In the wind...

John Bishop

 

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like to that above.

 

That’s one of the great old chestnuts of hymnody. Who reading those words doesn’t have that tune buzzing in their ears? Everyone knows it. Verse after verse goes by, each building on the way we depend on each other, support each other, and live with each other. It’s usually in F Major or G Major—I prefer G, or maybe start in F and modulate a couple times. Nice to step the tonic of the last chord down a major third, let that become the dominant of the new key, throw in the seventh, and start This glorious hope revives . . . up a half step!

The text is by John Fawcett, London, 1782. The tune is Dennis by Hans Nägeli (1773–1836) and later adapted by Lowell Mason (The Psaltery, 1845). It’s as familiar as they come. But did you ever stop to think that the meter (SM; 8.8.6.6.8) is that of a limerick? Everybody sing: 

 

Writing a limerick’s absurd,

Line one and line five rhyme in word,

And just as you’ve reckoned, 

Both rhyme with the second;

The fourth line must rhyme with the third.

 

To make this trick work, you may choose between including the upbeat or not, and you sometimes have to place two or more syllables on the last beat of a line. Everybody sing:

 

There once was a fellow named Beebe,

Planned to marry a woman named Phoebe,

He said, “I must see 

What the minister’s fee be,

Before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebe.”

§

Last month our friend Jim passed away. His death is a first for us—the first of close friends roughly our age to pass away—and he’s been on my mind a lot. He was a prolific organic gardener and a quintessential “foodie.” He had a great love and real appreciation for fine wine and, since a recent trip to Scotland, single malt scotch. He played guitar a little, and he and his wife Lois were frequent attenders and strong supporters of musical ensembles, especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. They traveled together frequently, especially to Italy where they spent much time and had many friends.

In addition to all this, Jim was a geologist, and he had a huge collection of minerals and ores. After his death, Lois is dealing with the dispersal of hundreds of specimens. Some are the size of a chestnut while others are huge—too heavy for one person to carry. The garage and basement are full of Jim’s rocks. Thankfully, Jim’s friends from the Boston Mineral Club have rallied to help with the task. That fellowship of kindred minds—each individual a little crazier than the last—is a tight society of people who are passionate about the variety of minerals that comprise the earth. You might say (as they often do), they have rocks in their heads. But they sure have been wonderful to our friend Lois in her sadness. Everybody sing:

 

Some people I hang with are jocks

With an aura of dirty white socks.

When they ask me to play

I say, “Maybe some day.

But my principal passion is rocks.”

§

Last summer Wendy and I launched and christened our new boat, Kingfisher. She’s a Marshall 22 built by Marshall Marine in Padanaram, which is a village of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, just across a bay from the great fishing and whaling capital of New Bedford, an easy sail in a small boat from Nantucket. She’s a broad-beamed, gaff-rigged craft of a class that was used originally for commercial fishing before boats had engines because she can carry lots of cargo and can be sailed single-handed. When I tell people she’s a catboat, they often think of those little rocketship-boats with two hulls. No, not a catamaran, a catboat. She’s only twenty-two feet long, but more then ten feet wide, with lots of space inside for hauling fish! She has a centerboard so we can go into shallow inlets, a little diesel engine to keep us off the rocks, and pretty, classic lines.

Even before we had a chance to put her in the water we joined the Catboat Association. There are about four hundred members, and annual dues are $25. Last February we attended the CBA Annual Meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Groton, Connecticut. We had such fun that we’re going again this year—we’ll miss the Super Bowl, but I’d rather talk about boats. Having been to lots of meetings of pipe organ groups, I’m used to seeing displays of combination actions, tuning tools, CDs, and published music in the exhibition room. This time it was boats on trailers, wood carvers (who could make you a bowsprit or a ribbon-shaped name board for your transom), a couple of smart guys from Yanmar (Japanese manufacturer of marine diesel engines), and monogrammed life jackets. There were workshops about sail handling, navigating, diesel engine maintenance, and lots of storytelling. This fellowship of kindred minds organizes races and other fun events. Catboats, for all their practicality and beauty, are not very fast. One wag spoke up in an open forum saying, “If you wanted to go fast, you should have bought a bicycle.” Racing catboats is a little like racing turtles. May the best man win. Everybody sing:

 

We’re gathered to talk about boats.

At our meetings, we never take notes.

We organize races

In watery places,

And officers win with most votes.

§

In the summer of 2010, Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Levitz was covering a story in Washington, D.C., when she noticed a large crowd milling about in the front yard of a church. When she realized they were all wearing nametags on lanyards she figured they were part of a convention and like any good reporter, she walked across to investigate. She was dumbfounded to learn that they were all organists attending a convention, a fellowship of kindred minds. It had never crossed her mind that organists would gather for large professional meetings so she asked a lot of questions about the current state of the pipe organ. She mentioned that she was based in Boston and someone suggested she should interview me to learn about the role of the organ in modern society. 

The result was a story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, “Trafficking in Organs, Mr. Bishop Pipes Up to Preserve a Bit of History.” (See http://tinyurl.com/mc9xu2y.) The story begins, “John Bishop leaves the soul-saving to the clergy. He’s content to save the pipe organs—and even that isn’t easy.”

By the way, I suggest there are three areas of public life where puns are
a nuisance:

1. Pipe organs (organ donor, organ transplant, piping up, Swell, Great, Positiv?)

2. Boat names (Liquid Assets, A Crewed Interest, Ahoy Vey)

3. Beauty shops (Shear Delights, The Mane Attraction, A Cut Above)

Feel free to continue with new categories!

In response to Jennifer’s call, we met at Starbucks near Faneuil Hall in Boston. We chatted over lattés for an hour or so. Jennifer is a tall, quick-witted, athletic woman, and from her enthusiasm about my topic, you might have thought she had been interested in the organ all her life. But as this was her first foray into our winded world, I took her through Organ Building 101, Church Music 101, and AGO 101. When she asked what I was working on at the moment, I invited her to come with me to Cambridge, near Harvard Square, that afternoon, where I was meeting with officials of Lesley University. The school had purchased a vacant building, formerly the North Prospect Congregational Church, and planned to move the building across its lot to adjoin a planned new building where it would become part of the Art Library, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ was being offered for sale.

Jennifer’s article concluded:

 

It can take years to place an organ, but sometimes there are matches made in music heaven. Within weeks of visiting Lesley University, Mr. Bishop found a home for its organ in a church in Texas. It was loaded onto a tractor-trailer, and off it went, the victory recorded by Mr. Bishop on Facebook.

“Another one leaves town ahead of the wrecking ball,” he wrote.

 

Everybody sing (add another syllable!):

 

We’re glad to have all that publicity.

Helps preserving works of historicity.

She wrote in the paper

’Bout that tricky caper;

By writing, she joined in complicity.  

§

In 1956, Walter Holtkamp installed a revolutionary organ in the tower gallery of the chapel at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts—again, near Harvard Square. My father, a retired Episcopal priest, was instructor of Homiletics there when I was a teenager, and he introduced me to Dr. Alastair Cassels-Brown who was professor of church music there, and with whom I had my first years of organ lessons on that Holtkamp organ. 

