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.

Meeting the future

This weekend, Wendy and I drove to Massachusetts to visit our new grandson. Samuel John Vichiett-Bishop was born last Thursday (October 22) at 3:45 p.m., weighing 3.45 kilograms (7.61 pounds), the second son of my second son Christopher and his wife Alessandra. Big brother Benjamin is almost three years old, a turbo-charged, bright-eyed, bilingual beauty. (Alex is Brazilian so they speak Portuguese at home.) Sam is just big enough to rest in my two cupped hands. His feet are about the size of my thumbs, and his toes are like the little peas in snow pea pods. The whole thing is magical, remarkable, moving, and inspiring.

Three years ago when we were anticipating Ben’s birth, I was looking forward to the rite of passage of becoming a grandfather. But as those who know me have heard me say, I was not prepared for the joy of seeing my son as a father. And yesterday, watching Chris confidently scoop up the teeny boy, and seeing Chris and Alex as a team preparing for Sam’s first few weeks, discussing schedules about daycare and medical appointments, all while managing Ben’s rambunctious motions, I was simply bursting with pride.

Then, driving home to New York, listening to news reports about national and international politics, I reflected on the first days of the life of a tiny person, wondering what kind of world he will know as an adult. 

Kids these days . . . 

Old fogies like me have been saying that for centuries, but I still like to make comparisons between generations in my family. My grandfather pointed out that local transportation when he was young involved horses, and he was about the age I am now when humans walked on the moon. When my father was growing up, a truck drove around his urban neighborhood delivering ice for iceboxes. My generation was the first to establish households that required refrigerators, air conditioners, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, and, heaven-help-us, computers at the outset.

Our thirty-something children are of the first generation to have had cell phones while attending school. CDs were the standard format for recorded music, color television was ubiquitous, and the Internet was barely a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, used only by scientists and academics.

When I was a kid, Popular Mechanics magazine predicted that by now, we’d be whisking about in personal jet-powered vehicles. It didn’t bother me that the cartoon renderings made them look like trash cans—I’d be happy to stand on banana peels and coffee grounds if my PJV would speed me through the Lincoln Tunnel two feet above the stalled traffic. I’m a little disappointed that this hasn’t happened yet. I think they spent too much time developing the fax machine.

When I wonder what the future holds for four-day-old Sam, it’s safe to say the technological products that will be important to him when he’s a young adult have yet to be imagined. But since I’m far from the field of technological development, I’ll leave that speculation to the engineers.

A couple years ago, Wendy and I were visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, when Christos, an architect, took us to visit an ancient amphitheater outside the city. He told us that the large architectural firm for which he had worked held employee conferences at the site so they could study the particulars of the design and construction, and he pointed out some incredible facts. I was especially impressed by the fact that the 10,000-seat structure occupied a section of a perfect sphere, and after thousands of years was still perfectly level. Christos explained that the techniques used for the design, surveying, and construction must have been written down, but that all documentation had been lost through the ages. He recalled his boss lowering his voice and posing the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the Library at Alexandria?”

The death of culture

Just as hundreds of generations of accumulated recorded knowledge was lost forever in the (multi-stage) destruction of that venerable library, our modern society seems capable of losing important components, ironically at the hands of the very advance of technology. As life becomes more complicated and methods of information management and communication proliferate, our collective attention spans are diminishing. National Public Radio is still able to retain an audience willing to listen to news stories that last several minutes, but most of our news is delivered to us in brief bursts. It’s easy to get the sense that some of the things that are central to our culture are being threatened by our collective ability to pay attention, to concentrate, and to participate in activities that require the thoughtful use of time.

One example of this is as simple as the written word. A friend who had neurosurgery on her right arm fell and broke her left arm while traveling in Italy. Her right hand is still tingly as her nerves heal, and her left arm is in a heavy rigid plaster cast. She reports the delight in taking advantage of the Dictation and Speech functions of her MacBook. Having lost comfortable use of both hands at least temporarily, she is able to continue her work as an attorney, dictating letters, e-mails, and formal documents into her machine. And I confess to frequent use of voice memos with my iPhone. But when I recently heard a story on NPR about how some educators are starting to wonder whether it’s necessary to teach cursive writing in public schools, I shudder while acknowledging my culpability.

