In the Wind. . . .

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.

A saint of our own

Sometime in the middle of the second century Anno Domine, a young Christian woman who had made a faithful vow of virginity was married to a man named Valerian. During the wedding, she sat alone and sang to God professing her faith. The bride, Cecilia, substantiated her previous vow by appearing before Valerian with an angel protecting her. Around 180 AD, the young couple suffered martyrdom for their faith under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the time of her death, Cecilia asked the pope to convert her home to a church.

In 1585, Pope Sixtus V released a papal bull founding the National Academy of St. Cecilia, naming her as the patron saint of music. We celebrate the Feast of St. Cecilia on November 22, which is today, as I write.

St. Cecilia is often depicted in statues, paintings, stained glass, and tapestries. Typically, she is carrying a small portative organ, and often, she’s depicted mishandling it. Assuming the Saint to be of average height, the organ is 18 or 24 inches high, with perhaps 20 notes. She’s looking off to one side, and the organ droops out of her hands, a few pipes slipping loose—I imagine that in a few seconds the pipes will clatter to the ground. I’ve asked around a little, but haven’t found anyone who has a good explanation or theory for why it’s okay for the good saint to be so careless! If anyone in the Organ Clearing House did that, they’d be on a bus home pretty quick.

Musicians throughout the Christian world celebrate St. Cecilia Day, honoring her memory for professing her faith through song. Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and George Frideric Handel are among the many who composed music dedicated to the saint. Benjamin Britten was born on the Feast of St. Cecilia in 1913 and aspired to write a piece in homage to the saint, but struggled to find an appropriate Latin text. W. H. Auden wrote the poem that Britten set to music in his Hymn to St. Cecilia.

November 22 is the date of a few auspicious musical events. In 1928, Ravel’s Boléro was premiered in Paris, and in 1968, The Beatles released their album, The Beatles, known by music lovers as “The White Album.”

Singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote his own homage to St. Cecilia, released in 1970 in Simon & Garfunkel’s album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. According to the website Genius.com, Simon has said that his lyrics are a reflection on St. Cecilia as an elusive muse, depicted as a troubling lover (“ . . . you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily . . .”). I don’t know if Purcell or Handel had such struggles—both have much richer catalogues than Paul Simon—but we have heard from Benjamin Britten’s partner Peter Pears, that as W. H. Auden submitted his poem to Britten in installments, he included hints as to how Britten might become a better artist. Ouch!

Gathering horsefeathers

I was a freshman at Oberlin in the fall of 1974, and that year on November 22, the grand Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. E. Power Biggs, Charles Fisk, Harald Vogel, and Dirk Flentrop were among the luminaries who participated in roundtable discussions, and Marie-Claire Alain played the opening recital. I don’t remember the program, but I do remember the encore. She eschewed the usual fireworks and offered Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40). Mr. Biggs received an honorary doctorate of music.

The Flentrop organ was dedicated to the memory of George Whitfield Andrews, longtime professor of organ at Oberlin, and was funded by Oberlin alumnus Frank Chapman Van Cleef, whose wife had studied with Dr. Andrews, and whose family members had been students at Oberlin in every decade but two of the school’s existence from its founding in 1833 until the 1970s! After graduating from Oberlin in 1904, Van Cleef earned a degree in law at Columbia and later founded a financial management firm in New York. He retired in 1948 and returned to Oberlin. I recall meeting him during that week in November of 1974 in the hallway by Haskell Thomson’s teaching studio. We were introduced, and I thanked him for his gift. He was 94, I was 18.

Frank Van Cleef is not the first wealthy elderly patriarch to be encouraged to write a memoir. Gathering Horsefeathers is the third installment in a trilogy, a goofy history of his life with his family, replete with tales of designing houses, arguing about shrubbery, killing rattlesnakes (really?), and ultimately, rallying his family to donate the funds for the new organ. I was amused to note that early in his career, while he and his first wife were planning the construction of their first house, they lived on the twenty-second floor (looking south) of One Fifth Avenue in New York. That building is a few blocks from where we live in Greenwich Village—I can see it through my office window if I swivel my chair. Looking south provides an expansive view of Washington Square Park, and in 1928, there wasn’t much else that tall except the 57-story Woolworth Building (built in 1913) on Broadway, between Park and Barclay Streets, across from City Hall Plaza, one and a half miles away.

The story of the Flentrop organ fills the last pages of Van Cleef’s book, presumably placing the experience as a high point in his life. He tells how Oberlin president Robert Fuller (his next door neighbor) and professor of organ Fenner Douglas came to him (by appointment) one evening, inviting him to support the project. As he tells it, his son John (Oberlin ’31) was present, and later the family agreed that Frank, his four children, and their spouses would support the entire cost of the project.

My musty copy of this little book has been on the shelves of all the offices in which I’ve worked. I bought it that weekend in Oberlin because I had met the man, and I suppose I read it then. As I read today, I reflect on the dozens of people I’ve met who have given generously to fund the design and construction of new organs.

Horsefeathers? The jacket flaps explain. They’re the long hairs on a horse’s fetlocks, and they have no particular purpose. (I know that Mr. Van Cleef was a horseman because he was on horseback when he killed the rattlesnake!) In his words, horsefeathers are “something you do for the public good, something that has no use for you.”

Some old friends

Mr. Van Cleef’s gift provided a platform for the education of hundreds of organists. 1974 was the heart of the Orgelbewegung movement—the time when American organists and organbuilders were in the thrall of classic styles of organ building and playing, when so-called “factory built” organs lost favor among many. In retrospect, I think that the movement was less about the oft-repeated battle between tracker and electric actions, but the realization that the collapse of the economy in 1929 and especially the economic impact of World War II led to the diminution of artistic integrity of American organs.

The Aeolian-Skinner organ in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel was considered “second-class,” and the town was crawling with Flentrops. Including the organ in the Episcopal Church, practice and teaching organs, and the big red one in Warner Hall, there were more than a dozen Flentrops in town.

It’s a long time since I played on that organ, but I remember it vividly. It was a thrill to sit surrounded by the cases, those huge pedal pipes visible in the corner of your eye. Leaving behind all the conflicting philosophies and vitriol that gushed in those days, that organ simply sounded beautiful. Each knob you drew brought a new touch of magic. The sound was lively, the action immediate and personal. That organ was mighty important to my formation as an organist.

