In the wind. . . .

Follow the money

In August of 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, ending a long process of suspicion, investigation, and Senate hearings into allegations that the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) used subterfuge and “dirty tricks” to sabotage the efforts of the Democratic Party leading up to the presidential election in 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post, were central to that investigation, jumping on the story of the notorious break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex near the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. They worked so closely together that they were known by their names melded as “Woodstein.” The story as they told it is widely regarded as the birth of modern investigative journalism.

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation, Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), which was a precursor to the 1976 movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. There’s a scene in the film where Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) is interviewing an accountant who worked for CREEP, who revealed that there was a stash of money—a secret fund—that was used to bankroll those dirty tricks. As Bernstein questioned her, she said, “Follow the money.” I suppose that phrase had been used before, but it’s popularly understood that it originated in that movie.

Woodward and Bernstein followed the money, which led them to discovering how many White House officials and Nixon appointees were involved in the scandal, ultimately unraveling Nixon’s presidency. I’m writing this in mid-September, and I realize that you will likely be reading it a few days before Americans go to the polls to decide what must be one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in the nation’s history.

Don’t take it for granted.

When I was a kid, I had practice privileges in four different local churches. I came and went as I pleased and made plenty of noise while I was there. I even had keys to a couple of them. One was the church where I had my lessons. Looking back, I suppose my teacher had made the arrangements for me, but I don’t remember any of the details. If I remember right, I played for an occasional funeral—I guess that was in return for the right to practice. I’m pretty sure that money never changed hands, and I know I took it for granted. Wasn’t I lucky?

When I arrived at Oberlin as a student in the fall of 1974, I was flabbergasted by the number of organs. There were sixteen practice organs, four in teaching studios, a big Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, and the brand-new Flentrop in Warner Concert Hall. Organ majors had two weekly lessons—one in the studio and one in the concert hall. And of course, we needed practice time in the hall. That was the way things worked, and I never paid attention to how frustrating it must have been for students studying other instruments. If you wanted to rehearse a string quartet in Warner Hall, you had to sneak past all those organists.

Of course, Oberlin also had a lot of pianos—hundreds of them. There was a marble plaque on the wall near the dean’s office that read, “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Music.”¹ I remember paraphrasing it: “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Steinway & Sons.” There were close to two hundred Steinways in the practice building, Robertson Hall. There was a Steinway “B” in every teaching studio, and two Bs in every piano teacher’s studio. Two Bs, or not two Bs, there was no question that we had access to excellent instruments wherever we turned. I suppose there were close to three hundred pianos. I wonder what that cost? The pianos were there in support of all the students—flautists, singers, violinists—but the organists sure ate up most of the real estate. 

We all had our favorite instruments. I certainly knew which practice organs I preferred, but I also had a half-dozen favorite pianos. I knew them by room number and serial number. Wasn’t I lucky to have a half dozen favorites out of the multitude? I once had a dream that Oberlin was replacing all the pianos at once, and they were discarding all the old ones. To make the disposal easier in the wacky world of dreams, the pianos were placed on the curb in front of houses all over town for trash day, and we raced about, looking at serial numbers to claim our favorites. I found mine on the curb in front of Fenner Douglass’s house on Morgan Street—the one with the big organ pipe out front. Lucky guy.

WWFS? What would Freud say? That I took it for granted that lovely instruments would be provided for me wherever I went? That I felt it was somehow my right? That was the time when I was getting deep into organ building and started to realize how much money was involved.

I’ve heard colleagues say something like this: “I’ll accept that job, but I told them they’ll have to buy me a new organ.” Have you ever heard anything like that? Have you ever said anything like that?

A crazy business

Picture a parish church with 250 “pledging units.” The organ is a broken-down, tired relic, and someone gets the idea that it should be replaced. How do we get started? What’s it going to cost? However they get started, somewhere along the line they start receiving proposals from organbuilders. $650,000. $800,000. $1,200,000. Wow! I had no idea.

To pay for an $800,000 instrument, every family in that church would have to donate $3,200. To pay for $1.2M instrument, more like $4,800. Of course, it never works like that. More likely, one family gives a third of the cost, three other families split the second third, and the rest comes in small gifts from the other 246 families. The smallest gift comes from the First Grade Class of the Sunday School.

Let’s think about this. A small community of people ponies up an average of $3,200 a head to buy a musical instrument. Crazy. Are they doing that as a gift to the organist? I doubt it. They may be doing it in recognition and appreciation for the wonderful music. The organist’s artistry may have inspired them. And they may be doing it in part to be sure they’ll be able to attract the next good musician. Whatever the motivation, we shouldn’t fail to notice what a remarkable process that is.

One brick at a time

Last April, Wendy and I spent ten days in the UK. She was attending the London Book Fair, so I had a few days on my own to explore the big city. After the fair, we traveled to Durham, to York, and to Oxford, especially visiting big churches and their organs.

I wrote about that trip in the June and July 2016 issues of The Diapason and touched on how the British National Lottery provides funding for the restoration of the pipe organs and church buildings through a program called Heritage Lottery Fund, which is dedicated to preserving the nation’s heritage. Durham Cathedral was built between 1093 and 1133, and a major renovation project is underway now. Dubbed “Open Treasure,” the project is focused not only on the fabric of the building, but on programming involving the use of the spaces as well. You can read about the project on the website: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/open-treasure. 

The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the project in large part, but Durham Cathedral is responsible for raising a huge amount of the money. And there’s a marvelous project as part of that campaign. In the gift shop, a large and ancient room that also houses a restaurant, there was a Lego™ model of the cathedral under construction. It’s more than 12½ feet long, 5½ feet tall, and includes more than 300,000 bricks. For a donation of £1 per brick, you could add to the model. We gave £20, and with the help of a cheerful volunteer wearing an “Open Treasure” sweatshirt, I followed architectural drawings to install my 20 bricks.

There’s a website describing that project: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/visit/what-to-visit/durham-cathedral-lego-bui…. When I looked at it this morning, I learned that the project, which started in July of 2013, is now complete. That webpage includes a video in five parts that animates the history of the cathedral using Lego™ bricks, with terrific singing by the cathedral choir in the background.

A note to readers: I hope you open the links I publish with this column. And Google “Durham Cathedral Lego.” You’ll find lots of newspaper coverage of this unique project.

In the July issue, I shared the tenth-century story of St. Cuthbert and the missing cow, part of the legend of the founding of the cathedral. There’s a commemorative statue of a cow high on the exterior of the cathedral, and there’s a Lego™ cow in the model, along with a representation of the famous poly-chromed façade of the cathedral organ, notable because it sports two 16′ Open Wood Diapasons, one which extends to 32′! Now we’re talking.

Buy a pipe.

The idea of buying bricks is not new. There are a couple bricks with our names on them in the path leading to the Skidompha² Library in Damariscotta, Maine (population 2,218). And my grandparents donated stones in honor of me, my three siblings, and ten first cousins for the construction of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I have no idea where those stones are located, but whenever I’m there, I look up and think about it.

A common gimmick for raising money for an organ project is “Buy a Pipe,” or “Adopt a Pipe.” The organbuilder and organ committee team up to create a catalogue of prices. You could list anything from a 13/5′ Tierce ($800) to a 32′ Bombarde ($75,000); a keyboard ($3,500) to a blower ($5,000). Donors could mark boxes on a form, and send in their checks. I’ve seen organ benches, carved pipe shades, and swell boxes listed as family gifts in dedication booklets. I’ve even seen an antiphonal Trompette-en-Chamade with the knob engraved Trompette Boyd, in memory of the son who died in the war.

This exercise is always a little mythical—it’s hard to make a list that accurately covers the entire cost of an organ. Windlines, schwimmers, ladders, and walkboards don’t make appealing memorials. Maybe you inflate the value of a music rack to cover a tuner’s perch. But it certainly is meaningful to donors to know they supported something specific. I often quip that raising money to build an organ is easier if there will be lots of space on the case for a plaque.

