In the wind...

The high cost of beauty

When the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, the world went agog over the dazzling beauty of the artifacts that had been hidden since his death some 3,300 years earlier. There were large pieces of gilded furniture, ornate masks, jewelry, and lots of hieroglyphics and paintings. The level of craftsmanship was bewildering, given the degree of antiquity. Other members of Egyptian royalty were buried in similarly grand circumstances, in tombs located under the great pyramids. And who built the pyramids? Slaves.

Big-time personal money always has and always will be part of the arts world. If there had been no Medici dynasty, we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, to name just a few. How did the Medici make their money? They were bankers, the wealthiest family in Europe. They parlayed their wealth into political influence, and many family members became important politicians. The family even produced four popes in the sixteenth century. If that implies it was possible to purchase a papacy, I’m surprised that Silvio Berlusconi didn’t try it. A family tree I found online shows more than twenty generations of Medici between 1360 and about 1725. 

We’ve learned a lot about the ethics of banking and investment in recent years, where executives use their clients’ money to leverage their own fortunes, bring down institutions, and go home with bonuses that equal the annual wages of hundreds of normal workers. I’m not setting about a researched dissertation on the source of the Medici’s money, but I’m willing to bet that much of it came at the expense of others.

Heavy metal

The Carnegie Steel Company was one of the country’s first major producers of steel, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, it developed important improvements in the manufacturing process, including open-hearth smelting and installation of advanced material handling systems like overhead cranes and hoists. The result was higher production levels using increasingly less skilled labor, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck against the Homestead Steel Works. There were various waves of strikes, and at first the union prevailed. 

Henry Clay Frick ran the Carnegie Steel Company for his eponymous partner. He announced on April 30, 1892, that he would keep negotiations open with the union for thirty days, and on June 29, he locked down the plant and the union announced a strike. Frick engaged the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security, and more than three hundred armed Pinkerton agents were involved in bloody battles with striking workers. The Pinkerton force surrendered, and the governor sent in the State Militia and declared martial law. There was a failed assassination attempt against Frick. The union was broken and collapsed about ten years later. 

It was important to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to beat down the union because they had their lifestyles to maintain. Carnegie built a majestic home on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street in New York (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) in which he installed a large Aeolian pipe organ. He paid about $65,000 for the organ at the time when workers in the Aeolian factory earned about $600 a year. Hmmm. The organ cost as much as the annual wages of more than a hundred workers. Not as bad as King Tut, but sounds about right.

Henry Clay Frick installed a large Aeolian in his gracious home on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (now housing the Frick Collection, commonly known as “The Frick”). These guys really knew how to build houses. Hank and Andy must have warmed each other’s hearts living just twenty blocks apart—an easy twenty-minute walk, just long enough to smoke a hundred-dollar cigar (six weeks for that Aeolian worker). Frick also built a tremendous Aeolian in his summer home at Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts and gave a four-manual job to Princeton University. That’s four big pipe organs built on the backs of striking steel workers.

Three years before the Homestead Strike, Andrew Carnegie paid about $1,000,000 to buy the land and construct the venerable Manhattan concert hall that bears his name. The place was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925 when they sold it to a real estate developer.

I’m giving Mr. Carnegie a hard time, because at least some of his business practices were mighty ruthless, and the mind-boggling wealth that he accumulated was not a reflection on his largess. But it’s important to remember that he was also an important philanthropist and the foundation that was founded on his fortune is still a major source of grants for all sorts of educational programs, scientific research, and artistic endeavors. Visit the website at www.carnegie.org.

I served a church in Cleveland as music director for about ten years, where a four-manual Austin was installed as a gift from the Carnegie Foundation in 1917. The Bach scholar Albert Riemenschneider of Baldwin-Wallace College was organist there when the instrument was installed—the perfect organ for a performance of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.

Among many other projects, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation installed more than 8,800 pipe organs in America’s churches and founded more than 2,500 public libraries. That’s important.

Moving musical chairs.

On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Wendy and I attended a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to hear Stephen Tharp play the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra of Aaron Copland. Until about three o’clock that afternoon it was doubtful that the concert would happen because Carnegie Hall’s stagehands had struck the night before, causing the cancellation of the concert on October 2. They were striking over the rules for soon-to-be-opened educational spaces above the hall, claiming that they should have the same jurisdiction as in the great hall itself. Carnegie Hall’s management took the position that as it would be an educational venue, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees should not have such control. It’s probably not this simple, but should Theatrical Stage people control educational spaces?

The New York Times reported that Carnegie Hall employs five full-time stagehands with average annual compensations of more than $400,000 a year, with additional part-time union members brought in as needed. I know a lot of organbuilders who would make great stagehands, and Wendy was quick to say that I missed my calling.

The strike was settled in time for us to hear Stephen play with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported that the union backed off, as it seemed ridiculous to almost anyone that a teenaged music student would not be allowed to move a music stand. You can read about that strike in the New York Times at: www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/carnegie-hall-and-stagehands-sett….

It’s an exquisite irony that the October 2 concert cancelled because of the strike was to be a gala celebratory fundraiser for the Philadelphia Orchestra, recently revitalized after years of labor disputes. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was to open his second season as music director in what was billed as the triumphant return of that great orchestra to its role as a national leader.

Vänskä-daddle

On October 3, 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Osmo Vänskä had resigned from his position as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His action was anticipated. The musicians had been locked out by the Board of Directors for more than a year in a dispute that pitted the player’s requests for salary increases against the board’s decision to spend $52,000,000 renovating the concert hall while claiming there were no funds to increase salaries.

The orchestra had long planned to play a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York during the fall of 2013. Ironically, Vänskä was widely celebrated for having brought the MSO into new prominence with several seasons of brilliant performances and celebrated recordings, and the Carnegie Hall concerts were to celebrate the MSO’s bursting into the upper echelons of American symphony orchestras. Vänskä had announced that the dispute must be settled so rehearsals for those concerts could begin on September 30. If not, he would resign. It wasn’t, and he did. Former Senator George Mitchell, famous for negotiating settlements of disputes in Northern Ireland and steroid use in Major League Baseball, had been enlisted to help with the MSO negotiations—turned out that Northern Ireland had nothing on the MSO.

In the past several years, a number of important orchestras have suffered serious financial stress leading to labor disputes, including the orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

Eerily, on September 30, 2013, the same drop-dead-date for Väskä’s resignation, Norman Ebrecht of ArtsJournalBlogs reported that players in one hundred German orchestras struck simultaneously to draw attention to the increasing number of orchestras closing because of dwindling government support. There were 168 orchestras in Germany at the time of reunification in 1991, and there are 131 today. It’s a big deal to lose nearly forty orchestras in twenty years.

Do the numbers.

