In the wind. . . .

John Bishop

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.

John Bishop

Follow the money

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

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

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

 

Don’t take it for granted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A crazy business

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

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

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

 

One brick at a time

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Buy a pipe.

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

Care for the money.

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

John Bishop

Winds across the prairie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Everybody gets a chance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

It’s all about air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

John Bishop

Living documents

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

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

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

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

 

An evolving document

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

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

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

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

 

People are dying to get in.

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

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

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

 

If you buy it, we’ll hang it.

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

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

Space for an organ

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

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

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

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

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

 

Oil and water

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

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

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

 

A Royal Festival of Reger

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

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

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

 

Heads will roll.

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

John Bishop

People, look east. 

The time is near . . .

We’ve done it again. We’ve finished a holiday season replete with performances of Messiah and Nutcracker, carol services, and pageants. We’ve roared through the glorious descants by David Willcocks, the Noël variations of d’Aquin and Balbastre, and we’ve sent choir members home to their families in the wee hours of the morning. We’ve tolerated ten weeks of holiday advertising—the first Christmas displays I saw this year were in Home Depot, two weeks before Halloween—and through it all, we’ve celebrated the holiday with our family and friends.

November and December are busy organ tuning months. In the northeast where I live, we think of these as “cold weather” tunings, adjusting the organs as required by the flow and striation of heated air, or the exposure of one organ chamber to prevailing winds while the other is in the lee. In this neck of the woods, Christmas and Easter are both winter holidays, so it makes more sense to tune in November and May. In the last couple months I’ve tuned more than fifty organs in New York and Boston, shuttling in and out of buildings, greasing the bearings of blower motors, cleaning keyboards, setting temperaments, and regulating reeds.

 

Of the crowning of the year . . .

I’ve been doing this since the 1970s, and I’ve always thought it’s fun to poke around the choir rooms to see what music is out. It’s also fun to see little packages of goodies that have been left for the organist, sometimes even a bottle or two, and notes on white boards offering thanks for the beautiful music.

Christmas is a holiday of traditions, so each church has a list of pieces that get sung each year. And lots of those pieces are common to hundreds of churches. Carols for Choirs is ubiquitous, in all its volumes. When I was a junior chorister, starting around 1966, Carols for Choirs I was five years old. The Willcocks descant to O Come, All Ye Faithful must be the standard against which all others are judged; how many millions of people know to start “Sing, choirs of angels . . .” on D. And let’s not forget those fantasmagorical chords under “Word of the Father . . .” or the majestic progression in the last phrase of the refrain after verse 7—all those sharps! Wow. Fifty-five years later, it stills gets me every time. Nice work, Sir David.

Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata is another favorite, with its beguiling mix of Renaissance-inspired motives and rhythms, and contemporary harmonies. Choirs love to sing it, and congregations love hearing it. I was at a party with Pinkham where he mentioned that Christmas Cantata paid for his house. Nice work, Daniel.

In the past generation, John Rutter’s music has renewed Christmas for many churches. Shepherd’s Pipe Carol is a peppy little number that makes people smile, and I imagine that Candlelight Carol will be as much a staple as Silent Night, Holy Night in a decade or two. Nice work, John.

Many organists consider the French Noël variations an essential part of Christmas. I know I do. But I had an interesting moment once when a parishioner asked me what was all that French stuff I play at Christmas. He helped me realize that the people in that New England Congregational church had never heard the French carols, as familiar to a French congregation as Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is to us, and equally familiar to organists. I had published the titles in the bulletin in French, meaningless to everyone except me. I knew it was Christmas music, but no one else did. Claude Balbastre (1724–99) was one of the most popular musicians in France, a virtuoso for the people. His Noël variations were wildly popular and people thronged to hear him play them, causing such a disturbance in the church that the Archbishop of Paris barred him from playing Christmas services. We should all have such trouble. Nice work, Claude.

 

Make your house fair as you are able . . .

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) was a British writer, best known for the more than eighty books of stories and poems she wrote for children. She won several prestigious literary awards, and the Children’s Book Circle, a society of publishers, authors, and librarians, presents the Eleanor Farjeon Award annually in Great Britain for excellence in children’s literature.

