In the Wind. . . .

Experts

In a suburb of Boston, there’s a three-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I rebuilt in the 1990s. It’s an electro-pneumatic organ built in the 1920s that had received a full-blown tonal revision in the 1960s, when American organbuilding decreed that eight-foot tone was no longer desirable. You know the drill. Strings were cut down to become mutations, an eight-foot Diapason was converted to the fattest Chimney Flute you’ve ever seen, and the resulting specification looked something like a cross between a Schnitger and a Schlicker. The organ was installed across the rear gallery at a time when the church had no choir, and access from the stairs to the console was a narrow, short, awkward passage through the organ, past an electro-pneumatic relay, over a few windlines, and a serious duck under the façade’s impost. The organist had hung a sign there that read, “Smack Head Here.”

We did a big job there that involved a new structure and new windchests intended to allow easier access to the gallery for musicians—there’s a choir now—and to allow easier access for maintenance. The church’s organist was a good friend and an excellent, imaginative musician who had been there for many years, and with whom I had lots of fun until his untimely death.

After a couple false starts with new musicians who didn’t last very long, the church was happy to announce they had engaged a young woman with strong credentials, especially as a choral conductor. When I met her, I was disappointed to realize that her keyboard experience was limited to the piano. She had no experience playing the organ at all. She asked me some questions about the stop knobs, such as, “What are these for?” I gave her a quick introduction to the art of registration, and offered to introduce her to colleagues who were good organ teachers. She responded that she didn’t think it was a big deal, and she’d pick it up naturally.

The American Idol syndrome

In the last several years, “reality TV” has taken a strong place in our entertainment life. There are a number of shows that focus on creating stars. I don’t watch them, so I don’t really know the difference from one to the other (maybe you think that means I’m not qualified to write about them!), but I do see contestants, ostensibly selected through earlier auditions and winnowing, performing in front of studio audiences and panels of judges. I’m sure that many of the finalists, who automatically become huge stars, are legitimately talented and well trained, but from what little I’ve seen, I know that plenty of them have learned their acts by imitating others. Through decades as a church musician, having been married to a singer, and friends with many others, I know enough about singing to tell when someone is well trained—or not.

Like that newly hired musician who didn’t think organ registration was such a big deal, I have the sense that our culture is accepting of the idea that great performers “just happen,” implying that there’s no real need to actually learn how to do something. Why should we study if we can answer any question by Googling with our phones? Why should we attend a conservatory of music if we can “just pick it up?”

I’ve been reflecting on expertise, on the concepts of excellence and the sense of assurance that comes with the intense education and practice that fosters them. Of course, I think of my many colleagues, who as organists sit at a console as though it were an extension of their bodies, whose manual and pedal techniques are strong enough that once a piece is learned, there’s no need to raise concern about notes. You know it when you see it. Playing from memory is accepted as the normal way to play. Several times now, I’ve seen an organist come to town to play a recital, spending days registering complicated pieces on an unfamiliar organ, but never opening a score—in fact, not even bringing a score into the building.

A great thing about the human condition is that we don’t have to limit ourselves to appreciating great skill in any one field. Whenever I encounter excellence, whenever I witness someone performing a complicated task with apparent ease, I’m moved and excited. 

Everyday and ordinary

There are lots of everyday things we witness that require special skills. In our work at the Organ Clearing House, we frequently ask professional drivers to thread a semi-trailer through the eye of a needle, driving backwards and around corners. It’s not a big deal if you know how to do it. And when I’m in the city, I’m aware of delivery drivers and the difficult work they have to do. Think of that guy who delivers Coke to convenience stores, driving a semi-trailer in and out of little parking lots all day, and all the opportunities he has to get into trouble.

I once saw a video of a heavy equipment operator cutting an apple into four equal pieces with a paring knife that was duct-taped to the teeth of a backhoe bucket. Take that, William Tell! If you want to get a sense of the skill involved in operating a crane, go to YouTube, search for “crane fail,” and watch some clips that show skill lacking. You’ll have a new appreciation for the operator who makes a heavy lift without tipping his machine over and dropping his load.

Where we live in Maine, there are lots of lobstermen. Their boats are heavy workhorses, usually thirty or forty feet long, with powerful diesel engines, and plenty of heavy gear on board. It’s not a big deal because it’s an everyday and ordinary part of their lives, but I marvel at how easily they approach a crowded dock. Recently I saw one fisherman run his boat sideways into a slot on a dock—imagine the equivalent in a car as an alternative to parallel parking.

Any homeowner will know the difference between a plumber with skill and one without. If he goes home wet, he needs to go back to school. And you want to hire a painter whose clothes are not covered with paint. If he’s covered with paint, so are your carpets.

I appreciate all of those people who do work for us, and love watching anyone doing something that they’re really good at.

Going to pot

One of my earliest memories witnessing excellence came from a potter named Harry Holl on Cape Cod, near where our summer home was when I was a kid. His studio was set up as a public display in a rustic setting surrounded by pine trees and lots of exotic potted plants. He always had apprentices, interns, and associates around, so there was lots of action. There was a row of pottery wheels arranged under a translucent fiberglass ceiling, so there was lots of sunlight in which to work. Clay was stored in great cubes. They were roughly the size of sacks of cement, so I suppose they weighed seventy-five or a hundred pounds. There was shelf after shelf of large plastic jars full of glazes in the form of powder. It was a favorite family outing to drop in there to see what was going on, maybe buy a coffee mug, then stop for ice cream on the way home.

Harry’s work is easily recognizable. For example, the signature shape of his coffee mugs is both beautiful and practical. It seems almost silly to say that his mugs are easy to drink from, but it’s true—the shape fits your lips, so there’s seldom a drip. That’s simply not true of every mug.

Harry Holl’s art is most recognizable through his glazes. He studied with a Japanese ceramicist whose experimentation with glazes inspired Harry. A material common in much of his work is black sand that’s found at a particular beach on the Cape. Harry would go there with shovel and buckets to harvest the stuff, and go home to blend it into the colored glazes. Firing the glaze in a kiln results in beautiful black speckles that enhance the rich colors.

