In the wind...

In perfect harmony

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

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

How green is green?

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

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

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

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

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take one for the team.

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

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

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

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

Tools of the trade

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

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

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

Make it up as you go along.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a frill.

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

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

What a winter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But baby, it’s cold outside.

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

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

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

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

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about pitch.

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

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

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

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

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

Mise en place

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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere you go, there you are.

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

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

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

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

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Experts

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

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

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

The American Idol syndrome

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

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

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

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

Everyday and ordinary

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

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

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

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

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

Going to pot

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

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

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

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

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

Dodging the draft

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts
when I do this.

I know, I know, don’t do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A writer’s best friend

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

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

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

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.

User interface

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

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

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

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

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

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

A work in progress

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

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

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

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

Consoles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gizmos and gadgets

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

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

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

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

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

White with blue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pitter-patter of little feet

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

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

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

I can name that tune in three colors! 

Is the pipe organ truly a symbol of yesterday, or is it a modern, vital, thrilling, inspiring part of our heritage, just as appropriate in the 21st century as it was in the 16th?

Loft apartments

Built on the Rock the church doth stand,

Even when steeples are falling;

Crumbled have spires in every land,

Bells are still chiming and calling;

Calling the young and old to rest,

But above all the soul distressed,

Longing for rest everlasting.¹

Choir loft, that is

Elizabeth Bolton, a Coldwell Banker residential real estate broker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has launched a website called Centers and Squares. On the home page, under the headline Condos in Renovated Churches, she writes:

Churches and synagogues converted to condos often result in dramatic spaces with soaring ceilings, beautiful oversized windows, and preserved architectural details. A number of former churches have been turned into condos in Cambridge, Somerville, and Watertown. Loft buyers will appreciate the wide-open spaces in these reused buildings.

Scroll down the page and you find photos of eight different former church buildings, with accompanying listings:

The church at 101 Third Street in East Cambridge is one of the oldest church buildings in Cambridge. Built in 1827 as a Unitarian Church it became the Holy Cross Church in 1940. In 2000 it was converted to four luxury condos. The condos range in size from 1300 to 3160 sq.ft. and sold for $585,000 to $1,300,000.

Other features noted in Ms. Bolton’s listings include “heated indoor garage,” and “ceiling heights soar to 60 ft.” in one of the units. The trouble with ceilings that high is that the Christmas tree costs five grand. But what a great place for a radio-operated helicopter—the ideal Christmas gift for a kid (or daddy) living in a converted organ loft. One of the properties is called “Bell Tower Place,” another is “The Sanctuary Lofts.”

In my work with the Organ Clearing House, I’ve been in and out of countless buildings destined to become
loft apartments. Having seen quite a few of these completed projects, I can tell you that it takes a really skillful architect to make usable comfortable living spaces from old church buildings. I’ve seen the top five feet of a large gothic stained-glass window rising from a dining room floor—The Ascension of Christ from the navel up. I’ve seen a 10-by-10-foot home office with a wood ceiling sloping from 20 feet high on one side to 24 on the other. Changing the battery in the smoke alarm is an ordeal. And I’ve seen a fourth-floor bathtub placed in what was the top eight feet of an apse.

About ten years ago, a grand stone church building in Meriden, Connecticut was purchased by a comedian whose vision was to create a comedy club. The belly-gripping name of this inspirational venue: “God, That’s Funny!” (I’m not kidding.) The magnificent three-manual 1893 Johnson Organ (Opus 788) has been on the OCH website for years. In response to a recent inquiry, I tried to track down the owner, who was of course long gone. (I guess God didn’t think it was funny.) A few calls around town revealed that two different worshipping communities had subsequently purchased the building. I drove through that town last Saturday hoping to track down the present owners to see if the organ is still intact. There was a fancy electronic sign out front, flashing information about weather, time and date, bible study, and Sunday “Praise!”, but no phone number. A Google search revealed a phone number that rang endlessly with no chance to leave a message. I guess I should go by on a Sunday morning.

Yet another committee

We’re all familiar with the traditional list of church committees: Memorials, Flower, Property, Finance, Education, and Music. Lots of church members think that the Nominating Committee is the worst assignment, because you spend your three-year stint listening to people explaining why they have to say “No.” But I think the worst assignment for a church member is the Dispersement Committee. (Spellcheck says there’s no such word—but I’ve worked with several such groups, so I know it’s true.) These are typically the last members standing, the most loyal, diehard people in the pews. By the time the Dispersement Committee gets down to work, the work of the Dissolution Committee is complete. The corporation has been closed, the denominational leaders have followed the rules of deconsecrating the property, the last service has been held, the building has been put on the market, the congregation has found new spiritual homes (or not), and all that’s left to do is empty the building.

