In the wind...

What a winter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But baby, it’s cold outside.

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

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

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

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

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about pitch.

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

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

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

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

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

Mise en place

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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere you go, there you are.

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

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

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

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

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

The invincible da Vinci

The other night I was watching a documentary about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, a time when the arts and sciences were flourishing. His contemporary, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), was studying the motions of celestial bodies and developing his theory of heliocentric cosmology, displacing the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, and proving that a system of planets including the earth rotates around the sun. Physician Richard Bartlot (1471–1557) was working hard to understand the functions of the human body. Another contemporary was Michelangelo (1475–1564), whose genius with the visual arts in both painting and sculpture dazzles us more than 500 years later. 

Leonardo was fascinated by flight, and made hundreds of drawings of the wings of birds in various positions, theorizing about how a bird could alter the shape of its wings to affect the direction of its flight. He noticed that soaring birds used spiraling updrafts of air to ascend effortlessly, and how they braked to slow for landing. I’m in an airplane as I write, and can’t help but associate the wing flaps with the drawings I saw on television.

Leonardo wondered if it would be possible for humans to fly, and imagined and sketched numerous designs of flying machines. The documentary tells of a group of aeronautical scientists in England building a glider according to one of those designs. It was a single fixed wing about 30 feet across with fabric stretched over a wooden frame weighing about 90 pounds. When it was finished, they tested it first by mounting it on the back of a pickup truck and covering it with sensors. As the truck drove forward, a computer recorded everything that was going on, and the team deduced that the glider developed enough lift to fly in air that was moving around 20 miles per hour.  

A pilot skilled at parasailing was engaged to try to fly the thing. Because the glider had no controls for direction or altitude, the team attached ropes to front and back and to each wingtip, and on a windy hilltop off she went. The first two tries allowed the pilot to get a sense of how it handled, and on the third try she went up about ten feet and flew as far as her team could run before they lost control. She flew a little farther each time, eventually getting up as high as 30 feet and flying forward for a couple hundred yards. It was fascinating to see that a design conceived 500 years ago was so effective.

The film discussed Leonardo’s grasp of human anatomy. His drawings of muscles and tendons in human arms, hands, and faces bore direct relationships to the forms of those body parts in Leonardo’s most famous painting, Mona Lisa.  

Perhaps most impressive was Leonardo’s study of the human heart. He obviously did some very gruesome experimentation to inform his drawings, and he documented how he deduced the heart’s valves functioned, even determining that the valves cause blood to form vortexes or eddies that add to the quality of blood flow. A modern heart surgeon compared Leonardo’s studies with X-rays and scans that prove their accuracy. I was amazed to see how well those sixteenth-century studies stood up to modern scrutiny. 

From one organ to another

While Leonardo was quietly slicing up human hearts, the pipe organ was being developed into the most complex machine on the planet. Simple flutes had been made from grass and canes for centuries—the panpipe grew common in the sixth century BC. I wonder who was first to think of making a flute out of metal, and forming a tone-producing mouth using a horizontal languid at the connection between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator?

In 256 BC, a Greek physicist named Ctesibius created a musical instrument called the Hydraulis, which had mounted flutes similar to organ pipes, a wind system that used the weight of water to create and regulate pressure, and a keyboard and mechanical action that operated valves to open those pipes. All this was 1,500 years before Leonardo was wondering about flight.

I was a young teenager when I was introduced to the unique and lovely organ in the Cathedral-Fortress in Sion, Switzerland through E. Power Biggs’s recording, The Historic Organs of Switzerland. At the time of that recording, it was widely thought that the organ was built in 1390. There is some modern research suggesting that it was more like 1430, but I wouldn’t argue about a 40-year difference—it’s a mighty old organ, and it’s perfectly recognizable and playable. There’s a nice video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiyy7AtMvis. It’s narrated in Dutch, but even if you don’t understand the language, you can see and hear this remarkable instrument.

I love recognizing the pipe organ as such an ancient art form, stopping to reflect on what life was like in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. Think of the state of public water supplies and sanitation, personal health and hygiene, transportation and commerce. If you’ve ever visited a modern organbuilding workshop, you have an idea of the complexity and precision necessary to make a monumental musical instrument function. Think of the effort and ingenuity involved in building a pipe organ in 1450, when there were no cordless drills, laser-sharpened blades, or electric lights. Those early organbuilders harvested trees and milled lumber by hand, hauled it to the workshop on oxcarts, cast metal and soldered seams, fashioned parts for mechanical actions, skinned animals and tanned leather, all to make music.

Anchors aweigh¹

We can compare that effort to shipbuilding. We all have pictures of Christopher Columbus’s little armada, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in our minds’ eyes. The names roll off our tongues like “I before E, except after C, or when sounding like ‘A’ as in neighbor or weigh.” The largest of those ships, Santa Maria, was about 60 feet long on deck with a 41-foot keel, about 18 feet wide, and weighed about 100 tons, smaller than many modern personal pleasure yachts. While we might sail in a 60-foot sailboat on a sunny afternoon with six or eight people on board, the Santa Maria had a documented crew of 40. The reason that a lavatory on a boat is called “The Head,” is because in those early sailing ships, the crew’s sanitation facility was to hang over the side at the head of the ship.

