In the Wind. . . .

I’m impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life

Feeding your passion

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I caught the pipe organ bug when I was a kid growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts. My father was rector of the Episcopal church, and the organist was a harpsichord builder. I sang in the choir, took piano lessons, took organ lessons, had summer jobs in organ shops, accompanied all the ensembles at the high school and countless rehearsals for musicals, went to college to major in organ performance, and never looked back. When my kids were teenagers and well aware of how my career track had started, they commented freely on how difficult it was for them to face adulthood without having such a clear track in mind.

Working in the organ world as a player and builder for decades, I’ve known many people with similar experiences. After all, the young musician who is most likely to be accepted as a performance major in a recognized school of music is a person for whom regular and serious practice at their chosen instrument was a priority from an early age.

When I was in high school, I was the most accomplished organist in town under the age of twenty, and I was mighty pleased with myself. In my first week as an entering freshman at Oberlin, I remember being impressed—flabbergasted—at how wonderfully some of my classmates played. Winchester was a pretty small pond. I wasn’t such a big fish at Oberlin.

Passionate feeding

James Andrew Beard was a cook. He was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and he said that his earliest memory was watching Triscuits™ and shredded wheat biscuits being made at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland in 1905. Two years old? 

Having studied music and theater, Beard moved to New York City in 1937 (the same year that George Gershwin and Charles-Marie Widor died), hoping to forge a career in the wildly active Broadway scene. While he failed to find a niche on stage, he was a smash hit on the Broadway cocktail party circuit, to the extent that he founded a catering company called “Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.,” specializing in producing elaborate cocktail parties. He followed this with a cookbook called Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés. In 1946, he was the first to host a television cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC.

James Beard wrote more than twenty cookbooks, he founded several cooking schools across the country, and was an important advocate for the careers of many influential chefs, including Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. He was the original modern American “foodie.”

He was a mountain of a man, a man of insatiable appetites, of unflagging energy, and focused passion. When he died in 1985, his estate became a foundation, based in his Greenwich Village townhouse. Today, the James Beard Foundation has provided over two million dollars in scholarships for promising chefs, and the James Beard House hosts countless dinners each year, promoting the work of chefs chosen from around the world.

Medium-rare at 140

You’re giving a dinner party. You’ve worked hard to gather a list of great guests, organize a menu, shop for the food. You’ve made “the house fair as you are able, trimmed the hearth, and set the table.” The guests arrive, you mix drinks, set out hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation picks up quickly. You go to the kitchen and realize you’re in a pickle—the broccoli is overcooked, you forgot to make salad dressing, and in spite of the care you’ve taken with the temperature-time continuum, the meat is simply not done. (Never happened to me, but I’ve heard it from others . . .) 

We went to a dinner at the James Beard House last Friday. Wendy’s assistant, literary agent Lauren McLeod, is married to Chef Danny Bua of The Painted Burro in Somerville, Massachusetts. His creative approach to Mexican cuisine attracted the attention of the scouts, and he was invited to present a dinner—a very big deal for a young chef.

Danny and his team prepped the food in their own restaurant kitchen on Thursday. Before sunrise on Friday their truck was on the road, and they spent the day toiling in the unfamiliar cramped kitchen of the James Beard House. The menu was sophisticated and complex. There were five hors d’oeuvres, including Crispy Native Oyster Tacos with Cabbage-Jalapeño Slaw, Baja Mayonnaise, Cilantro, and Lime; and five entrées, including Avocado Leaf-Roasted Short Ribs with Spiced Red Kuri Squash, Masa Dumplings, Heirloom Kale con Plátanos, Cotija Cheese, and Red-Wine Cola Mole. Altogether there were fifteen different dishes (each with at least five major ingredients), sixty guests, and everything was served warm, plated beautifully, each table was served as one, and the houseful of New York foodies were full of praise.

It was the culinary equivalent of getting off a train, walking cold into an unfamiliar hall, and playing the entire Clavier Übung (all parts) on an instrument you’ve never seen before, from memory. Danny is passionate about his art, and it’s a mighty amount of work.

A memorable effort

Last Monday night, colleague and friend David Enlow played a recital at his home Church of the Resurrection on the 1915 Casavant organ we installed there, completed in 2011. Our daughter Meg came to the recital with Wendy and me, which meant a lot because while she’s familiar with my work as she sees it in the workshop, it’s fair to say that serious organ music is really not her thing. It was really nice to have that support from a family member, and David made it worth her while. At home later in the evening, Meg talked about how impressed she was with David’s focus and command over what he was doing, and knowing perfectly well that there is nothing easy about what he was doing, she was impressed by the apparent ease of it. His fingers and feet just flickered around the console as if there was nothing to it.

David’s program included the entertaining, the academic, the sophisticated, and the sublime. He spared us the ridiculous—you can go somewhere else for that. His command of the repertory, the instrument, and his own person—his technique—was obvious at every moment.

It’s for the birds

Kenn Kaufmann is a client of Wendy’s literary agency, and he and his wife Kim are close friends of ours. With the support of his parents, Kenn dropped out of school at sixteen and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States in a quest for a birder’s Big Year—an effort to see the largest number of bird species in a year. Birding is a big business, and there have been several recent movies that give a glimpse into what it means to devote one’s life to such an effort.

Kenn can look at an apparently empty sky and pick out all the birds. He knows their calls, their habits, what they like to eat, what they’re afraid of. He knows what trees they prefer and why, and he knows their migratory routes, schedules, and destinations. He has written several field guides, developing a new technique for the computer-manipulation of photographs to create the “ideal” example of each bird.  

Like so many of our musician friends, Kenn’s genius is communication. All of that knowledge and intuition would be lost if he couldn’t write or speak about it in such a compelling way. We’ve been with him when he leads big groups on bird walks and gives slide-show-lectures, and there’s never anyone in attendance unmoved by all the information, but even more, by the rich personality that has learned how it all fits into the big scheme.

Measured success

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) studied nuclear physics at Stanford and Harvard, worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and then committed to a career as an organbuilder. He clearly would have made more money working in the high levels of nuclear physics, but the pipe organ was his real love. Those who worked with him and still operate the company that bears his name remember him as a caring and thoughtful mentor who taught by asking questions, encouraging his students and co-workers to think well for themselves. Charlie was passionate about the pipe organ, and his contributions to the modern American organ can hardly be measured.

Charlie was one of the first modern American organbuilders to travel to Europe to study the “Old Master” organs, collecting meticulous measurements, and studying the relationships of the organs to the music of their day. I expect that his scientific background was integral to those studies—he must have had a great power of attention.

There are two Fisk organs in Winchester, Massachusetts, and at the time I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have such access to fine instruments. Ironically, my first real relationships with electro-pneumatic instruments happened in the practice rooms at Oberlin!

§

Every one of these people knew his career path early in life. I suppose we all know people who were forced into a career that was not their first choice: “I’m a lawyer, all your uncles are lawyers, your grandfather was a lawyer, and you’re going to be a lawyer.” Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham was a banker, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. It was when he realized the depth of his son’s dedication that Abraham Mendelssohn made peace with Felix’s career choice. I don’t know if Felix would have had much to offer the world of banking, but we surely would have been the poorer without the music he left us. The thought leaves me without words.

In the concert hall, there’s nothing like hearing a performance by a master musician who in middle age is still working toward the unattainable perfection he envisioned as a six-year-old. In a restaurant, there’s nothing like tasting a dish created by someone whose earliest memory is based on a fascination with food. In an examination room, there’s nothing like being treated by a doctor whose early dreams were to care deeply for the health of patients. And if you’re meant to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, be a great lawyer. We know a brilliant young woman who finished law school with a large debt, held a lucrative job long enough to pay back the debts, then dove into the world of law in developing nations.

