In the wind...

Abetted by Satan

On August 5, 2014, the New York Times published a review of two concerts performed on the same evening as part of Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart Festival.” Both featured Swedish clarinetist Martin Frost, about whom critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote, “In earlier times, the talent of Martin Frost would have attracted suspicion. Like that of Paganini, whom contemporaries suspected to be in cahoots with the Devil…” Ms. Fonseca-Wollheim gushed on: “… something approaching the supernatural … sounds he drew from his clarinet were so extraordinary that they produced incredulous laughter and head-shaking …” The headline read, “Languid, Meandering, and Clearly Abetted by Satan.”

In the second half of the first program, Frost joined the Emerson String Quartet to play Mozart’s glorious clarinet quintet. Ms. Fonseca-Wollheim reported that his artistry pulled the Emerson’s players back together after a lackluster first half. Of that, she wrote, “Without him … the Emersons were having a bad evening … visibly struggled to hit their stride … uncharacteristic intonation problems … It felt as if the players were fiddling with the radio dial in search of a frequency on which to broadcast the music clearly.” Ouch! She went on, “It was an entirely different string quartet that returned for the performance of the Mozart…”

It’s unusual for a critic to carry on with such abandon. It was as if the fair Corinna was smitten and couldn’t help herself.

Last week, there was another article about Martin Frost in the New York Times. This time the writer was George Loomis, and he was commenting on another facet of Frost’s apparent genius. He opened the piece reporting that Frost was to start his season of appearances by playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, adding that he had played the same piece thirty-seven times last season. But the point of the article was Martin Frost’s “urge to move beyond the traditional concert format to create a new kind of experience.”

In an interview following his appearances at the “Mostly Mozart Festival,” the forty-three-year-old Frost said, “I’ve started to look back at my career from a point in the future. When I’m 85, what will I think I’ve done with my life? I wouldn’t be proud that I’d done 1200 Weber concertos. I need to shake myself around and be brave enough to develop new ideas.”

In that interest, Martin Frost has created a program that includes music taken from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and other well-known works, in which he appears as soloist, conductor, dancer, actor, and master of ceremonies. Two other clarinetists appear (Bless their hearts!) along with other orchestra players, the whole enhanced by lighting and choreography.

Silk and goats

In the world of sports, “the greatest of all time” can be defined, at least in part, by numbers—the most home runs, the most goals, the most saves, the most strikeouts. It’s more difficult to define “the greatest” in the arts. Who was the greatest painter? Was it Rembrandt, Picasso, Monet, or Pollock? The work of those four can hardly be compared, so it seems impossible to know who was best.

The twentieth century knew three great cellists, Pablo Casals (1876–1973), Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007), and Yo-Yo Ma (born 1955). The twenty-first century has given us Facebook as a new vehicle for the dissemination of wisdom. A lovely quote from Casals appears regularly in those ubiquitous pages. Asked at the age of ninety-three why he still practiced three hours a day, Casals replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

It’s easy to argue that those three masters set the standard for modern cello playing, if one fails to mention Jacqueline Du Pré, Janos Starker, or Lynn Harrell. But in the spirit of gushing, I’m willing to single out Yo-Yo Ma as an inspiration, a technical wizard, a magical interpreter, and an imaginative performer. Heaven knows how many times he has played The Elgar, The Barber, or The Dvorak (there are two Dvorak cello concertos), but it must be hundreds of repetitions for each.

Yo-Yo Ma has made more than seventy-five recordings and he has sixteen Grammy Awards to show for his trouble. A Grammy Award is a mighty special thing, and many performers are satisfied with just one. But think of this. He received those sixteen Grammys in just twenty-seven years, between 1986 and 2013. That’s an average of 1.7 Grammys each year! Give me a break.

But wait, there’s more. You might expect that Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammys would be in the usual categories: Best Chamber Music Performance, Best Instrumental Soloist Performance, Best Classical Album. Of course he’s all over those. But he’s also received four for Best Classical Crossover Album and one for Best Folk Music Album!

Instead of satisfying himself with the acknowledged glory of playing the great works for cello and orchestra on all the world’s greatest stages, the height of ambition for most performers, he has collaborated with the electrifying genius Bobby McFerrin, and founded the Silk Road Project, which has brought the world’s indigenous music together in the most energetic and meaningful way. Wendy and I attended a concert of the Silk Road Project at Tanglewood last summer, and were thrilled and mystified by the beauty of the collaboration. I was especially moved to witness Yo-Yo Ma (the world’s greatest cellist?) sitting as an equal between two younger brilliant cellists.