Mechanically, Santa Maria had three masts and a bowsprit, and five spars bearing five sails. Each sail would have had about eight control lines (halyard, sheets, downhauls, etc.) and many of the lines ran through blocks (multi-wheeled pulleys) for increased leverage. Complete the catalogue with a rudder for steering, a wheel with related lines and pulleys, and a capstan (winch) for mechanical advantage for hoisting sails and anchors, and we can estimate that Santa Maria had a couple hundred moving parts. The simplest two-manual organ of the same era, with 45- or 49-note keyboards, would have some four or five hundred moving parts, including keys, trackers, squares, rollers, and valves. It’s amazing to me that such a complex machine would be devised and built for the purpose of making music in a time when most machinery was so very primitive.

Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing, producing the Mazarin Bible about 40 years before Columbus’s great adventure. His printing press had only three or four moving parts—but that was one of the greatest advances in the history of communication. Without Gutenberg, we wouldn’t have e-mail. 

That ingenious business²

Let’s jump ahead 300 years. By the 1860s, science and technology had leapt forward exponentially. During that decade, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Transatlantic Cable were completed, and Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. And Aristide Cavaillé-Coll built the grand organ at Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris with 102 stops, five manuals, and a fantastic array of pneumatic registration devices.  

Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece at Saint-Sulpice must be one of, if not the most influential organs in existence. The bewildering array of levers and knobs gave those organists unprecedented control over the instrument, and the music written by Widor and Dupré, inspired by the sounds and mechanical assets of the Cavaillé-Coll organ, form a centerpiece of the long history of organ music. And like the ancient organ in Sion, the instrument at Saint-Sulpice is still in regular use, not as an antique curiosity, but as the church’s main instrument that is played every Sunday for Mass, and for countless concerts and recordings. 

Forty years later in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), Ernest Skinner was at work on a new revolution. Starting around 1890, a number of American organ companies were experimenting with pneumatic and then electric organ actions, but none was more creative or prolific than Mr. Skinner. As an employee and later factory superintendent of the Hutchings Organ Company, and later in the company that bore his name, Mr. Skinner invented and produced the Pitman windchest, the first electro-pneumatic organ action in which the stop action functioned as quickly as the keyboard action. That simple fact, which when combined with Skinner’s fabulous electro-pneumatic combination action, was as influential to organists as Cavaillé-Coll’s fantastic pneumatic and mechanical console appliances, because for the first time, dozens of stops could be turned on or off simultaneously as quickly as an organist could move from one key to the next. And those actions operated instantly; there was no mechanical noise.

A combination innovation

As I mention Mr. Skinner’s combination actions, I repeat a theory that I have proposed a number of times. Those machines, built in Boston around 1905, allowed the organist to select any combination of stops and set it in a binary memory, ready to be recalled at the touch of a button. Decades earlier there were water-powered looms that could be programmed to weave intricate patterns using blocks of wood with patterns of holes, the forerunners of the computer punch cards that people my age used to register for college classes. But it’s my theory that Mr. Skinner’s combination actions were the first industrially produced, commercially available, user-programmable binary computers—the first, ever.

I’ve had a number of opportunities to propose my theory to scientists outside the organ world, and have not heard any contradicting theories. If any of you out there in Diapason land know anyone who is expert in the history of computers, I’d be grateful if you’d pose this theory to them and let me know what you learn.

As electro-pneumatic actions allowed organists unprecedented control over their instruments, so they allowed instruments to be larger than ever before. In 1865, 40 or 50 stops made a very large organ. By 1920, such an organ had become commonplace. It was usual for a large church to commission an organ with four manuals, many dozens of ranks of pipes, and components of the organ in multiple locations around the church. Imagine yourself as the first to play an instrument with an Antiphonal division—how your mind would race with ideas of how to exploit it.

If we compare pipe organs that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Copernicus might have known, those that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Claude Monet heard, and those of the time of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, what milestones of development should we recognize? What innovations brought our instrument from the panpipe to Walt Disney Hall?

1. Ctesibius’s Hydraulis was the first huge leap, introducing mechanically produced wind pressure, mechanical action, and a keyboard for the first time, as far as we know.

2. Adding a second set of pipes foreshadowed the complexity of the modern organ. There would have been no stop action—two pipes played simultaneously with one key. I suppose they were pipes of similar character at different pitches, like today’s Principals eight-and-four.

3. In the early Renaissance, organ divisions called Blockwerk were developed.  These consisted of numerous voices, including the fractional pitches we know as mutations.

4. The stop action was the next obvious innovation, allowing the musician to select individual voices, or multiple voices in any combination.

5. The stop action would have led to the idea of contrasting voices. Instead of two or more similar voices, there would have been different timbres for each pitch, like our modern Principals and Flutes.