Lovely idealism, isn’t it?

But what happens when the money runs out? Most organbuilders would love the luxury of unlimited time to get things right, but the organ is built according to an agreed price, and as they say in the real world, “Time is money.” Remember Charlie Fisk’s definition of a reed? “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.”

The tuner might like to have another eight or ten hours to get things “just so,” but the church is supposed to pay for that at an agreed hourly rate, and organ tuning is a line-item on the annual operating budget. To propose an increase in the tuning budget, the organist makes a recommendation to the Music Committee, which meets bi-monthly and makes recommendations to the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee makes recommendations to the Parish Council, and the Parish Council makes recommendations to the congregation at the Annual Meeting. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.)  

It’s mid-October now. The vote will happen on June 15. And during the Annual Meeting, someone’s going to ask, “If it costs $150 to tune a piano, why do we have to spend $2,500 tuning the organ?” 

The organist might like to have another five hours to practice anthem accompaniments and postlude for the coming Sunday, but there’s a staff meeting, octavo scores to be filed, a bride to meet with, and then the sexton is vacuuming the nave. If I had a nickel for every organist whose dream was fulfilled by being offered a full-time position in a prominent church with a terrific organ, only to find that there was never time for practicing, I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ernest Skinner often added stops to his organs not specified in the contracts because he felt the building called for them. Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh were impoverished through much of their lives, and often couldn’t afford paint to put on canvas.

Throughout history, passionate, inspired people have had to find alternative means of support. That’s why I’m so impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life, like the concert organist who balances practicing and travel with the demands of the liturgical year or a university teaching schedule.

J. S. Bach had a busy professional life, was subject to the civic bureaucracy that employed him, and we know he spent at least enough time with his children to give them music lessons. A family that size must have taken up some of the old man’s time and attention. But he left a body of work that has inspired many generations of great musicians.

Mozart also left a tremendous catalogue of some of the most beautiful music ever written, but he died a pauper. Were he living today, he’d be playing the accordion in the subways of New York. Wouldn’t that be a treat!

Feeding a national passion

Subscribers to The Diapason must be well attuned to the importance of the arts in modern society. As I write, we are in the midst of the great crescendo of political chaos, watching two otherwise dignified men duke it out in the public forum. We’re hearing a lot about the balance of public priorities, and how the federal budget might be skewed in support of different points of view.

One thing we have not heard in stump speeches, televised debates, or from the talking heads super-analyzing everything that’s said, is a candidate standing up for the arts. I cannot see how a nation can fail to support the arts and humanities and consider itself a leader on the international stage. Is military might or the balance of trade more important than the cultural heart of a great people? We are the country of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein, of Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Virgil Fox, but I’ve read figures that compare the United States’ annual support of the arts with the hourly cost of warfare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an elected official talk passionately about the artistic culture—the passion—of our country. I think they’re missing something.

Performance

Rockport, Maine, is a quiet, picturesque village nestled between the bustling towns of Rockland and Camden. It’s on the west shore of Penobscot Bay, which forms the east end of the region known as mid-coast Maine, and like the surrounding towns, Rockport is a combination of a working fishing harbor and home to many private pleasure boats. There are a couple of active boatbuilding workshops there, and dozens, if not hundreds, of moorings bedeck the enclosed harbor. The area is home to many high-end vacation residences, so there’s a strong market for good musical performances, and Rockport, with two excellent restaurants and a vintage opera house within a few doors of each other, is known for the many outstanding concerts presented each summer.

But not last Tuesday. After a terrific dinner, Wendy and I took our seats in the opera house for a concert presented by a string quartet that’s resident in the area, and we were immediately stricken by the backstage sounds of the cellist, feverishly practicing a narky passage that started with a very high note, followed by a dramatic downward flourish. He played it over and over, right through the concert’s starting time, never getting the high note quite right, and sounding more frantic with each repetition. It was a dreadful display.

Finally, the quartet took the stage. Their concert attire was sloppy, and their progress from stage door to their chairs was haphazard. They opened the program with a few lofty remarks about the piece they were about to play, and offered a lackluster reading. Though the printed program indicated that they would play two pieces before intermission, they left the stage after the first piece, and the cellist went right back to his nervous and ineffectual practicing, still never quite reaching that high note. The audience was left to wonder if this was the intermission. There were no cues offered by house lights and no announcement about alteration of the program. The quartet would be joined by a singer for the final two pieces, so I suppose it made sense to present them together without break, but the sequence was strange and unsettling, especially as it was accompanied by dozens more missed chances at that pesky high note. Dozens.

Once again, it was a relief when the anguish stopped and they took the stage. The singer was a young woman who grew up in the area and made good. She has performed in several major opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and she knew how to dress appropriately. Her beautifully chosen dress and carefully coiffed hair was in stark contrast to the sloppy, uncoordinated garb heaped on the four chairs. The first piece they offered together was by Respighi, an erudite work with elusive structure, and none of them managed to pull out any sense of form. Finally, in Samuel Barber’s shimmering Dover Beach, the soprano got some traction and pulled the quartet toward meaningful playing. Inexplicably, the gullible audience gave them a standing ovation. Must have been the singer’s family. At least we had a wonderful dinner.

Rockport is 45 minutes from our place in Newcastle, and we had them in shreds by the time we got home. The quartet has been resident in the area for over 20 years, and they’re supported by a not-for-profit board that raises funds and organizes their concerts. Maybe things are a little too easy for them. Their performance lacked any sense of passion or commitment to the music.

The Salt Bay Chamberfest is an annual event in Damariscotta, Maine, which adjoins our town of Newcastle. The concerts are held in a barn owned by the Damariscotta River Association. It’s not a converted barn, it’s just a barn with wood walls and roof, cement floor, folding chairs, and a concession stand selling wine and cheese. Last summer, we heard a program that included three pieces by Kaija Saariaho: Nocturne, Cloud Trio, and Je sens un deuxième coeur. (Later in the year, her opera, L’amour de Loin, was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera written by a woman to be presented there in more than a century.)

That concert ended with Arnold Schoenberg’s mystical Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, with Alan Gilbert, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, playing viola. Those musicians were used to performing in central formal venues, but they gave the same level of energy and commitment to their performance in the barn. It was rich and rewarding.

§

I’ve long admired The Bobs, an a cappella vocal quartet formed in 1981 and now preparing their farewell tour. They write their own material in a rapid-fire hipster style, and they sing brilliantly in close harmony. I heard them live in a concert at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, a thousand-seat venue in Memorial Hall, just up the street from the museum formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger, home of E. Power Biggs’s iconic Flentrop organ. As we left the room after the concert, I was exhausted and assumed that most people present felt the same way. I reflected that those four performers spent enough energy to wear out the entire audience.

Just what is performance? Of course, performance is an artist presenting before an audience. Performers are actors, musicians, dancers, comedians, and various combinations of all those elements. But there’s more to it than sitting at an instrument, playing pieces of music. And, for the audience, the performance is more than simply sitting in a chair and listening.

There’s some kind of deal, some kind of relationship set up between performer and audience. Perhaps it’s tension—the audience is expectant and the performer intends to sate them. Perhaps it’s trust—the audience relies on the performer to present the music freely and accurately. Perhaps it’s risk—the performer interprets familiar passages in new ways, causing the audience to sit on the edge of their seats. And perhaps it’s the baring of soul—the performer exposes his inner person to the audience, willing to share his private thoughts from the stage.