I love to do goofy math. In the 1970s when I lived on a farm outside Oberlin, Ohio, I wondered how much corn might grow in a day. I measured a couple dozen plants in the morning, then again in the evening, and came up with an average amount of growth. I measured and multiplied to get the number of plants in an acre, then again by the number of acres on the farm. Of course I can’t remember the numbers, but I know it added up to many miles of growth in a day. You could almost hear it while lying in bed at night.

I did that recently with the economics of a symphony orchestra. I found a list online of American orchestras with the largest operating budgets. Los Angeles tops that list at $97,000,000. Boston is second at $84,000,000. I stuck with Boston because it’s home, and I got the rest of the information I needed. The BSO plays about a hundred concerts a year—that’s $840,000 each. Symphony Hall seats about 2,600 people. The average ticket price is around $75, so ticket revenue for a full house is about $195,000. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 per concert that must be made up by private and corporate donations, campaigns, bar and restaurant revenues, and heaven knows what else—if they sell out each concert. Read the program booklet of the BSO and you’ll be surprised how many of the orchestra’s chairs are “fully funded in perpetuity,” named for their donors. Three cheers for them.

I know very well that this is bogus math. There are many variables that I’ve overlooked, and doubtless many of which I am not aware—but I think it’s a reasonable off-the-cuff illustration of the challenges of large-scale music-making in modern society. You can buy a pretty snazzy new pipe organ for the $645,000 that’s missing for each BSO concert after ticket sales.

While I was surfing about looking for those numbers, I learned that the starting salary for a musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is about $135,000. That’s pretty good when compared to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra where the starting salary is more like $48,000. I suppose that senior members of the BSO must earn over $200,000. In the business world, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe would qualify as an Executive Vice President and head of a department—worth $250,000 or $300,000, I’d say. But not as much as a stagehand. 

I guess I’m laboring under an old-fashioned concept that the artistic content should be worth more than the support staff. Big-time stagehands are hardworking people with important jobs. It’s not just anyone who can be trusted to fling high-end harps around a stage. But how many church choir directors would like to have someone else available to set up the chairs?

If the cost of operating a symphony orchestra seems high, get a load of the Metropolitan Opera. I found an article in the New York Times published on October 1, 2011, that put the Met’s annual budget at $325,000,000, of which $182,000,000 is from private donations. The Met had just passed New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the arts organization with the largest budget. (Counting baseball, New York City has three Mets.)

I found a page on the Met (opera) website that listed the administrative staff, which includes the General Manager (Peter Gelb), Musical Director (James Levine), and Principal Conductor (Fabio Luisi), along with twenty-five assistant general managers, artistic management, design, production, finance, development, human resources, house management, stage directors, stage management, carpenters, electricians—a total of more than three hundred administrative employees. Add a symphony orchestra, costumes, make-up, custodians, ticket sellers, and—oh yes—singers, and you wind up with a whopping payroll.

Since I’m not a stagehand, I pretended I was going to buy one ticket online. I chose a performance of La Bohème on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m. I couldn’t choose between a seat in Row B of the Orchestra (down front, near the stage) for $300, or one in Orchestra Row U for $250. And nearly half of the operating budget is funded by donations. If you take a date and have a nice dinner and a glass of wine at intermission, that’s pretty much a thousand-dollar night, something stagehands could afford if they could get the night off.

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The source of much of the money that has funded the arts over many centuries is questionable, and it’s especially difficult to accept how much of has been the product of slavery. But scary as that is, I’m sure glad we had the Medicis and hundreds of others like them. It would be a barren world without the art and architecture that they funded. I have to admit that when I’m standing in a museum looking at a work of art, I’m not fretting about the suffering involved in its production.

Today’s system seems more just—concert-goers buy tickets, and corporate and individual sponsors theoretically make up the rest. That works as long as costs are reasonably controlled, and donors can be kept happy. The problem with that is how it can affect programming. 

If you listen regularly to a commercial classical radio station anywhere in the country, you would be able to list society’s favorite pieces of music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 9th, Mozart’s 40th Symphony and 23rd Piano Concerto, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances—you get the idea. Organists know how hard it is to get a bride to choose something other than the Taco-Bell Canon, or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Lots of serious classical music ensembles, from local choruses to major symphony orchestras, adjust their programming to please their patrons. The box office at Boston Symphony Hall has a long-standing tradition allowing people to pass on their subscription seats to friends. When James Levine came to town as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he increased dramatically the amount of contemporary music on the programs, and friends of ours who had long held great seats on the balcony above the stage asked if we wanted to take them over because they couldn’t take all the modern music. We did.

And, in a related matter, the players of the BSO made public the extra workload brought on by Levine’s energetic and imaginative programming. On March 17, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that orchestra players were concerned about longer concerts, extra rehearsals, and programming of exceptionally difficult music. You can read it online at www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_prove…. They cited aggravation of injuries and increased stress and negotiated with Levine to alter some of the planned programs. And the BSO Trustees created a special fund to support the cost of the extra rehearsal time. But smaller institutions with limited resources would not be able to do the same. So it’s back to the crowd-pleasing favorites at the cost of innovation.

I’ve often repeated a story about an experience Wendy and I had with artistic patronage. An exceptionally wealthy friend, now deceased, was well known in his community as a generous supporter of the arts. He lived in a city that is home to a nationally prominent repertory theater company that was mounting the premiere production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home. The play tells the story of a family’s gay son contracting AIDS, with the main dialogue happening in the family car driving home from a holiday celebration. The production was to include larger-than-life bunraku puppets that would provide the action less suited for the stage, conceived by the playwright, to be constructed by a New York-based puppeteer. Our friend was asked to fund the puppets, which were to cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He told us the story over dinner, saying that he hated the idea, was uncomfortable with the subject, but thought he should provide the funds because he knew it was important.

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Recently organist David Enlow and harpist Grace Cloutier performed a recital at David’s home church, Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, where the Organ Clearing House installed an instrument a couple years ago. At dinner after the concert, we were discussing the instruments we play, and I noted that with the exception of pianos and high-end violins, the harp is probably one of the most expensive instruments that musicians typically own privately. Organists have to rely on the institutions for which they work to provide them with an instrument to play. And they sure have gotten expensive.

I’ve always felt that a three-manual organ with forty or fifty stops is just about right for a prominent suburban church with a sanctuary seating five hundred people or more. But a first quality organ of that size will push, and easily exceed, $1,000,000. It’s pretty hard for many parishes to justify such a whopping expenditure. I grew up in the era when it was all the rage for churches to replace fifty-year-old electro-pneumatic organs with new trackers, and many organists fell into the habit of getting what they asked for. Those days are largely over, because now that we really know how to build good organs of any description, we also know what they cost! We have to remember what a big deal it is for a church to order a new instrument.

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I’m troubled by the striking stagehands. I believe in the concept of the labor union. They were formed to confront real injustice, and in the strange and shaky state of our economy, injustices are still firmly in place. But this is a time when they’ve gone too far. That kind of labor organizing can threaten the future of live music in concert halls.