Place a big organ pipe, at least an 8-footer, in the narthex. Mark it with increments of $100,000, and fit it with a gold tuning sleeve. As gifts come in, move the sleeve up the pipe. Nice visual.

§

There are lots of reasons for a church to purchase a new organ. The old one is worn out, or the old one was never any good. A new instrument would help revitalize the place. We care deeply about the meaning and role of music in our worship.

And there are reasons not to. A couple years ago I worked with a church, helping them to sell a large tracker organ. It was less than twenty years old, and very fancy, with carvings and moldings, shiny façade pipes, and turned rosewood drawknobs. But a significant number of members had been bitterly opposed to the acquisition. Many of those people left the church, and the opposition that remained carried on the battle. The installation of the new organ could be traced directly to the failure of the church and the disbanding of the congregation. Soli Deo Gloria. 

Wendy and I recently joined a church that installed a new organ a few years earlier. It was named the Bicentennial Organ, commemorating the bicentennial of the parish, and it was paid for by the wide membership of the parish and surrounding community. As a new member, I’ve enjoyed meeting people there. When they learn that I’m involved with pipe organs, they light up and speak eloquently about the church’s new instrument. They’re well informed about it. They not only know it’s a good and important organ, but they know why. They’re proud of it, and its presence in the building means a lot to them.

Care for the money.

The people who paid for the organ are entrusting it to you. Be sure that it’s always well cared for. That means tuning and mechanical issues, but there are some bigger, less obvious reasons. There’s someone on the property committee, the finance committee, or the board of trustees who is responsible for the church’s insurance policies. You are the advocate for the care of the organ. Take a moment to ask if the organ is properly insured. The organ should be specified on the policy, with a letter of assessment attached. If the organ is damaged by fire, by a roof leak, or by vandalism, they’ll find out very quickly how much it will cost to repair. If the organ was purchased for $200,000 thirty years ago, it may have a replacement value of over $1,000,000—$200,000 wouldn’t even cover the Rückpositiv. It’s remarkable how many organs are not adequately insured.

When the parish is planning renovation in the sanctuary, you are the advocate for the care of the organ. Be sure the organ is properly covered. If it’s going to be really dusty, the reeds should be removed to storage. New carpets, sanding the floors, painting, and carpentry are all enemies of the organ. I once saw a painter standing on top of the swell box in an antique organ, working over his head, a drop cloth and roller pan at his feet. Paint was dripping onto the Great pipes, and the guy had no idea how little structure there was under him. He could have fallen though and wrecked the organ. Might have gotten hurt, too.

Make sure that your music is well chosen and beautifully played—an inspiration to everyone in the pews. Use the organ to nurture and lead the congregation, not to aggrandize yourself. Use the organ as if it’s a privilege to play it. The people who paid for it are entrusting it to you. It’s there to provide beautiful music, but more fundamentally, it’s there as an expression of the congregation’s faith.

The new organ is a gift to future generations of worshipers. Your gift to those future generations is the inspiration you’ve provided—the magic, mystery, and majesty you’ve added to worship—that has encouraged the congregation to express their faith by supporting that new organ. Aren’t we lucky? ν

Notes

1. While writing this, I learned that Steinway provided a second plaque celebrating 150 years, honoring Oberlin as an “All-Steinway School.”

2. “Skidompha” is an acronym using the first initials of the names of the members of the club that founded the library. First Lady Laura Bush awarded the National Medal for Museum and Library Services to the Skidompha Library in 2008.

Living documents

Purist: A person who insists on absolute adherence to traditional rules or structures.

During the second half of the twentieth century, organists and organbuilders learned a lot about purists. As we delved into the evolving world of historically informed performance (we used to call it “early performance practice”), we could be disdainful of any elements added to the original—the original score, the original instrument, the original anything. We sought urtext editions and refused to alter the notes in any way. “Couperin didn’t place an ornament over that note, and I’m not ornamenting that note.” If some wayward organ guy had added a stop to an antique organ, we called forth the wrath of God—pox on his house. Funny, we didn’t seem to mind cutting down those lovely strings to make mutations . . . 

The ultimate purist preservation of an instrument is to retain the maximum amount of original material possible, including decomposed felt and leather, which likely means that the instrument would be unplayable, but it sure
is preserved.

If you’re curator of an exhibit of historically important furniture (Marie Antoinette sat here), you surround it with red velvet ropes and signs saying “Do Not Sit.” Most of the important historic organs I know are in regular use. What would be the point of preserving Widor and Dupré’s magnificent organ at St. Sulpice in Paris or the stupendous organ built by Christian Müller in the Grote Kerk in Haarlem, Holland, if we couldn’t play and hear them? The glory of those antique masterpieces is that their sounds are just as vital today as they were when they were new. We have to invade them to preserve them. Mozart played the Haarlem organ in 1766 when he was ten years old, and the organ, completed in 1738, was twenty-eight years old. That’s comparable to the current age of the famous Fisk organ at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, completed in 1992—twenty-four years old now. The Haarlem organ has seen changes, but we can be pretty confident that it sounds a lot like it did the day young Wolfie played it.

An evolving document

Wendy and I have just returned from an eight-day trip to the United Kingdom. As she is a literary agent, the trip was planned to coincide with the London Book Fair, an exhibition for the publishing world that attracted more than 25,000 participants from 134 countries this year. While she was meeting with clients and colleagues, I slummed around London visiting churches and organs, and I stoked my love of the fictional British Navy Captains Aubrey and Hornblower along with my love of sailing by visiting the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Together, we toured and heard Evensong at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

After the fair, we went north to Durham, where I spent an afternoon visiting the workshops of the great British organ company, Harrison & Harrison (I’ll write about that visit soon), and we shared experiences at Durham Cathedral. We spent twenty-four hours in York where we heard Evensong (by far the best singing we heard all week) and toured the great cathedral familiarly known as York Minster. By the way, yes, it is a cathedral—the official name is The Cathedral and Metropolitan Church of St. Peter in York.

And we spent two days in Oxford where we had meals with family members and clients and visited the new Dobson organ at Merton College, the venerable Willis organ at Blenheim Palace, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Bodleian Library, where three of the surviving four copies of the original 1217 Charter of the Magna Carta are held. Careful of those overdue fees.

As we walked through the grand and ancient church buildings, I was struck by how at their best, and at their worst, they are all evolving documents. The original forms are largely preserved, and important elements that define and enhance each building have been added over the centuries.

People are dying to get in.

Westminster Abbey is home to countless graves and memorials. Some are simple engraved paving stones, others are monumental Victorian splashes with larger-than-life heroes on horses engaged in swirling battles, capes a-fluttering and swords a-flying. The verger who was our tour guide quipped, “the larger the monument, the lesser the hero.” Nearly every royal coronation since 1066 (William the Conqueror) has happened at the Abbey, and through the ages, officials have struggled to maximize the seating capacity. The abbey normally seats about 2,000 people, but for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, temporary galleries were installed to squeeze in 8,200. I bet they could add a thousand seats if they took out all the flashy monuments.

The installation of graves and memorials is a terrific example of how Westminster Abbey has been used as a living and evolving document. Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400), Georg Frideric Handel (d. 1759), Isaac Newton (d. 1727, same year as Beethoven), and Charles Dickens (d. 1870) are all buried there. The most recent is a memorial to David Frost (d. 2013), the comedian and journalist who famously interviewed Richard Nixon following his resignation as President of the United States. I’m not sure what you have to do to secure a spot there. Perhaps you can download an application.

I expect that some conservative Christians would be surprised to see the grave of Charles Darwin near that of Isaac Newton in a house of worship. But as the Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, preached in the days following Darwin’s death, “It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr. Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God.” Now there’s an argument that’s been going on for a long time. How’s that for a living document?

If you buy it, we’ll hang it.