Some years ago, Wendy and I saw Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul at the Trinity Repertory Theater. One scene involved a male character, a diplomat in a position of power, who offered to provide the woman the visa she sought in return for sex. There was a struggle of wills until the actress tore off her blouse and, naked from the waist up, consented to the humiliation. That act took my breath away as an expression of a performer, baring herself both literally and figuratively. Her nakedness was metaphorical, a shout of anger at the ugly behavior of the diplomat. Her ability and willingness to do that in anger, apparently spontaneously, was one of the most eloquent instants in any performance I have witnessed.

Oh yes, I hear you sniggering out there. Of course he would never forget that. But how many of us have had performance anxiety dreams in which we are sitting at the organ in front of a room full of people and realize in horror that we are naked? Given the number of times I’ve heard friends and colleagues relate similar dreams, I’ll answer my own question. Lots of us. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to realize that those images are related to the requirement and expectation that when we perform, we are baring our souls and our artistic psyches before our audiences. Are we ready for that?

One concept of performance, often repeated, is that the performer is a vessel through which the music passes. An iconic painting hangs on a wall, open to the enjoyment and interpretation of the viewer. There is no need for a middleman between the artist and the consumer. The greatness of a composer is nothing but squiggles on a page until an artist brings them to life. And in my experience, the best performers and the most exciting performances happen when the artist-as-vessel is a conveyor of energy. Not only do the squiggles become organized sound, but they become energized, dancing, flitting, or tearing across the room. The artist transforms the squiggles into force, and topknots are uprooted.

That’s the sign of a great actress, who seems to be a completely different person in every role she plays. Think of the great Maggie Smith as the imperious, scathing Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, and compare that to the homeless Mary Shepherd in The Lady in the Van. You Downton Abbey fans, if you haven’t met Mary Shepherd, you must.

Bigger than yourself

Sometimes, the artist-as-vessel gets carried away and grows bigger than the music. Physical histrionics are purposefully created, supposedly adding to the artistic experience. The unvarying result is the opposite. The music takes a back seat to the performer, and the audience is the poorer. It’s as if you’re watching a gymnastics meet rather than an artistic performance. I don’t mind an occasional flourish, or a toss of the head at the end of an exciting passage, but I dislike unnecessary movement that seems theatrically planned.

Le Poisson Rouge is a trendy performance venue on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It’s downstairs (one can only imagine what would happen if there was a fire), and you sit at tables where you can order (pretty good) food and (very good) drinks. It’s within walking distance of our apartment, and we’ve heard quite a few wonderful performances there. But there was this duo-piano concert, two sisters who were personifications of the too-flashy, too-theatrical musician. The first chord made me cringe: the pianos were not in tune with each other. Wendy put her hand on my elbow, and hissed, “Behave.” She was right. I consoled myself by scrawling commentary on the program throughout their performance. The two pianists spent the evening tossing their hair, throwing their hands in the air, and making what their coaches must have thought were alluring facial expressions. We often talk about that performance in social settings, and we invariably call them “The Kissy Sisters.”

In professional football, a team is penalized when a player displays histrionics. It’s officially called “excessive celebration.” What if you had a button on the armrest of your concert hall seat that allowed you to vote? Artists whose first and last names are the same would be banned from the field.

Distraction

Did I mention that the pianos were not in tune with each other? Those who present concerts must accept the responsibility to create a suitable setting for performers and listeners. There were several hundred of us in that room, in fifty-dollar seats with twenty-dollar drinks. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t money to hire a piano tuner. There were two lovely Steinway “B’s” on the stage—at least they brought in good instruments. But had the pianos been in good tune, it might have taken me two or even three measures to dislike the performance.

During performances at Carnegie Hall in New York, there are huge glass snifters full of Ricola™ lozenges placed throughout the lobbies and corridors, a nice touch of consideration for all concert-goers. I remember hearing a radio story years ago about the London Symphony introducing “Silent Sweets,” little hard candies wrapped in paper specially designed to be quiet when opening.

Coughing and rustling candy wrappers are small fry when compared to cell phones. We’re all used to the public announcements before performances, reminding audiences to silence their cell phones. Look across the audience of a big formal concert and guess how many cell phones are in the room. Out of 2,500 people, I bet there are fewer than a hundred who don’t have phones with them.

On Thursday, January 12, 2012, The New York Times reported: 

They were baying for blood in the usually polite precincts of Avery Fisher Hall. The unmistakenly jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept going on, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor. 

You can read the story at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally-stopped-but-….

Coughing, crying babies, cell phones, and late arrivals are all intrusions into the relationship between performer and audience. Some are unavoidable. There are times when you just can’t help coughing. But thoughtful audience members must do their best to preserve the full experience for those around them. There’s a lot to be said for bringing children to concerts, but there’s a continuum between the child’s gain and the collective loss of hundreds of listeners whose experience was marred. Cell phones? No excuse. But the poor guy whose phone spoiled the New York Philharmonic’s concert had a plausible explanation. The New York Times reported that his company had replaced his Blackberry with an iPhone that day. He thought he had silenced it at the start of the concert, but didn’t realize that the alarm was set.

The consummate performer

We all have memories of spectacular live performances. Organist Stephen Tharp played the closing concert of the 2014 convention of the American Guild of Organists. Boston’s 3,000-seat First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) was filled to capacity with what must be the most critical audience an organist can face, and Tharp let loose with a performance that was dazzling both technically and artistically. His reading of his own transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring took the audience places they’d never been. In the three years since, I’ve discussed that concert with dozens of others who were there, most recently last night. And while you’d think that the wide world could dredge up one fussbudget who would criticize, I’ve never heard it. The concept of organ concerts changed that night, and everyone present knew it.

Another instance displaying the consummate performer was the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires’s experience with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1999. She was engaged to play a Mozart concerto, checked which one by referring to the orchestra’s published schedule, and prepared the piece. Not a good source, apparently. Amazingly, the first reading with the orchestra was during an open rehearsal in front of an audience. Conductor Riccardo Chailly began Mozart’s Concerto No. 20 in D Minor. Pires gave a shocked look, buried her face in her palm, then told Chailly that there was a problem. As the orchestra played, he turned to her and said something like, “You played it last year. You’ll be fine.” And she was. By the time the orchestra’s introduction was over, she had pulled herself together, dredged her memory for the correct piece, and played it flawlessly. You can see a video of that incredible moment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS64pb0XnbI.

I doubt that I fully understand the physiology that makes some people able to perform. How can a major league pitcher throw a strike in a tense situation when millions of people are watching? How can an actress toss aside all modesty to be someone else in front of an audience? How can a musician maintain control of her body to perform such intricate motions in front of thousands? What drives people to do that? What expansiveness of spirit is necessary? What generosity? What intense concentration?

I may not understand it, but I sure am grateful for every opportunity I’ve had to hear someone play beautifully. All of us who perform at any level need to witness others doing it as often as possible.

In the niche of time

The history of organ building and organ music is deep and rich, but the longer I toil in those vineyards, the more I realize how small it is in the wider world. The histories of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy fill libraries and geo-political history—especially the great procession of warfare that dominates every epoch of human existence, influencing the flow of the arts and academic thought. It may seem trite to acknowledge the relative insignificance of the pipe organ, but I notice that many professionals in the field focus on the interrelation of historic and geographic subdivisions of organ history, separate from the context of more general world history. 