6. I’m not sure when the first reed stop was introduced or who made it, but I sure know that a wide variety of reeds were present in organs in the very early sixteenth century. The tones of all organ flue voices are produced by the splitting of a “sheet” of air that’s formed by the slot between the front edge of a pipe’s languid (horizontal piece at the joint between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator) and the lower lip, which is a portion of the circumference of the conical foot that’s made flat. The tone of a reed pipe is produced by a vibrating brass tongue, which creates a sharp contrast of timbre.

7. The addition of a second keyboard made it possible for a melody to be accompanied by a contrasting sound, or echo effects to be achieved without changing stops. I am not researching this as I write, but I guess this innovation dates from around 1475 or 1500.

8. The logical and magical extension of multiple keyboards was the invention of the pedal keyboard and development of the technique for mastering that most “organistic” of skills. Playing melodies or the individual lines of polyphonic music with one’s feet allowed organ music to develop deeper complexity. This level of sophistication was achieved late in the fifteenth century.

9. A wonderful example of a very early organ with two manuals and pedals was the first Große Orgel of the Marienkirche in Lübeck in Germany, the church later made famous in our history by organists Franz Tunder and his successor Dietrich Buxtehude (who married Bruhns’s daughter). That organ had 32 stops and was built between 1516 and 1518, just at the time of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and when Michelangelo was about 45 years old.

10. By the time Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663), Tunder (1614–1667), and Buxtehude (1637–1707) were composing their catalogues of organ music, the use of the pedalboard for independent voices was in full swing. More complex forms of composition, in those days especially the fugue, exploited the versatility of the organ. And of course, it was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) who brought pedal technique to a level of virtuosity that was the true forerunner of the near-maniacal feats of the feet of early twentieth-century virtuosi like Edwin Lemare and Lynnwood Farnam, that school of players who took organ playing to new heights in response to the innovations of Ernest Skinner in the same way that Widor and Dupré responded to the genius of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

11. The Expression Enclosure (Swell Box) was an invention that transformed organ playing. Its earliest forms were like the Brustwerk of Baroque and Neo-Baroque organs, with doors that the organist could open and close by reaching up from the bench, or (God forbid) standing on the pedal keys.

12. Pneumatic motors such as Barker Levers allowed huge organs with otherwise mechanical actions to be played with little effort.

13. The introduction of electric actions gave us the modern symphonic organ, the detached and remote console, and the possibility of dispersing various organ divisions throughout a large room.

14. I discussed combination actions earlier.

15. And more recently, solid-state control systems for pipe organs have given us multiple levels of memory, piston sequencers, transposers that are considered a crutch by some and a godsend by others, and playback sequencers that allow an organist to capture a performance as a digital file, then ask the organ to play it back, allowing critical listening to registration, balance, technique, and accuracy.

Today we anticipate wireless consoles, tap-screen music racks, and heaven knows what else. Just as Leonardo da Vinci could not possibly have imagined the automobile or the cellular telephone, Jan Sweelinck (1562–1621) would be astonished by our massive consoles and high-pressure reeds.

I wonder what the organ would be like today had Leonardo included it in his sketchbooks.

Notes

1. Nautical. While “anchors away” may seem the intuitive spelling, implying casting off dock lines or hoisting an anchor and setting a vessel “underway,” the correct spelling, aweigh, defines the moment when the anchor is lifted off the seabed and is “weighed” by the anchor line. Anchors Aweigh is the fight song of the United States Naval Academy. The text of the chorus:

Anchors Aweigh, my boys

Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to college joys

We sail at break of day, ’ay ’ay ’ay

Through our last night ashore

Drink to the foam

Until we meet once more

Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!

2. That Ingenious Business, Ray Brunner, The Pennsylvania German Society, 1991. In 1762, Benjamin Franklin referred to organbuilding in Eastern Pennsylvania as “that ingenious business.”

In the niche of time

The history of organ building and organ music is deep and rich, but the longer I toil in those vineyards, the more I realize how small it is in the wider world. The histories of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy fill libraries and geo-political history—especially the great procession of warfare that dominates every epoch of human existence, influencing the flow of the arts and academic thought. It may seem trite to acknowledge the relative insignificance of the pipe organ, but I notice that many professionals in the field focus on the interrelation of historic and geographic subdivisions of organ history, separate from the context of more general world history. 

I’ve often mentioned the juxtaposition of the fashionable Rococo courts of Western Europe, complete with minuets and powdered wigs, and the Minuteman of Lexington, Massachusetts, scrambling behind walls and fences, trying to outsmart the British Redcoats in the early days of the American Revolution. Paul Revere (1735–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) were all contemporaries. 

Most of us have all the libraries of the world at our fingertips—a few clicks or keystrokes can call up reliable information on any subject. You can do it while you’re sitting on an organ bench. Give a Google or two to consider the composer on your music rack today—what painters, philosophers, or writers might he have met? What war was coming up or going on? How might that have influenced his thinking? Or did he scram when things got rough so he could work in peace?