Harvard Square

When I was growing up in the Boston area, Harvard Square was just the place. In 1956, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. installed a three-manual organ in St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School). Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music, was the organist of the chapel, the young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs (who had taught at Longy) lived nearby, and Daniel Pinkham was Biggs’s young protégé. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall while that organ was being installed, with its (terribly) low wind pressures, exposed Great and Positiv chests, and open toe holes. Those musicians, at the core of the revival movement, must have had some fascinating conversations in that crowded loft.

My father taught homiletics at E.T.S, and when I was clamoring to have organ lessons, he took me to Alastair Cassels-Brown, the chapel organist. The Holtkamp was the second organ I ever played. The first, ironically, was the 1904 E. M. Skinner organ at the Parish of the Epiphany in nearby Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad was rector, and I was about to “baritone” out of the youth choir to join the adults. The Skinner was in dreadful condition and was replaced in 1974 with a new organ by Fisk.

I was also excited to be allowed to practice on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at Christ Church (Episcopal), Zero Garden Street, in Cambridge, the church famous for its Revolutionary War-era bullet hole and its “George Washington sat here” pew. Daniel Hathaway was the organist there and was very kind to me. Many years later, I was to maintain that organ, build a new console for it, and then arrange for its sale as the church purchased a new organ from Schoenstein in 2006. The Organ Clearing House dismantled the Aeolian-Skinner for shipment—it was rebuilt by Quimby Pipe Organs and installed in a church in Sugarland, Texas. 

The Busch

After having given weekly radio broadcasts for sixteen years on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, in 1958 E. Power Biggs commissioned Flentrop to build a three-manual organ for the resonant but intimate room. Shortly after its installation, Biggs presented the Flentrop to the world through his record-breaking series of recordings on Columbia Masterworks, Bach Organ Favorites. (It’s still the best- selling series of solo classical recordings.) A few days ago, friend and colleague John Panning, of the Dobson Organ Company, posted photos of the organ on Facebook. His caption read: 

Yesterday I enjoyed the opportunity to play what I consider the most influential 20th-century organ in the United States. The 1958 Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum was not the first Organ Reform instrument in the country, but E. Power Biggs’ many recordings of it brought the gospel of the Orgelbewegung to an enormous audience, including me. Even today, jaded by subsequent developments, it still impresses as a tremendously beautiful organ.

I first heard that Flentrop as a young teenager when mentors took me to hear Biggs play several recitals. At the conclusion of one of those programs, chock full of Sweelinck, Buxtehude, and Bach, Mr. Biggs sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and told us that he’d be happy to play another piece, but that he’d “run out of baroque music” (yeah, right!), and gave us Charles Ives’s Variations on ‘America.’

Calliope

In Greek mythology, Calliope was one of the nine muses, representing eloquence and epic poetry. She defeated the daughters of the King of Thessaly in a singing competition, but instead of receiving a cash prize, professional concert management, and a recording contract, Calliope turned her opponents into magpies. Calliope was the name of the ship that left Rotterdam in the spring of 1977, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed up the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Erie to the Port of Cleveland where it delivered the Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

I was working for Jan Leek, a native of the Netherlands, who had immigrated to the United States in 1961 to work for Walter Holtkamp. When they were installing the Holtkamp in Warner Hall at Oberlin, John noted that the school was looking for an organ technician, and knew that was the job for him. I worked for Jan part-time and summers when I was a student, and as he left the school to form his own company, I worked full time with him for four years after I graduated. Jan, as a true Dutchman, was friendly with the folks at Flentrop, and we were engaged to help with the installation of the big three-manual organ at Trinity Cathedral. 

It was the summer before my senior year, and the first time I had participated in the installation of a large organ. We arrived at the cathedral to meet the truck bearing the overseas container. I carried a couple things up those stone stairs that were not featured in the Oberlin Flentrop—including a tied bundle of Swell shutters. What goes around, comes around! And there was Daniel Hathaway on the front steps of the cathedral, just arrived from Cambridge to start his magnificent tenure as director of music.Daniel and I played several duo-recitals using the cathedral’s two Flentrops (there’s a fifteen-stop job on a platform that rolls about the nave), treating audiences to Beethoven symphonies (3, 5, and 6), and Rossini overtures played in Werckmeister III.

Michael Jupin had been the associate rector of the Parish of the Epiphany when Dad was rector—he was now dean of Trinity Cathedral. Pat Quintin and I were married in that church in October of 1979 with my father officiating, assisted by his former assistant, my grandfather, uncle, and godfather (all priests). For the rest of his life, Dad loved to tell the story of how I shouted registration suggestions to Daniel Hathaway down the length of the nave during the wedding rehearsal the evening before. (Yup, I did that. . . .)

The organ’s main case is twenty-five feet tall, and the whole thing is perched on a high loft. There was scaffolding and lots of heavy lifting. I was outfitted with a rig of leather straps like the flagpole carrier in a parade, so I could put the toe of a big tin façade pipe in a little cup strapped to my waist, and climb a ladder using both hands while co-workers preceded me sixteen feet above, balancing the top. My knees are almost sixty years old now, and things are different.

All the façade pipes were in place, and as we left the cathedral, we turned and looked back at the organ. The late afternoon sun was flooding the organ with red and blue light, and I burst into tears. Organs still do that to me.

And on the other hand . . . 

Those Flentrop organs are terrific instruments, and they played a huge role in the history of the pipe organ in America in the twentieth century. But in those days, I also learned about the beauties of electro-pneumatic action, especially working with Jan Leek in the big Aeolian-Skinner at Church of the Covenant in Cleveland. And when I returned to Boston in 1984, I was lucky to get to care for the tremendous organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square. The regular Friday noontime recitals were an important part of my education, as each week I heard a different artist playing the same organ. Some were terrified of it, some would have rather played a tracker, and some made magic happen.