Remember that folk music Grammy? The Goat Rodeo Sessions is the collaboration of Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. It’s roughly described as a blend of classical and bluegrass music, and the term “goat rodeo” refers to a chaotic event that can succeed only if everything goes just right. One of the cuts on the album (my kids hate it when I use the old-fashioned word, album) is titled “13:8.” Students of music have pored over the piece analyzing the meter in attempts to make it conform to the time signature, 13:8. The mystery was revealed during a concert at Tanglewood in August of 2013, during which Stuart Duncan shared the story of an airline pilot with the audience. Each evening, when the flight attendant served his dinner, he replied, “Hebrews 13:8.” Her interest piqued, she finally looked up the New Testament verse: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

By the way, The Goat Rodeo Sessions was awarded two Grammys: Best Folk Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

What should I play this year?

I served a Congregational church in suburban Boston as music director for almost twenty years. I was fortunate to have lots of resources to work with including enthusiastic volunteer singers, a professional quartet, a fine pipe organ and excellent piano, and funds sufficient to maintain a large library and to engage other musicians for festivals and concerts. I was proud of the programming, but as I look back on it, I know I wasn’t always as imaginative as I could have been. I could never resist the temptation to play Bach’s settings of Valet will ich dir geben on Palm Sunday. They are both smashing pieces, based on the tune we know colloquially as St. Theodulph (“All glory, laud, and honor”). Of course, I published the title in German, assuming that the parishioners would figure it out. I haven’t gone back through archives to prove it, but it’s a safe bet I played those pieces on each of those nineteen Palm Sundays.

What’s the formula for a classic organ recital? I can give you a couple. The simplest is the “All-Whomever” recital. Your choice. Bach, Buxtehude, Scheidt, the list goes on and on. Open with a  chaconne, then a set of chorale preludes, followed by a choral fantasy. Interval. Second half: minor prelude and fugue, trio sonata or set of variations, close with a major toccata and fugue.

Or for more variety: Classic French set (the usual Couperin, Corrette, De Grigny, or Clérambault), three German chorale preludes, then a Baroque prelude and fugue. Interval. Second half: Selections from a favorite collection (Vierne or Langlais 24, or Pierné 3), novelty (elves, nymphs, naiads, your choice), close with swashbuckling barnburner.

Similar formulas also apply to the programming of orchestral concerts: Opera overture, classical piano concerto (“Elvira Madigan”). Intermission. Second half: Major Romantic symphony with lots of recognizable tunes and French horn solos.

Catch–22

Joseph Heller’s novel published in 1961 is a brilliant, satirical telling of the experiences of a group of World War II airmen in a fictional squadron based on an Italian island. The common thread seems simple enough—they are all trying to hold it together until the end of the war or their discharge from the service, whichever comes first. Some are trying to maintain sanity, while others are trying to convince their superiors of their insanity. The telling is so complex that the title of the book has become a catchphrase in our language describing an enigma, a puzzle that cannot be solved. A simple example that happens to me: if you lose your glasses, you can’t see to find them.

The commercial demands of the symphony orchestra have never been more clear. The past few years have shown a spate of stories about strained labor relations between orchestral musicians and the institutions that pay them. The Minnesota Orchestra is a premier example. When the board of directors asked the musicians to accept reductions in salary and benefits, the musicians pointed out that the wildly expensive renovation of the concert hall was the cause of the orchestra’s financial difficulties. The dispute raged for years with the board of directors locking out the players, culminating in the resignation of music director Osmo Vänskä, who was credited with creating a dramatic increase in the quality and popularity of the orchestra. 

The musicians made a unanimous vote of no confidence in the board’s president, Michael Henson. Vänskä stated that Henson’s departure would be essential to the orchestra’s recovery. Henson resigned, and eight other board members resigned in protest. Now, Vänskä has been engaged in a new two-year contract to start rebuilding the fortunes of the orchestra. This dispute has been a classic example of the struggle between art and commerce. It costs a fortune to place an elite symphony orchestra on stage for a single concert. One might wish that excellence in performance and programming would be enough to assure funding.

§

James Levine was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2004 until 2011. Levine, a musician’s musician, brought a host of terrific collaborators to the Boston stage. And as a tireless champion of new music, he programmed the most fascinating series of concerts. Wendy and I benefitted from this in three ways. One was simply the exposure to many brilliant performances of exciting and challenging new music. The second was when friends offered us their excellent subscription seats because they were tired of all the new music. The third—we lived for two years in an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue next door to Symphony Hall and as BSO audiences dwindled, the management of the apartment building received complimentary tickets from the BSO in their effort to put “butts in seats,” and we were only too happy to accept those offers.

It’s ironic that we who are interested in hearing new music benefit from the dismay of the many who don’t. It’s a safe bet that if Levine returned to the beloved formula, the hall would be filled.

