In the wind...

A Pokémon world

Last week, I visited a church in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with the rector, wardens, and organist about placing a vintage pipe organ in their historic building. After the meeting, I walked the eight blocks up Nostrand Avenue back to the subway. It was 97°, so I stopped at a corner bodega for a bottle of cold water. While I was paying, there was a series of great crashes just up the street, and I was among the crowd that gathered to see what had happened. A white box truck had rear-ended a car stopped at a traffic light and shoved that car into another that was parked at the curb. The truck must have been going pretty fast because there was lots of damage to all three vehicles—broken glass everywhere, hubcaps rolling away, mangled metal. Apparently, no one was hurt, but everyone present was hollering about Pokémon. 

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an important concept in our system of law enforcement, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that the driver of the truck was chasing a virtual-reality fuzzy something-or-other, and didn’t have his eyes on the road. When I told my son Chris about it, he asked, “So . . . , what did he catch?” 

Take away the deadly weapon of the automobile, and you’re left with at least a nuisance. Living in a big city, much of our mobile life is on foot, and we routinely cross streets with dozens of other people. It’s usual for someone to be walking toward me with ear buds pushed in far enough to meet in the middle, their nose buried in their screen. I often shout, “Heads up,” to avoid a collision. I wonder what’s the etiquette in that situation? When there’s a collision on the sidewalk and the phone falls and shatters, whose fault is it?

I know I’ve called home from a grocery store to double-check items on my list, but I’m annoyed by the person who stands in the middle of the aisle, cart askew, talking to some distant admirer. Perhaps worst is the young parent pushing a $1,000 stroller, one of those jobs with pneumatic suspension, talking on the phone and ignoring the child. No, I’m wrong. Worst is that same situation when the child has a pink kiddie-tablet of his own, and no one is paying attention to anyone. Small children are learning billions of bytes every moment—every moment is a teaching moment. It’s a shame to leave them to themselves while talking on the phone. 

The present danger is the possibility of accidents that result from inattention. The future danger is a world run by people who grew up with their noses in their screens, ignoring the world around them.

Starry eyes

An archeological site at Chankillo in Peru preserves the remains of a 2,300- year-old solar observatory comprising thirteen towers whose positions track the rising and setting arcs of the sun, their eternal accuracy confirmed by modern research. There are similar sites in ancient Mesopotamia. If I had paid better attention to my middle school Social Studies teacher, Miss Wood, who nattered on about the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as if she were reading from a phone book, I’d have a better understanding of modern Iraq and the tragedy of the current destruction of ancient sites there. 

Early astronomers like Aristotle (around 350 BC) and Ptolemy (around 150 AD) gave us the understanding of the motions of celestial bodies. I imagine them sitting on hillsides or cliffs by the ocean for thousands of nights, staring at the sky and realizing that it’s not the stars, but we who are on the move. I wonder if there’s anyone alive today with such an attention span.

The man from Samos

In April of 2014, Wendy and I and three other couples, all (still) close friends, chartered a 60-foot sailboat for a week of traveling between Greek Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands are within a few miles of Turkey, and many of us are increasingly familiar with that region as the heart of the current refugee crises. The island of Lesbos has a population of 90,000, and 450,000 refugees passed through in 2015. Lesbos was not part of our itinerary, but it’s adjacent to other islands we visited. We visited Patmos, where St. John the Divine, sequestered in a cave, received the inspiration we know as the Book of Revelation, but for me, our visit to Samos was a pilgrimage.

Pythagoras is my hero. He was a native of Samos who lived from 570 BC to 495 BC. He gave us the eponymous theory defining the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and importantly to readers of The Diapason, he defined musical tone and intervals in terms of mathematics that led directly to our modern study of musical theory. He was the direct forebear of the art of music. Approaching the island from the north, we entered the harbor of the main town (also called Samos) to be welcomed by a statue of Pythagoras. It shows the great man posed as one side of a right triangle, a right triangle in his left hand, and right forefinger pointing skyward toward a (compact fluorescent) light bulb. Okay, okay, it’s pretty tacky—even hokey, but you should see the Pythagoras snow-globe I bought there that graces the windowsill in my office.

Pythagoras deduced the overtone series by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers and anvils; he realized overtones are a succession of intervals defined by a mathematical series, and you cannot escape that his genius was the root of music. He noticed that blacksmiths’ hammering produced different pitches, and he first assumed that the size of the hammer accounted for the variety. It’s easy to duplicate his experiment. Find any object that makes a musical tone when struck—a bell, a cooking pot, a drinking glass. Hit it with a pencil, then hit it with a hammer. You’ll get the same pitch both times, unless you break the glass. So the size of the anvil determines the pitch. 

But wait, there’s more. Pythagoras noticed that each tone consisted of many. He must have had wonderful ears, and he certainly was never distracted by his smart phone ringing or pushing notifications, because he was able to start picking out the individual pitches. Creating musical tones using a string under tension (like a guitar or violin), he duplicated the separate tones by stopping the string with his finger, realizing that the first overtone (octave) was reproduced by half the full length (1:2), the second (fifth) resulted from 2:3, the third by 3:4, etc. That numerical procession is known as the Fibonacci Series, named for Leonardo Fibonacci (1175–1250) and looks like this:

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

3+5=8, etc., ad infinitum.

The Fibonacci Series defines mathematical relationships throughout nature —the kernels of a pinecone, the divisions of a nautilus shell, the arrangements of seeds in a sunflower blossom, rose petals, pineapples, wheat grains, among countless others. And here’s a good one: count out how many entrances of the subject in Bach’s fugues are on Fibonacci numbers. 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

If you’ve ever blown on a hollow stem of grass and produced a musical tone, you can imagine the origin of the pipe organ. After you’ve given a hoot, bite an inch off your stem and try again: you’ll get a different pitch. Take a stick of bamboo and carve a simple mouthpiece at one end. Take another of different length, and another, and another. Tie them together and you have a pan-pipe. You’re just a few steps away from the Wanamaker!

I have no idea who was the first to think of making a thin sheet of metal, forming it as a cylinder, making a mouthpiece in it, devising a machine to stabilize wind-pressure, and another machine to choose which notes were speaking, but there’s archeological evidence that people were messing around like that by 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompeii, and preserving a primitive pipe organ. And 350 years earlier, in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hydraulis was created, along with visual depictions accurate enough to support the construction of a modern reproduction.

I’m sure that the artisans who built those instruments were aware of Pythagoras’s innovations, and that they could hear the overtones in the organ pipes they built, because those overtones led directly to the introduction of multiple ranks of pipes, each based on a different harmonic. Having five or six ranks of pipes playing at once produced a bold and rich tone we know as Blockwerk, but it was the next smart guy who thought of complicating the machine to allow single sets of pipes to be played separately­—stop action. They left a few of the highest pitch stops grouped together—mixtures. Then, someone took Pythagorean overtones a step further and had those grouped ranks “break back” a few times, stepping down the harmonic series, so the overtones grew lower as you played up the scale.

Here’s a good one: how about we make two organs, one above the other, and give each a separate keyboard. How about a third organ with a keyboard on the floor you can play with your feet? 

As we got better at casting, forming, and handling that metal, we could start our overtone series an octave lower with 16-foot pipes. Or 32 . . . I don’t know where the first 32-foot stop was built or who built it, but I know this: he was an energetic, ambitious fellow with an ear for grandeur. It’s ferociously difficult and wildly expensive to build 32-foot stops today, but it was a herculean task for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century workers. And those huge shiny pipes were just the start. You also had to trudge out in the forest, cut down trees, tie them to your oxen, drag them back into town, and start sawing out your rough lumber to build the case for those huge pipes.

How long do you suppose it took workers to cut one board long enough to support the tower crown over a 32-foot pipe using a two-man saw? It’s a good thing they didn’t have smart phones because between tweets, texts, e-mails, and telemarketers, they’d never have finished a single cut.

It’s usual for the construction of a monumental new organ to use up 50,000 person hours or more, even with modern shortcuts such as using dimension lumber delivered by truck, industrial power tools, and CNC routers. How many hours did the workshops of Hendrik Niehoff (1495–1561) or Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) put into their masterpieces? And let’s remember that Schnitger ran several workshops concurrently and produced more than 150 organs. Amazing. He must have been paying attention.

Pay attention

The pipe organ is a towering human achievement. It’s the result of thousands of years of experimentation, technological evolution, mathematical applications, and the pure emotion of musical sensibilities. Just as different languages evolved in different regions of the world, so did pipe organs achieve regional accents and languages. The experienced ear cannot mistake the differences between a French organ built in 1750 from one built in northern Germany. The musicians who played them exploited their particular characteristics, creating music that complemented the instruments of their region. 

Let’s think for a minute about that French-German comparison. Looking at musical scores, it’s easy to deduce that French organs have simple pedalboards. But let’s go a little deeper. It’s no accident that classic French organ music is built around the Cornet (flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). Those pitches happen to be the fundamental tone and its first four overtones, according to Pythagoras, and they align with the rich overtones that give color and pizzazz to a reed stop. The reeds in those organs are lusty and powerful in the lower and middle octaves, but their tone thins out in the treble. Add that Cornet, and the treble blossoms. Write a dialogue between treble and bass using the Trompette in the left hand and the Cornet in the right. (Can you say Clérambault?) Add the Cornet to the Trumpet as a chorus of stops (Grand Jeu). And while you’re fooling around with the five stops of the Cornet, mix and match them a little. Try a solo on 8′-4′-22⁄3′ (Chant de Nazard). How about 8′-4′-13⁄5′ (Chant de Tierce)? It’s no accident. It’s what those organs do!

History has preserved about 175 hours of the music of J. S. Bach. We can only wonder how much was lost, and certainly a huge amount was never written down. But 175 hours is a ton of music. That’s more than a non-stop seven-day week. I guess Bach’s creativity didn’t get to rest until about 9:00 a.m. on the eighth day! We know he had a busy life, what with bureaucratic responsibilities (he was a city employee), office work, rehearsals, teaching, and all those children. When he sat down to write, he must have worked hard.

Marcel Dupré was the first to play the complete organ works of Bach from memory in a single series of recitals. We know he had a busy life as church musician, professor, mentor, composer, and prolific performer. When he sat down to practice, he must have worked hard.

In 1999, Portugese pianist Maria João Pires was scheduled to perform a Mozart concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. She checked the orchestra’s schedule to confirm which piece, and prepared her performance. Trouble was, the published schedule was wrong. The first performance was a noontime open rehearsal. Chailly had a towel around his neck, and the hall was full of people. He gave a downbeat and the orchestra started playing. A stricken look appeared on Pires’ face, and she put her face in her hands. She spoke with Chailly over the sound of the orchestra, saying she had prepared the wrong piece. It’s not easy to tell what he said, but I suppose it was something like, “Let’s play this one!” And she did. Perfectly. You can see the video by typing “Wrong Concerto” into the YouTube search bar. Maybe Ms. Pires wasn’t paying attention when she started preparation for that concert, but she sure was paying attention when she learned the D-minor concerto. It was at the tip of her fingers, performance ready, at a panicky moment’s notice.

