In the wind. . . .

Cuthbert and the Cow

Cuthbert (634–687 AD) was a monk and later a bishop in the Northumbrian Church, in the northeast of England, the area of modern Newcastle, near the Scottish border. After his death, his remains had remarkable adventures, which seemed to contribute as much to his eventual sainthood as did his activities while breathing. Eleven years after his death, his tomb was opened in preparation for his reburial, and to the amazement of those present, his corpse was miraculously preserved, inspiring the swift development of a cult honoring his memory and making him the most popular saint in England at the time.

Several centuries after his death, his admirers dug up his remains again to take him on the lam, protecting him from a Danish invasion. Suddenly and mysteriously, the cart carrying the coffin became stuck in the road. According to the legend, it wasn’t mud, and it wasn’t a mechanical breakdown, it was just stuck. Bishop Aldun, the leader of Cuthbert’s groupies, had a vision that St. Cuthbert was asking to be taken to Dunholme. Trouble was, no one knew where that was. As they pondered, a milkmaid wandered by looking for her lost cow. When she asked if anyone had seen her cow, a young woman pointed up the road, saying she had seen the cow heading toward Dunholme (now Durham). Miraculously, the cart was freed, and the roadies continued to Durham. Cuthbert was buried there and a great church was built to honor his memory. The present cathedral was built on the same site a century later, and Cuthbert was unearthed again and moved to a shrine attached to the new building. Apparently that was the end of Cuthbert’s travels, more than 400 years after his death, though after all that, I wouldn’t stand too close to his grave, beautifully preserved or not.

The episode with the cart might have been the first time on record that the men stood around wondering where they were, while a woman asked for directions. By the way, she found her cow, whose role in the legend is commemorated by a Victorian bovine statue, in a niche high on the exterior of the cathedral.

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Durham Cathedral is an incredible place. William the Conqueror appointed William of St. Carilef as the first bishop there in 1081. Construction of the new cathedral started in 1093, and the nave was completed around 1130 (AD, not AM). It’s officially called the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin, and St. Cuthbert of Durham. “Durham Cathedral” works for me. While the great buildings of the High Gothic defy gravity, relying on exterior buttresses to support the weight of huge high ceilings while walls are nearly all glass and apparently structure-free, the Norman architecture of Durham Cathedral is gravity-intensive. The ancient fabric of the building is solid, and it seems as though the engineers and architects were experimenting as they went. Some arches are round while others are pointed, and clerestory windows don’t line up above those in lower stories. Buttresses between the windows are integral with the building, amounting to “thickening” of the walls rather than flying free.

Wendy and I spent one night in Durham during our recent trip to England. After dinner, we walked up to the cathedral where bellringers’ practice was going on, and the building was bathed in light. I had the sense that we were witnessing the early development of monumental ecclesiastical architecture, a prelude for our visit the next day to the High Gothic masterpiece of York Minster. The 150 or so years between the buildings at Durham and York, just seventy miles apart, brought incredible advances in construction techniques. Those builders were true innovators, and I wonder how much communication there was between builders in England and those in France at the same time. There was no Chunnel facilitating travel between the two countries, but there must have been plenty of interchange. Maybe there were international job fairs for medieval stonecutters. Come visit us at booth #1081.

Durham is home to 65,000 people and is about 270 miles from London. It’s a long way to go for a one-night visit, but besides visiting the cathedral, I was being offered a cobblers’ dream holiday. Church musicians make pilgrimages to the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge to hear the world-famous choir and organ. I got to see that iconic Harrison & Harrison organ in the workshop during its reconstruction.

Not that Harrison,

The American organ world celebrates a British immigrant organbuilder who started his working life as a patent attorney before “catching the bug.” G. Donald Harrison was largely responsible for the development of the American Classic pipe organ­—that unique style of instrument found in places like the Church of the Advent in Boston, known for sprightly Principal choruses and Baroque-inspired secondary choruses on Positiv divisions with low wind pressure. They represent a style unto themselves and helped inspire the mid-twentieth century revival of classic styles of organbuilding. Harrison was also responsible for the great organs of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and the Riverside Church in New York City.

