In the wind...

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all about the holes.

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

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

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

And there are lots of holes.

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

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

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

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

Dust devils

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is it made?
We’re driving on a highway and a flat-bed truck with WIDE LOAD banners whips by in the other direction. The trailer is carrying a machine, big as a house and covered with a tarp that taunts as its corners flap in the wind. Aloud, I wonder what it’s for, and my wife smiles—or is it smirks? There’s a gap in the fence around a city construction site, and I stop to peer through to see what’s going on. Or I’m waiting in an airport (that’s what airports are for—I think they should call them waitports) amid hundreds of fellow waiters deep in laptop DVDs and MP3s. Important businessmen are having loud imaginary conversations on their iPhones, but I’m captivated by the panorama of activity outside. Each airplane is surrounded by a fleet of odd-looking trucks. By now, I think I know what each one is for, only because I’ve spent so much time watching them.
I’m fascinated by factories. I’ve seen steel, beer, automobiles, railroad cars, earth movers, and cigarettes being made. I’ve seen dollar bills, postage stamps, and newspapers fly through enormous printing presses at incomprehensible speeds. In the seventies, I rented a house from a guy who was a tool maker in an auto assembly plant. One December day, he invited me to a company Christmas party. We walked in to the din of the assembly line, and I quickly realized that the party was unofficial. Cars were being made by workers who were more focused on holiday cheer than the task at hand. I was secretly glad I was not planning to order a car that week.
Sesame Street was a staple in our house when our kids were young, and I loved the many segments of the show taking viewers on factory tours. Joe Raposo (brilliant composer of the show’s theme song, along with such classics as It’s not easy being green) wrote It takes a lot of little nuts to make a jar of peanut butter, a catchy tune that accompanied video shots of peanuts cascading down chutes into massive grinders and gooey paste blurping into jars as they shot along conveyor lines. Watching soda pop going into bottles at two or three a second, you might expect to hear the clanking of glass, but they shoot along obediently with only the whirr of the machines.
Organ builders spend much of their careers learning how to make little widgets one at a time, and figuring out how to make them better and more economically. I don’t say cheaper, because it’s a rare organbuilder who looks for cheap. Making a pipe organ part economically implies some kind of continuum that includes cost of material, time for manufacture, and artistic content. Just because you built a tremolo for less money doesn’t mean it’s going to “trem” musically. If you’ve developed a part that you know you’ll need by the thousand, you develop the ability for mass production. A tracker organ might need two or three hundred squares—if you’ve got a good design, why not spend a week making enough for the next ten organs? Or if someone else makes them in greater numbers for less money per piece, why not buy them and use them in your organs?
Another case in point is the huge parts that comprise a large organ. Building just one 32-foot wood pipe is a huge undertaking that takes hundreds of board feet of lumber, hundreds of clamps, and plenty of person-power. Just turning a pipe to wipe off the glue takes several people. At the Organ Clearing House, we know that a 32-foot wood stop automatically makes a second semi-trailer necessary. Think of the floor space you need to make something like that.
Wal-Mart tops the list of Fortune 500 companies with 1,800,000 employees. Compare that to the city of Philadelphia with 1,500,000 residents. Ford and General Motors both top 300,000. I do not have exact statistics at hand, but I’m pretty sure that no modern organ building company employs more than 150 people. Off the top of my head and counting on my fingers, I can think of fewer than ten American firms that employ more than twenty people. By far, most modern organ companies comprise two or three workers.
A big early twentieth-century firm like Austin, Hook & Hastings, Skinner, Möller, Reuter, or Schantz had dozens, in some cases hundreds of workers. The factories were divided into small shops that specialized in windchests, actions, consoles, or pipes. The woodworking shop built casework, made wood pipes, and provided milled pieces for the console and reservoir shops. A factory superintendent managed a production schedule that called for all the components of a given organ to arrive on the erecting floor where the instrument was assembled and tested before being shipped, and an installation team would meet the shipment and install the organ.
So a worker at Hook & Hastings might have spent his entire working life making keyboards. He wouldn’t be considered an organbuilder by modern standards. He might not have had any idea how a windchest works. But boy could he make keyboards. One of my colleagues talks about having tracked down one of the legendary, now very elderly women who glued pouches in the Skinner factory. While he was undoubtedly looking for hints about what machines and jigs and they used, she seemed to say that they just glued them. I doubt that she could tune an organ pipe, but boy could she glue a perfect pouch, and boy could she do it hundreds of times each day.
Which is the better organ? Is it the one that’s made from stem to stern by two or three dedicated “all-round” organbuilders, or is it the one that’s conceived by a salesman, designed by a team of engineers, endowed with standards and procedures established by the genius who founded the company, and built by a large group of people, each an expert and specialist in one facet of the trade? History has proven that both scenarios can produce wonderful organs.