The best part of witnessing the work of this unique artist was seeing him at the wheel. He wore leather sandals and a long gray beard. His hands and forearms were deeply muscled. And the relationship between his eyes and his hands was miraculous. He’d drop a lump of clay on wheel, wet his hands, and caress the lump into the center of the spinning wheel. With one hand cupped and the other thumb down, a coffee mug would sprout from the lump—and another, and another. Or you’d watch a five-pound lump of clay turn into twelve dinner plates or cereal bowls, measured quickly with a well-worn caliper as they sprouted. 

Other signature pieces were beautiful pitchers, bird feeders, birdbaths, and lamps. The Harry Holl lamp that my parents gave me as a wedding present thirty-five years ago is sitting on my desk as I write. And on the dinner table most evenings we use the dinner plates they gave Wendy and me as a house-warming present when we moved into our home in Maine.

Dodging the draft

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who works with writers, helping them sell manuscripts to publishers. One who stands out is Donald Hall, who has written hundreds of poems, essays, and books. He has written extensively about countless subjects—I think he’s particularly good with baseball (the most poetic of team sports), and he has written insightfully and eloquently about Work—comparing his work as a writer to that of his farmer grandfather, to sculptors, and other strong craftsmen. I recommend his book, Life Work, published by the Beacon Press.

His most recent publication is the essay, Three Beards, published in the online version of The New Yorker magazine. Read it at www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/three-beards.html. It starts:

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did.

Donald Hall’s writing is mesmerizing. It lilts along like a piece of music, casually using words we all know but never use, using them as parts of common speech just like they should be. When’s the last time you used the word raffish? You might imagine the brilliant old man—did I mention that he’s eighty-four years old?—whacking away on a computer keyboard, words flying across the screen like a stock ticker. But you’d be wrong. He writes in longhand on a tablet. And he wrote fifty-five drafts of this essay. Fifty-five!

I do a lot of writing, but I seldom write new drafts. Rather, I take the easy route and reread what I’ve written, editing on the screen as I go. A good final trick before hitting “Send” is to read a piece aloud to myself. That’s when I find I’ve used the same word twice in a paragraph, and that’s how I tell if something reads awkwardly. But fifty-five drafts? 

Hall’s fifty-five drafts are what makes it sound as though he writes in a flash, and when I read something of his aloud, it sounds like a friend talking to me.

For the birds

Another of Wendy’s clients whose work I admire is Kenn Kaufman, an ornithologist and chronicler of nature. He has little formal education—he dropped out of school as a teenager to hitchhike around the country building a “Big Year” list of bird species. His book Kingbird Highway (published by Houghton Mifflin) is the memoir of that experience. He traveled 20,000 miles, crisscrossing to take advantage of the particular times when rare species are most easily seen. Part of that experience was meeting a girl who lived in Baltimore and shared his passion for birds. While Kenn’s parents had allowed his crazy sojourn, Elaine’s father was more protective, and when Kenn was leaving her area to go to Maine for a round-trip on the ferry Bluenose, known to promise the best sightings of pelagic (open ocean) birds, Elaine’s father seemed unlikely to allow it.

Kenn writes that he slept in the woods the night before his boat trip, and when he arrived at the terminal, there she was, having found a way to get from Baltimore to down-east Maine on her own. He wrote: “If I could have looked down the years then, and seen everything from beginning to end—the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce—I still would not have traded anything for that moment.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a more eloquent or concise story of a love affair and marriage than that.

I’ve stood next to Kenn on the shore of the ocean, looking across an empty black sky, and Kenn rattles off the birds he sees. Have you ever heard of Confusing Fall Warblers, thirty or so different species that all look alike, and whose plumage is completely different at different times of the year? They don’t confuse Kenn. And I’m fond of the accurate scientific birding term, LBJs. Translation? Little Brown Jobs. Ask Kenn.

During his “Big Year,” Kenn realized that identifying birds is interesting and fun, but not very meaningful if you don’t know anything about them. He has observed, researched, and written about the lifestyles and habits of all the species. His book, Lives of North American Birds (Houghton Mifflin), looks like a reference tome, but it’s a wonderful read. And his field guides are handy, interesting, informative, and in a single paragraph description of a bird, Kenn inserts humor, sarcasm, and simple pleasure along with the facts.

Sitting with Kenn at a dinner table, or better yet, in the woods and fields or at the beach, I’m amazed and impressed by the depth of his knowledge, experience, and appreciation of his subjects.

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts
when I do this.

I know, I know, don’t do that.

In the June issue of The Diapason, I wrote about safety in the interior of pipe organs, and finished by describing the collapse of a 130-year-old ladder that dropped me six feet to land on my back—the experience that taught me once and for all that the older we get, the less we like falling. Oof! 

I described my encounter with EMTs, two of whom had grown up in that particular church, and all of whom agreed that my weight, when coupled with the lack of an elevator, was an issue for them. (I had a similar experience after a vehicle accident in 1979, when an overweight female EMT grunted from her end of the stretcher, “J____ C_____, is he heavy!”) I wrote about an ambulance ride across the river from Cambridge to Boston, and a long afternoon in the emergency room (thanks to Wendy for that long and supportive sit), ending with the news that I had a cracked vertebra.

That seemed to be healing well until a month later, when pain shot down my right leg and my right foot went numb. A herniated disc had pinched my sciatic nerve, and the shrill pain could have been described as stabbing, except for the fact that it was constant. It lasted four weeks.

My current favorite encounter with deep skill and knowledge was my brief relationship with an orthopedic surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, just blocks from our apartment. After an unpleasant visit with a specialist at another hospital, this was my quest for a second opinion. The guy walked into the room looking like a million bucks, dressed in a well-tailored suit and nicely matched, stylish, and colorful shirt and tie. He greeted me as though he cared how I felt, shared and explained my X-ray and MRI images, and then drew a terrific cartoon of “my” spine, naming the vertebra, showing exactly the issue that was causing the pain. Later when I was being prepped for surgery, one of the medical students (my doctor is a professor at the Harvard Medical School) said that he is famous for those drawings.

The doctor assured me that the surgery was simple and predictable, and that I could expect the pain to diminish quickly afterwards. In fact, when I awoke from anesthesia, the pain was gone. Simply gone. And two hours later I walked out of the hospital.