Along with a few exceptionally flamboyant memorials, there are two newer additions to the furnishings of Westminster Abbey that I think are incongruous. In 1966, the Guinness family (of stout fame) donated sixteen immense Waterford Crystal chandeliers to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the abbey. Each is more than ten feet tall and comprises hundreds of pieces of cut glass. They’re sumptuous and glorious, but their design has no more to do with the high gothic than a Ford Thunderbird. In my opinion, they’re ostentatious and out of place.

And in the glorious Lady Chapel, beyond the high altar, with one of the most beautiful pendant fan vaulted ceilings anywhere, there are two huge windows installed in 2013, depicting symbols associated with the Virgin Mary. They replaced windows that were destroyed during World War II, were designed by the British artist Hughie O’Donoghue, executed by Helen Whittaker of the Barley Studios in York, and are the gift of Lord and Lady Harris of Peckham commemorating the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Lord Harris (born 1942) is a member of Parliament who made his fortune in the carpet business. The vivid blue hue of the windows, while appropriate to the Virgin Mary, is oddly out of place in the chapel, as are the unflattering portraits of Lord and Lady Harris in the lower right corner of one of the windows.

Space for an organ

Finding space for the installation of a pipe organ is a conundrum often faced in modern church buildings. Likewise, while medieval cathedrals are monumental in size, they were not designed with pipe organs in mind. And a monumental building demands a monumental organ. Installing organs in buildings like those is quite a trick, as made clear by some of the interesting solutions we saw during our trip. 

In the cathedrals of York and Exeter, and the chapel of Kings College, Cambridge, the organ cases are placed high on the screens that separate the nave from the quire. But the organs burst the confines of their cases, and the overflow is dispersed around the higher reaches of the buildings. At Kings College, much of the organ is contained within the screen below the level of the console. At Westminster Abbey, the console is on the screen high above the quire, and the large body of the organ that is not contained by the ornate facing cases above the screen is housed stories higher in the triforium.

At York, an immense 32-foot Metal Open Diapason stands against the wall of the ambulatory, and is disguised as stone columns. At Durham Cathedral, huge Open Wood Diapasons (one at 32-foot, the other at 16-foot) are installed in the ambulatory on either side of the quire.

For those of us in the organ community, it’s hard to imagine all those buildings without organs, but I was struck by how those huge instruments are imposed on the ancient sites, and what an intrusion it was to install them. Do you cut big holes in 900-year-old floors to run windlines from a basement blower room to the organ case? Do you power-drill holes and place bolts in pockets of epoxy in 900-year-old columns to fasten the organ’s structure to the fabric of the building like we do in modern masonry buildings? And how much can you trust the integrity of the ancient material to bear the weight, stress, and vibrations of a pipe organ? We learned about several critical “stabilizing” projects that have limited the possibility of collapses. When you roll a windchest on a dolly across the floor of the quire, do you crack or shatter the ancient paving stones? What a responsibility it is to care for these world-famous and venerable buildings.

Our tour guide at Durham Cathedral told how they took up the stone floor of the quire to install the pipes for radiant heating. They had archeologists on hand in case they turned up unknown graves (they did), and the artisans had to catalogue everything so each stone was returned to its original location.

Oil and water

The other day, I visited an organ being offered for sale. It’s a three-manual American Classic beauty built just after World War II that suffers because it was placed in remote chambers out of earshot of the congregation. A Trompette en Chamade was added in 1970. It has high wind pressure, narrow scale, and a horribly prominent location. I suppose the hope was it would help define the sound of the instrument, as well as provide for festive voluntaries for weddings and such. The trouble is that it has nothing to do with the rest of the organ. Its self-righteous snarl violates the beautiful space of the nave. On the plus side, there’s no need for blend since it overpowers the rest of the organ.

Years ago, an organist asked me to add a 1-foot stop to the organ at his church, a nineteenth-century tracker with eight stops, none above 4-foot. He had been inspired by such a stop on an organ he had played recently, one that I know has more than a hundred stops. What’s the use of a 1-foot as the ninth stop on an organ?

I’m not opposed to adding stops to organs. I know plenty of instances where a pedal reed, a mixture, even an entire division has been added to an organ with great effect. But to be successful, such additions need to be thoughtful extensions of the whole. You may have salvaged a rank of Trumpet pipes and stored it in your garage, but just because it fits in the holes, there’s no guarantee it will sound good. Think about pipe scales, metal thickness, wind pressure, and halving ratios. Think about the original intent of the organbuilder. What’s the next stop he would have added to the organ? If you’re working with a decent organ, you’re working with a work of art. Please don’t tart it up with something that doesn’t belong.

A Royal Festival of Reger

Our trip to the U.K. was planned long before I knew that Stephen Tharp would be playing a recital on the organ at Church of the Resurrection in New York, where the Organ Clearing House installed a renovated and enlarged Casavant organ, relocated from a church in Maine. I admire Stephen’s dazzling and daring musicianship, and I was disappointed to learn that I’d miss such an occasion. Our consolation prize was Isabelle Demers playing a recital of the music of Max Reger at London’s Royal Festival Hall. What a treat! I snapped up tickets online before we left home.

Isabelle’s concert was part of the “Pull Out All the Stops International Organ Series,” presented in celebration of the recent restoration of the huge Harrison & Harrison organ at RFH, and there was a huge audience. Amazingly, it was recorded by the BBC for broadcast online, but unfortunately, the stream expires before this publication date.

The program included Reger’s Chorale Fantasy on Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme and closed with his monumental Introduction, Passacaglia, and Fugue in E Minor (op. 127). In keeping with today’s theme of messing with the original, Isabelle opened the program with Reger’s transcription of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, and four of his transcriptions of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions. Those were new ones for me. Most of us have played those “Two-Parters” in early keyboard lessons, perhaps returning to them as mature musicians to try to make music of them. But Reger turned them into fiendish etudes with impossible pedal lines, and at least three independent parts. If I had tried to play them, it would have sounded like falling down stairs, but Isabelle tossed them off with aplomb. It’s a good thing Reger didn’t try the same with the Three-Part Inventions.

Heads will roll.

Britain’s King Henry VIII was a tough character, dealing with dissent by beheading people. Ironically, shortly after he ensconced his mistress Jane Seymour in the palace, he accused his wife Anne Boleyn of infidelity. Anne was executed on May 19, 1536, the day before Henry became engaged to Jane. It’s hard to imagine how secure that made Jane feel, and Anne was not the last of Henry’s wives to be executed for infidelity.

Henry VIII famously fell out with the pope, who had refused to grant an annulment of Henry’s first marriage, and he set out to separate the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1540, the king ordered the destruction of shrines to saints, took possession of the assets of monasteries, and created havoc across the land. Everywhere we went in England, we saw empty niches where statues of saints had been removed, and where the saints remained in place, many were headless.

One of the more poignant new artistic expressions we saw was a collection of twelve modern headless statues called the Semaphore Saints placed across the west wall of York Minster, under the great window, six on each side of the main entrance. Created by sculptor Terry Hamill who donated them to the cathedral, each holds a halo in each hand and is posed as a letter of the semaphore alphabet. Collectively, they spell “Christ Is Here,” symbolic of the power of icons, heralding the strength of the message of the church, even if the saints’ heads have been removed.

§

I’ve gone out on several limbs here. I’ve pooh-poohed wildly expensive artworks that have been given to important and venerable institutions, and I’ve boiled centuries of history into a few glib paragraphs. In all expressions of art, from tiny paintings to huge cathedrals, we each have to decide what is complete and should be left in original form, and what deserves to be alive and evolving. If you add a pipe organ to an ancient building, or Art Deco chandeliers in a Gothic space, would you add a mustache or a dog to a painting by Rembrandt, or an extra act or character to a play by Shakespeare? How do you decide what’s acceptable and what’s abomination?

Perhaps it’s less intrusive to alter a piece of music or other performance art. After all, once an “enhanced” performance is over, you can always do it again the “right” way.