Over a number of years I learned various tidbits about the early history of that organ; that Charles Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, that E. Power Biggs lived a few blocks away, that Daniel Pinkham as a young disciple of Biggs was always around, that organ historian Barbara Owen was a close part of that circle, and that Melville Smith (director of the Longy School of Music and organist at the First and Second Church in Boston) was strongly connected with the seminary, and friend with all those others. The Holtkamp organ—with low wind-pressures, slider-windchests (though electro-pneumatic action), baroque-inspired reeds, full principal choruses, and a Rückpositiv—was quite the statement for 1956. And that fellowship of kindred minds (Holtkamp, Fisk, Pinkham, Owen, and Smith) must have had some heady conversations as the organ was being installed.

Christ Church (Episcopal) in Cambridge is an eighteenth-century building, complete with Revolutionary War bullet hole, around the corner from the seminary chapel. Stuart Forster is the current organist, and the World War II era Aeolian-Skinner has been replaced by a stunning new organ by Schoenstein. E. Power Biggs was appointed organist there in 1932, work that coincided with his blossoming concert career. In his book All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003, page 86), Craig Whitney relates a (to us) delightful story from that era:

Juggling all this took its toll, and when the rector of Christ Church asked Biggs to read the early Sunday service in addition to his musical duties, Biggs refused. The upshot was reported by Charles Fisk, a nine-year-old member of the church’s boy choir, in a note dated January 2, 1935, in the diary his mother had given him for Christmas. “I went to choir practice,” Fisk wrote. “Mr. Biggs wasnt there.” For (at least) the second time, Biggs had been fired from a church job. The leadership of Christ Church had decided that “Mr. Biggs” was more interested in his professional concert career than he was in being a good church musician, and they were right.

Everybody sing:

 

The choirboys all had to stand,

At a wave of the organist’s hand.

But Charlie had noted

And later he wroted

That dear Mr. Biggs had been canned.

§

The same year that Holtkamp installed the organ at the seminary, Rudolf von Beckerath installed a four-manual Werkprinzip tracker-action organ with sixty-five ranks at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland. You can read all about that landmark organ at its own website: http://clevelandbeckerath.org/beckerathorgan.html.

That instrument was a major step toward the revival of interest in classic styles of organbuilding. In the following few years, many more new European-built organs were imported to American churches and schools, notably the 1958 Flentrop installed at the instigation of E. Power Biggs in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall) at Harvard University. That’s the organ on which he recorded the wildly popular series Bach Organ Favorites for Columbia Records—a series that still stands as the best-selling solo classical recordings of all time. Nice going, Biggsy!

In June of 1956, G. Donald Harrison was hard at work finishing the great Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. He was working under a whopping deadline—Pierre Cochereau, organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, would be playing the opening recital on June 25 as part of the 60th national convention of the American Guild of Organists. During those weeks, New York was suffering both a heat wave and a taxi strike. After working late on June 14, Harrison walked to his Third Avenue apartment, ate dinner with his wife Helen, and sat down to watch Victor Borge present his shenanigans on television. At 11:00 p.m. he suffered a heart attack and died.

Last Christmas, and the previous two Easters, Wendy and I have worshipped at St. Thomas Church, to bask in the glorious sounds of the Choir of Men and Boys led by John Scott, who must be considered among the finest living church musicians. And, it’s a poignant thought that as I write, today is the second anniversary of the death of Dr. Gerre Hancock who led the music there with such distinction from 1971 until 2004. 

I never had a chance to meet G. Donald Harrison, but I can at least say our lifetimes overlapped—by less than two weeks. I was born on March 16, 1956!

As we think about the big changes that were going on in the American pipe organ industry, it’s fun to note other developments in the music world. On January 5, 1956, a truck driver named Elvis Presley made his first recording, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

§

Tom Gleason was Wendy’s Russian History professor at Brown University. He was a wonderful mentor, and as Wendy babysat for his kids when she was a student, Tom and his wife Sarah have remained dear friends to this day. Our daughter Meg was also Tom’s student at Brown—Tom and Sarah were hosts for Meg’s graduation party in their house and garden. And Tom and Sarah joined us for a sailing vacation around Greece’s Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. Tom and I share a fellowship of kindred minds with a love of limericks. Now, let’s face it, the limericks I’m sharing here, most of which are mine, are not the sort that we usually hear. But in the pages of this august journal, I’m not going there. Everybody sing: 

 

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In a space that is most economical.

But the good ones I’ve seen 

So seldom are clean, 

And the clean ones so seldom are comical!

The limerick is furtive and mean.

You must keep her in close quarantine.

Or she sneaks to the slums

And promptly becomes

Disorderly, drunk, and obscene.

 

(Modulate up a step, kindred minds.)

 

The next time we’re sitting at table,

And finish the sharing of fable,

We’ll pour from the jugs

And hoist up our mugs,

Sharing limericks as rude as we’re able.

Steven Egler

*Moniker assigned to Fred Swann in the printed program for the AGO 2008 Distinguished Performer Award.

 

Frederick Swann is one of the most well-known organists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this conversation, which is really a mini-biography, he reveals much behind-the-scenes information about his numerous high-profile positions, his relationship with the Murtagh/McFarlane Artist Management, and his early musical experiences, along with observations about the organ and church music today. He is an extremely humble man who has met his many challenges and professional opportunities with modesty and dignity. 

Swann’s honors and achievements in recent years include: 2002, International Performer of the Year by the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists; 2004, inaugural recital on the organ in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; 2008, AGO Endowment Fund Distinguished Performer Award; 2009, Paul Creston Award by St. Malachy’s Chapel, New York City. In November 2014, he will be honored by the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival.

He has performed inaugural recitals on symphony-hall organs at Orchestra Hall (Chicago), Davies Hall (San Francisco), and Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall (Costa Mesa).

Frederick Swann is currently the consultant for the Ruffatti organ restoration project at the renamed Christ Cathedral, formerly the Crystal Cathedral, where he was director of music and organist (1982–1998). Christ Cathedral is scheduled to reopen in 2016. (See The Diapason, June 2014, pp. 26–28.)

This interview was conducted on May 8, 2014, in Saginaw, Michigan, as Swann was preparing for his May 9 inaugural recital on Scott Smith and Company Opus 3, a project renovating Skinner Organ Company Opus 751. Thanks go to Kenneth Wuepper of Saginaw, Michigan, the recording technician for the interview; the First Congregational Church, Saginaw, Michigan; and to Fred Swann himself for allowing us to interview him, for his assistance with editing, and for providing the photos that accompany this piece.

 

Steven Egler: Please tell us about your early years and your family. 

Frederick Swann: I am the son of a minister, and there were six children—three boys and three girls. I was number five, and there was a big space between me and the four older ones. 

From the very beginning, I was fascinated by the piano, and I would frequently bang on it at age 3 or 4. My parents were not particularly happy about that, so they locked the piano. Of course, any three-year-old can figure out how to get into a piano if he really wants to, and I did! 

