In the wind. . . .

A Pokémon world

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

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

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

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

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

Starry eyes

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

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

The man from Samos

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

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

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

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

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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

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

Blow, ye winds . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

A time and a place

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

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

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

Notes

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

Follow the money

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

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

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

Don’t take it for granted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A crazy business

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

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

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

One brick at a time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy a pipe.

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

Care for the money.

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

People, look east. 

The time is near . . .

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

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

Of the crowning of the year . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Make your house fair as you are able . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trim the hearth and set

the table . . .

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

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

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

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

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

People, look east and 

sing today . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Love the Guest is on the way.

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Who you gonna call?

When I was an organ major at Oberlin in the mid-1970s, I had a part-time job working for Jan Leek, a first-generation Hollander who came to the United States to work for Walter Holtkamp and wound up as Oberlin’s organ and harpsichord technician. Traveling around the Ohio and Pennsylvania countryside with Jan making organ service calls, I learned to tune and learned the strengths and weaknesses of action systems of many different organbuilders. I moved back to Boston in 1984 with my wife and two young sons to join the workshop of Angerstein & Associates, where along with larger projects including the construction of new organs, I made hundreds of service calls. That workshop closed in 1987 when Daniel Angerstein was appointed tonal director for M. P. Möller, and I entered a decade during which I cared for as many as 125 organs each year as the Bishop Organ Company.

I’ve always been an advocate for diligent organ maintenance, but ironically, I’ve noticed in my work with the Organ Clearing House that century-old instruments that have never been maintained are sometimes the most valuable. The pipes are straight and true, the original voicing is intact, and there’s not a trace of duct tape anywhere. You remove a dense layer of grime (mostly carried out of the organ on your clothes) to reveal a pristine instrument. You might take that as an argument not to maintain an organ, but the truth is that I’ve found most of those organs in remote humble churches, where in many cases they haven’t been played for decades.

The challenge for the conscientious organ technician is not to leave a mark. If your tuning techniques damage pipes, you’re not doing it right. You should not leave scrape marks on the resonators with your tuning tools, and you shouldn’t tear open the slots of reed pipes. Cone-tuned pipes should stay cylindrical with their solder seams unviolated. Wiring harnesses should be neat and orderly, with no loopy add-ons. Floors and walkboards should be vacuumed and blower rooms should be kept clean.

There are legitimate excuses for fast-and-dirty repairs during service calls, especially if you’re correcting a nasty problem just before an important musical event. But if you do that, you owe it to the client to make it nice when you return.¹ And, when you do make a fast-and-dirty repair, you should adjust your toolkit to accommodate the next one. Did you use a scrap from a Sunday bulletin to refit the stopper of a Gedeckt pipe? Put some leather in your toolbox when you get home.

Many of the churches where I’ve maintained organs are now closed. Many others have diminished their programs and aren’t “doing music” anymore. Some tell me that they can’t find an organist, which is often because they’re not offering a proper salary, and some have “gone clappy.” In this climate, I think it’s increasingly important for organ technicians to be ready to help churches care properly and economically for their pipe organs.

Some churches charge their organists with curatorial responsibilities, purposely placing the care of the organ in the musician’s job description. Others do not, and it’s often a struggle to get boards and committees to grasp the concept of responsible care of their organs. It’s also important to note that while most churches once had full-time sextons or custodians, that position is often eliminated as budgets are cut. Lots of church buildings, especially larger ones, have sophisticated engineering plants that include HVAC, elevators, alarm systems, and sump pumps. The old-time church sexton knew to keep an eye on all that, and to be sure they were serviced and evaluated regularly. Hiring an outside vendor to clean the building does not replace the custodian. I think it makes sense for such a church to engage a mechanical engineer as consultant to visit the building a few times each year checking on machinery, and have volunteers clean the building.

A pipe organ is a machine like none other, a combination of liturgical art and industrial product. A layman might look inside an organ chamber and see a machine, but the musician sits on the bench facing a musical instrument. If you think that the governing bodies of your church don’t fully appreciate the value of their organ, I offer a few thoughts you might use to raise awareness.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

It’s an old saw, but besides your personal hygiene, there’s likely nowhere in your life where it rings truer than in your pipe organ. After fire, flood, and vandalism, dirt is the worst enemy of the pipe organ. An organ technician knows that a fleck of dust getting trapped on the armature of a chest magnet or the surface of a pallet is enough to cause a cipher. The leg of a spider will wreck the speech of a trumpet pipe, most likely one of the first five notes of the D-major scale, ready to spoil almost every wedding voluntary.