Mulling all this over, I guess the additions I like the best are those that make eloquent statements while honoring the original fabric of the place. The Space Window in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the Firefighters Memorial at St. John the Divine in New York, and York Minster’s Semaphore Saints are all contemporary expressions, and they all speak eloquently to me. 

I can only celebrate the wonderful organs we saw. The buildings were all more than 600 years old before the organs were added, but they bring the life of moving breath into the living documents which are the buildings they populate, and have served as catalysts for a powerful movement of sacred music I can’t imagine living without. Change, by all means. But the past becomes and is becoming to the future.

A Pokémon world

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

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

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

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

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

Starry eyes

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

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

The man from Samos

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

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

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

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

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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

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

Blow, ye winds . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

A time and a place

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

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

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

Notes

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

Why it matters.

An hour ago, I finished my last “Christmas” tuning. It’s been a fun season involving lots of organs—some wonderful, and some a little less wonderful. I started tuning organs in Boston in 1984 when I joined Angerstein & Associates after returning from almost ten years in northern Ohio that included my years as a student at Oberlin, my first marriage, a long stint as director of music at a large Presbyterian church in Cleveland, and my terrific apprenticeship and friendship with Jan G. P. Leek. I still tune quite a few of the organs I first saw when working for Dan Angerstein in 1984—organs that were nearly new then and that have lots of miles on them now. In those churches I’ve outlasted as many as ten organists, five pastors, and who knows how many sextons.

It’s fun to return to these places several times each year, visiting the old friends who work in the buildings and monitoring the condition of the organs. Many of my tuning clients couple with a particular restaurant or sandwich shop. We were disappointed a couple weeks ago in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to see that the favorite sandwich shop near the church had been torn down. A sign indicates that they’ll reopen in a new building in the spring, but I think it will take twenty years to get the place seasoned so things taste right.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to be associated with some very special organs—special because of their size, their musical beauty, or their historical significance. It’s exciting to tune an organ that was played by Marcel Dupré, Lynnwood Farnam, or Pierre Cochereau. And I’ve had the thrill of preparing organs for concerts by such giants as Simon Preston, Madame Duruflé, Catharine Crozier, and Daniel Roth. You sit in the audience waiting for the artist to play that C# in the Swell Clarion you had so much trouble with two hours ago. Hold on, baby, hold on!

Of course, most of those experiences happen in big city churches with rich histories, fabulous artwork, heavy tourist traffic, and outstanding musicians. I’ve always felt it’s a special privilege to work behind the scenes in those monumental places, surrounded by all that heritage. But let’s not forget the importance of the small church with the seemingly inconsequential organ. 

Yesterday, I tuned one of the older Möller unit organs known as The Portable Organ. The opus list of M. P. Möller includes something like 13,500 organs, and while we know plenty of big distinguished instruments built by that firm, by far the most of them were these tiny workhorse organs with two, three, or four ranks. They built them by the thousand, and you find them everywhere. Maybe you’re familiar with the newer Artiste models that have a detached console, and one or two, or even three eight-by-eight-by-four foot cases stuffed full of pipes like a game of Tetris. The model I’m referring to predates that—they were popular in the 1940s, had attached keyboards, and usually three ranks, Spitz Principal (they called them Diapason Conique—oo-la-la), Gedeckt, and Salicional. The ranks were spread around through unit borrowing, each rank playing at multiple pitches, and there were compound stops such as “Quintadena” which combined the Gedeckt at 8′ and the Salicional at 22⁄3′.

The particular instrument I tuned yesterday was originally in a Lutheran church in Bronx, New York. As that parish dissolved a few years ago, the Organ Clearing House moved the organ to another Lutheran church in Queens. There was no budget for renovation, so we simply assembled it, coaxed all the notes to work, gave the case a treatment of lemon oil, and off we went. It had been a year since the last tuning, and it was fun to find that all the notes were working, the tuning had held nicely, and the organ sounded nice. I spent less than an hour tuning the three ranks, chatting with the pastor, and cleaning the keyboards.

When I got home this afternoon, I had a quick lunch and took a look at Facebook to be sure everyone out there was behaving. I was touched to see a post by colleague Michael Morris who works for Parkey OrganBuilders in the Atlanta area. He had just tuned another copy of the same Möller organ and wrote this:

It’s not always the quality of the instrument that makes a tuning job enjoyable. For some years now, my last regularly scheduled tuning has been in Georgia’s old capital of Milledgeville. It’s usually a pleasant drive through farm country to get to the antebellum Sacred Heart Church.

This was Flannery O’Connor’s parish, the center of her spiritual life and an influence in her writing. In 1945 Möller delivered a three-rank unit organ and placed it in the heart-pine gallery. It’s not a distinguished instrument, but it’s always easy to tune and I enjoy the thought that this instrument was part of the fabric of her life.

I’m always done just before the parishioners start the Rosary before noon Mass. I have lunch at a Mexican restaurant, then drive back to Atlanta knowing I have put another tuning season behind me.

Nice work, Michael. 

Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) was a devout Roman Catholic. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, she lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with classics translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. In 1952, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus (from which her father died in 1941) and returned to her childhood home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. 

Her writing is spiritual, reflecting the theory that God is present throughout the created world, and including intense reflections on ethics and morality. The modest little organ in Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville was present for her whenever she worshipped. On such a personal level, that three-rank organ is every bit as important as the mighty 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston or the iconic Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

How did you get started?

After his ordination as an Episcopal priest, my father was rector of a small church in Somerville, Massachusetts. Subsequently, he was the first rector of a new parish in Westwood, Massachusetts, starting there when it was formed as a mission. I was two years old when we moved into the rectory next to the church building. The church building was designed as a very simple structure, sort of an A-frame with a linoleum floor. It was furnished with folding chairs, so the single room could be used for worship, dinners, and all sorts of other things. A few years later, the planned second phase was executed. An adjoining parish hall was built, and the original building was turned into a proper church with towers, stained glass, pews, and a rear gallery for organ and choir. The organ was also planned in stages. It was one of the first instruments built by Charles Fisk, back in the days when he was of the Andover Organ Company. It had six stops, mechanical action, and a detached-reversed console, all mounted on a six-inch-high platform down front. Get it? It was the console and Rückpositiv of an organ that could be expanded to include two manuals and pedal. When the second phase was under construction, there was a moment when the roof was off—and that’s the moment they moved the organ. They lifted the whole thing with a crane, pipes and all, and placed it in the new balcony. I would have a fit if someone did that with one of my organs today, but seeing that organ hanging from the hook of the crane is one of my earliest pipe organ memories. It was more than twenty years before the second case containing Great and Pedal was built.

When I was ten, we moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad became rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, home to an Ernest M. Skinner organ built in 1904 (Wow! That’s an early one.), during the time when Robert Hope-Jones was working with Mr. Skinner. I started taking organ lessons a couple years after we got there and was quickly aware that the organ was on its last legs. I didn’t play the Skinner organ much, because less than a year after I started taking lessons, I was playing for money at other churches. That organ was replaced by a twelve-stop Fisk in 1974, their Opus 65. Six additional stops that were “prepared for” were added in 1983. The on-site installation of those stops was under way when Charles Fisk passed away. A 16′ Open Wood was added in 2012.

My organ lessons continued a few blocks away at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home to Fisk’s Opus 50.¹ During my high school years, I was assistant organist to George Bozeman at the First Congregational Church in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played on the fabulous 1860 three-manual E. & G. G. Hook organ, which at 156 years old is still one of the very few remaining pre-Civil War three-manual Hooks. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I got to Oberlin a few years later and started hearing about the organs my classmates got started on.

All my college buddies were terrific organists, but I learned that some of them had never played a pipe organ before their audition at Oberlin. And while I had free access to those glorious organs by Fisk and Hook, some had only ever played on modest electro-pneumatic unit organs. The first time I played a tiny electro-pneumatic pipe organ was in a practice room at Oberlin! But thinking back and knowing that all of them were wonderful organists when they were in high school, I’m sure that thousands of parishioners in those few dozen churches were moved and excited to hear such young people play those organs so beautifully.