I mention Mr. Harrison somewhat out of context here because we’ve just passed the 60th anniversary of his death. In June of 1956, he was working feverishly to complete the rebuilding of the Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City in time for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, while New York was suffering the unfortunate combination of a heat wave and strike of taxi drivers. After work on June 14, Harrison walked the eight blocks from St. Thomas to his Third Avenue apartment, stopping on the way to pick up a dose of smelling salts. After dinner, while watching Victor Borge on television with his wife, Helen, Harrison suffered a fatal heart attack.

Four days after Harrison’s death, the British organist John Scott was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, foreshadowing Scott’s brilliant career as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church, so sadly cut short last August by his sudden death.

That Harrison (& Harrison).

In 1861, Thomas Harrison established a pipe organ building company in Rochdale, near Manchester in the U. K., and in 1876, he moved the company to Durham. He built a number of wonderful organs, and the company really took off when his sons Arthur and Harry took over in 1896. They were exceptionally gifted organbuilders, Harry at the design table and Arthur in the voicing room. The catalogue of Harrison & Harrison organs shows dozens of instruments built in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arthur and Harry must have been especially pleased to have the hometown opportunity to rebuild the 1876 Willis organ in Durham Cathedral in 1905. Arthur Harrison died in 1936, and Harry retired in 1946, and the cows came home when control of the firm was passed on to Harry’s son, Cuthbert in 1945. Cuthbert was director of the firm until 1975 and remained Chairman of the Board until his death in 1991.

Mark Venning ran the company from 1975 until 2011, when Christopher Batchelor was appointed managing director. Dr. Batchelor was my tour guide in the busy workshop, where, among other projects, the King’s College organ was being prepared for shipment back to Cambridge.  

A member of the Harrison & Harrison staff met us at the train station, dropped Wendy off at The Victoria Inn (a crazy little B&B above a six-stool pub), and took me to the workshop, a snazzy place built in 1996 to replace a 124-year-old building that had outlived its usefulness. There’s a small entry vestibule (narthex?) inside the front door that contained two items of interest. One was a four-stop dual-pitched continuo organ (which is for sale), and the other was a letter signed by Queen Elizabeth, framed with a special commemorative medal honoring the work done by Harrison & Harrison as part of the restoration of Windsor Castle following the devastating fire there in 1992.

An organ fit for a king

Reading that letter, I remembered thoughts I had while watching the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on television in 2011. That was some job for the organ tuners. The Harrison & Harrison organ at Westminster Abbey was installed in 1937 and was played for the first time for the Coronation of King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth. We were recently reminded of King George VI, as he was the central character in the 2010 movie, The King’s Speech. Remember, he’s the one who became king when his brother King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. 

All of us in the business of organ building have been involved in projects that must be finished by Christmas, by Easter, or in time for the wedding of the donor’s daughter. But who else besides the people of Harrison & Harrison have been faced with such momentous events, so many times? An internationally televised royal wedding or coronation is a terrible time for a cipher!

And speaking of kings, the marvelous Harrison & Harrison organ at King’s College was built in 1934. There are famous photographs that show the organ case perched atop the central screen. Graceful towers on either side of the case seem like upraised arms, while the center of the main case ducks out of the way of the view. It looks monumental, but in fact, the case is not large enough to house the massive organ, so much of the instrument is concealed within the screen, below the level of the organ’s console.  

Installing a large organ in an ancient building is charged with difficulties. Even though the chapel building is huge (those at King’s College, Duke University, and Valparaiso University are supposedly the world’s largest collegiate chapels), the original designers made no provision for placement of an organ. And if they had, they would never have conceived of our modern instruments with 32-foot pipes, heavy expression boxes, and all the other pneumatic goodies that take up so much space.

The organ at King’s College is used very heavily, and after 80 years, mechanical systems became increasingly difficult to maintain, so much of the mechanical structure of the instrument is new, including windchests, reservoirs, structure, expression boxes, and other appliances. Maintenance passage boards are mounted on hinges to swing up, providing freer egress of sound, especially allowing the organists to better hear the organ from the console. All of the new structure was standing in the shop during my visit. A large part of the project was complete before the organ was removed early in 2016.

The original pipes are being cleaned and repaired, ready for installation during the summer, with the project scheduled for completion in September. We (along with millions of others) can all look forward to hearing the renovated instrument in the broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve.

