In the Wind. . . .

The right tool for the right job

Parking a car in New York City is not for the faint of heart. I can reliably find a space in our neighborhood, as long as I remember to feed the meters ($3.50 per hour), and move the car, following street sweeping regulations, between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. every day except Sunday. If I park at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, I don’t have to do anything until the Monday morning sweepers. There’s an easy rhythm to weekday parking on East 9th Street. The entire street turns over for the sweepers, and like clockwork, at 8:30, the parking spaces fill with contractors’ trucks. There are six apartment buildings on our block, perhaps eight hundred apartments, and there are always a slew of home renovations going on. Co-op apartment buildings have rigorous rules stating the hours during which contractors can work,¹ so they all drive off between 4:30 and 5:00, and the whole street opens up.  

People in other neighborhoods enjoy “Alternate Side Parking” (ASP). There, parking is free, but cars must be moved at times designated on signs on every street, for example, 9:00 to 10:30 a.m., Monday and Thursday. At those times, car owners sit in their vehicles reading the newspaper, doing e-mail and crossword puzzles, and drinking coffee. An armada of police cars and tow trucks lurks at the end of the block until the appointed time, followed by the sweeper with lights flashing and horns blowing. No one doubts the sincerity of the enforcement of these regulations. The moment the posted time passes, motorists jockey to reclaim their spaces in a two-ton ballet that can get pretty comical.

The city maintains a website/app/phone service called 311 where they publish announcements such as snow-related school closings, and the blessed suspension of ASP for such reasons as religious holidays. When ASP is suspended, parkers get the relief of a few extra days of not having to move their vehicles. Funny when you think of it though—why have a vehicle if you have to go out of your way not to move it?

I have two secret weapons when I need to park my car for more than a couple days. One is a space in a commercial lot at 125th Street in Harlem, frequented by moving companies, bookmobiles, and bloodmobiles. It’s a thirty-minute ride on the subway, but it’s inexpensive and handy. The other came when we finished the installation of an organ in suburban New Jersey a couple years ago, and the pastor generously offered me parking privileges in their lot. It takes me almost an hour to get there by train, but if I’m not going to need the car for more than ten days, it’s worth the ride.

City slicker

Throughout my career, I’ve kept a fleet of tool bags, work lights, and vacuum cleaners in my car, taking for granted that I would always be able to park easily close to the job site and carry my tools inside. But when Wendy and I moved to New York City a couple years ago, I realized that I should create a “City Bag” that would stow enough tools for typical service calls and be light enough to be carried on the subway. Simple idea—but it turned out to be a tricky challenge. We work on organs with electric, pneumatic, and mechanical actions, which means I need to have several layers of specialized tools with me. Electrical testing equipment, soldering iron, tuning cones, voicing tools, pallet spring pliers are added to a collection of ordinary hand tools. You don’t need a wind-pressure gauge at every service call, but when you need one, you really need one, and Ace Hardware doesn’t carry them. And a good tool kit includes at least a dozen screwdrivers of different shapes and sizes—there’s always one ornery screw hidden behind a windchest leg that calls for an impossible angle. 

Besides tools, the conscientious organ technician carries an assortment of five or six different types of leather and felt for pneumatic repairs. He has little packages of replacement chest magnets and magnet armatures, leather and Heuss nuts for tracker action (and the special nut driver for the Heuss nuts), felt punchings for keyboards, screws, nails and brads, doodads and widgets. He has wood glue, contact cement, epoxy, and super glue, and he carries a tube of silicone adhesive (tub caulk), but he won’t admit to it. He has silicone lubricant, graphite, WD-40, a styrene candle stub (for lubricating screws), and oil and grease for blower motors. He has a couple flashlights and a fluorescent worklight with extension cord.

The terrific advances in battery technology means that cordless drill/screwdrivers are really useful, and there are some compact models that are surprisingly powerful. With a charger and one spare battery, you can work all day. Add that to your kit, along with a couple indexes of screwdriver and drill bits. I add a Tupperware container full of unusual bits. This includes bits I’ve filed fine and/or narrow for special applications, some extra long ones, and a messy heap of screws, just in case.