Now, more than forty years out of high school, I’ve worked with and played hundreds of instruments. Of course, some are unremarkable, but most of them bring to mind a story, a lesson learned, a mystery revealed, or simply a great place to have lunch nearby. I remember where I was the moment I grasped the concept of electro-pneumatic actions, the time the blower was running backwards, and the two times I’ve fallen. It’s fun to think back about those that stand out and how their histories are interwoven with my experience. I’ve had plenty of conversations with friends and colleagues about the organs that influenced them and played important roles in their careers, and I bet lots of readers are remembering their favorites right now. I’d love to hear your stories.

Lunching with geniuses

I used to be an avid baseball fan. Starting with the “Impossible Dream,” the fabled 1967 season of the Boston Red Sox, I followed the hometown team aided and abetted by my father, who had grown up in Cincinnati following the Reds from the bleachers of Crosley Field. Dad had the same seats at Fenway Park for more than thirty years (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14), and he and I had an unbroken streak of twenty-five consecutive opening day games there, unbroken even when opening day coincided with Good Friday, and the priest and the organist had to make special arrangements! A big part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats, and though I do not follow the game anymore, I cherish the memories.

Some of my colleagues play Virtual Baseball, a well-organized game in which they build teams by drafting and trading “real” players and keeping track of their virtual teams based on the daily statistics of their players from the live major league baseball games. They track wins and losses, and if they have built good teams, play through the playoffs and World Series. It is very sophisticated and they are very devoted, and there is some wagering involved to keep things interesting.

Throughout my career, I have watched the progress of many organ companies, both domestic and foreign, and it occurs to me that we might develop an organbuilding version of Virtual Baseball. We would make up cards with photos and lists of skills of all the employees in all the workshops, document their contributions to the various organs they worked on, and build a virtual “dream team” of craftsmen. No? Perhaps not.

We follow the great names in organbuilding as avidly as the most enthusiastic baseball fan in a sports bar. We cite their great instruments, celebrate their innovations, and rattle off specifications, just like we rattled off great starting line-ups of history with our seatmates at Fenway Park. (Did Rico Petrocelli bat before or after Tony Conigliaro in the 1967 Red Sox?) We single out our organbuilding heroes, past and present, chronicling their careers and the instruments they produced.

We trace how organbuilders and organists influenced each other, and if you are anything like me, we imagine conversations between them. Gottfried Silbermann and J. S. Bach must have had lunch together a couple times, as did Aristide Cavaillé-Coll with Charles-Marie Widor, and Dirk Flentrop with
E. Power Biggs. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or even seated at the table for one of those meals. I have read that Bach played a couple pianofortes built by Silbermann and did not think much of them. Maybe after that the lunches were over. Cavaillé-Coll was a parishioner at Saint-Sulpice in Paris until his death in 1899, when Widor was in the middle of his tenure there and at the height of fame and creativity. Cavaillé-Coll was thirty-three years older than Widor and was largely responsible for Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice. That great organ was nearly forty years old at the time of Cavaillé-Coll’s death, and they must have talked about it frequently. I bet they had a regular weekly table at their favorite bistro and were sometimes joined by friends like Charles Gounod or Camille Saint-Saëns.

Robert Clicquot and François Couperin, Henry (Father) Willis and Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Ernest Skinner and T. Tertius Noble, and Charles Fisk and Daniel Pinkham are among other lunch partners I would love to have joined.

Let’s hear it for the little guys

It may be the genius luminaries of the field that we think of first, but lurking in their shadows are thousands of talented craftsmen and musicians, without whom the history of our instrument would be incomplete. William Horatio Clark (1840–1913) is one whose work has interested me because our paths have crossed several times. He was born into a musical family in Newton, Massachusetts, and took his first regular job as a church organist at the Unitarian Church of Dedham, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen. He subsequently was organist at the Berkeley Street Congregational Church in Boston (now the site of Morgan Memorial Collection Center on Melnea Cass Boulevard, very close to the location of the Hook workshop), and moved to the First Congregational Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1861, which is where I first came across his legacy.

The First Congregational Church of Woburn was built in 1860. It is an enormous wood-frame building whose 196-foot spire is reputed to be the tallest wooden steeple in North America. The magnificent three-manual organ by
E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 283) was also built and installed in 1860, and I was fortunate to serve as assistant organist there while I was in high school. The organbuilder George Bozeman was organist there, and as I remember it from my headstrong youth, he created the position for me partly as the terrific educational experience it was, and partly so I would be there to cover for him as his organ work required him to travel. My first organbuilding experiences were summer jobs in Bozeman’s shop in 1975 and 1976, and I am grateful to him as friend and mentor.

That was one of my first cracks at leading a choir, and I was naïve enough that it never crossed my mind that conducting from an attached keydesk was supposed to be difficult. Today, as I meet with organists and organ committees who cannot conceive of such a thing, I am grateful for that early experience. And what an organ. Thirty-five ranks of Civil War era tone color, brilliant choruses of Principals, two Trumpets, an Oboe and a Clarinet, and a doozey of a Pedal Posaune with wood resonators. As a seventeen-year-old I knew it was a wonderful organ, but I had no idea how fortunate I was.¹ You can see photos and specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041.

The Reverend Stuart Nutter came as a new pastor during my time there, providing my first experience with conservative evangelical preaching. I was not close with members of the congregation, but I recall that members of the choir were not happy with his messages. One winter Sunday, there was a tremendous roar as a huge load of wet snow slid off the roof and fell fifty feet to the parking lot. It seemed a sign that it was Pastor Nutter’s car that was utterly flattened, such a wreck that three of the wheels were broken off.

I do not know if William H. Clarke had anything to do with the planning of that Hook organ, but it is fair to assume that he was present for at least part of the installation, where he would have met Stephen P. Kinsley, the brilliant voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Clarke left Woburn in 1865, returned to the Berkeley Street church for a couple years, then returned to Woburn where he stayed until 1869, when he moved across Woburn Center to the Unitarian Church. It was no coincidence that E. & G. G. Hook installed their Opus 553 there the following year, also voiced by Stephen Kinsley. During my high school tenure, there were two tremendous three-manual Hook organs in my life.

I have a vivid memory of a recital played by James Busby at the Unitarian Church (currently organist at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island), joined by soprano Elisabeth Phinney. Together, they offered Bach’s Cantata 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. The organ included a Carillon (I think the knob said “Carrillons”), the first percussion stop in an American organ. It was a set of 29 metal bars struck by piano hammers, located above the top manual behind the music rack, and playable without wind using a mechanical coupler, and Busby used that distinctive voice as part of “Bach’s Orchestra.”