When I was five, they decided that I could have piano lessons from May Carper, the organist of a church near my father’s church in Winchester, Virginia. One day I arrived early for a lesson and couldn’t find her. But I heard the organ going, and finally I found her at the organ console. I was hypnotized watching things popping in and out, lights were flashing, her hands and feet were flying, and I thought, “Oh my! That looks like fun. I’ve got to do that!” 

I asked her if I could play, but my legs were so short they wouldn’t reach the pedals. I kept after her, so she bribed me: if I had a good piano lesson, she would let me “bang” on the organ for five minutes before I went home. Then when my legs got longer—when I was about eight—she started showing me things about the organ and that you had to play it differently—not like a piano. They were really not organ lessons, because I just was continuing on the piano, but she still told me a lot about the organ. It was very good that she did because the organist in my father’s church, Braddock Street Methodist Church, suddenly died, and I became the organist of the church—there was no one else to play. It must have been simply awful, but that’s how I got started at age ten, and I’ve just kept on. I was a lucky kid since I didn’t have to decide what I was going to do when I grew up: I just started playing and kept doing it. 

 

Can you recall what those early church services were like and being thrust onto the bench?

Mostly I just played the hymns. The choir director, Madeline Riley, was somewhat of an organist herself, but the console was not located where she could play and direct. I would play the hymns, and she would show me how to play simple accompaniments.

I would practice during the week, and then my Saturday routine was that I always went to the horse opera theater—cowboy Western—for ten cents. On my way home, I’d go by the church and make sure that I had everything ready for the next morning.

I don’t remember too much about the services, except that it was an old Möller organ and setting the pistons made a lot of noise. I would love to “play with” setting the pistons, and the choir director would always come around to slap my hands because they could hear the noise out in the church. 

My biggest excitement came one Easter morning. There were certain stops that I was not allowed to use, and one was a great big Open Diapason in the Great. The church, however, was full and they were really singing, so she came by and pulled out the Open Diapason. I was just thrilled to death! I thought, “This is heaven,” since I had not been allowed to make that much noise before. 

That went on for a couple years, and then we moved down valley to Staunton in 1943. There I started studying with the organist of Trinity Episcopal Church, Dr. Carl Broman, singing in the choir, and getting a lot of very good musical education at the same time. He was a very fine musician.

 

You mentioned moving as a PK (preacher’s kid). Was that frequent as a child?

Not so much. I left home to go to school when I wasn’t quite 16, and we had only lived in three places. I was born in Lewisburg, West Virginia, but only lived there six weeks. We then moved to Clifton Forge, Virginia, where my father, Theodore M. Swann, pastored the Methodist church. Six years later, we moved to Winchester and the Braddock Street Methodist Church for six years (1937–1943). Then we moved down the Shenandoah Valley to Staunton, where my father became a district superintendent and later a bishop. We didn’t have a home church as such because he was always traveling to other churches. This is the main reason I was allowed to attend Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton where I was confirmed at age 13. I just loved it—the liturgy and the great music.

 

What attracted you to Northwestern University?

To tell you the truth, my childhood was not the happiest, and at that point in my life, the farthest place away that I had heard of was Chicago. With my Methodist background and it being a Methodist school, I won a scholarship and went there.

 

You studied with Thomas Matthews (1915–1999) who is known particularly for his choral anthems. How was he as a teacher? 

He was a fine teacher, and a very quiet but very fun man. He was inspiring as a teacher and was willing to let me try anything. He gave me very good ideas.

Most of my lessons were at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Evanston, on the fantastic E.M. Skinner organ. By my senior year, I’d started to do a lot of accompanying. Matthews was also the director of the Chicago Bach Choir that, for some reason, met in Evanston at St. Luke’s Church.

In 1952, we did the second United States performance of the Duruflé Requiem. The first had been performed slightly earlier at Calvary Church in New York City. At last count, I’ve played that marvelous work 91 times during my career. I played it many years later at Riverside Church with Duruflé himself conducting. 

Tom [Matthews] was a great improviser, so I learned a lot about improvisation and colorful use of the organ, both in organ literature and in adapting piano/orchestral scores to the organ.

I also studied with John Christensen, who was the organist at the First Methodist Church in Evanston, and was his assistant organist during my four years in college. During my senior year, I also became organist and choir director at First Baptist Church upon the retirement of William Harrison Barnes (1892–1980). Dr. Barnes was the author of The Contemporary American Organ (1930) and well known as an organ consultant.

 

You said that the Barnes family “adopted” you?

When I arrived on the scene at Northwestern University, they heard me play and thought that I was advanced for my age. They also had recently lost a son, and for some reason, I reminded them of him and they decided to take me into the family. They were also responsible for my introduction to Virgil Fox (1912–1980) and took me on my first trip to New York City. On Sunday, they took me to the choir loft of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to meet the organist, their close friend Charles Courboin (1884–1973). During the sermon at the Mass, Dr. Courboin said to me, “Why don’t you play the postlude?” Of course, I had never played in a room like that or on an organ of that size, but I knew the Langlais Te Deum from memory, so I managed to get through it with the crescendo pedal and a general piston or two. Later, I became very good friends with Dr. Courboin, and, in fact, I studied the complete organ works of Franck with him. This was a great privilege, for he was widely regarded as an expert on the works of Franck. He was a very fun-loving and wonderful man. He and his wife were both so good to me, and he never charged me a penny for all of those lessons!

 

You attended Union Theological Seminary. With whom did you study?

My primary teacher was Hugh Porter (1897–1960), who was the director of the School of Sacred Music at the seminary. The best thing, however, particularly at that time, was just being in New York. Those days were often referred to as the “glory days” because of the great names in church music who were at the other churches in town. On Sunday afternoons, you could hear Evensong at St. Thomas or St. Bartholomew’s. Plus, there were many choral programs and other concerts all of the time, so you learned as much being exposed to music itself in New York as you did with actual classroom or lesson study. 

 

What advice do you have for young people these days who see themselves being organists as their primary calling, attend university, and expect to be prepared for the big, wide world?

I usually remind my students that they really have to love playing the organ and really have to love what they are doing. 

As far as becoming a concert organist, one has to realize that the field is very full. There are dozens and dozens of organists under management, many of whom play very few recitals because there are so many organists available. 

If you think that you want to be a church organist, if this is something you feel you just have to do, go ahead and do it. But realize that there are not that many full-time church jobs where you are going to be able to make a living. So, learn the organ, play it as well as you can, find a church to play in, but be aware that you may also need other sources of income, maybe teaching or perhaps even something in the business world.

One of my current university students at Redlands is also studying to become a dentist, and he is one of the most talented students I’ve ever had. I believe that he could have a career in the concert field and in church work, but he’s preparing to have some other source of income. 

It’s not that there aren’t jobs available: they’re just not jobs at which you can make a living.

 

I’d like to discuss the sizes of the various organs you have played. One source cites First Congregational Church, Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral), and Riverside Church respectively as the third, fifth, and fifteenth largest organs in the world. You have presided over each one of these instruments. 

Theoretically, the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, where I was for three years after I retired from the Crystal Cathedral, contains the world’s largest church organ. There’s very little difference in the size of First Congregational and the organ at the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Passau, Germany, but interestingly, in a book that I picked up the last time I played there, it lists the largest organs in the world; they even put First Congregational’s organ before theirs! 