I found it strangely moving to see pipes in crates from particular stops I remember hearing on recordings and radio broadcasts, like the English Horn in Berlioz’s Shepherds’ Farewell. And who among us hasn’t wept to the strains of that Tuba pointing out the melody under descants in Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, or O Come, All Ye Faithful? (Special thanks to the late David Willcocks.) I also saw the famous gold-leafed façade pipes, many of which date from the original organ built in 1605, some of which had suffered terrible gravity-induced damage. A pair of cheerful metal workers showed me how they were cutting off time- and weight-ravaged toes, reinforcing the pipe feet, and soldering on new cast toes—a sort of galvanized pedicure.

A fund-lowering pitch

As Peterborough Cathedral celebrates its 900th anniversary, they’ve embarked on an ambitious campaign, raising funds for a large number of extraordinary projects. You can see the scope of Peterborough 900 on the cathedral’s website at www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/home/campaign-objectives.aspx. Two of the projects are directly related to music. One is a £1,000,000 Cathedral and Community Music School (when we were in the U. K. last month, £1 cost almost $1.50), and the other is lowering the pitch of the 1884 Hill Organ. The organ was originally built at “Old Philharmonic Pitch,” commonly used in the late nineteenth century. While modern concert pitch is A = 440 cycles per second, Old Philharmonic Pitch is A = 453 Hz, enough higher that singers are surprised by it, and many modern orchestral instruments can’t match it.  

Changing the pitch of a large pipe organ is a complicated process. Each pipe has to be made longer (the Peterborough organ has 5,286 pipes). It’s also a tricky decision because lengthening an organ pipe changes its scale, which is the ratio of length by diameter. During my tour, I saw many pipes from the Peterborough organ, both wood and metal, with their extensions and new tuning scrolls in various stages of completion. I was impressed that big projects on two huge and famous organs were underway in the workshop at the same time. There sure were a lot of organ parts stacked about. And that wasn’t all. A new two-manual tracker-action instrument was underway as well.

When one is not enough

The morning after my tour of the Harrison & Harrison workshops, H&H operations manager Jeremy Maritz met Wendy and me “by the font” at the west end of Durham Cathedral to show us the organ. The three of us crowded into the tiny console gallery above the quire and explored the kaleidoscope of tone color revealed by the luxurious ivory drawknobs. Isn’t it rich when a Great division has both First and Second 8′ Diapasons? But wait—this organ has four! It’s the Swell division that has “only” First and Second Diapasons. And here’s a new one—in the Pedal division, Open Wood 16′ I and Open Wood 16′ II. Those two huge stops are located on opposite sides of quire, in the surrounding ambulatory—and it’s Open Wood 16′ II that’s extended to 32-foot. Heavens! And as if that’s not enough, there’s also a 16′ Diapason made of metal. Reeds, you ask? 32′ Double Ophicleide (an extension of the Solo Tuba) and 32′ Double Trombone. It’s embarrassing.

I’m grateful to Jeremy Maritz, Christopher Batchelor, and the staff of Harrison & Harrison for their hospitality and for the great education I received at their hands.

Betting on the future of the past

Here in the United States, lotteries operated by governments are a mixed bag. In Colorado, proceeds from the state lottery are largely invested in parks and recreational facilities, while in Kansas significant lottery money goes to the construction and maintenance of prisons. In Great Britain, the Heritage Lottery Fund provides funding for countless projects related to the preservation of the country’s heritage, from steam-powered tugboats to church bells, from medieval cathedrals to pipe organs. Actually, the projects are not countless—the lottery’s website claims that £6.8 billion have been awarded to support 39,000 projects since 1994.

Durham Cathedral has an ongoing project called Open Treasure that involves restoration and preservation of the building itself as well as new programs and uses for the enclosed spaces. Exhibition spaces are being developed for the display of incredible treasures owned by the cathedral, and the lottery has provided £3,850,000. Peterborough 900 has received grants totaling £2.5 million from the lottery.

Go to the website www.hlf.org.uk, type “pipe organs” into the search field, and you’ll find a list of projects that have been supported by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund—from £44,000 for the restoration of the 1881 organ built by K. C. Reiter in the parish church of All Saints’, Roos, to £950,000 toward the restoration of the Harrison & Harrison organ at Royal Festival Hall.

During our trip, we saw signs proclaiming the support of the HLF at York Minster, Blenheim Palace, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We saw it at Westminster Abbey and at St. Martin in the Fields at Trafalgar Square.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is one of twelve specialty funds that disperse the proceeds of the National Lottery (www.national-lottery.co.uk). Other funds support arts councils, sports organizations, and the British Film Institute. As a short-term observer from the outside, it seemed pretty enlightened to me. Can you imagine our federal legislature coming up with something like that? I’d buy a ticket.

