In the wind...

John Bishop

Where’s the fire?

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

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

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

How fast is too fast?

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

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

How loud is too loud?

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

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

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

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

“Is the Aeoline playing?”

Barely audible, from the distance, “Yes.”

“Make it softer!”

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

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

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

What’s your job?

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

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

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

A happy little cloud

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

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

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

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

You can’t play a tune on a Mixture.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all in the numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the wind...

John Bishop

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all about the holes.

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

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

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

And there are lots of holes.

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

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

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

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

Dust devils

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

In the wind...

John Bishop

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.

In the wind...

John Bishop

For the home that has everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chillin’ in Coolin

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

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

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

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

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

Entering Enterprise

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

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

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

Be your own boss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the wind...

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Files

16May 2014 In the wind.pdf (863.66 KB)

A show of hands

It’s the middle of March and here in the frigid Northeast we had a little tease last week when the temperature outside went up into the fifties for a day or so. But while this is a beautiful sunny morning, it’s around twenty degrees outside, and the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. It’s bone-chilling cold and so dry that joints in floor boards are wide open, and my hands feel like baskets full of fall leaves. The almond scent of Jergens™ fills the room to no avail.

In the last few days I’ve been working with the old-fashioned hot glue that organbuilders favor. I start with crystals of dry glue the consistency of fancy rough-grain raw cane sugar (funny how much extra we’re willing to pay for something that isn’t highly processed!) and cook them with water in my temperature-controlled glue pot. It’s a versatile glue because I can make it as thick or thin as I want. It bonds leather and other materials to wood beautifully, and fifty years later when it’s time to replace the leather again, it can be removed from the wood with hot water.

I’ve been gluing the hinges, belts, and gussets on an Aeolian-Skinner wind regulator (bellows). I spread glue on the wood and the material I’m applying, put it in place, and rub it down with a hot damp rag, squeezing excess glue out of the joint so the chemical bond is between two pieces of material, not a layer of thick glue.

I have a big double-boiler—the kind of thing from which you ladle soup in a cafeteria—to keep that rag nice and hot. It holds two gallons of water (or soup) and keeps it as hot as I can stand. I put my hands in the water, then wring the rag as dry as I can. No wonder my hands are uncomfortably dry. It has led to one of those painful splits at the corner of my right thumbnail.

But wait, there’s more. The other day I was installing a new rectifier in that same Aeolian-Skinner organ because the old one was soaked in the flood that wrecked the regulator. The wires that carry the direct current power from the basement to the console and organ chambers three floors up are about the thickness of my little finger. When I was stripping the insulation from the wires, I took a teeny sliver of copper through the skin of that same thumb. Now as I write, every time I touch the spacebar my thumb throbs. I’m a big guy and I think of myself as pretty tough, but those two little injuries are nearly all I can think about just now.

Hanging by a thread

According to USA Today, there were five major league pitchers with annual salaries above $20,000,000 in 2012. These are the cream of the crop of prime starting pitchers, so they would be starting about every fourth game. Each team plays 162 games each year, so without injury, those pitchers would start about forty games. Let’s say for argument that they pitch six innings each time they start a game, face five batters each inning, and throw five pitches to each batter. That’s 6,000 pitches in a season or $3,333.33 per pitch. Do the same math another way and it comes to roughly $500,000 per game. One of those guys gets a hangnail and each time he throws the ball he’s in agony. His accuracy suffers, and the manager puts him on the bench. Okay for him because he’s on salary. But his employers lose the benefit of $500,000 worth of his effort for each day of the hangnail.

Me, I just go back to the glue pot and put my hands in the hot water. Walk it off. You’ll be fine.

The panda’s thumb

Our hands define us. They define us as a species, they define us as individuals, and they define us as musicians. We join some of the primates including the great apes, a few rodents, and to a lesser extent, the panda, in being blessed with an opposable thumb. While the primates use their thumbs to climb trees, and make primitive tools from sticks, our thumbs have allowed us to achieve extraordinary dexterity. We use that dexterity for practical tasks and for expression.

There are twenty-seven bones in each of our hands and a complex network of muscles and nerves. It was the physical therapy I had following a bout of “Carpenters’ Elbow” (I don’t play tennis) that taught me how the tendons and muscles in our forearms are related to the bones in our hands like the strings of a marionette. Put your left hand on the beefy part of your right forearm and wiggle your right fingers, and you’ll feel those little strings moving around like manual trackers. Come to think of it, they are like manual trackers.

Keyboard musicians are defined and define themselves by their hands. I have to admit I’m amused by publicity headshots of colleagues that include their hands. The photographer has struggled to find natural looking poses to include the hands in a close-up of an organist’s face, when most of the reasons we bring our hands to our faces shouldn’t be photographed. I chuckle as I remember my grandmother chiding me and my siblings to “get your hands away from your face.”