Actually, the Wanamaker organ (now Macy’s) in Philadelphia is the world’s largest operating organ. (The Atlantic City, New Jersey, Boardwalk Hall—formerly the Atlantic City Convention Center—organ is bigger, but most of it doesn’t play at this point.) 

Many people are obsessed with size, yet size is not everything. I have played many small and modest-sized instruments that were extremely beautiful and satisfying.

 

Please tell us about New York and the various pre-Riverside positions that you held. 

When I was in school at Union, I had a fieldwork position, the West Center Church in Bronxville, New York, but at that time I had already agreed to substitute for Virgil Fox whenever he was away, which was quite a bit.

My job in Bronxville was with the understanding that I had to be at Riverside when necessary. I was the official substitute organist (at Riverside) for a couple of years. When I graduated, Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969), whom I knew very well, had a heart attack—he was the organist and choirmaster at the Brick Church—and they asked me if I would fill in for him for nearly two years. At the same time, I became Harold Friedell’s (1905–1958) assistant at St. Bartholomew’s Church. I’d play in the morning at the Brick Church at 92nd Street and run down Park Avenue to play 4 o’clock Evensong at St. Bartholomew’s. There was a church in between called Park Avenue Christian Church, and they performed their oratorios at 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes I would stop there and accompany an oratorio between playing services at Brick Church and St. Bart’s. 

Some Sundays, I also played Riverside! I would finish at St. Bart’s, jump off the bench (Harold [Friedell] would finish the service), run downstairs and out the door where there was a car waiting to whisk me to Riverside. Somebody else would have played the opening hymn, and I’d jump on the bench and play the oratorio. It was crazy and I don’t how I did it, except that when you’re young, you do all kinds of foolish things and don’t think anything about it.

 

Of course, I assume that you knew the organs and had rehearsed with the choirs.

Yes, plus the enormous amount of preparation for all the other music involved. 

 

And those were with just organ accompaniments and no orchestra?

Yes. Fortunately, the organs were all big, beautiful instruments with every color in the world, and it was a wonderful experience. After a while, I played almost every oratorio in the standard repertory. At Riverside we even did the United States premieres of a couple of works—Stabat Mater (1925–1926) of Szymanowsky (1882–1937) and the Hodie (1954) of Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). It was a wonderful experience, both to learn the music and also to learn how to adapt the scores quickly to the organ.

 

Were you ever overwhelmed playing those large instruments?

No, but there were many challenges and satisfaction in being able to find solutions. 

I can remember Maurice and Marie-Madeleine Chevalier-Duruflé, who were very good friends, when they played their first recital in America at the Riverside Church. They had come for the 1964 AGO national convention in Philadelphia the week before, but Maurice had hurt his back and couldn’t perform, so Marie-Madeleine played the recital. 

I’m telling you this because I’m thinking about big organs and how they affect people. When the Duruflés entered the Riverside chancel and saw the console, Maurice put his hand on his head and said, “Oh, mon Dieu!” Marie-Madeleine said, “Ooooooo,” rubbing her hands. She just couldn’t wait to get at it. I don’t think that I ever said “Ooooo” and rubbed my hands, but I was always so thrilled by the color possibilities of an organ such as the Riverside organ.

When I first played at Riverside in 1952, the organ was not the Aeolian-Skinner. It was the original 1931 Hook & Hastings controlled by the Aeolian-Skinner console that had been recently installed. When they began putting in the new organ in 1953, they had to keep the organ going every Sunday for services, oratorios, and everything else. I can remember one time when there were two Greats—the old Great was on one side of the chancel, and the new Great was on the other. I had to flip a switch depending on which Great I was using. It was a real headache and I didn’t get that much time at the organ, but here again when you’re young, you think, “Oh well. I’ll work it out.” It was a challenge.

 

You mention color and large instruments. I’ve heard you play many times, both in person and on recordings, and I can say that you are an organ symphonist in how you approach your music-making. Obviously, all of these instruments that you have experienced have been an incredible influence upon you.

Absolutely. On any instrument, I explore every stop in the organ, and of course, with a large organ, it is important to find orchestral colors for the oratorio accompaniments. I always feel that if there’s a stop there, it’s supposed be used and you can usually find a way to do it. 

 

Please tell us about your time at Riverside Church in New York City. 

In the fall of 1952, I started substituting for Virgil Fox, and in 1957 the staff at the church changed quite a bit. Virgil’s career began to blossom, and thus, he was there very rarely, so they decided they would hire an organist. I was hired as organist, not as assistant organist, at the church. From then until his association with the church dissolved completely in 1965, he very rarely played—probably a handful of times a year, but his name was kept because he was famous. 

I was actually in the Army when I was appointed organist. I was not going to be released for another six months, so Richard Peek, who was studying in New York at the time, filled in for me as organist for the next several months. Then in January 1958, I started playing full-time.

 

Did you ever work directly with Virgil Fox? 

Maybe a few times, but very rarely. He was a real character in addition, of course, to being an incredible musician and technician. Amazing! 

 

So William H. Barnes introduced you to Virgil Fox. Was he responsible for getting you in the door at Riverside? 

Absolutely. Virgil was born in Illinois and got his career start in Illinois—that’s where he met the Barneses. As a result, I knew Virgil before that first trip to New York. 

 

Please tell us about the choir program at Riverside, which was well known and directed by Richard Weagley (1909–1989). 

He was a great musician and wonderful to work with. He retired in 1967, when the program had been reduced from an oratorio every Sunday to just eight or nine a season. There was less work, so they asked me if I would be director of music and organist, which meant that I was the primary organist but was responsible mainly for the choir. Then I was given an assistant organist, and I had some great ones: Marilyn Keiser, John Walker, and Robert MacDonald, to name a few. They were wonderful people, and we’ve remained lifelong friends. I had the whole show, basically, until I left January 1, 1983, to move to California.

 

One of the first recordings I heard of you was with the marvelous soprano Louise Natale (1918–1992). 

Louise was a fabulous soprano. She had sung with Robert Shaw and was one of his main soloists for many years, and we were so fortunate to have her at Riverside. I encouraged her to sing [Jaromir] Weinberger’s (1896–1967) cantata, The Way to Emmaus (1940), and she did it magnificently with that organ to accompany her. 

We started doing it on Easter afternoon, and we did it for 25 consecutive Easters! After all of the loud music and the “Alleluias” all morning and then to come at 5 o’clock with the sun streaming across the Hudson through the beautiful windows and to end the Easter Day quietly was a very moving experience for a lot of people, and eventually the church was filled. 

 

Did you position the console so that you were able to conduct the choir from the console? 

The console was not movable and worked just fine as far as services were concerned, but for the oratorios I would have to go out front and conduct while one of my assistants played. I think the only time I played and had somebody else conduct was when we performed Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. The accompaniment was so complicated and so wonderful that I wanted to hear it using all of that organ. So we engaged as conductor Dr. Harvey Smith from Arizona (now deceased). Of course, I had trained the choir before he arrived.