Farjeon’s People Look East is a delightful sprightly poem, familiarly set to the tune of a French carol. It was first published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 and has become a mainstay of traditional Christmas music. I bet the tune is rollicking through your mind’s ears as you read. I love this carol, both for its beguiling singability, and for the marvelous metaphorical allusion it suggests. Obviously, “. . . Make your house fair as you are able . . .” suggests the pleasure of decorating our houses, yards, and church buildings for the sweetest of Christian holidays. Nice work, Eleanor.

But it means so much more. As we prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ, we pull out the rich heritage of seasonal music. While I know it’s important to take Facebook with a grain of salt, my community of “friends” includes thousands of organists and organbuilders making thoughtful comments that enrich my experience. As we approached Christmas I saw conversations about how to finger tricky passages, how to read composers’ metronome markings, and what people might suggest for new and interesting choral music to offer during this most traditional of celebrations. Working out the slithery fingerings for Dupré’s Variations on a Noël is just another way to “trim the hearth and set the table.”¹

To the organ tuner, in addition to oiling blowers and tuning reeds, making the house fair expands to include making sure the Zimbelstern reversible works reliably. And given the usual keys for such carols as Silent Night and O Little Town of Bethlehem, it’s smart to check that B-flat and F in the chimes are sounding their best. The sickening clunk of a chime struck by a faulty hammer can change everything in that magical moment at midnight when everyone is singing with a candle in their hands.

We all love to play the French Noël variations, so it’s important to check the Cornet combinations on each organ. The classic registration is flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, and the pesky 13⁄5′. Sometimes the Cornet is created by combining five independent ranks, sometimes it’s independent ranks at 8′, 4′, and 2′, plus the Sesquialtera, which comprises the 22⁄3′ (Nazard) and 13⁄5′ (Tierce) ranks, and sometimes all five pitches pull as one stop. It’s most common for those five ranks to be wider-scale flutes, although some larger organs have Cornets both as flutes and as principals. In any event, those pitches, especially the two mutations, the second and fourth in the overtone series, complement the Cromornes and Trumpets of the organ because they reinforce the predominant overtones that color the reed voices.

If the organs you play have Trumpets, Nazards, and Tierces, you can prove this to yourself. Play a note on the Trumpet and turn the Nazard on and off. When it’s on, it reinforces that pitch hidden in the tone of the Trumpet, and when you turn it off, you can hear the tone linger as a component of the reed’s voice. If you have trouble hearing it, try it with different notes until you find one that’s clearer. It works best in the tenor range. This trick also works with an Oboe, Krummhorn, or Clarinet.

The Tierce is one of the most difficult pitches to hear in any organ. They’re tricky to tune accurately. But the pitch is clearer to your ears against a reed than a flue pipe. Try it. Play the Tierce with the Octave 4′, which is the usual tuning reference stop, then play the Tierce with a reed. I bet you’ll hear the tuning easier. It’s a good trick to tune a Tierce to a reed, as long as the reed has stable pitch and speech, and as long as you check each note as you go.

In French Classic organs, the combination of Cornet was developed to reinforce the treble ranges of the reeds, which were weaker than the tenor and bass ranges. That’s a simple explanation for why there are duets between cornet trebles and reed basses. It’s also the reason for the predominance of the Grand Jeu in French registrations. Those organs have lusty, powerful reeds that sound great with a Cornet added to the treble range. Hmm. Maybe that’s why the five-rank Cornet starts at middle C. Nice work, François (Bédos de Celles).²

 

Trim the hearth and set

the table . . .

The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (CMBG) is a spectacular example of community imagination, effort, and achievement. In 1991, a group of about ten families in the area of Boothbay, Maine, founded the original organization. They mortgaged their homes to raise the funds to purchase a 270-acre tract of coastal land, rescuing it from development, and they established the not-for-profit corporation. Corporate and private sponsorship came in at a rapid rate, and in June 2007, the gardens held a grand opening celebration. Less than ten years later, the CMBG comprises a rich collection of theme-based gardens, several public buildings with a café, gift shop, and educational facility. They present chamber music concerts and dozens of public events, and receive more than 100,000 visitors each year.

You might think that plants all grow at a common rate, but as we have visited the gardens several times each year, we wonder what they are using for fertilizer. You can almost hear the garden grow if you stand still. It’s gorgeous, thrilling, informative, and enriching. If you’re ever in the area, about forty miles up the coast from Portland, I recommend you stop in. Take a look at www.mainegardens.org.