A matter of scale

Many composers and musicians consider the string quartet one of the purest forms of music-making. The composer working with four musicians and four independent parts is writing intimately and minimally. Each measure, each individual chord is specially voiced and tuned for the moment. There is no blurring of the edges; everything is exposed. Compare that to a symphony orchestra with twenty first violins. Conductors are fond of saying that an instrumental or choral ensemble is only as strong as its weakest member. I’ve always thought that was baloney. It’s a great cheerleading sentiment, but it seems to me that in a twenty-member violin section, the stronger players inspire and encourage their colleagues, helping them to achieve new heights. I’ve led volunteer church choirs whose collective ability far outshone the individual skills and musicianship of the weakest member.

We can draw an analogy with pipe organs. A tiny chamber organ with four or five stops is every bit as beautiful as a big-city monster with two hundred ranks. It’s almost unbelievable that both are called by the same name. When you’re playing a chamber organ, you listen to the speech of each individual pipe, but when you’re whipping through a big toccata with a hundred stops drawn, each four-part chord involves four hundred pipes. There might be an individual stinker in the Swell Clarion (remember, the pipe I was having trouble with), or a zinger in a Mixture that stands out in the crowd, but otherwise, you’re really not listening to individual pipes any more than you single out an individual violist in a Brahms symphony.

If we agree that a tiny chamber organ and a swashbuckling cathedral job are both beautiful organs, we should also agree that they serve different purposes and support different literature. I suppose we should allow that it’s likely to be more effective to play Sweelinck on a hundred stops than Widor on five. But we’re lucky that we still have organs that Sweelinck knew, so we can imagine and even reconstruct how his playing sounded. I don’t know if Widor had much opportunity to hear others play his music, but I bet he wouldn’t have liked hearing “that Toccata” on a small two-manual organ in a two-hundred-seat church.

Will it play in Milledgeville?

I’m sure my colleague Michael Morris did a lovely job tuning that little Möller organ. I assume, or I hope that some caring person will be playing lovely music and our favorite Christmas carols on the organ in the next few days. Maybe the congregation will sing “Silent Night” while holding candles, lighting that simple sanctuary with magical twinkling. Maybe that lovely effect will make people’s eyes go moist. Families will go home after Mass, whistling and humming those familiar tunes.

We know that Flannery O’Connor worshipped in that church during bleak moments in her life. There was that first Christmas after she was diagnosed with the disease that killed her father. There was that last Christmas before she died, when she must have been in terrible pain. But there was that organist doing that special thing that adds so much to worship at any time, and on any scale. And the organ was in tune.

One more thing . . . 

I’ve tuned around forty organs in the last month. Some days it seems that all I do is carry my tools back and forth to the car. I’ve seen a ton of Christmas decorations—some gorgeous, and some horribly tacky. The brightly colored life-sized inflatable plastic Nativity scene was the nadir. I expect there will be some snickering going on there on Christmas Eve.

The sacred spaces that are the most worshipful are almost always beautifully kept. There are no ragged stacks of last Sunday’s bulletin, no wastebaskets overflowing with Styrofoam coffee cups, and no inflatable Santas.

Wendy and I worship at Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York. It’s a beautiful Gothic-inspired building with magnificent stained-glass windows, elaborate carvings around the pulpit and choir stalls, a big, shiny brass eagle holding up the lectern, and a fabulous organ built recently by Taylor & Boody. John Boody has a degree in forestry and a special affinity for beautiful wood. I believe that Taylor & Boody is alone among American organbuilders in harvesting trees and milling and curing their own lumber. And the Grace Church organ sure looks it. Intricate enchanting grain patterns abound. The two facing organ cases and the massive freestanding console add their gleam to the place. It’s nice that I’ve never seen a stack of music on the console.

There are lots of organ consoles that look like the day after a fire at a Staples store. Everything from Post-it notes to rubber bands, from cough drops to hair brushes festoon the cabinet. The organ console is a worship space, especially when it’s visible from the pews. I know that the console at your church is your workspace. I know you have to view it and use it as a tool, a workbench—something like a cubicle. But you might think of creating a little bag that contains all your supplies, or installing a neat little hidden shelf to hold your hymnals. I bet your organbuilder would be happy to build you one. 

Please don’t let the state of your organ console intrude on someone’s worship. Every week you’re playing for people who are suffering, scared, sick, or worried. Be sure that everything you do is enhancing their experience of worship. That’s why we’re there. ν

Notes

1. On the Fisk website, this organ is referred to as Winchester Old and Opus 65 is Winchester New. Another similarly cute organ nickname belongs to the Bozeman-Gibson organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts—Orgel-brookline.

When I was a kid . . .

KLH and WCRB

I grew up in the rectory of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector. Prominent on the shelves on the living room wall nearest the street was a KLH Model 24 “Hi-fi” and a collection of LPs. Dad wrote his sermons in the living room on Saturday nights using a typewriter set up on a card table facing the speakers of the KLH, listening to the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) on classical radio station WCRB. It was well understood that one entered that room on pain of death.

Once, a thief broke into the house, and the KLH was among the missing items. The police recovered a cache of stuff they thought might be ours, and asked my mother over the phone for details that would help identify it. She remembered that there was a Joan Sutherland recording on the turntable, and that turned the trick. The cache was returned with the record intact. Dame Joan saved the day.

WCRB was, and still is, the classical music radio station in Boston. When I was a kid, it was at 1330 AM and 102.5 FM (like so many things, those numbers have changed). The AM side was important because the Ford Falcon only had an AM radio. The theme music for WCRB’s afternoon rush-hour program, Drive Time, was the last movement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, op. 7, no. 6 (B-flat major), in a recording featuring Pierre Cochereau with a big orchestra. I thought his cadenzas were thrilling, but later realized they were “of a period,” romantic and virtuosic, un-Handelian. We heard that piece pretty much every day, singing along, and carrying the earworm through supper. WCRB was such a part of our family life that I played that concerto on my senior recital at Oberlin as a gift to my parents. I used a three-stop Flentrop chamber organ on the stage of Warner Concert Hall joined by a string quartet of friends and wrote my own cadenzas—a decidedly un-Cochereau-esque performance.

Richard L. Kaye was the manager of WCRB, and ultimately the chairman of its board of directors. He hosted a program called WCRB Saturday Night, which came on after the BSO concert, in which he presented humorous takes on classical music and introduced the Boston audience to British comedy. It was at his hands that I learned of the King’s Singers, Florence Foster Jenkins, the “Bricklayer” letter (www.lectlaw.com/files/fun28.htm), and heaps of other hilarity. Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…”) was a favorite, and Monty Python a staple.

Mr. Kaye’s greatest contributions were marathon fundraisers for the BSO. Each year WCRB would devote an entire weekend to the effort, featuring interviews with orchestra members and giving the audience the chance to make pledges in return for prizes, very much a model for the now ubiquitous NPR fund-raisers. One tee-shirt bore the phrase, “Beethoven Lives: 1770–1827.” I’m guessing that was Beethoven’s bicentennial year. There were contests for musical limericks and puns, with symphony tickets as prizes. One of my entries as a 16-year-old was “Of Korsakov only between movements.” I didn’t win. I’ve read that Richard L. Kaye was responsible for raising more than $3,000,000 for the BSO—in 1974 dollars.

Vinyl

My parents’ collection of recordings included lots of the favorite classical symphonies, and Dad subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, a mail-order record company with a “disc of the month” club. Two or three randomly selected discs would arrive in the mail each month. They were heavy on the baroque, which was fine with me, but I remember one in particular that featured the late McNeil Robinson and the choir of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Times Square in New York City. While I don’t remember the programming, I do remember that Neil improvised on that smashing Aeolian-Skinner organ between choral pieces. As a young pup of an organist, I was in the thrall of the sound of that organ and of the very idea that someone would create a piece of music out of thin air like that.

