In the Wind. . . .

Awareness in the wild

Cecil the Lion was a famous and favorite icon of Zimbabwe’s safari tourist industry. He was beloved by thousands who visited his home in Hwange National Park, and his photos were published around the world. He was thirteen years old and was central to a long-standing conservation study by biologists at Oxford University who had fitted him with a tracking device when he was six years old. He was huge and majestic, and he was easily recognizable because of big black streaks in his mane.

In the last days of July 2015, Cecil became an instant posthumous global celebrity when he was killed by Walter Palmer, a dentist and skilled trophy hunter from Minnesota. International news services and social media have been crackling with the story, Palmer is in hiding, the guide and landowner who had been paid to help with the hunt have appeared in court and been released on bail, and Cecil’s remains have been returned to the Zimbabwean government.

Palmer had paid for a license for such a hunt, but allegedly illegally lured Cecil outside the park, and as of this writing on August 1, the United States and Zimbabwean governments are discussing Palmer’s extradition. Thanks to social media, donations are pouring into wildlife conservation funds in six-figure clumps. Jane Goodall, who famously has spent more than fifty-five years studying chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, released a statement lamenting Cecil’s death that concludes, “Only one good thing comes out of this—thousands of people have read the story and have also been shocked. Their eyes opened to the dark side of human nature. Surely they will now be more prepared to fight for the protection of wild animals and the wild places where they live. Therein lies the hope.”

You can read the full statement on Dr. Goodall’s blog at www.janegoodall.org. And by now, her “thousands of people” must be many millions.

The timing of Cecil’s death was exquisite. Just a few days earlier, on July 25, while traveling in Kenya, President Obama released a statement that would effectively ban commercial trade in African elephant ivory in the United States. That announcement follows Obama’s executive order of July of 2013, in which he declared that the United States should “lead by example,” encouraging other nations to step up their active participation in the preservation of that majestic species. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) followed on February 25, 2014, by proposing a new rule affecting the trade and movement of ivory. You can see a simple summary of the specifics of the 2014 rule at www.fws.gov/international/travel-and-trade/ivory-ban-questions-and-answ…. For more background, I recommend you refer to the excellent article written by harpsichord specialist Anne Acker and published in the September 2014 issue of The Diapason. Ms. Acker did a great deal of excellent research and was generous with her time talking with me.

The specifics are presented in a chart. They include exemptions for any ivory more than one hundred years old (difficult to prove in many cases) and light exemptions for the domestic transportation of privately owned ivory. If you want to bring your grandmother’s harmonium home, there are no federal restrictions, unless your grandmother lived outside the United States.¹ No importing of ivory is permitted, period—except sports-hunted trophies. There is no restriction on importing sports-hunted trophies. Hang that on your wall.

Citing CITES

On July 1, 1975, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES, pronounced sight–eze) was implemented, the culmination of nearly fifteen years of international negotiation. The text of the treaty had been finalized two years earlier by eighty nations. Today, more than 180 nations enforce the terms of CITES, which oversees the protection of more than 30,000 species of animals and plants. You can see a list of protected species at www.fws.gov/
endangered/species/us-species.html. They are categorized as “E” (endangered), “T” (threatened), “SAT” (threatened because they’re similar in appearance to an endangered species), etc.²

Loxodonta africana (the African elephant) is the source of the most highly prized ivory, and that species was added to Appendix I of CITES on January 18, 1990. USFWS regulations currently in effect allow trade in ivory that was legally removed from the wild before that date.

With Obama’s Kenyan announcement, the clock started ticking. The USFWS released the latest version of the new ban on trade and movement of ivory. The agency is receiving comments from the public until September 28, 2015, after which the regulation will be amended once more and put into force. The version now open to comment includes revisions of that published in Feburary 2014 (that you’ve already read). You can read the latest proposed revisions at www.fws.gov/international/pdf/african-elephant-4d-proposed-changes.pdf…;

Again, it’s a neat summary, comparing the present proposal with that of 2014, and it’s easy to read. While commercial imports are entirely prohibited, sports-hunted trophies would now be limited to two per hunter per year, a big improvement over no limit at all, but if you maxed out the limit year after year, you’d need a mighty big house in which to hang them.

The Times Square Crush

Anyone who has navigated the sidewalks and pedestrian walkways in New York’s Times Square knows about the crush of humanity that throbs twenty-four hours a day. On June 19, 2015, the USFWS staged a different Times Square Crush. A huge industrial rock-crushing machine, the hulking behemoth that crushes boulders into gravel at highway-construction sites, was driven into the center of the square, and a ton of ivory artifacts that had been seized in an undercover operation was sent up into the machine on a conveyor belt and crushed to powder. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell presided over the event.

Two years earlier, the USFWS staged an ivory crush in Denver, Colorado, at which six tons of artifacts were destroyed. A statement published on the website of the USFWS reads, “Since that crush, several governments throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, have also destroyed ivory, joining with us to highlight this worldwide crisis and emphasizing that only a worldwide solution will stop wildlife poaching.” You can read the full statement and view videos of the Times Square Crush at www.fws.gov/le/elephant-ivory-crush.html.

These events were controversial—cheered by conservationists who believe that eliminating the commercial value of ivory is the strongest tool for the elimination of illegal poaching, and decried by others who claim that such destruction will not bring back dead elephants, and that diminishing the value of the ivory will diminish the care of the animals in the wild and drive the ivory market underground, likely leading to higher prices for illegal ivory. Still others feel that destruction of beautiful artifacts may make an emotional or political point, but would never have any impact on illegal poaching in Africa.

Who uses elephant ivory?

Readers of The Diapason will naturally think of musical instruments. Piano, organ, harpsichord, and harmonium keyboards were most typically made of ivory. Ivory veneers on natural keys are prized because as a natural grained material, ivory absorbs moisture, so the perspiration from the performers’ fingers doesn’t build up into slick pools on the keys. Ivory is also the most durable natural substance used on keyboards and arguably one of the most beautiful. And many organ consoles have engraved ivory knob faces, knob heads, and coupler tablets. 

Many guitars, violins, and other stringed instruments have small ivory parts such as the bridges and nuts that bear the strings, where it is prized for its acoustical properties. Ivory is also used for decorative elements on many musical instruments, and some wind instruments, both western and non-western, are made entirely of ivory.

Artisans who fashion high-quality pool cues are the largest consumers of new ivory (except in China, where carving remains prevalent), which is used in the tip (where the cue meets the ball) and the ferrules that join sections of the cue. Master players feel that those ivory parts give the ideal strike of cue to ball. No pianos and only a very few pipe organs are built with new ivory on the keyboards.