When I set out to assemble a City Bag, I found a neat, briefcase-shaped bag with lots of pockets, zippered compartments, a padded shoulder strap, and a little plastic tray with dividers to hold assortments of doodads. I stuffed it with hundreds of tools, bottles, vials, sandpaper, lens cleaners for my glasses, earplugs, band-aids, and all the scraps and paraphernalia I could think of. I included an electric meter, soldering iron, test light, and a wind-pressure gauge. Great, but it weighed a ton. 

I lumbered onto the 6 train to go to the Upper East Side for a service call and was exhausted by the time I arrived. And I was missing tools from the first moment. Over the next several sessions I kept a list of things to add, and tried again. During this period, my piano tuner came to our apartment twice, and I envied the backpack-shaped thing he carries. It seemed to include everything he needed, but of course, he just doesn’t need as much as I do to service pipe organs.

In the months before Easter I visited dozens of churches, some in New York where I lugged the City Bag on and off the subways, and some in suburbs and in Boston where I could use my car and the larger, more comprehensive sets of tools. But even then I was often missing things, or at least having to trudge back to the car for something. It was time to start over and get it right. I figured that after more than 40 years in the business, I should at least have a proper tool kit.

We spent a week at our place in Maine where I have a nice workshop. I dumped out both of my tool kits in separate piles and spread them out on a clean workbench. Now it was easy to compare the two, take an inventory, and complete them both by routing through drawers of old tools and buying a few new things. I decided not to worry about some details—it’s okay if diagonal wire cutters in the two kits have different colored handles.

I compared and combined the lists of stuff besides tools—leather, parts, lubricants, adhesives, solvents, and the like. Because the City Bag is necessarily smaller than the Car Bag, I had to make some tough choices, but I did save some space by switching to small containers of things. (I don’t need the 11-ounce WD-40, or the 8-ounce Titebond glue in the City Bag.)

I had grown to dislike my Car Bag. It was made of heavy nylon fabric, but it was square and bulky with hard corners, so it banged against my knees as I carried it. I found a new beauty with 60 pockets and a big center compartment. I added a second larger kit with wheels and collapsible handle that holds the cordless drill and lots of the other heavier stuff. And I got a couple of bungees so I could strap the Car Bag to the top of the Roller Board. Terrific. 

I stuck with the same briefcase style thing for the City Bag, but added a Big-Mouth satchel for the bulkier stuff and a totally cool collapsible two-wheel dolly, again with bungees. It’s heavy on the subway stairs, but rolls like a dream on the sidewalks—and when I go to a church and open my bags, those tools gleam and fairly jump into my hands.

It’s a tool thing.

People who work with tools have a thing about tools. My Facebook page is loaded with colleagues’ photos of new tools. One colleague posted a video he took aboard his new tractor while rototilling his voluptuous garden. “No texting while tilling!” Another friend shared photos of his stroke sander—a cool rig with very long belt of sandpaper that passes “360 feet of abrasive over the wood per second.” Several organ shops have recently acquired CNC routers, those pickup-truck-sized magical computer-guided rigs that take much of the hand labor out of building just about anything from wood.

Near our place in Maine, there’s an old-timer who runs a boatyard. He’s also the town’s harbormaster. The centerpiece of the place is an ancient truck-tractor (the front part of a semi-trailer truck) moored to the ground and fitted with a huge winch. A forty- or fifty-foot wooden sailboat is floated up to a huge car mounted on rails, balanced and secured on stands, and the powerful old diesel engine roars and belches as it draws the 80,000-pound boat out of the water. That machine is just as much a tool as the knife in his pocket.

A couple months ago, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City (5th Avenue at 91st Street) hosted an exhibition of tools. It included a remarkable variety of things from tiny pocket kits of gentlemen’s grooming tools, to a scale model of a 4,500-ton Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) with a cutting diameter of more than 50 feet. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a spectacular sculpture comprising thousands of hand tools suspended mobile-style, arranged with pass-through aisles. But the one that really got me was the “Tonometer” designed and built in 1876 by Rudolph Koenig (French, born in Germany, 1832–1901). It comprises 670 tuning forks that span the 49 semi-tones of four octaves (that’s almost 14 forks per semi-tone), which “afforded a perfect means for tuning any musical instrument.”² I wonder what Monsieur Koenig would have thought of the $9.95 Cleartune app I have in my iPhone.