 

Could you explain why there was overlapping time before you left Riverside and when you began your position at the Crystal Cathedral? 

When the Crystal Cathedral had just been built and the organ installed, there were many festivities to open the organ. Pierre Cochereau came to play with orchestra, and a week later I played the first solo recital on the organ. Additionally, they asked me, as long I was there, to play the Sunday morning service. I played the morning service, and afterwards, Dr. and Mrs. Schuller wanted to meet with me. They asked me if I would become the organist of the church. I told them that they had a very fine organist, Richard Unfried, who was a friend of mine, and that the job did not exist. I said that I knew they were without a director of music and asked them if they’d like to discuss that. They said, “No,” that they only wanted me to play the organ. I indicated that I was not interested, since they already had a fine organist. 

So I went home to New York, and four days later, there at my office door at Riverside Church stood Robert Schuller. He said, “I just want you to know that Arvella and I have come light years since our discussion last Sunday, and we’d like to offer you the position of director of music and organist. Would you please fly out to meet with us next Monday to make arrangements.” He then turned around and left! 

I flew out to California with no intention whatsoever of moving, but I had already fallen under the magic spell of that fantastic cathedral and the organ, and as is sometimes said, “They made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse.” 

The arrangement that we finally made was that I would spend one week a month in California—working with the choir, etc.—and the other three weeks a month in New York. That’s what I did the first six months and then moved full-time to California in January 1983. 

I played the last service at Riverside at midnight, December 31, 1982, and then January 2, 1983, I flew to Toronto to play a recital in Roy Thomson Hall, and then flew immediately to California to meet the moving van, set up housekeeping, and get started with the new position. 

People would always ask me if I missed New York, and I’d tell them that I didn’t have time to miss New York! The music program was very large (at the Crystal Cathedral) with several hundred people in the program. I had to learn the organ and get the choir going, so I didn’t have time to think—to miss New York.

 

What was it like working with Robert Schuller (b. 1926)? 

It was wonderful. What you see on television with him is what you get. Both he and Mrs. Schuller, Arvella de Haan (1929–2014), treated me beautifully all the years that I was there, and we became very good friends. 

Dr. Schuller wasn’t around that much since he was always out speaking and raising money. Mrs. Schuller was in charge of worship and the music.

It took us a while to learn which buttons to push with each other, but we eventually became very good friends. She was an organist herself and told me I could do Palestrina and Hubert Parry’s I was glad anytime that I wanted, but I would have to do “the other things that we do,” too. But they wanted me specifically to bring that type of music—the “big Eastern church music.” They wanted me to provide music they felt would be commensurate with the new cathedral building, a great organ, and a fine choir. Thus, I was able to stretch them in doing a lot of that music, but they also stretched me into various other forms of music. 

There was an enormous variety of music. We could have a country-Western singer, a Metropolitan Opera star, an English cathedral anthem, and a Bach prelude and fugue, all of these and more in one service, but the best thing was that whatever we did was done with the best taste, and to the best of everyone’s ability.

Johnnie Carl, a fantastic musician, was in charge of the instrumental program and contemporary music. It was a learning experience for all of us, and I thoroughly enjoyed my 16-plus years there. The people made it: the choir especially. 

 

And you just happened to be on television every week, too!

Yes, eventually I got over being nervous about cameras peering over my shoulder, and occasionally I’d look up and see a cameraman standing on top of the organ console getting ready to shoot something! It was all very enjoyable, and many stories can be told about that!

 

That’s almost a book.

Oh, easily! One of those stories is about Alicia the tiger that was born at the cathedral. Her mother was one of the 60 animals used in the “Glory of Easter” production. I knew her mother, and her mother’s trainer. After Alicia was about a week old I went to the animal compound and played with her mother a bit, and the trainer gradually moved Alicia closer. Her mother didn’t object, so I picked up Alicia (she weighed only 35 pounds) and scratched her stomach and played with her every day for two weeks after that. Tigers (tame ones, anyway) are somewhat like elephants—they can bond with you, remember you, and when you see them after being away for months they’ll come right over and nuzzle you like a kitten—with the trainer nearby, of course.

It used to scare my staff to death when she’d come to my office and come right over and want to play. She was from an animal training facility that provided animals for movies, and had a reputation for being the most-tame “cat” in the business. She’s retired now. Organists all over the world were fascinated, and wherever I traveled—Jean Guillou’s apartment in Paris, or one in Berlin—there was one of the photos framed.

 

After the Crystal Cathedral, you went to the First Congregational Church, Los Angeles, for three years (1998–2001).

Right. When the Crystal Cathedral organ went in, their nose went out of joint at First Congregational Church because, up to that point, they had the largest organ in the area, so they set about to make it bigger and better than the Crystal Cathedral organ. About the time that the organ was finished, their organist Lloyd Holtzgraf retired, and they said, “Okay, we’ve got the bigger organ. Now we want the big organist from the other place.”

As Rev. Schuller had done earlier, the Congregationalists made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. At the heart of it was simply the fact that I was really worn out from all that I’d had to do at the Crystal Cathedral. I was playing the organ less and less and doing administrative work and conducting more. So I thought it would be rewarding to play the organ for awhile. I went to First Congregational Church with the understanding that I would only stay three years and retire on my 70th birthday, which I did right to the day in 2001.

That was a wonderful time there, too. Thomas Somerville, a great Bach scholar, was the director of music, and we did wonderful music. The congregation just loved that organ and would remain motionless and utterly quiet during preludes and postludes. It was a great place to make music—a smart move, and I’m so glad that I did it.

 

And since 2001, you have been organ artist in residence at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, California. 

When it came time to retire, I decided not to move back east—I’d already shoveled enough snow! I had many friends in Palm Springs and had visited there a lot and decided to retire there. I’d even purchased a home three years earlier and was able to rent it out until I needed it.

When I moved to Palm Springs, John Wright had come from Memphis to St. Margaret’s Church as organist and choirmaster. I had opened a new organ in his church in San Antonio, Texas, years before. He invited me to practice at St. Margaret’s whenever I wanted, as long as I played a recital during the year. I said, “Okay.” I was still out on the road finishing up several recitals that I had on the books. This went on for a couple years, and he said, “Why don’t you play for church once in a while.” I said, “Oh no. I’ve done that and I’m tired.” But he kept after me and I finally agreed. In recent years, I have been playing at least two Sundays a month and sometimes more often than that, plus all of the festival services. John is then able to concentrate on conducting the choir—a very good choir—and the organ is a large four-manual Quimby. Friends who visit are always amazed to find, out in the middle of the desert, a big choir, big church, big organ. I think they thought that we beat on bamboo! But, it’s been very enjoyable, and it is a wonderful congregation. I can walk in and play and walk out, and I don’t have to attend staff meetings. After a lifetime of doing that, I’m happy just to be able to play the organ.

 

That takes us to another leg of your journey: your performing career and association with the Murtagh and now Karen McFarlane artist management. As far back as I can I remember, I can see your smiling face on the back page of magazines (The Diapason and The American Organist). When did you start with the management?

Soon after I went to Riverside—I can’t remember the exact date. I was with the management for over 40 years.