In those days, Gerre Hancock was organist at Christ Church (Episcopal, now Christ Church Cathedral) in Cincinnati. That was dad’s home parish, and he had gotten his hands on a couple LPs of “Uncle Gerre” leading the church’s annual Boar’s Head Festival. The “Title Song” was the Boar’s Head Carol, with organ improvisations between verses, and again, I was thrilled with the sound, the concept, and the power of that music. I feel lucky to have grown up to know both of those organists, and you can bet I told them both about how their recordings helped inspire my career.

Organs I knew

Ernest Skinner’s Opus 128—that’s an early one. It was built in 1905, the year that Robert Hope-Jones joined the Skinner Organ Company as vice-president, and it was in our home church. It was the first organ I played, and I thought it was pretty great. But from the beginning of my “organ awareness,” I knew it was in poor condition. It made all sorts of strange groaning and dying sounds, it had heaps of dead notes, and it ciphered. 

I have a vivid memory of the organist leaving the bench during a service, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), fetching a ladder, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), setting the ladder, and climbing to the chamber to pull a pipe, quelling the cipher, still wearing his black cassock—then repeating the solemn farce in reverse to return the ladder to its hook. Looking back on that, I’m sure he was delighted to stage that piece of theater. The Skinner was replaced by a two-manual tracker organ by C. B. Fisk (Opus 65) a few years later (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_65).

As a treble chorister, I was itching to take organ lessons. Dad was adjunct professor of homiletics at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he arranged for me to have lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown, professor of sacred music and chapel organist at the seminary, where the chapel organ had been built by Walter Holtkamp in 1956. That organ is just as old now as Skinner #128 was when I first played it. (Yikes!) It has electro-pneumatic action, a slider chest for the Great, and a Ruckpositiv, unusual for American organs at that time. Melville Smith was the organist when the Holtkamp was installed—he was also director of the nearby Longy School of Music. A young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs lived in the neighborhood, and his disciple Daniel Pinkham was also around. They were all leaders of a great revolution in organ design and playing, and I love to imagine evening conversations in that little organ loft during the installation. 

I rode my bicycle seven miles from home in Winchester to ETS for those organ lessons (when I was a kid . . . ). When I drive those narrow busy roads today, I can hardly believe I survived then—in the days before helmets.

A couple years later, my lessons moved to the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home of a three-manual Fisk organ built in 1972 (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50). John Skelton, a former student of Alastair, was the church’s organist, and he was my teacher through my graduation from high school in 1974. I was given practice privileges there, which was mighty convenient, as the church was just two blocks from our home.

George Bozeman was an organbuilder in the area, and his wife Pat was a member of the choir at the Parish of the Epiphany. George was one of several musicians in the area who encouraged my enthusiasm. He was organist of the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which has a marvelous three-manual organ built in 1860 by E. & G. G. Hook (http://database.organsociety.org/SingleOrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041). He offered me the chance to serve as his assistant, covering for him when he was away on organbuilding trips. It was about an hour walk or fifteen-minute bike ride from home (when I was a
kid . . . ), and I loved playing and practicing on that grand instrument. There was a Dairy Queen along the route. The Woburn Unitarian Church was across the square, home to another large three-manual Hook—that’s the one that was relocated through the Organ Clearing House to the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin, Germany—Die Berliner Hook.

William H. Clarke had been the organist of both those churches in Woburn through the 1860s and 1870s, oddly shuttling back and forth between the two. He was responsible for the installation of the organ in the Unitarian Church in 1870 and was the great and good friend of George P. Kinsley, the head voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Sometime just after that, Clarke moved to Indianapolis to start his own organ building company, taking Kinsley with him. Among the few dozen organs he built was a ten-stop job for the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, where my parents bought a summer home in 1969. That church only operated in the summer, and I was organist there for four summers. That was only a twenty-minute walk.

The First Congregational Church in Yarmouthport has a two-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I played on a lot, practicing in bare feet, and playing recitals once in a while. The pastor’s name was Carlton Cassidy—we called him “Hopalong.”

Biggsy

My father’s teaching position at the seminary came with a parking space. Harvard Square, a favorite haunt of our family, was a couple blocks from there. I loved the record department at the Harvard Coop (now Barnes & Noble) and spent all the money I could spare. It seemed that every time I went there, E. Power Biggs had released another recording. I snapped them all up, racing back to the KLH for hours of listening. One of my favorites was Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto as arranged for organ by J. S. Bach (BWV 596). Biggs recorded that, along with chorale preludes by Ernst Pepping, on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, Holland. I played it on a recital in 1972—I was 16 and never did get those pesky descending thirds in the fugue—and have played it dozens of times since. The organ in Zwolle was built in 1721—it’s 295 years old—and that contemporary music is just as viable there as Bach’s, which was written when the organ was new. Thanks to E. Power Biggs, I learned as a teenager that the pipe organ is all about timelessness. (I can play those thirds now!)

MBTA Commuter Rail trains run from Winchester to North Station in Boston. From there it was easy to take the Green Line subway to Boylston Street where I loved hanging out at the Boston Music Company and Carl Fischer’s, where George Kerr ran the organ music desk. He was a patient guide to an enthusiastic young musician on a tight budget, sharing stories of the famous musicians who came and went from his desk and offering me freebies—most of which I realized later was second-rate stuff he couldn’t sell. 

I bought Biggs’s editions and collections from George, dutifully dating each purchase. On March 4, 1970, I bought Festival Anthology for Organ ($3.00), and Treasury of Early Organ Music ($3.50), and on December 27, 1970 (Christmas money?), I bought A Treasury of Shorter Organ Classics ($2.00). Forty-six years later, they’re still on my shelf, chock full of my youthful fingerings (whose hands were those?) and naïve observations. Over the decades I’ve played from those volumes countless times, I treasure their presence in my library, and I can hardly express all I learned from Biggs through his publications and recordings.

I was surrounded by a group of organists who encouraged my interest in the organ, especially by taking me to concerts. I heard Anton Heiller and Fenner Douglass play the (first) Fisk organ at Harvard University, and thrill of all thralls, Biggs playing on “his” Flentrop organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall). One evening we heard him play all sorts of early music—Sweelinck, Bruhns, Buxtehude. At the conclusion of the published program, he sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and said to the delighted audience, “I’m happy to play another piece, but I’ve run out of baroque music!” (Baloney!) He gave us Charles Ives’ Variations on ‘America.’ I had never heard anything so cool. I’m guessing that was early in 1972, because the older of my two copies of “The Ives” is dated April 2, 1972. I must have been on the train to Carl Fischer’s the next weekend.

A favorite post-concert haunt of organists was The Wursthaus (long gone) in Harvard Square, an old-fashioned, old-world place that served beer by the bucket and classic soggy German dishes by the greasy pound. I sat with groups of organists at big round tables after concerts, and I recall one evening when someone noticed there were nine people present who played for area churches that had organs built by C. B. Fisk, Inc.

A few years later, in the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the magnificent Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated on St. Cecilia Day, capping a week-long festival of workshops, round-table discussions, and concerts. Biggs was there as participant and to receive an honorary degree, and a classmate and I were deputized to meet Mr. and Mrs. Biggs and show them around the Conservatory. He asked us to demonstrate the practice organs for him (his fingers had been ravaged by arthritis) and answered our questions patiently and generously, moments an eighteen-year-old would never forget. When we were finished, he asked if there was a place to get a beer. Oberlin was a dry town then, but my friend and I walked the mile to Johnnie’s Carry-Out on the township border, and brought beer back to their room at the Oberlin Inn. I shared the story with my girlfriend Amy who was still back in Winchester finishing high school. She didn’t believe me, so she went to a record-signing event at the Harvard Coop, and asked Biggs if he knew me. “Oh yes, the bearded one.” Hah! Told you.