§

In September of 2013, the stagehands at Carnegie Hall went on strike, demanding that they should have control over the movement of musical furniture in the hall’s new educational wing, due to open the following month. The turmoil was well documented in the New York Times and other august publications. Forbes Magazine documented that the hall’s executive director Clive Gillinson was paid $1,113,000 in 2012. The next highest-paid employee was stagehand Dennis O’Connell ($465,000), followed by carpenter James Csollany ($441,000). Fourth on the list was the Hall’s chief financial officer. Fifth and sixth were an electrician and another stagehand. How in the world can we afford to make music if we have to pay someone $465,000 a year to move music stands? Many of us sweated through this dispute because the opening of the Carnegie Hall season was in doubt, and our friend and colleague Stephen Tharp was to appear with the American Symphony Orchestra in Aaron Copland’s Organ Symphony. Happily, that concert was presented as scheduled, but the season opener, ironically an important fundraising event for the (recovering from a bitter labor dispute) Philadelphia Orchestra, celebrating its new music director, was cancelled because of the strike. By the way, because the new wing is specifically dedicated to educational activities and is not a performance space, the stagehands lost that round.

On August 22, the New York Times published an article about the opera house Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. The story opened with snide comments about how Italian opera houses are typically known for poor management and finances, singling out Teatro Regio as one company that’s making waves with wonderful performances, and ambitious tours and recording projects. But once again we run into that struggle. Music director Gianandrea Noseda is threatening to resign, accusing the company’s general manager Walter Vergnano of reigning in the finances unnecessarily. Noseda is quoted as saying, “Now we have the engine of a fantastic car, like a Ferrari, but you cannot drive a Ferrari and win the Gran Prix if you leave the brake down all the time.”

The mother of them all

All of these stories pale in comparison to the recent wild machinations at the Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s general manager Peter Gelb has been heralded as a genius in the field of arts administration, especially through his introduction of live HD simulcasts of Met performances, showing in some 700 movie theaters around the world, and attended by nearly a million viewers. But when the Met faced growing and serious deficits in its colossal budget, which exceeds $330,000,000, the salaried employees accused Gelb of placing too much of the burden of economy on them. According to the Met’s website, there are some 3400 employees, including 300 solo artists, 100 orchestra players, and 80 chorus members. These most visible workers are supported by legions of carpenters, tailors, directors, make-up and hair artists, painters, electricians, and—you guessed it—stagehands. All of these workers are represented by powerful unions, and the dirty details were published in the Times in a long series of complex articles. 

We learned that members of the orchestra and chorus are paid over $200,000 a year—nice compensation, but it doesn’t seem like that much when you realize that the 2012–2013 season included 209 performances of 28 operas. Add the requisite rehearsal time, and you have a mighty busy year! We learned that the highest fee paid to solo artists is about $16,000 a performance. Nice compensation, but given the depth of education and preparation compared to an evening’s take for a hip-hop artist, it doesn’t seem like that much.

The dispute put the musicians into the awkward position of arguing for fewer new productions of old favorites, and less new music in the interest of saving money. The recent new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle cost nearly $20,000,000. Why not just trot out the old one? There was an excruciating series of articles as the company threatened to lock out the employees and cancel the season. A special national arbitrator was engaged to direct the negotiations. Several deadlines passed or were extended, and finally a settlement was announced. The show must go on.

And our survey says…

In many markets, the most banal of classical music programming is the most successful. Radio stations run audience surveys whose results are predictable. The audience wants to hear the “greatest hits.” Brilliant and innovative programming, such as Levine’s in Boston, reduces the audience, but we need programming like that to sustain the arts, to encourage creativity, and to be sure there always is new music.

But the enigma continues. While I am strongly supportive of bold programming in concert venues, and am disappointed when programming seems weak when bending to popular demand, I realize that the future of the organ world, performers and audiences alike, depends on the discovery of bold new ways to use our venerated and ancient instrument. “Dead White Men” is a phrase that implies the kiss of death in the world of the arts. I interpret that to mean that we shouldn’t depend on the work of those from centuries before us for the completeness of our artistic expression. And with its huge heritage of ancient music, its correct and unswerving connection with the church, and its often arcane voice among the clamor of the modern world, the pipe organ can be the ultimate example of the Dead White Man. 

I got interested in the organ as a kid simply because I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I have many friends and colleagues who share that experience. Ours is a world in which you can easily spend $250,000 on a fine piano. When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, that was the price of a new 45-stop Flentrop (Warner Concert Hall). We’re more than a tenth of the way through the twenty-first century. Let’s give ’em their money’s worth. 

Pay attention

Once I spent an afternoon with a friend, dare I say lover, sitting on a rock at the seashore. The tide was coming in, and we were sitting there long enough to watch the water gain the shore one pebble at a time, until it was covering our feet. It broke in little rivulets around the stones, moved quickly to fill in hollows, and floated the sprigs of rockweed. Clams sensed its approach and gave their little squirts from under the sand, and hermit crabs scuttled along discovering new territory. It was a magical time, and I remember marveling at how gentle the motion was but what a huge force is the tide.