Ancient roots

The history of the pipe organ spans more than 2,250 years, starting with the hydraulis created by Ctesibius of Alexandria, Egypt, in about 256 BC. Sounds mighty old, but the hydraulis didn’t come out of thin air. Panpipes are still familiar to us today and predated the hydraulis by many centuries. With a dozen or more of individual flutes lashed together, the panpipe is a sort of pipe organ, minus the mechanical valve systems and the User Interface (keyboards) of “modern organs” built after 1250 AD. You can hear live performances on panpipes (for a modest donation) most days in New York’s Times Square Metro Station.

The Chinese sheng is a little like an ocarina with vertical pipes—an obvious precursor to the organ. It’s easy to find photos online. It is a common mainstay of Chinese classical music, with ancient roots. Archeologists working in the Hubei Province in 1978 unearthed a 2,400-year-old royal tomb that contained a sheng.

Most of us learned about the supposed oldest playable organ from E. Power Biggs, who featured the organ in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Valère, Sion, Switzerland, in his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. We read on the jacket notes of that vinyl LP that the organ was built in 1390, more than a century before Christopher Columbus ostensibly discovered the New World. It’s now generally thought to have been built in 1435, 17 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was active in Florence at that time—the dome of the cathedral there for which Brunelleschi is perhaps best known was constructed right at the time of his death. Cosimo de’ Medici, the great patriarch of the fabled Florentine banking family, inherited his fortune in 1429. Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who told us that the sun is the center of the universe, wasn’t born until 1473.¹ It’s fun to note that Cosimo, Brunelleschi, and the builder of the organ at Sion lived in a world where it was believed that Earth was the center of the universe.² As a sailor, I wonder how Christopher Columbus navigated?

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621)

Sweelinck was born and died in Amsterdam. He assumed the position of organist at that city’s Oude Kerk in 1577 at the age of fifteen and worked there the rest of his life. His employment was unusual for his day in that playing the organ was his sole responsibility. That left him with plenty of time to teach, and his studio included such luminaries as Praetorius, Scheidemann, and Samuel Scheidt. So while he was born in the last years of the broadly defined Renaissance, his music and teaching formed a bridge between, let’s say, Palestrina and Buxtehude—a mighty tall order.³

One of Sweelinck’s greatest hits is Balletto del Granduca, a set of variations on a simple theme. On my desk right now is the “sheet music” edition I bought as a teenager ($1.00), Associated Music Publishers, edited by E. Power Biggs. (Wasn’t he a great educator?)

Painters Rubens and Caravaggio were Sweelinck’s contemporaries, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was completed a few years after his death. Heliocentrism (the Sun as the center of the universe) was confirmed by astronomer Johannes Kepler in his publication Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596. The Edict of Nantes was signed by King Henry IV of France in 1598, recognizing the basic rights of Protestants (Huguenots) in predominantly Roman Catholic France, including the right to freely practice their religion. Henry IV was murdered in 1610 by the radical Catholic François Ravaillac, and succeeded by his son, Louis XIII. Coincidentally, the King James Bible was published in 1611.

Sweelinck was a Calvinist, a doctrine governed by the regulative principle, which limited worship to the teachings of the New Testament. Calvin notwithstanding, Sweelinck’s creativity was encouraged by the Consistory of Dordrecht of 1598, in which organists were instructed to play variations on Genevan Psalm tunes in an effort to help the people learn them.

On closer shores, British refugees established the Colony of Virginia in 1607, French refugees established the city of Quebec in 1608, and Dutch refugees founded New York in 1612. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, two years before Sweelinck’s death.

Given that much of the migration of Europeans toward the “New World” was inspired by religious persecution, we read that Sweelinck lived in an era of dramatic international religious tension and change. It’s not much of a stretch to compare those tensions around the year 1600 with today’s religious persecution, division, and fundamentalism.

(I’ll let you do Bach!)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)

Beethoven (1770–1827) was 29 when Mendelssohn was born, and Mendelssohn was 24 when Brahms (1833–97) was born.⁴ Felix Mendelssohn was as precocious as musicians get. He wrote 12 string symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. His three piano quartets were written between 1822 and 1825 (you do the math!)—these were his first published works. I’ve long counted his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream among my favorite pieces. Its brilliant passagework, soaring melodies, sumptuous orchestration, and driving rhythms are a tour de force for modern orchestras and ferociously challenging to organists playing it in transcription. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a mature work, but it’s the product of a 17 year old. What were you doing when you were 17?

The 1820s was a decade of violent uprisings all over Europe. Italians revolted against King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, resulting in the formation of a constitutional monarchy. A colonel in the Spanish army assembled a mutiny against King Ferdinand VII, who capitulated to their demands for a liberal constitution. France answered Ferdinand’s plea for assistance by sending 100,000 soldiers, quelling the uprising, and restoring the absolute monarchy. There were revolutions in Portugal and Brazil, and in a brutal revolutionary war, Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire. The death of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1821 coincided with Mendelssohn’s prolific adolescence. In the United States in 1825, John Quincy Adams was president, the Erie Canal was opened, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, passed away.