Supply and demand
I’ve been thinking about organ shops large and small because I just returned from a delivery tour that included visits to two large companies that are important suppliers to the pipe organ industry. The Organ Clearing House is involved in two projects that involve renovation and installation of historic organs, and these companies are adding their vast resources to our work. A. R. Schopp’s Sons of Alliance, Ohio, is an important supplier of new organ pipes. They also produce windchests, wind regulators and reservoirs, casework, and swell shutters. Organ Supply Industries of Erie, Pennsylvania (known across the trade as OSI), does all of that. In addition, OSI fills an essential niche as suppliers of widgets and doo-dads—the countless catalogue numbers refer to chest magnets, leather nuts, voicing tools, organ blowers, leather, wiring supplies, specialty lubricants, valves, and the squares I mentioned earlier. It is the rare American organ builder who does not rely on OSI for something.
I drove a truck filled with large components from the two organs, loading in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and Melrose, Massachusetts, on a Tuesday morning, and driving (in accordance with Department of Transportation rules) through heavy rain as far as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I spent the night. What had been rain in Pennsylvania was ice in Ohio, so Thursday brought a drive through rural countryside festooned with beautifully crafted ice formations, and low-hanging tree limbs slapping the side of the truck body. I spent Thursday afternoon with the people of A. R. Schopp’s Sons, and drove on to Erie, where I spent the night before visiting OSI on Thursday morning. Early morning television revealed the wisdom (or luck) of the schedule—northeast Ohio was blanketed with heavy snow on Thursday, and I spent the rest of the trip leading the storm east. And here’s a comment on the cost of doing business: my 1,800-mile trip consumed nearly $700 worth of diesel fuel.
I had substantive conversations at both factories that gave me new insight into the importance of their role in our trade. The phrase “supply house” can stir up negative connotations. I’ve used it myself to imply cheapness: “They replaced it with a supply-house console . . . .” Plenty of organs have cheap replacement “after market” consoles, but that’s not a fair way to judge the contemporary work of such important companies.
Let’s talk about the electro-pneumatic chest magnet. A century ago, much of organ building was prototypical. Most organs were incorporating the new-fangled electro-pneumatic action. In fact, at that time, the application of electricity was new throughout the industrial world. So naturally, organbuilders developed their own versions of the electric chest magnet. Some had one-piece cast-metal housings, while some were assemblies that combined punched brass plates, drilled maple blocks, and wood screws and tacks. Over the ensuing decades, the best features of each style were slowly combined, until today, most new electro-pneumatic organs incorporate chest magnets from one source.
The modern small organbuilding shop is challenged by the struggle between artistic content and commercial reality. No client purchasing an organ will agree to a price “to be determined.” Any organbuilder is expected to state a price before work starts. It makes no sense for a small shop to mess around developing the ideal chest magnet to complement their artistic philosophy when a century of research and development provides a universal model with space-age specifications at mass-market prices with the help of FedEx.
But there is another side to this issue. You can go into a Crate & Barrel store in Texas and buy a half-dozen beautiful wine glasses, take them home and enjoy them as part of your home, and then with a pang of disappointment see the same glasses on the table of a friend in Seattle. Or notice that the books featured on the front table at Barnes & Noble on Union Square in New York are identical to those in a shopping mall in suburban Phoenix—as if tastes in reading would be the same in any two places. It’s a natural impulse for an organbuilder to make his products unique—you feel a little pang when you see the same stuff you use in an organ built by another firm.
Is the magnet the artistic core of the organ? How many other little parts could be uniform through a variety of organ companies before the instruments all blended into one? How do we define the parameters for performance of the pats in an organ? One way to judge the performance of an electric or pneumatic organ action is the repetition rate—how fast can the note repeat? (The real key to fast repetition is quick release, not fast attack.) A standard answer is sixty repetitions per second, a speed faster than an organist can go, faster than a pipe can speak—in short, fast enough so the magnet would never be the weak link. Would it be worth the time and expense to spend a couple months developing a new magnet that could do sixty-five? Would the player be able to tell?