Often on a Sunday morning, my Facebook page shows posts from organ benches. Giddy organists comment between churches on the content of sermons, flower arrangements, or the woman with the funny hat. Really? Do you have your smart phone turned on at the console during the service? If your phone is on while you’re playing a service, is it also on while you’re practicing? I suppose the excuse is that your metronome is an app? Oh wait, you don’t use a metronome? To paraphrase a famous moment from a 1988 vice-presidential debate, I knew Marcel Dupré. Marcel Dupré was a friend of mine. You’re no Marcel Dupré.¹

A time and a place

I love my smart phone. In the words of a colleague and friend, I use it like a crack pipe. I read the news. I order supplies and tools. I look up the tables for drill-bit sizes, for wire gauges, for conversions between metric and “English” measurements. I do banking, send invoices, find subway routes, get directions, buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and do crossword puzzles. I check tide charts, wind predictions, and nautical charts. I text, tweet, e-mail, telephone, and “go to Facebook.” I listen to music and audio books, check the weather, look for restaurants, pay for groceries, and buy clothes.

The people who invented and developed our smart phones must have been paying attention to their work. It’s a world of information we carry in our pockets, and there must be millions of lines of code behind each touch of the screen. I’m grateful to have such an incredible tool, but I’m worried about its effect on our lives. We know a lot about the stars and orbiting planets, but I’m sure we don’t know everything. I hope there’s some smart guy somewhere, sitting on a remote hillside with no phone, wondering about something wonderful.

I’m not pushing strollers so often anymore, but I keep my phone in my pocket when our grandchildren are visiting. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the dog because it’s fun to be with him. And I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the streets of the city alone. I wouldn’t want to miss someone doing something stupid because they weren’t paying attention. Hope they don’t drop their phone. ν

Notes

1. Poetic license: truth is, I never met Marcel Dupré.

For the home that has everything

Many organists dream of having a pipe organ at home. It’s a great alternative to schlepping off to church to practice, especially if the church is far away, if it’s a busy building in which it’s hard to find quiet and privacy, or if the church is not heated during midweek and it’s simply too cold to sit in there for any length of time. Having worked with many clients as they purchase pipe organs for their homes, I’ve picked up some insight into what you might consider as you plan a purchase.

Pretty much every day I speak with someone about the cost of pipe organ projects, and I’ve found that the prices of new pianos can be a helpful comparison. I’ve downloaded an “Investment Brochure” from the website of Steinway & Sons that publishes the 2012 price of a new “Model B” (that’s the seven-footer) as $87,500, and the 2012 price of a new “Model D” (the nine-foot “concert grand”) as $137,400. If we round up a little to account for a couple additional years, we might say they’re at $90K and $140K. Not all of us can shell out that kind of money for a piano, but I think this is a good point of reference.

There are two basic and common types of residence pipe organs, two-manual tracker action “practice machines” with at least one voice for each keyboard, and two or three-manual electric or electro-pneumatic “unit” organs with a small number of ranks spread through switching to create a larger number of stops. The latter is typically less expensive, as engineering, construction, and materials are simpler and less expensive. But for the price of that Steinway “B” you can order a brand-new tracker-action practice organ with at least four independent stops. That’s enough organ for serious practice, and for “real” performances of organ music to add to your dinner parties.

I’m well aware of colleagues who have scored real bargains—hearing through the grapevine about an available instrument, and racing off in a rented truck to get it themselves. If you have basic mechanical skills, and if the organ is a good playable condition, you can be successful moving an organ yourself. There are even simple and inexpensive apps available that will help you tune your organ by watching a needle on the screen of your smart phone.

When planning to purchase a used car, many people arrange to take the car to their mechanic and ask him to assess it. You pay the usual hourly rate and receive a professional opinion as to whether it’s a good deal or not. Just because that gorgeous eighteen-year-old Jaguar looks like the car you’ve always dreamed of, you’ll be sorry if you find out the hard way that it has a fatal rust condition, or is running on only eleven cylinders.

In the same way, you can engage a professional organbuilder to give you advice about a purchase, to make suggestions about how to move it, to help you with the assembly at your home, and, I would add, ideally doing the tonal finishing and tuning for you. After all, those are specialized tasks and if you’ve never tuned an organ yourself, you’ll probably not achieve a really musical result.

What does it take?

Just this afternoon I received what I would call the most common type of inquiry regarding a residence organ: “I’ve always wanted to have an organ at home. Do you have anything that doesn’t need much work and doesn’t cost very much?”

I understand that personal budgets might be more limited than those of churches or other larger institutions. But if the price is your principal consideration, I doubt you have much chance for success. A fine pipe organ is a work of art, not a utilitarian machine. You should ask yourself what you hope to achieve. If you simply want two keyboards and pedal with sound coming from each key, you’ll be fine buying the cheapest thing out there. But consider these criteria:

1. If you’re serious about practicing, you should care about the “touch” of the keyboards. Some keyboards have simple spring actions that return the note just fine when you release, but have a dull, insensitive, mushy feel. That would hinder the development of the fine control of your technique. Your keyboards should have a precise clean feel, and if you’re going to develop your control, they must be regulated accurately, both in weight and contact point.

2. The response of windchest actions is just as important as that of the keyboards. Some electro-pneumatic and all-electric actions are sluggish, and while you might perceive that to be slow attack, it’s more common that it’s caused by slow release. A sluggish release hinders the repetition rate and produces a “gummy” feel. Also, some all-electric actions have a characteristic “bounce” on release that leads to actual repetition of a note on release. That will surely mess up your trills!

3. The stability of the wind supply is important to even playing. You may prefer winding that has some motion in it, but in tiny organs, this can be a real nuisance. If the original builder has squeezed a miniature wedge-bellows into the case, there might not be enough air to support the larger pipes. Also, in compact tracker organs, the scale of the windchest might be too small. If key channels and pallets are not adequate, the larger pipes in a stop will not get adequate wind, and you’ll be stuck waiting for them to speak. 

§

My colleague Amory Atkins and I are just back from a trip to Oregon and Idaho during which we finished the installation of two residence organs. The trip was quite an adventure for a couple of lifelong easterners, and while both locations were remote to the extreme, the two projects were very different. One of the organs is a two-manual tracker-action instrument built by Casavant in 1979, the other was built in 1964 by M. P. Möller—the nearly ubiquitous “Double Artiste.” Both organs came from churches for which they were too small, and both are now nicely ensconced in their new homes. And both clients are accomplished attorneys who elected to leave the big cities of California to live quietly in remote locations.

Chillin’ in Coolin

Robert Delsman recently completed building a beautifully appointed Craftsman-style house in Coolin, Idaho, located in the north-pointing “pan-handle” of the state, close to the border with Canada. We shipped the organ from New England in a rented truck. Roughly, the directions are to drive 2,800 miles west on Interstate 90 to Coeur d’Alene (Koor-dah-lane), Idaho, take a right, and drive north 150 miles. Once the organ was delivered, we flew back and forth from Spokane, Washington, which is less than two hours from Coolin by car. The town of Newport, Idaho, is between Spokane and Coolin, so it’s less than an hour’s drive to a real grocery store and the amenities of a mid-size town, but for real shopping, medical care, and other conveniences, Spokane is the nearest place. 

Wikipedia says that Coolin has about 210 residents. When I mentioned that to the proprietor of the Coolin Motel, he said, “Oh no, there aren’t that many people here.” Once you’re in the village, you drive twenty miles further north to get to Robert’s house. The twisting and pitching road is a nice drive in the summer time with plenty of sunlight and fragrant forest and mountain air, but when we were there last winter for the physical setup of the organ, there were two or three inches of hard ice on the road, giving us a difficult white-knuckle drive back and forth to town. Add to that excitement the large population of deer and elk, and you have a lot of chances to get in trouble. The local guys in the Moose Knuckle Bar and Grill told us that the spooky place with treacherous curves high above the surface of Priest Lake is actually the deepest place in the lake.

Robert’s house is on the shore of Priest Lake, with stunning views of forested mountains. It’s beautifully appointed inside with black walnut doors and alder paneling that would be the pride of any organbuilder, all held up by an internal timber frame complete with mortise-and-tenon joints, graceful curves, dovetails, and bow-tie shaped “keys” holding joints together. The organ is in the Great Room, with the console on a balcony facing the two-and-a-half story window overlooking the lake, and the two organ cabinets on nice perches on either side of the console. The blower, static reservoir, and power supply are located about twenty feet away in a lovely hardwood cabinet in the closet of Robert’s bedroom, with windlines laid down and cast into the cement slab that forms the second floor. It’s a beautiful installation, made classy by the skill of the architect and contractor.

The scheme of the Double Artiste is just what the name implies—two independent Möller Artistes, one for each keyboard, played from a two-manual console. Unlike most two-manual unit organs, the two divisions are discrete from each other, with the exception in this case that the Gemshorn of the Swell is also playable on the Great. The Great comprises a Diapason, Rohrflute, and a two-rank Mixture. The Gedeckt is extended to sixteen-foot pitch playable on both Great and Pedal, and each rank is playable at several pitches. The Swell comprises Gedeckt, Viola, Spitzflute, Gemshorn, and Trumpet. The Trumpet extends to 16-foot pitch playable on both Swell and Pedal and again, each rank is playable at several pitches.

Those organists toiling in the vineyards of symphonic music will benefit greatly from having two independent expression enclosures in their home practice organ.

Entering Enterprise

Stephen Adams lives in Enterprise, Oregon, the seat of Wallowa County. With over 1,900 residents, Enterprise is a much larger community than Coolin, but it’s more remote. It’s about a four-hour drive across prairie and ranch land from Spokane, and just as far from Boise, Idaho. Lewiston, Idaho, and Clarkston, Washington (get it, Lewis and Clark?) are on the Snake River just about halfway from Spokane to Enterprise, but that’s it. Leaving Lewiston on our way to Stephen’s house, we followed a nearly empty school bus on a forty-five minute route across that rugged terrain.

Stephen’s home is less than ten minutes outside town, but since the town is so remote, the place is in the middle of nowhere. It’s an old established farm/ranch with a Music House right by the gravel road, and the main house isolated by trees and landscape, up on a hillside remote from the road. The Casavant organ, with eleven stops and fourteen ranks, came from a closed Roman Catholic Church in Wyoming, Pennsylvania (near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre). It endured its own long ride on Route 90, and the ride from Lewiston to Enterprise includes a particularly challenging road from high elevations to river valleys including dramatic switchback curves and steep grades. Organ Clearing House drivers had a special challenge to “keep the shiny side up” that time.

The Music House was already home to two Steinway pianos. The Casavant organ replaces a unit organ by Balcom & Vaughan, completing the fleet for Stephen, who is, later in life, a very serious student of keyboard playing. He travels to the east coast for “binge” sessions of organ lessons, and practices many hours a day, working to satisfy a lifelong goal. He has a strong interest in the music of the Baroque era and earlier, and this fine tracker-action organ with precise, sensitive key action and sprightly voicing is just the ticket.