Last year, CMBG introduced “Gardens Aglow,” an extensive lighting display festooned about the grounds. This year, with a houseful of family from out of town for Thanksgiving, we convoyed to the Gardens to witness the spectacle. Knowing it would be crowded, we arrived as they opened at 4:00 p.m., just as the sun was setting (Maine is at the extreme eastern end of the eastern time zone, and includes the eastern most point of land in the United States). We were amazed by the number of people. It was the third night of the season, and we learned that they had received more than 10,000 visitors over the previous two nights. That may not seem like much to city dwellers, but considering that the population of Boothbay is under 2,500, and the ten neighboring towns combined have fewer than 12,000 people, this is a big deal. They anticipate more than 100,000 visitors before the exhibit closes on New Year’s Day, effectively doubling the annual attendance at CMBG. Nice work, people.

The “Gardens Aglow” page of the CMBG website mentioned that the exhibit is open Thursdays through Sundays, November 18 through December 31, but closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve—that was the only time I saw or heard the word Christmas connected with the event. The tasteful jazzy music playing through Bluetooth speakers seemed Christmasy, but it was actually just the wintery classics we associate with Christmas: Let it Snow, Jingle Bells, Sleigh Ride, Frosty the Snowman. Rudolph was nowhere to be heard, abolished, no doubt, due to his connection to Santa Claus, even though Jesus makes no appearance in the lyrics. Even the word “holiday” was missing.

It sure felt Christmasy to me, as it did to our Greek Orthodox in-laws. But I thought it was nice that the marvelous event could be freely enjoyed by people of any faith, or by people of no faith.

 

People, look east and 

sing today . . .

The United States has just experienced a painful and nasty presidential election. The amount of abuse suffered by both the candidates and their supporters is unprecedented. Things were said across public media that wouldn’t be tolerated in school playgrounds, and people of all races and ideological backgrounds were savaged and humiliated in public. No matter how we each feel about the results, no matter how we voted, we can’t escape the fact that it was a disgraceful display, a national tantrum displayed to the rest of the world. We should all be mortified. As a nation we are better than that.

While The Diapason is not a place to express or exchange political opinions, this experience must resonate for many readers because so much of the discourse involved interpretations of religious freedom. The idea that the United States was founded on religious principles is at best only partially correct, and according to many historians, it’s patently false. Of course, there was a huge indigenous population here before European settlers arrived in the early seventeenth century. But those European settlers did not arrive with the intention of establishing a religious country, they were escaping persecution because of their beliefs.

The point was to be able to worship freely, not just as Puritans, Anglicans, or Catholics, but as members of any faith. In the age of the Internet and the culture of social media, we express and confirm our opinions through memes, especially photos taken out of context and peppered with clever captions—modern versions of a political cartoon, and the campaign season fertilized many doozies. There was one that said, “If your religion tells you to hate anyone, you’re doing it wrong.” In others it was easy to interpret that “religious freedom” meant denying someone else the freedom to worship or express themselves.

A particularly poignant moment occurred less than a week before the election, when members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested in front of New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Their message was against the vanity of the arts and included hateful derogatory language directed at the faculty and students. The students responded elegantly. They came out onto the sidewalk with their instruments to play patriotic and religious music, and spoke eloquently about the importance of the arts to our shared human expression. Nice work, Juilliard students.

This was a small protest. Only three members of the Westboro Baptist Church were involved, including the daughter of the church’s founder, and fewer than a hundred students responded. It was not covered by major newspapers. Without social media it wouldn’t have amounted to much. But it was symbolic of how hatred and intolerance allows some people to condemn huge segments of society, justifying that intolerance by excerpting passages from the Bible out of context.According to my quick Google search, Playbill Magazine was the most prominent publication to carry a story with photographs. You can read the article at http://www.playbill.com/article/juilliard-students-greet-westboro-bapti….

 

Love the Guest is on the way.

A few days after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, I was invited to visit Trinity Church Wall Street to inspect the organs there. I lived in Boston then, and while I had seen dozens of hours of television coverage of the attack, I was surprised by the devastation, the misery, and even the smells I encountered. St. Paul’s Chapel, the neighboring church building that is part of the Trinity family, had instantly been converted into an emergency aid station, providing rest, refreshment, medical attention, even massages to the rescue workers. And the iron fence surrounding the property became a poignant memorial, adorned with photos of missing people and lost loved ones and expressions of national loss and unity through poetry, art, music, and memorabilia.