While the two companies I visited last week have different priorities and personalities, in my judgment they share a common philosophy. Because they work in large volume, they can afford sophisticated modern automated equipment that is beyond the reach of a small shop. But what they really offer is service. An organbuilder can choose to purchase a mass-produced reservoir from a list of sizes in the catalogue, or order one that’s custom built to specifications for a particular organ. And a small organ shop can view a supplier as an annex capable of providing anything from a box of screws to a complete organ.
These venerable companies employ engineers who advise their customers about the use of their products. They can help with the design of custom parts and components. And they work very hard to be sure that the quality of their products is high enough to complement the quality of the work of their customers, the American organbuilders.
Last year the Organ Clearing House completed the renovation of a three-manual Casavant organ. Because the organ was being moved to a totally different architectural environment, we provided a new case with new façade pipes. The case was built by another supply company, QLF Pipe Organ Components of Rocky Mount, Virginia. OSI supplied the polished pipes. Before and after photos show what “supply house” really means. (See “Here & There,” The Diapason, April 2008, p. 10.) It’s the next best thing to running a company with a hundred cars in the parking lot and a roster of specialty departments.?

The show must go on.

Each month, The Diapason sports a flashy color photo of a pipe organ on the front cover. (So do the other guys.) These photos show the glamorous side of the trade—exciting new instruments and important renovation projects. The “centerfold” articles typically include statements by the organbuilder, the local musician, the pastor, and chair of the organ committee. Each is testament to a bold adventure in which a local church or educational institution commits a lot of effort and a ton of money to the commissioning and building, or rebuilding, of a musical instrument.

Once an organ is installed, and the celebration is past, it’s important to maintain it so it will always sound its best, and the owners’ investment is protected. I’ve just spent a week in Boston doing service calls, reflecting on how that work has changed over the years, and enjoying those long relationships with the instruments and their buildings.

Job one

Tuning, cleaning, and repairing of dead notes and ciphers make up the bulk of the routine of pipe organ maintenance, but I think the most important part of the job is being sure the organ is safe. Countless organs have been damaged or destroyed by fire, roof leaks, vandalism, and other forces. This past August, an early organ built by John Brombaugh was lost when the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, was destroyed by fire, and I have been corresponding with a church in North Carolina that lost a fine Schantz organ to fire early this year. I know that the parish in North Carolina had proper and adequate insurance coverage, so they will be able to rebuild and to replace their pipe organ. I hope the same for the people in Lorain, but Brombaugh’s Opus 4 is surely irreplaceable.

The careful organ technician should encourage the owner of a pipe organ to review their insurance policies to be sure that the organ is properly covered. It’s common for people to find that the organ is insured for its original purchase price—fine if the organ is a few years old, but you’re going to lose big if your four-manual E. M. Skinner organ is insured for the same $27,000 that bought it in 1928. It’s usual for an insurance company to require an assessment of the organ. This can be provided by your organ technician, the company that originally built the instrument, or by any knowledgeable and reputable organbuilder. The assessment report should include photographs of the organ, inside and out, to document its complexity, accurate specifications, the history of any rebuilding projects or major repairs, and mention of any prominent musicians who have performed on it. And the figure stated as “replacement value” should include consideration of quality of construction, description of the degree of ornamentation of an organ case, gold leaf, and any special voices included that are particularly expensive or difficult to obtain. For example, an original Skinner Harp is worth a truckload of Tierces!

The careful organ technician will also encourage the organ’s owner to inspect the roof and walls that surround the organ, and the condition of heating, ventilation, and plumbing equipment that may pass through the organ chambers. Recently, a lovely Aeolian-Skinner organ in my care suffered significant damage to the static reservoir and Spencer blower located in the basement of the church, caused by the rupture of a frozen water main. The lower level of the building was flooded—lots of flooring, carpeting, and furniture were destroyed, and the repairs to the organ were fully covered by the comprehensive scope of the insurance policy.

One bad shingle, one missing piece of flashing, and the right storm can wreck an organ.

Hygiene

In my home parish in the 1960s the sexton was an old gent from the back woods of Maine, complete with the authentic accent and the salty talk. My father, the rector, kept a running list of Don Wilkins’s colorful turns of phrase and when Don retired, published a pamphlet recalling them. Don organized the care of the building’s “systems,” kept the floors clean, and wearing an old white Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled up and a skinny dark tie, made and served the Sunday morning coffee. Forty and fifty years ago, the standing equipment in a building like that wasn’t as sophisticated or complicated as it is now, and Don knew how to keep the place humming and sparkling.

It’s common now for churches not to have sextons, but to hire cleaning contractors instead. The volunteers on the property committee look after the physical plant, and simply put, I’ve seen some pretty big mishaps resulting from well-meaning, volunteer oversight. 