We live on a tidal river in Maine. There is a freshwater source about five miles up from us, but for the twelve miles between the Gulf of Maine and our village, it’s fully tidal with the water level rising and falling between ten and twelve feet twice each day, depending on the cycle of the moon. For most of its length, the river is between a half-mile and one-and-a-half miles wide, but about three miles from the Gulf of Maine, there’s a spot where the entire tidal flood passes through a passage that’s just a few hundred feet wide. Tens of thousands of tons of water race through the narrows every minute—it’s a dramatic demonstration of the power of the tide as eight or nine square miles of ten-foot-deep water race by. And the amazing thing is that the flow reverses with each tide cycle. When the ocean drops below that of the river confined above the narrows, the water flows toward the sea until the levels equalize, the current slows, stops, and reverses. 

There’s a fascinating and huge example of tidal flow through a narrow passage at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea—the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait is not wide enough to allow the entire Mediterranean to pass through with each tide, so at the eastern end the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean Seas around Albania, Greece, and Turkey have no perceptible tides. It’s a little unnerving for someone from New England to see a ship on salt water tied up to a fixed cement pier. At home where the tide can be as much as twelve feet, every boat has to be tied to a floating dock.

The grateful church

As much as I love the ocean, it’s pretty rare for me to sit still on a rock for an entire tide, and it makes me wonder about the people who first noticed, and then bothered to understand the phenomenon. Think of the patience it took to sit there watching night after day after night. Mr. Tide would have had to make the connection between the motion of the water and the passage of the moon across the sky, so the realization that the moon orbits around the earth was part of the project. The fact that tides can be accurately predicted years ahead is the result of millions of hours of observation.

Then think of the people who deduced by looking at the stars that the earth is simultaneously and continually orbiting the sun and spinning on its own axis. People like Copernicus and Galileo must have been very stubborn men to have had the patience to sit gazing at the sky for years.

On September 9, 1998, Hal Hellman published an article in the Washington Post that opened:

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial at Inquisition Headquarters in Rome. All of the magnificent powers of the Roman Catholic Church seemed arrayed against the famous scientist. Under the threat of torture, imprisonment, and even burning at the stake, he was forced, on his knees, ‘to abjure, curse, and detest’ a lifetime of brilliant thought and labor.

In the fall of 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered that the evidence against Galileo be reconsidered, and he was acquitted in 1992.

Just keep writing

Mozart lived for about thirty-five years and wrote well over 600 pieces of music. Schubert wrote about 800 pieces and lived less than thirty-two years. If we assume that each had twenty-five productive years as a composer, they each would have about 219,000 total hours to work with (25 x 365 x 24). Some of that time was spent sleeping and eating, some was spent on the logistics of daily life. How much of their total time on earth did those guys spend putting ink on paper? How long would it take you to simply copy the score of Don Giovanni, let alone write it for the first time?

The art of Aristide

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) was one of history’s greatest organbuilders. He’s on my mind a lot these days because I recently bought a copy of the superb documentary The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll released by Fugue State Films, and I’ve watched it several times. Buy your copy from the catalogue of the Organ Historical Society. If you have any affinity at all for the music of Franck, Widor, Dupré, Guilmant, Tournemire, Vierne, or any of the composers of French organ music since about 1835, you owe it to yourself to see this film. (See the review by Gene Bedient in the July issue of The Diapason.)

The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll tells of his childhood in Montpellier, located on the Mediterranean coast near enough to the Strait of Gibraltar to have tides of around one-and-a-half feet. It tells how Gioachino Rossini was exposed to the work of the young Cavaillé-Coll and encouraged him to move to Paris. And it documents his extraordinary career—how he won his first major contract when in his twenties, and how his imaginative innovations changed the world and music of the pipe organ profoundly and permanently. 

Cavaillé-Coll watched and listened to people playing wind instruments, and noticed that a trumpet player, for example, blew harder into his instrument to reach higher notes. So he divided his windchests, feeding higher wind pressure to higher notes, allowing solo stops like the Harmonic Flute to achieve a soaring quality.

Before Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations, changes of registration and dynamics were achieved by changing manuals or physically moving stop knobs. He divided his windchests across the other axis, separating mutations, reeds, and higher-pitched stops from the foundations—sixteen, eight, and four-foot flue stops. He invented the ventil—an air switch operated by the organist’s foot—that controlled the flow air to the chest with the reeds and mutations. This allowed the organist to “prepare” combinations of stops that could be added to a registration with a flick of the toe.