A Pokémon world

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

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

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

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

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

Starry eyes

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

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

The man from Samos

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

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

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

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

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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

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

Blow, ye winds . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

A time and a place

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

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

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

Notes

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

Why it matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice work, Michael. 

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

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

How did you get started?

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

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

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

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

A matter of scale

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

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

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

Will it play in Milledgeville?

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

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

One more thing . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Swing, style, and stops

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s the beef?

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

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

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

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

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

Passing batons

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

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

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

• Swell octave couplers to cut off 2′ stops

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

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

• one piston throwing off all sub couplers.

All this in 1912.

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

Notes

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

What’s it going to cost?

When you’re shopping for a car, it’s reasonable to start by setting a budget. Whether you say $10,000, $30,000, or $75,000, you can expect to find a vehicle within a given price range. Of course, it’s up to you whether or not you stick to your budget, but we all have experience with the exercise, and there’s plenty of solid information available. Printed advertisements broadcast prices in huge type, and you can fill in forms online with details about a given car to receive a generated price.

When you set out to buy a piano, you can start with a simple search, and get a quick idea of price ranges. I just spent a minute or two surfing the internet to learn that a new Steinway “B” (that’s the seven-foot model) sells for over $80,000, and that you should expect to pay about 75% the price of a new instrument to purchase a reconditioned used piano. If you start with that in mind and do some serious shopping, you may well get lucky and find a beautiful instrument for less, but at least you have a realistic price range in mind before you start.

There is simply no such information or formulas available for the acquisition of a pipe organ, whether you are considering a new or vintage instrument. In a usual week at the Organ Clearing House, I receive at least two, and as many as ten first-time inquiries from people considering the purchase of an organ. These messages often include a stated budget, usually $100,000, sometimes $200,000, and they typically specify that it should be a three-manual organ. Each time, I wonder how that number was generated. Was it the largest amount they could imagine spending? Did they really think that an organ could be purchased for such an amount?

It’s as if you were shopping for that car, but you promised yourself that this time, you’re going to get your dream car. You test-drive a Mercedes, a Maserati, and a Bentley, and oh boy, that Bentley is just the thing. You offer the salesman $20,000. He rolls his eyes and charges you for the gas. It’s a $250,000 car.

§

There’s a popular myth out there that people think that organ companies can be compared by their “price per stop.” The most common source for public information about the price of an organ is the publicity surrounding the dedication of a monumental new organ. You read in the newspaper that Symphony Hall spent $6,500,000 on a new organ with 100 stops. Wow. That’s $65,000 per stop. We only need a ten-stop organ. We could never raise $650,000.

The problem with this math is that the big concert hall organ has special features that make it so expensive. The most obvious is the 32′ façade. How much do you think those pipes cost? If they’re polished tin, the most expensive common material, maybe the bottom octave of the 32′ Principal costs $200,000? $250,000? More? And if the organbuilder pays that to purchase the pipes, what does it cost to ship them? A rank of 32-footers is most of a semi-trailer load. What does it cost to build the structure and racks that hold them up? This week, the Organ Clearing House crew is helping a colleague company install the 32′ Open Wood Diapason for a new organ. It takes ten people to carry low CCCC, and once you have it in the church, you have to get it standing upright. Years ago, after finishing the installation of a full-length 32′ Wood Diapason in the high-altitude chamber of a huge cathedral, my colleague Amory said, “Twelve pipes, twelve men, six days.” It’s things like that that pump up the “price per stop.” In that six-million-dollar organ, the 32′ Principal costs $400,000, and the 13⁄5′ Tierce costs $700.

Here’s another way to look at the “price per stop” myth. Imagine a two-manual organ with twenty stops­—Swell, Great, and Pedal, 8′ Principal on the Great, three reeds, and the Pedal 16′ stops are a Bourdon and a half-length Bassoon. The biggest pipes in the organ are low CC of the Principal, and low CCC of the Bourdon, and the organ case is 18 feet tall. Add one stop, a 16′ Principal. Suddenly, the case is twice as large, the wind system has greater capacity, and the organ’s internal structure has to support an extra ton-and-a-half of pipe metal. The addition of that single stop increased the cost of the organ by $125,000, which is now divided over the “price per stop.”