My dictionary has two definitions for the word oversight:

1. An unintentional failure to notice or do something.

2. The action of overseeing something.

Definition 2 describes the well-meaning committee member. Definition 1 describes the inevitable result of uninformed supervision. 

It’s too bad when failing to change a filter leads to a mechanical disaster. Hiring professional cleaners while relying on volunteer mechanical maintenance is a false economy. It would be better to have volunteers cleaning, and hire a stationary engineer to look after the equipment. A two-hour visit each month would do it. He would create a schedule for maintenance of the HVAC and elevator motors, alarm systems, and other necessary equipment. He would recommend contractors and oversee their work.

Over years of writing reports for consultation clients, I’ve used the term Institutional Hygiene. I use it to describe the general condition of a building as it affects and influences the care of the equipment. Using mechanical areas for general storage is the perfect example. Decades-old Christmas decorations stacked around and against a furnace is the next thing to arson. In one client church, I have to pass through an attic to reach the organ chamber. During a tuning, I noticed a “Manger Hay Bale” piled with the artificial Christmas trees. There was vapor, some combination of steam and smoke, coming from the bale—composting for Christ. I schlepped it down the ladder and mentioned it to the administrator in the church office, then went to lunch. When I got back, the hay bale was back in the attic, smoking away. Bad hygiene.

There was the frantic call on a Saturday morning: the church is full, the bride has arrived, and the organ won’t play. “I turned on the blower switch and the lights came on, but no sound.” I raced to the church, arriving to the din of vamping bagpipes, to find a card table sucked up against the air intake for the organ blower. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist who said she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. I found a stack of folding chairs on the reservoir, doubling the wind pressure. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist of the church with the card table, saying she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. This one was out of their control. The Public Library across the street was being demolished, and they were using dynamite to move stone so the foundation for the new building could be deeper. Every capped pipe and every reed pipe had the daylights knocked out of it!

There’s another level of hygiene that’s a little more sensitive to discuss because it involves your personal habits. A cup of coffee (especially with sugar) or a can of soda is a terrible thing to introduce to your organ console. Maybe it’s sitting innocently on the stop jamb and seems pretty safe, but there have been two episodes in my career when such a quaff has fallen onto the keyboards. Felt bushings, silver contacts, even the glue that holds the ivories to the keys can be compromised and the repair can cost many thousands of dollars.

I’m lucky enough to have a vintage rosewood Steinway at home that came to me through generations of my family. We have a sign next to it that says, “Nothing on the piano, please.” I do not hesitate to speak up when a guest places a drink on my rosewood. It’s not about the wood—there’s an impervious finish on it. It’s about the sensitive, delicate, balanced action inside, made of wood, and bedecked with felt and various fine metals. It’s one instance when a martini is not a preservative.

Many organists don’t like to be called on this issue, so take this as a quiet and anonymous hint. The damage caused by such a spill is not worth the cost of a cup of coffee.

Second to a sugary drink, paperclips are the enemy of the organ’s keyboards. They can cause keys to jam together, and they can wind up on the contacts causing wild cross-ciphers.

And there was the call…

There are a lot of things an organist can do to help the tuner/technician, and many of them are based in common sense. It’s not always easy to tell where a problem is coming from, and mishaps like ciphers can be intermittent. If an organist calls to say there was a cipher on Sunday, but it went away, there’s nothing I can do. If in the heat of battle, you hear a cipher but can’t stop to locate it, there are a few clues that might help recreate it.

Maybe you’re sharp enough to tell me which note of which stop ciphered. If you were playing a trumpet tune as a wedding march, I bet a dollar that the cipher happened when you trilled between F# and G on the Great Trumpet. But if it was more elusive, you can give me a hint.

As soon as you finish the hymn, anthem, or response during which the cipher occurred, jump for your Organ Notebook (don’t tell me there’s no organ notebook on the console!), and write down the piece you were playing, and what registration or piston you were using. Leave the music on the console with a note saying on what page, on what line, in what measure the cipher occurred. If I play the same music with the same registration, the cipher might reappear. If I hear it, I’ll fix it. You can even narrow down the division. While you’re hearing the cipher, make up an excuse to use the Swell pedal. You’ll know right away if the cipher was in the Swell. That may not seem like much, but a clue is a clue. If I know you had a cipher in the Swell strings, I’ll stand in the Swell box while my assistant runs up and down the keyboard. Maybe I’ll hear a little whimper. If I hear it, I’ll fix it!