Builders of custom firearms use large pieces of ivory for rifle stocks, pistol grips, and many forms of ornamentation. And there is an active community of carvers and sculptors who specialize in working with ivory.

What does it have to do with me?

The proposed ban on trade and movement of ivory would have a big effect on the manufacture, restoration, sales and purchases of musical instruments. The American Institute of Organbuilders (AIO) has engaged a lobbyist, and the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America (APOBA) is participating in a larger lobbying effort spearheaded by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM).

There is a revision aimed at musical instruments. In the “Proposed Changes” PDF that you’ve just read, the section of the chart devoted to “Sales across state lines” includes an exemption for certain manufactured items that include a small (de minimis) amount of ivory. Here’s the section from that PDF that defines de minimis:³ 

“What is the de minimis exemption? 

The proposed rule provides an exemption from prohibitions on selling or offering for sale in interstate and foreign commerce certain manufactured items that contain a small (de minimis) amount of ivory that meet the following conditions: 

A. If the item is located in the United States, the ivory must have been imported prior to January 18, 1990, or imported under a CITES pre-Convention certificate with no limitation on its commercial use. 

B. If the item is located outside of the United States, the ivory must have been removed from the wild prior to February 26, 1976. 

C. The ivory is a fixed component or components of a larger manufactured item and not the primary source of the value of the item. 

D. The ivory is not raw. 

E. The manufactured item is not made wholly or primarily of ivory. 

F. The total weight of the ivory component or components is less than 200 grams.

G. The item must have been manufactured before the effective date of the final rule.”

Item “F” in that list is directed at musical instruments. The USFWS acknowledges that 200 grams is the typical weight of the ivory veneers on a piano keyboard, and as that would allow the usual amounts of ivory found in stringed and wind instruments, it seems a fair number.

But let’s talk about the organ. A standard 88-note piano keyboard has 52 natural keys—the average weight of ivory for each natural key is about 3.8 grams. A standard 61-note organ keyboard has 36 naturals, which at 3.8 grams each would total about 137 grams for each keyboard. And here’s where the math fails for the pipe organ:

• Most organs have at least two keyboards—ivories on a two-manual organ would weigh a total of 272 grams, well over the limit.

• Many finer organ keyboards have special thick-cut ivory, at least twice as thick as that found on a piano.

• Many organ consoles have ivory knobs and tablets. The elegant 1¼″ ivory faces found on older E.M. Skinner organs weigh about 10 grams each.

• Using those facts, a four-manual console with a hundred knobs would contain nearly 1400 grams of ivory, which is almost 3¼ pounds!

That may seem like a lot of ivory. But let’s go back to the sports-hunting exception. According to the website www.fieldtripearth.org, the average weight of an African elephant’s tusk is around 135 pounds. A trophy hunter could legally bring home four tusks a year—that’s 540 pounds hanging over someone’s fireplace.

Under the proposed restrictions, it would be illegal to buy, sell, or transport organ consoles, it would be illegal to file or sand existing ivory during restoration of a console, and it would be illegal to use replacement ivories salvaged from other keyboards to replace those chipped or cracked. “Working” ivory, altering existing and otherwise legal artifacts, would be completely prohibited. If your church hired an organbuilder from another state to restore the Skinner organ, they would be prohibited from transporting the console back to their workshop. They’d have to leave the keyboards and stop jambs behind.

What’s the solution?

Earlier, I mentioned that the clock is ticking while the USFWS receives comments from the public. The USFWS website has clear instructions about how to submit your opinion:

We have published a proposal to revise the African elephant rule under section 4(d) of the ESA [50 CFR 17.40 (e)]. This proposed rule is open for public comment until September 28, 2015. To view a PDF of the proposed rule, go to http://www.fws.gov/international/pdf/african-elephant-4d-proposed-rule-….

To read the proposal and provide comments upon publication, please go to the Federal eRulemaking Portal at http://www.regulations.gov. In the search box, enter FWS-HQ-IA-2013-0091 (the docket number for this proposed rule). You may submit a comment by clicking on “Comment Now!” The Service will review and consider all comments received by September 28, 2015 before publishing a final rule.

While preparing this essay, I’ve spoken with the presidents of the American Institute of Organbuilders and the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America, the attorney engaged by the National Association of Music Merchants, a supplier of ivory, and an environmental journalist, and I’ve heard conflicting opinions. 

Some conservationists hold an extreme position that all trade in ivory should be banned without any exceptions. Others feel that some kind of middle ground is reasonable, and the USFWS seems to be receptive to such input. The 200-gram exception shows that. Still others feel that the proposed restrictions are counter-productive and could actually result in harming the stability of the elephant population while encouraging illegal trade. 

What’s the answer?

I will go to www.regulations.gov, enter FWS-HQ-IA-2013-0091 into the search field, and submit these suggestions:

• On January 18, 1990, the African elephant was added to Appendix I of CITES. The current regulation allows trade of de minimis amounts of ivory that was legally removed from the wild before that date.

The spirit of the 200-gram exception is to exempt ivory as found in musical instruments.

Pipe organs require more natural keys than pianos. Because the use of ivory as found in organ consoles is identical to that in pianos, any amount of ivory found in pipe organ consoles, legally removed from the wild before January 18, 1990, should be exempted.

• Much of the impetus behind the bans and the staged crush events is the possibility of new ivory being disguised as antique and slipped into the market. (Anyone who has spilled coffee or tea on a keyboard knows it can be done!) But I doubt such disguise is possible with older organ keyboards.

I wonder if the USFWS can suggest ways that legitimate craftsmen could help watch for disguised illegal material.

• There’s an exception in the proposed rules for museums, allowing the display of ivory artifacts in their galleries, or as part of traveling exhibitions.

Religious, educational, and other not-for-profit institutions could be granted similar exemptions for the preservation of their existing musical instruments.

• If the regulation allows even one self-indulgent trophy hunter to bring home a carcass or part of one, it shouldn’t restrict the sale of an historic organ console.

My several conversations have made it clear that whatever revisions are made, no new use of ivory and no importation will be permitted. That’s off the table. This will devastate some businesses, and severely limit others. It’s likely that no new “working” of ivory that’s less than a hundred years old will be permitted, including material dating from before 1990. While it’s possible that a subsequent presidential administration would weaken or reverse these rules, there’s less than a month left as you read this to comment before they take effect.