But where did that dirt come from? When building windchests, windlines, bellows, and wind regulators, the organbuilder tries hard to ensure that there’s no sawdust left inside. I have an air compressor and powerful vacuum cleaner permanently mounted by my workbench so I hardly have to take a step to clean the interior of a project I’m finishing.

Assuming that the organbuilder delivered a clean organ, the first obvious place for an organ to pick up dirt is in the blower room. Many organ blowers are located in remote basement rooms, and in many cases, there’s no one changing the light bulbs in basement corridors, and there’s no one in the building who knows what that thing is. We routinely find blower rooms chock full of detritus—remnants of Christmas pageants, church fairs, flea markets, and youth group car washes. Organ blowers can have electric motors of five horsepower or more, and I often see 90 or 100-year-old motors that throw impressive displays of sparks when they start up. If the ventilation is obstructed, a fire hazard is created. That sign from the 1972 church fair isn’t that important. Throw it away.

To illustrate the importance of cleanliness, I share our protocol for cleaning a blower room:

• Seal the blower intake with plastic and tape.

• Close the circuit breaker that provides power to the blower so it can’t be started accidentally.

• Vacuum, sweep, wash walls, ceiling, floor, blower housing, wind regulators, and ductwork.

• Leave the room undisturbed for 48 hours to allow dust to settle before opening and starting the blower.

Likewise, if a church fails to cover and protect their organ while the floor of the nave is sanded and refinished, they can expect serious trouble in the future.

Identification

As organist, you might be the only person in the church who can identify the areas occupied by the organ. Designate organ areas as “off limits,” with access limited to the organ technician. Nothing good will happen if the organ chamber is used for storage of old hymnals or folding chairs. Nothing good will happen if teenagers find their way inside to create a secret hidey-hole.² Nothing good will happen if the altar guild puts a vase full of water on the organ console, and, by the way, nothing good will happen if you put your coffee cup there.

The organ’s tuning will almost certainly be disrupted if someone goes into the chamber out of curiosity. Most things inside pipe organs that are not steps lack the “no step” marking, like the touchy areas on an aircraft wing have.

Insurance

Maybe that 1927 Skinner organ in your church (lucky you) cost $9,500 to build. In the early 1970s, a new two-manual Fisk organ cost less than $40,000. I’m frequently called as consultant when a church is making a claim for damage to their organ, working either for the church or the insurance company, and I’ve been in plenty of meetings where bad news about the difference between loss and coverage is announced. It’s both possible and wise to have the replacement value of an organ assessed every five or ten years, with that value named on the church’s insurance policy.

If the organ at your church sustains $250,000 of damage because of a roof leak, and the replacement value of the organ is not specifically listed on the church’s insurance policy, a lot of discussion is likely to lead to a disappointment.

What makes good maintenance?

It’s not realistic to make a sweeping statement about how much it should cost to maintain an organ. Some instruments require weekly, even daily attention, especially if they’re large and complex, in deteriorating condition, and in use in sophisticated music programs. Some instruments require almost no maintenance. A newer organ of modest size with cone-tuning could go five years or more without needing attention.

I suggest that every organ should be visited by a professional organ technician at least once a year, even if no tuning is needed, even if every note plays perfectly, even if all the indicators and accessories are working. The lubrication of the blower should be checked, and the interior of the instrument should be inspected to guard against that one pipe in the Pedal Trombone that has started to keel over. If it’s not caught before it falls, it will take the pedal flue pipes with it. A four-hour annual visit would prevent that.

It’s usual for an organ to be serviced twice a year. While it’s traditional for those service visits to be before Easter and Christmas, at least where I live in the temperate Northeast, Christmas and Easter can both be winter holidays, so it makes more sense to tune for cold weather and hot weather, or for heat on, heat off.

Most organs do not need to be thoroughly tuned during every visit. In fact, starting over with a new “A” and fresh temperament every time can be counterproductive, unless it’s a very small organ. While the stability of tuning varies from organ to organ, most instruments hold their basic tuning well. I generally start a tuning by checking the pitch stops in octaves from the console, writing down a few that need tuning, and check the organ stop-by-stop for inaccuracies. I list a couple dozen notes that need tuning and a half-dozen stops that don’t need anything, and I list which reed notes (or stops) need to be tuned. In that way, I can build on the stability of tuning established over years, keeping the broad picture of tuning clear and concise.

