In the wind. . . .

When it’s time, it’s time.

Old friends from New Haven came to New York for an overnight visit on Friday, April 13. We heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play at Carnegie Hall that night, and spent Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were taking the train home in the afternoon and had luggage with them, so we took my car to the museum, and I found a lucky parking space on East 79th Street. After lunch, we returned to the car to learn that I had misread the signs and had been treated to a bright orange envelope tucked under my windshield wiper. Oh well. It was in the mid-seventies that day, so I turned on the air conditioning. Nothing. We drove down Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Terminal with the windows open.

New York is a great place to live, but as we have the luxury of a house in Maine, there are a few things we try to do only in Maine to avoid the city surcharge. Among others, our dentist, veterinarian, and dog groomers are in Maine. (Besides the exorbitant cost, you should see some of the fru-fru rainbow jobs that come out of Greenwich Village Doggie Spas!) Groceries and staples like paper products and cleaning supplies are far cheaper in Maine, with many items at half the city price. And car repairs. Sitting in the waiting room of a Manhattan garage, you just know that creepy stuff is going on behind the scenes. I waited until I got back to Maine to have the air conditioning checked.

I drive a 2008 Chevy Suburban, that big black job used by the Secret Service, FBI, and Tony Soprano. It has three rows of seats, so there are two air conditioners. Can you tell where this is going? The service manager came to the waiting room with bad news. It would cost $2,500 to fix the AC, and the check engine light was on, which meant another $850 for a pressure sensor in the fuel tank.

Traveling back and forth between New York and Maine, and thousands of miles visiting churches, organ shops, and job sites, I surpass the mileage limits of any auto lease, and a lot of that driving happens with heavy loads in the car, sometimes towing trailers. I use cars very hard. I have long figured that it is best for me to buy a car a year or two old with low mileage, letting someone else use up the high retail value of a brand new car, then drive it until it will not go any further. Since about 1980, I have driven six cars over 225,000 miles, two of those over 275,000. About halfway through that list, I experimented with a Dodge Grand Caravan—a mistake because although with seats out I could carry loaded eight-foot pipe trays, it was not a truck, and the transmission left at around 189,000. That is a lifetime total of over 1,500,000 miles, or an average of 43,000 miles a year.

The Suburban had just 225,000 miles on it, but I could not see spending over $3,300 on repairs, so I went shopping. Now I am in a 2017 Suburban, silver this time, so people will not think I am the limo they ordered and climb into the back seat. Gotta love New York.

Parts is parts.

As I went in and out of car dealerships over the last couple weeks, I was thinking about the business of car repair and replaceable parts. Henry Ford really had something there, figuring that any item that you might sell a lot of could be made of carefully designed and manufactured parts, identical in every separate unit. Every dealership I visited had a little van with “Parts Shuttle” written on the sides. I do not know how many different models of cars Chevrolet makes and could hardly guess how many parts there are in each one, but I imagine that each dealership needs access to hundreds of thousands of different parts. Some things are closer to universal. Maybe they only need to stock six different oil filters, and the 5.3 liter V8 engine in my Suburban is used in pickup trucks and vans as well as SUVs, so hundreds of engine parts overlap ten or twelve models. But it’s still a lot of parts.

There are plenty of differences between a Chevrolet, a Ford, and a Toyota, but if you saw a piston from an engine by each maker, you would have to be an expert to tell them apart. Windshield wipers are pretty close to universal, with their overall length being the biggest difference. In fact, as the designers of vehicles seek the perfect aerodynamic shape, cars built by many different companies look more and more alike.

Recently, a colleague posted a photo of a broken organ part, asking if anyone knew how to replace it. I recognized it immediately. It was a Bakelite lever used in the console combination actions of Casavant organs in the 1950s and 1960s, about six inches long, with an axle hole in the middle, and forks at each end that “click” into place. They transfer the motion of the drawknobs between levels of the combination action, moving the traces that carry the toggles that allow the stops to be set on pistons. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly . . .) When one breaks, the stop cannot be set on or off any piston, and the stop action won’t turn on.

I recognized it because in about 1980, my mentor Jan Leek and I faced just such a repair in an organ in Rocky River, Ohio. It was an organ technician’s nightmare. The console was tightly surrounded by carpenter-built choir risers that had to be substantially dismantled to reach the access panels, and once we were inside, it took a couple days to wrestle the broken part out. The axle was common to about fifteen of the levers, and it was less than an inch from the framework of the console side. We happened to have some Bakelite in the workshop, and even knew where it was, so we were able to make a half dozen replacements. That repair must have taken sixty or seventy hours.

Early in the twentieth century, the Austin Organ Company developed a distinctive style of “modern” organ console. They are easily recognizable with two rows of stop keys above the top keyboard, unique piston buttons on stems like lollipops, curved maple expression pedals, and shallow-dip keyboards whose keys are about twelve inches long and pivoted in the center. The combination action is in a tray at the top of the console, with a horizontal trace for each piston that carries toggles that click up or down when you move the stop keys to create settings. When you press a piston, a double contact system activates a pick-magnet that pulls up a little pivoted lever at the end of the trace and fires a huge solenoid that moves a bar that engages the lever and pulls the trace. The toggles on the trace move the stop tabs according to the setting. (. . . that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her . . .) The action of that solenoid provides the signature “ka-thump” sound of a piston firing in an Austin console.

The general construction of these Austin consoles is also unique. There is a simple steel frame that supports the table on which the keyboards sit. The side case panels, which include the track for the rolltop, screw to those frames, the back-panel screws to cleats on the side frames, and the top sits on top of it all. Voila! The traces, toggles, pick magnets, and springs of the combination action are all interchangeable. It is a very simple system. I wish that Casavant console in Rocky River had removable side panels.

But there is something funny about Austin consoles. A Massachusetts organ technician, William Laws, thought that design was just about perfect, and he waited until the original Austin patents expired, and immediately started producing “Austin Clones.” I learned this innocently enough thirty years ago, calling the Austin factory to order a new solenoid. In spite of the Laws nameplate, I assumed it was an Austin console. It was Gordon Auchincloss who took my call, and asked, “Is it an Austin or a Laws?”

Ernest Skinner was famous for his beautiful consoles. He worked incessantly developing the geometry of his consoles, striving for complete comfort for the musician. He used elegant materials, and machined controls were all specifically intended to have a signature feel to them. The half-inch travel of a stop knob, the quarter-inch motion of a piston button, and the superb action of the keyboards were all part of the experience of playing a Skinner organ. A Skinner combination action produces a unique “Phhht” at the press of a button, nothing like the Austin ka-thump. Harris Precision Products in California has developed two sizes of electro-magnetic drawknob motors that duplicate the feel of the Skinner drawknob, but gone is the pneumatic Phhht of the piston action. Even when a hundred knobs are moving at once, there is a minimal bump at the touch of a piston.

The funny thing about Harris drawknobs is that they are so well made, so easy to install, so reliable, and so quiet that many organbuilding companies use them. That is great for the organists because the knobs work perfectly, but gone is the individuality of different companies. Any experienced organist could tell the difference between a Skinner and an Austin console blindfolded, but Harris drawknobs are everywhere.

It’s the pipes.

The musical heart of any pipe organ is its pipes. That may seem a simple thing to say, but while it is easy to focus on knobs and keyboards, music rack lights, and blower switches, an organ is there to produce musical tone, and it does that by blowing air through pipes. We all know that an organ voice comprises a set of pipes, one for each note on the keyboard. Each pipe is unique with different length and diameter. It is possible to make identical sets of pipes. In fact, though I was never in the Möller factory while it was in operation, I am pretty sure they had identical “stock” ranks. I have worked on enough Möller Artistes to conclude that.

But when you make a rank of pipes, you cut sixty-one rectangles to make the cylindrical resonators, sixty-one pie-shaped pieces to make the conical feet, and sixty-one discs to make the languids. Each successive piece is a different size, the dimensions calculated using elegant mathematics. Three ratios make up the math of an organ pipe: the ratio between diameter and length (scale), the ratio between mouth width and circumference, and the ratio between mouth width and mouth height (cut-up). Even at its most mechanized, pipe making is a personal thing. I know of no robotic substitute for the pipe maker’s soldering iron. The quality of the pipe and ultimately its tone are the result of the mathematics and the skill of the pipe maker. The saying, if it looks good it will work properly, is nowhere truer than in the making of organ pipes. If the languid is loose inside the pipe, the speech will be poor. Because of all that, two ranks of pipes built to identical dimensions can never sound exactly alike.

There are many other factors that determine the sound of an organ pipe besides those three ratios. The composition of the metal is critical. Most metal pipes are made of a mixture of tin and lead. The most common spotted metal pipes are in roughly the range of 40%/60% to 60%/40% tin and lead. Go to 70%/30% or 30%/70% and you will have a different sound. The thickness of the metal is important to the quality of speech. A pipe made of thick metal will speak more reliably and more profoundly than one made of foil.