Chimps do it.

Jane Goodall started studying chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika in 1960. I expect that most of us have seen films produced by the National Geographic Society that document her work. In November of 1960, she watched a chimp she had named David Graybeard poking pieces of grass into a termite mound, then raising the grass to his mouth. She didn’t understand what he was doing, so after he left, she tried it herself and found that the termites gripped on to the blade of grass. She realized that David was using the grass as a tool to feed himself by fishing the insects out of their otherwise inaccessible habitat. 

It’s funny to think that there is not much of a leap from a chimpanzee fishing for termites to a French scientist machining 670 tuning forks or to a modern crane or hydraulic machine. Of course our tools have gotten increasingly sophisticated and complex, but every tool shares the same conceptual origin—the adaptation of something to help us do work. Tomorrow, I’m joining a couple of my colleagues from the Organ Clearing House in Pittsburgh to dismantle an organ. Can’t wait to wheel those new kits into the building.

Government regulation

When I lived in rural Ohio, I had a neighbor who was a truck driver for a well-known chemical company. You might guess that his job was delivery of product. But no. They filled his truck with frightful waste, cracked the spigot at the back of the trailer, and sent him driving across the country, dribbling poison on the highways. It’s reasonable for the government to contain that sort of activity. 

In 2006, the pipe organ trade was involved in an example of government regulatory hooey when the European Parliament passed the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, which restricts the use of six substances in electrical equipment. It was aimed at the careless disposal of millions of cell phones and other personal electronics. Fair enough. I agree that we shouldn’t poison our rivers and lakes with lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, or polybrominated diphenyl ether. Each one sounds nastier than the last. (You can read more about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Direct….)

But wait: Pipe organs are electrical equipment, and it’s hard to hide that they have significant lead content. The European Parliament was talking about parts-per-million, while we measure our lead by the ton. Nevertheless, the restriction stood. The organ from a British cathedral was dismantled for restoration, and the new restriction would mean it couldn’t be put back together. The short story is that the international pipe organ community flung petitions back and forth across the Atlantic, and a loophole was created to separate pipe organs from
this restriction. 

The September 2014 issue of The Diapason included an excellent and troubling article by Anne Beetem Acker titled “The 2014 Ivory Trade and Movement Restrictions.” On February 11, 2014, President Obama issued an executive order effectively banning the trade and transportation of ivory, period. Ms. Acker describes the loophole: 

You may import an item containing ivory as part of a household move or inheritance, or as part of your own musical instrument or as part of a traveling exhibition as long as the item contains “worked elephant ivory that was ‘legally acquired’ and removed from the wild prior to February 26, 1976, and has not been sold or otherwise been transferred for financial gain since February 25, 2014.”³

That’s it. Until February 11, 2014, we at the Organ Clearing House considered ivory keyboards to be an asset. A simple organ built by Schantz or Reuter in the 1940s would have ivory keyboards, and because ivory is such a durable material, they would often be in perfect condition. I choose not to share my political views in this public forum. That’s not the point of this magazine or my regular column. But I sure wish my president had thought this one through a little better. To the best of my knowledge, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon are the most recent presidents who played the piano. I don’t know if Bill Clinton’s saxophone has any ivory on it.

I’ve had the thrill of an hour-long ride through the Thai jungle on a huge and gentle elephant. I am horrified by photos of majestic animals slaughtered for their tusks. I may be shortsighted and politically incorrect, so help me here. How in the name of tarnation will selling and moving a sixty-year-old pipe organ contribute to the slaughter of elephants?

I work with keyboard instruments every day. I talk regularly with dozens of colleagues across Europe and the United States. And I read the publications from our professional organizations like the Organ Historical Society, the American Institute of Organbuilders, and the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America. Excepting a few private conversations, Ms. Acker’s article is my first exposure to the severity of this order.