The Organ Clearing House uses Bank of America because we work all across the country, and it’s convenient to be able to get to a bank pretty much anywhere we go. But we were not bursting with pride when Time magazine reported on November 9, 2013, that the bank was to be fined $865,000,000 for mortgage fraud related to the Countrywide Financial scandal. At the same time, our bank is a Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Alvin Ailey Dancers, and the Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcasts in public schools. We thank them for all that.

Bank of America is also a “Season Sponsor” for Carnegie Hall, supporting the Hall’s mission “to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of the legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences,” as stated on Carnegie Hall’s website.

So the concert hall that was built on the backs of striking steel workers, whose schedule was recently interrupted by striking six-figure stagehands, is now supported largely by a bank guilty of major mortgage fraud. 

May the music keep playing. Sure hope it does. The stakes are high. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The upper class
I’m thinking about virtuosity these days. Last Tuesday, October 10, the New York Times published a tribute to Joan Sutherland following her death on the 8th. That day (noted as 10-10-10) happened to be my mother’s birthday and I enjoyed the coincidence as I remembered a family episode from the late 1960s. My parents are great music lovers and the instrument of choice when I was a young teenager was the then cutting-edge KLH stereo with amplifier and turntable in one sleek little unit and separate speakers. It seemed super-modern in those days of the console hi-fi built in the shape of a credenza. My father, an Episcopal priest, had a routine of closing himself into the living room on Saturday nights with a little analog typewriter on a card table and writing his sermon to the Saturday night live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra hosted by Richard L. Kaye on WCRB, 102.5 FM.

Joan
My mother was devoted to recordings by Joan Sutherland as confirmed by the Winchester, Massachusetts police department. When our house was burglarized, mother was asked over the phone if she could identify the stereo. Not being much of techno-wiz, all she could say was she knew there was a Joan Sutherland record on the turntable. Good enough to reclaim the prized machine.
The piece in Tuesday’s Times, written by the paper’s long-time astute and influential music critic Anthony Tommasini, shared story after story of triumphant debuts, thunderous ovations, immense technical facility, monumental stage presence (in every sense of the word), and a flexibility of stylistic intuition and pure ability that allowed this one artist to be revered as perhaps the greatest living interpreter and presenter of the operatic roles of Handel and Wagner—two musical worlds that are afterworlds apart.
Miss Sutherland was also humbly self-deprecating, referring to her figure in her autobiography as flat in the bust but wide in the rib cage. Tommasini quoted her as saying that certain dresses “could make her look like ‘a large column walking about the stage.’”

The supremacy of youth
I had a brief personal contact with her. When I was an undergraduate organ major at Oberlin, I was, naturally enough, accompanist to a gaggle of singers. Joan Sutherland was to give a recital in Akron, about two hours away, and I rented a car from the college fleet to haul a bunch to hear her. We had terrific seats very close to the stage so my youthfully discerning and supremely knowledgeable companions could witness every tic. I don’t remember what she sang or who was the accompanist, but I sure do remember that, inspired by a couple little bubbles we heard in the Diva’s voice, one of my flock greeted her in the receiving line asking if she had a cold.
Another lovely moment with virtuosi in my Oberlin career was the morning after the long-awaited artist recital when Itzhak Perlman sat in the student lounge chatting with the students. A lot of classes were cut that morning. I’ll not forget his bright smile and twinkling eyes as he casually shared thoughts about music-making while drinking vending-machine coffee.

Re-creation as recreation
Vladimir Horowitz was one of the greatest virtuosi of the twentieth century, and while I never had an opportunity to hear him in live performance, I’ve seen and heard plenty on television and recordings. He was inspiring to watch. His posture had his face close to the keyboard and his hands were pure magic and mystery. The piano was made a chameleon with a range of tones as great as any hundred-knob organ. Of virtuosity, Mr. Horowitz wrote,

In order to become a truly re-creative performer, and not merely an instrumental wizard, one needs three ingredients in equal measure: a trained, disciplined mind, full of imagination; a free and giving heart; and a Gradus ad Parnassum command of instrumental skill. Few musicians ever reach artistic heights with these three ingredients evenly balanced. This is what I have been striving for all my life.

I love the use of the word re-creative, implying that once the music is created by the composer, the performer with free and giving heart can re-create the music. Earlier in the same quotation, Horowitz writes,

Classical, Romantic, Modern, Neo-Romantic! These labels may be convenient for musicologists, but they have nothing to do with composing or performing… All music is the expression of feelings, and feelings do not change over the centuries… Purists would have us believe that music from the so-called Classical period should be performed with emotional restraint, while so-called Romantic music should be played with emotional freedom. Such advice has often resulted in exaggeration: overindulgent, uncontrolled performances of Romantic music, and dry, sterile, dull performance of Classical music.
The notation of a composer is a mere skeleton that the performer must endow with flesh and blood, so that the music comes to life and speaks to an audience. The belief that going back to an Urtext will ensure a convincing performance is an illusion. An audience does not respond to intellectual concepts, only to the communication of feelings.
He speaks directly to the conundrum inspired by concepts like Historically Informed Performance. It’s essential to play music with deep knowledge of the practices of the times in which it was created, but never at the expense of the “communication of feelings”—the imparting of depth and delight to the listener. To any listener.

Biggsy
As a teenager growing up in the Boston area, I had quite a few opportunities to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals, especially on the beautiful Flentrop organ that he had installed in the hall formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now called Busch Hall), a reverberant stone space on the campus of Harvard University. That organ was perhaps best know then (and still is today?) for the series of recordings, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, a fabulously successful series of recordings that gave both organ aficionados and professionals a new perspective on the music of Bach. I never questioned it then, and the group of organists I traveled with didn’t talk much about Virgil Fox except as some decadent music killer. Of course, now I realize that those two artists represented two wildly divergent points of view, both valid and both influential.
In his book Pulling Out All the Stops, Craig Whitney, former senior editor of the New York Times, presented an eloquent history of the relationship-feud-competition between Biggs and Fox. It continues telling the story of the twentieth-century American pipe organ by chronicling the lives and careers of Ernest Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, and Charles Fisk—a great read that still makes a terrific Christmas gift for anyone you know who’s interested in the organ.
In the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated with a recital played by Marie-Claire Alain. A galaxy of stars of the organ world were there for an exciting weekend of discussions, lectures, and concerts, and I was fortunate to be chosen with a classmate to give Biggs and his wife Peggy a tour of the conservatory building and its organs. It was thrilling to spend that time with them, and while Biggs’s arthritis meant he was not up to playing, he had us demonstrate practice organs for him. We ended the evening sharing beers.
My girlfriend at the time was still in high school in Winchester. She didn’t believe my story, so went to meet Biggs at a record signing at the Harvard Coop, and Biggs corroborated for me: “Oh yes, he was the bearded one.” (I’ve had the beard since high school—it’s never been off.)