Or take that 21-stop organ with the added 16′ Principal, but instead of housing it in an organ case, you install it in a chamber. In that comparison, the savings from not building a case likely exceeded the cost of the 16′ Principal.

Ballpark figures

On June 10, 1946, a construction manager named Joseph Boucher from Albany, New York, was sitting in seat 21, row 33 of the bleachers in Boston’s Fenway Park, 502 feet from home plate. Ted Williams hit a home run that bounced off Boucher’s head and wound up 12 rows further away. Boucher’s oft-repeated comment was, “How far away does a guy have to sit to be safe in this place.” That still stands as the longest home run hit at Fenway, and Boucher’s is a solitary red seat in a sea of blue. That’s a ballpark figure I can feel comfortable with. I have other stories saved up that I use sometimes as sassy answers when someone asks for a “ballpark figure” for the cost of moving an organ.

If you’re thinking about acquiring a vintage organ, you’ll learn that the purchase prices for most instruments are $40,000 or less. Organs are often offered “free to a good home,” especially when the present owner is planning a renovation or demolition project, and the organ has transformed from being a beloved asset to a huge obstacle. But the purchase price is just the beginning. 

If it’s an organ of average size, it would take a crew of four or five experts a week to dismantle it. Including the cost of building crates and packaging materials, dismantling might cost $20,000. If it’s an out-of-town job for the crew, add transportation, lodging, and meals, and it’ll cost more like $30,000. If it’s a big organ, in a high balcony, in a building with lots of stairs, and you can’t drive a truck close to the door, the cost increases accordingly. With the Organ Clearing House, we might joke that there’s a surcharge for spiral staircases, but you might imagine that such a condition would likely add to the cost of a project.

Once you’ve purchased and dismantled the organ, it’s likely to need renovation, releathering, and perhaps reconstruction to make it fit in the new location. Several years ago, we had a transaction in which a “free” organ was renovated and relocated for over $800,000. The most economical time to releather an organ is when it’s dismantled for relocation. Your organbuilder can place windchests on sawhorses in his shop and perform the complex work standing comfortably with good lighting, rather than slithering around on a filthy floor in the bottom of an organ.

The cost of renovating an organ is a factor of its size and complexity. For example, we might figure a basic price-per-note for releathering, but the keyboard primary of a Skinner pitman chest with its double primaries costs more than twice as much to releather as does a chest with single primary valves. A slider chest is relatively easy to recondition, unless the windchest table is cracked and split, and the renovation becomes costly reconstruction.

It was my privilege to serve as clerk of the works for the Centennial Renovation of the 100-stop Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine. (It’s known as the Kotzschmar Organ, dedicated to the memory of the prominent nineteenth-century Portland musician, Hermann Kotzschmar.) That project included the usual replacement of leathered pneumatic actions, but once the organ was dismantled and the windchests were disassembled, many significant cracks were discovered that had affected the speed of the actions for generations. Another aspect of the condition of that organ that affected the cost of the renovation was the fact that many of the solder seams in larger zinc bass pipes were broken. The effect was that low-range pipe speech was generally poor throughout the organ, and it was costly to “re-solder” all of those joints, a process that’s not needed in many organ renovations.

It’s generally true that if an organ that’s relatively new and in good condition is offered for sale, the asking price will be higher knowing that the renovation cost would be low or minimal. But sometimes newer organs are offered for low prices because they urgently need to be moved.

Let’s consider some of the choices and variables that affect the price of an organ:

Reeds

With the exception of lavish and huge bass stops, like that 32-footer I mentioned above, reeds are the most expensive stops in the organ. They’re the most expensive to build, to voice, to maintain­—and when they get old, to recondition. When you’re relocating an organ, the quality of work engaged for reconditioning reeds will affect the cost of the project and is important to ensuring the success of the instrument. You would choose between simply cleaning the pipes and making them speak again by tuning and fiddling with them or sending them to a specialist who would charge a hefty fee to repair any damage, replace and voice the tongues, mill new wedges, and deliver reeds that sound and stay in tune like new.