While I believe that ivory is the premium material for use on keyboards, I know very well that there are other suitable, even desirable materials. Cow bone has natural grain and therefore similar absorbing properties, though quality varies, and I know of bone keyboards that haven’t held up well. Many tropical hardwoods (some of them endangered species) work well, though they don’t wear as well as either ivory or bone. Fruitwoods are great, and you can throw the scraps in your barbeque grill to flavor the meat. And pretty much every modern concert piano has plastic keys. Scores of great musicians play on plastic before huge audiences every day. It would be hard to maintain that it’s impossible to build pipe organs without new working of ivory.

The 1990 rule works for me. If musical instruments built since then included ivory harvested earlier, they should be exempted. But from now on, no new cutting of any ivory.

Notes

1. I’m discussing only federal restrictions. It’s important to note that some states are enacting more restrictive rules, possible criminalizing possession of ivory, including mammoth ivory, which is not an endangered species. 

2. Go to www.fws.gov/endangered/species/us-species.html, and click on “mammals.” You’ll see that the African elephant is listed as threatened, not endangered. 

3. According to the dictionary imbedded in my laptop, de minimis is an adjective defined as “an amount too trivial or minor to merit consideration, especially in law.”

It’s all about the tools.

Last December, I spent several weeks driving around the Boston area tuning organs. In the Boston suburbs, I-95 is an unavoidable, perpetual traffic jam.¹ It was opened in 1951 as the first circumferential highway in the United States, and has been in a perpetual state of expansion ever since. It runs about sixty miles from Braintree to Gloucester, at a radius of about ten miles from the center of the city. A lot of wonderful pipe organs have left the Gloucester workshop of C. B. Fisk, Inc., at the northern end of Route 128.

These days, they’re finishing adding a fourth lane in each direction between Needham and Waltham, complete with the expected construction delays. During the recent tuning season, my colleague Amory and I drove up and down that stretch of highway over a dozen times. We’re both machine nerds, and each time we passed, we had our eyes on the construction site in the median strip, especially a particular Caterpillar Payloader (Model 938M). According to the Caterpillar website (www.cat.com) it’s an 18-ton machine with a bucket the size of a standard dump truck, around five cubic yards. That particular machine stood out from the throng because it was operated by a young woman. The usual hulking, cigar-chomping operating engineer looks small in the cab of a machine like that. This one with the braided ponytail looked tiny. She sat up there in perfect control, carrying materials up and down the narrow lanes. We saw her standing on the ground next to the machine, talking with the guy with the clipboard about the next chore, the wheel of the machine towering over her. I expect that she had to work hard to earn the respect of her co-workers. Some women face a glass ceiling. She was facing a rubber ceiling—a rubber tire seven feet tall that weighs 500 pounds.

But when you consider that a cubic yard of gravel weighs about 3,000 pounds (a bucket full would weigh 7½ tons) it wouldn’t matter if the operator of the machine weighed 100 or 300 pounds. It’s the tool that makes it possible, along with the operator’s skill.

§

I have two different kits of hand tools that I use in my work. One is the size and weight of a small air conditioner; I use a folding two-wheel dolly to cart it around. It has hundreds of tools in it, and I use it in my workshop and on job sites where I’ll be working for more than a day or two. I call my other kit my “City Bag.” When Wendy and I moved to New York City, and I started making service calls on organs here, I found a neat bag about the size of a briefcase, with lots of pockets and slots for tools and supplies. It has a padded shoulder strap, and I can carry it on subways. Even though the kit is intended to be compact and lightweight, it includes about twenty screwdrivers, some of which are multi-tools with as many as ten different bits. Why so many? In a pipe organ, we encounter massive steel screws that support huge pedal stops that weigh many tons, and tiny brass jobs that my sixty-year-old eyes can barely see. While some screws are out in the open and easy to reach, others are squeezed into tight places, hidden behind the legs of a windchest and stuffed into dark corners. I pick through the multitude of choices in my bag, and choose the perfect tool for the job. A couple of my screwdrivers even have lights in them.

Besides the travel bags, there are thousands of hand tools in my workshop. I have cordless drill motors and screwdrivers and cordless saws, an array of electric hand tools, and stationary machines such as saws, drills, and planers. I have hand planes, soldering irons, multimeters, arch punches, files, and knives. I have a drawer full of staple and pop-rivet guns. My collection of hammers includes tack and brad hammers, ball-peen hammers, hammers with plastic and leather heads, dead blow mallets, sledge hammers, and the expensive lignum vitae mallet I use with my chisels along with the usual carpenter’s hammers. If you have to whack something, you’d better whack it with the right tool.

When I’m tuning an organ, I’m climbing and crawling all over the thing, and while it’s a nuisance to try to carry too much with me, it’s more of a nuisance to have to climb down out of the organ to pick up a tool I need for a ten-second job, like a pair of pliers for a tight magnet cap or a file to remove the burr that snagged my shirt. So I carry two things in holsters on my belt, a Leatherman™ and a small flashlight. I have a Leatherman™ in each tool kit. They include sharp blades, scissors (for cutting that treble pipe that’s a tad too long), pliers that are sturdy enough to give a good squeeze, a file, a saw, an assortment of screwdriver bits, and a bottle opener that I actually never use on the job. It’s an excellent tool, and my name is engraved on it.

Not just any tool

Back in the days when Sears was robust, I bought many of my hand tools there. They were good sturdy tools, but the best part was the lifetime guarantee. When I broke a pair of pliers, chipped the blade of a screwdriver, or when the tip of the screwdriver got rounded, they would replace it instantly. The broken tool went in a bin in the tool department, and I walked away with a new replacement, no questions asked. There’s a wide range in the quality of the tools we buy, and cheaply made tools give cheap results. Wire cutters whose jaws don’t meet can’t cut wires. A dull screwdriver hops out of the slot in the screw head and gouges the surface of the wood. A saw with poorly set teeth cuts a curved curf. And a hand plane whose blade won’t hold alignment chatters along a piece of wood leaving a path of destruction.

Hand planes are essential to fine woodworking, and every organbuilder has a variety of them. Mine rest in a drawer on a pad of thick (Swell Shutter) felt. A good plane has a smooth machined “shoe” and a mechanism that holds the blade tight at an angle just right for the particular task. I use a styrene candle (the stub of an altar candle) to lubricate the soles of my planes. The blade should be made of tempered steel so it will hold a good edge. The Stanley Tool Works of New Britain, Connecticut, was the standard bearer for producing a wide variety of excellent hand planes, but as the company diversified in the middle of the twentieth-century, many of the specialty planes were discontinued, and the general quality declined.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is located in Warren, Maine, about twenty minutes from our place there. It’s right on Route 1, the coastal highway that stretches from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, and we often drive past on our way to the rich culture and fantastic restaurants in Rockland, Rockport, and Camden. Lie-Nielsen occupies an attractive campus of frame buildings, and though I own several of their tools and have visited their website often, I never stopped in to visit until recently. There’s a sales showroom so the public is welcome to stop in, but when I called saying that I was interested in writing about their products, they invited me for a tour of the workshops. 