Yo-Yo
In the panoply of living virtuosi, perhaps none is more esteemed and admired than Yo-Yo Ma. He took the world by storm as a very young man, playing all the important literature the world across. The rich tone he produces from the instruments he plays warms the heart and feeds the soul, and his mature collaborations with other musicians have proven his versatility and inquisitiveness. And I’ll not soon forget his self-deprecation made public in his appearance on Sesame Street. The cool-dude, dark-shades, saxophone-playing Muppet, Hoots the Owl, greeted the great musician, “Yo, Yo-Yo Ma, ma man!” Wonderful.
A few minutes ago I took you to Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, a thriving and dynamic place with a wonderful music program and an organ built by C.B. Fisk. It happened that Yo-Yo Ma and his family lived in town. His wife was a Sunday School teacher and his children were part of the place. He asked my father for an appointment at which he asked if he would be allowed to play in the church on Christmas Eve. Dad responded showing the respect for church musicians that has so inspired me, “You’ll need to speak with Larry, the organist. Planning music here is his responsibility.” Larry Berry did not have to consider for very long.
Dad remembers that as he and the other clergy were robing for that special Christmas Eve service, a couple obviously unfamiliar with the familiar knocked on the obscure back door that opened into the clergy robing room. “Is this where the concert is?” asked the boor. One of the clergy replied, “Actually, we’re celebrating a birth here tonight.”
Yo-Yo Ma also appeared a couple times to play for the children’s Sunday morning chapel service, to the amazement and excitement of the Sunday School teachers. I was not present for any of those experiences, but I’m still touched by the humility that would lead such a great artist to make such a gift.

Jimmy
Wendy and I have seats at Symphony Hall for the “Thursday A” series of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. James Levine has been music director of that great band since the retirement of the organ-deploring Seiji Ozawa, and we’ve been treated to some of the most extraordinary music making since “Jimmy” came to town. His programming is innovative and imaginative, and his rapport with the orchestra is obvious and thrilling. Our seats are in a balcony above stage right, so every time he turns to the concertmaster we feel we can hear everything he says—he’s talking and singing all the time as he conducts. His consummate musicianship is communicated with the musicians of the orchestra, and through them to the audience. There’s something very special about the sound of Levine’s music. Mr. Levine is well known for the admiration his collaborators feel for him, made abundantly clear in the up-close interviews of Metropolitan Opera stars during the HD-simulcasts of the Met’s performances.
A pure example of Levine’s facility happened on Saturday, October 9. That afternoon at 1:00 he led the Met’s performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and flew to Boston in time to lead the BSO and Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at 8:00. Holy cow! And this from a man who missed much of last season because of serious illness. Hey Jimmy, what do you want to do tomorrow?

There’s nothing to it
The thing about virtuosity is that it takes infinite effort to make it look easy. And when it can look easy it sounds good. A student musician might tackle a great masterwork and exult that he “got through it” when the performance was finally over. “Getting through it” is not the apex of the musical or artistic experience.
I think it’s correct to say that a virtuoso is born. Unless one is endowed with particular gifts, one cannot become a virtuoso. But he who is born with those gifts and doesn’t embrace them by dedicating his life to nurturing and developing them squanders what he has been given. The musician who plays scales and arpeggios by the hour achieves the appearance of effortlessness. The musician whose power of thought, concentration, and memory allows him to absorb and recall countless dizzying scores achieves the ability to knock off performances of multiple masterworks in a single day. Have you ever stopped to wonder at the spectacle of the great performer having to “cancel due to illness,” only to be replaced at the last minute by an artist who dashes across the country, roars from the airport to the concert hall, combs his hair, washes his hands, and walks on stage to play a concerto with a strange conductor, a strange orchestra, and a strange piano? There’s nothing to it.

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I feel privileged that my work brings me in contact with some of our greatest instruments and therefore, some of our greatest players. These thoughts on virtuosity are fed by the many thrilling moments I’ve had chatting with a great player at the console of a legendary organ. He draws a stop or pushes a piston and rattles off a passage, tries it on another combination, tries it with different phrasing or inflection. His conversation reveals that he is always thinking, always questioning, always searching for the actual essence of the music. There’s a depth of understanding of the relationship between the instrument and the acoustics of the room, between the intentions of the composer of the will of the re-creative performer.
Wendy and I have just gotten back to our sublet apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. This afternoon we heard Ken Cowan play the dedicatory recital of the large new Schoenstein organ at St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue at 71st Street. There was a large-screen video monitor set up on the chancel steps showing Ken’s work at the console with three different angles. There’s a great debate about whether or not this detracts from the experience. I love it. The organ is alone in its concealment of its players. Excepting the relatively few concert venues where the console is placed on the stage, most organists are completely hidden from view when they play. The extreme is the organ with Rückpositiv in a rear gallery. (I remember one concert where the organist was sitting on the bench before the doors were opened and announced he was about to start by playing a simple chord on a Principal. The audience never even laid eyes on him before he started. I can understand the desire to allow the music to speak for itself, but isn’t the performance of music a human endeavor and a human achievement?)
It’s great fun to watch an artist like Ken work the console, and seeing it on a clear screen adds greatly to the experience in my opinion. And of course, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch! The orchestration of Ken’s playing is the point. And of course, the Schoenstein organ is symphonic in design and intention—a great marriage between artist and instrument. It was a wonderful concert—fascinating programming and great artistry in a beautiful church building.

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This little string of remembrances, inspired by Joan Sutherland’s obituary, seems to be about the humanness of music-making. Some great musicians are haughty and unapproachable. I was once eating in a restaurant at the same time (not the same table) as Lorin Maazel, then conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He stood out because he stood up—when the waiter was ready to take his order he stood and announced the orders of everyone in his party. I don’t know if they knew beforehand what they would be eating. It seemed to me to be the performance of “a very great man.” I doubt he would have graced the Sunday School class of a suburban Episcopal church.
When a great virtuoso connects with the audience as a human being everyone learns a lot. As Horowitz said, it’s about communicating feelings. ■