I could feel his confidence the moment I met him. His professional manner was both comforting and reassuring. He certainly has studied his subject. I’m so glad he didn’t think he’d be just be able to “pick it up.” He’s given me my leg back. His name is Andrew White, and if you’ve got trouble with your spine, you should go see him. Tell him I sent you.

A writer’s best friend

I’ve written here about a couple writers I admire, both of whom I met through my wife Wendy who is their literary agent, and who edits their work. She has edited many of our renowned and beloved writers, and she works hard to keep me honest. Late one afternoon, I was walking to her office in Boston to meet her after work, and ran into one of her clients, an admired juvenile judge—we had met recently at a party. He was carrying his latest manuscript in a shoe box, and said to me, “She’s given me so much work to do!”

I’ve learned from Wendy the value of a good editor. And it has been a privilege and pleasure to work with Jerome Butera, editor of The Diapason. My file shows that I wrote In the wind… for the first time in April of 2005. That makes this the one-hundredth issue of my column that has passed through Jerome’s hands. At 2,500 words a pop, that’s 2,500,000 words, which is a lot of shoveling. Through all that, Jerome has worked with me with grace, humor, friendship, and an occasional gentle jab. I value and honor his judgment, guidance, and support. Many of you readers may not be aware of his presence over so many years. Take it from me that Jerome’s contribution to the life and world of the modern American pipe organ is second to none, and the equal of any. Best of luck and happiness to you, Jerome, and thanks for all your help.

And welcome to Joyce Robinson, who has been there for years, learning the ropes while sitting next to the master. We’re looking forward to lots more fun. Best to you, Joyce, and many thanks. Here’s hoping you have a fun ride.

Installation

My son Michael works for an architectural fabrication company in Boston that manufactures design elements for buildings, such as corporate logos with programmed LED displays, sophisticated signage, and art installations. They’ve made signs for Logan Airport in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Public Theater in New York. Recently, Mike built a clock tower that also displays arrival and departure information for installation in the international terminal of Logan Airport. It is in the form of an airplane wing, mounted vertically, and was the gift of Swissair. It is made of aluminum with lots of curved edges and a fancy paint job.

Mike’s work is similar to building organs in that a product is built in a workshop and taken on the road for installation. It also means that father and son get to be tool geeks together.¹ As I have done scores of times in my career, Mike goes on the road with a crew, staying in hotels, eating meals on a per diem budget in restaurants, and dealing with the logistics of getting things done while out of town.

Wendy and I live on East 9th Street in New York City, between Broadway and University Place. It’s in the heart of the campus of New York University, a bustling and colorful place. The other day, HVAC equipment was being delivered to a building up the street. There were signs placed at the beginning of the block (it’s a one-way street) a week ahead of time, saying the street would be closed Saturday and Sunday. Early Saturday morning, a crane arrived, the street was closed, and workers spent two days hoisting the machines to the roof of the five-story building. We live on the tenth floor, so I could look down and see the commotion. I was interested that of the twelve workers on the roof, only two were wearing hard hats.

§

Installing a pipe organ is a logistical tour de force. There’s often a lot of work to do on the building to prepare for the organ, creating a blower room, running wind lines, reinforcing floors, painting walls, and installing lighting. It’s fun to make a festival out of the delivery of the organ. Parishioners come to church on Sunday wearing work clothes, the truck arrives as the service ends, and organbuilders and parishioners work together to carry the organ parts into the church. Follow that with a pizza supper, and you’ve got a party and a fun introduction for a new organ in town. 

Some churches have wide driveways and parking lots that allow a big truck to back right up to the door, even sometimes putting the truck’s ramp right into the narthex. But one church where we installed an organ had a steep and winding driveway, and it was impossible to bring the semi-trailer to the door. We had to transfer the organ into a smaller truck and make several trips up the hill. It was a big organ, it was January, it was Wisconsin, and it was snowing. 

In smaller churches, we have the run of the place, taking over the kitchen for making lunches and working without interruption or inconvenience, just making sure that the sanctuary is clear for worship on Sunday. Remote locations can be difficult. We installed a residence organ in far northern Idaho, where it was a two-hour round trip to a hardware store, it took UPS extra days to make deliveries, and the Moose Knuckle Lodge was the only restaurant. Their kitchen had no ovens or fryers, just a griddle and a microwave oven, and we exhausted their menu pretty quickly.

A large, complex, and highly anticipated organ installation is under way now at St. Thomas Church in New York City. Dobson Pipe Organ Builders, Ltd., worked for years with the late John Scott, organist and director of music at St. Thomas, an active organ committee, and consultant Jonathan Ambrosino planning this immense and sophisticated organ. You can read a description and specifications of the organ at http://dobsonorgan.com/html/instruments/op93_newyork.html.

The organ will have 102 stops and will feature an elaborately carved and decorated case on the south wall of the chancel, opposite the magnificent north case designed by Bertram Goodhue for the church’s 1913 Ernest M. Skinner Company organ.

Preparing a stately stone building for the installation of a 64,000-pound pipe organ is a herculean task. The Great and Positiv divisions will be installed in the new case, cantilevered over the choir stalls. In order to keep all that weight from bearing on the church’s stone walls, a huge steel structure has been installed. There are a few spots in the organ where it’s obvious that the structural engineers and the organbuilders had to work together closely to get all that material to fit.

I visited St. Thomas Church the other day where Lynn Dobson and John Panning gave me a tour of the partially assembled organ. All of the windchests were in place, along with wind regulators, ladders, walkboards, and lots of sturdy racks for supporting large pipes. Another truckload of parts and pipes was scheduled to arrive the next day.

St. Thomas Church is on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 53rd Street, one of the busiest neighborhoods in the city. It is halfway between St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Trump Tower, next door to the hyper-popular Museum of Modern Art, and right in the heart of the legendary high-end shopping district. The sidewalks are always packed with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, and the Dobson workers have to unload four, maybe five semi-trailers parked at the sidewalk.