Some of my colleagues only build new organs, so are not affected by President Obama’s executive order. But the market for new instruments has been shrinking steadily for years, and many of us in the world of organbuilding find much, if not most of our revenue in the renovation and restoration of historic organs. 

On February 10, 2014, it was perfectly legal to dismantle an organ with ivory keyboards, load it in a truck, take it across state lines to your workshop, restore it, return it to the church, and be paid for your effort. Now it’s not. The fact that Obama’s language includes “trade and movement” implies that we couldn’t even do it for free. 

What do you think? ν

Notes

1. This is good for the quality of life as it limits noise to certain hours of the day, but surely adds to the cost of renovations.

2. Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, legend at tool exhibit.

3. Anne Beetem Acker, “The 2014 Ivory Trade and Movement Restrictions: New regulations and their effects,” The Diapason, September 2014, 28.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Don’t blame the tools
The carpenter is finishing a house. He’s carefully measuring and mitering baseboards, windowsills, and doorjambs. He’s distracted by a mosquito, and his hammer glances the nail creating a carpenter’s rosette. The first thing he does is look at the head of the hammer—must be some glue on it or something.
The same carpenter needs to make one quick cut. He draws a square line on the board and picks up his handsaw. The saw veers to starboard. The first thing he does is look at the saw. Must be dull.
Or he measures a piece with a folding wooden ruler. He makes his mark and cuts his piece, but he didn’t unfold the ruler all the way—the inch markings skip from 13 to 26 and the piece is a foot too short. The first guy to come up with a wood-lengthener or wood-widener is going to make a fortune.
Organbuilders typically have many more tools than most tradesmen because our trade comprises so many facets. Of course, we have lots of woodworking tools, but we also have tools for leather, soft metal, hard metal, electrical work, and some ingenious rigs specific to pipe organs such as pallet spring pliers, tuning cones, toe cones and toehole reamers, and a wide assortment of nasty-looking little spades and prickers for voicing organ pipes.
When I’m working on a job site installing, tuning, or repairing organs, I carry a canvas sailmaker’s tool bag that measures about 8 by 16 inches and 12 inches high when fully loaded. It’s got 24 pockets on its sides and ends that surround a big central cavity. I like this format because you don’t need extra space to open it. Carry a steel toolbox up onto an organ walkboard and you need twice the space for the open lid. I keep it organized so that each tool has a pocket (some pockets have a half-dozen tools in them), and when I’m squeezed in a dark corner in an organ I can put my hands on many of my tools without looking at the bag. When co-workers borrow tools from me, I ask them to leave them on the floor next to the bag so my system doesn’t get messed up.
This morning I unloaded my car after a weeklong trip to one of our job sites, and all my toolboxes are on the long workbench in my shop. I wonder as I write just what’s in the favorite sailmaker’s bag, so I’ll take everything out and count. My everyday tool kit includes:
• 15 screwdrivers (no two alike, including ratchets, stubbies, offsets, straight, Phillips, or Robertson drive—I hope there’s never a screw I can’t reach)
• 2 wire cutters (fine for circuit boards, heavy for larger wires)
• 2 pairs long-nosed pliers (small and large)
• Flat-billed pliers
• Round-nosed pliers (for bending circles and hooks in wire)
• Double-acting linesman pliers (strong enough to let me bend bar steel in my hands, though the last pair broke in half when I did that)
• 1 pair slip-joint pliers
• 2 pairs vise-grips (one small, one long-nosed)
• Sears Robo-grip pliers (inherited from my father-in-law’s kit)
• 6″ adjustable wrench
• 2 sets Allen keys (English and metric)
• 2 pairs of scissors (one specially sharp, one general use)
• 6″ awl
• Tapered reamer
• 3 hemostats (two curved, one straight, for gripping tiny wires)
• Wire stripper (American Wire Gauge 16 through 26)
• 2 flashlights (large and small with spare batteries)
• 2 saws (one reversible back saw, one “harp” hack saw with replacement blades)
• 2 cheap chisels (3/4″ and 1″)
• 35-watt soldering iron and solder (for wiring)
• Electric test light
• 6 alligator clip leads
• Small hammer (my maul-wielding colleagues call it my “Geppetto” hammer)
• 2 rulers (one 35′ tape measure, one 72″ folding rule)
• 2 utility knives (light and heavy)
• 10 files (flat, half-round, round, big-medium-tiny)
• 3 tuning irons
• Pallet spring pliers
• 2.5-millimeter hex-nut driver (for Huess nuts)
• Wind pressure gauge
• 2 rolls black vinyl tape
• Sharpies, ballpoint pens, pencils
• Sharpened putty knife
• Spool of galvanized steel wire (for quick repairs)
• Bottle of Titebond glue
• Tubes of epoxy
• 5 small brushes
And there’s a canvas tool-roller with 35 little pokers, prickers, burnishers, spades, spoons, a bunch of little rods for raising languids, wire twisters, magnets, special keyboard tools, and an A=440 tuning fork.
I often ship this bag on airplanes, wrapping it in a blanket and stuffing it in a duffel bag—checked baggage, of course—and I dread losing it. It would take weeks to reconstruct this tool kit.
In the back of the car I carry three other larger toolboxes, with cordless drills, bit and driver sets, and heavier hammers, multimeter, etc., etc., etc. There’s a big plastic box with 40 dividers for wiring supplies, and another full of “organy” odds-’n’-ends like leather nuts and Huess nuts, felt and paper keyboard punchings, a few spare chest magnets, and some old piano ivories. And finally, a cardboard box full of pieces of leather and felt of almost any description—any large scrap from a workbench project goes into that box.
And I’m always missing something.