I’ve often mentioned the juxtaposition of the fashionable Rococo courts of Western Europe, complete with minuets and powdered wigs, and the Minuteman of Lexington, Massachusetts, scrambling behind walls and fences, trying to outsmart the British Redcoats in the early days of the American Revolution. Paul Revere (1735–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) were all contemporaries. 

Most of us have all the libraries of the world at our fingertips—a few clicks or keystrokes can call up reliable information on any subject. You can do it while you’re sitting on an organ bench. Give a Google or two to consider the composer on your music rack today—what painters, philosophers, or writers might he have met? What war was coming up or going on? How might that have influenced his thinking? Or did he scram when things got rough so he could work in peace?

Ancient roots

The history of the pipe organ spans more than 2,250 years, starting with the hydraulis created by Ctesibius of Alexandria, Egypt, in about 256 BC. Sounds mighty old, but the hydraulis didn’t come out of thin air. Panpipes are still familiar to us today and predated the hydraulis by many centuries. With a dozen or more of individual flutes lashed together, the panpipe is a sort of pipe organ, minus the mechanical valve systems and the User Interface (keyboards) of “modern organs” built after 1250 AD. You can hear live performances on panpipes (for a modest donation) most days in New York’s Times Square Metro Station.

The Chinese sheng is a little like an ocarina with vertical pipes—an obvious precursor to the organ. It’s easy to find photos online. It is a common mainstay of Chinese classical music, with ancient roots. Archeologists working in the Hubei Province in 1978 unearthed a 2,400-year-old royal tomb that contained a sheng.

Most of us learned about the supposed oldest playable organ from E. Power Biggs, who featured the organ in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Valère, Sion, Switzerland, in his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. We read on the jacket notes of that vinyl LP that the organ was built in 1390, more than a century before Christopher Columbus ostensibly discovered the New World. It’s now generally thought to have been built in 1435, 17 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was active in Florence at that time—the dome of the cathedral there for which Brunelleschi is perhaps best known was constructed right at the time of his death. Cosimo de’ Medici, the great patriarch of the fabled Florentine banking family, inherited his fortune in 1429. Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who told us that the sun is the center of the universe, wasn’t born until 1473.¹ It’s fun to note that Cosimo, Brunelleschi, and the builder of the organ at Sion lived in a world where it was believed that Earth was the center of the universe.² As a sailor, I wonder how Christopher Columbus navigated?

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621)

Sweelinck was born and died in Amsterdam. He assumed the position of organist at that city’s Oude Kerk in 1577 at the age of fifteen and worked there the rest of his life. His employment was unusual for his day in that playing the organ was his sole responsibility. That left him with plenty of time to teach, and his studio included such luminaries as Praetorius, Scheidemann, and Samuel Scheidt. So while he was born in the last years of the broadly defined Renaissance, his music and teaching formed a bridge between, let’s say, Palestrina and Buxtehude—a mighty tall order.³

One of Sweelinck’s greatest hits is Balletto del Granduca, a set of variations on a simple theme. On my desk right now is the “sheet music” edition I bought as a teenager ($1.00), Associated Music Publishers, edited by E. Power Biggs. (Wasn’t he a great educator?)

Painters Rubens and Caravaggio were Sweelinck’s contemporaries, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was completed a few years after his death. Heliocentrism (the Sun as the center of the universe) was confirmed by astronomer Johannes Kepler in his publication Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596. The Edict of Nantes was signed by King Henry IV of France in 1598, recognizing the basic rights of Protestants (Huguenots) in predominantly Roman Catholic France, including the right to freely practice their religion. Henry IV was murdered in 1610 by the radical Catholic François Ravaillac, and succeeded by his son, Louis XIII. Coincidentally, the King James Bible was published in 1611.

Sweelinck was a Calvinist, a doctrine governed by the regulative principle, which limited worship to the teachings of the New Testament. Calvin notwithstanding, Sweelinck’s creativity was encouraged by the Consistory of Dordrecht of 1598, in which organists were instructed to play variations on Genevan Psalm tunes in an effort to help the people learn them.

On closer shores, British refugees established the Colony of Virginia in 1607, French refugees established the city of Quebec in 1608, and Dutch refugees founded New York in 1612. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, two years before Sweelinck’s death.

Given that much of the migration of Europeans toward the “New World” was inspired by religious persecution, we read that Sweelinck lived in an era of dramatic international religious tension and change. It’s not much of a stretch to compare those tensions around the year 1600 with today’s religious persecution, division, and fundamentalism.

(I’ll let you do Bach!)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)

Beethoven (1770–1827) was 29 when Mendelssohn was born, and Mendelssohn was 24 when Brahms (1833–97) was born.⁴ Felix Mendelssohn was as precocious as musicians get. He wrote 12 string symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. His three piano quartets were written between 1822 and 1825 (you do the math!)—these were his first published works. I’ve long counted his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream among my favorite pieces. Its brilliant passagework, soaring melodies, sumptuous orchestration, and driving rhythms are a tour de force for modern orchestras and ferociously challenging to organists playing it in transcription. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a mature work, but it’s the product of a 17 year old. What were you doing when you were 17?

The 1820s was a decade of violent uprisings all over Europe. Italians revolted against King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, resulting in the formation of a constitutional monarchy. A colonel in the Spanish army assembled a mutiny against King Ferdinand VII, who capitulated to their demands for a liberal constitution. France answered Ferdinand’s plea for assistance by sending 100,000 soldiers, quelling the uprising, and restoring the absolute monarchy. There were revolutions in Portugal and Brazil, and in a brutal revolutionary war, Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire. The death of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1821 coincided with Mendelssohn’s prolific adolescence. In the United States in 1825, John Quincy Adams was president, the Erie Canal was opened, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, passed away.

One of Mendelssohn’s greatest hits is his Violin Concerto, completed and premiered in 1845, four years before his death. The year 1845 was a busy one around the world. Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven, Baylor University and the United States Naval Academy were founded, James Polk succeeded John Tyler as President of the United States, and the potato blight began in Ireland. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an earth-shaking work that represented several giant steps in the march toward the American Civil War.

There were many “firsts” that year: a “screw-powered” steamship crossed the Atlantic, anesthesia was used to ease childbirth, the New York Herald mentioned baseball, and the rubber band was invented in Great Britain. It has never occurred to me to associate Felix Mendelssohn with baseball, anesthesia, or rubber bands. Do you suppose Mendelssohn ever rolled up a manuscript with a rubber band?

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Widor is probably forever to be remembered by legions of organists and brides for one piece of music. But seventy-five measures of sixteenth notes in 4/2 time, followed by three of big whole-note chords in F major is a pittance when compared to the rest of his massive output of music. He wrote tons of orchestral music including symphonies, works for orchestra with organ, piano, violin, cello, harp, chorus, and various huge combinations. There are six duos for piano and harmonium, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and sonatas for violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet. There are reams of piano music, songs, and choral music, even music for the stage. But all we really know are ten organ symphonies along with a half-dozen incidental pieces for organ. And most of us only play one of his pieces. Oh yes, there’s also a doozy in G minor, but it’s a lot harder.

Widor was one of the most important teachers of his generation, succeeding César Franck as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890, later leaving that post to become professor of composition. His students included Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Schweitzer.