Thomas Lie-Nielsen founded the company in 1981 to produce a single specialty tool patterned after the original made by Stanley, the “No. 95” edge plane. It’s made of bronze with an “integral 90° fence,” and it’s used for squaring the edge of a piece of wood. The bronze edge plane sold well from the beginning, and over the years the company has expanded so that today, more than 90 workers produce a line of more than 150 tools.  

My tour started in the showroom, where senior sales representative Deneb Pulchalski shared the company’s history and philosophy with me. He put tools into my hands, one after the other, allowing me to feel the heft of the specialized metals and the jewelry-like polish of all the surfaces. While an ordinary Stanley bench plane sells for around $50 at Home Depot, the equivalent Lie-Nielsen tool costs about seven times as much. You might imagine that the market for expensive tools of such exceptional quality would be limited to professional woodworkers, but the company understands how valuable they are to enthusiastic amateurs. A skillful woodworker can get decent results from a mediocre tool. A tool of exceptional quality allows the amateur to make a clean cut.

As I handled those beautiful tools, I was struck by the notion that a tool designed for a particular task, made with exquisite care from the finest materials, is an inspiration to the craftsman who uses it. The quality of the tool transfers to the quality of the piece. The weight of a tool is critical. It must be heavy enough to generate momentum as it passes over a piece of wood, but light enough to be easily managed. The tempering and sharpness of the blade, the angle of the blade, and the integrity of the controls that position it have everything to do with the alacrity of the shavings jumping off the piece.

What’s in it?

Julia Child taught us that if a bottle of wine wasn’t good enough to drink, it shouldn’t go in the sauce. Fifty years after her charming attitude toward food and cooking hit television screens across the United States, the farm-to-table movement grows in popularity. Besides Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, Warren, Maine, is home to Beth’s, a prolific produce farm with a richly stocked retail stand, and Curtis Meats, a cooperative butcher that provides locally produced meat and poultry. The quality of each ingredient adds to the quality of the dish.

Organbuilders work hard to procure the best materials from hardwoods for cases to chrome-tanned leather for pneumatic actions, from pure metals for organ pipes to woven felt for action bushings. You can’t make a beautiful cabinet out of bad wood. The people at Lie-Nielsen go to great lengths to be sure that their tools are made from the best materials.

As we’ve learned to dread the sight of an iPhone plummeting toward the floor, the experienced woodworker cringes when a prized plane falls from the workbench. Most commercially available hand planes are made of standard cast iron, otherwise known as “Grey Iron.” The internal microscopic structure of that metal is shaped like flakes, which allows the metal to crack easily on impact. Lie-Nielsen tools are made of “Ductile Iron,” a variation of cast iron whose structure is rounded nodules that resist cracking. They’ve tested their #60½ Rabbet Block Plane with a 15-foot drop to a concrete floor without cracking the casting.

Manganese bronze is used for the bodies of smaller planes and for many components of other tools. According to the Lie-Nielsen website, this material is “heavier than iron, and adds heft to the tool, doesn’t rust, won’t crack if dropped, and has wonderful warmth in the hand.”

The castings of iron and bronze are “stress relieved” by soaking them at high temperatures. Slow cooling then relieves internal stress so the tools will stay perfectly straight after machining. With all that attention to the bodies and parts of the planes, you can imagine how seriously they take making the blades, using a particularly high grade of double-tempered tool steel to ensure that the blades will take and retain the sharpest cutting edges.

For two hours on a rainy afternoon, I walked through the Lie-Nielsen workshops with customer service representative Christopher Stevens. I saw the world map with pins showing the distant locations where Lie-Nielsen tools are used, including the Geographic South Pole. I saw rows of precision production CNC machines producing exact copies of myriad tool bodies and parts. I learned that each worker at a production station acquires a dial micrometer when hired and saw them holding tool parts up to the light, squinting to see the measurements accurately. I saw workers methodically moving through bins of parts, rejecting those that were not within specifications. I saw men and women sitting in front of huge, high-speed buffing wheels, putting a polish and shine worthy of fine jewelers like Shreve, Crump & Low on large tool bodies and small adjustment screws.

I was greeted cordially at each workstation and saw smiles that showed the satisfaction that comes from the awareness of participating in excellence­—a smile that is often seen at the workbenches in the finest organbuilding workshops.

And I saw bins and carts loaded with fabulous examples of engineering and craftsmanship, along with an army of specialized craftsmen pouring their skills and energy into the tools that will soon be prized by the seasoned hands that hold them. All this in a bright and airy working environment, designed to keep the workers comfortable, enhancing the quality of their products.

You can visit the Lie-Nielsen website at www.lie-nielsen.com. You can peruse through the terrific list of tools and purchase everything from a temporary tattoo to the finest premium tools. Your next project will be the better for it.

From tool to tool

The organ in a church is the primary tool for the resident organist. I hope it was beautifully made by craftsmen using the finest tools. The high-end smoothing plane leaves a lustrous finish on the wood. The bench, the music rack, the key cheeks are all made of exquisite woods, smoothed to be luxurious to the touch. The joinery of the case and the internal structure are the source of the instrument’s integrity, both its sturdiness and rigidity, and its resonance and ability to project musical tone. All those steps are accomplished by skilled hands handling familiar, even beloved tools. If an organ does not sit firmly, if it’s free to sway, wobble, or tip, it cannot have stable tuning or adjustment of the intricate mechanical parts. A structure that’s not plumb will ultimately be wrecked by gravity. An instrument that stands straight and true will be kept stable by gravity.

Windlines must be rigid and roomy with gentle bends so the organ’s air, its breath, passes from blower to regulator and from regulator to windchest without obstruction, with a minimum of turbulence. If organ pipes receive little tornados through their toe holes, they speak not with the tongues of angels, but of tipsy demons. The organbuilder creates the wind system with care and thought, his sharp tools fitting comfortably in his hands, adding to the pleasure and enhancing the outcome.