One of Mendelssohn’s greatest hits is his Violin Concerto, completed and premiered in 1845, four years before his death. The year 1845 was a busy one around the world. Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven, Baylor University and the United States Naval Academy were founded, James Polk succeeded John Tyler as President of the United States, and the potato blight began in Ireland. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an earth-shaking work that represented several giant steps in the march toward the American Civil War.

There were many “firsts” that year: a “screw-powered” steamship crossed the Atlantic, anesthesia was used to ease childbirth, the New York Herald mentioned baseball, and the rubber band was invented in Great Britain. It has never occurred to me to associate Felix Mendelssohn with baseball, anesthesia, or rubber bands. Do you suppose Mendelssohn ever rolled up a manuscript with a rubber band?

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Widor is probably forever to be remembered by legions of organists and brides for one piece of music. But seventy-five measures of sixteenth notes in 4/2 time, followed by three of big whole-note chords in F major is a pittance when compared to the rest of his massive output of music. He wrote tons of orchestral music including symphonies, works for orchestra with organ, piano, violin, cello, harp, chorus, and various huge combinations. There are six duos for piano and harmonium, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and sonatas for violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet. There are reams of piano music, songs, and choral music, even music for the stage. But all we really know are ten organ symphonies along with a half-dozen incidental pieces for organ. And most of us only play one of his pieces. Oh yes, there’s also a doozy in G minor, but it’s a lot harder.

Widor was one of the most important teachers of his generation, succeeding César Franck as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890, later leaving that post to become professor of composition. His students included Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Schweitzer.

Widor studied in Brussels with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (lots of us play Lemmens’s Fanfare). When he finished those studies in 1868 at the age of 24, he moved to Paris where he was appointed assistant to Camille Saint-Säens at Église de la Madeleine. And in 1870, he was appointed “provisional” organist at Ste-Sulpice, the most prestigious post in France and home to the fantastic Cavaillé-Coll organ that is revered, cherished, and studied by generations of organists and organbuilders around the world. His primary advocate for that envied position was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll himself, who had been disappointed by the flippancy of the music of Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–69), the previous organist who had presided over the first years of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece. It’s rumored that Cavaillé-Coll’s agitation contributed to Lefébure-Wély’s early death. (You gotta watch out for those organbuilders!)

Daniel Roth, the current organist at Ste-Sulpice,⁵ visited New York City to play a recital at Church of the Resurrection, where I, with the Organ Clearing House, had installed a renovated and relocated 1916 Casavant organ. It was an exciting moment for us to have such a master player perform on “our” instrument, but one of the most interesting moments came not at the organ console, but walking the sidewalks of Park Avenue, when Monsieur Roth told me some of the back story surrounding Widor’s appointment in 1870.

That’s the year that the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had used brilliant and nefarious schemes to provoke a French attack on Prussia. The French Parliament declared war on the German Kingdom of Prussia on July 16, 1870, the Germans were armed and in position, and quickly invaded northeastern France. Paris fell to Prussian forces in January of 1871. In May of 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany what is now Alsace-Lorraine, and the balance of power in Europe was upset. France was determined to reclaim lost territory, Britain was nervous about the change of balance in power, and the seeds were sown for World War I.

In that harsh political climate, patriotic (and perhaps, bigoted) Frenchmen considered Belgium as German,⁶ and Widor’s detractors whispered in the ears of the priests that Widor “plays like a German.” Cavaillé-Coll prevailed, and Widor was appointed. But his appointment was never made formal. He served Ste-Sulpice as provisional organist for 64 years. Widor’s student Marcel Dupré succeeded him, and served until 1971—more than a hundred years after Widor’s appointment.⁷

Claude Monet (1840–1926) completed some of his early works while living in Paris between 1865 and 1870, when Camille Doncieux was his model for The Woman in the Green Dress, Woman in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine. Camille gave birth to their son in 1867, and they were married on June 28, 1870, less than three weeks before the start of the Franco-Prussian War. As the war started, Monet fled to England with his new wife and child, where he studied the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. How’s that for war influencing the arts?

Édouard Manet, James Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir were contemporaries of Widor. Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir were all active in Paris when Widor was organist at Ste-Sulpice. I wonder if they met? What would they have talked about?

And that organ?

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Ste-Sulpice was built in 1862, incorporating some pipes from the previous (1781) Clicquot organ. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was one of the largest organs in the world. (An additional voice was added when Widor retired.) It included pneumatic actions to assist the vast mechanical systems, a complex wind system with multiple wind pressures (all in the days of hand-pumping), a state-of-the-art whiz-bang console with arrays of mechanical registration devices, and a huge palette of tonal innovations. 

Europe had not cornered the market on war in those days. The American Civil War was in full swing when Cavaillé-Coll completed that organ. In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. Do you suppose Widor ever read Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government, Slavery in Massachusetts, or Walden? And who will be the first to include Battle Hymn of the Republic on their recording at Ste-Sulpice?