And there was the call from the organist who left a message on the answering machine saying, “The F-key sounds funny.” (True story.) Hmm. There are twenty-five stops on two keyboards, and eight stops in the pedals. That makes 274 “F-keys” in the organ. And maybe it’s not a single pipe that sounds funny. I’m not sure of which equation to use to compute the number of possible of combinations, but let’s say I square 274. That’s 75,076 possibilities. You can be specific (Great Melodia, #30, F above middle C, etc.), or you can help me find it (Hymn 242, third line, second measure, General 3). I’ll find it.

And there was the call from the cathedral organist. That organ has more than eighty stops on four manuals, and it’s more than an hour away. He called in a panic: “The organ is wildly out of tune.” I know very well that unless there has been some big event, like the dynamite at the library, a huge organ in a big stone church doesn’t just fly out of tune. But I jumped in the car, and raced to the cathedral. One pipe in the Pedal Clarion was out of tune. To be fair, it was way out of tune, but to this day, I can’t imagine why he didn’t poke around for a moment to identify it. Was it worth my losing a Saturday afternoon with my family? I think he would have been fine without the Pedal Clarion.

And there was the call from the organist of a church on Martha’s Vineyard. If you’re not familiar with “The Vineyard,” all you need to know is that it’s a quiet little sand-spit of an island offshore from Cape Cod in Massachusetts that morphs into an elite playground for the rich and famous during the summer. U.S. Presidents go there to play golf. Senators keep their lavish wooden yachts there. The summer social life on Martha’s Vineyard is transplanted directly from Embassy Row in Washington.

But this call was off-season. It was Maundy Thursday, and the organ was ciphering. Early the following morning, Good Friday, of course, I drove the hundred miles to the ferry slip, paid $90 for a round-trip ticket, enjoyed the hour-long passage to the island, drove to the church, fixed the cipher, and went home. The whole adventure took ten hours, and included two hundred miles of driving plus the cost of the ferry. I sent an invoice for nearly a thousand dollars. The organist was furious. “You were only in the church for ten minutes.” True enough, but I fixed your cipher on Good Friday, and it took all day. (By the way, I had my own service to play that night.) 

The tuner is coming this week.

There is a short list of things that you, the organist, can do to prepare for my visit. I’m sure my colleagues in this important work will have things to add, and I look forward to hearing from them.

1. Clean up around the console. The tools of your trade include hymnals, organ music, octavo scores, empty coffee cups (tsk!), paper clips (tsk!), cough drops, Kleenex (fresh and used), nail clippers and files, Post-Its, rolls of tape, hair brushes, etc. I can move them for you, but the meter is running, and I’ll never be able to put things back where they were. I’ve used my cell phone camera to document the piles of music, but it’s a nuisance. If you know I’m coming, take a half hour after the service to straighten things up.

2. Be sure the heat or air conditioning will be on. The rule is simple: We want to tune the organ in the same conditions for which it’s used in public. If the heat is turned up to 68˚ two hours before the service, turn the heat up to 68˚ two hours before the tuning. There was the time when after three or four visits to a certain church with the heat forgotten each time, the sexton announced to us joyfully, “I’ve got it good and hot in there for you this time.” That didn’t help!

3. Leave me a note. I trust that you’ve been writing things down in the notebook. (Don’t tell me there’s no notebook!) But take a minute to share your observations and concerns. You can call, text, e-mail, or leave an “analog” note on the console. If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll do my best, but I may not stumble across what’s bothering you most.

4. Follow up. Please don’t call me ten weeks later saying, “Ever since you were here …” The organ changes character when the temperature changes, it’s affected by humidity—especially rain—or extreme dryness. If I missed something, or if something jumped out of tune, let me know that week.

If you don’t know the rules, let me clean the keyboards. A heavy spray of detergent and a lot of scrubbing will cause damage. 

Above all, it’s best if you and I know each other. We should have lunch together once in a while, or at least a good chat in the choir loft. I’d like to hear you play, to see how you sit at the keyboards. I can tell a lot by studying your piston settings, but the more I know about how you use the organ, the better. Feel free to ask me about the organ. The more you know about the organ, the better. Let’s keep that thing sounding good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

To be the best, must it be the biggest?

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

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

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

…Oldest?

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

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

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

…Most majestic?

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

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

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

…Most influential?

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

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

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

…Most melodious?

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

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

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

…Most incensed?

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

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

…Most seminal?

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

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

…Most nostalgic?

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

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

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

Postscript:

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

Thank you for reading.