While the pistons from a Chevy or Ford look very much alike, the pipes from an Austin or a Holtkamp organ look nothing alike. And the pipes in organs by “handcraft firms” like Fritts, Richards-Fowkes, Fisk, or Noack look very different. I admit that I say that with over forty years of experience tuning organs by every builder you can think of, my eyes are as experienced as my ears. But the individual ethic, habits, tools, and philosophy of each pipe maker are different enough that no two craftspeople can make identical pipes.

What’s the difference?

Any good organ is a teacher, guiding a musician’s expression, inviting each musician to explore sounds and effects. Most organists participate in the choice of a new organ only rarely, if ever. And some organists only ever play on one instrument, whatever organ is owned by the church where they work. I get to play on many different organs in the course of any working month. It is one of the fun things about my work. I love experiencing and comparing different organs, gleaning what each organbuilder had in mind, mining the instrument for the richest sounds, the brightest colors, the most mystical effects.

I often refer to my tenure as curator of the organs at Trinity Church in Boston, the venerable pair of Skinner/Aeolian-Skinners matched with the magical LaFarge interior of the H. H. Richardson building. An important feature of the music program of that church continues to be weekly organ recitals, and as curator, I suppose I heard eighty or a hundred different people play that organ. For each player, the organ was different. Sometimes, the organ was victor and the experience was not so great. People could get eaten alive by the big unwieldy antiphonal beast. But the difference in the sound of the instrument as different masters played it was remarkable. Understanding how different organists could draw different things from a single instrument was one of the more important experiences of my organ education.

Likewise, I have heard single organists playing on many different instruments. That allows a glimpse into the musical personality and philosophy of the musician. Some seem to do the same thing with each instrument they play, while others bend their style and approach toward the instrument of the day.

I do not drive anywhere near as many different cars as I do organs. I drive Wendy’s car once in a while, and I drive rental cars when traveling on business, but almost all the driving I do is in that Chevy Suburban. Unlike the organ, I am not looking for means of expression when driving a car whether it is mine or not. When I mentioned to my colleague Amory that I was shopping for a car, he said, “Buy a Ford.” He drives a snazzy and beefy Ford pickup truck that’s perfect for his work. But I really liked my black Suburban. It was comfortable, quiet, and sturdy, all important for someone who has driven one-and-a-half-million miles. It is great for carrying tools and organ components, and for the boating side of my life, our eight-foot rowing dingy fits inside with the doors closed. Like a Skinner console, the geometry of the driving position fits me beautifully. (I know, I know, that’s a little romantic.) If all goes well, I will be driving the new one for 250,000 miles over eight or ten years. Come to think of it, it may be the last work car I buy.

The invincible da Vinci

The other night I was watching a documentary about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, a time when the arts and sciences were flourishing. His contemporary, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), was studying the motions of celestial bodies and developing his theory of heliocentric cosmology, displacing the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, and proving that a system of planets including the earth rotates around the sun. Physician Richard Bartlot (1471–1557) was working hard to understand the functions of the human body. Another contemporary was Michelangelo (1475–1564), whose genius with the visual arts in both painting and sculpture dazzles us more than 500 years later. 

Leonardo was fascinated by flight, and made hundreds of drawings of the wings of birds in various positions, theorizing about how a bird could alter the shape of its wings to affect the direction of its flight. He noticed that soaring birds used spiraling updrafts of air to ascend effortlessly, and how they braked to slow for landing. I’m in an airplane as I write, and can’t help but associate the wing flaps with the drawings I saw on television.

Leonardo wondered if it would be possible for humans to fly, and imagined and sketched numerous designs of flying machines. The documentary tells of a group of aeronautical scientists in England building a glider according to one of those designs. It was a single fixed wing about 30 feet across with fabric stretched over a wooden frame weighing about 90 pounds. When it was finished, they tested it first by mounting it on the back of a pickup truck and covering it with sensors. As the truck drove forward, a computer recorded everything that was going on, and the team deduced that the glider developed enough lift to fly in air that was moving around 20 miles per hour.  

A pilot skilled at parasailing was engaged to try to fly the thing. Because the glider had no controls for direction or altitude, the team attached ropes to front and back and to each wingtip, and on a windy hilltop off she went. The first two tries allowed the pilot to get a sense of how it handled, and on the third try she went up about ten feet and flew as far as her team could run before they lost control. She flew a little farther each time, eventually getting up as high as 30 feet and flying forward for a couple hundred yards. It was fascinating to see that a design conceived 500 years ago was so effective.

The film discussed Leonardo’s grasp of human anatomy. His drawings of muscles and tendons in human arms, hands, and faces bore direct relationships to the forms of those body parts in Leonardo’s most famous painting, Mona Lisa.  

Perhaps most impressive was Leonardo’s study of the human heart. He obviously did some very gruesome experimentation to inform his drawings, and he documented how he deduced the heart’s valves functioned, even determining that the valves cause blood to form vortexes or eddies that add to the quality of blood flow. A modern heart surgeon compared Leonardo’s studies with X-rays and scans that prove their accuracy. I was amazed to see how well those sixteenth-century studies stood up to modern scrutiny. 

From one organ to another

While Leonardo was quietly slicing up human hearts, the pipe organ was being developed into the most complex machine on the planet. Simple flutes had been made from grass and canes for centuries—the panpipe grew common in the sixth century BC. I wonder who was first to think of making a flute out of metal, and forming a tone-producing mouth using a horizontal languid at the connection between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator?

In 256 BC, a Greek physicist named Ctesibius created a musical instrument called the Hydraulis, which had mounted flutes similar to organ pipes, a wind system that used the weight of water to create and regulate pressure, and a keyboard and mechanical action that operated valves to open those pipes. All this was 1,500 years before Leonardo was wondering about flight.

I was a young teenager when I was introduced to the unique and lovely organ in the Cathedral-Fortress in Sion, Switzerland through E. Power Biggs’s recording, The Historic Organs of Switzerland. At the time of that recording, it was widely thought that the organ was built in 1390. There is some modern research suggesting that it was more like 1430, but I wouldn’t argue about a 40-year difference—it’s a mighty old organ, and it’s perfectly recognizable and playable. There’s a nice video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiyy7AtMvis. It’s narrated in Dutch, but even if you don’t understand the language, you can see and hear this remarkable instrument.

I love recognizing the pipe organ as such an ancient art form, stopping to reflect on what life was like in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. Think of the state of public water supplies and sanitation, personal health and hygiene, transportation and commerce. If you’ve ever visited a modern organbuilding workshop, you have an idea of the complexity and precision necessary to make a monumental musical instrument function. Think of the effort and ingenuity involved in building a pipe organ in 1450, when there were no cordless drills, laser-sharpened blades, or electric lights. Those early organbuilders harvested trees and milled lumber by hand, hauled it to the workshop on oxcarts, cast metal and soldered seams, fashioned parts for mechanical actions, skinned animals and tanned leather, all to make music.

Anchors aweigh¹

We can compare that effort to shipbuilding. We all have pictures of Christopher Columbus’s little armada, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in our minds’ eyes. The names roll off our tongues like “I before E, except after C, or when sounding like ‘A’ as in neighbor or weigh.” The largest of those ships, Santa Maria, was about 60 feet long on deck with a 41-foot keel, about 18 feet wide, and weighed about 100 tons, smaller than many modern personal pleasure yachts. While we might sail in a 60-foot sailboat on a sunny afternoon with six or eight people on board, the Santa Maria had a documented crew of 40. The reason that a lavatory on a boat is called “The Head,” is because in those early sailing ships, the crew’s sanitation facility was to hang over the side at the head of the ship.

Mechanically, Santa Maria had three masts and a bowsprit, and five spars bearing five sails. Each sail would have had about eight control lines (halyard, sheets, downhauls, etc.) and many of the lines ran through blocks (multi-wheeled pulleys) for increased leverage. Complete the catalogue with a rudder for steering, a wheel with related lines and pulleys, and a capstan (winch) for mechanical advantage for hoisting sails and anchors, and we can estimate that Santa Maria had a couple hundred moving parts. The simplest two-manual organ of the same era, with 45- or 49-note keyboards, would have some four or five hundred moving parts, including keys, trackers, squares, rollers, and valves. It’s amazing to me that such a complex machine would be devised and built for the purpose of making music in a time when most machinery was so very primitive.

Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing, producing the Mazarin Bible about 40 years before Columbus’s great adventure. His printing press had only three or four moving parts—but that was one of the greatest advances in the history of communication. Without Gutenberg, we wouldn’t have e-mail. 

That ingenious business²

Let’s jump ahead 300 years. By the 1860s, science and technology had leapt forward exponentially. During that decade, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Transatlantic Cable were completed, and Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. And Aristide Cavaillé-Coll built the grand organ at Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris with 102 stops, five manuals, and a fantastic array of pneumatic registration devices.  

Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece at Saint-Sulpice must be one of, if not the most influential organs in existence. The bewildering array of levers and knobs gave those organists unprecedented control over the instrument, and the music written by Widor and Dupré, inspired by the sounds and mechanical assets of the Cavaillé-Coll organ, form a centerpiece of the long history of organ music. And like the ancient organ in Sion, the instrument at Saint-Sulpice is still in regular use, not as an antique curiosity, but as the church’s main instrument that is played every Sunday for Mass, and for countless concerts and recordings. 