Anyone who’s been involved with the life of a church can picture the list:

• 533 hymnals

• 346 pew bibles

• 7 rolling coat racks with Christmas pageant costumes

• 26 adult choir robes, 33 child choir robes

• 433 monogrammed teacups with saucers

• 275 ten-inch dinner plates (ivory with green edge stripe)

• grand piano

• 4 upright pianos (one blue, one black, two white)

• 58 small bottles Elmer’s glue

• 6 framed 8x10 “Smiling Jesus”

• 7 boxes elbow macaroni, 2 cans gold spray paint

• 3 step ladders (6-foot, 8-foot, 12-foot)

• 1 Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, 49 ranks, 1937 (G. Donald Harrison)

It all seemed so essential a few years ago. Now it’s a pretty forlorn collection.

When a church has reached this stage, about the best thing that can happen is a crew arriving to dismantle the organ. When the organ has been sold and renovation has been planned, the members of the Dispersement Committee take solace in knowing that some last breath of their beloved church will blow its inspiration across another congregation. Often, when we arrive to dismantle the organ, committee members comment that for just a few more days there’s real activity in the building. They arrive in the morning with family photos they’ve taken off the walls in their homes—photos of their parents’ weddings and funerals, their children’s baptisms and confirmations, or an empty sanctuary decked out in Christmas finery. In each photo, that organ is standing proudly in the background, a monument to a century or more of parish life—celebrations, tragedies, triumphs, and disappointments.

As we thunder through the nearly abandoned building setting up scaffolding, building pipe trays, and unpacking tools, taking down the first façade pipes, we see people sitting quietly in the rear pews with tears streaming down
their cheeks.

A movable feast

Through the disappointment and sadness of the loss of a church, the organ lives on, and it’s fun to be able to share a couple stories in which the relocation of an organ brought a little light to a story.  

In the middle of 2011, Christ Episcopal Church in South Barre, Massachusetts closed its doors, and most of the remaining parishioners transferred their memberships to St. Francis Church in nearby Holden. The Diocese of Western Massachusetts contacted us to place the organ in a new home, and after only a few brief conversations, someone had a bright idea. The outdated and malfunctioning electronic instrument in the chancel at St. Francis Church needed only a little push to make way for the quick installation of the lovely 1910 Hook & Hastings organ (Opus 2344). How bittersweet for the members of Christ Church to be welcomed into a new congregation with the opportunity to bring a beautiful and living piece of their church with them. It took a little more than three weeks to make the move, and as I write, the relocated organ is to be dedicated in a recital by Robert Barney the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Some 20 years earlier, the First Unitarian Church in Woburn, Massachusetts closed. The three-manual 1870 E. & G.G. Hook organ (Opus 553) was sold to a church in Berlin, Germany. The money from that sale was entrusted to church member Charley Smith, who salted it away confident that a good use for the funds would come up someday. And in 1995, the Stoneham (Massachusetts, two miles from Woburn) Unitarian Church closed. The two-manual 1868 E. & G.G. Hook organ (Opus 466) was placed in storage, and advertised in a U.U.A. District Newsletter as available, “free to a good home.”

The Follen Community Church (UUA) in Lexington, Massachusetts (five miles in the other direction from Woburn) was contemplating the future of the home-built instrument in its historic sanctuary when their minister noticed the bit about the Hook organ and handed it off to the chair of the committee. It didn’t take long for the arrangements to be made and the Bishop Organ Company was engaged to renovate and install the organ in Lexington. Charley Smith in Woburn got wind of all this, and presented the Follen Church with the funds from the sale of the Woburn organ to support the organ’s maintenance and to assist in the presentation of annual organ recitals. Charley passed away before the project was complete, but his widow and several past members of the Woburn church were in attendance when the Stoneham organ was dedicated in its new home. Two organs, three Massachusetts towns, one European city, and a lot of good will in the face of disappointment.

§

The Organ Clearing House was an active presence in Boston in the 1970s. I was in high school then, and was assistant organist at a church in Woburn, Massachusetts (across the town square from the former Woburn Unitarian Church), where there is a three-manual E. & G.G. Hook organ built in 1860 (Opus 283). Organbuilder George Bozeman was the titulaire. Mentors George Bozeman and John Skelton both made sure that I was aware of the quality and significance of organs like that. In 1972, Bozeman-Gibson & Company relocated a terrific two-manual, 17-rank Hook organ (Opus 538, 1870) from Our Saviour Methodist Church in Boston to the United Parish in Auburndale, Massachusetts. John Skelton (my private organ teacher) took me to the dedication recital. That was a landmark project—the organ is of the highest pedigree, it was the first project of the fledgling firm, and just recently the church celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the installation of the organ.