The summer of 1976 (I was twenty) was my second stint working for Bozeman-Gibson & Company. That summer, the company moved from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Deerfield, New Hampshire, and my co-worker John Farmer (now an active organbuilder in North Carolina) and I installed a new one-manual organ in the chapel on Squirrel Island, just off Southport Island and Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The only way to reach the island was by ferry, a small privately operated thing like a lobster boat. We caused quite a spectacle carrying the organ parts from the rented truck down the dock to the ferry and stacking them among the other passengers. It took three trips. That was lovely foreshadowing, as Wendy and I have had a house in that area for fifteen years, and we often sail around Squirrel Island.

Before the trip to Squirrel, Farmer and I took the organ on a detour to Boston where we installed it in the crossing of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in preparation for the 1976 American Guild of Organists national convention, where Barbara Bruns played a Handel Concerto with the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra. I had my AGO convention debut that week as Farmer and I played the organbuilder parts in a piece for organist, organbuilders, and electronic tape by Martha Folts. We stood inside the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel in Boston with the score on a music stand, slapping at square rails and rollerboards, stirring up a fine racket!

The highlight of the 1976 convention was “AGO Night at the Pops” at Symphony Hall with Arthur Fiedler, the Boston Pops, and E. Power Biggs. For one of his signature “Pops Extras,” Fiedler addressed the thousands of organists present, inviting us to sing along with the “next number,” and launching the orchestra into the introduction of “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah. Lord, what a thrill. Biggs played a Rheinberger concerto with the orchestra in what I believe was his last public performance. He died on March 10, 1977.

§

I was lucky to come up playing a fleet of wonderful organs, both new and old. In those days, new organs were being sold like fried dough at the State Fair, and I was treated to more than a dozen dedication recitals during those years. I was fortunate to live in that area where so many talented people were doing so much interesting work in and around organs. They were generous to me with their time and interest in my development. I’m grateful to them all and have tried to pass on the torch in their names to young people I meet who are interested in the organ.

It’s sobering to realize how many of those organs were new—some brand new—when I first knew them, and they’re all over forty years old now. Their leather, like mine, is showing signs of age.

Swing, style, and stops

The Museum of Science in Boston is a venerable institution housed in an imposing building at the head of the Charles River Lagoon. It spans the river between Boston and Cambridge and is easily recognizable from almost any angle because of the distinctive profile of the Hayden Planetarium near the Boston end. As you enter the museum’s main lobby, before you reach the admission desks, you encounter a simple and elegant exhibit offering an eloquent statement of a fundamental truth, the rotation of our planet, the Foucault Pendulum.

The first such eponymous pendulum was introduced by French physicist Léon Foucault in Paris in 1851, a heavy bob suspended by a long cable that swings back and forth over a circular field. A row of pins or markers is set up around the perimeter of the space. As the earth rotates under the pendulum, the markers are knocked over, demonstrating the motion. The length of time for completion of the circle varies depending on the latitude; there is a complex series of equations that define that phenomenon.

In Boston, the circular field is a mosaic representation of an Aztec calendar with the Sun God in the center, and the cable suspending the bob is five stories high. I haven’t visited the museum for many years, but as grade-school student, and later as the father of two children, I’ve been there many times and was always impressed by the grandeur of the motion. It takes more than ten seconds for the pendulum to complete each passage (one chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee . . . ). It’s ominous, it’s majestic, it’s mesmerizing, and it’s inevitable. I loved it whenever I happened to be there within range of a peg being knocked over. Standing there for forty or fifty swings seemed like an eternity, and there was a little thrill when the pendulum bumped a peg enough to wobble it, and then returned to finish it off.

I find it strangely reassuring to have that visible proof of the earth’s rotation, as if the endless procession of sunsets and sunrises wasn’t enough.

§

It’s around fifty-five years since I first saw the Foucault Pendulum, and over that same period, I’ve witnessed and participated in a pendulum motion of even grander amplitude and period. The history of the pipe organ has swung back and forth in a repetitive arc. In rough terms and broad strokes, the introduction of electric and pneumatic actions in pipe organs in the beginning of the twentieth century led to the renaissance of the ancient, classical styles of organbuilding, which in turn led to the current reawakening of interest in symphonic, expressive instruments, and the styles of playing they engendered.

When I was a student at Oberlin in the mid-1970s, we celebrated the installation of a large new Flentrop organ. It’s still a gleaming centerpiece of the campus, painted lovely hues of red and blue, with generous gold enhanced elaborate moldings. It’s an ideal vehicle for the music of the Baroque era and before, and it was a privilege to have access to an instrument like that for lessons, practice, and study. As we celebrated that organ, the Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ in Finney Chapel was moving into its golden years. Freshmen used it for some lessons, and I played my freshman jury on it, but it was not a high priority for the conservatory, and its condition was deteriorating. It was replaced in 2001 by a new 75-rank instrument built by C. B. Fisk, Inc., following the tradition of Cavaillé-Coll.

During my time as a student, and for six years following, I worked for Jan G. P. Leek in Oberlin. He was the organ and harpsichord technician for the Conservatory of Music for the first few years of my time with him, and then left the school to establish his own firm on the outskirts of town. He’s a colorful guy, and a first-generation Hollander who came to the United States in the early 1960s to work for Walter Holtkamp. In the summer of 1977, following my junior year, he was engaged to assist a crew from Flentrop installing the new three-manual organ for Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio.  

That was a dream summer for a fledgling organbuilder. I was thrilled to be part of that project, working high on the scaffolding, hoisting magnificent case pieces to the ceiling of that great vaulted church. I was young and strong (oh, for a taste of those days!), and in the thrall of the art that would dominate my life.  

There was one grueling, stifling day when we hoisted the 16-foot tin façade pipes into the organ case. As we were leaving at the end of the afternoon, we turned to admire our handiwork, and I was moved to tears as the late afternoon sun poured through the rich stained glass windows, flooding the façade in blue and red light.

That project started when the organ was delivered to the sidewalk on Euclid Avenue in shipping containers on the back of semi-trailers. The shipment had come across the Atlantic from Rotterdam and up the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Port of Cleveland on a ship aptly named Calliope. We had a powerhouse of a day hauling the instrument, piece-by-piece and crate-by-crate, up the many steps from the sidewalk into the cathedral. I was a naïve organ guy at the time, twenty-one years old, bearing the weight of magisterial knowledge, but I knew enough to take notice of a box of pipes I was carrying marked “Celeste.” Hmmm. A little later, there were bundles of swell shutters. Again, hmmm. The pendulum was swinging. Never throw out a necktie.

Where’s the beef?

Except for the nine years I spent in Ohio, I’ve lived in Boston all my life, as my family has since before the American Revolution, so it was quite a step when Wendy and I moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan four years ago. We’ve had a wonderful time building our new life in the city, and an important part of the excitement is our new membership at Grace Church, a grand Episcopal church on lower Broadway, kitty-corner from our building. I was first introduced to Grace Church in 2008 when I was asked to list the church’s 1961 Schlicker organ for sale through the Organ Clearing House. The Schlicker was a double organ: the main instrument was in the rear gallery with tall pedal towers reaching up on either side of the rose window, and the smaller chancel organ was in side chambers. The organ was playable from two identical three-manual consoles.

As I surveyed the organ, I realized it was something of a house of cards. Although the gallery case looked grand enough, it turned out that the organ actually crouched—cowered—near the floor of the gallery under the rose window. The Pedal towers each contained five large pipes, only those five pipes. There was a thin plywood panel immediately behind the pipes. It reminded me of the 1984 advertising campaign for Wendy’s™ hamburgers that had a little old lady squinting at a competitor’s burger, and barking “Where’s the beef?”