Forty years later in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), Ernest Skinner was at work on a new revolution. Starting around 1890, a number of American organ companies were experimenting with pneumatic and then electric organ actions, but none was more creative or prolific than Mr. Skinner. As an employee and later factory superintendent of the Hutchings Organ Company, and later in the company that bore his name, Mr. Skinner invented and produced the Pitman windchest, the first electro-pneumatic organ action in which the stop action functioned as quickly as the keyboard action. That simple fact, which when combined with Skinner’s fabulous electro-pneumatic combination action, was as influential to organists as Cavaillé-Coll’s fantastic pneumatic and mechanical console appliances, because for the first time, dozens of stops could be turned on or off simultaneously as quickly as an organist could move from one key to the next. And those actions operated instantly; there was no mechanical noise.

A combination innovation

As I mention Mr. Skinner’s combination actions, I repeat a theory that I have proposed a number of times. Those machines, built in Boston around 1905, allowed the organist to select any combination of stops and set it in a binary memory, ready to be recalled at the touch of a button. Decades earlier there were water-powered looms that could be programmed to weave intricate patterns using blocks of wood with patterns of holes, the forerunners of the computer punch cards that people my age used to register for college classes. But it’s my theory that Mr. Skinner’s combination actions were the first industrially produced, commercially available, user-programmable binary computers—the first, ever.

I’ve had a number of opportunities to propose my theory to scientists outside the organ world, and have not heard any contradicting theories. If any of you out there in Diapason land know anyone who is expert in the history of computers, I’d be grateful if you’d pose this theory to them and let me know what you learn.

As electro-pneumatic actions allowed organists unprecedented control over their instruments, so they allowed instruments to be larger than ever before. In 1865, 40 or 50 stops made a very large organ. By 1920, such an organ had become commonplace. It was usual for a large church to commission an organ with four manuals, many dozens of ranks of pipes, and components of the organ in multiple locations around the church. Imagine yourself as the first to play an instrument with an Antiphonal division—how your mind would race with ideas of how to exploit it.

If we compare pipe organs that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Copernicus might have known, those that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Claude Monet heard, and those of the time of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, what milestones of development should we recognize? What innovations brought our instrument from the panpipe to Walt Disney Hall?

1. Ctesibius’s Hydraulis was the first huge leap, introducing mechanically produced wind pressure, mechanical action, and a keyboard for the first time, as far as we know.

2. Adding a second set of pipes foreshadowed the complexity of the modern organ. There would have been no stop action—two pipes played simultaneously with one key. I suppose they were pipes of similar character at different pitches, like today’s Principals eight-and-four.

3. In the early Renaissance, organ divisions called Blockwerk were developed.  These consisted of numerous voices, including the fractional pitches we know as mutations.

4. The stop action was the next obvious innovation, allowing the musician to select individual voices, or multiple voices in any combination.

5. The stop action would have led to the idea of contrasting voices. Instead of two or more similar voices, there would have been different timbres for each pitch, like our modern Principals and Flutes.

6. I’m not sure when the first reed stop was introduced or who made it, but I sure know that a wide variety of reeds were present in organs in the very early sixteenth century. The tones of all organ flue voices are produced by the splitting of a “sheet” of air that’s formed by the slot between the front edge of a pipe’s languid (horizontal piece at the joint between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator) and the lower lip, which is a portion of the circumference of the conical foot that’s made flat. The tone of a reed pipe is produced by a vibrating brass tongue, which creates a sharp contrast of timbre.

7. The addition of a second keyboard made it possible for a melody to be accompanied by a contrasting sound, or echo effects to be achieved without changing stops. I am not researching this as I write, but I guess this innovation dates from around 1475 or 1500.

8. The logical and magical extension of multiple keyboards was the invention of the pedal keyboard and development of the technique for mastering that most “organistic” of skills. Playing melodies or the individual lines of polyphonic music with one’s feet allowed organ music to develop deeper complexity. This level of sophistication was achieved late in the fifteenth century.

9. A wonderful example of a very early organ with two manuals and pedals was the first Große Orgel of the Marienkirche in Lübeck in Germany, the church later made famous in our history by organists Franz Tunder and his successor Dietrich Buxtehude (who married Bruhns’s daughter). That organ had 32 stops and was built between 1516 and 1518, just at the time of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and when Michelangelo was about 45 years old.

10. By the time Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663), Tunder (1614–1667), and Buxtehude (1637–1707) were composing their catalogues of organ music, the use of the pedalboard for independent voices was in full swing. More complex forms of composition, in those days especially the fugue, exploited the versatility of the organ. And of course, it was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) who brought pedal technique to a level of virtuosity that was the true forerunner of the near-maniacal feats of the feet of early twentieth-century virtuosi like Edwin Lemare and Lynnwood Farnam, that school of players who took organ playing to new heights in response to the innovations of Ernest Skinner in the same way that Widor and Dupré responded to the genius of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

11. The Expression Enclosure (Swell Box) was an invention that transformed organ playing. Its earliest forms were like the Brustwerk of Baroque and Neo-Baroque organs, with doors that the organist could open and close by reaching up from the bench, or (God forbid) standing on the pedal keys.

12. Pneumatic motors such as Barker Levers allowed huge organs with otherwise mechanical actions to be played with little effort.

13. The introduction of electric actions gave us the modern symphonic organ, the detached and remote console, and the possibility of dispersing various organ divisions throughout a large room.

14. I discussed combination actions earlier.

15. And more recently, solid-state control systems for pipe organs have given us multiple levels of memory, piston sequencers, transposers that are considered a crutch by some and a godsend by others, and playback sequencers that allow an organist to capture a performance as a digital file, then ask the organ to play it back, allowing critical listening to registration, balance, technique, and accuracy.

Today we anticipate wireless consoles, tap-screen music racks, and heaven knows what else. Just as Leonardo da Vinci could not possibly have imagined the automobile or the cellular telephone, Jan Sweelinck (1562–1621) would be astonished by our massive consoles and high-pressure reeds.

I wonder what the organ would be like today had Leonardo included it in his sketchbooks.

Notes

1. Nautical. While “anchors away” may seem the intuitive spelling, implying casting off dock lines or hoisting an anchor and setting a vessel “underway,” the correct spelling, aweigh, defines the moment when the anchor is lifted off the seabed and is “weighed” by the anchor line. Anchors Aweigh is the fight song of the United States Naval Academy. The text of the chorus:

Anchors Aweigh, my boys

Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to college joys

We sail at break of day, ’ay ’ay ’ay

Through our last night ashore

Drink to the foam

Until we meet once more

Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!

2. That Ingenious Business, Ray Brunner, The Pennsylvania German Society, 1991. In 1762, Benjamin Franklin referred to organbuilding in Eastern Pennsylvania as “that ingenious business.”

Winds across the prairie

Andy Rooney, long-time curmudgeonly commentator on CBS’s 60 Minutes, once said that he considered the best cities to be those that could only be entered by crossing a bridge or tunnel. He thought the effort of building the bridges proved the value. I live in Manhattan, where you have to cross a river to get in; Google Maps shows twenty bridges and tunnels. Must be a great place. We call our apartment there our island home.

When I visit cities in other regions where geographical borders do not limit the area, I marvel at the space available for things like highway interchanges and church parking lots. In New York, the quickest way to get around is walking or taking the subway. In an expansive city like Dallas, you drive for miles to get places, and there are free parking spaces when you get there. While Manhattan squeezes 1.6 million people into about 30 square miles (53,300 per square mile), Dallas scatters 1.2 million across 386 square miles (3,100 per square mile).

The American Guild of Organists held its national convention in Dallas in 1994. I was both conventioneer and exhibitor, splitting my time between attending concerts and seminars and promoting my Bishop Organ Company in the exhibition hall. The convention was based in the Loews Anatole Hotel (now Hilton). According to the convention-planning article in the January 1994 edition of The American Organist, the hotel boasted more than 1,600 guest rooms, seven restaurants, six tennis courts, eight racquetball courts, a basketball court, two theaters, and a 1,000-seat auditorium. There were 2,000 employees, even the elevators were manned, and 2,000 “complimentary” parking spaces. No hotel in New York City has 2,000 parking spaces. TAO reported that the convention rate for a single room was $85.

The World Cup of soccer was being hosted by the United States that summer, and Dallas’s Cotton Bowl was one of nine venues across the country hosting games. Along with AGO conventioneers, the Brazilian soccer team and legions of their fans were staying at the Anatole. Brazil won the World Cup that summer, and the enthusiastic nationalistic displays in the hotel after the games were worthy of the country that is home to Carnival.

The magnificent organ by C. B. Fisk, Inc., in the Meyerson Symphony Center was just two years old. Most of us were hearing it for the first time, and I remember being dazzled by Bruce Neswick’s playing in the opening convocation and by Jean Guillou’s fiery performance of Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie Concertante with the Dallas Symphony. The Meyerson organ was the first of the thrilling succession of imaginative, powerful, and fiery modern concert-hall organs, and it formed a majestic centerpiece to the convention.