A Night at the Opera

When you think of a night at the opera, what images flash through your mind? Stunning sets and costumes? Brilliant singing? Melodramatic stories transformed into staged magic? The thrill of a lifetime to witness such ambitious performances? Or do you imagine fur coats and diamonds, limousines, $200 orchestra seats, standing room lines, no late seating?
I have friends in the Boston area who make special trips to attend performances at the Met. This means traveling to New York ($100 each for the train), staying in a hotel ($300), restaurant meals (say $200), and expensive tickets ($150 each for moderate-priced seats)—a thousand dollars! How accessible is that?
The future audience for opera is today’s children, but how many families can consider such an expensive outing? And how many children can manage a three-hour commitment to sit in a seat and pay attention? What is the future of the art form if it’s not really available to young people? We who are serious about the performance of serious music are used to strict rules of etiquette at concerts. We never applaud between movements. We scorn those who arrive late or leave early; we’re openly derisive of those who leave early and then return to their seats. We focus on authentic performances of complete pieces; we take all of the repeats. We expect our listeners to accept the music on our terms, insisting that we are speaking for the composers. These are all important rules. We should stick to them. But I think we need to admit that these rules apply more to those who are already appreciators of serious music, and that they are not great tools for audience development.
In August of 2006, Peter Gelb succeeded Joseph Volpe as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Mr. Gelb began his working life as an office boy for the great impresario Sol Hurok, presenter of more than 4,000 artists including Marian Anderson, Pavlova, and Andrés Segovia. You can find his biography on the Met’s website . Realizing the importance of offering opera to children, and stating that most operas are simply too long for children, he has spearheaded a striking effort to build tomorrow’s audience. Under his leadership, the Met has created an edited version of Julie Taymor’s 2004 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte especially for audiences of children. From its typical duration of three hours and ten minutes, the production was cut to 90 minutes.
On Monday, January 1, 2007, the New York Times printed two articles about this revolutionary presentation. Times music critic Anthony Tommasini’s article, “An Opera at the Met That’s Real and ‘Loud’,” reports that “the overture and several ensembles and arias were cut. Other arias were abridged through some very deft trims.” Poet J. D. McClatchy, a lecturer in English at Yale University, created a new free English translation of the libretto. And as perhaps the most important vote of support, James Levine conducted. The matinee performance on Saturday, December 30, was sold out, and Tommasini reported, “Actually the matinee clocked in at close to two hours, but few of the children seemed to mind. The audience was remarkably attentive and well behaved. Of course one strict Met protocol—if you leave the auditorium you are not allowed re-entry until intermission—was wisely ditched for the day, so children could take restroom breaks.”
When Tommasini interviewed some children in the audience, they told him that the singing was too loud. He challenged them, “when children hear amplified music everywhere, even channeled right into their ears through headphones, how could un-amplified singing seem too loud?” They responded that it wasn’t too loud to listen to, but that they “never thought voices could do that.” Tommasini went on, “So their reaction was not a complaint about excessive volume, but rather an attempt to explain the awesome impression” made on them by the Met’s singers.
The other article about this extravaganza was written by Campbell Robertson under the title, “Mozart, Now Singing at a Theater Near You.” As if the abridged edition weren’t radical enough, the Metropolitan Opera went a step further and arranged for the performance to be simulcast live to 100 movie theaters across America, in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway. The numbers were not all in at press time, but Robertson reported that the average attendance was at 90% of capacity—of the 60 American theaters presenting the simulcast, 48 were sold out. Tickets were priced at $18. The article was full of enthusiastic responses from parents and children. I imagine Mr. Gelb was pleased.
What a radical approach to a seemingly inaccessible art form. If there were 200 seats in each of those 100 theaters and an average of 90% attendance, that’s 18,000 tickets. Add 3,800 seats and 195 standing-room places in the Metropolitan Opera House* and you get 21,995. Now that’s an audience!
This kind of radical programming is not for everyone. We have to admit that the diamonds-and-fur crowd is essential to the Met. Take a look at the program book of any major musical ensemble and you can see who gives what. I have the program from a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in my hands in which is published the list of contributors to the orchestra’s recent Capital and Endowment Campaign. There are three names in the $2,000,000 and up category, eight in $1,000,000–$1,999,999, and seven in $500,000–$999,999. Elsewhere in the same book is the list of supporters of the Higginson Society, which “embodies the deep commitment to supporting musical excellence continuing the legacy of the orchestra’s founder and first benefactor, Henry Lee Higginson.” This list is a little closer to earth with the highest gifts at around $100,000; there are 107 sponsors ($5000–$9999) and 281 members ($2500–$4999). These lists fill eight full pages.
While I’d like to imagine that many of these $2500 to $2,000,000 supporters would approve of such innovative programming as I describe from the Met, I bet that many would prefer to attend a “real” performance of Die Zauberflöte. So of course the Met continues to offer their familiar fare. Go to and you’ll see everything from Andrea Chénier to Eugene Onegin to Butterfly to The First Emperor (the premier of a very ambitious piece by Chinese composer Tan Dun commissioned by the Met, which we heard on the radio this past Saturday).
What does all this have to do with the organ? When’s the last time you saw a family with young children in the audience at an organ recital? What’s your attitude about audience etiquette at recitals presented at your church? How welcoming are the concerts presented in your community? And who will be listening to organ music in your town 50 years from now?
We could promote the simulcast trick for special recitals—something flashy from Walt Disney Hall might fill a few theaters—but there are exciting organs in many (hundreds, thousands?) locales that could attract big crowds of young people if handled right. What would you play if you were guaranteed a full audience of teenagers? Chorale preludes of Johann Gottfried Walther? Elevations by Frescobaldi? Don’t get me wrong—I love that music, I’ve played it and many other things like it. But with respect to Johann and Girolamo, it’s just not the thrall of a 21st-century kid.
Do we have to degrade the organ to make it enticing? I don’t think so, but we have to be creative. Do we cheapen our musicianship by “catering” to the masses? On the other hand, what good are we without the masses? I’ve heard colleagues refer to the lay public as “the great unwashed.” I object to this characterization. Does that make us the “great washed?” (If so, that precludes us from getting “down and dirty” with our music-making.) My objection comes from the feeling that while we certainly expect the respect of our audiences (in both sacred and secular settings), we often fail to offer reciprocal respect. And in that failing, we are shooting ourselves in the collective foot. Just as a wife might compliment her husband for his good taste in women, the organist might applaud the audience for its good taste in choosing their afternoon’s entertainment. And what better way to applaud the audience than to reward it with a thrilling, enlightening, accessible program?
I participate as a member of the board of the Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, a non-profit organization that supports, promotes, and presents the quartet in regular concerts in mid-coast Maine. In addition to some 30 concerts a year in the home region, they frequently play in distant cities, acting as musical ambassadors from the small towns in which they live. It’s a wonderful organization with a strong audience, and it’s impossible to measure the advantages of having such an institution in a small town. But there’s an inherent struggle. How do we balance the artistic ideals and aspirations of the quartet with the pressures of meeting the budget? The fact is the choice is never that clear. Of course the audience wants to hear the classic string quartet repertory. Of course the quartet wants to explore new music, new concepts, and new challenges. Of course, everyone wants to play and attend concerts of music that is beautiful, uplifting, and stimulating. And of course all of us would like to see more children attending the concerts. It’s a matter of balance.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra rewards its generous donors with “Pre-Concert Talks” presented by leading musicologists before every concert and with museum-quality displays about the composers’ life and work. An educated audience will be more receptive to the unfamiliar.
I was struck by what I read in the New York Times about the Metropolitan Opera. For such a venerable institution to undertake such a radical program should be an example to all who care about the future of the arts. Imagine the expense. A special translation, editing all those scores and parts, recasting the production to allow for a new pace of set and costume changes and lighting cues, relearning and re-rehearsing that most familiar of operas so singers were familiar with the cuts. And don’t forget the paperwork to arrange for all those theaters and organizing the simulcasts. The whole adventure must have cost a fortune, no doubt supplied by well-briefed donors. It’s fun to picture all those children running up and down the grand staircases, covering their ears at the high notes from the Queen of the Night, and going home looking forward to the next time they get to go to the Met. Or the symphony. Or a string quartet concert. Or an organ recital—now playing at a theater (or a church) near you. Make it happen.
* http://www.metoperafamily.org/met opera/about/whoweare/faq/house.aspx

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.