Regular organ maintenance should include cleaning keyboards, vacuuming under pedalboards (the tuner keeps the pencils), checking blower lubrication, and noting larger things that will need attention in the future. Tuners, if you see cracks in a leather gusset on a wind regulator, make a note with your invoice that it will need to be releathered within several years. Your client doesn’t want to hear bad news, but they don’t want a sudden failure and emergency expense either.

When you should call

The better you know your organ, the easier to judge. I once received a panicky call from an organist saying the entire organ had gone haywire. He was abusive over the phone, and demanded that I come right away. I dropped everything and made the 90-minute drive to the church. Haughtily, he demonstrated the cause of his concern. It took me just a few seconds to isolate one pipe in the Pedal Clarion. If he had bothered to look, he could have played without the Clarion for weeks, but I couldn’t tell him that, and I’ve carried the memory of that unpleasant encounter for more than 30 years.

You should call your tuner/technician when:

• You hear a big bang from inside the organ. (Once it was a raccoon tripping a Havahart trap!)

• You hear unusual wind noise. (In some organs, a big air leak like a blown reservoir can lead to the blower overheating.) 

• You hear unusual mechanical noise, grinding, thumping, squeaking, etc.

• You find paint chips in organ areas. (Is the ceiling falling in?)

• The organ blower has been left on accidentally for a long time. It’s a long time for a blower to run between Sundays.

• And obviously, when something important doesn’t work.

When you should not call

Sudden changes in climate often cause trouble with the operation of a pipe organ. Several days of heavy rain will raise the humidity inside a building so Swell shutters squeak and stick, keyboards get clammy and gummy, and the console rolltop gets stuck. If you can manage, simply let the organ be for several days. When conditions return to normal, chances are that things will start working again. Likewise, excessive dryness can cause trouble.

A couple years ago, I was rear-ended in heavy traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County, just north of New York City. I drive a full-size SUV and have a heavy-duty trailer hitch so while the Mercedes that hit me left a rainbow of fluids on the road under its crumpled radiator, the only damage to my car was that the back-up camera stopped working. As I’ve driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one, I didn’t bother to get it fixed, and I’m still perfectly happy driving the car.

If there’s a dead note in the middle octave of the Swell to Great coupler, call me and I’ll fix it. It’s important to the normal use of the organ. If there’s a dead note in the top octave of the Swell to Choir 4′ coupler, and it’s spoiling a melody in a certain piece you’re playing, choose a different registration, or choose a different piece. One good way to head your church toward giving up on the pipe organ is to spend a lot of money on single repairs that don’t matter much to the music. Remember that your church pays me the same for mileage and travel time whether I’m doing a full service call with dozens of little repairs, or making a special trip for a single issue. A cipher is a bigger issue than a dead note.

It’s important to the long life of an organ not to “overtune.” Believe it or not, many churches in northern climes do not have air-conditioning, and it’s usual for temperatures to climb into the 90s inside the organ during the summer. If an organ was built, voiced, and tuned for A=440 at 70°, you’ll ruin the reeds—really ruin them—if you try to tune them to the Principals at 90°. It doesn’t make sense to wreck an organ’s reeds for one wedding, no matter who is the bride.

One of the most difficult tuning assignments I’ve had was at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, in the early 1990s when Brian Jones, Ross Wood, and the Trinity Choir were making their spectacular and ever popular recording Candlelight Carols. It was surreal to sit in the pews in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweltering in mid-July heat, listening to David Willcocks’s fanfare and descant for O come, all ye faithful. Everyone wanted the organ to be in perfect tune, but it was my job to be sure that the organ’s spectacular antique Skinner reeds would live to see another real Christmas. More than 200,000 copies of that recording have been sold, so lots of you have a record of that tuning!

§

Remember what I said about those dead notes that are a nuisance but not critical to the use of the instrument? The most important part of the organist’s role in organ maintenance is keeping a list. Maintain a notebook on the console, and write down what you notice. You might hear a cipher in the middle of a hymn that goes away. If you can pay attention enough to identify anything about it (what division, what stop, what pitch), write it down. If you think of a question, write it down. Maybe you noticed a tuning problem during a hymn. Write down the hymn number and what piston you were using. I’ll play the hymn and find the problem.