Mrs. Phinney taught singing at the New England Conservatory of Music for thirty-two years. Her daughter Monique, also a singer, was one of my high school pals, and her husband Keith was director of music at nearby Bedford (Massachusetts) High School. I remember several great experiences when I was accompanying Monique in various local performances, and her parents were there as coaches.

William Clarke was thirty years old when the Hook organ was installed in the Unitarian Church and had moved back and forth between jobs six times. His longest tenure was the four-year stint at the Congregational Church in Woburn. He stayed with the Unitarians and their grand forty-five-rank organ for only one year, and showed up in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871 as the superintendent of school music. In 1873 he become organist of the First Methodist Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in 1874 he moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, to become organist of the First Baptist Church. While he was in Indianapolis he founded Wm. H. Clarke & Co., Church Organ Builders, enticing his friend Stephen Kinsley to leave E. & G. G.
Hook to become head voicer. If I were building a virtual organ shop, I would want to have Kinsley as my voicer!

After the Unitarian church closed,
E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 553 was dismantled by the Organ Clearing House, restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen, Germany, and installed in 2002 in Die Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin. Thomas Murray played the dedication recital. It is known as Die Berliner Hook-Orgel and is highly regarded in its unique situation as a nineteenth-century American organ in a German church.

Wm. H. Clarke & Company built fifteen organs that we know of, two of which have been part of my life. My parents purchased a little house in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), in 1968 where we spent summers, and where they moved after my father’s retirement. There are two historic organs in Yarmouthport, but it was at the Swedenborgian Church where I served as organist for the summer-only congregation. The organ had been built by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. in 1872, then rebuilt and modified by the Andover Organ Company in 1960. You can see “before and after” stoplists at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8978, a study of sign-of-the-times organ renovation.

Clayton Priestnal was pastor of the small congregation (he served a parish in Philadelphia during the winter) who was the epitome of Central Casting’s version of a rickety country minister. He was a slight man with the shaggiest eyebrows I had ever seen, who had a way of bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet for emphasis as he was preaching. He had established a relationship with the Highfield Theater of Falmouth, Massachusetts, a summer theater company that specialized in productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Cast members were conservatory voice majors from across the country, and a different singer came to Yarmouthport each Sunday to participate in the service, another great educational opportunity for a young organist. It was after my last summer on Cape Cod that I went to Oberlin, where I was reunited with several of the singers I had worked with in Yarmouthport.

The Wm. H. Clarke/Andover organ was a simple and small instrument, but it was lovely, and I loved playing on it. It was about two miles from home, and I did all that walking in bare feet, a memory that sends lightning bolts up and down my legs today. I played recitals each summer, and I know that instrument was an important part of my early education. In 2002, after I had joined the Organ Clearing House, I was invited to play another recital, the first of many lecture-recitals I developed. My topic was roughly the history of the nineteenth-century American organ, with special attention given to William Horatio Clarke. I was fortunate to learn that the Indiana Historical Society had considerable material about Clarke’s life, family, and work, which is the source of the biographical information I am sharing here.

As a student at Oberlin, I worked part-time and summers for Jan G. P. Leek, the ebullient organbuilder who was the school’s full-time organ and harpsichord technician until he left to start his own firm during my junior year. He was a first-generation immigrant, who apprenticed in the Netherlands as a child and came to Cleveland to work for Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was a great teacher and a lot of fun, and I stayed in his shop for four years after I graduated in 1978. It was from him that I learned the fundamentals of organbuilding and woodworking, tuning, and troubleshooting.  

One of the projects we did together was the restoration of another organ by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. This one in Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio, a commanding stone Gothic building with a tall spire that was visible from many miles away across rolling farmland. The church’s organist was a high school student from a farming family with thirteen kids, who had the presence of mind to organize the parish to fund the restoration of the organ. The project was guided by his dream that the organ should be “plaqued” by the Organ Historical Society, and we completed the work in 1980. You can see the specification of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=4256.  

Garth Peacock of the Oberlin organ faculty played the dedication recital. Part of the historical authenticity of our project was the restoration of the feeder bellows and hand-pumping system. The recital was to close with the singing of a hymn led by the hand-pumped organ, and I was the designated pumper. I do not remember which hymn it was, but I do remember the impish glint in Peacock’s eye (we could see other around the corner of the organ case) as he drew more stops, filled in the chords, and played octaves in the pedals, requiring me to flail the pump handle up and down like the clapper between the two bells of an alarm clock!

§

William Clarke moved from Indianapolis to Toronto where he became organist of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in 1884, then served Plymouth Congregational Church there from 1884–1886. From 1886 to 1888, he was organist of the First Baptist Church of Rochester, New York, and he returned to the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1888 where he served until he retired in 1892.

In his last years, he lived in Reading, Massachusetts (which adjoins Woburn), where he wrote a treatise on organ mixtures, a “Cheerful Philosophy for Invalids,” and a booklet on “Valuable Organ Information.” He wrote music for organ, edited anthologies of organ music and anthems, and worked as an organ consultant by correspondence until his death in 1913.

William Clarke was not a distinguished or renowned organbuilder, and his organs are not remarkable for their size, content, or innovations. Rather, they were good, solid, reliable church organs. The two that I have known didn’t include reeds, perhaps wise because neither Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, nor Bethlehem, Ohio, had organ tuners nearby in the 1870s.

Judging by the number of times he jumped from one short tenure to another, William Clarke may not have been the most stable or reliable of church musicians. Maybe he argued with the pastors. I imagine he was a colorful and exciting organist because of the number of times he was welcomed back for a second stint at a church where he had presumably left in a huff or been dismissed. I have played and loved organs he knew, built, and others that he presumably designed. I suppose he would have been an interesting guy to talk with. It would be my first choices to have lunch with Ernest Skinner or Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, but if neither were in town, I would be happy to sit with Mr. Clarke. I know some good lunch spots in Woburn.

Notes

1. I had my weekly lessons and practiced after school on a three-manual organ by
C. B. Fisk: http://www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50. When I got to Oberlin as a freshman in the fall of 1974 (the Flentrop in Warner Hall was dedicated that November), I was surprised to learn that some of my peers had never played a pipe organ before.