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

To be the best, must it be the biggest?

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

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

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

…Oldest?

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

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

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

…Most majestic?

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

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

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

…Most influential?

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

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

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

…Most melodious?

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

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

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

…Most incensed?

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

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

…Most seminal?

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

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

…Most nostalgic?

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

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

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

Postscript:

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

Thank you for reading.

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

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User friendly
We call it Classical Music. It may be Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, Contemporary Music, or Romantic Music—but we call it Classical Music. And Classical Music has a bad rap. It’s perceived by many as pricey, snooty, exclusionary, and snobbish. We could say that Classical Music has earned its bad rap, and I think we might be the culprits.
In the early 1970s I was a teenager learning to be serious about music. Around the corner from our house was a Congregational church with a new Fisk organ where I had my lessons on Friday afternoons and where I practiced most days after school. My father was rector of the Episcopal church (home of another Fisk organ). His invariable routine was to close himself in the living room on Saturday night with a card table and a black manual typewriter. He tuned the KLH hi-fi to WCRB, Boston’s only commercial Classical Music station, and wrote the sermon for the next morning, accompanied by the live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
For decades, Richard L. Kaye was the announcer for those broadcasts. I listened to many of them on my own (far superior) hi-fi gear in my upstairs bedroom and became devoted to the show that followed the broadcasts, WCRB Saturday Night. Also hosted by Richard L. Kaye, this was an erudite mix of music and humor that I think may have had something to do with my musical formation. Richard Kaye was a connoisseur of music-based humor. He played parodies by Spike Milligan and Allen Sherman. He was the first in Boston to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even before they “went video.” Victor Borge was a perennial favorite, and I know that I heard the King’s Singers first on his program, giving London weather forecasts to Anglican chant.
I’m afraid I was a pretty serious teenager, very sure (way too sure) of myself when it came to the Praeludia of Buxtehude, dead sure that an organ recital should open with a suite from Classic (read Baroque) French music, and horrified if some unwitting devotée would presume to applaud after the Prelude and before the Fugue during one of my (perhaps too frequent) recitals.
Richard Kaye ran semi-annual fund raisers on WCRB for the Boston Symphony dubbed Boston Symphony Marathons. His obituary in The Boston Globe (December 23, 2006) credited him with raising more than three million dollars for the orchestra. I loved listening to the marathons because they were peppered with interviews of the orchestra’s players, conductors, and guest artists—and I was fascinated to hear those luminaries talk about their musical lives. One marathon included a contest for musical puns with prizes that included concert tickets, back stage visits, tee-shirts, the whole nine yards. My entry: “Of Korsakov only between movements.” No tee-shirt.
While I thought that was the height of musical humor, it was also an early sign of musical snobbism. I was intimately familiar with the polite shuffle heard over the radio as patrons shifted themselves in their seats and gave the little “symphony coughs” that they had been stifling for the previous eight minutes. And I knew personally the agony of sitting in the hall with my glottis clamped shut, wishing that for once they wouldn’t take all the repeats. It was unthinkable to me to be the boor who dared interrupt the musicians’ flow.
Several years after graduating from Oberlin, I had an impromptu reunion with a conservatory classmate who had become principal trumpet for a regional symphony orchestra. He told of an evening when during a performance there was a commotion in the balcony and the (unpopular) music director stopped the orchestra and whirled around indignantly to berate the audience. The heart-attack victim survived—the conductor didn’t.
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applaud v – intr. 1. To express approval, especially by the clapping of hands. 2. To commend highly; praise. (from Latin, applaudere, to strike upon, clap.)1
The ancient Romans were early developers of organized applause. There was a hierarchy of expression, starting with the snapping of fingers, moving through rhythmic clapping of hands, to the hair-raising waving of the flaps of togas. The emperor Aurelian suggested substituting the waving of handkerchiefs for the flapping of togas, certainly more appropriate for organ recitals and other events of immense dignity.2 Although as I write, I’m imagining a hilarious scene involving togas that might well take place at an organists’ convention.
Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope (perhaps unwittingly) took up the tradition instituted by Aurelian when he invited fans of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers to bring yellow dish towels to the stadium for use as applause props during a championship game with the Baltimore Colts in 1975. Nearly 30 years later, Steelers’ fans are famous for the yellow Terrible Towel, available officially in various forms from the Pittsburgh Steelers at <http://news.steelers.com/catalog/
TerribleStuff/> for about $7.95, or from Amazon.com (new for $5.79, used for $.99). (I suppose you’d choose a used one to take to a concert of which you didn’t expect much.)
To help with your decision of which to buy, I offer words from Aurelian’s applauded successor, Myron Cope himself:
The Terrible Towel is not an instrument of witchcraft . . . It is not a hex upon the enemy. THE TOWEL is a positive force that lifts the Steelers to magnificent heights—and poses mysterious difficulties for the Steelers’ opponents only if need be. Many have told me that THE TERRIBLE TOWEL brought them good fortune, but I can’t guarantee that sort of thing because the Steelers, after all, are THE TOWEL’S primary concern. Still, at the least, the symbol of THE TERRIBLE TOWEL will serve as a memento of your having been part of the Steelers’ Dynasty and if it causes good things to happen to you, so much the better.
I realize that Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium (replaced in 2001 by Heinz Field Stadium) is a long way from Symphony Hall in Boston, and that the events typically presented in those venues bear little in common. But I wonder how much good the stuffy applause etiquette practiced at serious concerts does for the future of good music. Edward Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in Manchester, England in 1908. His wife Caroline wrote, “after 3rd movement E. had to go up on platform & whole Orch. & nos. of audience stood up—Wonderful scene.” It’s hard to picture that scene today. Who would give the “first clap” after the first movement? One concert musician wrote that she liked it when a few uninitiated people started to clap between movements because it meant there was someone new there.
I read an interesting article by Henry Fogel in the online Arts Journal <http://www.artsjournal.com/onthe
record/2007/03/the_applause_issue.html>. (That’s where I got the quote from Elgar’s wife.) The article ended with a lengthy set of blogging responses. One was from a woman named Ashley, who had taken her ten-year-old son to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote,

Everyone had their nose so far up in the air that they could barely see my son walking in front of them—the last straw was when several people on the lower level began applauding so my son followed suit and the people around us were FREAKING OUT, making rude comments, and shushing them . . . my son and I felt like idiots (and I hadn’t even clapped). We will NEVER attend again . . . I have enough stress in my life—I don’t need to be made to feel like a 2nd class citizen and a complete idiot while trying to enjoy some culture with my son . . .