The convention exhibition hall was in a huge ballroom with a grand entrance doorway, guarded by two life-sized statues of elephants. Between the elephants, the Schlicker Organ Company had installed a modest two-manual organ as their convention exhibit. I can’t remember the stoplist, but it had something like ten or twelve ranks and a swell box. Giddy and well-oiled conventioneers sat on the bench in their multitudes, boiling down the wealth of organ literature to two flourishes and two rolled chords from Bach’s Toccata in D Minor and eight measures of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. It was as if those were the only choices.

My friends in neighboring booths and I rolled our eyes at each smashed mordent and each flubbed pedal note, until one fiery moment when the simple little organ emitted a righteous roar. Maniacal flourishes ripped across the paisley carpeting, echoing off the drywall. Thunderclaps and lightning bolts shot across the room, and draperies blew through windows. Jaws dropped and heads turned. I raced from my booth to see who it was, and there was Jean Guillou, tousled mane flying, eyes looking skyward, astride a carousel pony of an organ that had suddenly become a furious stallion. It was a remarkable moment, showing how a great artist can transmit energy through an instrument. I remember it vividly twenty-two years later, although I may be making up the image of smoke pouring from the organ as Guillou dismounted. 

That week in Dallas ended with a comical note. As 2,500 organists were leaving the hotel at the close of the convention, a pink-hued mob of Mary Kay representatives were arriving for theirs. When I got on the elevator I commented on the spectacle. The operator rolled his eyes and quipped, “you can’t find an ironing board in this hotel.”

Everybody gets a chance.

I cared for the wonderful Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, for about twelve years during the 1980s and 1990s. That was a wonderful era for choral music in that church. During that time, the renowned Trinity Choir, directed by Brian Jones and accompanied by Ross Wood, recorded and released Candlelight Carols, which has sold well over 100,000 copies, and is still featured on Amazon with 4½ stars some thirty years later.

Between Brian and Ross, I heard lots of wonderful organ playing at Trinity, but the recital series, Fridays at Trinity, was an especially important learning experience for me. During the program year, the church hosted a noontime organ recital every Friday. Each week I’d arrive at 8:00 to tune the organ, and the récitaliste du jour would arrive at 10:00 to warm up. It was usual for a rowdy group to retire to House of Siam, a nearby Thai restaurant, for lunch after the recital.

I have fond memories of many conversations at those lunches, both raucous and thoughtful, but the best of it was hearing the same organ played by so many different people. I worked there for about twelve years, I suppose there were 40 recitals a year, and maybe I heard two out of three, over 300 recitals. Of course, there were repeats, but let’s say I heard a hundred different people play the same organ.

There are actually two organs in Trinity Church: a larger Skinner, much modified, with four manual divisions in the rear gallery, and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in the chancel. There are about 150 stops in total, and both organs are played from a three-manual console in the chancel. It’s an unusually complicated organ with cutout switches for each organ and couplers every which way, and practice time was rigidly limited for each récitaliste du jour because of the church’s busy schedule. For many of the Friday recitalists, it was the chance of a lifetime—the biggest organ in the biggest church they’d ever played in. For others used to “big city” venues, it was more like home, but a few of those got tripped up by the extra complications of playing two large organs, one with four manuals, on a three-manual console.

That collective experience was an important part of my education in the pipe organ. I knew the organ intimately through thousands of hours of tuning and repairs, both major and minor. I learned how to dissect registrations by listening, and could often anticipate what a player might do after the next page turn. I heard some players make the organ come alive, and I heard some players get eaten alive by the thing. I was constantly amazed at how different the organ sounded under different hands.

You could tell who had never played an organ with a Trompette-en-Chamade, as they couldn’t keep their hands off it. People used to big organs with powerful stops could play a whole recital without touching it; it wasn’t the right tone color for lots of Romantic music. (Warning signs were posted on the doors to the gallery on those Sundays when the “en Chamade” would be used.)

The speed of sound is 768 miles per hour. After a little arithmetic, I round it off at 1,125 feet per second. I guess the distance between the console and gallery organ at Trinity Church is around 150 feet, so the time lag for the organist would be about .13 seconds. (Mathematicians are invited to correct me!) That’s a lot less than some guesses I heard, but it sure was enough to trip up some players.

Sometimes the organ had its own issues. Better run back after Chicken Yellow Curry and get that squeak in the Chancel Choir shutters. The acoustics varied with the weather. And tuning was challenging because the organ was scattered about the building in different locations and different altitudes. The recording sessions for Candlelight Carols were in July—I remember the surreal feeling of lying on my back in the pews in the wee hours of the morning, listening to that glorious choir singing familiar carols accompanied by an organ in “summertime tuning.”

Seasonal and short-term foibles aside, it was the same organ each week, the same pile of windchests, reservoirs, and shutters. Every time you drew Principal 8′, the same set of pipes would play. But the character of the organ depended on who was at the helm. Sometimes it was a lumbering monster, careening around a laboratory full of bubbling beakers. Sometimes it was a stubborn horse, obstinately pawing the ground, waiting for its rider to inspire motion. And sometimes it was a massive symphony orchestra, swooping through swashbuckling literature with thrilling stereophonic expressive effects.

It’s all about air.

Orchestral musicians have personal and intimate relationships with their instruments. Arnold Steinhardt, longtime violinist with the Guarneri Quartet, wrote of how he holds his violin between his thinking brain and his beating heart, wrapping his fingers lovingly around its neck. A clarinetist wraps both hands around the instrument, and holds one end of it in his mouth. A cynic might say that playing on the keyboards of a monumental organ is more like using a remote to open a garage door. 

Many orchestral conductors consider the pipe organ to be unexpressive, because an individual organ pipe can play only one pitch at one volume level. A violinist, a trumpeter, or a flautist can emphasize a note with a little burst and can create crescendos and decrescendos on a single sustained note. The organist is an illusionist, creating musical expression by remotely operating a machine. Every console control is a switch. Throw a few switches and the shutters open. It’s no accident that the contacts for swell shutters are arranged in a continuous row so they can be operated ad seriatum by a motion of the ankle.

We speak about the organ in metaphors of life and breath. The organ inhales and exhales the same air we use to sing. When you’re inside an organ with the blower off, it’s a heap of industrial equipment. Turn on the blower, and it comes alive, every sinew quivering, ready to speak on command. I still love being inside an organ when the blower is turned on and that transition happens. The organist is as much a conductor as instrumentalist, turning musical thought and impulses into tangible sounds, sounds that are perceived physically as much as aurally. 

It’s normal to think of the organ as a keyboard instrument, but the organ is really a wind instrument. The keyboard is just user interface, and playing the organ is about managing wind. You learn that right away playing on a large and sensitive tracker organ. I remember my introduction to that concept at the keys of the three-manual Flentrop organ in Warner Hall in Oberlin. Release a pedal note with a big combination of stops while sustaining a chord on the manuals, and those big pedal valves would slap the air and jiggle the treble notes. Managing the wind meant releasing a chord from the top down, so the pedal note was released last.

Knowing about that phenomenon, organbuilders like Ernest Skinner devoted huge thought and effort to creating wind systems you could use with impunity. Low CCCC is on a remote windchest, along with the other eleven notes of that octave, with its own isolated wind supply. No way does early release jiggle the Great.

There are relatively few of us who have actually experienced how much wind is involved. Lift CCCC of a 32′ Open Wood Diapason off its hole (the pipe probably weighs 1,500 pounds) and play the note. It’s like a hurricane. (I’m a professional: don’t try this at home.) Your glasses blow off your head, clouds of dust burst about, there’s so much wind you can’t stop it with your hands. That’s the energy you release when you play that low C, delivered to the windchest by the blower and the reservoirs, ready for your use. And the cool thing is that you can sustain that note as long as you like. There’s no decay of tone as the amplitude of a vibrating string decreases, and there’s no limit imposed by the capacity of the human lung. As long as you can hold your foot down, and as long as the electric bill is paid, that note will keep playing. Take that, Mr. Orchestra Conductor.

When installing a windchest in an organ, whether you’re releathering, or it’s a new organ, it’s usual, actually necessary, practice to “blow it out.” Each crumb of sawdust trapped inside the windchest is a potential cipher. After the action and the windlines are connected, before the rackboards get put on, and before the pipes are placed, each note of the chest is played to be sure that every little loose piece of dust is blown free. You do it note by note with a vacuum cleaner held over each hole, and you do it in big fistfuls of notes to let the air really blow through. Once again, the organbuilder witnesses the amount of air moving when playing a big piece, just how much wind energy a windchest can deliver. I’d love for every organist to experience that in person. 

Whenever I’m listening to an organ, I’m aware of all those valves in motion, all the air blowing into the pipes, and how the pipes transfer the wind into music. You can think of it as a hurricane, as Guillou surely did when he coaxed that magic from the unsuspecting little instrument. Or you can think of it as a gentle zephyr, wafting off the water on a sunny afternoon, riffling your hair as you sip a drink on the deck. You get to decide what to do with that air. The organ provides you with limitless energy. If you as a musician can generate your own energy in addition to the waiting gale, then you have something.