Windchests are built with dovetailed corners, not because dovetails look so lovely, but because they are the strongest joints for connecting pieces of wood, end to end, at 90° angles. The internal channels of pitman chests are formed, drilled, bored with the sharpest tools, ensuring that there is no tearing of grain allowing leakage between notes. If air can leak from one channel to the next, two notes play at once. Organists don’t like that. The ribs that form the note channels in slider chests are made with “vertical grain.” Since wood only splits perpendicular to the growth rings of a tree (like the spokes of a wheel), a rib made of slab grain can split, causing air to leak from one note to the next. If the joints are made with dull tools, air can pass through. No matter how hard you try, quarter-inch glue is not air-tight. Organists don’t like this, either. If I meant to play Chopsticks, I would have played Chopsticks.

And the organ pipes, whether metal or wood, are made precisely. Each is an individual musical instrument; the myriad joins together in chorus. Metal is cut with perfectly square corners so the joints and seams fit exactly. Solder seams are straight and even. The “cut up” of the pipe mouths is executed exactly. You might use saws and files for the mouths of huge 16-footers, but the mouths of the top notes of a 2-foot stop are less than a quarter-inch wide. Only the tiniest blade, with the pointiest point and the sharpest edge, can make such a cut. And if that blade is not made of good tool steel, you’ll spend all your time sharpening and have no time left for cutting. The voicer’s fingers are firm and strong, cutting through the fine metal like a surgeon.

A fine pipe organ represents the height of human achievement. Math, physics, and structural engineering all combine with simple fine craftsmanship. Every cut of a piece of wood or metal contributes to the stability, reliability, and majesty of the instrument. The people who made the tools are as much a part of the music as those who built the organ, or the musician who plays it. It all starts with the toolmaker’s tools. ν

Notes

1. Boston natives know I-95 as Route 128. It was built in the 1920s, and in 1951, 27 miles of the road was opened as a limited-access highway. Since then it has been in a constant state of expansion. It was the first limited-access circumferential highway in the United States. In the 1960s, there was a plan to build a new highway directly through the center of Boston, linking I-95 coming from Providence, Rhode Island, and points south to Florida with I-95 heading north through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, into Maine. But in the 1970s, a moratorium on new highway construction was enacted, and Route 128 was renamed as I-95, using the circumferential route to link the two ends of I-95. Natives still call it 128.

What a winter.

Our son Andy writes for a daily news service at the State House in Boston and gets to see his prose online and in print the next day. Writing for a monthly journal is a little different. You’re reading in May, and I can only hope that the giant gears that drive the universe continued to function properly and the weather is warm. 

I’m writing in March on the first day of spring. I’m in my office at our place in Newcastle, Maine, looking across the Damariscotta River, a dramatic and beautiful tidal river. We’re eight miles up from the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean, and the tide chart says that we’ll have an eleven-foot high tide just before 11:00 this morning, a couple hours from now, so the ice floes are drifting north toward town with the tide. I can barely see the sea ice on the river, because my usual view is all but obscured by the piles of snow outside.

A couple weeks ago, the weatherman predicted a heavy snowfall, to be followed by rain. There were already several feet of snow on the roof, so we hired some local guys to shovel the roof, fearing that the added weight would be too much. Those piles added to the drifts already in place to leave six feet on the ground outside my windows.

We’ve spent a lot of time outside this week in eight-degree weather because we have a new puppy, and in spite of the cold, we’ve heard the calls of eastern phoebes and cardinals right on schedule. The wicked weather must be unsettling for these denizens of springtime in coastal Maine. Think of the poor ovenbirds, who get their name from the oven-shaped nests they build on the forest floor.

We’ve had about 90 inches of snow here this winter, which is plenty, but it’s a foot-and-a-half short of the all-time record of 108 inches set in Boston this year. Last weekend, friends and family there were rooting for the predicted snowfall to exceed the two inches needed to break the record—“if we’ve been through all this . . . .” I trust they’re happy with their bitter reward. 

Subways stopped running, roofs collapsed, and houses burned down because fire hydrants were buried deep beneath the snow. Local school officials are debating whether to bypass legislated minimum numbers of school days, because it’s simply not possible to make up all the days lost to cancellations through the winter. And the New York Times quoted the city’s guide to street defects, which defines a pothole as “a hole in the street with a circular or oval-like shape and a definable bottom.” An actionable pothole is one that’s at least a foot in diameter and three inches deep. I wonder what they call a hole that doesn’t have a definable bottom.

But baby, it’s cold outside.

It’s been a terrible season for pipe organs. Long stretches of unusually cold weather have caused furnaces to run overtime, wringing the last traces of moisture out of the air inside church buildings. Concerts have been postponed, and blizzards have sent furious drafts of cold air through old stained-glass windows, causing carefully regulated and maintained pitches to go haywire. One Saturday night, a colleague posted on Facebook that the pastor of his church called saying there would be “no church” tomorrow. The sewers had frozen and the town closed public buildings.

One organ we care for outside of Boston developed a sharp screech lasting a few seconds when the organ was turned on or off. After spending a half hour tracking it down, it was easy to correct by tightening a couple screws and eliminating a wind leak, but it had been a startling disruption on a Sunday morning. 

A church in New York City that is vacant because it merged with a neighboring congregation suffered terrible damage when an electric motor overheated, tripping a circuit breaker for the entire (poorly designed) hot-water heating system. Pipes froze and ruptured, the nave floor flooded ankle deep, and the building filled with opaque steam. A week later, when heat was restored, steam vented, and water drained and mopped up, the white-oak floorboards started expanding, buckling into eight-inch-high mounds, throwing pews on their backs, and threatening to topple the marble baptismal font.

My phone line and e-mail inbox have been crackling with calls about ciphers and dead notes, swell boxes sticking and squeaking, and sticking keys—all things that routinely happen to pipe organs during periods of unusual dryness. And I can predict the reverse later in the season—maybe just when you’re finally reading this—as weather moderates, humidity increases, heating systems are turned off, and organs swell up to their normal selves.

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

So sings the hapless Jud Fry in a dark moment in the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma!. He’s lamenting his lot, pining after the girl, and asserting to himself that the smart-aleck cowhand who has her attention is not any better than he. The lyrics pop into my head as I notice the winter’s effects on the woodwork that surrounds me. We have a rock maple cutting board inserted in the tile countertop next to the kitchen sink. The grout lines around it are all broken because the wood has shrunk. The hardwood boards of the landings in our stairwells are laid so they’re free to expand and contract. Right now, there are 5/16′′ gaps between them—by the time you read this, the gaps will be closed tight. I need to time it right to vacuum the dust out of the cracks before they close. And the seasonal gaps between the ash floorboards of the living and dining rooms are wider than ever.