When you’re delivering to a church in a big city, there’s never a loading dock, and you can never put the ramp of a truck on the top step at the church door. You go to City Hall to purchase a parking permit that allows you to put cones on the street, but you still have to watch like a hawk that no one tries to sneak in and park. Five years ago, the Organ Clearing House delivered a three-manual organ to the Church of the Resurrection on East 74th Street and Park Avenue, a much quieter neighborhood than St. Thomas, but we still had to stand with heavy loads on our shoulders while Park Avenue people walked their ten-thousand-dollar dogs along the sidewalks.

And in that church, like most of the places we work, there’s not much going on in the nave during the week, so you can put furniture pads on the pews and stack the whole organ on them early in the week, knowing that most of the big stuff will be up in the chamber before the weekend. St. Thomas Church is open to tourists, and there’s a busy schedule of weekday services. They’ve built a temporary wall closing off a side aisle of the nave to create storage space for organ parts and a workroom for the organbuilders. But there’s not enough space to accommodate all the organ’s components, so the Dobson people have the incredible task of sorting and organizing the myriad parts and pieces so the succession of truck deliveries contain what is needed soonest. Leave one windchest leg at the shop by mistake, and the job could come to a halt.

The truck arrives the night before the scheduled delivery to take advantage of lighter traffic in the wee hours, and an army of workers spends the day carrying components and packages across the sidewalk and up the stairs into the church. The first time I was on such a crew for the installation of the Flentrop organ at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977, an overseas shipping container was delivered to the sidewalk on Euclid Avenue, and the team spent the entire day carrying the organ up the 20 stone steps to the nave. The organ had come from Rotterdam, across the Atlantic Ocean and up the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Port of Cleveland on a ship named Calliope. 

There follows a ballet of hoisting and rigging. Floor frames, which position the legs of the organ’s structure and ground-level components, are assembled and leveled. The structure is installed and prepared to bear the weight of the windchests, which are then hoisted into place. Workers on the chancel floor are busy teeing up the next few pieces while those in the chambers are turning screws, fastening pieces into their permanent homes. It’s a little like a game of Tetris, with oddly shaped pieces drifting along a pipeline.

At St. Thomas Church, massive towers of scaffolding have been installed on both sides of the chancel. They are partially obscured by safety netting so it is difficult to see the chamber interiors from the floor. But once upstairs, it’s quite a spectacle. As many times as I’ve stood or worked in a partially assembled organ, especially a huge one like this, I still marvel at the process. Where else but in a large organ chamber do you see such a display of human handiwork? The 600-year heritage of organbuilding culminates anew with each installation. All the different functions of a large organ are intermingled into one fantastic whole.

§

St. Thomas Church is a landmark for the world of church music. Since 1913 when the present building was opened, along with its new Skinner organ (Opus 205), the organists have been T. Tertius Noble (of free-accompaniment fame), T. Frederick H. Candlyn, William Self, Gerre Hancock, and John Scott. Daniel Hyde is the newly appointed successor to John Scott, whose tenure was sadly cut short by his sudden death.²

According to its website, the St. Thomas Choir School is “the only church-related boarding choir school in the United States, and one of only three of its kind remaining in the world.” The choir has an intense schedule. A recent article about the choir in the New York Times stated that the boys are singing more than 20 hours each week. A look at the church’s calendar makes it clear that the organbuilders have a lot to work around.

The new Dobson organ will be a workhorse, played dozens of hours each week, and heard by tens, even hundreds of thousands of people each year. It will be played by some of the finest organists in the world. It was a thrill to stand inside the partially assembled organ, thinking of all the wonderful music yet to come. I’m grateful to Lynn and John for welcoming me, and I sure look forward to hearing the organ. You can see many photos of the construction and installation of this organ on Lynn Dobson’s and Dobson Pipe Organ Builders’ Facebook pages. It’s worth a ramble!

In recent memory, there has been a string of exciting organ installations in New York, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. James’s Episcopal Church, Christ and St. Stephen’s, Fordham University, Grace Church, Church of the Ascension, Church of the Resurrection, and Marble Collegiate Church. The organ at St. Thomas Church will surely be a thrilling addition to the fleet.

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Social media is a techno-sociological phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. I have an active community on Facebook, which is mostly limited to professionals in the pipe organ world. While sometimes it seems the whole thing is actually a revolution by cats trying to take over the world, for the most part, I find it stimulating and edifying, and a wonderful way to keep in touch with my profession. It is mid-June as I write this column, and in recent weeks I have seen countless posts of church musicians and school music teachers wrapping up their program years.

Students are saying goodbye to their important mentors, young organists are leaving academia to go out into the world, and choir directors are celebrating the bittersweet emotion of saying goodbye and looking forward to a few months with a lighter schedule. Lots of you out there are posting photos taken during year-end choir parties—festive gatherings of close-knit communities celebrating the time they’ve spent together. In many churches, the choir is the busiest volunteer group. While most committees meet monthly, the choir is together in the building twice a week, at least.

A few years ago, the music publisher J. W.
Pepper released a video interview with John Rutter, one of their most celebrated composers. I wrote extensively about that video in the July 2015 issue of The Diapason, and you can see the video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U. I’m reminded of this as I view the year-end posts. John Rutter 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’s 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. . . .

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.

While I’m not an active sports fan, I have been one for much of my life: my father and I had an unbroken streak of 25 consecutive opening-day games at Fenway Park in Boston, and I understand the value of teamwork in athletics. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why a public school system would cut a music budget in favor of sports. And this has nothing to do with the increasing awareness of the dangerous long-term effects of the more violent sports.

At its root, choral singing is a basic human activity. We must breathe to live, and when we exhale across our vocal chords, we gain the power of speech. If we sustain our speech, sustain our vowel sounds, we’re singing. Voilà! When we’re singing together, we’re exchanging our very breath.  

Many of you are a month away from bringing the choir back together for a new year. It’s not one of life’s frills, and it should never be a chore. “It’s something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls.”

Notes

1. Recently, we were gathering at hotel in western Massachusetts for a family wedding.  Mike arrived at the same time as Wendy and me, and walked over to my car to greet us. My car is a Chevrolet Suburban, which has a long, deep interior, so I’ve made a tool with a hook that helps me pull stuff toward the back where I can reach it. As I fished for a suitcase, Mike laughed and said, “That’s what separates us from the animals.” I think he was comparing me to a chimpanzee using a stick to get ants out of the ground!