Organ transplants
Now that you know what my tool bag looks like, here’s a story that makes me wonder. I got a Saturday call from one of my clients, a large Roman Catholic church with a big organ in the rear gallery. The organ wouldn’t start and there were two Masses that afternoon. I knocked on the door of the rectory to get the key for the organ loft and was greeted by a teenage girl who was volunteering to answer the parish phones on the weekend. She called a priest’s extension and said, “The organ guy is here.”
The priest was a tall, dignified, elderly man, who came down the stairs, invited me into a parlor, and offered me a seat. I carried my tool bag with me and set it on the floor next to my chair. He asked two or three questions before I realized he thought I had something to do with a human organ donation program. I set him straight as politely as I could, asking for the keys to the organ loft while wondering what in the world he thought I was going to do with those tools!

Tool renewal
When I was first running around the countryside tuning organs, the “land line” was our only means of communication. You had to get all your service visits arranged in advance, and if a day’s plan changed because a sexton forgot to turn on the heat, I’d look for a pay phone at a gas station. Now of course we all have phones in our pockets. I usually have mine with me in an organ, not because I intend to interrupt my work taking calls, but because it has a notepad and a voice-memo system that allow me to keep notes while on the job. If I realize I’m missing a tool, I’m out of glue, or I don’t have any fresh batteries along, I make a note, and every couple weeks I spend an hour with my tools, replenishing supplies, sharpening blades, and keeping things in order.

Tool envy
There are many clever people working in tool design—every time I go into a hardware store I notice some neat little innovation: the cordless drill-screwdriver with a little headlight that lights when you pull the trigger; the 4-in-1, then 8-in-1, then 10-in-1 screwdriver (I carry one of those in my briefcase); the little rubber octagonal washer that goes on the end of the flashlight to keep it from rolling. And boy, are they tempting. I buy a ten-dollar hand tool because it’s cool and stuff it in my tool bag. Every now and then there has to be a culling. I guess it’s good news that tools break and wear out. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones.
When I was a hotshot apprentice in Ohio, I bought a fancy set of chisels by mail order. These were the Marples beauties, with maple handles, iron ferrules, and Sheffield steel blades. I paid about a hundred dollars for the set of nine—a huge amount of money for me in 1978. (Those were the years when good new large organs cost $5000 per stop!) I was enough of a beginner that my mentor teased me, saying all I needed now was some wood. But I still have those chisels, and I still have the racks I made to hang them on the wall over my bench. They’re the only workshop chisels I’ve ever owned, and while some of them are a little shorter than they used to be, they sharpen just as easily as when they were new. The iron ferrules mean you can hit the handle pretty hard with a mallet without damaging the tool. They are old friends.
By the way, also hanging on the wall over my bench in that shop was a display of my mistakes, hung there by my mentor to keep me humble. I think they’re still there.
When I started the Bishop Organ Company in 1987, I bought a Rockwell-Delta 10″ table saw—it’s known as a “Uni-Saw” and it must be one of the most popular table saw models ever made. The blade can be tilted to make angled cuts, and there’s a crosscut miter gauge that allows me to cut angled ends of boards. Over more than 20 years, I’ve cut miles of wood with it, and only last month I had the first trouble with it. The arbor bearings had finally worn out, and I found a local industrial supply company that was able to replace the bearings quickly. It was such a pleasure to use my saw again with the new bearings that I treated it to a new Freud carbide-tipped blade.