Frank Hastings, of the Weston Hastings

For the past 25 years or so, I’ve been caring for a lovely little organ in a Lutheran church in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was built by the Hook & Hastings Company in 1927, their Opus 2542. Originally, there were three stops on the Great (Diapason, Dulciana, Trumpet), five on the Swell (Stopped Diapason, Salicional, Voix Celeste, 4′ Orchestral Flute, Oboe), and a Pedal 16′ Bourdon. The Bourdon has a dual-pressure stop action and two drawknobs. When you draw 16′ Bourdon you get the same 4-inch pressure as the Swell and Great; when you draw 16′ Lieblich Gedeckt, you get 3-inch pressure, and the pipes speak more softly. If you don’t know any better and draw them both, the organ is smart enough to simply use the standard pressure.

Three ranks were added to the Great in the 1950s—a 4′ Octave, and a Quint and Super Octave that draw on one knob as Mixture II. A set of chimes was added at the same time. The additions were not made with particular historic sensitivity: they’re a little brighter than the rest of the organ. It’s fun to play using just the original stops to understand best what the builder had in mind. There’s a Tremolo for the Swell, plenty of couplers and combination settings, and a handsome little drawknob console. The entire organ is enclosed in a single expression chamber.

Such a simple little organ, so why all the fuss?  

A grand tradition

Elias and George Greenleaf Hook founded their famous organbuilding firm in 1827 in Salem, Massachusetts. The first organ they built is preserved in the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem. The company moved to Boston in 1831, occupying a site near the present North Station. It took about 18 years for the Hook brothers to produce their first 100 organs. In 1854, the firm moved again to Tremont Street to the neighborhood now occupied by Northeastern University. By that time, E. & G. G. Hook employed more than 200 workers and built 20 organs the year they moved. 

Francis (Frank) Hastings was born in 1836, apprenticed with a toolmaker, and joined the firm of E. & G. G. Hook as a draftsman at the age of 19. He quickly proved himself a valuable employee and gained experience in all departments of the factory.

In 1870, E. & G. G. Hook produced 54 organs. Nine of those were three-manual instruments, including the 45-rank organ built for the First Unitarian Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, now located in the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin, Germany. In 1870, George Hook was 63, Elias was 65, and the brothers were planning their retirement. They took Frank Hastings into partnership and changed the name of the company to E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings. George and Elias Hook died in 1880 and 1881, respectively. Frank Hastings purchased their shares in the company, and the name was changed to Hook & Hastings.

Frank Hastings had grown up in Weston, Massachusetts, now an affluent suburb to the west of Boston. But in the 1830s and 40s, Weston was rolling farmland with few trees and no hint of proximity to the city, excepting the Fitchburg (later Boston & Maine) Railroad that passed through town. Frank’s grandfather, Jonas, worked as a boot-maker and farmer; his father, Francis, had continued that work. Frank was born in the house Jonas had built on North Avenue in 1823. Frank may have loved living in the country, but he hated making boots and farming as much as he hated school, so he dropped out at the age of 14 and found work in Boston. Although he had worked in the city most of his life, he dreamed of moving the Hook & Hastings factory to Weston.  

This was more than a bucolic or nostalgic urge. The 1880s were the dawn of labor unrest, and many American companies were struggling to control their work forces. This led to the founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, the same year that an anarchist exploded a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket. In 1892, there was a highly publicized violent strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And in 1895, striking workers at the Pullman railcar factory in Chicago were confronted by the Illinois National Guard—30 people were killed and 57 injured. 

Frank Hastings conceived that he might avoid such unrest within his company if he went out of his way to provide comfortable living and working conditions for his employees and their families. So in 1884, three years after the deaths of the Hook brothers, he purchased five acres of land from the family homestead, and built a gabled, Shingle-style house, directly across the road from his parents. In 1886, he purchased the remaining 45 acres of the family property, along with the 150-acre Warren farm on nearby Lexington Street. The new factory was completed in 1889, and the company was moved.

The new factory was located adjacent to Fitchburg Railroad tracks, and Mr. Hastings arranged for a whistle stop and later the small Hastings station, making it possible for his workers to commute easily from Boston. The Hastings stop is still active as a whistle stop in Boston’s commuter rail system. The proximity of the railroad allowed for efficient delivery of materials to the factory and shipment of completed organs to customers.

To accommodate his work force, Frank Hastings built cottages on his properties for workers to rent. He made inexpensive mortgages available so workers could build their own houses, stipulating that the houses must be worth at least $1,000, because if a house was too cheap, the owner wouldn’t maintain it faithfully. Hastings Hall was constructed to serve as a community center, theater, and recreation hall. Across from his house he built a caretaker’s cottage for the employee who oversaw the maintenance of gardens, lawns, and all the buildings.

In 1890, the population of Weston was around 1,600, and Hook & Hastings was by far its largest employer and industry. The Weston Historical Society has records of company parties that included dinners “under the tent,” “games and rambles,” badminton tournaments, speeches, and contests. Newspapers reported that a community of self-respecting mechanics sprang up around the factory. In 1890, the Boston Herald reported that “every man feels he has a friend in his employer. If there is any trouble coming, if there is sickness in the family, the one to whom they turn for help, for sympathy, for comfort, is the head of the concern. He knows personally every man in his employ.” Settled in the new factory, the company built 26 organs in 1890.

We know little about Frank Hastings’ first wife. Their son, Francis Warren Hastings, was an officer in the company; but his health deteriorated, and he moved to Bermuda in 1895. In 1897, Hastings hired Arthur Leslie Coburn (brother of the schoolteacher Anna Coburn, who taught at the nearby District School #4) as factory superintendent and secretary of the corporation. Frank’s first wife died during this period, and in 1899 Frank married Arthur’s sister, Anna. How’s that for a harmonious working situation?

Warren Hastings died of consumption in Bermuda in 1903, and Arthur Coburn became the president of the company. In 1904, the first full year of Coburn’s presidency, the Hook & Hastings Company built 39 organs.  