The teenager trying to sneak up the front stairs after curfew is stymied in winter, because the stair treads and risers have shrunk due to dryness, and the stairs squeak as the feet of the culprit cause the separate boards to move against each other.

The other day, working in my home office in New York, I heard a startling snap from my piano, as if someone had struck it with a hammer. I ran up the keyboard and found the note that had lost string tension. Plate tectonics. Good thing the tuner is coming next week. 

As I move around in quiet church buildings, I hear the constant cracking and popping of woodwork changing size. Ceiling beams, floorboards, and pews are all susceptible. But it’s inside the organ where things are most critical. The primary rail of a Pitman chest shrinks a little, opening a gap in the gasketed joint, and three adjacent notes go dead in the bass octave of the C-sharp side because the exhaust channels can no longer hold pressure. And there’s a chronic weather thing in Aeolian-Skinner organs: The ground connections to the chest magnets are only about a quarter-inch long, and near the screws that hold the magnet rails to the chest frames, where the wood moves with weather changes, the ground wires yank themselves free of their solder and cause dead notes.

Let’s talk about pitch.

Fact: Temperature affects the pitch of organ pipes. You might think this is because the metal of the pipes expands and contracts as temperature changes, and while that is technically true, the amount of motion is so slight as to have minimal effect. The real cause is changes in the density of the air surrounding and contained by the organ’s pipes. Warmer air is less dense. If a pipe is tuned at 70°, it will only be in tune at that temperature. If that pipe is played at 60°, the pitch will be lower; if it’s played at 80°, the pitch will be higher.

While it’s true that all the pipes involved in a temperature change will change pitch together (except the reeds), it’s almost never true that a temperature change will affect an entire organ in the same way. In a classic organ of Werkprinzip design, with divisions stacked one above another, a cold winter day might mean that the pipes at the top of the organ are super-heated (because warm air rises), while the pipes near floor level are cold. 

There are all kinds of problems inherent in the classic layout of a chancel organ with chambers on each side. If the walls of one chamber are outside walls of the building, while the walls of the other back up against classrooms and offices, a storm with cold winds will split the tuning of the organ. I know several organs like this where access is by trap doors in the chamber floor. Leaving the trap doors open allows cold air to “dump” into the stairwells, drawing warmer air in through the façade from the chancel. This helps balance temperature between two organ chambers.

One organ I care for has Swell and Great in the rear gallery on either side of a large leaky window. The pipes of the Swell are comfortably nestled inside a heavy expression enclosure, while the Great is out in the open, bared to the tempest. A windy storm was all it took to wreck the tuning of the organ as cold air tore through the window to freeze the Great. It only stayed that way for a few days, until the storm was over, the heating system got caught up, and the temperatures around the building returned to usual. Trouble was, the organ scholar played his graduate recital on one of those days, and there was precious little to do about it.

One of the most difficult times I’ve had as an organ tuner was more than twenty years ago, caring for a huge complicated organ in a big city. The church’s choir and organists were doing a series of recording sessions in July, preparing what turned out to be a blockbuster bestselling CD of Christmas music, on a schedule for release in time for the holiday shopping season. It was hot as the furnaces of hell outside, hotter still in the lofty reaches of the organ chambers, and the organ’s flue pipes went so high in pitch that the reeds could not be tuned to match. It was tempting to try, and goodness knows the organists were pressing for it, but I knew I was liable to cause permanent damage to the pipes if I did. It was a surreal experience, lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweating to the strains of those famous arrangements by David Willcocks and John Rutter rendered on summertime tuning.

Mise en place

I started doing service calls maintaining pipe organs in 1975, when I was apprenticing with Jan Leek in Oberlin, Ohio. Jan was the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and had an active maintenance business on the side. I worked with him three days a week when I was a student, and loved driving around the countryside and rolling from church to church. (Many of my peers were trapped on that rural campus by a college that didn’t allow students to own cars.) I suppose in those days we did fifty or sixty service calls each year, and as my career expanded, there were some periods during which I was caring for well over a hundred organs, visiting each at least twice a year. I suppose the annual average has been around sixty a year, or 2,400 since those naïve days in Ohio. 

Each organ has peculiarities, and each has its own environment of climate and acoustics. The tuner-technician has to learn about each organ and how it relates to the building, as well as learning the ropes of the building itself. Over the years you learn where to find a stepladder, how to get the keys to the blower room, and most important, where to find the best lunch in town.¹

And speaking of peculiarities, organists crown ’em all. A professional chef has his mise en place—his personal layout of ingredients, seasonings, and implements that he needs to suit his particular style of work and the dishes he’s preparing. It includes his set of knives (don’t even think of asking to borrow them!), quick-read meat thermometer, whisk, along with an array of seasonings, freshly chopped or minced garlic, parsley, basil, ground black and white peppercorns, sea salt, and several different cooking oils. 

Likewise, the organist, both professional and amateur, sets up his own mise en place—cluttering the organ console with hairbrushes, nail clippers, sticky-notes, paper clips, cough drops, bottled water, even boxes of cookies. Sometimes the scenes are surprisingly messy, and these are not limited to those consoles that only the organist can see. Next time you’re at the church, take a look at your mise en place. Does it look like the workplace of a professional? If you were a chef, would anyone seeing your workspace want to eat your food? 

Care for the space around the organ console. Ask your organ technician to use some furniture polish, and to vacuum under the pedalboard.² Keep your piles of music neat and orderly, or better yet, store them somewhere else. Remember that what you might consider to be your desk or workbench—the equivalent of the chef’s eight-burner Vulcan—is part of everyone’s worship space.

Everywhere you go, there you are.

There’s another aspect of visiting many different churches that troubles me more and more. As a profession, we worry about the decline of the church, and the parallel reduction in the number or percentage of active churches that include the pipe organ and what we might generally call “traditional” music. But as I travel from one organ loft to another, peruse Sunday bulletins and parish hall bulletin boards, I’m struck by how much sameness there is. What if suddenly you were forbidden to play these pieces:

• Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (you know the composer)

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

• Nun danket alle Gott . . . (which of the two?)

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

Each of these is a beautiful piece. There are good reasons why we all play all of them, and congregations love them. The same applies to choral music. We could get the sense that if we took away “ten greatest hits,” no organist could play for another wedding. Take away a different “ten greatest hits,” and no organist could play another ordinary Sunday worship service.