Be your own boss.

In 1987, I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts. It was a nice place to work—a large, airy space with wood floors in an old mill building with lots of equipment. While I was there, we had a deep pit dug through the concrete floor of the large lower room, which increased the available height for erecting organs by about eight feet. It was an unusual setup in that you had to climb down to work on keydesk and ground-level action, but it was fun to “walk the plank” across from the main floor to the impost level of the organ. Loading pipes into an organ was a breeze.

We completed several fun projects in my three years there, and I have lasting friendships with co-workers, but the fun ended in 1987 when Daniel Angerstein accepted the appointment as tonal director for M. P. Möller, Inc., and decided to close the workshop. As I had been doing much of the organ maintenance work for the company, Daniel and I made a deal allowing me to continue that work as an independent organ builder. The service work continued without interruption for the clients, and I was off on my own.

§

Loyal readers of The Diapason will remember that I’m a fan of the genre of historical fiction involving the exploits of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. My favorites are the epic tales by Patrick O’Brien known as the Aubrey/Maturin series comprising nineteen novels, and the eleven book series by C. S. Forrester known as the Hornblower novels. I love the accurate description of the techniques of handling and equipping those ships, and am fascinated by the deep character development possible in such extended stories.

I have all of them as audio books, and just as some people listen to the same recording of music repeatedly, I enjoy listening again, sometimes to a particular passage, sometimes through a whole series from beginning to end.

Forrester’s Captain Horatio Hornblower seems to be modeled after Lord Viscount Admiral Horatio Nelson, the heroic real-life officer responsible for Britain’s great naval victory at Trafalgar. Throughout the series, Hornblower struggles against his personal weaknesses, from seasickness (which affected Nelson horribly in real life) to fear and trepidation—all characteristics unbecoming a naval officer. As my relationship with Captain Hornblower has developed, I’ve singled out two contradictory quotations that define the responsibilities of authority, and by extension resonate deeply with me as a self-employed worker.

In one installment, Hornblower is in a French prison after his ship, The Sutherland, was defeated in a battle in which it had been outnumbered four-to-one by ships of the French navy. He imagined that he would be executed by Napoleon, and in the agony of this confinement he relives an earlier period of imprisonment that had occurred before he reached the rank of Captain: 

“In those days, too, he had never known the freedom of his own quarterdeck, and never tasted the unbounded liberty—the widest freedom on earth—of being a captain of a ship.”

At another moment in his career, he is thinking about his coxswain Brown (we never learn Brown’s first name). Hornblower admires and envies Brown for his powerful physique, his natural cheerfulness, and his unbridled courage—all attributes that Hornblower lacks. He reflects on the relative ease of the life of an ordinary sailor (tar, swab), who is subject to the absolute authority of his superiors, and “never knows the indignity of indecision.”

I’m amused and perhaps informed by the idea that serving as a naval captain, or being the owner of a business, is either an incredible freedom, or the road to ignominy. Truth is, it’s a mixture of the two, see-sawing from day to day and from project to project. What a ride. 

Notes 1. Frank Rippl, “OHS 52nd National Convention, July 11–17, 2007, Central Indiana,” The Diapason, February 2008, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 24–29.

Since the beginning of this century, the recital calendar of The Diapason has included numerous listings for Ken Cowan. A native of Thorold, Ontario, Canada, Cowan was first taught organ by his father, David Cowan; he subsequently studied with James Bigham, with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Thomas Murray at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has held organist positions at St. Bartholomew’s, St. James Episcopal Church, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia; during his college years he was on the roster of associate organists for the Wanamaker Grand Court organ in Philadelphia. He presently serves as Assistant Professor of Organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey; Rider University has honored him with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.
A featured artist at the 2004 AGO convention in Los Angeles and during the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis (as one of several players during a concert recorded for Pipedreams), Ken Cowan has also performed at many AGO regional conventions, as well as at conventions of the Organ Historical Society and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. His discography comprises numerous recordings (for the JAV label) on Skinner instruments, including The Art of the Symphonic Organist, recorded on the 1921 Skinner organ at the Parish Church of St. Luke, Evanston, Illinois. (Note: John Speller’s review of this recording in The Diapason praised Cowan’s choice of repertoire, demonstration of the organ’s colors, and skill with buildup and decrescendo, calling the disc “one of the finest I have heard in some time.” See The Diapason, August 2004, p. 14.) With Justin Bischof, he recorded Aaron David Miller’s Double Concerto for organ with the Zurich Symphony Orchestra, on the Kleuker organ in the Tonhalle in Zurich (Ethereal Recordings). Cowan’s repertoire is broad, but favors nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, from Bossi to Liszt, Wagner to Widor, Dupré to Roger-Ducasse, and much in between. He is associated with transcriptions, yet these do not dominate either his recital programs or his recordings. As a performer he seems relaxed, taking any difficulties in stride. Ken Cowan is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

JR: Let’s talk about your DNA! Your father is an organist, and other grandparents were too, correct?
KC: Yes, two grandmothers and great-grandmother Cowan. Thurza Cowan was an organist, and I think she must have been pretty good too, because the repertoire that is still sitting around my house in Canada shows she played some really difficult things.

JR: Were those the days when you had to have a pumper?
KC: A little bit after that, I think it was. She played a Woodstock organ. I saw a picture of the old console, and it looks like a theatre organ console. But it would have been electrified, I think.

JR: And your grandmothers?
KC: My father’s mother and my mother’s mother both played, each as a local parish organist.

JR: Did your grandmother teach your father?
KC: No, actually; that’s not our family’s habit. My father studied with a local organist named George Hannahson, actually a very good player; the brothers Hannahson did a lot of the church music in the area. Except for the things that my dad showed me to get me started at the organ, I think everybody in my family who learned an instrument always studied with somebody outside the family.

JR: Were your first lessons with your father?
KC: He got me started with the instrument. He didn’t teach me piano, so we always had it in mind that I would eventually find an organ teacher outside of our house.

JR: Did you insist on organ lessons, or did he suggest you should take them?
KC: No, it was me. He insisted that I study the maximum amount of piano possible before I ever touched the organ. Ever since I was three years old, I would hang around the organ bench, and I knew what all the stops were. I knew the difference between a Lieblich flute and a Rohr flute when I was little—before I could play anything. And I was the token key-holder in the family—if the reeds needed to be tuned, I would be carted down to the church. The arrangement was that if I was well-behaved in church, he would play whatever my favorite organ tunes were before we would go home. I still remember that.

JR: So what were your favorite organ pieces when you were a wee lad?
KC: They were a little different from what they are now! (laughter) Probably mostly little songs that I knew how to sing at the time. Or wedding pieces and old campy hymns, I used to like those too—and I knew all the words. Somewhere I have a tape of myself singing along, I think—locked away! Anyway, I was fortunate that there was a really nice Casavant organ from the ’20s in the church where my father played, a three-manual organ, so it was great just to get to know registration on a nice instrument first. And we always had a lousy piano—which is still there, actually! So to have this really nice organ—I couldn’t resist but to learn how to play it—or try.

JR: How old were you when you started playing the organ?
KC: I knew how to play a hymn on the organ, but I really started to learn pieces around eighth grade, so twelve or thirteen. I knew how to play the piano pretty well by then. In fact, I got a lot more interested in piano after I realized how much I really liked playing the organ. I learned about some organ pieces that had been arranged for piano—I remember one was the Liszt B-A-C-H—I guess if you don’t realize that it’s a hard piece
. . . . So I improved a lot as a pianist after I decided I wanted to try to become as good an organist as I possibly could, and realized at that time, too, that piano was the key, at least for a lot of it. A couple years after that, studying some Bach and other things, I heard music of Dupré for the first time. So I went along for a while just learning all the pieces that made me think “oh, that’s a really neat piece!” It wasn’t the most logical progression, but it worked out all right.

JR: What was your first recital like?
KC: First recitals on the organ—I was 13 or 14. At that time it was mostly playing the Widor Toccata, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor—I used to work on lots of Bach pieces when I was in high school, so I always programmed that. I could practice the same pieces quite a lot, unlike now where there are piles and piles of things to get through in a short amount of time. But at least when I began performing I was confident that “I’ve been playing this Bach piece for a few months, it’ll probably be all right.”

JR: What was your first church position?
KC: I was sort of the perpetual assistant organist! I worked that way alongside my dad for the last year or so of high school, so I guess outside of any kind of familial supervision was when I went to college. I was assistant at St. Clement’s Church—and that was being thrown into the deep end of the pool, because Peter Conte was the organist at that time and of course ran a pretty tight ship, and still does there. I stayed at St. Clement’s the whole time I was in college in Philadelphia, and worked for a couple years at St. Mary the Virgin, and then at St. James Madison Avenue, and then at St. Bartholomew’s.

JR: You had said that when you were first studying, you weren’t sure about a career. At what point did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?
KC: I think that when I went away to college I knew pretty well that music was going to be what I would do primarily. And I never had any doubt that certainly I’d always be involved in music in my life. But I guess I was brought up in a casual enough way that no one ever said “You must be a musician.” And there are plenty of other interesting things out there to do! So it was by the time I went away to Curtis for college. I was fortunate that they were willing to take me in, and it was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate, in every place and with everyone with whom I’ve studied—I really made some lucky choices.

JR: At this point, could you identify who your big influences are?
KC: I think now it’s sort of a conglomeration. But there’s no one that I’ve ever studied with who hasn’t been an influence, and recordings are very valuable too. I remember when I was in high school—even though it wasn’t a complete immersion in music like college, I remember clearly what I learned from James Bigham, who was my teacher at that time—a major influence and a masterful player and teacher. At Curtis, of course, I was studying with John Weaver, and he had a different approach to teaching and was demanding about what was to be expected week to week.
My experience at Curtis was great. I still remember bringing in—I think it was my second year there—the Liszt Ad nos, and I was trying to be conservative, in the sense of not using countless general pistons. At that time the organ at Curtis Hall had just twelve general pistons, so I learned it using only one level, and I thought, “well, that’s a bit of restraint here”—a mere twelve generals, with lots of divisionals. I finished playing through it, and we talked about the music, and John Weaver said, “Now, I just should tell you, that when you’re approaching the registration of a piece like this, you can’t always count on having a dozen general pistons. I just bet that through use of more divisional pistons, I could work out all the registrations for this piece with no compromise whatsoever, on six general pistons.” And the amazing thing is—that he could! He was really impressive in that way, because, having decades of touring experience, he’s mindful that there weren’t always multiple memory levels. So he was very encouraging about people not being a slave to a computer combination action. For example, if you hit a piston for a chorale prelude registration that had a flute here and a cornet there, you’d be asked—“Can’t you remember these stops? Why do you have to hit a piston?”
Then of course, Thomas Murray is sort of a wonder in his own way. I enjoy just watching him at an organ—how he approaches the instrument, how to choose registrations—musically and registrationally always doing the most with the least, and loving every minute of it. I think a lot of people associate him with “oh, and he hits 500 Swell pistons.” Actually he doesn’t; he uses the fewest number to get the greatest effect. I didn’t realize that until really watching.
Martin Jean began teaching at Yale the same year I began studying there, and he was a really interesting person to study with as well. I had lessons with him for a semester at Yale while Tom Murray was on sabbatical; in addition to a coaching here or there at other times, students in the Yale department were free to coach with faculty outside of their own studio. Martin was full of curiosity about compositions and their possible interpretations, so I would always leave lessons with him pondering many possibilities. And I remember along the way I had a few lessons with McNeil Robinson, and he, in terms of how to learn a piece of music in a really thorough way, is just masterful. But you don’t have to study with someone for five years to get something immensely valuable, that you’ll never forget.

