I have increasingly moved in teaching to encouraging students to identify what that range of possibilities, historically, is, and to make their own choices within that range to create a performance that might be very different from my conception of a work—or someone else’s—but still faithful to the intent of the composer.

JR: Do you have an overall philosophy of performance practice?
JK: What I value most in music performance is the sense of certainty—a compelling performance, a convincing performance: “This is the way it goes!” Dr. Karl Schrock, one of my doctoral students years ago, said to me, “I think the most authentic performance is a convincing performance.” I have decided that what creates that sense of being so convincing is not just making effective decisions about all of the issues of performance—registration, tempo, ornamentation, articulation, nuance—but that intuitive ability of some performers to integrate all of their choices into a single vision of the music.
That’s what I concentrate on in teaching. When I judge competitions, I think that’s what I respond to—not necessarily looking for somebody who plays the piece the way I do, but who creates that sense of certainty.

JR: Some performers maintain that Bach, for instance, should be played in a certain way.
JK: Anybody who knows the nature of the historic record has to acknowledge that there is so much we don’t know. The answer to so many of these questions is—we don’t know. If anyone pretends to know how Bach played the organ, they’re deluding themselves. We have to be intellectually honest enough to be able to say the words “I don’t know.”

JR: Bach was such a musician and so knowledgeable about the organ; if he had the instruments and technology we have today, would he have used them?
JK: He might have written very different music. All of these people—Bach, Buxtehude, Franck, Dan Locklair—are using the materials that they have at hand to create great music: the kind of organs, the way people play the organ, the abilities of the musicians they’re working with. And because they’re geniuses, they use that raw material to create great musical works. So then if, after the work is created, I depart from that, I introduce anachronisms—the word means “out of time,” something that doesn’t belong to the time of the composition—I weaken it.
Even though it’s true that Bach might have used different sorts of organ effects that weren’t available to him then, the fact is that not having had them, he wrote music that doesn’t need them. Actually, by introducing them, we’re weakening the musical content of what he provided us. Our generation’s contribution to the understanding of performance practice has been that the music sounds best if you hear it approximately in the context of how the composer conceived it. Within that, as I said, there’s so much that we don’t know.
Our generation hasn’t grappled with what may be the central question: if I can create a 100% authentic performance, if I could play the organ exactly as it existed, the instrument that Bach knew, in exactly the acoustics, and play every detail of the performance exactly as Bach did it, my audience would be listening to it with 21st-century ears, not 18th-century ears. As a result, it’s a radically different piece of music.
We have not begun to address that limit on authenticity, and I think it’s probably the next generation that’s going to have to grapple with that. Our generation seems not to have been willing to think about that.

JR: One of the current trends in organ building is in the direction of larger scales and higher wind pressures—we’ve moved away from the Orgelbewegung and now we’re in another direction. Is this a fad?
JK: The best organ builders may draw inspiration from various historic periods, but they invariably build instruments that are of their own time and their own place, and that reflect the personality of that builder. The artistic direction of the particular builder doesn’t come essentially from historic models; you can learn from E. M. Skinner or Arp Schnitger or whomever, but the finest builders must gradually develop their artistic personality. I am not as interested in historic modeling as I am in the quality mechanically and tonally of the instruments, judged by contemporary standards.

JR: You have a Létourneau instrument.
JK: In my house—I’m so proud of it. We have another Létourneau at the University of Michigan. My colleague Michele Johns recently led a project to relocate that organ to a newly created small concert hall that’s a joint project of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the School of Public Health. It will be the focus of an ongoing series of chamber music concerts and will also be used for teaching and practice. The room is great—cabaret seating, a catering kitchen, and even a rose garden.

JR: Let’s talk about the instruments at the University of Michigan.
JK: Our students typically have some of their lessons on the big four-manual E. M. Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ in Hill Auditorium, some lessons on our Fisk in the style of Gottfried Silbermann, and some lessons on one of the two studio organs. We also have the Létourneau organ in its beautiful new hall, and we have a number of tracker and electric-action practice organs. All are pipe organs, of course. That’s what students expect, and only a pipe organ allows for performance of the repertoire to the standards we require. We also have access to some fine organs in local churches—Ann Arbor is a great “organ town.”