Lilian Murtagh was the assistant to Bernard LaBerge, the famous manager of organists and other musicians in this country. After LaBerge’s death in 1952, she continued as head of the organ division (under what had become Colbert-LaBerge). She then purchased the organ division in 1962 and continued until her death in 1976 when Karen McFarlane became president. Murtagh was a dear, dear lady and so very good as a manager. 

It was great to get to know all of the famous organists who were with the management: it was a wonderful relationship. 

Lilian had gotten to know my secretary at Riverside, Karen McFarlane, and after Lilian became ill and realized that she didn’t have long to live, she asked Karen to consider taking over the management. Thus Karen McFarlane became the manager from 1976–2000.

 

So you and Karen McFarlane go way back.

We go way, way back! She had done some playing for me and was my secretary at Riverside. Then she became my concert manager. She’s like a sister and is a very dear friend.

When I retired I intended to finish recitals that I already had on the books, but I really didn’t intend to play anymore, so I asked them to please take my picture off the back page. I’ve curtailed my performing to maybe two or three concerts a year, mainly because the travel is becoming more difficult.

 

Do you have any more recordings in the works? 

No, I did my last one in 2010 (Gothic Records) on the magnificent Casavant organ, Opus 1230, in the Memorial Chapel at the University of Redlands. Recording is very nerve-wracking at my age. I can still play adequately as long as a microphone has not been turned on. When that happens, I become the Florence Foster Jenkins of the organ!

Going back to the LP days, I think that there’s a total of about 30 recordings. A lot are from Mirrosonic, Vista, Decca, and, of course, Gothic. It’s not an enormous number—many people record a lot more—and some of those are organ and some are with choir.

Some things I’ve recorded more than once, and I don’t really apologize for that. Marie-Claire Alain was once asked why she recorded three sets of the complete Bach works; she answered, “Because my ideas change or I learn.” It’s the same with all of us, and I would hate to think that we were not constantly changing.

 

Please tell us about your varied teaching experiences, the positions you’ve held, and your students. 

I’ve had a whole bunch. The first formal teaching that I did was at the Guilmant Organ School (1899–ca. 1970) in New York. It was established in the early 20th century by William Carl, who was the organist at First Presbyterian Church, New York City. He had been a student of Guilmant. I came to it late, actually just the last three years of its life, and I had about eight to ten students. Then I began teaching organ and accompanying the choir at Teachers College, Columbia University. I also did some private teaching at Union Seminary where I was also the fieldwork supervisor; I would go out to students’ churches, take notes, and make suggestions. 

In 1973, I became head of the organ department at the Manhattan School of Music. At that time, it was housed in the old Juilliard School buildings across the street from the Riverside Church, which was very convenient. I held that position for eight years during the 1970s until I left New York for California. 

When I first went to California, there was absolutely no time for teaching. But after I finally “retired,” playing almost no recitals and just playing at St. Margaret’s, in 2007 I became the university organist and artist teacher of organ for the University of Redlands, just an hour west toward Los Angeles. 

The Casavant organ there, originally installed in 1927, was completely restored in 2002 at the same time that the building was being retrofitted for earthquakes. It’s a marvelous organ, totally enclosed—even the three 32-foot stops. It’s a thrilling sound, even with the orchestra and choir and soloists. Just a short while ago, we were able to fill up all of the blank knobs on the console and add another 20 ranks.

I have very good students there. 

 

What about the composer in you?

Oh, I’m not a composer! 

 

You wrote a wonderful Trumpet Tune.

I don’t know how wonderful it is, but people seem to enjoy it. One man has even made a handbell arrangement of it that is published. There are a few other organ pieces, too.

The other compositions are mainly anthems, and they were all written when I was at the Crystal Cathedral, because I couldn’t find what I wanted to fit with the service of the day or they were not the right length. They all had to be written in major keys, had to be loud, and had to end with the sopranos on high C, so there isn’t a great deal of variety. But the publishers wanted them: because I was the organist at the Crystal Cathedral, and they thought they would sell! I don’t know if they ever did or not—a few of them did, I guess—but I make no claims to being a composer, whatsoever. 

There are several hymn arrangements and preludes that are also published. In particular, Toccata on “O God, Our Help, In Ages Past” is fun to watch— it made good television. It has lots of work jumping manuals, which idea I got from Petr Eben’s Moto Ostinato. I played it for him once and he burst out laughing. I said, “Well, it was your idea!”

 

Please reflect upon your time as President of the American Guild of Organists (2002–2008), which is when I first got to know you. 

I was amazed that I got elected, and I’m sure the only reason was because of television and concerts. A lot of people don’t know most of the people who are ever nominated for office, so they usually vote for the ones who are best known. I enjoyed it very much. We had a wonderful group of people on the National Council—you were there—everybody worked well together and with the administration of the Guild. It was a very happy time and I feel that we accomplished a lot of things. In addition to the POEs (Pipe Organ Encounters), there were many highlights of my years there. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to serve the Guild in that way.

 

What do you see as the function, the purpose, and even the future of the AGO?

I think that the Guild is very much alive. It is still very influential—it’s the largest and oldest organization (founded in 1896) of its kind for musicians and for instruments in this country. 

The only other musical organization that is older is the Royal College of Organists in London, which in 2014 is celebrating its 150th anniversary. They used to wield an enormous amount of power, and even had a big office building. The organ and organist had been well thought of in halls and cathedrals, but a recent article in the New York Times said that they have fallen on bad times and there are not as many jobs. They are now focusing on reinventing themselves by reaching out more to the general public. I don’t how they will do it, but they are determined. 

Generally speaking, I believe that the Guild is on firmer ground now than it’s ever been. I’m very optimistic about the future of the AGO and about the organ in general. There are many naysayers who think that the organ is dying and that there are too few people interested in becoming organists. This is simply not true.

Some of the major organ builders no longer exist, but there still are organs being built—some of them very large and expensive—as well as smaller organs. Along with all of the recordings that exist, I feel very optimistic about future of the organ, and I don’t believe it’s going to die anytime soon.

 

What do you like to do in your free time?

I don’t have a lot of free time, although I try to walk one to two miles daily—I am not in shape to do any great physical activity, but I do enjoy walking. I live in a two-story condominium, just so I can have the exercise of going up and down steps many times a day. I like reading, going out to eat, and I love being with friends.

There are many retired organists where I live in Palm Springs, many of whom I have known for years. It’s fun having a very nice social life, too. 

 

Very little grass grows under your feet. 

No. I learned several years ago—and I practice it religiously—that when you get into your ninth decade, you do not want to sit and stare at the wall. The day may come when I have to do that, but until it does, I’ll keep as physically and mentally active as I possibly can. I do crossword puzzles and everything I can to stay active. 

 

Do you practice everyday? 

I’m embarrassed to say that I do not. I should, but I practiced a lot in recent weeks to prepare for the recital here. 

 

Here is where humility must be brushed aside for the sake of honesty. You have everything on your résumé: you are without a doubt the most well-known and most visible organist of our day . . . 