Frank Hastings died in 1916 at the age of 80, 61 years after he joined E. &
G. G. Hook, and 27 years after moving the company to Weston. Arthur Coburn had assimilated enough of Frank Hastings’ philosophy that the company continued to produce organs with exceptional artistic content for about fifteen more years. But the pace was diminishing. In 1916, the year of Frank’s death, the 89-year-old company produced only 19 organs. That same year, the 10-year-old Ernest M. Skinner Company built 23 instruments.

Ernest Skinner brought formidable competition to the marketplace. At the turn of the 20th century he was young, ambitious, and a brilliant mechanic and inventor with deep musical intuition. He had a knack for providing his organs with snazzy new mechanical accessories and innovative tonal resources. In the first years of the century, his fledgling company produced instruments that were admired by the best musicians, and he quickly developed an impressive roster of clients. The meteoric rise of the Skinner firm coincided with the decline of Hook & Hastings.

After Arthur Coburn’s death in 1931, the company continued for a few years, but the quality of the instruments declined dramatically, and the output dwindled to four instruments in 1934, and four more in 1935. Anna Hastings had retained ownership of the company after Frank’s death, and as she watched the decline, she said that her husband had always put quality before price, and when organbuilders started talking about price first, it was time to stop. A contract was signed with the Mystic Building Wrecking Company of Chelsea, Massachusetts, the company’s buildings were demolished, and the corporation was dissolved in April of 1937.

Under the names of E. & G. G. Hook, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, Hook & Hastings, and The Hook and Hastings Company, 2,614 pipe organs were built over a span of 110 years. They were located in 47 states and as far away as Quebec, London, Dresden, and Chihuahua, Mexico. Organs were installed in two churches in Honolulu, one in 1875, and another in 1893. Often, when I’m sitting at my desk talking on the phone, my correspondent and I exchange photos and documents by e-mail or text. It’s surreal to be talking with someone in Australia, and having a message arrive in a few seconds. In 1876, a railroad train crossed the continental United States in 83 hours, setting a new record. Those Honolulu organs must have left Weston by rail, traveling to San Francisco where they were transferred to ships for the 2,100-mile voyage to Hawaii. It would have taken weeks to send proposals and drawings back and forth, to exchange signed copies of contracts and receive funds. Did Hook & Hastings send a crew to install an organ, or were there locals available on the island?

Why the fuss?

Remember that neat little organ in Waltham I mentioned earlier? It’s The Hook & Hastings Company Opus 2542, and it’s located about two miles from the site of the Hook & Hastings factory in Weston. It was built in 1927, four years before Arthur Coburn passed away, one of 11 instruments built that year. That organ would have been delivered on a small truck, taking less than half an hour to travel from factory to church. Maybe Anna Hastings and her brother Arthur went to hear it since it was so close to home.

The factory building is long gone, but Frank Hastings’ house is still there. The homestead across the street where Frank was born is still there, as are about a dozen of the houses built by the factory workers using mortgages provided by the company. After tuning in Waltham, it’s fun to take a spin past all that. Just after you pass Frank’s house at 190 North Street, turn left onto Viles Street. The first right off Viles is Hastings Road. The railroad tracks that passed the factory are a few hundred feet further down Viles Street.

What a heritage. Today, Hastings is a leafy, upscale neighborhood, where the heaviest traffic is landscapers’ trucks. I pull off to the side of the road and imagine the bustle of a 280-foot-long wood factory with scores of skilled workers creating hundreds of beautiful pipe organs. In the early days of the factory, there would have been plenty of horse-and-dray traffic delivering materials, and hauling finished organs for local delivery. The company opus list shows nearly 600 organs delivered to churches in Massachusetts, more than 90 in Boston alone! In the 1890s, the factory shipped around 50 organs each year. Roughly once a week, an instrument would be loaded onto wagons or railroad cars. Thousands of ranks of pipes, millions of action parts, and tons and tons of windchests, reservoirs, blowers, consoles, casework, and building frames left Weston each year.

Hook & Hastings to the land of the lemurs

In 1915, one year before Frank Hastings died, the company built a one-manual organ (Opus 2369) with six ranks for the Church of the Sacred Heart in Greenville, New Hampshire. It was moved by the Organ Clearing House to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1995, where it was installed for temporary use while George Bozeman & Company were preparing the installation of a larger organ. When that organ was installed in 1996, the Hook & Hastings was moved to an upstairs parish hall, where it sat, little used.  

In March of 2008, I received a phone call from Zina Andrianarivelo, Madagascar’s ambassador to the United Nations. I thought, of course you’re the ambassador from Madagascar. What ensued was a lifetime adventure. The Protestant (Presbyterian) churches in the capital city, Antananarivo, were preparing for the 140th anniversary of three acts of martyrdom, when an evil pagan Malagash queen ordered the murder of Christian missionaries. Three church buildings were established on those sites. One of those churches, located on the edge of a dramatic cliff was named Ampamarinana, which translates as “the Church of the Hurling Cliff.”

The nation’s president, Marc Ravalomanana, was also the vice-president of the National Church. He had charged the ambassador with “going back to the United States and finding a pipe organ for this church.” Skepticism satisfied, I went to New York (I lived in Boston at the time) and met with Mr. Andrianarivelo—I figured that I was the only organbuilder working at the United Nations that day.

Zina (we were on first-name terms right away) told me a little about the history of the churches, and the president’s desire to import organs to several churches. The priority would be the main central church, Faravohitra, where the anniversary service was planned for early November. Could we start with that one? It’s a pretty tall order to move and install an organ internationally in five months, but I thought of the one-manual Hook & Hastings in Charlestown, and suggested that we could relocate it quickly for temporary installation. We could bring a larger organ later, and move Opus 2369 to another smaller church.

Zina arranged for my visa, I followed the advice of the State Department concerning vaccinations (they warned me to be sure of the source of water I drank, including ice cubes), and received my airline ticket—my one-way airline ticket. Madagascar was formerly a French colony, so it’s serviced by Air France. They schedule weekly flights from Paris to Antananarivo (which is colloquially shortened to Tanariv, or simply, Tana), but they don’t schedule return flights until there are enough passengers on a list to fill a plane. I’m a stickler about travel arrangements, always being sure I have reservation numbers, flight information, accommodations, and addresses. Zina assured me there would be nothing to worry about.