When I make repairs, I can check things off your list, write comments about the cause, make suggestions for future repairs or adjustments, and invite you for coffee the next time. The console notebook is the most important tool for maintaining an organ.

Notes

1. As I write, I’m thinking of the three clients where I owe follow-up. You know who you are.

2. I once found a little love nest inside an organ, complete with cushions, blankets, candles, and burnt matches. What could happen?

How to run a railroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real estate rich

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

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

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

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

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

For the sake of the little ones

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

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

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

Turf wars

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

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

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

Row with the oars you have

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

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

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

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

Church bullies

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole package

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

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

On the road again . . .

What do you get when you play a country song backwards?

—You get your dog back, you get your truck back, you get your wife back . . .

I worked in the shop of Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 with an assortment of coworkers. There was a minister from an obscure sect who spent lunch and coffee breaks reading the King James Bible, a motorcycle mechanic who had run the service department of a Honda dealership, a carpenter who had worked on large construction projects, two conservatory organ major graduates, Dan Angerstein, and his sister, Linda, both educated and cultured people.

There were frequent discussions about what would play on the radio. I preferred solid classical music, a couple co-workers were rock-n-roll devotees, and the minister had cassettes of treacly inspirational music. Country-Western music was a frequent compromise. Jack, the motorcycle guy, was exceptionally quick witted. Hardly a day passed without some hilarious quip floating across from his workstation, and I was deep in the thrall of puns, a habit that my family still shouts about, but I believe secretly envies.¹ We had a blast making up new lyrics to songs like All the Girls I’ve Loved Before (Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesia), Better Keep Your Hands Off My Potential New Boyfriend (Dolly Parton), and Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life (Bobby Bare). Oh boy, those were the days.

Willie Nelson provided another favorite: “On the road again. Just can’t wait to get on the road again. The life I love is making music with my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again.” That one really resonated for me, because since my first days in an organ shop in the summer of 1975, I’ve loved the part of organ building that takes you out of town, loading an organ into trucks and setting off for adventure, camaraderie, mishaps, and triumphs.  

There was the delivery of an organ to the chapel of an exclusive island summer community that required three trips on the little ferry to transport the organ across the water.

There was the installation in the chapel of Salvation Army headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, where the client was providing meals for us. Breakfast and lunch in the headquarters’ dining room with the chapter officers, served by ex-con chef Vinnie were fine, but dinner in the line at the Men’s Service Center was a lot more colorful.

There was the trip from Oberlin, Ohio, to Oakland, California, to deliver a new harpsichord, where the client’s surgeon husband lectured us about smoking and brought home a smoker’s lung in a glass jar to make his point.²

I’ve driven dozens of rental trucks across the country, one of which wound up on its side. I’ve been with hundreds of people experiencing the excitement of the delivery of their new organ, squealing with delight as the blower went on for the first time and the first pipes sounded. I’ve sat in the pews on the first Sunday after the organ case was erected, watching the reactions of the parishioners as they saw it for the first time. One little girl announced at the top of her voice, “I liked the old one better.” I’ve attended the weddings of the daughters of members of the organ committee, and I’ve ridden an elephant in a jungle in Thailand.

But my trips to Madagascar were as good as adventure gets for an organ guy. In these pages last month, I shared the history of the Hook & Hastings Company, the venerable Boston firm that produced more than 2,600 organs under several different names over a span of a hundred years, and started the tale of my trips to the land of the lemurs. Take a look back at the June issue of The Diapason and reread the last eight (or so) paragraphs.

Zina Andrianarivelo, Madagascar’s ambassador to the United Nations, called me in the spring of 2008. Of course, I thought, you’re Madagascar’s ambassador to the United Nations. I get calls like this all the time. The ambassador attends the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, and the organist there told him about the Organ Clearing House. He asked if we could meet.  

Over a well-oiled lunch in an Italian restaurant near the United Nations headquarters, he told me that the Church of Jesus Christ of Madagascar, the FJKM (which is associated with the Presbyterian Church of the USA), was in the middle of an important anniversary celebration, and he had just been in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, for the opening event. The church’s national Vice-President, Marc Ravalomanana, who also served as the President of the Federation of Madagascar, was delivering a sermon to a full congregation in the city’s central church. From the pulpit, he pointed to the ambassador and said, “Mr. Ambassador, I want you to go back to America and find an organ for this church.”