. . . fading fast, as there are some real barn-burners coming along nowadays who are really going to go right to the top and who are creating a lot of stir in the organ world. I’m thankful for them because we need to keep the organ world alive . . . 

 

What do you see being your important contribution(s) to our profession? 

Regardless of what some people might think, I’m really modest and somewhat shy. I have been given wonderful opportunities in my career, such as having been blessed to serve in church positions most organists can only dream about. I’ve played close to 3,000 recitals in various places around the world, including a lot of daily recitals in churches, as well as being on television for over 16 years.

With the combination of things like that and teaching, I feel that I’ve helped to contribute to keeping the organ alive. I don’t believe that I’ve done any one thing in particular that I could cite as being outstanding. Rather, I’m grateful to have been given so many opportunities. I’ve tried to make the most of those opportunities for the advancement of the organ and its music. I’m more embarrassed than pleased when people compliment me.

 

At this point in your life and career what occurs to you as the most pleasurable reward resulting from your more than 70-year career?

That’s easy! In addition to being grateful for all the music making I’ve been fortunate to do, it’s the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve been able to bring joy and encouragement to others. One thing that has surprised me in recent years, and keeps happening more and more, is hearing from colleagues in the profession that my service playing or a recital or teaching, often on a very specific occasion, was a life-changing event for them in their career path. I am so very grateful for these expressions! More important, it makes me aware that all of us should take time to consider the influence we may unconsciously be having on others. 

 

Good advice for all. Thank you, Fred. You are the gem of our ocean! 

John Bishop

The secret of life

Donald Hall is an American writer. Because he’s Wendy’s client, I’ve met him several times. He was born in 1928 and last saw a barber or handled a razor at least ten years ago. He published an essay in the June 12, 2013, issue of The New Yorker with the title “Three Beards,” in which he chronicled his long relationship with facial hair. It begins:

 

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present beard is monumental, and I intend to carry it to my grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.)

 

It concludes: 

 

As I decline more swiftly toward the grave I have made certain that everyone knows—my children know, Linda knows, my undertaker knows—that no posthumous razor may scrape my blue face.

 

In 2011, Wendy accompanied Hall to the White House, where President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. (That’s the same day she chatted with Van Cliburn, as noted in the May 2014 installment of this column.) The neatly trimmed and dapper President met the self-styled Methuselah. 

Donald Hall lives in the New Hampshire farmhouse that was built by his grandfather, whom he helped harvesting hay. Today, hay is harvested by powerful and intricate machines that spit out neatly tied bales in the wake of a tractor. (Hay bales are legitimately held together with baling wire.) Donald Hall, then a child, and his grandfather did it with scythes, pitchforks, and horse-drawn carts. And that’s the way he writes—the old-fashioned way.

He has published dozens of books of poetry, and dozens more of non-fiction, memoirs, and collections of essays. He has written hundreds of articles of literary criticism and countless essays for many publications. And his lifelong collection of thousands of letters to and from other literary and artistic giants will be the grist of many future dissertations. He writes in longhand and dictates into a tape recorder, and leaves a briefcase on his front porch every morning for his typist who lives across the road, who in turn leaves a corresponding case of typed manuscripts.

When we were first dating, Wendy shared Donald Hall’s memoir Life Work with me (Beacon Press, 1993). At 124 pages, it’s an easy read, but when he describes his process, you feel obligated to read it again, and then again. He writes drafts. There were fifty-five drafts of that essay about beards, and there are hundreds of drafts for some of his poems. He started working on his poem Another Elegy in 1982, and put it away, disgusted, in 1988 after more than five hundred drafts. He numbers the drafts. In 1992, he picked it up again, wrote thirty more drafts, then showed it to his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, “who remembered the old one; her response encouraged me.” As he brought it toward conclusion, he woke many days before the alarm, jumping out of bed to start writing, but reminding himself that “You felt like this, about this same poem, a hundred times between 1982 and 1988.”

In Life Work, Donald Hall writes about his grandparents’ work ethics, about baseball players’ dedication to their work, and of course about his own routine, but he makes it clear that hates the phrase “work ethic.” Shortly after leaving the security of a professorship at the University of Michigan to move to the farm with Jane to support himself with his own writing, he attended his Harvard class (1951) reunion where he found himself complimented over and over about his self-discipline. He responded, “If I loved chocolate to distraction, would you call me self-disciplined for eating a pound of Hershey’s Kisses before breakfast?” He simply loves the process of moving words about, mining the English language, dog-earing his beloved Oxford English Dictionary—no matter what it takes to get it right to his own ears.

One of the principal characters in Life Work is the British sculptor Henry Moore. They met in 1959 when Hall was commissioned to write a magazine piece about Moore, and Hall was moved and inspired by Moore’s approach to his work. There was always a sketchpad at hand, there were studios scattered about the property allowing work at different stages to proceed concurrently, and when in his seventies, Moore built a new studio next to the house allowing him to spend another hour at work after dinner. The last time they were together, when Moore was eighty, Hall asked him, “What is the secret of life?” Moore’s response:

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your entire life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

 

Wrapped around a monument

Last week, the Parisian organist Daniel Roth played a recital at Church of the Resurrection in New York where a couple years ago, the Organ Clearing House renovated, expanded, and installed a Casavant organ built in 1915. It was a treat and a thrill to be around him for a couple days as he prepared and presented his program, and I particularly enjoyed a conversation in which he gave some deeper insight into the heritage of the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, where he has been titulaire since 1985. His three immediate predecessors were Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, Marcel Dupré, and Charles-Marie Widor—four tenures that span nearly a hundred-fifty years. 

Those four organists are identified by their relationships with that organ. Their improvisations and compositions have been inspired by its beautiful tones and enabled by the ingenious mechanical registration devices built in 1862, maintained to this day in their original condition. Roth confirmed the legend that Widor’s original appointment was temporary, and though it was never officially renewed or confirmed, he held the position for sixty-seven years. I’ve known this tidbit for years, but Daniel Roth shared some skinny.

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was a tireless champion of his own work. He was disappointed in the general level of organ playing in Paris in the late 1860s, but was enthralled by performances by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, the professor of organ at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, who first played recitals in Paris during a tour in 1850. Widor was born in Lyon into a family of organbuilders and Cavaillé-Coll was a family friend. It was he who arranged for Widor to study with Lemmens, and the twenty-five year old Widor was Cavaillé-Coll’s candidate for the vacant position at St. Sulpice.

As a reflection of the political and even racial tensions leading up to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Widor’s detractors competing for the important position claimed he played like a German! (Quelle horreur!) The rector compromised by appointing Widor for one year.

Hundreds of American organists have been treated to Daniel Roth’s hospitality at the console of that landmark organ, hearing his improvisations and compositions, and his interpretations of the immense body of music produced by his predecessors. My conversations with him last week reminded me of that quote from Henry Moore. When a great musician spends a lifetime with a great organ, does that qualify as something to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do?