JR: Did you choose a Létourneau for yourself because of the one at the university?
JK: Yes, and because I had worked as consultant on a number of projects where Létourneau had been the builder chosen, and I developed a particular fondness and respect for his instruments. When I got this house organ in 2000, I wanted to make a little recording—sort of like a baby picture, you know, the proud parent!—so I recorded a partita Hugo Distler had written for his own house organ and put it on my website as a free download at Christmas time. That began what’s now an annual tradition.

JR: Your Christmas card!
JK: Yes! And I tracked the month-by-month downloads for those various recordings, and where the requests for downloads were coming from. It’s phenomenal, the number of people that month after month download these little house organ recordings—from Romania, China, western Europe, South Africa—all over the world! That’s what alerted me to the importance of this field of Internet downloads, and it’s one of the things that made me decide to release the Bach recordings as free Internet downloads rather than as commercial CDs.

JR: Do you have a grant for the Bach recordings?
JK: It’s very expensive, about $60,000 over three years to make the recordings, plus the expenses connected with the website. I puzzled a long time over how it could be possible. Then Dr. Barbara Sloat came to see me. I hadn’t met her before, but she explained she wanted to do something to honor her husband Barry, who was nearing the end of his life. He had attended all 18 recitals in the complete Bach series I had given at the University of Michigan in 2000. She wanted particularly to recognize Barry’s interest in the organ and in Bach, and she offered a very generous donation toward my Bach recording project. The University of Michigan has provided the remainder of the funding.
It’s a three-year project to record the complete organ works of Bach on historic 18th-century organs in Germany. As the recordings are made and mastered, they’re put on this website (www.blockmrecordings.com), sponsored by the University of Michigan, so that they can just be downloaded free by anybody, anywhere in the world.

JR: Your project is recording Bach on historic instruments. What were the criteria you used for choosing instruments to record on?
JK: There’s no single “Bach organ,” because he wrote for such different instruments over the course of his life, from the North German organs he knew in his youth to the late Baroque organs of his Leipzig years. I haven’t tried to make my recordings an anthology of historic organs. I’ve chosen a limited number of instruments, so I can deal with each instrument in detail. The 2007 recordings are on three Silbermann organs, the one-manual and two-manual instruments in Rötha, and the magnificent three-manual organ in the Dresden Kathedrale. About seven hours of repertoire on these organs is now posted on the website.

JR: Robert Clark recorded on the organ at Naumburg. Is that one of the instruments?
JK: No, instead I’m using two Trost organs next year that have a similar late-Baroque character, in Waltershausen and Grossengottern. But I love that recording of Robert Clark! I think the performer, the repertoire and the organ all match perfectly. He must have thought a long time in putting it together—selecting not only the organ, but the pieces that would go with the organ and go with him and what he wanted to do. I think it’s one of the great Bach recordings.

JR: What will you tackle next after your Bach project on the Internet?
JK: Bach is enough to think about right now, but I’ve already decided that my reward in 2009, when I finish all of the Bach recordings, is going to be particularly to go back to the organ works of Franck. It’s been several years since I’ve performed Grande pièce symphonique, for example. I’ve performed all of the Franck works, but I’m looking forward to going back to them as a sort of reward for finishing the Bach project.

JR: Do you have any favorite instruments that you like to play, besides your own?
JK: Instruments that belong to the time and place where they were built, not instruments that try to do everything, but instruments that do one thing, or one slice of the pie, particularly well. If you have a beautiful instrument, it lends its beauty and its integrity to anything that you play on it. Silbermann never thought of his organs playing anything other than contemporary music—music of 18th-century Germany—and yet churches with Silbermann organs have very multi-faceted musical programs, and the organ is central to that music program now in the 21st century as much as it was in the 18th, in ways that Silbermann couldn’t imagine. Because the instrument is so beautiful and so well built, it becomes flexible over time.

JR: Do you have an overall hopeful view of the organ world, especially in our culture? Ours is a culture of mediocrity, feeding off the bottom. How do we who feed off more lofty things deal with this?
JK: I’m enormously optimistic. The level of organ performance right now in this country is the highest that it’s been, I think anywhere, historically. The students, particularly the undergraduate students that we’re getting at the University of Michigan, are some of the finest talents that we’ve ever had. The quality of organ building is as high as it’s ever been in this country; there are new pipe organs being built all the time, including some really significant instruments in high-visibility venues. I am not worried!

What is art?