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

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

The Ugly Duckling”

I am a hopelessly besotted fan of Patrick O’Brien’s magnificent series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Through twenty-one novels, O’Brien carries his cast of characters from exuberant youth to deep old age, hardened by the experiences of more than twenty years at war. The main characters are “Lucky Jack” Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. We first meet Aubrey as an unruly lieutenant, who matures into one of the most illustrious post captains in the Navy. Captain Aubrey is impossibly unlucky and foolish when ashore, exposing himself to scams, cuckolding his superior officers, and occasionally winding up in prison for debt. When at sea, he is universally admired for his seamanship, leadership, intuition, courage, and cheerful demeanor.  

His close friend is Stephen Maturin, a complicated and curmudgeonly character, who is a physician and “natural philosopher” (biological researcher). When we meet him he is flat broke because his wealthy patient died, and a servant made off with all the money. But as the story progresses, we learn that he is not only widely recognized as a brilliant scientist, but is one of the most important members of the British Naval Intelligence Service. Stephen is responsible for much of Jack’s seagoing success as he cooks up secret missions, insisting that Jack sail as captain with him.

In the opening paragraphs of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, Jack and Stephen meet at a concert, and the first days of their friendship are based on music, the one thing they have in common. Jack convinces Stephen to sail with him in his first command to serve as ship’s surgeon, allowing him to take advantage of world travel to fuel his scientific studies. 

Stephen plays the cello and spends a lot of time during long voyages, between battles, arranging various masterpieces for them to play together. Jack plays the violin, well enough that having received a “fortune in prize money” for capturing an enemy vessel, he indulges himself in the purchase of an Amati violin. (Stephen goes to the shop with him to offer his opinion about the instrument.)

They both play quite well for amateurs, often sharing a game of improvisation and finding relief in blasting through their favorite pieces, such as the “often played, yet ever fresh Corelli in C Major.” Night after night in the captain’s cabin, Aubrey’s steward, Preserved Killick, prepares toasted parmesan cheese in a silver chafing dish, complaining to his mate about the horrible noise of the tuning, “There they go again, screech, screech, scrape, scrape . . . and never a tune you could sing to, not if you were drunk as Davie’s sow . . . “

The musical subplot is always bubbling through this massive tale. It’s accurate and learned, and often very funny. One afternoon while in London, Jack takes refuge in a church where he is delighted to find that the organ is being played, but halfway through the piece, it whimpers to a stop mid-phrase and a surly teenager lurches out of the loft and onto the street. The priest who was playing comes down, apologizes for the sudden stop (the teenager was pumping the organ and the hour was up), and Jack compliments the beautiful playing, “Händel, wasn’t it?” The priest mentions that the organ was built by Father Willis. Jack offers to pump the organ himself so he can hear the end of the piece. As the music continues, Jack starts chuckling as he thinks, “it would be a pity to leave Händel (handle) up in the air for lack of wind.”

The many passages that describe the handling of those great nineteenth-century ships are equally colorful and accurate, making two passions of mine that are nurtured as I re-read these books.

Early on, Jack gets by on his innate seamanship alone, relying on others for the advanced mathematics necessary for navigation. But when Stephen is away on a mission and there’s no music, Jack listens in to the on-board schoolroom of his midshipmen (who are young teenagers), one of whom is so gifted that Jack is shamed into joining in. He is enchanted by spherical trigonometry (whatever that is!), and quickly adds deep scientific skills to his toolbox. That student, whose first name is Richard, is “horribly disfigured” by acne and is given the nickname of Spotted Dick, which is a dessert dish of custard and currants, popular among the officers.

Several novels later we meet up with Spotted Dick again, acne long past, who has matured into a “seagoing Apollo, perfectly unaware of his beauty.” He is serving as flag lieutenant under Admiral William Pellew, also a musician who “never sailed with anything less than a clavichord,” and “required his steward to take tuning lessons” in a long series of unlikely foreign ports, and who was known for “his appreciation of beautiful young men.”

The transformation from “Spotted Dick” to “A Seagoing Apollo” reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, The Ugly Duckling, in which all the farmyard creatures make fun of the clumsy, unsightly little black bird and receive their comeuppance when he matures into a beautiful swan.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Over the years working in the organ business, I’ve enjoyed it when our projects have attracted the attention of the local press. When a little weekly country newspaper gets wind of an organ project in a church, they show up flannel-shirted with camera hanging from a strap and ask ridiculous, ubiquitous questions. As we answer, we can tell that they don’t understand what we’re talking about, and invariably, when the story is published it’s full of inaccuracies. I remember a front-page photo of my teenaged self proudly holding up a stenciled façade pipe, bearing the caption, “Organbuilder John Bishop voices an organ pipe.” That made two promotions for me—to organbuilder and voicer—and my co-workers bowed and scraped appropriately, tongue in cheek, dope-slaps included.