Opera vitae

The mid-twentieth century renaissance in American organbuilding has given us a bevy of small companies building organs under the name of their founders. Among these, C. B. Fisk, Inc. is notable, in that the legendary Charlie Fisk passed away relatively young, and the work of his company has been continued by his co-workers—dare I say disciples? But when I think of names like Wolff, Wilhelm, Noack, Brombaugh, and the double-teaming Taylor & Boody, I think of these men, now elderly, retired, or deceased, who have had long careers personally producing many instruments with the help of their small and talented staffs. I think Fritz Noack is in the lead. His company was founded in 1960 and has completed nearly 160 organs. Nice work, Fritz, quite a fleet. Imagine seeing them all in a row. 

Considering all the effort and expertise involved in selling, planning, designing, building, and installing a pipe organ, I marvel at what Fritz and his colleagues have accomplished personally, with a lot of help from their friends. That’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

 

What was the question?

An old family friend is an expert in “heat transfer”—how heat moves from one mass to another, from a mass to a gas, or any other way heat moves around. One evening sitting with drinks in my parents’ living room and staring at the burning fireplace, I asked him, “Just what is fire?” He told me that it’s a chemical reaction. Yes, but what is it? I never did get an answer I could understand. I think he thought I was a bit of a prig, and I think I was asking a question that couldn’t be answered.

The more you know about the organbuilding trade, the more you realize you don’t know. Building pipe organs is a profession that remains mysterious to its most experienced practitioners. How does that air get from one place to another inside the organ? How does that thin sheet of pressurized air passing through the mouth of an organ pipe turn into musical tone? And how do those tones blend so beautifully with each other? How do we move such volumes of air silently? We have answers that refer to the laws of physics, but like my question about fire, they seem unanswerable. I’ve come to think that all you can do is know the questions and keep working to achieve better understanding of how to answer them. It’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

 

Go Daddy, go.

My father passed away at home on April 8, about six weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday. He was born four years before Donald Hall. He had a stroke a few months before from which he had largely recovered, although the gorgeous handwriting for which he was well known was gone. A vicious headache, which may have been another stroke, was our signal that the end was near. His doctor helped us establish home hospice care, and after about a week of comforting medication and declining consciousness he was gone. My three siblings and I, and our spouses, managed to gather during that week along with lots of the grandchildren. My brother Mark and his wife Sarah, my wife Wendy, and my mother Betsy were with Dad at his moment of death. Coincidentally, I was at work in St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, where my parents were married almost fifty-nine years ago.

The Rev. John J. Bishop was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Massachusetts in 1952, and all the parishes he served were in that diocese. Everyone called him Jack. He served as rector of churches in Somerville and Westwood before he was called to be rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where he served from 1966 until his retirement in 1989. That was when my parents moved to the newly renovated and expanded family summer home on Cape Cod. After that retirement, he served as interim rector at churches in Dedham, Woods Hole, Falmouth, Provincetown, and Belmont. In December of 2012, the Parish of the Epiphany hosted a celebratory Eucharist honoring the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination.

My father grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a member of Christ Church, which is now the Cathedral of the Diocese of Southern Ohio. Our grand colleague and mentor Gerre Hancock was organist and choirmaster there in the 1960s. Dad had recordings of that church’s Boar’s Head Festival led by Gerre Hancock—the first improvisations I ever heard. As he grew up in Ohio in the 1920s and ’30s, some of the liberal causes for which he was later known hadn’t been contemplated, but before he was finished, my father had championed civil rights, social justice, the ordination of women, and
same-sex marriages.

The Rev. Jeanne Sprout was the first woman to be ordained in the Diocese of Massachusetts. Her ordination in 1977 happened at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester as she joined the staff there. And Dad chaired the steering committee that nominated Barbara Harris as the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion. As interim rector in Provincetown, he blessed same-sex unions many years before the ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that made them legal as marriages ten years ago. During his adolescence in Ohio and while serving in the United States Army during World War II, he would never have imagined such a thing.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the parish’s associate rector Michael Jupin participated in a widely reported protest on the steps of Boston’s Arlington Street Church, placing his draft card in an offering plate in the hands of William Sloane Coffin, pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, and activist and pediatrician Benjamin Spock. This created a firestorm in the then conservative parish (Winchester was cited as the town where the politics met the zip code: Zero-1890). The wardens approached my father, demanding to know “how to get rid of Jupin,” as important pledge-units left the parish in droves. Dad’s immediate answer was, “you get rid of the rector.” He told us later about that crisis in his career and the life of that church, how he sat alone in his car weeping, wondering what to do, and how he sought the council of his bishop, who encouraged him to “stand in the midst of those people and lead.”

Through all of that, Dad remained devoted to the traditions and liturgy of the Anglican Communion. He was a strong supporter of the music of the church, and during his tenures, the parishes in Westwood and Winchester both purchased organs from Charles Fisk. I remember the thrill of using my newly acquired adult voice, singing in harmony accompanied by orchestra as the adult choir presented Bach’s Cantata 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. 

Dad understood the importance of the “theater” of liturgy. My childhood friends who were acolytes laugh today about how they were terrified of “blowing it” around Rev. Bishop. He needed it to be right. He led worship and celebrated the Eucharist with enthusiasm and joy—his “church voice” was nothing like his everyday voice. The crisp cadence and musical intonation of his delivery of the Prayers of Consecration are still in my ears, and remain my ideal. He really celebrated communion.

I’ve spent many days working as an organbuilder in churches of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Often, when I’m introduced to a rector, I’ve heard, “There’s a priest in this diocese with that name,” followed by unsolicited tributes. It’s been wonderful to hear accounts of my father’s work from so many different sources. I’m grateful for Dad’s encouragement and inspiration.

 

What a weekend.

Today is Monday. Dad’s memorial service was Saturday. There were four bishops and twenty priests in robes up front and the pews were full of family, friends, and parishioners from across the diocese and around the world, and plenty more priests. In a piece included in the leaflet for Dad’s memorial service, I wrote, “The definition is ‘Great excitement for or interest in a cause.’ It’s from the Greek root, enthousiasmos, which came from the adjective entheos, ‘having God within.’ Enthusiasm.” That is the way he lived his life, inspiring people, encouraging them to think and grow, and sharing his love for the church, for better or for worse.

That’s work to which you devote your life, but cannot possibly do.

Of course I’m sad. Of course I miss him. But when a man lives such a long and productive life, has nearly sixty years of marriage, sees four children grow up, knows ten adult grandchildren, and with our grandson Ben, knew his first great-grandchild, we can only be grateful.

Yesterday, we interred Dad’s ashes. There were about thirty of us at the end of the boardwalk over the marshes that led to Dad’s favorite Cape Cod swimming hole. As the last of the ashes sprinkled into the water I blurted out, “Go daddy, go.” ν

John Bishop

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

Where’s the fire?

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

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

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

 

How fast is too fast? 

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

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

How loud is too loud?

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

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

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

 

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

“Is the Aeoline playing?” 

Barely audible, from the distance, “Yes.” 

“Make it softer!”

 

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

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

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

 

What’s your job?

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

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

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

 

A happy little cloud

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

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

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

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

 

You can’t play a tune on a Mixture.

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

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

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

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

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

 

It’s all in the numbers.

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Bishop

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

 

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

 

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

 

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

 

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It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

 

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This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

 

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When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.