JR: Were you fairly confident with your registration ability before you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray?
KC: I guess I was. Since I was a little kid I was fascinated with how stops were built, what the different ones did, the difference between the various colors, and so on. And there were enough nice instruments around that I pretty much understood how that worked—also, my dad was good at registration himself; that helped. If you’re around someone just an hour a week, that’s different than being around somebody all the time—as an aside, you can at any point say, “hey, how come you would do this, as opposed to something else?” And then Jim Bigham, with whom I studied in high school, just has an amazing imagination for registration and a huge instrument at Holy Trinity Lutheran; that was another great stroke of good fortune for me.

JR: When you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray, did you work more on interpretation, or did they spend a lot of time with registration?
KC: A little of everything. Tom Murray in particular is very attentive to registration; even if he doesn’t change something radically, he is very sensitive to the finest details. Even if you can row your own boat to start with, I’d say to study with Weaver is to learn his system of managing a big instrument. He’s quite amazing in that he can register an entire recital in a couple of hours, and it will sound as though he’s played the organ for a long time, just because he’s so clear about exactly what he’s going to do at every point in a piece. Tom Murray is known as this “orchestralist,” who gives each color in an instrument its best opportunity to shine, so just to watch him do what he does is really an education!

JR: At Curtis, you were required to play pieces from memory. How many pieces have you memorized?
KC: Oh, probably hundreds. I think from year to year there are pieces—especially pieces that I learned when I was in high school—that I find I can usually play without really thinking about it much at all. From year to year I’ll carry around a few recital programs’ worth of repertoire, at any given time, and I try to keep on expanding that. During school semester, for example, there’s just not time to practice the number of hours a day that I’d love to, so I’ll always practice technical things on the piano, even if I don’t touch an organ. I find that to maintain a few hours of music is manageable, but it takes a lot more time to be constantly learning dozens of pieces.

JR: Do you have some favorite pieces? Desert island pieces?
KC: I’ve always loved Bach, and I think as is the case with so many people I ended up playing the organ because of the music of Bach. As things have gone, I’ve gotten into a lot of repertoire that is far from Bach—I’ve always loved symphonic organs, orchestral transcriptions and that sort of thing. But I think I could do just fine with some of the great works by Bach.
Now as far as what’s fun to play in a concert, on, say, a particular type of organ—for Skinner organs, they’re great at something English Romantic; the Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue is a fun piece to play because it relies quite a lot on the interpreter, as does Liszt, Reubke, Reger—if you hear three people play the same piece by Liszt, or Reger, or Reubke, it will sound completely different, as I think it should.
Many people who play those pieces think that it couldn’t possibly be done any other way than their own, because they require a very strong interpretive perspective, but in reality there are of course many possible interpretations. I love playing transcriptions, because on an American symphonic organ, you really push the instrument to the edge of what it’s able to do, and that’s always kind of fun. And historically it’s been controversial because for much of the twentieth century the attitude of most organists was “why would you do such a thing? Go learn some more legitimate organ pieces!”

JR: It’s nice stuff!
KC: Yes, there are so many great pieces that weren’t originally composed for the organ. I think once you do learn most of the standard organ repertoire, it’s fun to look beyond it a little bit and see how an instrument can work at interpreting something else. I have to confess, too, that I started listening to records of transcriptions when I was in high school. I have old recordings by George Thalben-Ball, for example, and I still remember getting two recordings of transcriptions by Tom Murray and Thomas Trotter, I think both made in the ’80s, and so I thought, “Wow! That instrument sounds great—and very expressive. Wouldn’t it be fun to learn how to do that?”
Anybody who gets into this kind of orchestral stuff might be pigeon-holed with “Oh, all he plays is Wagner,” or, “All he plays are transcriptions,” which of course I don’t think is true of anybody who does. One of the keys to having success with transcriptions, though, is to know when it’s a good idea not to play something, because one of the pitfalls about the organ is you cannot bring exactly the same program to every instrument, or else you’ll win some and lose some. I find as with some of the big Romantic works, a transcription can sound great on an ideal instrument and it can sound like a dismal failure on the wrong instrument. I hope to usually be a good judge of when’s the time, and when’s not the time, to play a particular part of the repertoire.

JR: How about the future of this instrument with young people?
KC: I’m always glad when I know someone is bringing kids to a recital. And in a way, it’s a good reason to think about programming very carefully. Every once in a while I’ll play a program that might get a little too—mature for the newcomer.
If I were only playing for myself, I could go on for days listening to very intense-sounding organ music. But I’m not just playing for me; though I guess some people would say you should always be playing as though no one else is there—but someone else IS there. (laughter) So I am usually quite cognizant of the fact that there may be some young person there who’s never heard an organ recital before.

JR: Do you ever program a specific piece with children in mind?
KC: If I know they’re going to be there, yes. Things that are very effective with kids are pieces that are programmatic and tell a story, or pieces that really are “visual” in how the instrument is used. Kids immediately get a kick out of the fact that there are all these different colors and that wow, the organist plays with his feet, and beyond that things like Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre are great for kids, because they understand—they can tell what’s going on in the story as it’s going along. Of course, that’s a transcription, but there’s George Akerley’s A Sweet for Mother Goose nursery rhyme suite—that would be just the thing. I’ve heard some people do things like Carnival of the Animals and so on—that’s another work that’s not originally an organ piece, but can certainly get children’s interest in the instrument. And they all love the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!

JR: How do you plan a program? Fast–slow, or loud–soft, or keys?
KC: Having interesting key relationships can be nice, particularly if you segue from one piece to the next. More importantly, just not flogging people with the same kind of piece over and over again is a good rule of thumb. For example, I wouldn’t play half a program of, say, a prelude and fugue by Bach, followed by a preludium by Buxtehude followed by Prelude and Fugue on the Name of BACH, and so on—but contrasting forms, contrasting styles. I’ve never been much into the philosophy that “we should always go in chronological order.” It’s more a question of how can you give a good psychological flow to it? I guess that’s the right way to describe it. And it’s different on recordings, too. I think how you listen to a recording is a little different. In a concert, you can go from fast and furious to very intimate, to scherzo, back to this, back to that. On a record, if you do exactly the same thing, you end up with people constantly adjusting the volume control.
Programming is a constant challenge. And then the trap is, when you find a combination of things that you think works really well, to then be able to get out of it. I remember reading an article years ago about Glenn Gould’s thoughts on why he stopped playing concerts; he said he was feeling that sometimes he settled in on the same small number of pieces, the philosophy being, “well, the Beethoven worked in Toronto, it’ll probably work in New York, too, so I’ll play it again!” And again, and again—and so on it goes. Trying something new, even if it means going out on a limb, is a good idea, I think.

JR: You’ve long been an Organ Historical Society convention favorite. How did that get started?
KC: Good fortune, I guess! When I was working at St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, I think it was 1996 the OHS had their convention in Philadelphia; at that time we were doing an Evensong at St. Clement’s as part of the convention, and they wanted Peter to play something, and he was already going to play a recital at the Wanamaker Store, so he said, “I’ll play the prelude, and why don’t you have my assistant play a short program after the Evensong?” I think there was some trepidation at first; “who is this guy?” I guess they liked it. And one thing led to another there; I’ve been back several times since.

JR: Yes, including in 2007 with your wife! Tell me about her, and how you cooked up this scheme.
KC: We met in graduate school; she went to Yale too. While we were students there, I had always liked an old recording I had of Jascha Heifetz and Richard Elsasser playing the Vitali Chaconne, as arranged by Leopold Auer. So on one of JAV’s Skinner series recordings, Joe Vitacco asked me to go out to Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian in Detroit, and I checked out the organ and it’s a great instrument—huge sound, and very mellow sound. I thought this would be a good accompanying organ, and that it would be neat to try and do a violin piece. So I asked Lisa to come along then, and that was the beginning of playing together. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asked to play duo programs together, so we’ve always been on the lookout for good repertoire that has been written for violin and organ, and things that transcribe well. We’ll often do an early piece, maybe something that’s contemporary written for those instruments; from the Romantic period, Rheinberger wrote some violin and organ works. I’ll often transcribe a concerto accompaniment for the end, and do a violin concerto as a violin and organ piece. And then we’ll usually do a solo piece each, too.

JR: The review of the OHS convention in the February 2008 issue of The Diapason mentions Lisa playing behind a screen.1
KC: We did the Karg-Elert Fugue, Canzona and Epilogue, for organ and violin, and a quartet of women’s voices is included at the end. I think Karg-Elert may have started this tradition himself, but there’s been a long practice of putting the violinist and the singers either offstage or in the Swell box. And at this particular church it worked, because you could open the door behind the Swell box and there was a hallway in behind. So everyone crammed in behind the chamber and you could have this diminuendo to nothing at the end. It was very unexpected color coming out of the organ chambers suddenly! It was a lot of fun, and everyone was a very good sport about the whole thing. The instrument was a Kimball organ, and certainly played repertoire well, but maybe accompanied even better. So it was nice to show that side of things.

JR: At the AGO convention in Minneapolis you played some new works. Do you play new pieces from memory?
KC: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. One of the things I’ve been working on this week is memorizing them. I find if I have a deadline, it doesn’t take long to get things like that learned. I probably spent a week or so learning each of the preludes and fugues. But then the question is—what do you want to do with it? There’s no question that I play a piece better after a year than after a week. So the rest of the time is spent just trying to refine things and get a clear interpretation, especially with brand-new pieces. The composer Henry Martin is a pianist and is probably known for composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and he teaches jazz and music theory at Rutgers, Newark. The reason for the commission was that Michael Barone really liked his piano pieces, and so commissioned him to write a couple for organ. Not knowing what his musical taste is—of course, when you learn a piece like that, I found I was initially sort of cautious in an interpretive sense—if it’s not written in the score, well, is it OK to do something? Well, he has a great imagination, and is a good sport about everything. That was actually nice to discover. Interpretive freedom is good! So I really liked them—they’re difficult, but I think will make nice pieces.