I know very well that when you’re planning wedding music, it’s difficult to get the bride (or especially, the bride’s mother) to consider interesting alternatives. And I know very well that when you play that famous Toccata, the faithful line up after the service to share the excitement. It would be a mistake to delete those pieces from your repertoire.

But if we seem content to play the same stuff over and over, why should we expect our thousands of churches to spend millions of dollars acquiring and maintaining the tools of our trade? Many people think that the organ is yesterday’s news, and I think it’s important for us to advocate that it’s the good news of today and tomorrow.

The grill cooks in any corner diner can sustain a business using the same menu year after year, but if the menu in the “chef restaurant” with white tablecloths and stemware never comes up with anything new, their days are numbered.

This summer, when many church activities go on vacation, learn a few new pieces to play on the organ. Find a couple new anthems to share with the choir in the fall. You might read the reviews of new music found each month in the journals, or make a point of attending reading sessions for new music hosted by a chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Here’s a real challenge for you—work out a program of preludes and postludes for the coming year without repeating any pieces. Can you rustle up a hundred different titles? You never know—you might find a new classic. Remember—every chestnut you play was once new music! ν

Notes

1. In the days when I was doing hundreds of tunings a year, I made a point to schedule tunings so as to ensure a proper variety of lunches. As much as you may like it, one doesn’t want sushi four days in a row! It was tempting to schedule extra tunings for some of the churches—there was this Mexican place next to First Lutheran . . . Wendy would say I have a lot to show for it. 

2. It’s traditional for the organ technician to keep all the pencils found under the pedalboard.

A Pokémon world

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

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

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

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

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

Starry eyes

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

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

The man from Samos

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

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

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

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

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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

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

Blow, ye winds . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

A time and a place

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

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

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

Notes

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

In perfect harmony

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

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

How green is green?

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

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

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

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

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take one for the team.

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

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

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

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

Tools of the trade

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

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

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

Make it up as you go along.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a frill.

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

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

Color my world

Twenty years ago I was serving a New England Congregational church as music director, bringing the glories of the English cathedrals to the land of the Puritans. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. The moderator of the parish council was a curmudgeonly attorney who lived in an attractive house sited prominently on a corner lot along my route to the church. The Sunday after contractors finished painting his house, I teased that he had his house painted pink. He responded in his usual gruff way, “It’s Chippendale Rose.” Ha! My point. It was pink.

When placing organs in church buildings, we often leaf through the “swatch fans” provided by paint companies, and I always wonder who invents the names of paint colors. The website of the paint company Pratt & Lambert shows a cozy-looking room featuring the colors Pearl Tint, Toasted Wheat, Dusk Sky, and Gloaming. The P&L color experts deem this to be a winning combination. The first three names give clues as what the colors might be, but “gloaming?” What’s gloaming? Its root, glo-m, is an Old English word of Germanic origin that means “twilight,” and is related to “glow.” So gloaming refers to the glow of twilight. I would describe the color in the photo as a sort of dark ecru—“twilight” and “glow” mean something else to me than dark ecru.

The printer on my desk spoke to me the other day. A cute little chime rang and the screen informed me that I needed to replace the cyan cartridge. Cyan? It’s a sort of light blue. My printer has three color cartridges: cyan, magenta, and yellow. I think of primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, so I googled to learn that there are now at least three basic systems of blending colors, each based on three “primary” colors.  

The standard for photography, television, and video screens is an “additive” system that uses red, green, and blue. The standard for printing is a “subtractive” system that uses cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Combine those three colors and you get black.) The website I visited says artists still prefer the additive system that uses red, yellow, and blue.¹ That’s a relief! Seems to me that the world of art would be a different place if Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso had cyan, magenta, and yellow on their palettes as primary colors.

Colors in music

I’m a devoted fan of Captain John Aubrey, the principal character in Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In the first scene of the first novel, Jack meets Stephen Maturin (a physician, drug addict, and elite member of Naval Intelligence) at a concert by a string quartet. They are as different as two men can be, but after their introductory dispute they become firm and fast friends, and they share a love for music. Jack plays the violin (his “on land” violin is a Guarneri), Stephen plays the cello, and through the twenty-year span of the war, they spend thousands of evenings playing together in the captain’s cabin while enjoying their customary toasted cheese and Marsala.

In the second novel, Jack is promoted from the rank of Master and Commander (remember the Russell Crowe movie?) to Post Captain. That night, in his happiness, he dreamed about a painting owned by his old nanny, now wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man who had promoted him: 

Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!²

When I first read that passage I immediately compared it to playing the organ. We accept the traditional system of notes, harmonies, and tuning as common with all other instruments, but the organ is unique because of its range of color. A pianist or flautist can conjure up contrasting tone colors by varying the physical forces involved in playing their instruments, but if you sit at an organ console and compare a Cromorne to a Diapason, a Trombone to a Rohrflute, or an Open Wood to a Tierce, you realize that the organ is a collection of instruments that contrast and complement each other, and like the painter’s palette of colors, the organ’s drawknobs allow the musician to blend a finite number of basic timbres into a seemingly infinite number of color combinations.  

Express yourself in color

I’ve heard that some symphony conductors consider the organ to be the least expressive musical instrument because the basic unit of musical tone—one organ pipe playing one note—cannot be altered in volume or timbre. That fact is true enough, but it’s like saying yellow is a boring color because all it can do is be yellow. Pratt & Lambert shows me Old Linen, Buttery, Golden Glimmer, Bay Rum, and Colorado Sand as complementary shades of yellow, and I haven’t touched the blues, reds, or greens. It’s ridiculous and ignorant to say that a pipe organ is not expressive.

Let’s consider an eight-foot flute stop, a simple enough subset of organ tone. But is it a Flauto Dolce, Gedeckt, Melodia, Harmonic Flute, Rohrflute, Spitzflute, Koppelflute, Hohlflute, or Flûte Triangulaire? Nine different flute stops, each with a unique tone color, and each comprising pipes of different shape and construction. Could you discern between them in a hearing test? Could you name each one if shown photographs of the various pipes? Or do you just draw an eight-foot flute because you always use an eight-foot flute in this piece as if you were painting a wall yellow instead of Golden Glimmer?

Pratt & Lambert says:

The color of the sun, yellow is associated with laughter, happiness and good times. It can cause the brain to release more serotonin, which makes people feel optimistic. It even has the power to speedup [sic} metabolism and drive creativity. However, yellow can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to a cool palette of blues or grays. It can also work well with orange, red, olive green or brown.³

It would be easy to paraphrase this when discussing organ stops:

A Cornet can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to an Oboe, Cromorne, or Trompette. It can also work well with Principals at eight and four-foot.