Are we alienating our future public by trying to prove how much we know? After all, you really show that you know the piece well if you dare applaud loudly the second a piece is finished. Conversely, when you’re hearing a world premiere performance, are you going to be the first to applaud? The audience sits nervously, glancing around, clappers poised, not daring to budge until the conductor asks the orchestra to stand . . .
Concert pianist Emmanuel Ax is challenging tradition. He has written in his website blog <www.emanuelax.word press.com/2008>: “All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes. And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” I was made aware of this “Ax of evil” in an article by Sam Allis in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 16, 2009, “Make a joyful noise; Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will.” He begins, “Manny Ax is my new hero.” (This is a local joke on Manny Ramirez, of late the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and an extraordinary hitter, who is perhaps best known for his arrogance and poor attitude on the field.)
In his article, Sam Allis cites Mark Volpe, distinguished general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

Mark Volpe . . . agrees that there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra’s goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.
§

They loved me in Milan, they loved me in New York
There may be no more formal concert venue in America than the Metropolitan Opera of New York. If you think it takes a lot of money to run a symphony orchestra or a pipe organ, consider the Met. It has a symphony orchestra plus a chorus, a battery of high-end singers, a dance company, countless stagehands, designers, choreographers, storage facilities, transportation departments, and lighting technicians. The patrons of the Met are assumed to be the wealthy and elite. But—the Met offers 15-dollar seats, admittedly not very close to the stage, and if you hear something you like you can applaud. In fact, it’s customary for the audience to applaud vigorously after a well-sung aria.
On Monday, April 21, 2008, a singer sang an encore of an aria during a Met performance for the first time since 1994. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez was singing the role of Tonio in Donizetti’s romp, La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). The highpoint of this role is the aria, Ah! mes amis, in which Tonio shares that he has joined the regiment as a soldier because of his love for Marie (the title role), sung magnificently and hilariously by Natalie Dessay. (We saw the production on HD simulcast the following Saturday, and I’ve got to tell you, she’s a virtuoso with a steam iron, an absolute laugh-riot. Plus, she can sing.)
The tenor’s aria includes nine high Cs, eight of which are reached by octave leaps, allegro. Luciano Pavarotti’s fame was established in large part by this aria, earning him the sobriquet, King of the High Cs. (Aaargh!) Two days after the encore, Robert Siegel of National Public Radio interviewed Peter Gelb, the innovative general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on All Things Considered. Mr. Gelb told us that Juan Diego Flórez had recently sung an encore of that aria at La Scala in Milan, and when the tenor arrived in New York for rehearsals with the Met, Mr. Gelb asked him if he would like to plan for an encore if the audience response warranted one. Mr. Gelb has a box seat in the Metropolitan Opera House with a hotline to the stage manager. Forty-five seconds into the roar of applause following the aria, Mr. Gelb made the call, the stage manager pressed a button to turn on a light on conductor James Levine’s music stand, the conductor and the singer made eye contact, and they were off to the races.
Siegel asked if, now that the ice has been broken again, more singers would be invited to sing encores. Gelb’s response, “We should only have that problem.”
You can hear Siegel’s eight-minute interview of Peter Gelb, including the high Cs, on <NPR.org>. Here’s the address—it’s worth it, tell them I sent you: <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89884693&gt;.
Why can’t we do that at an organ recital? If people like the music, let ‘em roar! In fact, plan your programs and present your performances so they feel invited.You’d rather have them come back, even if they don’t know the difference between the Prelude and the Fugue. (Are there really such people?)