Widor studied in Brussels with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (lots of us play Lemmens’s Fanfare). When he finished those studies in 1868 at the age of 24, he moved to Paris where he was appointed assistant to Camille Saint-Säens at Église de la Madeleine. And in 1870, he was appointed “provisional” organist at Ste-Sulpice, the most prestigious post in France and home to the fantastic Cavaillé-Coll organ that is revered, cherished, and studied by generations of organists and organbuilders around the world. His primary advocate for that envied position was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll himself, who had been disappointed by the flippancy of the music of Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–69), the previous organist who had presided over the first years of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece. It’s rumored that Cavaillé-Coll’s agitation contributed to Lefébure-Wély’s early death. (You gotta watch out for those organbuilders!)

Daniel Roth, the current organist at Ste-Sulpice,⁵ visited New York City to play a recital at Church of the Resurrection, where I, with the Organ Clearing House, had installed a renovated and relocated 1916 Casavant organ. It was an exciting moment for us to have such a master player perform on “our” instrument, but one of the most interesting moments came not at the organ console, but walking the sidewalks of Park Avenue, when Monsieur Roth told me some of the back story surrounding Widor’s appointment in 1870.

That’s the year that the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had used brilliant and nefarious schemes to provoke a French attack on Prussia. The French Parliament declared war on the German Kingdom of Prussia on July 16, 1870, the Germans were armed and in position, and quickly invaded northeastern France. Paris fell to Prussian forces in January of 1871. In May of 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany what is now Alsace-Lorraine, and the balance of power in Europe was upset. France was determined to reclaim lost territory, Britain was nervous about the change of balance in power, and the seeds were sown for World War I.

In that harsh political climate, patriotic (and perhaps, bigoted) Frenchmen considered Belgium as German,⁶ and Widor’s detractors whispered in the ears of the priests that Widor “plays like a German.” Cavaillé-Coll prevailed, and Widor was appointed. But his appointment was never made formal. He served Ste-Sulpice as provisional organist for 64 years. Widor’s student Marcel Dupré succeeded him, and served until 1971—more than a hundred years after Widor’s appointment.⁷

Claude Monet (1840–1926) completed some of his early works while living in Paris between 1865 and 1870, when Camille Doncieux was his model for The Woman in the Green Dress, Woman in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine. Camille gave birth to their son in 1867, and they were married on June 28, 1870, less than three weeks before the start of the Franco-Prussian War. As the war started, Monet fled to England with his new wife and child, where he studied the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. How’s that for war influencing the arts?

Édouard Manet, James Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir were contemporaries of Widor. Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir were all active in Paris when Widor was organist at Ste-Sulpice. I wonder if they met? What would they have talked about?

And that organ?

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Ste-Sulpice was built in 1862, incorporating some pipes from the previous (1781) Clicquot organ. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was one of the largest organs in the world. (An additional voice was added when Widor retired.) It included pneumatic actions to assist the vast mechanical systems, a complex wind system with multiple wind pressures (all in the days of hand-pumping), a state-of-the-art whiz-bang console with arrays of mechanical registration devices, and a huge palette of tonal innovations. 

Europe had not cornered the market on war in those days. The American Civil War was in full swing when Cavaillé-Coll completed that organ. In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. Do you suppose Widor ever read Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government, Slavery in Massachusetts, or Walden? And who will be the first to include Battle Hymn of the Republic on their recording at Ste-Sulpice?

§

Maybe Felix Mendelssohn was aware of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, but it would be a reach to trace how that machine influenced Mendelssohn’s music (though there are dissertations out there that seem just as obscure). Widor had to have noticed the Prussian occupation of Paris as he was starting his epic tenure at Ste-Sulpice. He must have had terrifying walks to church past Prussian soldiers brandishing weapons. Such a sight would have influenced my improvisations. And suppose he had happened to meet Degas or Renoir at a reception. Would he have gone to the studio for coffee the next day and discussed the confluence of pictorial art and music?

In its collective history, the organ is an exquisite example of the highest of human achievements. It combines an array of crafts, it functions thanks to scientific principles, and it evokes the full range of human emotions. But it’s not a be-all or end-all. Its place in our society is the result of complex evolution, and given the complexity of today’s world and the state of today’s church, we’re passing through a time that has been less than a Golden Age.

But the range of the instrument, the breadth of its history, and the sheer power of its voice continue to keep it in the forefront. However obscure and arcane, its nearly unique status as a vehicle for improvisation equips it perfectly as an instrument of the future. What will future generations deduce from today’s organ music when they look back and consider the wide world in which we live today?

And here’s a hint: your recital audience loves to hear this stuff. Of course we’re interested in the intricacies of sonata form, or the structure of a fugue (“listen for the entrances”), but the people might get more out of connecting your organ world with their history world, their literature world, their art world. It took me about seven hours to write this piece, including the deep research. It’s not a big effort, and it adds a lot. The buzz phrase in the real estate world is “location, location, location.” How about “relevance, relevance, relevance?” ν

Notes

1. A general note: In this essay, I’m tossing about lots of supposedly specific facts. As usual, I’m sitting at my desk with nothing but a laptop, and I’m gathering data from quick Google searches. Much of the data comes from Wikipedia, which we suppose is generally accurate, but cannot be relied on as absolute. I am, therefore, not citing each specific reference, and offer the caveat that any factual errors are unintentional. They are offered to provide general historical context, and discrepancies of a year or two are inconsequential for this purpose.

2. There may well be some hangers-on who still believe that the sun revolves around the earth!

3. Similarly, Haydn was eighteen years old when J. S. Bach died, just as the Baroque era was ending. 

4. I like telling people that my great-grandmother, Ruth Cheney, was seven years old when Brahms died, and my sons were present at her funeral in 1994. On her hundredth birthday she increased from one cigarette a day to two! I treasure her piano, an 1872 rosewood Steinway, passed through our family to me as the only musician in my generation.

5. Daniel Roth has just been named International Performer of the Year by the New York City AGO chapter.

6. Today, Belgium has three official languages: French, German, and Dutch.

7. It’s poignant to remember that in his memoir, Dupré wrote of the agonies of World War II. He and his wife stayed at their home in Meudon during the Nazi occupation. German officers visited their home, planning to install guns on the roof, which commanded a view of Paris. Somehow the presence of the big pipe organ in the Salle d’orgue helped them decide not to. Later, their home was badly damaged by a German bomb. For the first two weeks of the German occupation, with no other transportation available, the Duprés (then in their fifties) walked the several miles to Ste-Sulpice.

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.

§

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.

§

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.

§

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.

§

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.

We’re working on it.

This is a lovely moment to be writing. It’s about 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting at the dining table in our house in Maine, with a nice view down the river. It’s 19 degrees and snowing, with wind from the northeast at eight-to-ten. Wendy left here yesterday for an important engagement in Providence, bugging out a day early to beat the bad weather. I’d say I’m alone in the house, except Farley the Goldendoodle is here with me. A half hour ago, I lit the dining room woodstove, so it’s nice and cozy. To complete the lovely scene, there’s a boat coming up the river. Did I mention that it’s snowing?

The Damariscotta River is a tidal estuary, 12 miles from the Gulf of Maine to the bridge between the villages of Newcastle (where we live) and Damariscotta. We’re about eight miles up from the ocean. The river is fully tidal­—the water rises and falls an average of about ten and a half feet, twice a day—and it’s renowned for aquaculture. Farmers raise mussels and oysters in large waterborne plots that they rent from the towns. Mussels grow underwater hanging from ropes, and oysters grow in half-submerged flat baskets that float on the surface, and the farmers tend them using 20 to 25 foot skiffs with outboard motors.