For the last several years the Organ Clearing House has been involved in the preservation of a mighty organ. M. P. Möller’s Opus 5819 (89 ranks) was installed in the Philadelphia Civic Center in 1929–30. The Civic Center had something like 13,500 seats. It was 400 feet long, and the ceiling was 100 feet up. The organ was above the ceiling, 120 feet off the auditorium floor—the floor on which professional basketball and hockey games were played, on which the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus performed, on which national Democratic conventions were held. I’ve written about the organ before in these pages. In fact, the first column of “In the wind . . . ” (The Diapason, April 2005) included some impressions of the then recently completed dismantling project. The Civic Center was about to be demolished. It was mid-winter. There was no heat in the building. And we were hard at work above that ceiling dismantling what must be 85 tons of pipe organ. There were 162 stairs to climb to get to the organ.
The organ was placed in storage in another large Convention Center building next door. We moved it between buildings on flat-bed semi-trailers—it took 16 loads. As it is stored it occupies about 150 feet by 80 feet of floor space surrounded by a chain-link fence with a padlock on the gate (pace that out in the sanctuary of your church). And it looks about as much like a work of art as a defunct steel mill or an automobile salvage lot. There is stack after stack of wooden crates full of organ pipes—200 eight-footers and 100 ten-footers. A six-foot-high pile of Swell frames looks like a collapsed barn. All of the big metal bass pipes laid out on the floor look like a storage yard at an oil refinery. And the two huge four-manual consoles (covered with tarps) look like abandoned narrow-gauge railroad cars. Dozens of windchests and reservoirs, the dismantled blower with its 30-horsepower motor, and a vast array of theatre-organ percussions (drums, cymbals, gongs, whistles, you name it) create the illusion of some huge demonic machine that came down the River Styx.
There is very little light in the building. The organ parts are dirty, having sat in that huge industrial-style building for over 70 years with nothing but our clothing to move the dust. I walk around inside that fence and know that I’m in the midst of a monumental and magnificent work of art. Though the organ was played only twice since 1979, I did have the thrill of playing it before we dismantled it. It was out of tune, and there were plenty of ciphers, but there was no doubt that we were in the presence of something great. Anyone else looking at the heap in storage could only say, “what in the world is that?” For us, familiar with the most beautiful and ornate of church buildings, working in this setting with scaffolding, trucks and construction vehicles circling the floor, asbestos abatement enclosures, and the crash and clatter of hundreds of construction workers was something new. I had never been in a building that large except as a spectator with hot dogs and beer in my hands, and ticket stubs in my pockets. At the close of the job I found for myself a moment to be alone in the building after hours. I was loading up the last of our tools and equipment and my van was parked on the floor on the front of the stage. (To drive into the building, you used the same curving ramps that the circus elephants walked on.) I climbed up to the second balcony (Row ZZZ) and took this photo (p. 14).
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000) offers several definitions of the word art, the first of which is “Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.” Seems to me that’s a definition that covers almost anything. Have the lexicographers punted? How does a great work of art fit into this definition? Michelangelo’s Pietà at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, depicting the crucified Christ lying across his mother Mary’s lap, is an unparalleled example of the imitation of nature using an unlikely medium. Depicting human pathos in stone is at least a contradictory effort, but critics and viewers seem to agree that the artist’s effort was successful (understatement intended!).
Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday in the Park (completed 1886) (you can see at it ) was his effort to prove his theory that painting in colored dots, a technique known as pointillism, would produce colors more vivid and pure than the traditional technique of mixing colors on a palette. He believed that human eyes would mix colors better than an artist. Seurat’s dots are approximately 1/16" across. The painting is about 82" by 121"—multiplication says that there are something like 2.5 million dots. To twist this visual effect into our dictionary definition, Seurat was both counteracting and imitating nature. And note that Seurat (1859–1891) was a century ahead of his time—aren’t those dots the Victorian equivalent of pixels?
Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses that blended into their sites. Fallingwater is located in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, and was built in 1934 for Edgar J. Kaufman. It is widely celebrated as a brilliantly conceived contemporary structure imposed on a wooded setting in such a way as to create an unlikely but beautiful blend of concrete, trees, rocks, and a waterfall. You can see photos of this amazing building at . I like the word imposed here—maybe we could add that to the definition. Fallingwater is supplementing, counteracting, altering, and imposing on nature—and it is simply gorgeous.
When Christo bedecks Central Park with saffron-colored fabric is he supplementing or counteracting nature? Or is Central Park itself a work of art as it was constructed in an urban setting to imitate nature? As we walk through the world we all notice different things. I’ve wondered if an artist can be defined as someone who sees more clearly than others and has some special ability to communicate clear observations. Meidert Hobbema (1638–1709, nearly an exact contemporary of Dietrich Buxtehude) had an unusual affinity for light. Go to to see an example of his sun-lit landscapes. Any of us has witnessed such a scene—but how many of us can notice enough of the detail to retell it so effectively using paint?