2. I wrote about John Scott following his death in the October 2015 issue of The Diapason.

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.

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/…

Meeting the future

This weekend, Wendy and I drove to Massachusetts to visit our new grandson. Samuel John Vichiett-Bishop was born last Thursday (October 22) at 3:45 p.m., weighing 3.45 kilograms (7.61 pounds), the second son of my second son Christopher and his wife Alessandra. Big brother Benjamin is almost three years old, a turbo-charged, bright-eyed, bilingual beauty. (Alex is Brazilian so they speak Portuguese at home.) Sam is just big enough to rest in my two cupped hands. His feet are about the size of my thumbs, and his toes are like the little peas in snow pea pods. The whole thing is magical, remarkable, moving, and inspiring.

Three years ago when we were anticipating Ben’s birth, I was looking forward to the rite of passage of becoming a grandfather. But as those who know me have heard me say, I was not prepared for the joy of seeing my son as a father. And yesterday, watching Chris confidently scoop up the teeny boy, and seeing Chris and Alex as a team preparing for Sam’s first few weeks, discussing schedules about daycare and medical appointments, all while managing Ben’s rambunctious motions, I was simply bursting with pride.

Then, driving home to New York, listening to news reports about national and international politics, I reflected on the first days of the life of a tiny person, wondering what kind of world he will know as an adult. 

Kids these days . . . 

Old fogies like me have been saying that for centuries, but I still like to make comparisons between generations in my family. My grandfather pointed out that local transportation when he was young involved horses, and he was about the age I am now when humans walked on the moon. When my father was growing up, a truck drove around his urban neighborhood delivering ice for iceboxes. My generation was the first to establish households that required refrigerators, air conditioners, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, and, heaven-help-us, computers at the outset.

Our thirty-something children are of the first generation to have had cell phones while attending school. CDs were the standard format for recorded music, color television was ubiquitous, and the Internet was barely a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, used only by scientists and academics.

When I was a kid, Popular Mechanics magazine predicted that by now, we’d be whisking about in personal jet-powered vehicles. It didn’t bother me that the cartoon renderings made them look like trash cans—I’d be happy to stand on banana peels and coffee grounds if my PJV would speed me through the Lincoln Tunnel two feet above the stalled traffic. I’m a little disappointed that this hasn’t happened yet. I think they spent too much time developing the fax machine.

When I wonder what the future holds for four-day-old Sam, it’s safe to say the technological products that will be important to him when he’s a young adult have yet to be imagined. But since I’m far from the field of technological development, I’ll leave that speculation to the engineers.

A couple years ago, Wendy and I were visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, when Christos, an architect, took us to visit an ancient amphitheater outside the city. He told us that the large architectural firm for which he had worked held employee conferences at the site so they could study the particulars of the design and construction, and he pointed out some incredible facts. I was especially impressed by the fact that the 10,000-seat structure occupied a section of a perfect sphere, and after thousands of years was still perfectly level. Christos explained that the techniques used for the design, surveying, and construction must have been written down, but that all documentation had been lost through the ages. He recalled his boss lowering his voice and posing the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the Library at Alexandria?”

The death of culture

Just as hundreds of generations of accumulated recorded knowledge was lost forever in the (multi-stage) destruction of that venerable library, our modern society seems capable of losing important components, ironically at the hands of the very advance of technology. As life becomes more complicated and methods of information management and communication proliferate, our collective attention spans are diminishing. National Public Radio is still able to retain an audience willing to listen to news stories that last several minutes, but most of our news is delivered to us in brief bursts. It’s easy to get the sense that some of the things that are central to our culture are being threatened by our collective ability to pay attention, to concentrate, and to participate in activities that require the thoughtful use of time.

One example of this is as simple as the written word. A friend who had neurosurgery on her right arm fell and broke her left arm while traveling in Italy. Her right hand is still tingly as her nerves heal, and her left arm is in a heavy rigid plaster cast. She reports the delight in taking advantage of the Dictation and Speech functions of her MacBook. Having lost comfortable use of both hands at least temporarily, she is able to continue her work as an attorney, dictating letters, e-mails, and formal documents into her machine. And I confess to frequent use of voice memos with my iPhone. But when I recently heard a story on NPR about how some educators are starting to wonder whether it’s necessary to teach cursive writing in public schools, I shudder while acknowledging my culpability.

Will Sam go to school in an age when copperplate script is obsolete? What would that mean to our society? Do we care? Or would that be a lamentable loss?

§

Most readers of The Diapason can read music. With a glance at a score, we can accurately hear melody, harmony, and rhythm in our “minds’ ears.” We’re multilingual. We might take it for granted, but we learned every jot-and-tittle purposefully. When and where did we learn this? I’ll speak for myself—you can fill in your own story. I had my first piano lessons when I was about eight, and I know Miss Swist laid the foundation for my musical literacy. I also remember the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who crowed in front of elementary school classrooms, teaching us simple songs and writing quarter notes and rests on the blackboard using a cool chalk gang-holder to draw staves.

Of course, I’ll encourage Chris and Alex to give Ben and Sam music lessons—I’ll offer to pay for them. But I doubt they’ll experience anything like the even questionable musicianship provided by Miss Louden in Winchester, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. When I was leading a church youth choir, most of the kids had no background reading music, so I gave it to them. I know that many of my colleagues do exactly that as part of their work with children. But that covers only those kids going to church. If the schools aren’t teaching basic musical skills, a huge swath of children would never be exposed to quarter notes. Do we care about that? 

Plato said, “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the key to learning.” Imagine a Presidential Education Commission that promoted the teaching of music as a basic tenet of public education. What a world that would be!

In 1920, the population of the United States was about 106,000,000, and 300,000 new pianos were sold. That’s one new piano for every 353 Americans. Today there are about 319,000,000 Americans, and according to an article published in the New York Times, in 2006, Americans bought only about 76,000 pianos.¹ That’s one new piano for every 4,197 Americans. That huge decline must have been caused largely by the introduction of radio, television, and electronic recordings. But I can’t escape the notion that a hundred years ago, most households owned pianos and included family members who could play them.