As I grew into my newly acquired “in name only” skills (I’m still not much of a voicer—I rely on my smarter colleagues for that), I learned to understand that the pipe organ is an arcane subject. I received an important lesson from a member of a church where the Organ Clearing House was delivering a rebuilt organ. We had organized an “Open House” in the nave of the church the evening after unloading the truck. Some fifty people showed up, and I walked about through the heaps of bewildering parts, picking things up and explaining their purpose, trying to give the group a general idea of the assortment of components it takes to make up a working pipe organ. One gentleman spoke up, saying that now he understood why it all cost so much.

When an organbuilder is selling or planning a project with a committee of a client church, he may be the only person in the room who understands the subject. Through those experiences, I realize what a responsibility it is to carry the trust of the client, who nods his head, signs the contract, and hopes for the best.

I often hear comments from parishioners indicating that it had never occurred to them that the organ was separate from the building, that it required maintenance, and was in any way sensitive to what goes on around it. How often have we finished a project, only to learn that the floors of the church would be sanded and refinished the next month? How could that have failed to come up as we neared the end of the project, BEFORE we put the reeds in?

A shuttered view

It’s easy enough to understand innocent ignorance regarding the organ as a musical instrument, but it troubles me to realize that more than a few prominent symphony conductors consider the pipe organ to be expressionless. I think this notion comes from the concept that a violinist, clarinetist, or trumpeter can alter the volume and timbre within the duration of a note, while a single organ pipe can only play a single note at a single volume level. Also, the classical idea of terraced dynamics, which has played such an important role in our study of historically informed performance, enforces the idea of the uninitiated that the pipe organ is unexpressive. 

These are simplistic views. Organists know that expression comes from the manipulation of stops and shutters. It’s a physical and mechanical fact that any accent, crescendo or decrescendo, “soloed out” melody, change of timbre—in short, any alteration of dynamics at all—is accomplished by the organist manipulating “the machine” by pushing buttons, operating pedals, drawing stops, each motion in addition to the simple playing of notes. The uninitiated may focus on the machine, but the effect is all art.

The apparent ugly duckling blossoms into the dramatic and beautiful expressive instrument.

I believe that the modern pipe organ, with its sophisticated combination actions and efficient and effective expression enclosures, is the most expressive of musical instruments. The skillful organist can take the listener smoothly from a distant whisper to a heroic roar in a few seconds—and today’s large instruments have a greater dynamic range than a full symphony orchestra.

There’s an apocryphal story that I believe is true about the first rehearsal of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with the brand-new Fisk organ in the Meyerson Center. The orchestra was preparing (of course) Camille Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. When the last movement started with the monumental C-major chord from the organ, a trombone player raised a white flag with his slide.

The Meyerson Fisk is a landmark in my opinion, as it was the first of a new wave of brilliant concert instruments with tracker key action. 

And let’s not forget that early in the twentieth century, a tribe of brilliant concert organists, many of whom as municipal organists were city employees, played with just as a great a dynamic and expressive range, as they explored the extraordinary, newly conceived electro-pneumatic instruments being produced by such innovators as Ernest Skinner.

Perhaps twenty years ago, I was having a conversation with organ historian and consultant Barbara Owen, during which she asserted, “We need to get the organ out of the church.” At first I thought that was ridiculous. After all, without the long illustrious history of the organ in church, we wouldn’t have the pipe organ today. But reflecting on the (let’s face it) diminishing role of organized religion in American society, it’s true that if we would only find organs in churches, most people would never hear an organ.

How ordinawy

So says Madeline Kahn as Lily von Shtupp as she receives a gift of flowers in Mel Brooks’s zany 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles.

When we think of the pipe organ, we might be thinking of the grand and glorious instruments that knock our socks off in church and in the concert hall. But we have to admit that for every inspiring and beautiful organ, there are at least two dowdy old tubs lurking in dusty balconies. Through decades of working in and around organs, I’ve been aware that thousands of people think of the organ as a wheezy, murky thing that utters incomprehensible sounds at unexpected moments. (I suppose that some of this may be operator error.)

I’ve written many times that it was the corporate assessment of these dull cousins that inspired the revival of classic styles of organbuilding that ultimately led to the further revival of interest in the spectacular electro-pneumatic instruments that dominated the early twentieth-century. Many people defined this movement as “organ wars,” known as the battle between electric and mechanical actions. But it was deeper than that—I think it was the battle between good and bad organs. Something had to be done in response to the content-lacking factory-produced organs of post-World War II America. 