§

In Dallas in 1994, I heard Jean Guillou make a modest simple organ roar. I also heard him pass the same energy through his fingers into the monumental, seemingly limitless Fisk organ in the Meyerson Center. Guillou playing Jongen’s triumphant music on that heroic organ along with the mighty sounds of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was an experience of a lifetime. I feel a little smug thinking back on it, because I was among a relative few in the hall who knew how the wind blows.

As you play the organ, don’t focus on fingers on the keys. Focus on the flow of air from blower to reservoir, from reservoir to windchest, from valve to pipe. Pay attention to that magic when pressurized air is converted into music. Show the organ how to breathe. It’s all about the air.

The most important reason for assessing the value of a pipe organ is for the purpose of determining appropriate insurance coverage

What’s it worth?

When my kids were growing up, we were active in a small inland sailing club that ran weekly races from April to October. My son Michael was part of a group of five boys of the same age who were great competitors—one of them went on to race and win in the Olympics—and the five fathers had a blast supporting the boys as they competed in regattas in the fabled yacht clubs up and down the Massachusetts coast.  

Our club was a modest place—annual membership was less than five hundred dollars, and even when I had been elected commodore, I was not immune from the regular chore of cleaning up after the geese that occupied the docks whenever we were not on the premises. Many of the clubs we visited for races were rich and formal affairs, with stewards in uniform, and clubhouses with catering kitchens that could handle high-society wedding receptions. One breezy afternoon, my sailing-dad buddies and I were sitting in a boat in Marblehead Harbor doing duty on the safety committee, seaward of the mooring area that is home to some of the most beautiful pleasure boats in the area, and I commented that there must be a half-billion dollars tied to those moorings.

It seems as though we are preoccupied with the value of things. “That purse must have cost a thousand bucks.” “He has a million-dollar house and a hundred-thousand-dollar car.” “That organ cost forty-grand a stop.”

The other day I received a call from someone at a wrecking company in a big midwestern city. His company was about to demolish a church building and the diocese wanted bids for dismantling and preserving the organ, a 25-stop instrument built in the 1890s. He assured me that the organ was “one of the 20 best in the country, worth at least a half-million dollars.” I didn’t want the conversation to end prematurely so I kept my thoughts to myself. It would certainly cost a half-million dollars to build the same organ today, but the actual cash value is more like $25,000. It’s worth what someone would pay for it.

When you reflect on the thousands of hours it takes craftsmen to build a fine organ, and the tons of expensive materials involved, it’s hard to accept that an organ would be worth so little, but at the risk of over-simplifying, there are two basic reasons: the high cost of renovating and relocating a pipe organ, and the huge number of redundant organs available around the United States and abroad.

You must remember this . . . 

Yesterday there was an auction at Sotheby’s in New York and a funny-looking piece of movie-prop memorabilia sold for $500,000—plus $102,000 in commissions. It’s a good thing it was a black-and-white movie, because I doubt the sickly green-and-yellow paint job would have added to the poignancy of the moment. As a musical instrument, the Casablanca piano is hardly more than a ruse. It has only fifty notes; it’s barely the height of a cheap spinet. A short video on the website of the New York Times showed artists playing it in an opulent room at Sotheby’s—it looked a little like an adult riding a tricycle. And in the famous scene with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (listening to “As Time Goes By”), the guy at the piano wasn’t even really playing. Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, was a drummer, crooning to the accompaniment of an offstage instrument while he pretended to play. Of course, the scene wouldn’t have worked if it were a full-size upright (like the one off which Lauren Bacall dangled her famous gams in front of Harry Truman¹) because the actors would have been hidden behind it.

I understand that the handsome price paid for the piano was not based on its artistic value. But in a world in which a cheap toy instrument would claim such a grand sum, and a magnificent pipe organ would be pretty much worthless, how do we assess and justify the value of a pipe organ?

How much per stop?

Think of a prospective home buyer calling a realtor and asking how much does an eight-room house cost? The realtor responds with a list of variables: how many acres of land, how many fireplaces, is there a swimming pool, central air, master bedroom suite, water view, three-car heated garage . . .? These are all basic questions that would have a big effect on the value of an otherwise simply described house. And we haven’t touched questions like new kitchen, Jacuzzi, great room with cathedral ceilings, or theater seats with cup-holders.

Asking an organbuilder “how much per stop” is equally meaningless. For fun, let’s think about an organ with three manuals and 60 stops. It might be located in a chamber with a simple façade of zinc pipes sprayed with gold paint. Compare it to what must be the most famous visual image of a pipe organ, the one built by Christian Müller in the St. Bavokerk in Haarlem, the Netherlands—you know, the one with the lions on top. (It actually has 62 stops, no borrows!) Imagine what it would cost to build that case today. Two million bucks, three million? I have no idea. But let’s say it would be two and a half million, and divide that by the number of stops. The case alone would cost $40,322.58 per stop. And we haven’t made a single tracker. Add forty grand per stop for the organ itself and we’re over eighty. Woot!²

It’s common to hear people in pipe organ circles talking about how a new organ cost “so much” per stop. It’s typically a prominent instrument in a central church or concert hall where the price of the organ has been publicized—or leaked. When the local newspaper publishes the “three-point-five” price tag of the organ, the smart organist looks at the specifications, does the math, and comes up with “so much” per stop.

I think that it’s counterproductive, even destructive, to refer to the cost of an organ as “so much” per stop. If an organist mentions at church that the organ in Symphony Hall cost fifty-grand per stop, the church looks at its 20-stop organ as a million-dollar asset, and worse, vows never to consider acquiring a new pipe organ. They fail to realize that the simple organ in their church would cost a fraction as much to replace.

Get real.

There are many factors that contribute to the price of an organ in the same way that a sunken living room affects the value of a house. Let’s consider a few of them.

There are plenty of organs out there that don’t have “swell boxes,” so we should consider the independent cost of building one. (We almost always call them swell boxes, even if they actually enclose a Choir, Positiv, Solo, or Echo division. “Expression enclosure” is a more accurate term.) A free-standing expression enclosure in an organ chamber might be something like a 10- or 12-foot cube of heavy hardwood construction. There’s a bank of shutters, carefully built and balanced, that are operated by a sophisticated motor. Consider the challenge of building a machine that can operate a thousand pounds of venetian blinds in the blink of an eye, silently. A well-designed and built expression enclosure might add $50,000 to the cost of an organ. And some organs have three or four of them.

When you’re counting stops on a published list, they all take up the same amount of space. But in reality, you can house hundreds of 61-note Tierces in the space it takes to mount a single octave of 16′ pipes. (The largest pipe in a Tierce is not much bigger than a paper towel tube.) Think of a 20-stop organ with a Pedal division that’s based on a 16′ Subbass, then add a 16′ Principal as the twenty-first stop. That one extra stop doubles the size of the organ’s case, increases the organ’s wind requirements by 40 or 50 percent, and increases the scope of the instrument in just about every way. Maybe that one stop increases the price of the organ by $100,000, or even $200,000, which then is divided over the total number of stops to achieve the fabled “so much” per stop.

Take it a step further and think of a 32-footer. A 32′ Double Open Diapason made of wood is worth a quarter of a million dollars when you combine the cost of pipes, windchests, racks and supports, and wind supply. The twelve largest pipes fill a large portion of a semi-trailer, and the cost of shipping, hoisting and rigging, and just plain lugging is hard to calculate. One large pipe might weigh a half-ton or more. Stops like this are relatively rare because they’re so expensive and they take up so much space—but most of the big concert hall organs have them. So that impressive “so much” per stop you read about in the paper includes dividing the cost of Big Bertha the Diapason across the rest of the stops. The price of the Tierce went up by ten grand.

When the Organ Clearing House is preparing to dismantle a pipe organ, we arrange for scaffolding and hoisting equipment, packing materials, truck transportation, and we figure the number of pipe trays we’ll need. We build trays that are eight-feet by two-feet and eight-inches deep. We usually figure one-and-three-quarter trays per real stop, which allows enough space to pack the pipes, small parts, shutters, and the odds-and-ends we call “chowder.” That figure works for lots of organs. A four- or five-rank Mixture fits in one tray, an 8′ string fits in one or two trays (low EE of an 8′ stop fits in the eight-trays), and an 8′ Principal fits in two or three trays. Most organs can be packed in seventy or eighty trays—the lumber for that many trays costs around $3,000.  

Sometimes we’re fooled. A smallish two-manual tracker organ built in the seventies might have a 16′ Bourdon and a Brustwerk division with five or six stops no larger than a skinny 8′ Gedeckt. The entire Brustwerk division can be packed in two or three trays. Compare that to the mighty M.P. Möller organ, Opus 5819, built for the Philadelphia Convention Center, and now owned by the University of Oklahoma. There are four 8′ Diapasons in the Great, all of large scale. We used 14 trays to pack those four stops. That organ ruined the curve—89 ranks packed in nearly 400 trays. Which organ was more expensive to build “per stop?”