JR: Teaching versus performing—do you enjoy the balance that you have right now?
KC: Absolutely! I think it would probably be hard for me to only teach, because you end up living musically only through your students, instead of being able to do something yourself—so you need an outlet. On the other hand, it’s great to work with other people—it’s so satisfying and exciting when students work very hard and get a lot better, and you can help them along their way. This year, it was only the second time in recent memory that I didn’t play Easter Sunday some place. So before cooking dinner for family, I went to Trinity Church where two of my students play, and I had a better time listening to them accompany the Easter service than I would have if I’d done it myself! I’ve always been interested in teaching, so I have no regrets there at all.

JR: Tell us about your position at Westminster. Do you teach service playing, or does your teaching concentrate just on recital literature?
KC: Mostly my colleagues Alan Morrison, Matthew Lewis, and I end up concentrating on creating some kind of structured program of study for each student. I do at times make students learn hymns and accompaniments as part of their lessons. I find that you can teach somebody about as much about creative possibilities at the organ through hymns and accompaniments, at least from a registration point of view, as from anything else, because so often with a lot of the primary parts of the repertoire—Bach, Franck, Vierne, and so forth—you frequently follow convention or instructions for registration; in service playing you have a blank slate, and can really get acquainted with the organ in a more individualistic way.
The school’s strong emphasis on choral training provides a great background for developing graduates who can become very effective church musicians. There are classes in improvisation, courses in organ literature, there’s a class on accompanying at the organ, which is primarily a service playing course. Then the sacred music department offers courses on the history of church music, theology, choral pedagogy and management of programs, worship planning, and congregational song. A broad range of guest lecturers in the organ and sacred music departments address other specific topics. It could be a masterclass on organ playing or literature on some occasions, or frequently guest perspectives on the general field of church music in America.

JR: Do you see any consistent patterns of problems among your students?
KC: Nothing that applies to everybody. In fact, that’s one of the fun challenges of teaching—it’s all problem solving, but everybody’s a different case. For example, some students don’t learn pedal technique in a structured way, and I’m surprised that students coming in at the graduate level sometimes don’t understand very much about registration—that can be a big project. But that’s certainly not unique to everybody; some of them are great at that. Nuanced registration is a hard thing to teach in a short time. And if you encounter people who are trained to do only one thing in a particular situation, it can be a real challenge to make them more curious and sensitive to the precise character of each stop or chorus on different instruments, and how they combine with others. Then comes the issue of how to control the instrument in the context of a complex piece if they’ve never been trained to manage a console with a combination action.

JR: Do you have responsibilities at Westminster besides teaching?
KC: I also am the coordinator of the organ and sacred music program. That involves plenty of meetings, planning, and discussions with other faculty about how to proceed with programs and curriculum. In the past year we have revised the entire curriculum in organ and in sacred music. This year began the implementation of those revisions, which is a big undertaking, but a necessary step to try to keep the program from getting behind the times. Of course, I’m not doing that on my own, but I certainly have to stay involved with how things develop. And then another task for sacred music at Westminster will be to find a faculty member to succeed Robin Leaver, who just retired. Hopefully we’ll soon be looking for the next teacher of sacred music there, but in the current economic climate, universities can be tentative about filling vacancies. Always something, you know! It’s the sort of place where I can stay there until ten o’clock every night and have plenty more to greet me the next morning.

JR: Are you ever able to go hear other organists or other concerts?
KC: Here and there. There’s not as much time as I’d like there to be, because I’m often away weekends, when a lot of great concerts happen. Going to conventions and so forth, I can hear a lot of things in a short amount of time, just to keep track of who’s doing what. And then the nice thing living between New York and Philadelphia is oftentimes there will be good concerts on week nights. Plus, Princeton has some really good music series right in town. So whenever possible, I attend performances.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned?
KC: For Westminster, keeping the department growing stronger is a priority. As far as playing goes, it’s asking myself, what do I want to play now that I haven’t played before? And I’ve got lined up some recordings that I’ve been promising to make and that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I’ll just keep chipping away at them. A new CD on the big Schoenstein organ at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, was just released this February on the Raven label. That disc has German Romantic repertoire (Reger, Reubke, Karg-Elert) and a transcription of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz #1. But otherwise it’s a question of just balancing responsibilities out—and finding some time for fun, too.

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Advent in New York
Today, as I write this column, is the third Sunday of Advent. The Organ Clearing House is installing an organ in Manhattan, and my wife Wendy came down for the weekend. We went to a Christmas choral concert last night on the Upper East Side. We’ve had a string of nice meals together. And this morning we attended the 11 am Choral Eucharist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.
That landmark church is a huge and spectacular place. It’s a true stone Gothic building, especially fascinating as its perpetual state of incompletion allows the architecture aficionado to study the construction techniques—what the massive stonework looks like under the finished limestone veneer. The place is 601 feet long inside. The ceiling is nearly 125 feet above the floor. Single rooms just aren’t that big. There’s something like 15,250,000 cubic feet of air contained inside. Don’t even think about the fuel bill. The idea that a building that large could be dedicated to worship is solid testament to the power of faith—not just American Episcopalianism, but any faith anywhere.
It’s awe-inspiring. It’s breath-taking. It’s humbling. And thinking back on the history of cathedral building, so highly developed in twelfth-century France, it’s easy to understand how people were motivated to create such elevating structures. In rural areas, the cathedral building is visible for miles. Approaching Chartres in France, for example, one sees the famous cathedral on the horizon from a great distance. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC dominates the top of a hill, so it can be seen from Route I-95 some ten miles to the east of the city. In upper Manhattan, there’s really no place that I’ve found on ground level where you can see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine from any great distance. If you approach by subway, you get off the 1-2-3 train at 110th Street, walk north to 112th, turn right, and there you see the west-end façade of the cathedral at the end of the block. Heading up Amsterdam Avenue from Midtown, you don’t see the cathedral until you’re right on it. It blends in with the hundreds of façades that line the east side of the street. When you pass 110th Street, the cathedral campus opens up to the right—a dramatic and verdant two-block oasis in that busy urbanscape.

You can’t hold a candle to it.
Worship in the cathedral was a wonderful experience for us. Although the nave can seat thousands, there were enough people in attendance for the place to feel populated. There was a raft of clergy in beautiful vestments, clouds of incense wafting to the heavens, and a brigade of acolytes. I chuckled at the sight of a pint-sized acolyte bearing a candle on a pole that must have weighed as much as he did—and in order to show up in such a vast place, altar candles need to be fifty-pounders.
Perhaps the grandest thing about the place is the sound. We usually measure reverberation in half-seconds. At St. John the Divine it’s measured in days. Walk in on a Monday morning, and yesterday’s postlude is still in the air. Close your eyes and spin around, and you can no longer tell where a sound originates. The organ chambers were 150 feet from where we were sitting. The organ’s sound is powerful and rich. Gentle individual colors are easily distinguishable. Of course, we expect always to be able to tell when a Clarinet is playing, or when it’s replaced by an Oboe, but I am somehow surprised that subtle tones carry so distinctly in such a vast space. Some of the most impressive subtle tones in a monumental organ are the quiet 32-foot stops. An 800-pound Bourdon pipe consumes a hurricane of air through a four- or five-inch toe-hole to produce a rumbling whisper. It has to be the most extravagant consumption of materials and forces in the entire world of music. But when you sit a hundred feet away in a vast interior space, it’s impossible to put a price on that quality of sound.
The grand choruses of principals and reeds create huge washes of sound. The organ is powerful enough to startle you from across the room. There’s a good variety of bold solo reeds that bring clarity to hymn tunes. And perhaps the most famous organ stop in the world is 600 feet away high on the west wall under the great rose window—the State Trumpet. It’s blown with 50 inches of wind pressure—that’s more than twice what we otherwise consider to be high pressure. And do those pipes ever sound. One would never ask, “was that the State Trumpet?” The only answer would be, “If you’ve gotta ask, that wasn’t it.”
If you’ve never been able to experience the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, go. Just go. You can get there easily on the subway from Pennsylvania Station or Grand Central Station. You can find plenty of great meals within a few blocks. There are terrific hotels nearby, especially in my experience along Broadway between 75th and 80th Streets—just a few subway stops from the cathedral.
In summer 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri completed their restoration of the cathedral’s mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. You can read about that project in detail in the November 2009 issue of The American Organist. The Organ Clearing House was engaged to assist in the installation of the organ, and it was our privilege to spend that summer hoisting and assembling thousands of organ parts in the chambers, nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the cathedral. Sometime soon I’ll write about that experience in more detail. For now, take my advice—just go.

A clean sweep
So we’re installing an organ. Sunday is over and we’re into the work week. Sometimes we work in parish church buildings in quiet little towns. There’s a big parking lot where we can leave our cars. There’s plenty of space around the building for maneuvering trucks. And the sidewalks are quiet, so it’s easy to walk around while carrying heavy loads. There’s a hardware store just up the street, next to a sandwich shop that sells great coffee in cardboard cups.
Not this time. We’re working on 74th Street in Manhattan, just east of Park Avenue. It’s a great neighborhood, but it’s very busy. Park Avenue is lined with high-end housing—high-rise condominium buildings with uniformed doormen, expensively dressed women with little expensively dressed designer dogs, and snazzy green awnings. I think the nearest business on Park Avenue is the Maserati dealer. I’ve never been inside. They don’t have anything there that I need.
Lexington Avenue is one block to the east. It’s a much more interesting street, with hundreds of shops, cafés, restaurants, groceries—and thousands of people on the sidewalks. You can buy coffee, but it’s four or five dollars a cup. The hardware store is a half-hour round-trip walk (forget about driving—you’ll never find a parking space). There are delivery people on foot and on bicycles carrying everything from flowers to groceries to meals. 74th Street is supposedly one lane wide with parking on both sides.
The north side of the street is cleaned every Monday and Thursday—the south side on Tuesday and Friday. “Alternate Side Parking” is the regulation regarding street cleaning. The big street-sweeping machines are escorted by a fleet of public works cars. They come into the street and fan out, sticking to windshields aggressively tacky stickers that scold residents for thwarting their efforts to keep the city clean by leaving their cars in violation of the sweeping schedule. Seems that they don’t need to issue citations—the stickers are so difficult to remove that they are punishment enough. One car had three weeks’ worth of stickers. I guess the owner just gave up.
There’s a nursery school in the church building. At 8:30 every morning a platoon of kids arrives in the building escorted by parents and au pairs. A lot of them come by car.
Last week we brought a large truck into the neighborhood to deliver a load of organ parts. We got it here before 6:30 in the morning because we knew there’d be a scene. It’s difficult enough to park a car on a Manhattan cross-street. Just try to parallel-park a 45-foot-long truck. It was street-sweeping day, and the garbage trucks came at the same time as the street-sweepers. The nursery-school delivery was in full swing. There’s a private school across the street—a few hundred middle-schoolers added to the mix. And the sidewalks were jammed with people hurrying to work. Professional dog-walkers with their dozen-at-a-time charges sniffed their ways along, criss-crossing their leashes like a maypole dance. Building contractors were leaning on brooms, finishing their morning coffee. We were carrying 16-foot-long wooden organ pipes (500 pounds each) out of our truck, across the sidewalk, and into the church. It was quite a spectacle. It’s amazing how little patience people can have for people doing their work.