Chris and his older brother Mike grew up singing in choirs that I directed, they both had piano lessons, and they were both often conscripted as “tuner’s helper,” but when they were out on their own, they made their own choices about church. I doubt that Sam or Ben will follow their grandfather’s footsteps into church music, but I hope they’ll both go through life with an understanding of the art of music, enough to allow them to be free to be moved by it.

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Throughout the centuries, artists have manipulated materials as various as marble and linseed oil to record their observations and interpretations of the world around them. And they took it seriously. Michelangelo’s stunning statue, David, is almost 17 feet tall and weighs almost 12,500 pounds. Do we assume that the original block of marble was twice that heavy (25,000 pounds), 2½ times (31,250 pounds) as heavy, or more? It was removed from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, and the finished statue is in Florence, over 80 miles away. No big deal; a heavy crane lifts it onto a truck, and off we go on an asphalt highway. No, Michelangelo completed the statue in 1503—that 13-ton stone was hauled over hill and dale using carts with wood wheels drawn by oxen over roads of mud and stone.

When I was in college, I took several art history courses, learning rudiments of style, iconography, and techniques—knowledge that enhances every visit to an art museum forty years later. I’ve watched droves of tourists stream from their buses along well-worn pathways toward an iconic masterpiece like Mona Lisa, ignoring hundreds of compelling artworks, actually missing the entire experience while snapping bootleg photos, as I sneaked off in the other direction to have sumptuous galleries to myself.

Walking through a doorway from one gallery to another, I’ve burst into tears encountering an iconic painting. I would have been introduced to the image by a slide in a Carousel machine in a darkened lecture hall forty years ago, but seeing the real thing is visceral. The Starry Night on a tee-shirt doesn’t raise the hairs on your neck, but the very piece of canvas and streaks of paint that were handled by Vincent Van Gogh sure do.

Sam and Ben live more than 200 miles from us. I’m looking forward to having them here for Grandpa visits when I can take them to New York’s wonderful museums. Meanwhile, I know that Chris and Alex will take them to the great museums of Boston. I hope that forty-something Sam will take his children to art museums.

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The three major broadcast networks and two UHF channels that were around when I was growing up have become hundreds of cable channels broadcasting everything from real art to pure bunk. Originally hailed as the greatest educational tool of the twentieth century, television has deteriorated into a wasteland of misnamed experiences. You might tune in to Animal Planet, expecting something like the carefully researched nature programs of public television, but find a blood-and-guts story about feeding habits, narrated in an emergency voice, as if normal feeding habits should be reported like war zones. (Oh no! Look what that alligator did to that egret!) The History Channel shares idiotic testosterone-induced antics that have nothing to do with history, and while The Weather Channel could teach us some fascinating science, you’re more likely to see poorly equipped, poorly educated “researchers” racing across Texas and Oklahoma, intending not to be hit by a tornado and acting surprised when they are.

Hollywood provides an endless supply of violent, gory fantasies, and full-length movies are instantly available to us, streaming through our laptops and phones, but what about live theater? When I was in high school, dozens of friends were gathered by the music department to learn, produce, and perform Broadway musicals. I’ll never forget the lyrics to the songs of Oklahoma! or Little Mary Sunshine, having pounded out the tunes on the piano hundreds of times, and watching my friends spread their thespian wings was a delight.

Those productions were more energetic and enthusiastic than artistic, and our Curly was no Alfred Drake (original Broadway cast, 1943), but that troupe of school chums sure got a taste of what’s involved in live theater. We dealt with stage fright, casting jealousy, embarrassing stage kisses, memory lapses, and missed cues, but that was really a life experience, giving us an appreciation of the emotion of acting. Two people on a stage can make an audience gasp, cringe, laugh, or cry. You see spittle flying between faces and realize the extent to which the actors have abandoned themselves in service of the story. I hope that Sam will appreciate and seek out live theater.

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Wendy is a literary agent, working to enable authors selling their manuscripts to publishers and laboring to promote and advocate the books as they arrive on the shelves in bookstores. In many ways, her work parallels mine. Books and pipe organs are facing competition from electronic alternatives; both are viewed by many as outdated, even unnecessary. But just like a pipe organ, there’s no substitute for a real book. You feel its weight in your lap, you handle the pages, you can even write in it, leaving notes for yourself or for the next person to read. 

I’m proud that my kids grew up loving books, and that they love books as adults. Chris and Alex’s condo is alive with books—hundreds of books. We bring more each time we come, and we know that friends and family join us. Ben loves to sit in a lap to “read” a familiar book. He knows many of them by heart and recites along as you read, imitating inflections and correcting errors.

I trust that Sam will become an adult in a world that reveres the printed page, in which information is disseminated and discussed on paper and in which stories are told on paper. I trust that he will pass on that love to his friends and the family members that follow him. And I’ll be giving him books at every opportunity.

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Books, music, theater, and art are all still in the mainstream of our culture. People who seek and appreciate them enjoy the wealth of knowledge and depth of expression of those who have preceded us. And through their exposure to the heights of human culture, they are open to the appreciation of less prevalent expressions. As participation in the American church has diminished, fewer members of society are likely to be familiar with pipe organs, or even have experienced them at all.

I imagine that Sam will be more familiar with the pipe organ than other kids in his classes—I’m looking forward to sharing my passion with him as part of his awareness of his family. And who knows, maybe he’ll take some lessons. 

I fully expect Sam to be familiar with video games—his father and uncle are products of the generation that started with PacMan and Mario Brothers and has since gone deeper into that world that I don’t understand. As our kids were the ones who understood how to program a VCR, my grandsons will be virtuosic in operating gadgets we haven’t dreamed of.

But I hope, and I’ll do all I can to guarantee, that his education will not only expose him to the wide world of culture, but also immerse him in it. He’ll be well versed in the latest games, movies, music, and art. And he’ll be familiar with Shakespeare and Shostakovich, Donatello and Don Giovanni, Brunelleschi and Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Bernstein and Sondheim. He’ll know the difference between Bach and Offenbach, and he’ll pass it all on with love and passion. I’m not pretending that he’s going to be an artist, an actor, or a musician, but intending that he’ll know enough about those things to care about them. I expect it of him, and I expect it of me. Lucky for all of us.