I had a brief encounter with the church’s rector, a tall handsome guy with an enviable white coif, and suggested to him that it seemed a little strange to be thinking about a pipe organ in the midst of that immense tragedy. He responded that the work of the church had never been more important—and he meant all of the work of the church.

Many, if not most of us who read and care about The Diapason, serve the church in at least one capacity. We plan and present the church’s music, maintain and prepare its musical instruments for worship, sharing the message of the church through its music and through all forms of artistic expression. As we work through the next seasons of the Christian year, we should be aware of how bruised we are as a people. Our work has never been more important. Celebrate the talents and gifts you’ve been given, nurture them through study and practice, and return them to the church and to the nation, doing all you can to make this a better world. It matters. And it’s important. Go do it. Good work, people. ν

 

Notes

1. Eleanor Farjeon also wrote the poem, Morning Has Broken, popularly set to the Gaelic tune, Bunessan.

2. François Bédos des Celles (1709–1779), familiarly known to organbuilders as Dom Bédos, was a Benedictine monk and master organbuilder. His treatise, L’art du facteur d’Orgues (The Art of Organ Building), published in 1768, is still central to the education of every modern organbuilder.

John Bishop

Music in terrible times

 

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

—Leonard Bernstein

 

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia under the code name Operation Barbarossa, a plan that led to the Siege of Leningrad, the horrific isolation of a city of three million people. After systematically closing access routes to the city during the summer, the German army closed the last road into Leningrad on September 8, and during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Leningrad (then known as St. Petersburg) in 1906 and established himself as an outspoken, provocative artist. In 1936, Joseph Stalin stormed out of the Bolshoi Theater after the third act of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The next morning, the state newspaper, Pravda, wrote that Shostakovich was “playing a game” that “may end very badly.”¹

Shostakovich wrote the first two movements of his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as the siege began. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia in October 1941, after all roads were closed, during a period when 650,000 civilians were evacuated, mostly by boat across Lake Ladoga or by ice road across the lake as winter set in. There, he completed the symphony on December 27, 1941, dedicating it to the city of Leningrad. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater in Kuibyshev performed the premiere on March 5, 1942. Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere in a radio broadcast on July 19.

The people of Leningrad first heard “their” symphony on August 9, 1942. The score and parts were flown into the city by a pilot, skimming above the surface of Lake Ladoga to avoid detection. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, and there were only 15 players remaining in the orchestra of the city’s radio station, so the ensemble was filled out by musicians who were serving as active soldiers in the Russian army, released by their commanders for the occasion. 

I hadn’t thought much about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony until last week when Wendy and I heard it performed in Carnegie Hall by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Six minutes into the opening Allegretto, when the muffled snare drum started a relentless ostinato and pizzicato violins introduced the seductive melody, I was on the edge of my seat. The oboe repeated the melody, echoed phrase by phrase by the clarinet, and the haunting tune repeated with ever increasing orchestration, ever more complex harmonizations, and ever expanding, even maniacal intensity until the orchestra reached a towering climax with all the thundering guns of the percussion section, and an astonishing closing statement of the theme by the bass brass, as powerful in that mighty orchestra as all the diaphonic fog horns the Coast Guard could muster from Maine to North Carolina.

We were dressed for a night at the symphony and seated on red velvet chairs in a box in the first balcony. The heat was on, the hall was comfortable, the lighting was perfect, and the legendary acoustics of Carnegie Hall brought every nuance of the complex score to every ear in the house. Each musician on the stage was playing a first-class instrument in perfect condition, and each was supported by a comfortable salary and pension plan. You could just tell that they had all practiced earlier in the day. And by the way, that was the first time I heard the BSO’s new conductor, Andris Nelsons. Wow! They should keep him.

It takes about 75 minutes to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The program book listed a huge orchestra, with a phalanx of percussion, and almost as a footnote, “additional brass group (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones).” Those bad boys and girls were seated in a long row, stage right, with the traditional brass section (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba) seated stage left.