§

Once we get everything inside, the fun really starts. This organ is going into two locations in the building. The Swell, Great, and large Pedal stops are going in a high organ loft on the rear wall of the building. The Positif, Solo, and the rest of the Pedal are going in a chamber in the chancel. The Solo will be above the Positif, speaking through grilles in the arched chancel ceiling. We’re starting with the gallery organ. Today we hoisted the larger of the two Swell windchests into place. It’s about fifteen feet to the floor of the gallery and another eight or nine up to the frame where the chest sits. We have towers of scaffolding set up on the floor of the nave, with a bridge between that supports an electric chain-hoist. We can use the hoist to get the heavy parts up into the gallery, but we have to manhandle them from the gallery floor to their resting places in the organ’s framework. The 16-foot Double Open Wood pipes (those 500-pounders) are lying on the gallery floor under the organ. The organ’s floor frame is supported above those pipes. The tall legs that support the windchests are on top of the floor frame. And the 12-foot-high Swell box sits on top of all that.
The organ is a heavy industrial machine. It comprises many tons of wood along with hundreds of other materials. There are leather valves and bellows, steel springs, and every imaginable type of fastener. There are sophisticated valves for regulating wind pressure, compensating between the flow of air from the blower and the demand for air from the player and, by extension, the pipes. There are bearings that allow Swell shutters to operate noiselessly. There are powerful pneumatic motors that operate those shutters. There is a complex network of wind conductors that carry the pressurized “organ” air from blower to reservoirs and from reservoirs to windchests and various other appliances.
It can seem overwhelming as you get all that material out of a truck and into a building, then up into place. And after all that, it has to work. There are weeks of work finessing connections and adjustments, tuning, adjusting the speech and regulation of thousands of organ pipes.
The electrician is coming today to wire the blowers. That makes one more truck in the neighborhood, one more vehicle liable for citations, one more guy we’re depending on who’s liable to be held up in traffic.
It takes tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and install a pipe organ. It would be nice to be able to count and control how many times each part of the organ gets lifted—a busy organ company lifts many thousands of pounds of material every day.

§

When it’s all done we sit down to play. We forget the splinters, the cuts and bruises, the sleepless nights sitting up thinking through problems. We forget the sidewalk congestion, the hassle of plowing through dense city traffic in an oversized truck. We forget the endless days of hoisting, fastening, balancing, and fitting thousands of oddly shaped and unwieldy pieces. And we forget the hundreds of hours of powerful concentration as we adjust keyboard springs and contacts and strive to eliminate the music-spoiling effects of poor mechanical operation.
We hear the magic of air-driven musical sound reverberating through the building. We feel the incomparable vibrations of immense bass pipes rumbling along the bass lines of the music. We experience the energy of the congregation’s singing, complemented and enhanced by the majesty of the organ’s tone.
Imagine a church up the street receiving delivery of an electronic organ. It comes out of a truck, gets moved inside, plugged in, speakers hooked up, and you sit down and play.
It would be much easier to find funding for pipe organs if they were the essential engines of international finance. There are bankers within blocks of me here in Manhattan whose offices cost more than the organ we’re working on. Because pipe organs are “engines” of worship and because churches are the institutions that depend most on them, there will always be a struggle between the cost of producing them and the owner’s ability to fund them. There have not been many organs built without some kind of financial constraint. If we could have raised another $30,000 we could have had that Bourdon 32′.
I’m often asked how I got involved in organbuilding. Fact is, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing. 

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

Back in 1915, for the Panama-California Exposition, John D. Spreckels dedicated an organ pavilion in Balboa Park to “the peoples of all the world.” The post of Civic Organist of San Diego was first held by British-born Dr. Humphrey John Stewart (one of the founders of the American Guild of Organists), who served from 1917-1932. Stewart’s latest successor is Dr. Carol Williams, also British-born--and the first woman to be appointed to the post. Trained both in the UK and the USA--at London’s Royal Academy of Music, Yale University, and the Manhattan School of Music--Carol’s career today is anchored by her Civic Organist activities, but not limited by them. She has concertized throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, and continues her musical travels when possible. She has recorded a video and twelve CDs (details are available from her website, www.melcot.com). Carol Williams is represented in the USA by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, and in the UK by PVA Management.

Carol traveled to Illinois in March, and we had the opportunity to meet with her as she was preparing for a concert at Chicago’s St. Vincent de Paul Church, home of a 1901 Lyon-Healy organ that is undergoing restoration.

JR: Carol, I’m curious about your theatre organ background--you said you grew up playing theatre organ. Did you start with piano lessons?

CW:  Yes, that’s right. I started piano at age 5; I read music before I could read. There were electronic organs in the family, Hammonds, Lowreys--my aunt had a Hammond--and it just naturally progressed from having a Hammond, then to hearing a theatre organ.  I started theatre organ playing when I was about 13 or 14, and all the way through I continued a very strict piano training. I didn’t start classical organ until I was 17. But it was a natural progression.

JR: By the time you started classical organ, were you playing in theatres?

CW: I was doing concerts, yes, playing some theatre organs. But there were very few theatre organs left in their original surroundings; some had been moved into concert halls in England. I guess I started playing late since I didn’t sing in a boys choir, because I was a girl! The natural progression for the cathedral organist was you sang in the choir and then you naturally moved over--this didn’t happen to me, I just moved over. I heard Carlo Curley at the Alexandra Palace, and that was a turning point, because I thought, “this is really exciting!”

JR: Was it what he played, or how he played it, or the instrument?

CW: Everything! The Father Willis there was not working and there were electronic organs on stage and there were, I think, three or four organists. He was chauffered in, in a white Cadillac, I remember that. And Virgil Fox was there--he didn’t play; he stood out--that’s the closest I got to him. I was seventeen; I just clicked--”that’s my instrument!” I really do see myself as a concert organist. I enjoy playing light music, and it all feeds me, in the sense of keeping me alive. But I don’t see myself as a theatre organist. I enjoy playing it, and you have to be able to play light music in the park; you can’t just play a straight Buxtehude-Bach program--it would just go down like a lead balloon.

JR: I’ve been fascinated by your programming choices and liking them, because I’ve seen how audiences react to a varied program.

CW:  A lot of people find it hard to go into a church--I mean, they don’t see it as a concert venue. That’s why the park is great, because there are no “sacred” connotations, so you can play whatever you like. You can’t always do that in a church--you’ve got to show some respect. But you’ve got to get them in there, you’ve got to get them to stay, and you’ve got to get them to go again. So, you must play what they want to hear.

JR: Did you actually have theatre organ training? It’s definitely a different style of playing and registration. And did you learn how to create theatre arrangements, with the little fill-ins after a bit of melody?

CW: A lot of theatre organ arrangements are done from piano score and piano conductor score. I had two theatre organ teachers. Vic Hammett, who was a really fine artist, had so many innovative ideas, and my second teacher  was Eric Spruce, who was organist at the Empire Leicester Square in London--a very famous venue. They both knew what was entailed for playing theatre organ programs. That was alongside my classical organ training, so they were both feeding each other. It’s musicianship--you listen to orchestral scores, and then sometimes you might take a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical and you carve out your own ideas. You just let the music flow through you. But the training really helps. You work a lot from piano scores and novelty numbers--Zez Confrey . . .

JR: Kitten on the Keys!

CW: Beautiful stuff! James P. Johnson, Scott Joplin, they’re all quite delightful. They work well on a classical program, too. I love playing them!

JR: You play it very well. Some people just can’t make it work and you do.

CW: I like jazz. I think it should be like a soufflé, very light--and the pedal should be more 8-footish than 16 foot, so it really is more light, like a double bass plucking away. It shouldn’t be heavy. If you play Lefébure-Wély, this approach really helps, because that music is very flamboyant--it shouldn’t be stiff and stodgy.

JR: There are people who look down their nose at Lefébure-Wély.

CW: But he was an eminent musician. He was organist at Saint-Sulpice and he was one of Cavaillé-Coll’s key players. There is a funeral march by him, his opus 122, it’s some lovely music--not all oom-pah, oom-pah.

JR: You had so much training in England, then you came to the United States and you earned a DMA here. Why did you feel the need for training in America after such a good solid grounding in the UK?

CW: Well, I came to the States in ‘94, and I did a series of concerts. I really liked it out here. I went back and I happened across a CD of Thomas Murray--The Transcriber’s Art--and I just fell in love with that. You can never learn enough. I remember one teacher saying to me, “you should always remain a student,” always willing to learn. It just seemed right to come out here and do an artist’s diploma with Tom Murray, so I did. And I felt I really should do that DMA--you know, it’s worth having. I admire McNeil Robinson greatly; he’s a tremendous teacher. I enjoyed the scholarly aspect behind it; I did my thesis on 19th-century concert organs in England. The DMA at Manhattan School of Music is fairly performance based, which is me. I didn’t want to spend my time with textbooks and not play the organ. I wanted to play. So it worked out well. And for remaining in this country, I think a DMA really probably does help.

JR: Do you hope to teach some day, or just keep playing? 

CW: I think keep playing. It’s hard for me to take on a series of students because I’m traveling a fair amount and it’s not fair. At this stage I just want to play.

JR: But you did have one church job when you were in New York.

CW: Yes, I was an assistant organist at Garden City Cathedral, and that was good fun; I enjoyed the work. But doing that job, I realized that’s not what I want to do, because I didn’t want to immerse myself in conducting a choir, playing anthems--it just wasn’t me. But it fed me musically. While doing study at Yale, I was organist at Yale University Chapel; that was a good position. But from doing something, you learn something: that you don’t want to do it (if you follow me!).

JR: You seem to have a lot of fun with the Spreckels Pavilion concerts, including dressing up for them. You’ve got your Mexican dress for Cinco de Mayo, and if it’s a sunny day you have sunglasses--have you had to make any wardrobe investments just for that job?

 CW: Yes. A lot of warm stuff! (chuckles)

JR: Really? San Diego is warm!

CW: The building faces north, and it is so cold there this time of year. Actually they’ve just had a heat wave there this week. Yesterday it was in the 90s; this time of year, from October-November-December-January-February, and especially now, February-March, it’s the worst season. So the audience is in the sunshine, but you’re in the cold. And the organ is outside, the console is on the platform, and it kicks up a wind. It is the coldest place I have ever played! I remember Robert Plimpton saying to me, “You’re going to be cold.” I know English cathedrals--how could anything be as cold as an English cathedral? Well, he was absolutely right! I have a lot of silk things, underwear and stuff, layers--I wear a hat and warm coat. What I did start doing is going to the gym a lot, so I work out and that has helped me enormously--just keeping fit. Getting fit, I should say!

JR: What type of exercise do you do?

CW: Pilates and just general workouts--Pilates is really good for an organist, because of the neck--sitting at the organ, especially practicing under a lot of pressure, your neck is vulnerable. I’ve had serious neck problems, actually, and Pilates just strengthens your whole core. It makes you strong, and is well worth it.