One summer, our daughter, Meg, worked for an oyster farmer. It was back breaking work, leaning out of boats to turn those baskets, and digging in the mud for the natural oysters. The farm was just down the road, so she could come home for lunch, muddy and tired, but happy with the dozen oysters she’d share with her mother. She tanned dark brown and went back to school strong and slim. But catch my key word there. Summer. If you’re going to work on the water, you might as well be out on a boat in the sunshine. The magic ends when that little boat is churning upriver against a bitter wind during a snowstorm, whitecaps breaking over the bow, covering the farmers in freezing salt spray. It’s much nicer work to be sitting by the fire, writing.

In 1993, the poet Donald Hall wrote Life Work, a slim book of musing about what it means to work at what matters to you.¹ Early in his career, Hall was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, living a suburban life of cocktail parties and dealing with the mechanics and minutia that are the workings of a large institution. His marriage failed, and he took a lifetime risk, leaving the security of tenure and pension and moving onto the rural New Hampshire farm where his grandparents had lived to focus on writing. He supported himself writing reviews, magazine articles, and several books, while working endlessly on his poetry. He describes how a brief poem would travel through scores, even hundreds of drafts. He also describes the repetitive annual routine of his grandfather’s farming—how the changing seasons drove the succession of work days through plowing, planting, harvesting, milking, haying. His grandfather’s unfailing work ethic was inspiration to a lifetime of writing.  

In Life Work, Hall wrote about his friendship with the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986). Moore is best known for monumental bronze sculptures located across the world. He worked in the abstract, creating small-scale clay models as he explored shapes, and increasing the scale as he passed through multiple “drafts” of each work before committing them to the eternity of bronze. Hall reflected on artists’ passion, as they devote their lives to their work. Creating monumental sculpture in bronze requires immense dedication, and handling the materials involved is heavy physical work. Is that harder work than the dogged pursuit of a poet, demanding of himself hundreds of drafts of an 80-word poem?

The other day, I stacked this year’s cord of firewood in the usual place along the north wall of the garage. It had been delivered by a dump truck and was in a knee-high pile near the stack site. It took me two hours to move two tons of wood from below knee level on to a stack with more than half of it above waist level.² That work was like Donald Hall’s grandfather’s chore of tossing forkfuls of hay into the loft of the barn, a necessary seasonal chore. Some of that wood is burning in the stove now.  

Henry Moore moved tons of clay from table height to the extremes of height of his largest pieces. I suppose he carried clay in buckets up ladders. His hands would have been iron-hard like those of the hay-pitching farmer.

Back to work

Michelangelo’s famous marble statue,
David, is about 17 feet tall and weighs nearly 12,500 pounds. I love the (perhaps) apocryphal quote from Michelangelo when he was asked how he accomplished such a masterpiece: “All I did was chip away the stone that didn’t look like David.” That leads me to wonder what the original stone weighed. Was it twice as much, three times as much as the finished statue? Let’s say it was 30,000 pounds—fifteen tons. First, that rascal was cut from a hillside in Carrara near Italy’s Ligurian coast, then moved almost 90 miles to Florence. That would be enough of a challenge today with heavy trucks, hydraulic lifting equipment, and modern highways. Imagine it with ox-drawn carts, levers, and muddy, rutted hilly roads.

And once that mighty stone was in place, Michelangelo had to remove 17,500 pounds of marble chips. Popeye had nothing on him for hands and forearms. He would have had stone chips in his eyes and fierce aches and pains at the end of the day. It’s meaningful to appreciate this work of art from that point of view, that the result of such extreme physical labor would be the emergence of the monumental, elegant, sensual figure taking life under the tools of the master. Just how did he know which chip was part of David and which wasn’t? There are some pretty sensitive areas there that would be a shame to whack with a chisel.³

I wonder if he knew that the immense toil of quarrying and transporting that stone and chipping away almost nine tons of marble to reveal that image would leave five centuries of viewers in awe, moved to tears by the beauty, majesty, and humanity of that image.

The work of life

When you visit the Noack Organ Company in Georgetown, Massachusetts, you’re greeted by a display of photographs of all the instruments built by the firm. They’re currently working on Opus 162 for St. Peter’s Church in Washington, D.C. Fritz Noack retired in 2015, and Didier Grassin is the active leader of the company. Didier reports that he has been responsible for the last three Noack organs, and that the first “real organ” built by Fritz Noack was Opus 9, so Fritz’s career spans 149 organs. What a remarkable achievement. Think of that in terms of tons of tin and lead, hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber, perhaps tens of thousands of sheets of sandpaper. You know why you need more sheets of sandpaper? Because you wear it out with elbow grease.

In a 50-week year of 40-hour weeks, a worker produces 2,000 person-hours. If there was an average of seven people in the Noack shop over the years, that would make 14,000 person hours each year.  Opus 9 was built in 1962, so Fritz’s career spanned 53 years during which he produced 149 organs in 742,000 person hours. Let’s guess that a quarter of those hours (185,500) were spent on service, maintenance, tuning, rebuilding, and other work not related to the numbered organs. That would mean that 556,500 hours were spent building 149 organs—an average of 3,735 hours per organ. I suppose that some took fewer than 2,000 hours, and a few probably took 10,000 or more.

That’s a staggering amount of work and a splendid heritage. The display of photos on the workshop stairway shows the development and maturation of an artist as well as the progression of styles of expression in American organ building. Nice going, Fritz.

Stop to think.

Have you ever been in the presence of a new monumental organ? Have you touched one, played one, or just sat alone in the room gazing at it? Every surface is made smooth by the hands of a craftsman. Hand-turned drawknobs gleam. Maybe there’s an exquisite bit of marquetry on the music rack, and snazzy carvings on the key-cheeks. Tilt back and look up at the tower crowns. They might be 30 feet off the floor, but every one of the myriad miter joints is perfect, ready for close-up inspection.

Have you been inside such an organ? Row upon row of gleaming pipes, each row a unique voice waiting to be called
on. Precise matrices of mechanical parts, some massive and powerful for stop actions, some feathery and light for keyboard actions. Or if the organ uses electricity in its actions, you’ll find neat bundles of wires, carefully obscured, carrying the complex signals that are the music.

I spend a lot of time around pipe organs. Some are ordinary, unremarkable, and some are downright awful. But those instruments add to my appreciation, my awe of an organ produced by true craftspeople. The Organ Clearing House is frequently engaged by other firms to assist in the installation of new instruments. We always regard that as a special statement of trust, as we are allowed an intimate look into the ways and work of the individual firm. Often the paperwork and specifications that precede a job are beautifully crafted, forming a prelude to our relationship with the instrument itself.

As thrilling as it is to see a finished organ, working with an instrument in pieces is the best way to appreciate what goes into it. Once when we were delivering a new instrument to a church, unloading thousands of components from a truck and laying them out on blankets across the backs of the pews, a parishioner commented to me, “Watching this for three minutes has told me more about why the organ is so expensive than hundreds of hours of committee meetings.”

We select organ parts in the correct order, carry or hoist them to their spot in the loft, lay them out and screw them together. Perfect. Just like it was made that way! After the many thousands of hours spent making all that stuff, it’s a touch of magic to put it all together in its final location. In 1977, I had the privilege of helping install the new Flentrop organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, a three-manual organ with Rückpositiv and a tall mahogany case perched on a beautiful loft. In those days, I was the 21-year-old brute who did some of the heaviest lifting, so I was in the thick of it as we installed the gleaming polished façade pipes. That’s a special kind of work, handling 700-pound polished pipes, 30 feet off the marble floor. Leaving the church at the end of that grueling day, we turned to look back at the instrument. The façade pipes were bathed in the deep tones of blue and red as the afternoon sun poured through the stained-glass windows, and I burst into tears. Some tough guy.