As Cavaillé-Coll’s organs grew larger and more complex, he incorporated the Barker Lever, an ingenious device that pneumatically magnifies the power and travel of an organ’s mechanical key action, reducing dramatically the force needed from the organist to play keys that open valves against high pressures, and with multiple couplers engaged. This allowed the effective size of organs to increase. The film tells the scurrilous story of politics and smear campaigns that finally allowed Cavaillé-Coll the free use of the Barker Lever, which had been developed by a competitor who controlled its use.

Cavaillé-Coll was influenced by the concurrent development of the symphony orchestra. He considered the organ comparable to the symphony, emphasizing the importance of solo voices, the ability to change combinations of sounds instantly, and the entire organ as a single mass of tone, capable of seamless dramatic crescendos through the vast dynamic range. Of course, his organs still had individual manual choruses allowing the long-established “terraced” dynamics of the vast body of organ literature. But his rethinking of the concept and potential of the organ inspired the musicians who played his instruments to create new worlds of expression.

Of more than five hundred organs built by Cavaillé-Coll, his greatest achievement was the tremendous instrument at Saint-Sulpice, completed in 1862, still in regular use and widely considered one of the greatest organs in the world. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was the largest organ ever built, and although it’s more than a hundred-fifty years old, it is still as vital, expressive, powerful, and impressive as it was when it was first played. Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was organist at Saint-Sulpice when the organ was completed, and we learn in the film how Cavaillé-Coll advocated his music, until he became aware of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens who was the organ teacher at the Royal Brussels Conservatory. Cavaillé-Coll tried to introduce Lemmens to the Paris audience, intending to spare Lefébure-Wély’s feelings by presenting him in concert with Lemmens. But the plan backfired, and Cavaillé-Coll and Lefébure-Wély had a falling out.

I was interested to learn that Widor studied with Lemmens in Brussels—that would give some insight into Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice, replacing Lefébure-Wély. And let’s remember that between 1870 and 1971, just two organists served that church—Widor, and Marcel Dupré. I think that single succession of organists and that singular instrument is enough to justify the claim of Cavaillé-Coll’s unique importance in the history of the instrument.

Cavaillé-Coll traveled throughout Europe studying other organs. The film recounts his impressions after visiting the great organ by Christian Müller at Haarlem. He built organs throughout France, in Spain and Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Venezuela, and Brazil, among other countries. This was at a time when it took days to travel across France, and weeks or months to cross the ocean. 

If Aristide Cavaillé-Coll had an iPad and a Facebook page, I bet we wouldn’t have had the organ at Saint-Sulpice.

Reviewing a life’s work

Some of our contemporary organ companies have impressive opus lists. Taylor & Boody is preparing to build Opus 70, and the Noack Organ Company is working on number 157—a fantastic productive life for a company with a single principal. Cavaillé-Coll’s workshop was much larger that any that are active today, but nevertheless, I’m staggered to think through the accomplishments of his life. He must have been thinking all the time. And he must have been on the move constantly. France was early outpaced by neighboring countries in the development of railroads, so for much of his career, Cavaillé-Coll would have relied on horse-drawn vehicles for his travel. Google Maps tells me that it’s 748 kilometers (465 miles) from Montpellier to Paris. It would take about seven hours to make that trip in a modern car on modern highways. What an effort it must have been to run between clients scattered across the country in the mid-1800s.

To supervise the sale, design, construction, and installation of more than five hundred organs was a stupendous achievement. To conceive and realize his inventions, from the circular saw blade to the Ventil, was a creative output unequaled in the history of the craft. And we know that Cavaillé-Coll spend much energy promoting musicians, encouraging compositions, and planning concerts.

TTFN, GPP

I’ve learned to refer to a website called netlingo.com when I come across an initialism that I don’t understand. When I received this one in a text message, I knew right away that the first one is “ta ta for now.” But the second one wasn’t on the list, and it took me some time to figure it out. When I realized it was from an organist who must have been sitting on the organ bench during a service, I guessed correctly, “gotta play postlude.” Really? Would that be the same organist who complains that churches don’t pay organists well enough? Would that be the same organist who feels disrespected by the clergy? Would that be the same organist who is disappointed because his idea of encouraging the church to acquire a new organ hasn’t gained traction?

Texting is a great example of how people fail to concentrate. We’ve only been texting for a few years—and I admit freely that I do all the time, and consider it a terrific way to stay in touch. Imagine the Organ Clearing House crew working in a distant city, picture them high on a tower of scaffolding, and Bishop needs to ask a question. A phone call would be a nuisance. A text message is like putting a sticky-note on someone’s refrigerator. I do that even to say, “CWYHAC” (call when you have a chance). 

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Manhattan. It was around seventy degrees, breezy and sunny, and thousands (millions?) of people were out and about. But I’m sure most of them were missing the beautiful day, because when I paid careful attention and counted on my fingers while walking a block or two, I noted that well over half the people were “in their phones.” They were texting, talking, e-mailing, probably searching for music, but they certainly weren’t paying attention to the beautiful day.