How does music fit into all this? You can’t very well compose music to depict a bowl of pears in still-life. Or at least in my ignorance I haven’t heard of such a piece. There are some obvious musical depictions of nature such as the thunderstorms in Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and organists cannot overlook Olivier Messiaen’s bird calls. But outside programmatic tone-paintings, what does an orchestral symphony or a piano sonata have to do with nature?
Organ tuners and voicers are very familiar with musical overtones. I’ll give an easy example. Play tenor C of an Oboe, Clarinet, or Krummhorn. Hold it for five seconds or so—then while you’re holding it hum G to yourself. That should reinforce for your ears the organ pipe’s overtone so that when you stop the humming and keep holding the note, you’ll hear the G as clearly as if you were holding two notes. In fact, G is part of C. It’s nature. For many years I was curator of the wonderful Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1203, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. The building was open to the public, and there was a platoon of tour guides whose spiel became as familiar to us as the rising of the sun. One of the guides was a singer who loved singing arpeggios while I was tuning: “Next, la-la-la-LA-la-la-la; Next, la-la-la-LA-la-la-la.” It was predictable, unalterable, and wildly distracting. But it was a clear and accurate representation of nature’s musical harmonic series.
Remember the harmonic series: Fundamental, Octave, Twelfth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-first, Twenty-second, etc. Sound familiar? 8' – 4' – 22⁄3' – 2' – 13⁄5' – 11⁄3' – 11⁄7' – 1'. So that’s where that comes from! A principal chorus is nothing more than overtones on top of their fundamental. All of those overtones exist in every organ pipe. Start with a Gedackt 8'—strong fundamental, weaker overtones. Pierce the cap and solder on a chimney and it becomes a Chimney Flute or Rohrflöte—you get a stronger second overtone (22⁄3' and a brighter, cheerier sound.
Any musical sound has those overtones—a bell, a frying pan, a pottery bowl, an axe; all produce sounds with overtones. The first person to strike a resonant object and produce a lasting tone would have been the first to hear overtones. When do you suppose that was? And when did humans first learn to sing? If you could sing a melody of three notes, and you could also hear overtones, you might imagine trying to have two people singing the same melody an overtone apart—as in a fourth apart, as in faux bourdon. If you could do that and you were imaginative enough to be interested in counteracting nature the two of you might sing some notes in parallel motion (faux bourdon) and then some in opposite motion (counterpoint). From there, all you would have to do would be to write the rules of four-part harmony (Theory 101 and 102) and there you’d be: 371 Harmonized Chorales, Preludes and Fugues, Sonatas, Symphonies, Ballads, Rock ‘n roll . . .
The modern symphony orchestra is a grand human achievement. Starting with those basic overtones, we have driven an evolution, organizing those manipulated overtones into time—we call it rhythm—in unbelievably complex structures. There is more going on in five measures of a Brahms symphony than in the first 10,000 years of music history. And not only have we developed the music itself as imitation, supplementation, alteration, and counteraction of the work of nature, but all the myriad instruments, and the techniques to play them. A modern violinist in a silk gown with a Stradivarius under her chin is a long way from a Cro-Magnon homo sapiens with a rock in his hand!
Back to my fenced-in organ in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has quite a fleet of huge pipe organs, among them the new Dobson organ at the Kimmel Center (4-111), the recently renovated Austin in Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania (4-162, two blocks from the now demolished Civic Center), and of course, the legendary and recently revived Wanamaker Organ (6-461—think of it!). One wonders how many monumental secular organs one city can support.
The Civic Center Möller will almost certainly leave town. When it does, it will take with it a big piece of the history of 20th-century Philadelphia, from the moment when a flock of symbolic doves were released during a convention of the Democratic party, flew into the big electric fans that were cooling the stage, and were splattered all over party chairman Sam Rayburn on national television, to the tens of thousands of high school and college graduates whose commencement exercises were held in the hall.
This huge organ is an industrial machine, built in a large factory by hundreds of workers. It has miles of wire, tons of lumber and metal, and a bewildering array of gadgets and gizmos. There are dozens of ladders, walkboards, structural beams. There are more than 250 swell shutters. But at its core it’s the artistic equivalent of those hundred tuxedos and gowns on the stage at Symphony Hall with the truckload of sophisticated valuable instruments. A vast pile of lumber and metal; a vibrant, breathing work of art, imitating, supplementing, altering, and counteracting the work of nature.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Monumental intimacy
In the July 2007 issue of The Diapason, this column commented on a book by Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet. Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) is a sort of musical memoir—a great artist sharing his experiences as a child, a student, and an increasingly successful performer. He’s articulate, humorous, and just humble enough. He shares many wonderful reflections, and I’ve commented on the book several times subsequently. Early on he writes about his relationship with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
A beautiful metaphor—makes you want to run down to the church and fire up the organ. But as I commented in 2007, he’s leaving us out. He goes on:

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

Coincidentally, a friend who is violist of the DaPonte String Quartet (resident musicians in our town in Maine) recently asked me how organists relate to their instruments. She spoke of gigs she’s played in churches where she saw organists at work, wondering how you play an instrument that’s so far away from you. Of course I jumped in with these Steinhardt quotes, offering the opposite point of view. The organ is a monumental instrument. Your relationship with the instrument is as a vehicle with which you can fill a huge room with a kaleidoscope of tone colors.
I’ve always found it thrilling to hear my music come back as reverberation in a large room. I love the sensation of having a congregation barreling along with me as I lead a hymn. And I love the feeling that huge air-driven bass pipes can cause in a rich acoustic environment. So it was a gift when my wife shared this passage from I am a Conductor, the autobiography of Charles Munch (Oxford University Press, 1955):

The organ was my first orchestra. If you have never played the organ, you have never known the joy of feeling yourself music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities. Before those keyboards and pedals and the palette of stops, I felt almost like a demigod, holding in my hands the reins that controlled the musical universe. Walking [to work], opening the little door to the organ with a big old key, looking over the day’s hymns lest I forget the repeats, finding a prelude in a good key in order to avoid a difficult modulation, choosing a gay piece for a wedding or a sad one for a funeral, not falling asleep during the sermon, sometimes improvising a little in the pastor’s favorite style, not playing a long recessional because it would annoy the sexton—all this filled me with pride.

“ . . . a certain reserve built into the relationship . . .” Funny, I think some of my best moments on an organ bench have been when I was free of reserve.