Keyboards

An organbuilder can purchase new keyboards from a supplier for around $1,000 each to over $10,000. The differences are determined by the sophistication of balance, weighting, tracker-touch, bushings, and of course, the choice of playing surfaces. Plastic covered keys are cheaper than tropical woods, bone, or ivory, which is now officially no-touch according to the United States Department of the Interior (remember President Obama and Cecil the Lion). Some organbuilders make their own keyboards and don’t offer choices, but especially in renovations, such choices can make a difference.

Climate

If an older organ has been exposed to extremes of dryness, moisture, or sunlight, it’s likely that the cost of renovation will be higher because of the need to contain mold, splits, and weakened glue joints.

Casework

A fancy decorated organ case with moldings, carvings, and gold leaf is an expensive item by itself. As with keyboards, some builders have a “house style” that is built into the price of every organ they build. If you don’t want moldings, towers, and pipe shades, you can ask someone else to build the organ. Especially with electro-pneumatic organs, chamber installations are often an option, and are considerably less expensive than building ornate casework. However, I believe that it’s desirable for a pipe organ to have a significant architectural presence in its room, whether it’s a free-standing case or a well-proportioned façade across the arched opening of a chamber.

Console

Drawknob consoles are typically more expensive than those with stoptabs
or tilting tablets. Sumptuous and dramatic curved jambs speak to our imagination through the heritage of the great Cavaille-Coll organs, especially the unique and iconic console at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Those dramatic monumental consoles were the successors of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stop panels, as found on the Müller organ at Haarlem or the Schnitger at Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. The default settings of most woodworking machinery are “straight” and “square,” and by extension, curves require more work and greater expense.

Many modern consoles and most renovation projects include the installation of solid-state controls and switching. There is a range of different prices in the choice of which supplier to use, and the cost of individual components, such as electric drawknob motors, vary widely.

What’s the point?

Some of the items I’ve listed represent significant differences in the cost of an organ, while some are little more than nit-picking. Saving $30 a pop by using cheap drawknob motors isn’t going to affect the price of the organ all that much. And what’s your philosophy? Is cheap the most important factor? When you’re commissioning, building, purchasing, or relocating a pipe organ, you’re creating monumental liturgical art. I know as well as anyone that every church or institution that’s considering the acquisition of an organ has some practical and real limit to the extent of the budget. I’ve never seen any of the paperwork between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II, who commissioned the painting of the Sistine Chapel, but it’s hard to imagine that the Pope complained that the scheme included too many saints and should be diminished.  

You may reply that putting a 20-stop organ in a local church is hardly on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, but I like to make the point that the heart of planning a pipe organ should be its artistic content, not its price. If you as a local organist dream of playing on a big three-manual organ, and you imagine it sounding like the real thing, and functioning reliably, you can no more press a job for $100,000 or $200,000 than you can drive away in the Bentley for $20,000.

Let’s think about that three-manual organ. Money is tight, so we think we can manage 25 stops, which means that while you’ve gained some flexibility with the third keyboard, that extra division might only have five or six stops, not enough to develop a chorus and provide a variety of 8′ tone or a choice of reeds. Sit down with your organbuilder and work out a stoplist for 25 stops on two manuals, and you’ll probably find that to be a larger organ because without the third manual you don’t need to duplicate basic stops at fundamental pitches. Manual divisions with eight or ten stops are more fully developed than those of five or eight, and let’s face it, there’s very little music that simply cannot be played on a two-manual organ. Further, when we’re thinking about relatively modest organs in which an extra keyboard means an extra windchest, reservoir, and keyboard action, by choosing two manuals instead of three, you may be reducing the cost of the mechanics and structure of the organ enough to cover the cost of a few extra stops.

Let the building do the talking.

Because a pipe organ is a monumental presence in a building and its tonal structure should be planned to maximize the building’s acoustics, the consideration of the building is central to the planning of the instrument. It’s easy to overpower a room with an organ that’s too large. Likewise, it’s easy to set the stage for disappointment by planning a meager, minimal instrument.

Maybe you have in your mind and heart the concept of your ideal organ. Maybe that’s an organ you played while a student or a visiting recitalist. Or maybe it’s one you’ve seen in photos and heard on recordings. But unless you have the rare gift of being able to picture a hypothetical organ in a given room, there’s a good chance that you’re barking up the wrong tree.

While I state that the building defines what the organ should be, five different organbuilders will propose at least five different organs. Think about what the room calls for, think about the needs of the congregation and the music it loves, and conceive what the organ should be. Then we’ll figure out how to pay for it.

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.