Perhaps the most dramatic result of the texting boom is the rapid increase in highway fatalities. It’s amazing to me that people think they can take their eyes off the road and their attention from their driving for long enough to write a note.

Initialism is a new word for acronym. It’s new enough that my spellchecker doesn’t know it. Initialisms in texting are typically short statements like SHWASLOMF (sitting here with a straight look on my face), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), or the teenager’s staple, PWOMS (parent watching over my shoulder). But there’s another that is a noun (the initials of a three-word name for a clinical condition) that’s started to turn up as an adjective: ADD—as in, “I’m pretty ADD today.” WWST (what would Shakespeare think)?

Our daughter Meg and her husband Yorgos have a beautiful dog named Grace. They got her from a shelter in Greece, before moving to the U.S. last fall. She’s part Irish Setter and, we think, part Saluki—which is the ancient Egyptian breed that is seen in many hieroglyphs. When they first had her, they thought they had her trained to stay off the furniture. But as Meg was studying the art of documentary film making, she got a cool time-lapse camera that sticks to a wall or window with a suction cup. They set it up with a laptop once when they went out, and were amazed and amused to see that in the span of a couple hours, Grace had climbed on and slept on pretty much everything in their apartment. Playing back the film shows a hilarious sequence of her changing her mind. It’s indicative of many people I know, who have such short attention spans that I wonder how they ever accomplish anything.

This is why I bring up the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Mozart, Schubert, and Cavaillé-Coll. I wonder what we are losing today because so many people are so wrapped up in the complexity of accomplishing nothing. I know a few people who actually stand out of the crowd because they have powerful and long attention spans. They really can sit on an organ bench for hours, practicing hard, without no powered-up phone sitting there waiting to ring. We’re increasingly surprised when someone plays an organ from memory, but it’s simple enough—they’ve done the serious work that it takes to master the music. They’ve paid attention.

A friend who is organist of a large and prominent church in Manhattan told me recently that he sits at the grand console in the chancel of his church looking out over a congregation full of people who are buried in their phones. He can see the telltale glow in their eyes. 

Are you paying attention? 

Photos of cats

Read recently on Facebook:

“We each have in our hands an instrument with nearly limitless computing power that gives me instant access to worlds of information, and we use it to publish photos of cats.”

My iPhone is sitting on my desk. It’s seldom more than a few feet away from me. It’s my link to the world. I get nervous when the battery is low. Imagine how awful it would be if the phone went dead while I was on the subway in the middle of a game of solitaire. I’d have to sit there and stare at a carload
of nutcases.

The iPhone (or any so-called “smart phone”) is a fantastic tool. It enables me to stay in touch with co-workers and clients when on the road. The ability to take a photo and send it away instantly is a fantastic aid when sorting out mechanical issues at projects. Need to send the specs of a blower motor to a repair shop? Take a photo of the engraved plate. Poof. I can make and change airplane, train, and hotel reservations. I keep my calendar and contacts organized. I can access bank accounts to transfer funds and pay bills. I can create and send invoices for service calls as I leave the church. You’d think that such a gizmo would have nothing but positive effects.

But there’s a hitch. They’ve turned us into a race of navel gazers. On any street corner you’ll see people standing still, staring into their phones. People stop suddenly while walking to go into their phones. The other day on the street, I was hit in the shoulder by a woman who was gesticulating while arguing with someone on the phone. And another tidbit from Facebook—a friend posted a photo of a woman dressed in yoga togs on the down escalator from New York’s Columbus Circle to the Whole Foods store, balancing a huge stroller laden with toddler with one hand, the other hand holding the phone to her ear. Sounds like child neglect and endangerment to me.

People talk on the phone at restaurant tables with friends, they talk on the phone at the cashier in a grocery store, they talk on the phone in the middle of a business meeting. Do those phones help us get more done, or do they keep us from getting anything done?

And worse, if we let them, our phones will affect the flow of human thought in generations to come. I did perfectly well without a smart phone until I was in my forties, but my kids have pretty much grown up with them. And our grandson Ben, at eighteen months old, is adept at managing touch screens—giggling as he swipes to change photos, touching icons, all the while staring intently at the thing. Thank goodness his parents read to him, and I hope he grows up learning conversational skills that seem to be eroding today. 

Innovation

The last century has been one of innovation. Many of the most important developments have come with significant downsides. The automobile has given us unlimited mobility, but it has torn up the landscape and poisoned the skies. The technological revolution has given us connectivity that we could not have imagined a generation ago, but it has compromised good old-fashioned face-to-face human contact. Image a guy breaking up with his girlfriend by text message. It happened in our family! Suck it up and face the woman, bucko.