The philosophy of that organ was grounded in the heritage of eighteenth-century northern European instruments. Careful planning was involved in determining pipe scales, case dimensions, wind conveyance, and mechanical action. But don’t forget for a moment that the splash of sunlight sparkling on the polished tin and gold leaf was part of the plan. It was making music before the blower was hooked up.

Flentrop Orgelbouw was founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop (1866–1950). His son, Dirk (1910–2003), grew up working for the family firm and assumed leadership control in 1940. During his tenure, the firm produced around 250 organs and restored more than 100 instruments, another wonderful example of a life’s work devoted to the organ.

Somebody play.

Once an organ is built, we need someone to play it. In the last several years, the editors of The Diapason have been recognizing rising young stars through the program “20 Under 30.” These brilliant young artists are chosen from fields of more than 100 nominations, all of which reflects the extraordinary level of musicianship and artistry from the younger generations of organists. It seems to me a thrilling upswing in this noble art, which is essential to ensuring the future of the fabulously expensive art of building organs.

Recently, Stephen Tharp posted a tidbit informing us that he had played his 1,500th organ recital. Now in his mid-40s, Stephen is a consummate artist, dazzling audiences with rich and thrilling performances. He serves as artist-in-residence at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where his full-time job is to practice many hours every day, always working on music to feature in the next tour. That work is comparable to Donald Hall’s multiple drafts of each poem—hundreds of hours of intellectual and artistic toil, always developing new pedagogic skills to further the freedom of artistic expression. It takes countless repetitions and hundreds of hours of knuckle busting nit picking to absorb and express a complex score. It takes motivation, diligence, fervor, and devotion to take a program of music from the printed page and pass it through an organ, turning it into audible art. It’s a life’s work to build a repertory and to nourish a creative soul capable of such sophisticated expression.

Recently, I watched the BBC documentary, Simon Rattle: The Making of a Maestro, an hour-long look into the development and career of that brilliant musician. (You can find this easily on YouTube: just search “Simon Rattle Documentary.”) His love and ability as a musician was the force behind the rejuvenation of an entire city. Under his leadership, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was established in a terrific new performing arts center, transforming the town and its population. What an eloquent example of the power of music.

That leaves the rest of us.

I’m no Simon Rattle. The fate of the city doesn’t hang on my success. I’m also not the old-time farmer, doggedly moving from one chore to the next at the behest of the seasons. I’m fortunate to work in a field that I care about. And I value the examples of geniuses around me, and the geniuses that came before who helped define all the expressions of humanity—the Humanities. Writers, painters, sculptors, philosophers—artists in general have collaborated to form the human condition.

Sometimes the organ seems to us to be the center of the universe, and for many of us, it is the center of our universe. But in reality, it’s an eloquent part of a much larger whole, perhaps using its noble voice to speak for other artists. We are not living in normal times, and we are not the first society to have that experience. In response, we are called to “hold fast to that which is good,” to proclaim the necessity of the arts in our lives. We do that by living artistic lives in whatever capacity we can.

Leonard Bernstein famously said, “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Substitute strife, confusion, injustice, or anger for the word “violence,” and follow the great artists who have paved the way for us. And be sure you’re paving the way for those who follow in any way you can.

Notes

1. Published by Beacon Press.

2. I know it was two tons because I guessed three, Wendy doubted it, and I googled it!

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo).

It works for me.

After I graduated from Oberlin, we lived in a rented four-bedroom farmhouse with a huge yard in the rolling countryside a few miles outside the town. Foreshadowing fracking, there was a natural gas well on the property that supplied the house. It was a great place to live, but there were some drawbacks. The gas flowed freely from the well in warm weather, but was sluggish in cold. The furnace was mounted on tall legs because the basement flooded. All the plumbing in the house was in a wing that included kitchen, bathroom, and laundry machines, but the basement didn’t extend under the wing, so the pipes froze in cold weather. 

After a couple winters there, we had wrapped the pipes with electrified heating tape, mastered how to set the furnace to run just enough when the gas well was weak, and learned to anticipate when the basement would flood so we could run a pump and head off the mess. 

Outside, there was a beautiful redbud tree, several huge willows, acres of grass to mow, and the residual effects of generations of enthusiastic gardening. One summer, the peonies on either side of the shed door grew at radically different rates. One was huge and lush while the other was spindly. I was curious until I investigated and found an opossum carcass under the healthy one. Not that you would read The Diapason for gardening tips, but I can tell you that a dead ’possum will work wonders for your peonies!

I wanted to care for that landscape, so I bought an old walk-behind Gravely tractor with attachments. I could swap mower for roto-tiller for snow-blower, and there was a sulky—a two-wheeled trailer with a seat that allowed me to ride behind when mowing. I remember snatching cherry tomatoes off the vines, hot from the sunlight, as I motored past the garden.

I was the only one who could get the Gravely to start, at least I think so, given that I was only one who used it. It had a manual choke that had to be set just so. Then, as I pressed the starter button with my right toe, I’d move the throttle from fully closed to about a quarter open, and the engine would catch. I’d run it at that slow speed for about ten seconds, and it would be ready to work. If I did anything different, it would stall.

The bigger the toys . . .

I learned a lot about machines from Tony Palkovic who lived across the street. He had an excavating business and owned a fleet of huge machines. One weekend I helped him remove the drive wheels from his 110,000-pound Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer to replace the bearings. It involved a couple house jacks and 6-inch open-end wrenches that were eight feet long and weighed a hundred pounds. He used his backhoe to lift the wheels off the axles, not a job for “triple A.” I admired his affinity for his machines, and it was fun to watch him operate them. The way he combined multiple hydraulic movements with his fingertips on the levers created almost human-like motions, and he liked to show off by picking up things like soda cans with the bucket of a 40-ton machine.

The soul of the machine

In The Soul of the New Machine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), author Tracy Kidder follows the development of a new generation of computer technology, and grapples with the philosophical questions surrounding the creation and advances of “high-tech.” We’re beholden to it (witness the lines at Apple stores recently as the new iPhone was released), but we might not be sure if the quality of our lives is actually improved. Yesterday, a friend tweeted, “There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.” Have you ever sat on a rock, talking with a friend, dangling your toes in the water until the rising tide brings the water up to your knees?

There’s a mystical place where soul and machine combine to become a pipe organ. The uninitiated might look inside an organ and see only mechanical mysteries. Many organs are damaged or compromised by uninformed storage of folding chairs and Christmas decorations within. But the organ is a complex machine whose inanimate character must disappear so as not to interfere with the making of music.

Musicians have intimate relationships with their instruments. In Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, page 5), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writes, “When I hold the violin, my left arm 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, in a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” 

No organist can claim such an affinity, not even with the tiniest, most sensitive continuo organ. Steinhardt refers to instruments that you “play at arm’s length.” More usually, the organist sits at a set of keyboards separated from the instrument by at least several feet, and sometimes by dozens or even hundreds of feet. And in the case of electric or electro-pneumatic keyboard actions, he is removed from any direct physical or mechanical connection with the instrument he’s playing. He might as well phone it in.

A pipe organ of average size is a complex machine. A thirty-stop organ has about 1,800 pipes. If it’s a two-manual tracker organ, there are 154 valves controlled by the keys, a system of levers (multiplied by thirty) to control the stops, a precisely balanced action chassis with mechanical couplers, and a wind system with self-regulating valves, along with any accessories that may be included. If it’s a two-manual electro-pneumatic organ, there are 1,800 note valves, 122 manual primary valves (twice that many if it’s a Skinner organ), and hundreds of additional valves for stop actions, bass notes, and accessories.