JR: How about your shoes? I’ve also noticed that you don’t wear the standard organ shoes like a lot of us do. You’ve found shoes you can manage in?

CW: Yes. I think it’s personal. These are ballet shoes--and the sole is suede, so I can feel the pedals. And I have the heel made up so it’s not too flat. People have criticized them, but they work for me. Everybody’s feet are different. I have a very high arch, so I can’t wear a lot of flat shoes. But these work perfectly for me; other shoes don’t. I find them too solid. I wouldn’t feel supple--I want to feel like a dancer when I play--to feel that your feet are as nimble as your hands. If they’re solid, then it just doesn’t work. But I get a lot of shoes--different colors, too.

JR: Since you’ve had formal training in the UK and here, is the approach to playing any different? Would you say that there are different “schools” between the two countries?

CW: Yes. We have bigger acoustics in England. A lot of the cathedrals have tremendous resonance. A lot of the buildings over here do not have big resonance. One can play faster in dry acoustics; you go back home to England, or France, and you can’t do the same thing.  You play at St. Sulpice, you’ve got to really listen to that organ or it’s like having an argument with somebody and the organ would win. You’ve really got to listen to the instrument.

Each country, each acoustic, the voicing of each organ will bring out a different interpretation; you’ve got to be flexible.

JR: You clearly thrive on travel. Do you have an approach when you come to a new place and you have to learn the organ fast, because you’ve only got so many hours before that concert starts?

CW: It initially starts with them sending you a specification, getting that through the management. That gives you some idea of what you’re dealing with.  But it’s only something on paper. It’s nice to have two days if it’s possible--it should be possible, yet in England, many places, at cathedrals, they’d just give you a couple of hours. And it’s not fair; you barely get through a program, registering; it’s no way for musicians to work. You need that time to register, you need that time to savor the sounds, keep playing it through, always changing sounds--you know, change your balances. It takes a long time! I don’t like to work with my back against the wall because I don’t think I give my best.  I’d like to have two days if I could with an instrument.

JR: And the specification is just the starting point; you don’t know what the organ really sounds like or how responsive it is.

CW: Some of the big organs in this country with a big acoustic may have an action that is very light, and this can be a problem. Playing somewhere like St. Sulpice, the action is heavy but this can be very helpful with a large acoustic as this then allows the music to really make sense in the building.

JR: Are you saying that a heavier action works like a brake?

CW: It helps you. It makes you then appreciate what you’re dealing with: a big, big animal, a big friend. You’ve got to listen to it breathe; and you can’t do that at breakneck speed. Like the organ here: it’s got a big acoustic, the action is nice, but it’s light. You’ve got to switch off and put your ears in the building and listen to it as you play.

JR: About your Spreckels position--when you heard about it, what was it that made you think, “you know, I’d like to apply for that”?

CW: (chuckling) I saw it in The Diapason.

JR: Really!

CW: I did, yes. I remember reading it in The Diapason and I thought, “now that is an interesting position and that’s a position I know I could do,” because it was performance all the time. I always had in the back of my mind if there’s ever any job I wanted, it would be to be a civic organist--Lemare and people like that; his autobiography is fascinating, and the programs he played. I knew that would be me. So I applied. They had many applications--I understand about 100 applications--they narrowed it down to five, and the five were invited to give a Sunday afternoon concert. And I did; I did my best show, I thought. I loved the atmosphere because the audiences there are the general public, because it’s right in the middle of the park, it’s not far from the zoo, and there’s a museum of art, there’s all the big museums there. It’s a beautiful environment--there are about a thousand people there every Sunday afternoon. And I played a concert and I just clicked with the venue, I thought. Because you’re not limited as to what you can play, you can play what you want, within reason, on a big 73-rank Austin organ. And the organ itself is very versatile; it’s basically a good concert organ--plays the main repertoire incredibly well, and transcriptions. But it’s also got a tibia rank, so it plays theatre organ music well, and if you use the orchestral reeds and the couplers and the strings, you can get a good Wurlitzer sound from it. So it’s very versatile and it suits me, because I like to play all types of music. The organ and I, we’re a good marriage, I think.

JR: Do you remember what you played on your audition concert that sealed the deal for you?

CW: Well, I didn’t know for a while afterwards--not knowing is worse than anything! I played from Marchand right through to the Beatles, I remember. I just went the whole spectrum: Widor; Reger; as I said, the Beatles; Bach; a varied program.

The people there, they want to hear all types of music. The concerts are free; the organ was given by John D. Spreckels. And part of the deed was that the concerts have to be free. And I think it’s the hardest audience to play to, because  you get a lot of people who wander by, sit down, and the only way you can keep them there is if you play things that they want to hear, and in a way that they find exciting. If somebody’s paid 30 or 40 dollars for a concert, they’re going to sit right to the end. But if it’s free, they’ll go to another museum. So it’s hard. You’ve really got to connect with them--tell them about the organ, tell them about the music. You mustn’t be stuffy, play things that maybe two people might want to hear. With maybe 1000 people, you’ve got to try and connect with those thousand people. For the Monday night festival concerts we average 2500 people, and then on opening and closing nights we get about 4000. I shared a concert with Joshua Rifkin--I did the first half, he did the second half. He did beautiful ragtime; oh, it was fabulous! And then we did some duets at the end. We had 4000 people! It really was magic.

JR: Did you do Joplin duets with Rifkin?

CW: Yes. Maple Leaf Rag.

JR: You’ve recorded that already on your own.

CW: Yes--I love ragtime!

JR: Duets with Rifkin! He started the whole ragtime revival.

CW: Yes, he did. We owe the revival to him. He has exquisite playing, and it suits the tasteful construction of the music; they work well together. And he’s a great man, too; he’s a lot of fun.

JR: You’ve already talked about one occupational hazard at Spreckels, and that’s the cold. What about in summer? Does it get impossibly hot?

CW: It does get hot. We sometimes have the hot weather from the desert, and that’s what really fueled the fire in October. And it’s a dry, hot wind; it’s unbearable. As soon as you raise that big door on the organ, you suffer; so does everybody. It seems to suck out something from the atmosphere and the tuning unfortunately goes; there’s nothing you can do about that. But the Monday night festival concerts, because they’re at night, don’t have that problem so much. Sometimes you get an atmosphere problem, with moisture in the air, during late August and it can be very damp at night. That’s a problem; the keys get wet and the bench is wet; these are things you have to deal with.

Last year I shared a concert with Hector Olivera. He brought the Roland Atelier. We did the Guilmant First Symphony--he did the orchestra, and I did the solo organ. It was fabulous, absolutely fabulous. As we got to the second page of the Guilmant, I saw the biggest bug on the pedals! And I looked down and thought, “oh, no!” I didn’t have much to do that page, and I jumped off the bench. Lyle Blackinton, the organ curator, removed the bug; Hector looked at me, dazed, like “we haven’t finished, we’ve only just started,” and I jumped back on. The bug was crawling away--it was huge! I was terrified. We have these bug problems and I tell women not to use hair spray or anything like that. There are certain things that you cannot do!

JR: Does the Spreckels program have an endowment that funds the concerts?

CW: My position is two separate positions, actually. I’m the civic organist for the city, and then separately I’m the artistic director for the Spreckels Organ Society. And they put on the summer festival. They work on funding and donations and that’s a lot of work. From that we can put on concerts and pay artists to come and play. But it’s a lot of work because we can’t charge for programs, so it has to be done with donation. Next year is the 90th year with the instrument--she started life December 31st, 1914, so next season, the official 90th birthday, will be a very special year. For the opening concert we’re going to have the three civic organists--Jared Jacobsen, Robert Plimpton, and myself--they’ll call us the Three Tenors of the organ world!

This year’s an international festival; we have organists coming from Poland, Australia, France, Germany, and they’re going to be playing some music from their own countries. So that’s the flavor for this year. Next year will be very much linked with the celebration of the organ. So programs must have a connection with the instrument and the city. I have to say, it is a lot of work planning a festival.

This year, closing night, we are doing a Lloyd Webber Spectacular--including  artists in costumes. I’m playing the accompaniments to Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc. After a very serious festival and after a lot of serious organ music, I think it’s good that you have something that’s completely different, and this will bring in a different audience. Otherwise, you keep attracting the same audience, the same organ enthusiasts. So I’m always looking for something different each year that’s going to have a different appeal. I am also going to play some of Lloyd Webber’s father’s music--his father, W.S. Lloyd Webber, was an eminent musician.

JR: The Spreckels website shows pictures that look especially delightful, from programs where you were accompanying young people playing other instruments. That looked like so much fun!

CW: It was good. The concert was with children--”Music with children 2003”--and it’s getting young people involved, and not just organists. I’ve got a singer who’s actually going to be with me opening night--eleven years old and he has a voice that’s just amazing. His name is Daniel Myers.

JR: Is it a boychoir voice?

CW: He’s a boy soprano, but his voice hasn’t broken yet. It’s got power behind it. The director of the San Diego Children’s Choir, Dr. Garry Froese, recommended this youngster--said he wanted to sing Granada. I thought, singing Granada? But I couldn’t believe it when I heard him. Goodness me, the power behind it! So he’s going to be with me opening night.

We do something for children that’s important. That’s for the people of San Diego, that the instrument is used for really good things. I don’t mind if kids play violin, or sing, or whatever--they get a chance to play for a thousand people. And they love it!

JR: When you’re in San Diego, you’re playing at the pavilion. Do you do your practicing there, or how do you manage? Do you have an instrument of some sort at home?

CW:  I have a Rodgers at home. But I actually like going into the park early in the mornings to do practice, because it’s so quiet. I like working with the organ when there’s nobody around, telephones not around. I turn my cell phone off--I know I shouldn’t do that, but I just like to be left alone sometimes. Just get into the music. And there’s a piano in the pavilion, and the building’s very quiet. It’s very peaceful, so I can really get into my work. I make sure that I do so much practicing, then I will put on the computer and sort out the e-mails. I’m really disciplined about that. You can get so stuck into paperwork and e-mails and that; practice comes first for me! If people get in the way of my practicing, I can be very difficult. I mean, I’ve got to practice--that’s what I’m supposed to do! If you get in the way of that, then you’re not going to be performing so well. So that’s definitely first on the list every day.

JR: How much do you practice?

CW: At least three hours a day. I’m happy when I can do five, or when I’m traveling and working with new instruments, it can be up to eight hours a day. It’s a different type of work, getting used to a new organ.

JR: Let me ask you one last question. Where do you go from here?

CW: I love being busy, I love traveling, I love playing. The San Diego position I very much enjoy because you’re getting through to new people all the time. People come there specifically to hear that organ; people come from all over the world to hear it. It’s really refreshing to hear that. Just doing more and more recording; I love French organ music, I want to do some more recording of French organ music. Just keep busy--I’ve hardly started!

JR: Thank you so much.