Not responsible for valuables

Park your car at the airport or check a coat at a restaurant and you’ll read a disclaimer saying that management is not responsible for valuables. Each time we add a gadget to our daily kit, the importance of the disclaimer advances. We cringe when our car gets hit by a careless shopper parked in the next space, and we’re annoyed when a departing guest leaves a rut in the lawn. But we often fail to realize and respect the value of the organ in the church. Hardwood cases get beat up by folding chairs and organ chambers get used as closets. Façade pipes get dinged by ladders while people hang Christmas wreaths on the case, and we sweep the basement floor while the blower is running, wafting clouds of debris into the organ’s delicate actions.

There are two principal reasons for assessing the value of an organ. One is for the unfortunate moment when it must leave the building, and is being offered for sale, and the other is when an insurance policy is being established or updated. A third and less usual reason is when an organ is privately owned and is being considered as a donation to a not-for-profit institution.

If the organ is being offered for sale, especially when it has to be offered for sale, the value is defined simply by what someone would pay for it. And the closer the church building gets to demolition or a real estate closing, the lower the value of the organ. It’s usual for large and wonderful organs to sell for less than $50,000. In fact, it’s unusual for any existing pipe organ to sell for more than $50,000. Recently we organized the sale of a large three-manual tracker organ built in the 1970s—a wonderful instrument whose installation was a momentous occasion—but the price for the entire instrument was equal to the hypothetical cost of one stop in a new large organ.

You might think that a lovely 150-year-old organ by E. & G.G. Hook is priceless—but put it up for sale and you’ll find that it will claim twenty grand, far less than the price of a good piano, and a tiny fraction of the supposed value of a tinker-toy movie prop painted kindergarten green!

The most important reason for assessing the value of a pipe organ is for the purpose of determining appropriate insurance coverage. The instrument is worth the most to the congregation that is actively using and striving to care well for its organ. In 1991, Hurricane Bob raced up the East Coast, pushed a 15-foot storm surge into Buzzards Bay at the southern end of the Cape Cod Canal, and drenched eastern Massachusetts with six inches of rain along with heavy winds. The slate roof over the organ chamber in a church in suburban Boston was compromised and the nice little E.M. Skinner organ got wet. The insurance coverage was based on the original price of the organ, purchased more than 60 years earlier. The damage to the organ was moderate—limited to one end of a manual windchest and a couple offset chests, but when the cost of repairs was pro-rated against the insurance policy, the settlement offered would have covered the cost of a tuning.

If the real and current cost of replacement of a pipe organ is reflected in the insurance policy, not only will the organ be covered in the case of complete loss, but also the cost of repairing partial damage caused by fire, flood, vandalism, or even rodents would be covered. A thorough organ maintenance technician should regularly remind his clients of the importance of being sure that the organ is properly covered by insurance.

Just weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy brought terrific destruction to New England, especially New York City and the surrounding urban area in New Jersey and Connecticut. A few blocks from Grand Central Station, a section of the stone cornice of a thirty-story apartment building broke loose and plummeted through the roof of the church next door. The hole in the roof was right above the organ, while the trajectory meant that most of the rubble hit the floor in front of the organ. The stones caused minor damage to the organ, but it sure was raining hard. Hope the policy was up to date.

Notes

1. Before using the word gam, I checked the dictionary: “a leg, especially in reference to a woman’s shapely leg.” It’s derived from the Old French gambe, which means “leg.” Guess that’s how the Viola da Gamba got its name. Could we call the Rockettes a “Consort of Gambas?” 

2. I looked this one up too. I’ve often seen the word woot used on Facebook and assumed it means something like “woo-hoo.” Urbandictionary.com agrees, but adds that it’s also a truncation of “Wow, loot,” in the video-game community.

Who you gonna call?

When I was an organ major at Oberlin in the mid-1970s, I had a part-time job working for Jan Leek, a first-generation Hollander who came to the United States to work for Walter Holtkamp and wound up as Oberlin’s organ and harpsichord technician. Traveling around the Ohio and Pennsylvania countryside with Jan making organ service calls, I learned to tune and learned the strengths and weaknesses of action systems of many different organbuilders. I moved back to Boston in 1984 with my wife and two young sons to join the workshop of Angerstein & Associates, where along with larger projects including the construction of new organs, I made hundreds of service calls. That workshop closed in 1987 when Daniel Angerstein was appointed tonal director for M. P. Möller, and I entered a decade during which I cared for as many as 125 organs each year as the Bishop Organ Company.

I’ve always been an advocate for diligent organ maintenance, but ironically, I’ve noticed in my work with the Organ Clearing House that century-old instruments that have never been maintained are sometimes the most valuable. The pipes are straight and true, the original voicing is intact, and there’s not a trace of duct tape anywhere. You remove a dense layer of grime (mostly carried out of the organ on your clothes) to reveal a pristine instrument. You might take that as an argument not to maintain an organ, but the truth is that I’ve found most of those organs in remote humble churches, where in many cases they haven’t been played for decades.

The challenge for the conscientious organ technician is not to leave a mark. If your tuning techniques damage pipes, you’re not doing it right. You should not leave scrape marks on the resonators with your tuning tools, and you shouldn’t tear open the slots of reed pipes. Cone-tuned pipes should stay cylindrical with their solder seams unviolated. Wiring harnesses should be neat and orderly, with no loopy add-ons. Floors and walkboards should be vacuumed and blower rooms should be kept clean.

There are legitimate excuses for fast-and-dirty repairs during service calls, especially if you’re correcting a nasty problem just before an important musical event. But if you do that, you owe it to the client to make it nice when you return.¹ And, when you do make a fast-and-dirty repair, you should adjust your toolkit to accommodate the next one. Did you use a scrap from a Sunday bulletin to refit the stopper of a Gedeckt pipe? Put some leather in your toolbox when you get home.

Many of the churches where I’ve maintained organs are now closed. Many others have diminished their programs and aren’t “doing music” anymore. Some tell me that they can’t find an organist, which is often because they’re not offering a proper salary, and some have “gone clappy.” In this climate, I think it’s increasingly important for organ technicians to be ready to help churches care properly and economically for their pipe organs.

Some churches charge their organists with curatorial responsibilities, purposely placing the care of the organ in the musician’s job description. Others do not, and it’s often a struggle to get boards and committees to grasp the concept of responsible care of their organs. It’s also important to note that while most churches once had full-time sextons or custodians, that position is often eliminated as budgets are cut. Lots of church buildings, especially larger ones, have sophisticated engineering plants that include HVAC, elevators, alarm systems, and sump pumps. The old-time church sexton knew to keep an eye on all that, and to be sure they were serviced and evaluated regularly. Hiring an outside vendor to clean the building does not replace the custodian. I think it makes sense for such a church to engage a mechanical engineer as consultant to visit the building a few times each year checking on machinery, and have volunteers clean the building.

A pipe organ is a machine like none other, a combination of liturgical art and industrial product. A layman might look inside an organ chamber and see a machine, but the musician sits on the bench facing a musical instrument. If you think that the governing bodies of your church don’t fully appreciate the value of their organ, I offer a few thoughts you might use to raise awareness.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

It’s an old saw, but besides your personal hygiene, there’s likely nowhere in your life where it rings truer than in your pipe organ. After fire, flood, and vandalism, dirt is the worst enemy of the pipe organ. An organ technician knows that a fleck of dust getting trapped on the armature of a chest magnet or the surface of a pallet is enough to cause a cipher. The leg of a spider will wreck the speech of a trumpet pipe, most likely one of the first five notes of the D-major scale, ready to spoil almost every wedding voluntary.

But where did that dirt come from? When building windchests, windlines, bellows, and wind regulators, the organbuilder tries hard to ensure that there’s no sawdust left inside. I have an air compressor and powerful vacuum cleaner permanently mounted by my workbench so I hardly have to take a step to clean the interior of a project I’m finishing.

Assuming that the organbuilder delivered a clean organ, the first obvious place for an organ to pick up dirt is in the blower room. Many organ blowers are located in remote basement rooms, and in many cases, there’s no one changing the light bulbs in basement corridors, and there’s no one in the building who knows what that thing is. We routinely find blower rooms chock full of detritus—remnants of Christmas pageants, church fairs, flea markets, and youth group car washes. Organ blowers can have electric motors of five horsepower or more, and I often see 90 or 100-year-old motors that throw impressive displays of sparks when they start up. If the ventilation is obstructed, a fire hazard is created. That sign from the 1972 church fair isn’t that important. Throw it away.

To illustrate the importance of cleanliness, I share our protocol for cleaning a blower room:

• Seal the blower intake with plastic and tape.

• Close the circuit breaker that provides power to the blower so it can’t be started accidentally.

• Vacuum, sweep, wash walls, ceiling, floor, blower housing, wind regulators, and ductwork.

• Leave the room undisturbed for 48 hours to allow dust to settle before opening and starting the blower.

Likewise, if a church fails to cover and protect their organ while the floor of the nave is sanded and refinished, they can expect serious trouble in the future.

Identification

As organist, you might be the only person in the church who can identify the areas occupied by the organ. Designate organ areas as “off limits,” with access limited to the organ technician. Nothing good will happen if the organ chamber is used for storage of old hymnals or folding chairs. Nothing good will happen if teenagers find their way inside to create a secret hidey-hole.² Nothing good will happen if the altar guild puts a vase full of water on the organ console, and, by the way, nothing good will happen if you put your coffee cup there.