I flew from New York to Paris, and then to Tana on a flight that would arrive there after midnight. I didn’t know who would meet me. I didn’t know how I would get from the airport to the city, 20 kilometers away. I didn’t know where I’d be staying, or how I would get around the city. And I didn’t know when I’d be going home. But I got on the plane for the 12-hour flight. Zina said it would be OK.

In next month’s column, I’ll tell my Malagash tales.

I offer thanks to Pamela Fox of the Weston Historical Society for providing photographs and facts, and for reading an early draft of this essay. Her command of this history and cheerful contributions have added much to my telling of this tale.

How to run a railroad

Recently I had a conversation with the rector of an Episcopal church who had been at that parish for seven years. He told me that in his first weeks on the job, he spent a late evening in the building by himself, wandering the halls, looking into closets and corners, and was startled by the messes he found. Closets were crammed into uselessness, and entire classrooms were so full of junk that you could hardly turn around inside. He told me how he vowed to himself that in two years, every inch of the building would be contributing to ministry. Seven years later, there are a half-dozen twelve-step programs meeting there, an active program of feeding the hungry, and countless other examples of meaningful use of the building, besides the usual activities of the parish. It’s a modest place, but today, the hallways, classrooms, offices, closets, kitchen, and restrooms are all clean and inviting.

I know I’ve shared this wedding story before. I received a panicked call from an organist, “The wedding starts in thirty minutes and the organ won’t play.” I raced to the church, arriving at ten past. There was a row of limos out front, and bagpipes playing in the yard. Running up the stairs to the organ loft, I could tell that the blower was running, so I went to the basement where I found a card table sucked up against the blower’s air intake. That’ll do it.

I’ve also shared the hay bale story before, the one where the Christmas decorations were stored in the attic near the door to the organ chamber. The hay bale from last Christmas’s manger was there with smoke rising from it as the hay decomposed. I wrestled the thing down the ladder and went to the office to ask if the custodian could dispose of it. When I got back from lunch, the hay bale was back in the loft.

I served a church in suburban Boston as organist and music director for almost twenty years. It was a large building, the quintessential white frame building with a steeple on the town square, but it was more than meets the eye. A new commuter highway was built in the area in the 1950s, and the parish expanded dramatically. The intimate nineteenth-century sanctuary became the chapel when the much grander new church was built. The people who had been leaders of the parish during that ambitious building program were still around, and there was a lot of pride in the place. The sure sign that it was a new and well-planned building was that there were electrical outlets under every window for the Christmas lights.

But the day I auditioned for the position, I noticed that the stalls in the men’s room were rickety, coming loose from their moorings, and the doors wouldn’t latch. I mentioned it often during my tenure, but they were never repaired. Everything else in the place was in crackerjack condition. There was some kind of block about that men’s room, a strange way to welcome visitors.

My usual routine of consulting, tuning, repairing, installing, and dismantling organs takes me in and out of hundreds of church buildings. Perhaps fifty of them are regular clients, where I visit a few times each year, some of those for more than thirty years. I know the buildings well, usually better than the custodian. And I’m always visiting buildings that I’ve never seen. I can tell a lot about the state of a parish by the state of its buildings.

Real estate rich

Our church buildings are our treasures. I know that some are rough around the edges, and some have outdated and unsafe mechanical systems. Some parishes have small buildings that are inadequate and less beautiful, while others are ironically burdened with huge buildings that were built in an earlier age and are now unsustainable. It can cost a million dollars to repair a leaky stained-glass window. But I marvel at how many parishes, both large and small, operate bustling buildings that provide space for dozens of community activities that would otherwise struggle to find affordable space. Alcoholics Anonymous and the Boy Scouts of America would be different organizations if they hadn’t had access to affordable space in church buildings.

I was struck by the comments of the space-conscious rector who saw the messes in the building as wasted resources. His comments reminded me of the value of the real estate that we might take for granted. As a teenager, I certainly took it for granted that I could have unfettered access to church buildings so I could practice the organ. The cash value of such a resource never occurred to me.

There are hundreds of magnificent church buildings in New York. Some are free-standing, iconic places along the big avenues, but by far the majority of New York’s churches are nestled on the narrow numbered cross streets. A church’s grand façade has townhouses pressed up against each side, and you can’t get more than 50 or 60 feet away, the width of the street and two sidewalks. Many of those buildings are more than 150 feet long inside, and the illusion of the interior space is heightened because you haven’t seen the length of the building from the outside. It’s a great sensation to walk through a doorway on a narrow street into a cavernous room, in a city where space is so valuable that many people live in apartments smaller than 500 square feet. A 150 by 80 foot room, 60 feet high could be developed to 720,000 square feet.

In New England and small towns across the country, church buildings dominate “downtown.” Countless little burgs through New Hampshire and Vermont have three white churches with steeples surrounding the town green: Congregational, Baptist, and Unitarian. The Episcopal church is a stone building with a red door, half a block up, and the Catholic church is a little further out because the Protestants got there first. There weren’t many Roman Catholics among the early colonists.

I’ve lived most of my life in northern cities, where the boundaries are determined by geography. Both Boston and New York are surrounded by water, so there’s no room for expansion. When I’m traveling, I marvel at the sweeping new campuses built by congregations in areas like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, or Phoenix, places where future streets are laid out, ready for growth and expansion, unheard of where I live. If a church in New York City had a 500-space parking lot, no member would ever have to fill out another pledge card. A parking garage in mid-town Manhattan gets $30 an hour—a white-striped gold mine.

For the sake of the little ones

Many of the buildings in which I work house daycare centers or nursery schools. In some, classrooms are used for daycare during the week and Christian education on the weekends. In others, a parish simply doesn’t need a dozen rooms dedicated to Sunday School. Some parishes operate daycares themselves, others rent the space to companies from the outside. In either case, a daycare center changes the dynamic of a building. Most, if not all states and towns require certification of facilities that offer daycare. Buildings are inspected, locks are changed, security protocols are established. No daycare employee is pleased to see a troupe of organbuilders walking in unannounced.