Also, mass production and mass marketing has led to homogeneity. People in Boston and Tucson buy the same candlesticks at Crate and Barrel, as if there were no cultural differences between those regions.

These concepts apply to our world of pipe organs. In that world, the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by a debate about innovation. We argued in favor of the imagined purity of historic instruments and wondered exactly how they sounded when played by the artists of their day, or we argued in favor of the convenience of registration devices, the effect of expression enclosures, and the flexibity of organ placement made possible by electric actions. Both sides made cases about how unmusical were the instruments favored by the other camp. 

The result of the decades-long debate is generally a positive one. It’s true that many wonderful historic organs, especially early twentieth-century electro-pneumatic organs, were displaced and discarded by new tracker organs. But after all, that trend was a simple repeat of one sixty years earlier, when hundreds of grand nineteenth-century instruments were discarded in favor of the newfangled electro-pneumatic organs in the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Described in terms of the history of organbuilding in Boston, we threw out Hook organs in the 1910s and 1920s to install Skinners, and we threw out Skinners in the 1960s and 1970s to install Fisks and Noacks. What goes around, comes around.

Homogeneity

Until sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, each organbuilder’s work was unique. Any serious organist, blindfolded, could tell the difference between a Skinner console and an Austin console. The profile of the keycheeks, the weight and balance of the keyboards, the layout of the stop controls, the sound of the combination action, and the feel of the pedalboard were all separate and distinct.

I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague one night in a bar, during which we discussed the evolution in organbuilding toward homogeneity. Supply houses have become increasingly important to us, which means, for example, that our consoles have that “Crate and Barrel” syndrome. For example, there’s one brand of electric drawknob motors widely favored in the industry. They work beautifully and reliably, and they’re easy to install. So many firms building both electric and mechanical action organs use them on their consoles. They’re great, but they smudge the distinguishing lines between organbuilders.

There are several firms that supply keyboards to organbuilders. There is a hierarchy of quality, and builders can make choices about which organs should have what keyboards. If you’re renovating the console of an indistinct fifty-year-old organ, it doesn’t make much sense to install fancy keyboards at ten-thousand a pop, when a thousand-dollar keyboard will work perfectly well. But when comparing organs of high quality, we notice when different builders are using keyboards from the same sources. Again, the lines are smudged.

But here’s the thing. If a basic component of an organ is developed at high quality and reasonable cost by a specialist, the organbuilder can cross that off his list knowing that it will function perfectly and reliably, freeing him to put his effort into another part of the instrument. Ideally then, each hour saved by the purchase of ready-made parts can be put into voicing and tuning.

Ernest Skinner put lots of time and resources into the development of his famous Whiffle Tree expression motor. Today, there are three or four suppliers who manufacture electric expression motors with digital control systems. They use the motors developed for wheelchairs, and the controls allow the organbuilder to program the speed and distance of each stage. When shutters are opening, it’s great when the first step can be a tiny one, with the subsequent stages getting larger and larger. And even Mr. Skinner knew that it was an advantage when closing the shutters, for the last stage to be slower than the others to keep the shutters from slamming. He did it by making the exhaust valve smaller in the last stage so the power pneumatic wouldn’t work as fast. We do it by programming a slower speed.

When organbuilders get together, you hear chat about who uses which drawknobs, which expression motors, which solid-state relays and combination actions. We compare experiences about the performance of the machines, and the customer support of the companies that sell them.

Human resources

A fundamental difference between today’s organbuilding companies and those of a century ago is the size of the firms. Skinner, Möller, Kimball, Hook & Hastings, and others each employed hundreds of workers. The American church was powerful, and as congregations grew, new buildings were commissioned by the thousands. There were decades during which American organbuilders produced more than two thousand organs each year. And because the market was so strong, the price points were relatively higher than they were today. So when Mr. Skinner had a new idea, he could put a team of men on it for research
and development. 

Today there are a couple firms with more than fifty employees, but most organ companies have fewer than ten. A shop with twenty people in it is a big deal. In part, this is the result of the ethic of hand-craftsmanship championed during the twentieth-century revival. “Factory-built” organs had a negative stigma that implied that the quality of the artistic content was lower in such an instrument. And there can be little argument that in the mid-twentieth century, thousands of ordinary little work-horse organs were produced.

But the other factor driving the diminishing size and number of independent companies is the decline of the church. Congregations are merging and closing, and other parishes are finding new contemporary forms of musical expression. Electronic instruments now dominate the market of smaller churches. And it’s common to see congregations of fifty or sixty worshipping in sanctuaries that could seat many hundreds. Century-old coal-fired furnaces equipped with after-market oil burners gulp fuel by the truckload. And an organ that would have cost $50,000 in 1925 now costs $1,500,000. That’s a lot of zucchini bread at the bake sale.