There’s that ugly duckling again.

The best of both worlds

Last Thursday night, one of Wendy’s clients treated us to fancy “down front” seats at Paul Winter’s “Winter Solstice Celebration.” The venue was New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, affectionately known as St. John the Unfinished. It’s a grand Gothic structure on Amsterdam Avenue, unfinished as the West End façade and towers are not complete, transepts haven’t been built, and interior stonework is incomplete. We understand that it will remain in this state of perpetual incompletion. The six-hundred-foot-long interior is breathtaking, and it has all the functions, chapels, and memorial spaces needed for majestic worship and pageant. As an unfinished edifice, it’s a metaphor for Work in Progress, symbolizing the state of religious celebration and thought.

I am well aware that many colleagues disagree with the frequent secular use of that most grand of sacred spaces. Since the twelfth century, worshippers have been building Gothic spaces out of stone—spaces that are so lofty and massive as to be inspirations to us before the introduction of any content, whether religious or secular. The Episcopal Diocese of New York has condoned and promoted the liberal use of its landmark space for decades.

On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit surreptitiously strung a high-wire between the two towers of New York’s World Trade Center and famously spent forty-five minutes walking back and forth, saluting, kneeling, even lying on the wire. New Yorkers were transfixed and the police were baffled by the spectacle. That incredible feat and the years of planning that preceded it are documented in the award-winning documentary film, Man on Wire. To commemorate that singular public expression of self-confidence, theater, and the human spirit, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine includes Petit on a long list of Artists in Residence and has installed permanent fittings in the fabric of the building that allow him to hang a high-wire across the nave.

For thirty-five consecutive years, the cathedral has hosted the Paul Winter Consort’s celebration of the winter solstice. The heavily amplified instruments of the Consort (saxophones, oboe, cello, bass, keyboards, percussion) and the Latino night-club style of Puerto Rican headliner Danny Rivera are not the usual fare of Episcopal cathedrals, but the production standards, the choreography, and the iconography combined to provide a deeply moving spiritual experience.

We were especially moved by the depiction of the sunrise that ended the first half of the three-hour production. A procession down the length of the seemingly endless nave, up the steps to the chancel, and all the way to the great granite columns that define the apse was accompanied by brilliant music dominated by the sounds of more than a dozen great bronze gongs. Dramatic lighting and smoky effects focused on the distant front of the church as the sun, depicted as the mother of all gongs in polished, spotlighted brass, rose out the depths and ascended to a dizzying height. The thing must have been ten feet in diameter, big enough to look dramatic in that vast place. It was accompanied toward the heavens by a safety-harnessed “Gonger,” wielding a mallet of suitable heroic size in a slow rhythm that produced a crescendo of earth-shaking tones that echoed throughout the cathedral.

Wendy and I have visited the site of the quarry where those fifty-foot high columns were made on a specially built lathe. It’s in Maine on the island of Vinalhaven in Penobscot Bay. As the spectacle of the sunrise unfolded, I remembered that visit and marveled at the role those columns were playing in that glorious theater.

In 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs completed a comprehensive rebuilding and renovation of the cathedral’s great Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. The Organ Clearing House was privileged to play a role in that herculean job, providing scaffolding and rigging and assisting the staff of QPO with the installation of the completed organ. It was a thrill for us to experience that building “up close and personal,” learning the legends of the place and experiencing the singular acoustics when the space was empty.

The organ was used heavily during the Paul Winter extravaganza, and I wept as we were enveloped by its gorgeous tones. The emotions generated by the scope of the sound were enhanced by memories of the spooky heights of the hoisting scaffolding, the difficulties of getting four semi-trailers full of organ parts into the hundred-feet-up organ chambers, and the incongruity of logistics meetings held while sitting in folding chairs surrounding the bronze medallion in the chancel floor.

Through the miracle of concert technology, the instrumentalists on the stage in the Great Crossing were effortlessly accompanied by the organ, more than a hundred feet away. I pointed out to our hosts that the organ was the only instrument that was not amplified, and while Paul Winter’s soprano saxophone was much nearer to us, and the speakers through which he played were almost directly in front of us, the organ was by far the more present—a triumph for acoustic music.

The majesty of the room, the creativity of the music and the production, the energy of the instrumentalists, singers, and dancers, and the enthusiasm of the vast audience (must have been over three thousand people) combined to create a beautiful artistic and spiritual experience. What’s wrong with that?