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User friendly
We call it Classical Music. It may be Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, Contemporary Music, or Romantic Music—but we call it Classical Music. And Classical Music has a bad rap. It’s perceived by many as pricey, snooty, exclusionary, and snobbish. We could say that Classical Music has earned its bad rap, and I think we might be the culprits.
In the early 1970s I was a teenager learning to be serious about music. Around the corner from our house was a Congregational church with a new Fisk organ where I had my lessons on Friday afternoons and where I practiced most days after school. My father was rector of the Episcopal church (home of another Fisk organ). His invariable routine was to close himself in the living room on Saturday night with a card table and a black manual typewriter. He tuned the KLH hi-fi to WCRB, Boston’s only commercial Classical Music station, and wrote the sermon for the next morning, accompanied by the live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
For decades, Richard L. Kaye was the announcer for those broadcasts. I listened to many of them on my own (far superior) hi-fi gear in my upstairs bedroom and became devoted to the show that followed the broadcasts, WCRB Saturday Night. Also hosted by Richard L. Kaye, this was an erudite mix of music and humor that I think may have had something to do with my musical formation. Richard Kaye was a connoisseur of music-based humor. He played parodies by Spike Milligan and Allen Sherman. He was the first in Boston to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even before they “went video.” Victor Borge was a perennial favorite, and I know that I heard the King’s Singers first on his program, giving London weather forecasts to Anglican chant.
I’m afraid I was a pretty serious teenager, very sure (way too sure) of myself when it came to the Praeludia of Buxtehude, dead sure that an organ recital should open with a suite from Classic (read Baroque) French music, and horrified if some unwitting devotée would presume to applaud after the Prelude and before the Fugue during one of my (perhaps too frequent) recitals.
Richard Kaye ran semi-annual fund raisers on WCRB for the Boston Symphony dubbed Boston Symphony Marathons. His obituary in The Boston Globe (December 23, 2006) credited him with raising more than three million dollars for the orchestra. I loved listening to the marathons because they were peppered with interviews of the orchestra’s players, conductors, and guest artists—and I was fascinated to hear those luminaries talk about their musical lives. One marathon included a contest for musical puns with prizes that included concert tickets, back stage visits, tee-shirts, the whole nine yards. My entry: “Of Korsakov only between movements.” No tee-shirt.
While I thought that was the height of musical humor, it was also an early sign of musical snobbism. I was intimately familiar with the polite shuffle heard over the radio as patrons shifted themselves in their seats and gave the little “symphony coughs” that they had been stifling for the previous eight minutes. And I knew personally the agony of sitting in the hall with my glottis clamped shut, wishing that for once they wouldn’t take all the repeats. It was unthinkable to me to be the boor who dared interrupt the musicians’ flow.
Several years after graduating from Oberlin, I had an impromptu reunion with a conservatory classmate who had become principal trumpet for a regional symphony orchestra. He told of an evening when during a performance there was a commotion in the balcony and the (unpopular) music director stopped the orchestra and whirled around indignantly to berate the audience. The heart-attack victim survived—the conductor didn’t.
§
applaud v – intr. 1. To express approval, especially by the clapping of hands. 2. To commend highly; praise. (from Latin, applaudere, to strike upon, clap.)1
The ancient Romans were early developers of organized applause. There was a hierarchy of expression, starting with the snapping of fingers, moving through rhythmic clapping of hands, to the hair-raising waving of the flaps of togas. The emperor Aurelian suggested substituting the waving of handkerchiefs for the flapping of togas, certainly more appropriate for organ recitals and other events of immense dignity.2 Although as I write, I’m imagining a hilarious scene involving togas that might well take place at an organists’ convention.
Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope (perhaps unwittingly) took up the tradition instituted by Aurelian when he invited fans of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers to bring yellow dish towels to the stadium for use as applause props during a championship game with the Baltimore Colts in 1975. Nearly 30 years later, Steelers’ fans are famous for the yellow Terrible Towel, available officially in various forms from the Pittsburgh Steelers at <http://news.steelers.com/catalog/
TerribleStuff/> for about $7.95, or from Amazon.com (new for $5.79, used for $.99). (I suppose you’d choose a used one to take to a concert of which you didn’t expect much.)
To help with your decision of which to buy, I offer words from Aurelian’s applauded successor, Myron Cope himself:
The Terrible Towel is not an instrument of witchcraft . . . It is not a hex upon the enemy. THE TOWEL is a positive force that lifts the Steelers to magnificent heights—and poses mysterious difficulties for the Steelers’ opponents only if need be. Many have told me that THE TERRIBLE TOWEL brought them good fortune, but I can’t guarantee that sort of thing because the Steelers, after all, are THE TOWEL’S primary concern. Still, at the least, the symbol of THE TERRIBLE TOWEL will serve as a memento of your having been part of the Steelers’ Dynasty and if it causes good things to happen to you, so much the better.
I realize that Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium (replaced in 2001 by Heinz Field Stadium) is a long way from Symphony Hall in Boston, and that the events typically presented in those venues bear little in common. But I wonder how much good the stuffy applause etiquette practiced at serious concerts does for the future of good music. Edward Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in Manchester, England in 1908. His wife Caroline wrote, “after 3rd movement E. had to go up on platform & whole Orch. & nos. of audience stood up—Wonderful scene.” It’s hard to picture that scene today. Who would give the “first clap” after the first movement? One concert musician wrote that she liked it when a few uninitiated people started to clap between movements because it meant there was someone new there.
I read an interesting article by Henry Fogel in the online Arts Journal <http://www.artsjournal.com/onthe
record/2007/03/the_applause_issue.html>. (That’s where I got the quote from Elgar’s wife.) The article ended with a lengthy set of blogging responses. One was from a woman named Ashley, who had taken her ten-year-old son to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote,

Everyone had their nose so far up in the air that they could barely see my son walking in front of them—the last straw was when several people on the lower level began applauding so my son followed suit and the people around us were FREAKING OUT, making rude comments, and shushing them . . . my son and I felt like idiots (and I hadn’t even clapped). We will NEVER attend again . . . I have enough stress in my life—I don’t need to be made to feel like a 2nd class citizen and a complete idiot while trying to enjoy some culture with my son . . .
Are we alienating our future public by trying to prove how much we know? After all, you really show that you know the piece well if you dare applaud loudly the second a piece is finished. Conversely, when you’re hearing a world premiere performance, are you going to be the first to applaud? The audience sits nervously, glancing around, clappers poised, not daring to budge until the conductor asks the orchestra to stand . . .
Concert pianist Emmanuel Ax is challenging tradition. He has written in his website blog <www.emanuelax.word press.com/2008>: “All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes. And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” I was made aware of this “Ax of evil” in an article by Sam Allis in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 16, 2009, “Make a joyful noise; Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will.” He begins, “Manny Ax is my new hero.” (This is a local joke on Manny Ramirez, of late the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and an extraordinary hitter, who is perhaps best known for his arrogance and poor attitude on the field.)
In his article, Sam Allis cites Mark Volpe, distinguished general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

Mark Volpe . . . agrees that there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra’s goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.
§

They loved me in Milan, they loved me in New York
There may be no more formal concert venue in America than the Metropolitan Opera of New York. If you think it takes a lot of money to run a symphony orchestra or a pipe organ, consider the Met. It has a symphony orchestra plus a chorus, a battery of high-end singers, a dance company, countless stagehands, designers, choreographers, storage facilities, transportation departments, and lighting technicians. The patrons of the Met are assumed to be the wealthy and elite. But—the Met offers 15-dollar seats, admittedly not very close to the stage, and if you hear something you like you can applaud. In fact, it’s customary for the audience to applaud vigorously after a well-sung aria.
On Monday, April 21, 2008, a singer sang an encore of an aria during a Met performance for the first time since 1994. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez was singing the role of Tonio in Donizetti’s romp, La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). The highpoint of this role is the aria, Ah! mes amis, in which Tonio shares that he has joined the regiment as a soldier because of his love for Marie (the title role), sung magnificently and hilariously by Natalie Dessay. (We saw the production on HD simulcast the following Saturday, and I’ve got to tell you, she’s a virtuoso with a steam iron, an absolute laugh-riot. Plus, she can sing.)
The tenor’s aria includes nine high Cs, eight of which are reached by octave leaps, allegro. Luciano Pavarotti’s fame was established in large part by this aria, earning him the sobriquet, King of the High Cs. (Aaargh!) Two days after the encore, Robert Siegel of National Public Radio interviewed Peter Gelb, the innovative general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on All Things Considered. Mr. Gelb told us that Juan Diego Flórez had recently sung an encore of that aria at La Scala in Milan, and when the tenor arrived in New York for rehearsals with the Met, Mr. Gelb asked him if he would like to plan for an encore if the audience response warranted one. Mr. Gelb has a box seat in the Metropolitan Opera House with a hotline to the stage manager. Forty-five seconds into the roar of applause following the aria, Mr. Gelb made the call, the stage manager pressed a button to turn on a light on conductor James Levine’s music stand, the conductor and the singer made eye contact, and they were off to the races.
Siegel asked if, now that the ice has been broken again, more singers would be invited to sing encores. Gelb’s response, “We should only have that problem.”
You can hear Siegel’s eight-minute interview of Peter Gelb, including the high Cs, on <NPR.org>. Here’s the address—it’s worth it, tell them I sent you: <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89884693&gt;.
Why can’t we do that at an organ recital? If people like the music, let ‘em roar! In fact, plan your programs and present your performances so they feel invited.You’d rather have them come back, even if they don’t know the difference between the Prelude and the Fugue. (Are there really such people?)