Wave it like it is.

Wendy has been actively involved at her alma mater, Brown University, as long as I’ve known her. She served on the Board of Fellows (she was a jolly good fellow!) for most of twenty years, as an officer of the Corporation for much of that time, and now serves as co-chair of the committee planning the observation and celebration of the university’s semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary. Last weekend we were on campus for the grand kickoff of more than a year of anniversary events including a President’s Colloquium on the Virtues of Liberal Education. One of the panel discussions that day brought four sitting state governors together with a professor of political science as moderator for a wide-ranging discussion about modern American politics.

Two of the participants, Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont, had hands that were unusually large and expressive. They were seated in plush armchairs (brown, of course) onstage in a large lecture hall, and I was struck as I listened and watched at how much their beautiful hands added to the effectiveness of their delivery. The other two governors had good things to say, but they seemed less eloquent.

In March of 2011, Wendy accompanied her client, former United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall, to the White House as he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Among the tales with which she came home was the lengthy conversation she had with another honoree, Van Cliburn, the storied pianist who won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Along with comments on his legendary grace and regal carriage, Wendy spoke of his enormous, expressive hands.

I googled Van Cliburn and watched a few performances on YouTube. I saw the obligatory tours de force of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, but was singularly impressed by his presentation of the National Anthem at the start of the 1994 opening day game of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers in the newly completed Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. We’ve all seen the worst of so-called musicianship in such venues, not to be confused with soprano Renée Fleming’s marvelous offering at this year’s Super Bowl, but watching the sixty-year-old Van Cliburn stride on to the playing field dressed in white tie and tails, waving to the crowd, and seating himself at the piano was to witness a classy man bringing his classy act to a venue otherwise not known for my present definition of class.

And those hands. They were big as all outdoors. I marveled as I saw that left hand playing three- and four-part chords at the spread of a tenth in rolling eighth-note passages. It looked as though there was about eighteen inches between the piano’s fallboard and Van Cliburn’s wrists.

You can read about this performance and see the video at http://tinyurl.com/p6faslj. I bet you’ll agree, the Fort Worth Symphony didn’t add much to the experience, except that it was fun to see Van Cliburn stand for the second verse, place a huge hand over his huge heart, and sing. Isn’t America a great country?

Last night, Wendy and I attended an all-Beethoven concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi. They opened with a lackluster performance of Leonora Overture Number 3, and then were joined by pianist Yefim Bronfman for the First and Second Piano Concertos. That’s pretty good work for a pianist, especially when you consider that he plays the remaining three concertos and the Triple Concerto with the same band in the next two weeks. Wow, what a lot of notes.

Mr. Bronfman does not cut a dashing figure as he crosses the stage toward the piano. But I don’t have to risk my relationship with him by describing any further because I can rely on novelist Philip Roth to do it for me. In his novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), the narrator observes the main character, the disgraced Coleman Silk, having his somewhat creepy and typically Rothian way with the fragile woman on whom he is preying during a live rehearsal at Tanglewood:

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the Brontosaur! . . . He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso . . . someone who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman . . . Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than the guy who is going to move it . . . this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew.

Philip Roth can say what he likes, because Mr. Bronfman is more than just a pretty face. He can rely on his hands to speak for him. I often marvel at how a great pianist can project the illusion of fluidity when in fact, the tone of the piano is generated by percussion. The musician’s hands allow a control that produces the image of a waterfall rather than a hammer hitting an anvil. And Yefim Bronfman sprinkled that magic all over Symphony Hall. It’s impressive that he played two concertos—I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of notes there were, and not one out of place. As I sat listening with my thumb throbbing, I marveled at the understated assurance of his hands—those amazing structures of joints, muscles, and sinews—and how they could project such torrents of expression and emotion.

We’ve got to hand it to you.

The business of learning to play a keyboard instrument involves training the hands to perform specialized tasks. We develop those muscles in unusual ways, refining the accuracy of aim and attack, and learning to simultaneously apply different amounts of pressure so as to emphasize notes of a melody. The muscles in our hands develop their own memories for the patterns of fingering in scales and passages in the pieces we learn. Our hands grasp the unique patterns of each of the twelve major and minor keys as easily as a doorknob. It is that tactile memory that allows us to play without looking at our fingers.

As miraculous as the human hand on the keyboard might be, the basic position of our hands on the keys as we play is common to many other activities. Place your hands flat on your desk and you have a pretty good start for the hand position of a keyboard player. Contrast that to the left hand of the violinist or guitarist. I grab a handful of nuts from a bowl by turning my hand over and clasping my fingers in a position similar to what I might clumsily do on the neck of a violin, but if I move my fingers I drop the nuts. The position of the violinist’s hand as he selects notes by pressing the strings against the neck is pretty much opposite that of an organist.