In the middle of the 19th century there was an evil Malagasy (pronounced Malagash) queen who was cured of a horrible disease by healers in her palace. In gratitude, she outlawed Christianity, and 150,000 Christians were put to death during her rule. Her successor invited Christian missionaries back into the country, and four stone churches were built in Antananarivo during the 1860s commemorating four early instances of Christian martyrdom. Each bears the name Tranovato, which means stone house. So for example, FJKM Tranovato Ambonin’ Ampararinina is the Stone Church of the Hurling Cliff. Tranovato Faravohitra commemorates a martyr who was burned alive. The two sites are a couple miles apart. Legend has it that on the days of the two martyrdoms, a rainbow connected the two sites.

President Ravolamanana grew up in the rural village of Imerinkasinana, about an hour drive from Antananarivo (colloquially contracted to Tananriv, or simply, Tana). As a teenager, he delivered yogurt by bicycle. As a young man, he made a fortune developing a system for delivering dairy products all around the country without refrigeration. And he used that fortune to build a conglomerate of construction companies, television stations, and newspapers; he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. The church had advocated his candidacy, and in turn, he was donating huge sums for the construction of new church buildings and the repair and renovation of older buildings, and he was interested in importing a fleet of organs.

The ambassador would be traveling to Madagascar in June to participate in an international conference arranged by the president to increase international trade, aimed at improving the life conditions and styles of the poorest Malagasy people. That would be an ideal time for me to visit the country. All arrangements would be taken care of. All I would have to do was get on an airplane.

I went to Madagascar’s mission at the United Nations to get a diplomatic visa. At the advice of the State Department, I went to a travel health clinic where I was vaccinated against seven nasty diseases. I was told not to eat raw vegetables if I didn’t know how they had been handled. I was given medicine to fight dysentery and to prevent malaria. And I was told not to drink tap water, including ice cubes.

Madgascar was a French colony until 1960, so Air France has scheduled departures from Paris to Tana, but they don’t schedule return flights until they could fill a plane. Mine would be a one-way ticket. I got on the plane knowing I’d arrive in Tana around 1:00 a.m., but I didn’t know who would meet me, I didn’t know where I’d be staying, and I didn’t know what I’d be doing once I got there. 

When we landed at Ivato International Airport, there were three snazzy young men in white shirts with presidential IDs; one was holding a card with my name. They showed me into a VIP lounge and offered me a drink (gin and tonic). It only took a couple minutes off the plane for me to have my first Malagasy ice cubes. They drove me to the Carlton Hotel in Antananarivo, where the president’s name was on my reservation. There was a gift basket and a bottle of wine in my room.

So far, so good. I woke early and went to the hotel dining room for breakfast, wondering what the day would bring. While I was eating, another guy with an ID tag came to my table to tell me that my driver was waiting outside. He took me to Tranovato Faravohitra and there was Zina to greet me, along with a group of church officials he had gathered. They had planned an itinerary that had me visiting 15 churches—some which needed organs, and some which had organs in need of repair. One of these people would be my guide, making the schedule and making contacts with the churches. Richard, who had picked me up at the hotel, would be my driver, and Adolha Vonialitahina would be my translator. I had an entourage.

That evening, Zina took me to the annual awards banquet of the Rotary Club, held in a rural country club, about an hour away from the city. Small talk continued as we found our assigned tables and were ushered to a buffet dinner loaded with things I didn’t recognize. Just as I picked up a plate and started surveying the choices, the lights went out.

In the course of a week, I visited 12 churches. One was under construction, the gift of the president, and there were chickens running around the site. One chicken wound up in a pot and became lunch for the workers—no refrigerator, no problem. Several of the churches had organs. One was a terrible junker with no nameplate, but I had to admire the organist who had figured out how to keep it working. I offered to do some tuning. The organist held notes, and it was fun to watch his face light up as each pipe came into tune. I gave Adolha a quick lesson for holding notes, and invited the organist up on the walkboard. I showed him how to use the tuning iron, and he got the knack of it right away.  

We arrived at another church where there was a simple organ façade. I opened the fallboard to reveal the classic Cavaillé-Coll logo and burst into tears. I had travelled 8,700 miles to find a Cavaillé-Coll organ in an East African island nation. It didn’t look like much, and there were a lot of dead notes, but it had that sound.