§

Maybe Felix Mendelssohn was aware of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, but it would be a reach to trace how that machine influenced Mendelssohn’s music (though there are dissertations out there that seem just as obscure). Widor had to have noticed the Prussian occupation of Paris as he was starting his epic tenure at Ste-Sulpice. He must have had terrifying walks to church past Prussian soldiers brandishing weapons. Such a sight would have influenced my improvisations. And suppose he had happened to meet Degas or Renoir at a reception. Would he have gone to the studio for coffee the next day and discussed the confluence of pictorial art and music?

In its collective history, the organ is an exquisite example of the highest of human achievements. It combines an array of crafts, it functions thanks to scientific principles, and it evokes the full range of human emotions. But it’s not a be-all or end-all. Its place in our society is the result of complex evolution, and given the complexity of today’s world and the state of today’s church, we’re passing through a time that has been less than a Golden Age.

But the range of the instrument, the breadth of its history, and the sheer power of its voice continue to keep it in the forefront. However obscure and arcane, its nearly unique status as a vehicle for improvisation equips it perfectly as an instrument of the future. What will future generations deduce from today’s organ music when they look back and consider the wide world in which we live today?

And here’s a hint: your recital audience loves to hear this stuff. Of course we’re interested in the intricacies of sonata form, or the structure of a fugue (“listen for the entrances”), but the people might get more out of connecting your organ world with their history world, their literature world, their art world. It took me about seven hours to write this piece, including the deep research. It’s not a big effort, and it adds a lot. The buzz phrase in the real estate world is “location, location, location.” How about “relevance, relevance, relevance?” ν

Notes

1. A general note: In this essay, I’m tossing about lots of supposedly specific facts. As usual, I’m sitting at my desk with nothing but a laptop, and I’m gathering data from quick Google searches. Much of the data comes from Wikipedia, which we suppose is generally accurate, but cannot be relied on as absolute. I am, therefore, not citing each specific reference, and offer the caveat that any factual errors are unintentional. They are offered to provide general historical context, and discrepancies of a year or two are inconsequential for this purpose.

2. There may well be some hangers-on who still believe that the sun revolves around the earth!

3. Similarly, Haydn was eighteen years old when J. S. Bach died, just as the Baroque era was ending. 

4. I like telling people that my great-grandmother, Ruth Cheney, was seven years old when Brahms died, and my sons were present at her funeral in 1994. On her hundredth birthday she increased from one cigarette a day to two! I treasure her piano, an 1872 rosewood Steinway, passed through our family to me as the only musician in my generation.

5. Daniel Roth has just been named International Performer of the Year by the New York City AGO chapter.

6. Today, Belgium has three official languages: French, German, and Dutch.

7. It’s poignant to remember that in his memoir, Dupré wrote of the agonies of World War II. He and his wife stayed at their home in Meudon during the Nazi occupation. German officers visited their home, planning to install guns on the roof, which commanded a view of Paris. Somehow the presence of the big pipe organ in the Salle d’orgue helped them decide not to. Later, their home was badly damaged by a German bomb. For the first two weeks of the German occupation, with no other transportation available, the Duprés (then in their fifties) walked the several miles to Ste-Sulpice.

In perfect harmony

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

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

How green is green?

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

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

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

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

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take one for the team.

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

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

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

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

Tools of the trade

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

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

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

Make it up as you go along.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a frill.

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

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

Color my world

Twenty years ago I was serving a New England Congregational church as music director, bringing the glories of the English cathedrals to the land of the Puritans. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. The moderator of the parish council was a curmudgeonly attorney who lived in an attractive house sited prominently on a corner lot along my route to the church. The Sunday after contractors finished painting his house, I teased that he had his house painted pink. He responded in his usual gruff way, “It’s Chippendale Rose.” Ha! My point. It was pink.

When placing organs in church buildings, we often leaf through the “swatch fans” provided by paint companies, and I always wonder who invents the names of paint colors. The website of the paint company Pratt & Lambert shows a cozy-looking room featuring the colors Pearl Tint, Toasted Wheat, Dusk Sky, and Gloaming. The P&L color experts deem this to be a winning combination. The first three names give clues as what the colors might be, but “gloaming?” What’s gloaming? Its root, glo-m, is an Old English word of Germanic origin that means “twilight,” and is related to “glow.” So gloaming refers to the glow of twilight. I would describe the color in the photo as a sort of dark ecru—“twilight” and “glow” mean something else to me than dark ecru.

The printer on my desk spoke to me the other day. A cute little chime rang and the screen informed me that I needed to replace the cyan cartridge. Cyan? It’s a sort of light blue. My printer has three color cartridges: cyan, magenta, and yellow. I think of primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, so I googled to learn that there are now at least three basic systems of blending colors, each based on three “primary” colors.  