That first performance in Leningrad must have been a very different experience. If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

The performance was broadcast by radio, and over loudspeakers in public places. I bet that not one member of that audience was sitting on red velvet. I wonder if there’s a Syrian refugee at work on the score of the Aleppo Symphony.

 

A cathedral in ruins

On November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) dropped more than 36,000 bombs on the city of Coventry in Great Britain, killing more than 1,400 people. Hundreds of structures were destroyed, including St. Michael’s Cathedral. Besides the human loss and suffering, think of the cultural and historical loss. How many works of art, how many rare books, how many pipe organs were destroyed during that attack?

I was seven days old when Queen Elizabeth II laid the cornerstone for the new Coventry Cathedral on March 23, 1956, and the controversial contemporary structure was consecrated on May 25, 1962. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a choral work for that occasion, with freedom to choose topic and content. Britten’s War Requiem comprises a combination of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems of the British poet, Wilfred Owen, who at the age of 25 was killed in action in the British army during World War I, seven days before the Armistice of 1918.

War Requiem is dedicated to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerly, David Gill, and Michael Halliday, all close friends of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who were killed during World War II. Like Shostakovich’s Seventh, War Requiem is scored for a huge force of musicians, including full orchestra, chamber orchestra, four-part chorus, soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, a boy choir (at a distance) accompanied by a chamber organ or harmonium, and grand organ. It’s about five minutes longer than Shostakovich’s Seventh, and it rings with the deepest emotions.

Wilfred Owen became well known as a war poet posthumously. He was commander of a rifle brigade, and the poems that Britten chose to include in War Requiem were written in the field. Imagine the young man on a bedroll in a military camp, writing Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action:

 

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great Gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;

Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse

Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!

Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse.

Spend our resentment, cannon, yea disperse

Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison

Must wither innocent of enmity,

Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,

Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.

But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul.

I had to look up some of the words. In English, there are many words for curse.

 

He plays like a German.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) is one of the towering figures of the pipe organ. He was born into a family of organbuilders in Lyon, France, and his earliest studies were with his father François-Charles, a church organist. The great French organbuilder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, a friend of the Widor family, encouraged young Charles-Marie to go to Belgium to study with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens at the Royal Brussels Conservatoire.

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–1869) was a prominent French organist, known for his many compositions in “popular” style. I have enjoyed playing his music, especially programming the famous Sorties as rollicking larks, foils to more serious, meaty music. Cavaillé-Coll advocated Lefébure-Wély, arranging for him to play the dedication recitals of many of his prominent organs. It’s no accident that he was installed as organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in 1863, home to Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental magnum opus completed in 1860. But by that time, the young Widor was in Cavaillé-Coll’s sights as a young genius who represented the future of serious organ playing and composition, and Cavaillé-Coll apparently grew tired of Lefébure-Wély’s shallower antics, feeling that his huge and sophisticated organ was deserving of a more serious musician. Legend has it that Cavaillé-Coll made life miserable for Lefébure-Wély, even hinting that contributed to his death.

In the late 1860s, Paris was in a state of political tension as Prussia was on a tear toward German unification, and the French Empire of Napoleon III anticipated and feared that if the Prussians succeeded, the balance of power in Europe would be upset. Sure enough, on July 16, 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and three days later, the Germans invaded France.

With that political climate as background, Cavaillé-Coll championed the 26-year-old Widor to the rector at Saint-Sulpice, but Parisian organists, many of whom must have wanted a crack at the plum position, protested that Widor “plays like a German.”² That explains why the rector offered Widor a temporary position, feeling the weight of Cavaillé-Coll’s recommendation, but not making a full commitment. Widor started his legendary tenure in a France occupied by Germany. Marcel Dupré, in his memoir Recollections, shares Widor’s telling of presenting himself at the rectory when the year was up, hoping for an upgrade in his status. The rector simply wished him “Happy New Year,” so Widor assumed he should just keep playing—64 years as temporary organist!

Marcel Dupré succeeded Widor as organist at Saint-Sulpice in 1934. German troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, starting the occupation that lasted until 1944. In his memoir, Dupré wrote that as the occupation began, while many Parisians were fleeing the city, he and his wife Jeanne stayed at their home in Meudon, about 6½ miles from Paris. The city was deserted and transportation was stopped. For the first two Sundays, Marcel and Jeanne Dupré walked together back and forth to Saint-Sulpice: “Our fatigue was nothing compared to the joy we felt when we reached the organ, and I know that the parishioners still remaining in Paris found comfort when they heard it.”