As I cavorted around town, Zina was working on getting an appointment for us to talk with President Ravolamanana. A couple times were set and changed, and finally Zina took me to the presidential palace. As I sat in a waiting room while Zina met alone with the president, I thought of Alan Laufman, the founder of the Organ Clearing House. “Alan would have loved this!”

It may have seemed surreal, but it was real. I sat with President Ravalomanana for about 45 minutes. I shared some highlights of my studies with him, and promised a report on all the churches I had visited. He asked if we could bring an organ for Tranovato Farovohitra in time for the anniversary celebration in November, and made it clear he would like to follow up with more projects later.  

Bringing a pipe organ from the United States to Madagascar with five months notice seemed like a tall order, but we had a four-rank Hook & Hastings organ³ in Boston that would be easy to move. We would consider it a temporary installation and move it to a smaller church later. The president’s office arranged for a shipping container. There would be plenty of extra space, so a clothing drive was organized, and I lined up donations of surplus pianos to be delivered to churches and an orphanage I had visited.

I rented a truck and gathered the pianos in Maine. Approaching the New Hampshire border, I had to stop in a weigh station. The trooper in the booth asked, “What are you carrying?” “Pianos.” “Where are you taking them?” I couldn’t resist. “Madagascar.” “Pull over.” The state police went over my truck and papers with a fine-tooth comb. Thankfully, Ryder had not omitted any of the required safety equipment.

A few months later, my colleague Amory Atkins and I flew to Tana. Because the streets of Tana are steep and narrow and festooned with thousands of low-hanging wires, the container could not be trucked directly to the church. Instead, it would be delivered to a presidential campus on the outskirts of the city. The Malagasy Army would provide a flat-bed truck and the manpower to transfer the load. An Army colonel would make the arrangements.

There was a snafu with the container. President Ravolamanana had recently implemented some new import restrictions. His container was in violation and was being held at the dock. The colonel hinted that the president “had to play by his own rules.” It took a couple days to sort that out. When the container finally arrived, we transferred it to the Army’s truck. Amory was brilliant as a platoon leader!  

When we arrived at the church, we learned that steel supports were being added to the structure of the balcony, so there would be further delay. The steel workers were barefooted (a couple were wearing flip-flops), and they were using rechargeable cutting tools. It was obviously going to take a long time. Amory and I tried to help; the cordless tools we had were better than theirs! Finally, we let the colonel know that we wouldn’t have time to install the organ before the anniversary service if we couldn’t start in 36 hours. A couple hours later, a team of real steel workers arrived, equipped with acetylene torches, welding gear, and steel-toed boots. Problem solved. (They were from one of the president’s construction companies.)

The church was full. The regular organist played on a Hammond. The congregation sang hymns. The president preached from the same pulpit where he directed the ambassador eight months earlier. During the sermon, he introduced me and asked me to play. When I finished, he thanked me and said, “It’s good—but we’re going to do better. We’re bringing a larger organ next year.” I thought having the president announce that in public was a great way to seal the next project.

But I was wrong. The following January, Zina and I planned to meet for lunch to discuss the next step. He called to cancel. He sounded panicky. He told me to visit the website, France 24 (International News Headlines). President Ravalomanana was being ousted in a coup d’etat led by high-ranking army officers (I’ve wondered if it was “my” colonel) and Andry Rajoelina, a 27 year-old former disc jockey who was mayor of Antananarivo. So that was that.

I’m sorry that we didn’t get to fulfill the grandiose plans. It would have been fun to help raise the standards of music in the Malagasy Church. I have no idea if the organ we brought is still working or being used. But we sure did have an adventure. The next time an ambassador calls, I’ll know what to do.

Notes

1. I was building tower crowns for a large organ case, which included a run of dental moldings, crenelations that ran between a couple rows of ogees. It was a trick to lay them out so the gaps were symmetrical across mitered joints. I stood staring at a joint I was prepared to cut, ruler and pencil in hand, when Dan walked by and asked what I was doing. I replied, “I’m in a trance of dental meditation.”

2. I quit smoking cigarettes on New Year’s Eve, 1981, three months before my son Michael was born.

3. Hook & Hastings #2369 (1915). One manual: 8′ Open Diapason, 8′ Gedeckt, 8′ Dolce, 4′ Flute Harmonic.