The standard for photography, television, and video screens is an “additive” system that uses red, green, and blue. The standard for printing is a “subtractive” system that uses cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Combine those three colors and you get black.) The website I visited says artists still prefer the additive system that uses red, yellow, and blue.¹ That’s a relief! Seems to me that the world of art would be a different place if Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso had cyan, magenta, and yellow on their palettes as primary colors.

Colors in music

I’m a devoted fan of Captain John Aubrey, the principal character in Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In the first scene of the first novel, Jack meets Stephen Maturin (a physician, drug addict, and elite member of Naval Intelligence) at a concert by a string quartet. They are as different as two men can be, but after their introductory dispute they become firm and fast friends, and they share a love for music. Jack plays the violin (his “on land” violin is a Guarneri), Stephen plays the cello, and through the twenty-year span of the war, they spend thousands of evenings playing together in the captain’s cabin while enjoying their customary toasted cheese and Marsala.

In the second novel, Jack is promoted from the rank of Master and Commander (remember the Russell Crowe movie?) to Post Captain. That night, in his happiness, he dreamed about a painting owned by his old nanny, now wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man who had promoted him: 

Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!²

When I first read that passage I immediately compared it to playing the organ. We accept the traditional system of notes, harmonies, and tuning as common with all other instruments, but the organ is unique because of its range of color. A pianist or flautist can conjure up contrasting tone colors by varying the physical forces involved in playing their instruments, but if you sit at an organ console and compare a Cromorne to a Diapason, a Trombone to a Rohrflute, or an Open Wood to a Tierce, you realize that the organ is a collection of instruments that contrast and complement each other, and like the painter’s palette of colors, the organ’s drawknobs allow the musician to blend a finite number of basic timbres into a seemingly infinite number of color combinations.  

Express yourself in color

I’ve heard that some symphony conductors consider the organ to be the least expressive musical instrument because the basic unit of musical tone—one organ pipe playing one note—cannot be altered in volume or timbre. That fact is true enough, but it’s like saying yellow is a boring color because all it can do is be yellow. Pratt & Lambert shows me Old Linen, Buttery, Golden Glimmer, Bay Rum, and Colorado Sand as complementary shades of yellow, and I haven’t touched the blues, reds, or greens. It’s ridiculous and ignorant to say that a pipe organ is not expressive.

Let’s consider an eight-foot flute stop, a simple enough subset of organ tone. But is it a Flauto Dolce, Gedeckt, Melodia, Harmonic Flute, Rohrflute, Spitzflute, Koppelflute, Hohlflute, or Flûte Triangulaire? Nine different flute stops, each with a unique tone color, and each comprising pipes of different shape and construction. Could you discern between them in a hearing test? Could you name each one if shown photographs of the various pipes? Or do you just draw an eight-foot flute because you always use an eight-foot flute in this piece as if you were painting a wall yellow instead of Golden Glimmer?

Pratt & Lambert says:

The color of the sun, yellow is associated with laughter, happiness and good times. It can cause the brain to release more serotonin, which makes people feel optimistic. It even has the power to speedup [sic} metabolism and drive creativity. However, yellow can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to a cool palette of blues or grays. It can also work well with orange, red, olive green or brown.³

It would be easy to paraphrase this when discussing organ stops:

A Cornet can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to an Oboe, Cromorne, or Trompette. It can also work well with Principals at eight and four-foot.

Is your imagination strong enough to find ways to use that Cornet that will make people feel optimistic?

Clashing or harmony?

You and your partner are getting dressed for a party. She comes out of the bathroom, takes one look, and says, “You’re not wearing that, are you?” We all think we know when colors clash, but while there are some basic rules, you have to judge each comparison separately. Otherwise, it would be impossible for two shades of red to clash. I have a pairing of red shirt and red tie that I think looks great, but there are also a couple doozies of possible combinations of red hanging in my closet that Wendy would question, rightly.

When we register a piece of music on a particular organ, we have to judge each combination separately. It’s not safe to assume that because it sounded good on one organ, that it will also sound good on another.

In his wonderfully researched book, The Language of the Classical French Organ (Yale University Press, 1969), Fenner Douglass presents detailed information about the various “standard” registrations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French organ music. He opens Chapter 5 (Registration in the Classical Period) by citing the prefaces to various famous “books” of organ music, the Livres d’orgue of Corrette, Nivers, Lebègue, Boyvin, and many others. He boils all that data down into charts that compare the registrations for Le Grand Jeu, Fugue, Le Duo, etc. by all these composers. It’s terrific material for informing our playing today, but does it have any real meaning if we don’t hear those registrations on the specific organs? One chart shows that in 1676, Nicolas Lebègue uses Grand Jeu de Tierce for the left hand of Le Duo, while Dom Bedos suggests sixteen-foot foundations. Who is right? And what organs were they using?

Assuming the Möller organ in your church has all the correct names and pitches on the knobs as cited by Fenner Douglass, does the historically correctly drawn Grand Plein Jeu sound anything like what Lebègue was hearing? Simply and definitively, no. Douglass has given us a great gift by collecting this information, but you still need to use your ears.