In perfect harmony

All musicians know what harmony is: chords, voice leading, dissonance, and resolution. We know harmony as one of the persnickety courses you’re required to take in school, in my case taught by a tyrannical and sometimes abusive professor. When you master the craft of harmony, or at least understand it enough to be dangerous, the magic of music is unlocked for you. You may have always known that Bach’s music was special, but dig into its structure and mathematics, and it becomes otherworldly. Paradoxically, the more you know about, the less you can understand it. I think it’s the mystical equivalent of how Rembrandt, Rubens, or Hobbema could mix linseed oil and pigment and make light flow from their paintbrushes.

But harmony is more than a mathematical exercise or an enigmatic code. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of managing the life of a community. Dictionary definitions use words like “pleasing,” “agreement,” and “concord.” 

How green is green?

I have vivid memories of two special moments in my childhood when I experienced something “live” for the first time. One was the first time I walked into Fenway Park in Boston with my father to see a Red Sox game. Dad was an avid fan, and I had watched dozens of games on (black and white) television with him. I’ve never seen grass so green as it was at Fenway that day. It was breathtaking, and I’ll always remember it.

The other was the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live on their “home field.” There was something about the sonority of those double basses that I knew could not exist anywhere else. And the scale of the thing—the sea of black suits, the amber hues of fifty or sixty stringed instruments with their bows moving precisely in parallel, the gleaming polished brass in the back row, the majestic proscenium arch, and of course, the huge display of gold façade pipes of the great organ. 

That impression has evolved over the years to include the idea that a hundred highly trained musicians spread out over a vast stage, playing simultaneously, is one of the great expressions of the human condition. I love witnessing the precision of all those instruments assuming playing positions, the conductor’s downbeat, and the instant expression of sound. It moves me every time. Young and old, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and from all races and backgrounds, baring their souls and their intellects toward a common result. What a world this would be if our politicians worked that way.

Let’s take it a step further. Strip those musicians of their paraphernalia. No violins, no piccolos, no drums, no hardware at all. What have you got? A choir. It’s elemental. The instruments are the human bodies themselves. Isn’t it amazing that you can give a pitch and have them sing it back, out of the blue? And I love the sound of a hundred people drawing breath at the same instant. It gives new meaning to the phrase, corporate inspiration!

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

While I know some musicians consider John Rutter’s choral music to be saccharine, or too sentimental, few of us would fail to recognize this opening line from one of his lovely Christmas carols. I think his music is terrific, not necessarily because of its intellectual content, but simply because it’s beautiful. I’ve been rattling on about harmony as if it’s the essence of music, but what about melody? A Mozart piano concerto, a Schubert song, and as far as I am concerned, anything by Mendelssohn draws its beauty first from melody. I think John Rutter is one of the best living melodists. 

Whenever I put a new piece by Rutter in front of a choir, invariably, they loved it. Congregations lit up with smiles, and people went home humming. Beautiful harmonies, catchy rhythms, gorgeous tunes. So what if it’s sweet and sentimental?

Rutter was born in 1945, which makes him eleven years older than me. But when I was fourteen years old, singing in the choir in my home parish, I saw his name in that green Carols for Choirs published by the Oxford University Press. He was in his twenties when he started creating those arrangements and newly composed carols, and a choir member once said to me, “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without John Rutter.” (She was referring to the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol with its snazzy organ licks.)

I’m not thinking about John Rutter because I’m yearning for Christmas. As I write, a late spring is finally beginning to look like summer in Maine, after a long harrowing winter. And besides, he has written plenty of music for other occasions. But the other day, while lurking about Facebook, I came across a brief video, The Importance of Choir, produced by J. W. Pepper, which markets Rutter’s music in the United States. It’s three and a half minutes long, with two basic camera angles, showing Rutter in the obligatory Oxford shirt (unbuttoned at the neck) and sweater, summarizing his long-gestated reasoning of why choirs are important. He says:

Choral music is not one of life’s frills. It’s something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls. You express, when you sing, your soul in song. And when you get together with a group of other singers, it becomes more than the sum of the parts. All of those people are pouring out their hearts and souls in perfect harmony, which is kind of an emblem for what we need in the world, when so much of the world is at odds with itself. That just to express in symbolic terms what it’s like when human beings are in harmony. That’s a lesson for our times, and for all time.

It may sound as though he’s describing a perfect choir—one that could hardly exist. But he continues, “Musical excellence is, of course, at the heart of it, but even if a choir is not the greatest in the world, it has a social value, a communal value . . . a church or a school without a choir is like a body without a soul.”

“Not one of life’s frills.” I love that. It’s such a simple statement, and it rings so true. When the human essence of the thing is described so eloquently, the concept is elevated to become essential. You can watch this brief but meaningful video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U, or type “John Rutter the importance of choir” into the YouTube search field. 

An important foundation of tomorrow’s choristers is the youth choir of the local church. Ideally, it’s a group of kids who dependably attend rehearsals, where they’re taught musical and vocal fundamentals. I remember wonderful experiences with the kids at my last church, when they responded to challenges and took pleasure in mastering complicated music. But it was a short season. That was a community where lots of families had second homes in ski country, and as soon as there was snow, off they went. Oddly, the kids often came to weekday rehearsals, but then missed Sunday mornings. 

And ice time. Holy cow. Peewee hockey teams jockeyed for reserved time at rinks, and since that time was so highly valued, coaches were happy to get a 5 a.m. slot. By the time the kids got to church at 8:30, they were beat up and exhausted. And in the schools, when budget time came around, arts and music (as if they could be separated) got cut long before football and even cheerleading.

And I’m talking about young kids in public schools. Take it to the next level where colleges and universities produce scholarships for athletes with sometimes only cursory academic requirements, and the priorities of an institution can really be questioned.

Take one for the team.

I’m not what you’d call an all-around sports fan, but I do love baseball. Our move last year from Boston to New York has made things complicated for me. There’s a precision about baseball—an elegance in the strategies. The application of statistics makes it the closest thing in sports to a Bach fugue. And since that first breathtaking glimpse of the greenest of green grass, I think I’m safe saying I went to hundreds of games with my father, who had the same seats for forty years. I love telling people that the two of us attended twenty-five consecutive opening day games at Fenway Park. That’s many thousands of hours, and I know that an important part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats (Section 26, Row 4, Seats 13 and 14—on the third base line).

And when they were playing well, it was a pleasure to watch the carefully choreographed 6-4-3 double play. Or a pitcher and first baseman trying to bluff a base runner. I think I understand the importance of teaching teamwork, which I suppose is the root of why there’s such a strong emphasis on sports in schools. But if choir, or band, or orchestra isn’t teamwork, I guess I’m missing something. 

Later in that video, John Rutter challenges those who are responsible for institutional budgets to acknowledge the central importance of the arts and especially ensemble music in education, saying that it’s “ . . . like a great oak that rises up from the center of the human race, and spreads its branches everywhere.” To carry that thought a little further, as long as the squirrels don’t get there first, that great oak will drop thousands of acorns which, assuming good conditions, will grow to become tomorrow’s great trees.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why cuts in a school’s budget should affect the arts before sports. I know I’m biased, and I surely know that people will disagree with me, but to quote the late Robin Williams, “I’m sorry. If you were right, I’d agree with you.” Football is just a game, while music—learning to play an instrument or singing in a choir—is a centuries-old centerpiece of human expression. And the more we hear in the media about new understanding of the lasting effects of games like football on the human body, the more I wonder how it can be justified. Singing in a choir doesn’t cause concussions or brain damage, and it exposes students to the history of our culture in an important way. I’d say “it’s a no-brainer,” if it wasn’t so very brainy.

Tools of the trade

American jazz pianist Benny Green said, “A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” The development of harmony is a fascinating story of evolution. Pythagoras lived on the Greek island of Samos from about 570 BC to 495 BC. It was he who, listening to the blows of blacksmiths’ hammers on anvils, first noticed and described the overtone series, which is the root of all intervals. He must have had terrific ears, and his deductions about the math that became music are no less spectacular than Galileo and Copernicus sitting on a hilltop at night for long enough to deduce that the earth rotates on its axis while orbiting the sun.

The identification of the overtone series led to organum, where two voices chanted in parallel motion. Then, maybe an inattentive monk made a mistake and went up instead of down, creating a dissonance that demanded resolution. It only took a few hundred years for that brotherly slip to turn into the harmonies of Dunstable, Dufay, Ockeghem, Lassus, Sweelinck, Schiedemann, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest is history.

Our tyrannical music theory teacher helped us understand the tools and the building blocks of music—those rules that define the difference between the music of Josquin des Prez and Felix Mendelssohn. Major and minor, diminished and augmented chords are arranged in sequence—progressions—that lead the listener from start to finish of a piece. They are analogous to the ingredients that are combined to produce a luscious dish.

Make it up as you go along.

Last week, I was preparing an organ in New York City for a colleague’s recital. But since it was to be a program of improvisation, we agreed it couldn’t be called a recital. Taken literally, the word implies “reciting” something that has already been written. In the hours before the concert, he received themes submitted on-line and in person, and a program was distributed that listed the compositional styles he would be using: Classic French Suite, Baroque Prelude and Fugue, etc.

Improvisation is the realm of the jazz musician and the organist. There’s something about the organ that lends itself to monumental improvisation, and there’s something about improvisation that propels a musician to a different level.

There’s a parlor-stunt aspect to improvisation. Sometimes the themes are humorous, like that for The Flintstones, which was submitted by the audience the other night. We chuckle as we hear a tux-clad performer using the clichés of classic French organ registration to warble that tune, invoking visual images and lyrics associated with childhood Saturday mornings. Imagine Fred and Wilma wearing powdered wigs. But we marvel at the skill, and the knowledge of harmony, of regional and historical compositional styles, as he conjures up a never-heard-before majestic piece of music right before your eyes, or is it your ears?

It’s easy to figure why the organ, so deeply rooted in the history of the church, would be such a perfect vehicle for improvisation. The musical heritage of the church, of any church, is based on simple melodies such as plainchant and hymn tunes. And how much of the literature of the organ is based on tunes like Veni Creator Spiritus, or Nun danket alle Gott?

While improvisation seems like magic, it’s based on solid knowledge of the tools and building blocks of music. Don’t think for a moment that Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, or Ella Fitzgerald are just doodling. Charles Tournemire or Pierre Cochereau are not doodling. They’re serious, carefully constructed, thoughtful pieces of music.  If they weren’t, they would never survive the relentless scrutiny of recording, or of reconstruction for “re-performance.”

It’s not a frill.

Music. There’s something about it. Is that a trite thing to say? How did any of us get involved in music enough to bother with reading this journal? No musician purposely sets an educational course to financial success. It’s the love of it, the caring about it, the need for it. In choirs, we find community without parallel, human cooperation and collaboration that can serve as a model for everything else we do. In improvisation, we create masterpieces for the moment. When the last echo dies away, it’s gone, making space for another.

Hundreds of generations of scientists, philosophers, and artists have collaborated to give us this music, which inspires, thrills, and soothes us. It’s not a frill. It’s not an elective. It’s essential. Don’t waste your vote. ν