I think these are compelling reasons in favor of the common use of basic components provided by central suppliers. Ours is a complicated field, and it’s unusual for a small group of people to combine every skill at the highest level. When I talk with someone who has done nothing but make organ pipes all his life, I marvel at his depth of understanding, the beauty of his drawn solder seams, and his innate sense of π, that mathematical magic that defines circles. He can look at a rectangle of metal and visualize the diameter of the tube it will make when rolled and soldered. The organ will turn out better if he doesn’t also have to make drawknobs.

The comfort of commonality

When Wendy and I travel for fun, we sometimes stay in quaint bed & breakfast inns, enjoying their unique qualities, and chuckling about the quirks and foibles of the innkeepers. But when I’m traveling for business, trying to maximize each day on the road, I prefer to stay in brand-name places. I want to check in, open my luggage, and know that the plumbing, the television, the WiFi, and the heating and air-conditioning will work properly. I want to find a functioning ice machine, and I expect a certain level of cleanliness. Besides, I like amassing rewards points.

Likewise, I’ve come to understand that traveling organists benefit from finding the same few brands of console equipment wherever they go. If you’re on a concert tour, taking a program of demanding music from church to church, you get a big head start when you come upon an organ with a solid-state combination system you’re familiar with. 

Peter Conte, Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, played the dedicatory recital on the Casavant we installed at Church of the Resurrection in New York, and I took him to the church to introduce him to the organ. Seconds after he sat on the bench, he was delving through the depths of the menus of the Peterson combination system, setting things the way he wanted them. He knew much more than I about the capabilities and programmability of the organ.

Recently I was talking with a colleague who was telling me about the installation of a new console for the organ he has been playing for nearly forty years. He told me how he had to relearn the entire organ because while it had much the same tonal resources as before, he was able to access them in a completely new way. It was a succinct reminder of how sophisticated these systems have become, and how they broaden the possibilities for the imaginative organist.

So it turns out that for many, the homogeneity of finding the same combination systems on multiple organs allows organists a level of familiarity with how things work. It takes less time to prepare complex registrations, which is ultimately to the benefit and delight of the listener.

The top of the world

Many of us were privileged to hear Stephen Tharp play the massive and magical Aeolian-Skinner organ of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston as the closing event of this year’s national convention of the American Guild of Organists. The majestic building was crammed with thousands of organists and enthusiasts. I suppose it’s the most important regularly recurring concert of the American pipe organ scene. And what a night it was. The apex, the apogee, the zenith —the best part—was his performance of his transcription of Igor Stravinski’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). It’s a wildly complex score, but luckily, Stephen is a complex and wild performer! He didn’t play as though it were a transcription, he played as though it were an orchestra. He made 243 registration changes in the course of about thirty-three minutes. That’s roughly 7.4 changes a minute, which means thumping a piston every 8.1 seconds. Try that with two stop-pullers on a big tracker-action organ! For that matter, try that on a fancy electric console with all the bells and whistles. If there ever was an example of how a modern organist is liberated by the possibility of setting thousands of combinations for a single concert, we heard it that night.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty…

Last May, Daniel Roth, organist at the legendary church of St. Sulpice in Paris, played a recital on our Casavant organ in New York. Besides the thrill of hearing such a great artist play our instrument, a very deep part of that experience for me was a conversation with Mr. Roth about his research into the life and work of his predecessor, Charles-Marie Widor. It’s a lovely and oft-repeated bit of pipe organ trivia that Widor was appointed as temporary organist there in 1870, and retired in 1937 having never been given a permanent appointment. I don’t know when the first electric organ blower was installed there, but let’s assume it was sometime around 1900, thirty years into his tenure.

There are 1,560 Sundays in thirty years. So Widor played that organ for thousands of Masses, hundreds of recitals, and countless hours of practice and composition while relying on people to pump the organ’s bellows. I’ve seen many photographs of the august Widor, and I don’t think he shows a glimmer of a smile in any of them. He must have been a pretty serious dude. But I bet he smiled like a Cheshire Cat the first time he turned on that blower and sat down for an evening of practice by himself. ν

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

Facebooking the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are we doing this, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not just any wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The look of the sound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative freedom

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

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

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

Yes, chef

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

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

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

For all the saints

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

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

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

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

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

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

You say you want a revolution…

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

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

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

Leave the driving to us

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

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

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

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

The art of organ building

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

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

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

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

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

Art by committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One memorable line from Peter and the Commissar stands out: 

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

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

The start of a century

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

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

Invisible barriers

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

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

Humpf.

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

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

Centennials

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

Everything’s up to date in Kansas City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twenty-first-century pipe organ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of the ballet…

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

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

New threads on old bones

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

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

• Frank Gehry gave the familiar skyscraper a new twist.

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

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

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

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

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

The end of the world as we know it

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

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

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

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