Shutter bugs

Besides choices of colors, many modern organs have an additional dimension of expression. Enclosing a group of stops, usually all the stops of one keyboard, in a tightly and heavily constructed “box” with movable shutters on one or more of the faces, allows the organist to simulate control over the volume of a single organ pipe. This does not literally answer the conductor’s ignorant criticism because the pipe is still only speaking one pitch at one timbre at one volume level.
But it increases the organist’s palette of
colors exponentially.

When I was a teenager, a mentor listening to my preparations for a recital commented that if everyone used the Swell Pedal like I was, they’d have called it a crush. I was closing the box at the end of a phrase, and popping it open before starting the next phrase, using only half of the device’s possibilities—but I was still too green to realize that the expression is about more than volume. It’s also an important tool for the creation and manipulation of tone color.  

When two or more manuals are coupled together, moving the expression pedals changes the emphasis from one tone color to another, taking the organ’s color spectrum from the finite number of possible combinations of stops to the infinite. Here’s a simple example. You might play the opening verse of a hymn on Great Principals with a Swell Trumpet coupled in, saving the more powerful Great Trumpet for later. Add to that registration the dimension of starting the verse with the Swell Box closed, and open it gradually as the choir comes down the aisle. The sound of the Trumpet is subtle at first, and blooms into being the principal ingredient of the aggregate color.  

Think of an “Old Master” painting. When Meindert Hobbema takes your eyes from the green of a tree canopy to the blue of the sky, he takes you through an infinite spectrum of colors. Compare that to the results of a color-by-number kit in which the boundary between one color and another is defined by a stark black line. And think of the artist making a drawing with charcoal or pastel, using her fingers to smudge the lines to create shading. Smudge is no better a description for the use of the expression pedals than crush, but the creative colorist at the organ can use the expression pedals to enhance the transitions from one color to another. That’s painting with sound, like Captain Aubrey’s colorful violin strings.

Stop, look, and listen

In these pages, I’ve often mentioned formulaic organ registration. You play the opening of a baroque Prelude and Fugue on Organo Pleno—Principals eight, four, and two, plus Mixture. You’ve always done it that way. Fair enough. That implies that the opening of Bach’s B-Minor Prelude (a high and screechy B) should be registered the same as his Dorian Toccata (middle of the keyboard canonic counterpoint). We are free to choose registrations that reflect the response of the specific instrument playing the specific notes in the specific acoustic. 

I think of my own performances of Bach’s B-Minor, how in the boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop episode of the fugue I always reduced the registration to flutes at eight and two. Always.

As I think about the opening of that great piece, I wince at the high B. What about starting on a smaller registration (that hymn registration I described earlier?) so the opening high B is less jarring. And here’s a radical thought. I know organs that simply don’t have stops that can be combined to give an impressive and dignified sound on that high B, so maybe I won’t play that piece on one of those organs—the ultimate registration discretion. There are other pieces.

Have you ever heard an organist play the opening pedal solo of Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne on anything other than pretty-much full organ, including reeds and mixtures, and manuals coupled to the pedals? Me neither. Why doesn’t someone play it on a four-foot flute? One of my favorite organ tones is a good clear Koppelflute, especially in a spacious acoustic. Would the Buxtehude cops storm into the church if I played that opening pedal solo on a four-foot Koppelflute? Would the first-time listener be disappointed?

If you, as an educated and experienced organist, went to an organ recital and the performer had the nerve to do that, would you be offended or disappointed? Are you just as happy to hear the same piece played with the same registration by every organist on every organ? Or are you excited when someone offers a fresh approach to an old warhorse? If we’re not listening as we register pieces, why should we expect the audience to listen?

Once when a colleague was demonstrating the organ in his church to me, he drew a huge combination of stops and told me that was his typical registration for postludes. Yikes. Easter I? Advent I? Pentecost XVIII? Bach? Widor? Stanley?

You go to a restaurant and order a chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. Delicious. Next week you go a different restaurant and order chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. And the next week, and the next. Different chef, different cooking temperature, different weather, but same ingredients. Can we think of a different way to cook a chicken breast?

How many different colors can you paint a front door and still be correct?

If we say Swell instead of crush, why do we call them stops? That seems limiting. Why don’t we start calling them Go’s? No matter how many of you agree with me, we’re probably stuck with stops. It would sound ridiculous for a politician to say, “We’re pulling out all the go’s.” But in your mind’s eye—and ear—think of them as opportunities, possibilities, or ingredients. If you’re listening when you draw stops, there aren’t many wrong answers. You’ll know if the tie clashes with the shirt. Have a blast. Put it on my tab. But hold the capers. They’re not my favorite.

Notes

1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/pricol2.html

2. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain. William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, London, 1972, page 421.

3. http://www.prattandlambert.com/color-and-inspiration/learn-about-color/…

User interface

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

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

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

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

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

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

A work in progress

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

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

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

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

Consoles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gizmos and gadgets

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

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

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

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

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

White with blue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pitter-patter of little feet

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

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

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

I can name that tune in three colors!