Anything you can do, I can do better
What’s really going on between Arnold Steinhardt and Charles Munch? Is it like a playground spat that winds up with did-not, did-too? Or is it the childish idea that one instrument is more difficult to play than another? I’ve certainly heard people admire the complexity of playing the organ—all that dexterity with hands and feet. But can’t you also argue that the organist is only pushing buttons?
The violinist has to create an even and convincing tone through the manipulation of the bow against the strings while making the notes happen at the same time. And, while the organ produces notes that are in tune or not in tune no matter what the organist does (as long as he’s hitting the right notes), the violinist has to put the finger on the fingerboard in exactly the right place. (No worries. They leave the fretting to the guitarist.)
The flautist adds breath control to all the complexities of manual dexterity. The trumpeter has a finicky relationship with a mouthpiece. A trumpeter with a cold sore is like Roger Clemens with a hangnail. Neither can go to work that day. And singers? Let’s not even get started with singers!
No matter what instrument you’re playing, once you’ve mastered the physical technique you can get down to making music. As I get older, I notice that on the printed page I can track the development of my technique. I still play some of my favorite pieces from the same scores I had when I was a student, hopelessly marked up with teachers’ comments and registrations for dozens of different organs. Each time I get reminded of the physical crises of 30 or 35 years ago as I play past those passages that I just couldn’t get at 20 years old. You might say it’s the reward of a lifetime to be able to breeze past those danger zones—a lifetime of practice, that is.
Learning to drive a musical instrument is a barrier between you and artistic expression. Whether you’re learning the “pat your head and rub your tummy” thing about playing the organ, developing the finger strength and control to pluck harp strings, or the incredible muscle control of the mouth of the oboist, all you’re doing is teaching your body the physical tricks necessary for it to become a conductor between your mind and the sonorities of the music.
It’s the actual music that’s so difficult to do right. Shaping notes and phrases, placing the notes in time and tempo, and following your instincts to express the architecture of the music form the essence of the art of music. And you get a whiff of that essence when the physical act of operating the machine that is your instrument doesn’t distract you.
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There is an aspect of the art of organ playing that most other musicians don’t necessarily experience. A clarinetist might own the same instrument for most of his career, seldom playing on another. That is a very personal relationship that like any intimacy includes inherent danger. Imagine the master player who discovers a crack in his instrument moments before an important performance. Or worse yet, what if the treasured instrument is lost or destroyed in a fire? I suppose more than one musical career has ended simply because the musician couldn’t face starting over with a new instrument. Yo-Yo Ma famously left a treasure of a cello in a New York taxicab. It was later recovered because he had bothered to save his receipt and the cab could be tracked down. When you get into a New York cab you hear a gimmicky automatic recording—the voice of a celebrity giving safety tips. Along with Jessye Norman reminding you to fasten your seat belt, there’s one with Yo-Yo Ma advising you to keep your receipts!
The organist is at the mercy of whoever hires him. How many of us have arrived in town to prepare a recital, only to sit down at a mediocre instrument in terrible condition? You can refuse to play, or you can recognize that it’s the only instrument the local audience knows and accept the challenge of doing something special with it. “I’ve never heard this organ sound like that!”
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Busy organists might be playing on dozens of instruments each year, but there are also many examples of life-long relationships between players and their “home base” organs. Marcel Dupré played hundreds of recitals all over the world, but he was Organiste Titulaire at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 until 1971. He succeeded Charles-Marie Widor, who had held the position since 1870. So for more than a century that great Cavaillé-Coll organ was played principally by only two brilliant musicians. What a glorious heritage. Daniel Roth has been on that same well-worn bench since 1985. I first attended worship in that church in 1998 and vividly remember noticing elderly members of the congregation who would remember the days when Dupré was their parish organist. I suppose there still may be a few. I wonder if any of them cornered Dupré after church to complain that the organ was too loud!
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It’s the real thing, baby
My work with the Organ Clearing House often takes me to big cities where I get the thrill of hearing important organists playing on mighty instruments. Both the organist and the organ have a relationship with the church building—the sound rings and rolls around the place, the organist has the knack of timing the echo, and the effect is dazzling.
But most of our organists are playing on instruments of modest size in “normal” church buildings. The effect of the beautiful pipe organ in a small country church is just as dazzling as that of the 200-rank job roaring away in a room with a 150-foot ceiling. There’s such magic to the combination of the sound of wind-blown organ pipes and human voices, even in the setting of a small country church. The sounds meld together, exciting the collective air that is the room’s atmosphere. The organ has a physical presence in the room, letting us know before a note is played that there’s something special coming. We decorate church buildings with symbols of our faith. The organ joins pictorial windows, banners, and steeples as one of those symbols.
We plan a dinner party. On the way home from the supermarket we stop at the florist to get something pretty to put on the table. Likewise, we place flower arrangements on the altar on Sunday morning. In church, do we do that simply for decoration, or are those flowers a celebration of God’s creation—of the beauty of nature? Are there candles on the altar for atmosphere like that dining room table, or is there another loftier reason? Does a choir sing an anthem to cover the shuffling of the ushers as they take up the offering, or is the anthem a true part of the experience of worship? (If so, why don’t they take up the collection during a scripture reading, or during the sermon? Why all this tramping around while the music is playing? But that’s a rant for another month!)
The organ, that instrument that makes us “music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities,” stands in our churches declaring our devotion. The pipe organ is testament to the wide range of the skills with which we humans have been blessed. We’ve been given the earth’s materials and learned to make beautiful things from them. And for centuries the pipe organ has been part of our worship, monument to our faith, and symbol of the power of the Church.
But with the advance of technology we are deluded by dilution. We settle for plastic flowers. We buy cheap production hardware for the doors of our worship spaces. We substitute artificial sound enhancement for real acoustics. And we substitute arrays of circuits for those majestic organ pipes.
Walk through a museum and look at sculpture made of gold, jade, or ivory. Don’t tell me you can’t tell it’s special. When we experience something special, we know it’s special. Walk through a jewelry store and try to tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the fake costume stuff without looking at price tags. You will never be wrong. Of course we know the difference. If your fiancée is not a jeweler, don’t bother with a real diamond. She won’t know the difference. (Oh boy, are you in trouble.)
And buy a digital instrument to replace the pipe organ. “After all, I’m not a musician. I can’t tell the difference.” Baloney. Of course we can tell the difference. And our churches and we deserve the best.