Take the violinist’s tactile control a step further. It’s difficult enough to learn to play the right notes on a piano keyboard. But let’s face it, we’re given a simple choice and a relatively wide margin. If you manage to play the key that is F-sharp without touching another key, you get whatever F-sharp the instrument has to offer. On the violin, some combination of seeing, hearing, and feeling must be achieved to allow the player to seemingly randomly select an accurate note. Listen for a few seconds to a beginning violinist and you’ll know what I mean. The first four measures of Twinkle, twinkle, little star is like looking at your reflection in a fun-house mirror.

Even the guitarist has it easy because his luthier has reduced care by adding frets. But as much as the frets ease some of the difficulty of playing the instrument, our guitarist relies on the strength and evenness of the nails on his plucking hand to create his tone. No bundle of horsehair for him. A cousin of mine who lives near Paris was married to a classical guitarist who asked me to help him purchase the 800-grit sandpaper he liked to use to preen his fingernails. Snag a nail pulling open a cardboard box and you’re on the bench, sitting next to the pitcher with a hangnail.

Practice and use has another effect on the fingers of a string player. Anyone else’s fingers would get pretty sore jumping around on those strings. I think mine would be bleeding in ten minutes. But witness a great violinist playing a complex concerto and you’ll know that thousands of hours of practicing is necessary to condition those little pads of flesh to endure that abuse. Adding to the physical punishment of playing the violin is the hickey they get from the neck rest.

Modern carpenters are armed with pneumatic nailing machines. Walking past a construction site you hear POW POW POW at march tempo as nails propelled by air pressure slam through wood. But a good carpenter still has the old-time rhythm of placing a nail with one hand and driving it home with three rhythmic strokes of a hammer in the other. Watching a beginner start a nail in a piece of wood is like listening to that infant violinist. Many of us know the special feeling when hammer strikes and thumbnail goes black.

A potter throws a lump of clay on a wheel, wets his hands, and coaxes it into center. Then with one hand open cupping the lump and the other closed with thumb pointing down, a cup or a bowl emerges by metamorphosis. Practice allows the creation of a set of plates similar enough in size to produce a set.

A surgeon uses forceps to tie complicated knots in monofilament thread to make leak-proof joints that can contain the pressure of blood as driven by the beating heart.

A tailor or seamstress puts the end of a thread through the eye of a needle, then bonds two pieces of fabric with microscopic stitches.

The massive boom of an excavating machine responds to the touch of the operator’s fingertips on the controls, combining multiple movements into fluid, nearly human motion.

As generations pass, our bodies adapt to our circumstances. We rely on clothing and central heating systems to keep us warm so we evolve toward hairlessness. The balding man takes comfort in the knowledge that he’s more advanced than his hairy friends.

Early humans had to rely on large vestigial molars to reduce plant tissue to digestible forms. Think of a cow chewing her cud. Today the plants we eat grow in convenient forms and we get a lot of our nutrition from meat that is cooked and cut into small pieces, so we have evolved smaller jaws than our ancient predecessors. But we still have those pesky vestigials, ironically called wisdom teeth, and as few of us have space on our jaws for them, out they come.

Like our hair and our teeth, our hands have evolved and adapted to operate the devices we’ve created. One quick handshake is enough to tell the difference between a carpenter and an office worker. Notice how many tiny motions we combine to button a shirt. And look across the symphony orchestra to see how many ways our hands can be used.

What’s next? If our hair is getting thin and our jaws are getting smaller, think of our thumbs. Sit on a seat in the subway or a bench at the mall and watch the teenagers texting and playing hand-held games. Our thumbs will keep getting more nimble and I figure we’ll always need our fourth and fifth fingers to grasp hand-held devices. But it will take fewer than a hundred generations for our index and third fingers to wither away from disuse. So put down that phone and go practice!

A conversation with Frederick Swann

Steven Egler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What attracted you to Northwestern University?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said that the Barnes family “adopted” you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And those were with just organ accompaniments and no orchestra?

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

Were you ever overwhelmed playing those large instruments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you ever work directly with Virgil Fox?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s almost a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you and Karen McFarlane go way back.

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

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

Do you have any more recordings in the works?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have very good students there.

What about the composer in you?

Oh, I’m not a composer!

You wrote a wonderful Trumpet Tune.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you like to do in your free time?

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

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

Very little grass grows under your feet.

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

Do you practice everyday?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the wind...

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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16April 2014 In the wind.pdf (1.27 MB)

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.

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