My first organbuilding experiences were in the workshops of Bozeman-Gibson during the summers of 1975 and 1976, and several of the projects on the books then came through the Organ Clearing House. Among others, there was a small two-manual organ (I think by George Ryder) being installed in a Salvation Army Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island (the arrangement for meals was a little sketchy), and an E. & G.G. Hook organ going to a Roman Catholic Church in Marine City, Michigan.

Fifteen years later when I joined the Organ Clearing House as executive director, those memories were refreshed, and I looked forward to being able to help with preservation of wonderful organs across the country. It didn’t take long for me to realize a couple hard truths: Not all organs are worth preserving, and many organs worth preserving will be lost.

Without identifying organbuilders, it’s simple enough to say that there are thousands of non-descript two-manual nine-rank electro-pneumatic organs strewn across the country. They all seem to have the same stoplist (Diapason, Dulciana, Melodia, Octave, Stopped Diapason, Viole, Harmonic Flute, Oboe, Bourdon), and each is presented as huge, rare, and world-class.

I’ve come to understand that not all organs can be saved. When an organ like this is discarded—and they often are—I feel that it’s justifiable. There is a finite amount of money available to be spent on pipe organ projects of any description in the United States in a given year. I think it’s important to avoid squandering any of it on projects destined for a mediocre result. If a church owns an organ like that I describe, loves it, and wishes to keep using it, I’m a big champion of developing as economical a renovation project as possible. But in my opinion, it’s hard to justify leaping in ahead of the wrecking ball to scoop up an organ, and encouraging a small church to purchase, renovate, and relocate it when organs of excellent pedigree are equally available.

The Sistine Condos

The New Yorker magazine is a huge read. Each week, a new issue appears, chock full of commentary, fiction, news, poetry, investigative reporting, and a comprehensive view of the arts and culture in New York City. As a newly settled New Yorker, I think I understand how critical the New York view of the arts is to the rest of the country. Nowhere else is there such a concentration of performance spaces, museums, theaters, speakeasies, galleries, and arts festivals of every description. Any American who is interested in or depends on the arts would do well to read the first ten pages of each issue, “Goings on About Town,” which lists by category everything that’s going on. There are comprehensive listings of concert programs from the New York Philharmonic to organ recitals, and the listings, synopses, and reviews of cinema are unsurpassed.

Each issue includes new original fiction and poetry, and each includes original artwork in the form of cartoons and the eloquent commentary of the drawn cover art. Any tourist in Times Square will recognize the ubiquitous double-decker tour buses, run by rival companies, that roar up and down the avenues providing in-depth exposure to this most complex of cities. One New Yorker cover showed two rival buses as battling square-rigged frigates, unleashing broadsides at one another. Another cover showed Aesop’s Hare climbing into a taxi while the tortoise plodded quietly into the subway. (The subway always gets there faster.)

In the September 10, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, I was startled to find a cartoon that depicted “New coat of paint at the Sistine Condos.” I see two painters, none too skilled or too careful, rubbernecking white paint across Michelangelo’s masterpiece, and I see the dome of St. Peter’s in the background. I’ve asked several friends who know Rome well if they recognize the building on the left in the background, but none seem to think it represents an actual identifiable building. (Please be in touch if you know it.)  

I see here comment on what would be the ultimate church closure, and the ultimate desecration of the artistic and architectural heritage of the church. I’ve mentioned the top five feet of the Ascension of Christ. There are plenty of condominium ceilings with white paint that conceals sacred frescos and architectural decoration. Having seen a lot of church buildings in the throes of de-consecration, I can tell you, this is not a great stretch.

Above all, this cartoon speaks of irrelevancy. To many modern Americans, the church is irrelevant. To many modern churchgoers, the pipe organ is irrelevant. Is the instrument truly a symbol of yesterday, or is it a modern, vital, thrilling, inspiring part of our heritage, just as appropriate in the 21st century as it was in the 16th? If we really believe that, are we using it to its fullest as a 21st-century vehicle for expression?

Of course, the pipe organ made the transition very well from Baroque to Classical to Romantic, and into the unique language of the twentieth century. In 1976, jazz pianist Keith Jarrett made a recording, Spheres, of improvisations on the venerable organ by Josef Gabler in the Abbey church at Ottobeuren (available on Amazon.com), but I don’t think we can claim that the organ has been used as flexibly or as imaginatively as the piano. Why not?

I’ve seen an ornate Victorian organ case with stenciled façade unceremoniously spray-painted sky blue (along with the sanctuary walls) because the rector felt threatened by the power of the music. Think of your favorite grand organ case (Haarlem, Sydney, Lübeck, or the Mormon Tabernacle) and picture that crew of painters, caps on backward, approaching with ladders and buckets.  

What you are doing to ensure the future of the pipe organ?

Notes

1. Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig, in Sang-Vaerk til den Danske Kirk, 1837 (Kirken Den Er Gammelt Hus); translated from Danish to English by Carl Døving, 1909, and Fred C. M. Hansen, 1958.