A few days into the occupation, German officers visited Dupré’s home in Meudon, where there was a clear view of the entire city. The Germans intended to install anti-aircraft guns on the roof of Dupré’s salle d’orgue. When they saw the hall’s interior, they thought it was a chapel, but Jeanne Dupré told them that a musician worked in that room. The Germans reconsidered, and occupied the roof of the house next door, evicting the woman who lived there.³

 

A cold night at Stalag VIIIA

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a soldier in the French army during the German invasion of 1940 when he was captured and taken to a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, near the modern border between Germany and Poland. Fellow prisoners included the clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier, which explains the unusual instrumentation of Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which Messiaen wrote after his arrival at Stalag VIIIA. Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic guard, provided Messiaen with paper and pencil.

The premiere of the quartet was presented on January 15, 1941, in an unheated space in Barracks 27, using instruments that Brüll helped procure. The performance was announced with a flyer bearing an official stamp, “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft” (approved). There was an audience of about 400 prisoners, with German officers sitting in the front row.⁴

Messiaen’s deep Catholic faith was at the heart of the composition. In the preface to the score, he quoted from the Book of Revelations, Chapter 10:

 

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire . . . and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth. . . . And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. . . .

 

The opening movement is titled Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). In the preface, Messiaen described the movement:

 

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane, and you have the harmonious silence of heaven.

Imagine the mix of emotions of prisoners of war, playing that new music on beat-up instruments in a frigid prison room, with their captors in the audience shivering among the other prisoners, the throng listening to music expressing the sadness, the rage, the pathos of war.

 

Just another gig

Have you ever felt that a gig was a nuisance? “Do I really have to play that wedding on Saturday or grind out another Sunday in the heart of Pentecost?” Is your phone sitting on the console on “silent” while you’re playing a service? Have you ever sent a text from the bench during a sermon? When I receive a text from an organist at 10:42 on a Sunday morning, letting me know that the swell shutters are squeaking, I know that his eyes are not on the road, and that his heart is not in church. 

I keep two artifacts in the top drawer of my bureau in our bedroom in Maine. One is a note I received 25 years ago from a soon-to-be bride. I had met with her and her fiancé a few evenings earlier to help them choose the music for their wedding. It’s a simple drugstore thank-you card, and the handwriting is childish (the transcription is verbatim):

 

Mr. Bishop, we wanted to thank you for such a nice night, we had picking out our music. You were so very nice, the way you helped us, pick out what we wanted. I’am sure our wedding day will sound beautiful, thank you again for you kindness. Steve and Ruth.

Maybe Steve and Ruth’s wedding was another go-round of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Did I think it was just another gig I had to finish? Doesn’t matter. It was important to them.

Music matters. Music is important. A bride and groom and a war-torn city have something in common. They can express themselves through music. If you think you’re a vendor providing music, standing in line for a check with limo drivers, florists, and caterers, you’re missing something. Anyone can wrap bacon around a scallop. You know how to play the organ. You’re providing a sacred art. It matters to people. You’re their voice.

So pretty

The second artifact in that bureau drawer is my draft card, dated April 15, 1974. The draft had ended in 1973, but the Selective Service issued numbers to all American men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended. I had to report to Local Board No. 108 in the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (There’s a McDonald’s in that storefront now.)

In 1968, while war was raging in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Leonard Bernstein wrote the song, So Pretty, with lyrics by Comden and Green for a fundraiser for Broadway for Peace, where it was premiered by Barbra Streisand, with Bernstein at the piano. A child is learning in school about a far-away place, wondering why the pretty people are dying. The teacher replies, “. . . they must die for peace. . . .”⁵ ν

Notes

1. Book review: “Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,” The Washington Post, Peter Finn, October 3, 2014, quoting from the book by Brian Moynahan.

2. That story was told to me by Daniel Roth, current organist at St. Sulpice, as we walked together up Park Avenue in New York after he played a recital at the Church of the Resurrection. 

3. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, page 107, Belwin-Mills, 1972.

4. Alex Ross, “Revelations: The Story behind Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time,’” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.

5. You can read the lyrics of So Pretty here: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=7245&lang=en, and hear Deborah Voight singing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYlwwRmv8c.