But the conundrum is that we expect all that machinery to disappear as we play. We work to eliminate every click, squeak, and hiss. We expect massive banks of expression shutters to open and close instantly and silently. We’re asking a ten-ton machine in a monumental space to emulate Arnold Steinhardt’s loving caress. 

It’s a “one-off.”

Most of the machines we use are mass-produced. The car you buy might be the 755,003rd unit built to identical specifications on an automated assembly line. If there’s a defect, each unit has the same defect. But while individual components in an organ, such as windchest actions, might be standardized at least to the instruments of a single builder, each pipe organ is essentially a prototype—one of a kind. The peculiarities of an organ chamber or organ case determine the routes of mechanical actions, windlines, and tuning access. The layout of the building determines where the blower will be located, as well as the relationship between musician and machine.

The design of the instrument includes routing wind lines from blower to reservoirs, and from reservoirs to windchests. Each windchest has a support system: ladders, passage boards, and handrails as necessary to allow the tuner access to all the pipes. An enclosed division has a frame in which the shutters are mounted and a mechanism to open and close the shutters, either by direct mechanical linkage or a pneumatic or electric machine. Some expressive divisions are enclosed in separate rooms of the building with the expression frame and shutters being the only necessary construction, but others are freestanding within the organ, so the organbuilder provides walls, ceiling, access doors, ladders, and passage boards as required. The walls and ceiling are ideally made of a heavy, sound-deadening material so the shutter openings are the only path for egress of sound.

What’s in a tone?

Galileo said, “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.” While it may not be immediately apparent, mathematics is the heart of the magic of organ pipes. Through centuries of experimentation, organbuilders have established “norms” that define the differences between, say, flute tone and principal tone. The physical characteristics of organ pipes that determine their tone are defined using ratios. The “scale” of the pipe is the ratio of the length to the diameter. The “cut-up” that defines the height of a pipe’s mouth is the ratio of mouth height to the mouth width. The “mouth width” is the ratio of mouth width to the circumference. The type and thickness of the metal is important to the tone, so the organbuilder has to calculate, or guess, what material to use in order to achieve just the tone he’s looking for.

Finally, the shape of the pipe’s resonator is a factor. A tapered pipe sounds different from a cylindrical pipe, and the taper is described as a ratio of bottom diameter to top diameter. A square wooden pipe sounds different from a round metal pipe. A stopped wooden pipe sounds different from a capped metal pipe, even if the scales are identical. When comparing the scale of a wood pipe to that of a metal pipe, the easiest criterion is the area of the pipe’s cross section—depth times width of the wood pipe is compared to πr² of the metal pipe. If the results of those two formulas are equal, the scale is the same.

The reason all these factors affect the tone of the pipes is that each different design, each different shape, each different material chosen emphasizes a different set of harmonics. The organbuilder, especially the voicer or the tuner, develops a sixth sense for identifying types of pipes by their sounds. He instantly hears the difference between a wood Bourdon and a metal Gedeckt, or between the very narrow-scale Viole d’Orchestre and the slightly broader Salicional. He can tell the difference between high and low cutup just by listening. Conversely, his intuition tells him which selections of stops, which types of material, what level of wind pressure will produce the best sounding organ for the building.

The keen-eared organist can intuit all this information. Why does a Rohrflöte 8′ sound good with a Koppelflöte 4′? You may not know the physical facts that produce the complementary harmonics, but if you’re listening well, you sure can hear them. Early in my organ studies, a teacher told me not to use a Flute 4′ with a Principal 8′. Fair enough. That’s true in many cases. But it might be magical on a particular organ. Ask yourself if a combination sounds good—if it sounds good, it probably is good.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If the organ is part machine and part mathematics, and the musician is physically separated from the creation of tone, how can it be musical or artistic? How can an organist achieve the sensitivity of a violinist or a clarinetist who have direct physical control over the creation of tone? If you don’t have a good embouchure, you don’t make pretty sounds.

While I’ve talked about mechanisms and the mystical properties of the sound of the pipes driven by their math, we’re still missing something. Without wind, we have nothing but a big pile of wood, metal, and leather. Wind is a lively, living commodity. It has character and life. It’s endlessly variable. Outdoors in the open climate, wind is capricious. Any sailor knows that. You can be roaring along with white water boiling from under your transom, sails and sheets taut, and suddenly you fall flat as the wind dies. Or it shifts direction a few points and instead of drawing you along, it stops you dead.

Inside our organs, we harness the wind. We use electric blowers that provide a strong steady supply of wind, we build windlines and ducts that carry the wind from one place to another without loss through leakage. We design regulators with valves that regulate the wind (we also call them reservoirs because they store the regulated pressurized air), and respond to the demands of the music by allowing air to pass through as the valves open and the speaking pipes demand it, and our windchest actions operate those valves as commanded by the keyboards under the hands of the musician.

When you’re sitting on the bench, or inside the organ chamber, and the organ blower is off, the whole thing is static, inanimate. It’s like the violin or clarinet resting on padded velvet inside a locked case. I’ve always loved the moment when the blower is turned on when I’m inside an organ. You hear the first rotations of the motor, the first whispers of air stirring from the basement, and a creak or two as reservoirs fill and the springs pull taut. Hundreds of things are happening. When the blower is running at full speed and all the reservoirs have filled, the organ is alive and expectant—waiting to be told what to do. And at the first touch of the keyboard, the music begins.

Defining the indefinable

Once we’re playing, we enter the world of metaphysics. Intellectually, we understand how everything is functioning, but philosophically, we can hardly believe it’s true. Combinations of stops blend to create tone colors that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Peculiarities of acoustics create special effects heard in one location, but nowhere else. The motion of the air is apparent in the sound of the pipes, not, as a wag might quip, because faulty balance or low supply makes the wind wiggle, but because that air is alive as it moves through the organ’s appliances.

It’s that motion of wind that gives the organ soul. This is why the sounds of an electronic instrument can never truly equal those of the pipe organ. Sound that is digitally reproduced and funneled through loudspeakers can never have life. The necessary perfection of repetition of electronic tone defies the liveliness of the pipe organ. Just like the mouth-driven clarinet, it’s impossible that every wind-driven organ pipe will sound exactly the same, every time it’s played. It’s the millions of nearly imperceptible variations that give the thing life.

This starts to explain how the most mechanical and apparently impersonal of musical instruments can respond differently to the touch of different players. I’ve written several times about our experience of attending worship on Easter Sunday at St. Thomas’s Church in New York, when after hearing different organists playing dozens of voluntaries, hymns, responses, and accompaniments, the late John Scott slid onto the bench to play the postlude. The huge organ there is in questionable condition and soon to be replaced, but nonetheless, there was something about the energy passing through Scott’s fingers onto the keys that woke the gale that is the organ’s wind system and set the place throbbing. It was palpable. It was tangible. It was indescribable, and it was thrilling.

§

My friend Tony cared about his machines, not just because they were the tools with which he made his living, but because their inanimate whims responded to his understanding. We survived in that beguiling but drafty and imperfect house because as we loved it, we got to know it, and outsmarted most of its shortcomings. And I had lots of fun with that old Gravely, taking care of it, coaxing it to start, and enjoying the results of the mechanical effort.

Tony’s D-9 moved dirt—lots of dirt. But the sound of the organ moves me. And because I see it moving others, it moves me more. It’s all about the air.