The organ’s tuning will almost certainly be disrupted if someone goes into the chamber out of curiosity. Most things inside pipe organs that are not steps lack the “no step” marking, like the touchy areas on an aircraft wing have.

Insurance

Maybe that 1927 Skinner organ in your church (lucky you) cost $9,500 to build. In the early 1970s, a new two-manual Fisk organ cost less than $40,000. I’m frequently called as consultant when a church is making a claim for damage to their organ, working either for the church or the insurance company, and I’ve been in plenty of meetings where bad news about the difference between loss and coverage is announced. It’s both possible and wise to have the replacement value of an organ assessed every five or ten years, with that value named on the church’s insurance policy.

If the organ at your church sustains $250,000 of damage because of a roof leak, and the replacement value of the organ is not specifically listed on the church’s insurance policy, a lot of discussion is likely to lead to a disappointment.

What makes good maintenance?

It’s not realistic to make a sweeping statement about how much it should cost to maintain an organ. Some instruments require weekly, even daily attention, especially if they’re large and complex, in deteriorating condition, and in use in sophisticated music programs. Some instruments require almost no maintenance. A newer organ of modest size with cone-tuning could go five years or more without needing attention.

I suggest that every organ should be visited by a professional organ technician at least once a year, even if no tuning is needed, even if every note plays perfectly, even if all the indicators and accessories are working. The lubrication of the blower should be checked, and the interior of the instrument should be inspected to guard against that one pipe in the Pedal Trombone that has started to keel over. If it’s not caught before it falls, it will take the pedal flue pipes with it. A four-hour annual visit would prevent that.

It’s usual for an organ to be serviced twice a year. While it’s traditional for those service visits to be before Easter and Christmas, at least where I live in the temperate Northeast, Christmas and Easter can both be winter holidays, so it makes more sense to tune for cold weather and hot weather, or for heat on, heat off.

Most organs do not need to be thoroughly tuned during every visit. In fact, starting over with a new “A” and fresh temperament every time can be counterproductive, unless it’s a very small organ. While the stability of tuning varies from organ to organ, most instruments hold their basic tuning well. I generally start a tuning by checking the pitch stops in octaves from the console, writing down a few that need tuning, and check the organ stop-by-stop for inaccuracies. I list a couple dozen notes that need tuning and a half-dozen stops that don’t need anything, and I list which reed notes (or stops) need to be tuned. In that way, I can build on the stability of tuning established over years, keeping the broad picture of tuning clear and concise.

Regular organ maintenance should include cleaning keyboards, vacuuming under pedalboards (the tuner keeps the pencils), checking blower lubrication, and noting larger things that will need attention in the future. Tuners, if you see cracks in a leather gusset on a wind regulator, make a note with your invoice that it will need to be releathered within several years. Your client doesn’t want to hear bad news, but they don’t want a sudden failure and emergency expense either.

When you should call

The better you know your organ, the easier to judge. I once received a panicky call from an organist saying the entire organ had gone haywire. He was abusive over the phone, and demanded that I come right away. I dropped everything and made the 90-minute drive to the church. Haughtily, he demonstrated the cause of his concern. It took me just a few seconds to isolate one pipe in the Pedal Clarion. If he had bothered to look, he could have played without the Clarion for weeks, but I couldn’t tell him that, and I’ve carried the memory of that unpleasant encounter for more than 30 years.

You should call your tuner/technician when:

• You hear a big bang from inside the organ. (Once it was a raccoon tripping a Havahart trap!)

• You hear unusual wind noise. (In some organs, a big air leak like a blown reservoir can lead to the blower overheating.) 

• You hear unusual mechanical noise, grinding, thumping, squeaking, etc.

• You find paint chips in organ areas. (Is the ceiling falling in?)

• The organ blower has been left on accidentally for a long time. It’s a long time for a blower to run between Sundays.

• And obviously, when something important doesn’t work.

When you should not call

Sudden changes in climate often cause trouble with the operation of a pipe organ. Several days of heavy rain will raise the humidity inside a building so Swell shutters squeak and stick, keyboards get clammy and gummy, and the console rolltop gets stuck. If you can manage, simply let the organ be for several days. When conditions return to normal, chances are that things will start working again. Likewise, excessive dryness can cause trouble.

A couple years ago, I was rear-ended in heavy traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County, just north of New York City. I drive a full-size SUV and have a heavy-duty trailer hitch so while the Mercedes that hit me left a rainbow of fluids on the road under its crumpled radiator, the only damage to my car was that the back-up camera stopped working. As I’ve driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one, I didn’t bother to get it fixed, and I’m still perfectly happy driving the car.

If there’s a dead note in the middle octave of the Swell to Great coupler, call me and I’ll fix it. It’s important to the normal use of the organ. If there’s a dead note in the top octave of the Swell to Choir 4′ coupler, and it’s spoiling a melody in a certain piece you’re playing, choose a different registration, or choose a different piece. One good way to head your church toward giving up on the pipe organ is to spend a lot of money on single repairs that don’t matter much to the music. Remember that your church pays me the same for mileage and travel time whether I’m doing a full service call with dozens of little repairs, or making a special trip for a single issue. A cipher is a bigger issue than a dead note.

It’s important to the long life of an organ not to “overtune.” Believe it or not, many churches in northern climes do not have air-conditioning, and it’s usual for temperatures to climb into the 90s inside the organ during the summer. If an organ was built, voiced, and tuned for A=440 at 70°, you’ll ruin the reeds—really ruin them—if you try to tune them to the Principals at 90°. It doesn’t make sense to wreck an organ’s reeds for one wedding, no matter who is the bride.

One of the most difficult tuning assignments I’ve had was at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, in the early 1990s when Brian Jones, Ross Wood, and the Trinity Choir were making their spectacular and ever popular recording Candlelight Carols. It was surreal to sit in the pews in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweltering in mid-July heat, listening to David Willcocks’s fanfare and descant for O come, all ye faithful. Everyone wanted the organ to be in perfect tune, but it was my job to be sure that the organ’s spectacular antique Skinner reeds would live to see another real Christmas. More than 200,000 copies of that recording have been sold, so lots of you have a record of that tuning!

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Remember what I said about those dead notes that are a nuisance but not critical to the use of the instrument? The most important part of the organist’s role in organ maintenance is keeping a list. Maintain a notebook on the console, and write down what you notice. You might hear a cipher in the middle of a hymn that goes away. If you can pay attention enough to identify anything about it (what division, what stop, what pitch), write it down. If you think of a question, write it down. Maybe you noticed a tuning problem during a hymn. Write down the hymn number and what piston you were using. I’ll play the hymn and find the problem.

When I make repairs, I can check things off your list, write comments about the cause, make suggestions for future repairs or adjustments, and invite you for coffee the next time. The console notebook is the most important tool for maintaining an organ.

Notes

1. As I write, I’m thinking of the three clients where I owe follow-up. You know who you are.

2. I once found a little love nest inside an organ, complete with cushions, blankets, candles, and burnt matches. What could happen?

Shifty and puffy

It is mid-September in mid-coast Maine, and the days are getting shorter. Sunset here is about sixteen minutes earlier than in New York City, as we are as far east as we are north of the Big Apple. There are four windows facing east in our bedroom that allow us to track the motion of the sun, which is rising further south than it did a month ago. When we are on the water, we notice that the afternoon sun is lower in the sky as the sunlit water sparkles differently than in the height of summer. And the wind changes dramatically with the change of season. In mid-summer, we cherish the warm sea breeze, predominant from the south or southwest, caused by the air rising as it crosses the sun-warmed shore. All that cooler air above the ocean rushes in to fill the void, and we can sail for miles without trimming the sails in the steady and sure wind.

We had our last sail of the season last weekend in lumpy, bumpy wind from the northwest, which is never as steady as the southwesterlies. It is shifty and puffy, and it can be a struggle to keep the boat going in a straight line. Just as you get going, you get “headed” by a burst of wind from straight ahead, or you get clobbered abeam by a twenty-five mile-per-hour gust. Oof.

You have read this kind of thing from me before, thinking about sailboats when I should be writing about pipe organs, but because both are important parts of my life, and both involve the management of wind, I cannot escape it. And I am thinking about it a little more than usual because at the moment I am releathering three regulators for the organ I am working on. My method for assembling and gluing the ribs and frames of a wind regulator involves seven steps:

• Glue outside belts on the pairs of ribs.

• Glue inside canvas hinges on the pairs of ribs.

• Glue canvas hinges around regulator frames and bodies.

• Glue ribs to top frames.

• Glue ribs/top frames to body.

• Open regulator and glue gusset bodies.

• Close regulator and glue gusset tails.

It is still officially late summer as I write this, and my personal workshop is a three-car garage. Since we are on the shore, I love to have the overhead doors open to the breezes, though it is humid here. I am using the traditional flake hide glue (the stuff that is made when the old horse gets sent to the glue factory) that you cook in an electric pot with water, apply hot, and wipe clean with a hot-water rag that I keep just hot enough that I can put my hands in to wring the rag dry in the sort of double-boiler from which you scoop oatmeal at a cafeteria line. For the glue to set, the moisture must evaporate, and since the air is humid, I have to wait overnight between each step. Running fans all night keeps the humidity down and speeds the drying. In winter, when the air inside is dry, I can typically do two gluing steps in a day.