Notes

1. Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Laid-Back Labor” (Freakonomics blog), The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007.

User interface

In 1975 and 1976 I had summer jobs in the workshops of Bozeman-Gibson & Company. I use the plural because the shop was in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1975, and during the summer of 1976 the company was moving to new digs in Deerfield, New Hampshire. These were my first forays into the craft, and those few months were full of adventure. In 1975 the company was installing an organ in Castleton, Vermont, and I thought it was great fun to be working on site. They were also starting the restoration of the very old Stevens organ in First Church in Belfast, Maine.

During the transitional summer of 1976, we worked hard moving truckloads of machines, tools, stock, and supplies to Deerfield. As I arrived in the shop at the end of the semester, a one-manual organ for the Chapel on Squirrel Island, Maine was being completed. We installed it in the crossing of Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston for use in a concert by the Handel & Haydn Society during the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. When the convention was over, we took the organ to Maine, carrying it to the island on the small private ferry. It was all very exotic.

The new workshop in Deerfield was an old barn, and we split our days between organ building and barn building, making all sorts of repairs to the place. One night there was a wicked thunderstorm, the remnants of a hurricane that worked its way up the coast, and we stayed up late moving things away from the unfinished windows.

George Bozeman and David Gibson were the partner-principals, and David and his family moved into the farmhouse that accompanied the barn. Several of us rented rooms in the house. We had a beer kitty (25 cents a bottle) on top of the refrigerator and we had communal meals. The whole thing was a great experience for a 20-year-old organ nut.

Today, the Organ Clearing House rents the workshop from George in his retirement. The plywood outfeed table I built for the table saw is still there, along with remnants of lots of other little handyman things I did. The roof above the table saw is the place where I put a hammer through the wood into a hornet’s nest while replacing shingles, and escaped by sliding off the roof into the bushes—a stunt that would kill me today! Since we occupied the shop several years ago, we’ve done lots of great work there, and it’s nice to have that connection with my past. George still lives in the little house out back, and it’s great fun to see him regularly.

Today, our house in Maine is about twelve miles from Squirrel Island, as the crow flies. I visited the organ there last summer. And First Church in Belfast is about fifty miles away. Wendy and I attended a concert there a couple years ago. It’s fun revisiting those places and those instruments that were part of my introduction to organbuilding, nearly forty (gulp) years ago.

A work in progress

As I look back across the intervening years, I realize how much has changed in the trade, and in my outlook and perception. In the seventies, I was a tracker-action firebrand. I’ve since come to appreciate and love the sounds of the expressive electro-pneumatic organ. Thirty-five years ago I scoffed at the gaudy consoles of big organs with electric actions. Those were the days when the phrase cockpit syndrome was born, and it was not meant to be complimentary. I wondered why an organist needed all those gizmos and indicator lights to make music. It seemed that the intimacy of the pure relationship between musician and instrument was compromised.

But even I had to admit that it was tricky to get your fingers between the huge ebony sharp-keys on the keyboards of a Hook organ. And speaking of that big 1860 three-manual Hook organ that I loved so much, draw two or three couplers, especially the Choir to Great sub-octave, and to repeat a common phrase, it was like driving a Mack truck. How intimate is that? And by the way, that would be a Mack truck from 1950 with a steel dashboard, twelve-speed manual transmission (without synchronized gears), a two-speed axle, and a cracked mirror—not a modern dreamboat of a truck with power steering, hydrostatic transmission, ergonomic seats, air conditioning, stereo, and GPS.

What was Ernest Skinner thinking when the only Trumpet in the organ was in the Swell box, not on the Great where God meant Trumpets to be? And forget about Trumpets, what about the Mixture? One Mixture in an organ and he put it in the Swell? Ridiculous.

Oh, wait a minute, I get it—when the most powerful voices are under expression, you maximize the range of expression. So when that full Swell is coupled to the Great with the box closed, you can “crack” it for the start of the second line, and by the end of the verse the organ is roaring, and your hands never left the keyboards. Marvelous.

Consoles

Until I joined the Organ Clearing House, I led the double life common among organ folk, that of organist and organbuilder. I recognize this as the source of my love for working on consoles. Whenever one of our projects includes rebuilding a console, I try to organize bringing it to my personal workshop at our house in Maine, where I can revel in the puzzle of how best to make the console as functional and accessible as possible.

I’ve come to realize that the well-appointed console of an expressive electro-pneumatic organ is the vehicle for the intimacy between the organist and the instrument. Longtime violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, Arnold Steinhardt, has written eloquently of the intimacy between the player and the instrument: “When I hold the violin, my left hand stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” (Violin Dreams, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, page 5.)

Steinhardt goes on to compare all this with instruments that are played “at arm’s length.” He implies that the violinist has more intimacy with the music he makes than the pianist. He overlooks the oboe, clarinet, and bassoon—those guys take the intimacy thing a step further. But I don’t think organists need to be left out of the fun. Playing a large organ in a vast acoustic is a heroic, monumental experience. Many of us know the thrill of taking our hands off the keys and reveling in that last chord as it reverberates. But the modern console allows the organist real intimacy in the control of that gigantic beast.

Think of the players of orchestral instruments as they achieve fortissimo. The trumpet player’s face becomes a roadmap of veins and muscles, the violinist sends horsehair and rosin flying, the pianist conjures power from the base of his spine and his shoulders, not unlike the major league pitcher turning his arm into a whip to hurl a ball at superhuman speeds.

Sit at the console of a large organ and draw a full registration, then quietly touch a single key. With a miniscule twitch of a muscle you emit a roar. If you saw that motion on a soundless video, it might resemble touching a lover’s hand or flicking away a mosquito. Combine hundreds of those flicks, and a cavernous space is alive with sound energy. There are 82 notes in the first measure of the Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony. Play that on a hundred stops, that’s 8,200 individual notes in about four seconds, unless you’re playing too fast. Take that, Mr. Steinhardt!

What that organ’s console allows you to do is fling those notes into space by the thousand without breaking a sweat. The flick of the organist’s finger is magnified exponentially.

I think of this as a magical intimacy. The ergonomic seats and power steering in that modern Mack truck allow the driver to manage the huge machine effortlessly and tirelessly. The ergonomic organ console allows the organist to command many tons of organ components with flicks of the fingers.