A reflection of attitude
The organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook was most active in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century. There’s a legend handed down through generations of workers there that in order to be hired to work in the factory an applicant had to present his toolbox for inspection. In the days before Sears, Home Depot, Woodworker’s Warehouse, Woodcraft Supply, Duluth Trading Company, McMaster-Carr, and Grainger, a woodworker built himself a box to store and transport his tools. Remaining examples show infinite attention to detail, with special drawers and cubbies designed for each specific tool, fancy dovetail joints, and hidden compartments. The worker that could produce such a masterpiece could build anything required in an organ shop.
Recently I noticed that Lowe’s was featuring a new line of mechanics’ toolboxes. These were not the little boxes you’d carry around, but monumental affairs with dozens of steel drawers on ball-bearing slides and heavy-duty casters. Some were five and six feet wide and just as tall. Fully loaded they’d weigh a ton or more. I’ve seen things like these for years in mechanics’ service bays and I have a more modest version in my shop, but I’d never seen a toolbox with a built-in refrigerator! Not a bad idea, though.
You may have seen the traveling salesmen who peddle tools to mechanics. The companies are Snap-On, Cornwell, and Matco, among others. A heavy mobile tool showroom pulls up to a service station and the mechanics all come out to shop. The driver is a franchise owner who travels a regular route of customers. He extends credit to his customers, allowing them to make cash payments each week so the wives never learn how much money the guys are spending on tools. And the Snap-On driver is likely to be armed. He’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools that every mechanic would love to own.

A tool for every purpose
I take a lot of pleasure in my tools. I know, I know—it’s a guy thing, as my wife often mentions (though her weaving habit depends on an in-house service department!). But maintaining a comprehensive and effective tool kit is essential to good organbuilding. We say don’t blame the tools, but we cannot work without them. It’s a simple pleasure to draw a sharp knife along a straight edge to cut a neat piece of leather. I enjoy the sound and sight of plane shavings curling off my workpiece onto my hands and wrists, littering the workbench and floor with aromatic twists. It brings to mind the cute little Christmas dolls made from plane shavings in places like Switzerland—Saint Nicolas with a curly beard of cedar shavings. Moving the languid of an organ pipe to achieve good musical speech, soldering wires to a row of pins that wind up looking like a row of jewels, gluing goat-skin gussets to the corners of a reservoir are all motions repeated countless times that I don’t take for granted and can’t repeat without my tools. When I use someone else’s tools they feel funny in my hands.
Sometimes I’m asked how we can maintain patience to complete a project that might take a year or more. Easy—every day you take satisfaction in each little thing you make. A finished organ comprises thousands of those little projects blended into a unified whole. Listening to an instrument brings back the memories of each satisfying cut, each problem solved, and of course each mistake. My tools are my companions and my helpers. They’ve been with me to almost every American state and as far abroad as Madagascar. Right now they’re all spread out on my workbench for a photo shoot, but they’ll be back at work on Monday morning. 

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.

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.

Frank Hastings, of the Weston Hastings

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

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

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

A grand tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the fuss?

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

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

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

Hook & Hastings to the land of the lemurs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a winter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But baby, it’s cold outside.

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

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

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

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

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about pitch.

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

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

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

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

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

Mise en place

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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere you go, there you are.

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

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

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

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

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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