One of the regulators I am working on is thirty inches square. For that one I am using around twenty-five feet of one-inch-wide heavy canvas tape for the hinges and a comparable length of laminated rubber cloth for the outside belts. The gussets (flexible leather corner pieces) are cut from supple heavy goat skins that have a buttery texture and are impossible to tear. The key to finishing a wind regulator is finding a combination of materials that are all very flexible and strong, that are easy to cut, and that receive glue well enough to ensure a really permanent joint. If the structural integrity of a regulator is iffy, the wind will be shifty and puffy, and it will be a struggle to keep the music going in a straight line. Just as you get going, you get “headed” by a burst of wind that jiggles the music, or you get clobbered by a jolt from out of nowhere.

What’s in a name?

I am referring to these essential organ components as “regulators.” We also commonly call them “bellows” or “reservoirs.” All three terms are correct, but I think regulator is the most accurate description of the function of the thing. Taken literally, a bellows produces air. Air is drawn in when it is opened and pushed out when it is closed, like the simple bellows you have by the fireplace. The hole that lets the air in is closed by an internal flap when air is blown out.

A reservoir stores air. In an organ built before the invention of electric blowers, it was common for an organ to have a pair of “feeder bellows” operated by a rocking handle that blew air alternately into a large reservoir. The feeders had the same internal flaps as the fireplace bellows. The top of the reservoir was covered with weight (bricks, metal ingots, etc.) to create the air pressure, and the air flowed into the organ as the organ pipes consumed it. The bellows were only operated, and the reservoir was only filled when the organist was playing. Just try to get that kid to keep pumping through the sermon. . . .

With the introduction of the electric blower, it became usual to turn the blower on at the beginning of a concert or service and leave it running. That made it necessary to add a regulating valve between the blower and the reservoir. When the reservoir filled and its top rose, the valve closed, stopping the flow of air from the blower, so the system could idle with the blower turning and the reservoir full. When the organist played and therefore used air, the top of the reservoir would fall, the valve would open, and the air could flow again. Like before, there was weight or spring pressure applied to create the proper wind pressure. The addition of that valve added the function of pressure regulation to the bellows. In an organ with an electric blower, the bellows are storing and regulating the pressurized air. Calling it a regulator seems to cover everything.

The longer you go, the heavier you get.

Twice in my life, I have heard EMTs comment about my weight when lifting the stretcher, once after a traffic accident in the 1970s, and again after a fall in an organ seven years ago. But that is not what I am talking about here. We usually think of an inch as a unit to measure length or distance, so how can it refer to pressure, as in, “the Swell division is on six-inches of pressure?”

In industrial uses of pressurized air, more familiarly, in the tires or of your car, the unit of measure is pounds per square inch (PSI). I inflate the tires of my car to 35 PSI, and I use 80 or 100 PSI to operate pneumatic tools. But while my workshop air compressor gauges those high pressures, the actual flow is pretty small, something like two cubic feet per minute.

Organ wind pressure is much lower, and we measure it as “inches on a water column.” Picture a clear glass tube in the shape of a “U” that is twenty-inches high. Fill it halfway with water, and apply pressure to one side of the U. The water goes down on that side of the tube, and up on the other. Use a ruler to measure the difference, and voilà, inches on a water column, or centimeters, or feet. You can easily make one of these using plastic tubing. The little puff it takes to raise three inches of pressure is just the same little puff it takes to blow an organ pipe you are holding in your hand. Instead of the actual tube full of water, we use a manometer that measures the pressure on a gauge without spurting water onto the reeds.

Did you ever wonder how the conversion works? One PSI equals almost 28 inches on a water column. Five inches on a water column equals about .18 PSI. And how does that relate to the organs you know? In a typical organ, it is usual to find wind pressures of three or four inches. In general, smaller organs with tracker action might have pressures as low as forty millimeters, or less than two inches. In a three-manual Skinner organ, the Great might be on four inches, the Swell on six, and the Choir on five. In a big cathedral sized organ, solo reeds like French Horn and English Horn might be on fifteen inches, while the biggest Tubas are on twenty-five. The world-famous State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on fifty inches (incredible), and in the Boardwalk Hall organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Grand Ophicleide, Tuba Imperial, Tuba Maxima, Trumpet Mirabilis are on one hundred inches of pressure, or 3.61 PSI! Stand back. Thar she blows!

Once you have determined pressure, you also have to consider volume. A twenty-rank organ at three inches of pressure might need 1,000 cubic feet per minute at that pressure to sustain a big chord at full organ. Some of the largest organ blowers I have seen are rated at 10,000 CFM at ten inches of pressure. And when you lift the biggest pipe of a 32′ Open Wood Diapason and play the note as an empty hole, you will blow your top knot off. It takes a hurricane coming through a four-inch toehole to blow one of those monster organ pipes.

All the air you could wish for

Before the introduction of the electric blower, most organs had at least two bellows. One would be in free fall, supplying pressure to the organ while the other was raised by the organ pumper. The system I described earlier with two feeders and a reservoir was a great innovation, because once the reservoir was full, the pumper could slack off a little if the organist was not demanding too much wind. The six-by-nine-foot double-rise reservoir in the heart of a fifteen-stop organ by E. & G. G. Hook or Henry Erben has huge capacity, and can blow a couple 8′ flutes for quite a while without pumping. Organs by Hook are great examples of efficiency, with pipes voiced in such a way as to produce lots of tone with very little air, and even large three-manual organs are pumped by just one person using the two-feeders-and-a-reservoir system.

The electric blower changed everything. Organbuilders and voicers could now work with a continuous flow of wind at higher pressures than were available before. New styles of voicing were invented, and along with the introduction of electric keyboard actions, organs could be spread around a building, creating stereophonic and antiphonal effects. When organs were first placed in chambers, and their sounds seemed remote, the builders raised the pressure and increased the flow of air through the pipes, driving the sound out into the room.

While modest organs with electric blowers usually have only one wind regulator, larger instruments can have dozens. In a big electro-pneumatic organ, it is common to have a separate regulator for each main windchest. That is how Ernest Skinner could have the various divisions of an organ on different wind pressures, as each individual regulator can be set up to deliver a specific pressure.

But what about wiggly?

When I mention factors that can add to the stability of an organ’s wind system, I raise the question about “wiggly wind,” or “shaky wind,” both somewhat derogatory terms that refer to the lively flexible wind supplies in smaller and mid-sized mechanical action organs with lower wind pressure. When wind pressure is low and an entire organ receives its air from a single regulator, the motion of the wind can be affected by the motion of the music. It is especially noticeable when larger bass pipes are played while smaller treble pipes are sustained. At its best, it is a delightful affect, akin to the natural flow of air through the human voice. At its worst, it is a distraction when the organ’s tone wobbles and bounces.

This phenomenon is part of the fierce twentieth-century debate concerning “stick” organs versus so-called “industrial-strength” electro-pneumatic organs. I have been servicing organs for more than forty years, and I have often thought that much of the criticism of the emerging tracker-action culture was because craftsmen were reinventing the wheel, learning the art of organbuilding from scratch. They may have measured the dimensions of an organ bellows accurately but failed to compensate for the fact that the ancient model did not have an electric blower. And let’s face it: a lot of flimsy plywood tracker organs were built in the 1960s and 1970s, enough to give that movement a bad name from the start.

The evolution of modern tracker organs toward the powerful, thrilling, reliable, sonorous instruments being built today has much to do with how much the craft has learned about the management of wind over the years. A little tracker organ built in 1962 might have key channels and pallets that did not have the capacity to blow their pipes. It might have flexible wind conductors to offset bass pipes that were too small and that jiggled when the notes were played, causing the tone to bounce. It might have bass pipes with feet that were too short, so air did not have a chance to spread into a dependable sheet before passing between the languid and the lower lip. All of these factors affect the speech of the pipes, giving the impression that the organ is gasping for air. And worse still, you might hear the pitch drop each time you added another stop. I have worked on organs where adding an 8′ Principal made the 4′ Octave sag. How do you tune a thing like that? I marvel now at how air pressure moves through the best new tracker organs, especially at the wonderful response of large bass pipes. Organs by builders like Silbermann do not lack in bass response. Once the revival movement was underway in the middle of the twentieth century, it took a few decades to really start getting it right.

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The organ I am working on today is a simple little thing with two unit action windchests. Each has its own regulator, and there is a third “static” regulator that mounts next to the blower. The blower produces seven inches of pressure; the static regulator brings it down to five inches and distributes the wind to the other two regulators, which each measure out four inches. The biggest pipes in the organ are the 16′ Bourdon, and though there are only ten ranks, it is a unit organ, and a lot of pipes can be playing at once. It is destined to be a practice instrument for a university organ program, so I know that talented and ambitious young organists will be giving it a workout as they learn the blockbuster literature we all love so much. I hope that those students never have to worry about having enough air. And perhaps Maine’s salty breezes will travel with the organ, adding a little flavor to the mix.