Though the organ was only 47 years old, many of its pipes had fallen in on themselves and lost their speech. The collapse of the largest façade pipes was so pronounced that we feared the supporting hooks were in danger of failure. In the interest of public safety, and because there was no other place to store them in the building, we turned the pipes upside down and lashed them to the racks with ropes. It sure was strange looking, but they didn’t fall!

The Schlicker organ was replaced in 2013 with a new organ of 87 ranks by Taylor & Boody, a joy to all who play and hear it, and a meaningful boost to the life of the congregation. It’s an extraordinary organ because it includes all the features of the finest classically inspired mechanical action organs, including brilliant, balanced choruses, colorful reeds, gorgeous casework, and a strong presence in the room. But it’s a big departure from Taylor & Boody’s usual vocabulary, as it has a detached console, organ cases on both sides of the chancel, Solo and Pedal divisions in the remote chamber near the chancel, high-pressure reeds, and even an antique 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason, a hangover from the earlier Ernest M. Skinner organ in the rear gallery. There’s a tunnel full of tracker action under the floor of the chancel connecting all those rooms, and a sophisticated electric stop action with solid-state combinations.

The Schlicker organ followed a succession of instruments by Skinner including a four-manual, 89-rank double organ (gallery and chancel) built in 1902, a four-manual, 84-rank chancel organ built in 1912, and a four-manual, 48-rank gallery organ built in 1928. The 1928 project included a spectacular new four-manual chancel console with 167 knobs, 70 tilting tablets in two rows, five expression pedals, and two crescendo pedals.

Passing batons

The Grace Church Skinner organ in its final form was one of the great masterpieces of a great master. By contemporary accounts, it was immensely colorful and powerful. Study the specifications (www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/GraceEpis.html#Skinner707) and you can imagine the range of expression possible, not only because of the multiple expression enclosures, but the sensitive and creative array of stops. For example, there were twelve 16′ flue voices between the two Pedal divisions, many of them borrowed from manual stops that were under expression. What a wealth. The massive chancel organ had two choruses of Trombones in the Pedal, one borrowed from the expressive Solo, which included an exceedingly rare 102⁄3′ Trombone. Wow! The Chancel Swell had ten 8′ flues. There were a total of 32 ranks of reeds, and twelve 8′ Diapasons scattered about six manual divisions. That’ll do you. That’s just a quick list of highlights of the content of that monumental organ, but there’s another fact about its creation that piques my curiosity.

Ernest Mitchell (1890–1966) was the organist at Grace Church from 1922 until 1960. The final rebuild of the Skinner organ happened on his watch, and it’s fair to assume that he had plenty to do with its tonal design. Mitchell’s great and good friend was Lynnwood Farnam, the genius organist who was central to the creation and development of the “symphonic style” of organ playing. I imagine that Mitchell and Farnam spent many evenings together discussing the special features of that organ, especially the details of the console.

Years ago, I got to know another console that had been designed by Farnam, that of the massive double 1912 Casavant organ (Opus 700) at Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street, Boston, where Farnam served briefly as organist. I was studying the instrument in 2002, as it was being offered for sale, and was fascinated by the ornate and intricate console,¹ which was festooned with unique gadgets that could only have been requested by an organist of Farnam’s sophistication. Here are a few examples:

• Swell octave couplers to cut off 2′ stops

• other manual 2′ and 16′ stops not to be cut off by octave or sub couplers

• one piston “throwing off” all manual 16′ stops, as well as Quint 51⁄3′ and Tierce 31⁄5′

• one piston throwing off all sub couplers.

All this in 1912.

The 1928 console of the Grace Church Skinner is preserved in the church’s music office, and it’s easy to pick out a couple features that could well have come from Farnam’s fertile symphonic imagination. There are two crescendo pedals. Above that for the Gallery organ, there are two toe pistons marked “Regular” and “Orchestral.” But the Chancel crescendo was a real tour-de-force. Concealed in a drawer under the bottom manual, there’s a “User Interface” crescendo setter, a semi-circle of electrical plugs neatly labeled with the names of stops and couplers, and an array of wires bearing tags that identify the positions of the Crescendo pedal. The organist could create his own setting while seated at the console—in 1928! Sadly, the original “guts” of the console were removed, so there is no record of the content of those crescendo settings. Happily, the console was returned to Grace Church as a gift following the death of its subsequent owner.

Another feature that could well have come from Farnam is the expression selector switch to the right of the music rack that allows the organist to assign the various expression enclosures to specific expression pedals. That and the programmable crescendo are precursors to some of our most complex modern consoles.

From 1920 until his death in 1930, Lynnwood Farnam was organist at Church of the Holy Communion on 6th Avenue at 20th Street, just over a mile from Grace Church. His proximity with Ernest Mitchell surely enhanced that friendship. Farnam was also head of the new organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his influence spread quickly. His students included people like Ernest White, Carl Weinrich, and Alexander McCurdy.

Ernest White studied with Farnam  and went on to an illustrious career including a fruitful tenure at St. Mary the Virgin in New York City. He played over 1,000 recitals, was a champion of new music, and released the first recording of Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur. In addition to his career as an organist, he was also tonal director for M. P. Möller, designing and supervising the installation of many new organs.

Carl Weinrich was organist and choir director of the chapel at Princeton University for 30 years. He also taught at Westminster Choir College and Columbia University. He championed contemporary music by playing premieres or early performances of works such as Vierne’s Symphony VI, Samuel Barber’s Prelude and Fugue in B Minor, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative. And in the 1950s and 1960s, he was at the vanguard of the rebirth of the classic organ, recording the organ music of Bach on Holtkamp organs.

Alexander McCurdy was one of the first graduates of Lynnwood Farnam’s organ class at Curtis, graduating in 1931, just after Farnam’s death, and was head of the Curtis organ department from 1935 until 1972, and concurrently at Westminster Choir College. McCurdy passed his devotion to the symphonic organ on to his students, many of whom later participated in the 20th-century renewal of interest in the classical organ. His incredible roster of students included Richard Purvis, David Johnson, David Craighead, James Litton, John Weaver, Keith Chapman, Gordon Turk, and Joan Lippincott, who joined the faculty at Westminster at McCurdy’s invitation. Lippincott will soon be honored by the American Guild of Organists for her lifetime of service to the organ and its music. That’s a big chunk of the history of the 20th-century American pipe organ in a nutshell.

§

Ernest Mitchell’s tenure at Grace Church ended in 1960, and the Schlicker organ was installed there in 1961. I haven’t dug into that history yet—when I do, I’ll come back to report. But I can only imagine that it would have broken Mitchell’s heart to see that magnificent instrument replaced. The irony is increased by the temporary nature of the Schlicker. Grace Church’s architecture is Gothic in style, but the walls and vaulted ceiling are made of plaster, which is less advantageous acoustically than stone. With low wind pressure and an emphasis on upperwork rather than fundamental tone, the new organ never had the power for real presence in the room.

The swing of the pendulum is clear in the history of the three most recent organs at Grace Church. The mighty, innovative, symphonic masterpiece by Skinner was replaced by a neo-Baroque instrument, so much the style of day in the early 1960s. The present instrument by Taylor & Boody is the modern statement of a heroic pipe organ in that venerable sanctuary. It includes the best features of both previous organs, with the clarity and presence for playing Baroque literature, and the lungs and flexibility to play the most complex Romantic literature.

Renovating Skinner Opus 707 would have been a huge undertaking in 1960, both technically and financially. Many similar organs, notably the Skinner in Finney Chapel at Oberlin, were renovated by Aeolian-Skinner, which converted them in the neo-Baroque style. It was not stylish to restore a symphonic masterpiece in 1960. If the Skinner had not been replaced, we wouldn’t have the Taylor & Boody, which is a magnificent statement of 21st-century organ building. But the inner me would sure love to take that Skinner for a spin. . . .

Notes

1. The Emmanuel Church Casavant organ was sold to a musical museum in China. More than 15 years after it was shipped to China, it’s now being prepared for renovation and installation by Rieger.