Gizmos and gadgets

I love to think of a console as a magnifier, expanding the motions of the fingers into monumental sounds. I also love to think of an organ console as a manipulator, even a conjurer, fooling the organ into doing things it didn’t know were possible. The clever use of Unison Off and related couplers make possible the redistribution of the keyboards so a solo sound might be made available on a neighboring keyboard for the “thumbing” of a few solo notes, or a lengthy melody. This is one place where “thumbs down” is a positive thing. 

And when we get into a complicated situation like that, it’s handy to have indicators that tell you where you are and remind you what you’re doing. Now, if only we could add a “rerouting” feature like that in Google Maps, which realizes when you’re gone astray, takes a moment to catch its breath, and then displays a new route home.

The organ console is our “user interface.” When we play, we have the notes in our minds, whether we’re reading a score or drawing on our memory. The organ console allows us to translate those thoughts, which are the intellectual versions of audible music into a stream of information—a data-stream. The data-stream leaves the console and enters the organ, where the data is converted to audible music at the speed of light.

Ideally, the console is configured to allow maximum flexible control over the machinery that is the organ. There’s a philosophical beauty present as we think of how thoughts are translated into sound.

The intimacy is magnified when we add the composer to the mix. The creation of music comes from the mystical skill of hearing melody and harmony before they have jelled into a musical phrase or composition. Our system of notation is precise enough to allow the intentions of a composer to be delivered to the brain of the musician, and it is the relationship between the musician and the instrument that allows the contemporary immediate translation and interpretation. The organ console is that relationship between musician and instrument. It’s a physical appliance that performs a metaphysical function. How cool is that?

White with blue

Most organbuilders have adopted and adapted the use of color-coded cables that were developed by telephone companies to simplify the wiring of multiple circuits. The cables come in various sizes—12 pairs, 25 pairs, 50 pairs, and the special 32-pair cables created for organbuilders that allow the 61 notes of the keyboard plus three spares.

The conductors are arranged in reversing pairs, with primary and secondary colors. The first two conductors of a standard cable have a white wire with blue stripe, and a blue wire with white stripe. Keeping white as a common, you go through a series of five colors—blue, orange, green, brown, slate. So we rattle off the sequence as white-with-blue, blue-with-white, white-with-orange, orange-with-white. When we finish the first five pairs at white-with-slate, slate-with-white, the common color shifts to red: red-with-blue, blue-with-red, etc. Sounds complicated, but after you’ve wired a hundred keyboards, stops, windchests, etc., it becomes second nature. Everyone knows that black-with-green is note 25, which is middle C. The point is that you can accurately wire both ends of a lengthy cable by yourself.

As I separate the individual conductors in a cable, and sort them into the correct order, I think of the relationship between colors and notes. Green-with-white is low F. That wire will fire the low note of the last chords of grand pieces by Widor, Bach, or Mozart. Slate-with-white is number ten—the low note of the first chord (after the fanfare) of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. How many times will that piece be played on this organ? And have you ever stopped to think of the ironic symbolism that the first note of that melody is supported by a chord that demands resolution, ‘til death do us part? Think of all those brides and grooms trembling with the increased tension of the diminished chord. It’s the second note of the melody that allows a sigh of relief. And by the way, that high C which starts the melody? Violet-with-slate.

Years ago my company installed a solid-state switching system in the grand Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Boston’s Trinity Church. One woman working for me at the time had trouble seeing the difference between the slates and violets in the color code. More than half of the high-B/C pairs were reversed!

The console is up on my workbench so I can work on the stuff below the keyboards. Those expression pedals—I’m manipulating them with my hands. Is that enough tension for operation by foot? (If you manipulate with your hands, do you pedipulate with your feet?) How long after the organ is finished before the organist hears the first squeak? What can I do to lengthen that period? Some axle grease, lithium grease, graphite paste?  

Will the light over the pedalboard shine up through the keyboards to distract the organist? It’s a movable console. When the console is placed in front of an audience, will that light distract them? If the light is shaded so it doesn’t distract the audience, can the organist see the pedal keys?

Recently we completed an organ with a complex and sophisticated console. I’m counting the indicator lights with my memory’s eye—I think there are about ten. I came up with LED (light emitting diode) bulbs with various and rich colors that are about an eighth of an inch in diameter. I drilled perfectly sized holes in the stop jambs and coupler rail and inserted the bulbs from behind so they stuck out the tiniest bit. Man, were they bright. I pushed them back in the holes, which made the light more remote to the organist, but they shone on the wall behind the console like a circus wagon, and when the console was moved to the chancel steps for a recital, those pesky lights were like laser beams in the eyes of the audience. So I used a leather punch to make little discs of black translucent plastic that I stuck in the holes in front of the LEDs. Perfect. The colors are still vivid, but not so gaudy. Where did I get the black plastic? A report cover from Staples.

The pitter-patter of little feet

When I was a student at Oberlin, I was fortunate to participate in a month-long workshop in Eurhythmics. It was organized by my organ teacher Haskell Thomson, and led by the recently retired professor of Eurhythmics and Music Theory, Inda Howland, who had studied with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva. The longer I played music after my graduation, the more I realized the value of that month—what the exposure to that discipline added to my musicianship. I was studying Bach’s Toccata in F at the time (remember that green-with-white wire), and during one of the sessions I played the piece for the class in a Robertson Hall practice room. Professor Howland’s first comment was a question: “What is my first impression?” I had the right answer—the noise on the pedalboard. “Play it again without making noise.” Hmm. Good point.

And today, I try to make the pedalboard help the player to meet Professor Howland’s standards. Here’s a pedalboard that doesn’t make much noise when I play the keys, but makes a heck of a thump when I release a note. It’s a little like playing the pedal solo on steel drums. What can I use as a bumper or cushion that won’t compress too much with use, changing the travel of the pedal key and the “pluck point” of the contacts?

All this happens in that workshop that’s so close to some of the first organs I worked on. If I had been given a 50-pair color-coded cable in the summer of 1975 I wouldn’t have understood. But those thousands of little wires have everything to do with great music-making.

I can name that tune in three colors!