Is your imagination strong enough to find ways to use that Cornet that will make people feel optimistic?

Clashing or harmony?

You and your partner are getting dressed for a party. She comes out of the bathroom, takes one look, and says, “You’re not wearing that, are you?” We all think we know when colors clash, but while there are some basic rules, you have to judge each comparison separately. Otherwise, it would be impossible for two shades of red to clash. I have a pairing of red shirt and red tie that I think looks great, but there are also a couple doozies of possible combinations of red hanging in my closet that Wendy would question, rightly.

When we register a piece of music on a particular organ, we have to judge each combination separately. It’s not safe to assume that because it sounded good on one organ, that it will also sound good on another.

In his wonderfully researched book, The Language of the Classical French Organ (Yale University Press, 1969), Fenner Douglass presents detailed information about the various “standard” registrations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French organ music. He opens Chapter 5 (Registration in the Classical Period) by citing the prefaces to various famous “books” of organ music, the Livres d’orgue of Corrette, Nivers, Lebègue, Boyvin, and many others. He boils all that data down into charts that compare the registrations for Le Grand Jeu, Fugue, Le Duo, etc. by all these composers. It’s terrific material for informing our playing today, but does it have any real meaning if we don’t hear those registrations on the specific organs? One chart shows that in 1676, Nicolas Lebègue uses Grand Jeu de Tierce for the left hand of Le Duo, while Dom Bedos suggests sixteen-foot foundations. Who is right? And what organs were they using?

Assuming the Möller organ in your church has all the correct names and pitches on the knobs as cited by Fenner Douglass, does the historically correctly drawn Grand Plein Jeu sound anything like what Lebègue was hearing? Simply and definitively, no. Douglass has given us a great gift by collecting this information, but you still need to use your ears.

Shutter bugs

Besides choices of colors, many modern organs have an additional dimension of expression. Enclosing a group of stops, usually all the stops of one keyboard, in a tightly and heavily constructed “box” with movable shutters on one or more of the faces, allows the organist to simulate control over the volume of a single organ pipe. This does not literally answer the conductor’s ignorant criticism because the pipe is still only speaking one pitch at one timbre at one volume level.
But it increases the organist’s palette of
colors exponentially.

When I was a teenager, a mentor listening to my preparations for a recital commented that if everyone used the Swell Pedal like I was, they’d have called it a crush. I was closing the box at the end of a phrase, and popping it open before starting the next phrase, using only half of the device’s possibilities—but I was still too green to realize that the expression is about more than volume. It’s also an important tool for the creation and manipulation of tone color.  

When two or more manuals are coupled together, moving the expression pedals changes the emphasis from one tone color to another, taking the organ’s color spectrum from the finite number of possible combinations of stops to the infinite. Here’s a simple example. You might play the opening verse of a hymn on Great Principals with a Swell Trumpet coupled in, saving the more powerful Great Trumpet for later. Add to that registration the dimension of starting the verse with the Swell Box closed, and open it gradually as the choir comes down the aisle. The sound of the Trumpet is subtle at first, and blooms into being the principal ingredient of the aggregate color.  

Think of an “Old Master” painting. When Meindert Hobbema takes your eyes from the green of a tree canopy to the blue of the sky, he takes you through an infinite spectrum of colors. Compare that to the results of a color-by-number kit in which the boundary between one color and another is defined by a stark black line. And think of the artist making a drawing with charcoal or pastel, using her fingers to smudge the lines to create shading. Smudge is no better a description for the use of the expression pedals than crush, but the creative colorist at the organ can use the expression pedals to enhance the transitions from one color to another. That’s painting with sound, like Captain Aubrey’s colorful violin strings.

Stop, look, and listen

In these pages, I’ve often mentioned formulaic organ registration. You play the opening of a baroque Prelude and Fugue on Organo Pleno—Principals eight, four, and two, plus Mixture. You’ve always done it that way. Fair enough. That implies that the opening of Bach’s B-Minor Prelude (a high and screechy B) should be registered the same as his Dorian Toccata (middle of the keyboard canonic counterpoint). We are free to choose registrations that reflect the response of the specific instrument playing the specific notes in the specific acoustic. 

I think of my own performances of Bach’s B-Minor, how in the boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop episode of the fugue I always reduced the registration to flutes at eight and two. Always.

As I think about the opening of that great piece, I wince at the high B. What about starting on a smaller registration (that hymn registration I described earlier?) so the opening high B is less jarring. And here’s a radical thought. I know organs that simply don’t have stops that can be combined to give an impressive and dignified sound on that high B, so maybe I won’t play that piece on one of those organs—the ultimate registration discretion. There are other pieces.

Have you ever heard an organist play the opening pedal solo of Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne on anything other than pretty-much full organ, including reeds and mixtures, and manuals coupled to the pedals? Me neither. Why doesn’t someone play it on a four-foot flute? One of my favorite organ tones is a good clear Koppelflute, especially in a spacious acoustic. Would the Buxtehude cops storm into the church if I played that opening pedal solo on a four-foot Koppelflute? Would the first-time listener be disappointed?

If you, as an educated and experienced organist, went to an organ recital and the performer had the nerve to do that, would you be offended or disappointed? Are you just as happy to hear the same piece played with the same registration by every organist on every organ? Or are you excited when someone offers a fresh approach to an old warhorse? If we’re not listening as we register pieces, why should we expect the audience to listen?

Once when a colleague was demonstrating the organ in his church to me, he drew a huge combination of stops and told me that was his typical registration for postludes. Yikes. Easter I? Advent I? Pentecost XVIII? Bach? Widor? Stanley?

You go to a restaurant and order a chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. Delicious. Next week you go a different restaurant and order chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. And the next week, and the next. Different chef, different cooking temperature, different weather, but same ingredients. Can we think of a different way to cook a chicken breast?

How many different colors can you paint a front door and still be correct?

If we say Swell instead of crush, why do we call them stops? That seems limiting. Why don’t we start calling them Go’s? No matter how many of you agree with me, we’re probably stuck with stops. It would sound ridiculous for a politician to say, “We’re pulling out all the go’s.” But in your mind’s eye—and ear—think of them as opportunities, possibilities, or ingredients. If you’re listening when you draw stops, there aren’t many wrong answers. You’ll know if the tie clashes with the shirt. Have a blast. Put it on my tab. But hold the capers. They’re not my favorite.

Notes

1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/pricol2.html

2. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain. William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, London, 1972, page 421.

3. http://www.prattandlambert.com/color-and-inspiration/learn-about-color/…