The parish where I grew up, where my father was rector, has a grand gothic-inspired brick sanctuary, a two-story “gothicky” brick parish house attached, and a newer parish hall with a lofty A-frame ceiling. The parish hall is a lovely space, large and airy. There are French doors along one wall that open into a cloister garden, the new parish hall added to the rest to complete that enclosure. There’s a fountain, a statue of St. Francis, and gardens that my father tended personally during his tenure­—he was a prolific, joyful gardener. He instituted the Cloister Garden Concert Series for summer evenings. The whole thing is very elegant.

But the planning of the new parish hall included classrooms in the windowless basement. When I was appointed at the position with the big new building, I took Dad to see the place. He marveled at the lovely, breezy, well-lit classrooms on the second floor of the new parish house, beautiful environments for the children of the parish. It was a lesson for me about priorities of planning a new building.

Turf wars

Space is at a premium in most church buildings. I’m not thinking of the campus that has a hundred-seat amphitheater for a choir room. I’m thinking of the place where Sunday School classes are separated by vinyl accordion doors that don’t quite work, and where the custodian keeps his tools and supplies in the organ blower room. In one building I know, the sacristy has an outside door, and the custodian keeps a snowblower there in the winter. I know a lot of altar guild members who wouldn’t stand for that. (My mother-in-law served on altar guilds most of her life. When she claimed that adding gin to the water made cut flowers last longer, I suggested that was an excuse to have the gin bottle out on Saturday morning.)

Altar guilds and music departments often wind up at odds. The sacristy is usually adjacent to the chancel, a perfect place to store music stands. And what’s it like when the organist has to practice on Saturday morning? Does he have a fit because the altar guild is chattering, or does he find another time to practice? We’re all here to worship. Work it out, people.

The sacristy really gets threatened when we start to plan a new organ project. Remember, it’s adjacent to the chancel. If we add the sacristy to the organ chamber above, we’ll have space for 16-footers. Oh no, you don’t.

Row with the oars you have

Through forty years of working with parishes, installing and caring for their pipe organs, I’ve seen significant changes in how they manage themselves as businesses. Churches that used to have a secretary in the office 9–5, five days a week, now have an answering machine. We have office equipment in our homes more sophisticated than the church office of a generation ago. It’s easy enough to run off bulletins yourself if you have to. At least the names of composers would be spelled correctly.

Alongside the functions of faith and worship, a church is a corporation. In some denominations, the priest, rector, or minister serves legally as a CEO. In others, the leadership and management is run by an elected board, sort of like an old-fashioned town meeting. Some of those CEO pastors are savvy businessmen and women and are able to oversee and delegate the management of functions of the business besides worship. But others fail terribly, knowing nothing about the mechanics or structure of a building, and nothing about managing employees and their tasks. How many seminaries offer courses in building management?

Instead of a full-time custodian, some churches hire cleaning companies who send a team for half a day a week. Not bad, as they can really get the place clean in a hurry. But who is looking after the mechanical systems? Any church building of any size has equipment far more complex than we have at home. Three-phase electricity, industrial HVAC equipment, elevators, tower bells, commercial kitchen appliances, and, oh yes, pipe organs require professional attention. In the old days, the custodian would have had a sense of that, and a schedule for regular maintenance. Today, those important functions are often the responsibility of a volunteer property committee.

There have been many churches where I thought it would be better to assemble volunteers from the parish to do the cleaning and hire a mechanical contractor to manage the physical maintenance of the place. Property management firms have specialists who can assess all the equipment in a building and develop a regular maintenance plan. It’s certainly less expensive to have professionally managed maintenance than to be rebuilding complex air-handling equipment because no one oiled the bearings.

Church bullies

If you’ve never worked in a parish that has a bully, you might dismiss the idea. But if you have, you know how destructive it can be. I’ve worked for quite a few churches with resident bullies, but one stands out in particular. He was a powerful professional who retired from business and moved to the town where he had always vacationed. Since he had attended services during summer vacations, people in the parish knew him and were excited at first that he would be around all year. He was appointed to committees, joined the choir, and roared enthusiastically into the life of the parish. A building project was in planning stages, and he volunteered to participate, logically getting appointed to, and then becoming chairman of the building committee. By then, it was too late. 

I’ve been maintaining that church’s organ since it was installed in the 1980s, coming twice a year to tune, but because the organ had to be removed to storage during the building program, I was in the building more than usual. There would be some modification to the organ’s location to make maintenance access easier, so I attended a couple meetings of the building committee, and, of course, worked there for weeks dismantling and then re-installing the organ.

I saw this guy reorganizing the parish bulletin board in the hallway outside the office. I saw him haranguing the parish administrator, calling out mistakes in the bulletin, and criticizing her methods of running the office. The long-time organist was in tears every week because this guy was so domineering during choir rehearsals. The rector became meek and withdrawn. We had words when he challenged my approach to the care of the organ.

The rhythm of the place changed. While there used to be a pleasant stream of parishioners coming and going during a weekday, chatting in the office, dropping something off in the sacristy, or preparing the kitchen for a parish supper, now the halls were empty—except for the bully. It took less than a year for one person to change the life of a parish.

Caring for the organ all those years, I built up a nice friendship with the organist. She had built the choir program enough that they had a tour one summer, singing in English cathedrals. It was painful to share her distress as her twenty-plus year tenure seemed to be going up in smoke.

If you’re unfamiliar with this syndrome, and especially if you think it’s going on where you work, give “church bully” a quick google. You’ll learn right away that it’s a “true thing,” that it’s very common, and that there are methods and programs designed to steer bullies away.

The whole package

In every church where I’ve worked, the pipe organ has been my mission. It’s not my job to meddle in how things are being run, in the condition of other equipment, or getting rid of a bully. But I care about the church, about its rites and traditions, and its importance to the social lives of its people. It has been part of life since my parents brought me home from the hospital to the rectory. I can’t help mentioning the hay bale, because protecting the organ from damage is my direct responsibility. I can’t help mentioning the dry bearings on the furnace fans, because a failed furnace spoils the tuning. And I can’t help mentioning the bully, because the thriving music program of that small local parish, built so happily by the dedicated organist and her friends in parish, was falling to pieces.

Everything in your church building was purchased with donated money. The parishioners contributed to the building fund, and that money paid for every light switch, every toilet, every folding chair, and that pipe organ that is so central to your work, to your career, to your art. Here’s a scary one. Is the organist at your church ever a bully?

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.