Will Sam go to school in an age when copperplate script is obsolete? What would that mean to our society? Do we care? Or would that be a lamentable loss?

§

Most readers of The Diapason can read music. With a glance at a score, we can accurately hear melody, harmony, and rhythm in our “minds’ ears.” We’re multilingual. We might take it for granted, but we learned every jot-and-tittle purposefully. When and where did we learn this? I’ll speak for myself—you can fill in your own story. I had my first piano lessons when I was about eight, and I know Miss Swist laid the foundation for my musical literacy. I also remember the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who crowed in front of elementary school classrooms, teaching us simple songs and writing quarter notes and rests on the blackboard using a cool chalk gang-holder to draw staves.

Of course, I’ll encourage Chris and Alex to give Ben and Sam music lessons—I’ll offer to pay for them. But I doubt they’ll experience anything like the even questionable musicianship provided by Miss Louden in Winchester, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. When I was leading a church youth choir, most of the kids had no background reading music, so I gave it to them. I know that many of my colleagues do exactly that as part of their work with children. But that covers only those kids going to church. If the schools aren’t teaching basic musical skills, a huge swath of children would never be exposed to quarter notes. Do we care about that? 

Plato said, “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the key to learning.” Imagine a Presidential Education Commission that promoted the teaching of music as a basic tenet of public education. What a world that would be!

In 1920, the population of the United States was about 106,000,000, and 300,000 new pianos were sold. That’s one new piano for every 353 Americans. Today there are about 319,000,000 Americans, and according to an article published in the New York Times, in 2006, Americans bought only about 76,000 pianos.¹ That’s one new piano for every 4,197 Americans. That huge decline must have been caused largely by the introduction of radio, television, and electronic recordings. But I can’t escape the notion that a hundred years ago, most households owned pianos and included family members who could play them.

Chris and his older brother Mike grew up singing in choirs that I directed, they both had piano lessons, and they were both often conscripted as “tuner’s helper,” but when they were out on their own, they made their own choices about church. I doubt that Sam or Ben will follow their grandfather’s footsteps into church music, but I hope they’ll both go through life with an understanding of the art of music, enough to allow them to be free to be moved by it.

§

Throughout the centuries, artists have manipulated materials as various as marble and linseed oil to record their observations and interpretations of the world around them. And they took it seriously. Michelangelo’s stunning statue, David, is almost 17 feet tall and weighs almost 12,500 pounds. Do we assume that the original block of marble was twice that heavy (25,000 pounds), 2½ times (31,250 pounds) as heavy, or more? It was removed from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, and the finished statue is in Florence, over 80 miles away. No big deal; a heavy crane lifts it onto a truck, and off we go on an asphalt highway. No, Michelangelo completed the statue in 1503—that 13-ton stone was hauled over hill and dale using carts with wood wheels drawn by oxen over roads of mud and stone.

When I was in college, I took several art history courses, learning rudiments of style, iconography, and techniques—knowledge that enhances every visit to an art museum forty years later. I’ve watched droves of tourists stream from their buses along well-worn pathways toward an iconic masterpiece like Mona Lisa, ignoring hundreds of compelling artworks, actually missing the entire experience while snapping bootleg photos, as I sneaked off in the other direction to have sumptuous galleries to myself.

Walking through a doorway from one gallery to another, I’ve burst into tears encountering an iconic painting. I would have been introduced to the image by a slide in a Carousel machine in a darkened lecture hall forty years ago, but seeing the real thing is visceral. The Starry Night on a tee-shirt doesn’t raise the hairs on your neck, but the very piece of canvas and streaks of paint that were handled by Vincent Van Gogh sure do.

Sam and Ben live more than 200 miles from us. I’m looking forward to having them here for Grandpa visits when I can take them to New York’s wonderful museums. Meanwhile, I know that Chris and Alex will take them to the great museums of Boston. I hope that forty-something Sam will take his children to art museums.

§

The three major broadcast networks and two UHF channels that were around when I was growing up have become hundreds of cable channels broadcasting everything from real art to pure bunk. Originally hailed as the greatest educational tool of the twentieth century, television has deteriorated into a wasteland of misnamed experiences. You might tune in to Animal Planet, expecting something like the carefully researched nature programs of public television, but find a blood-and-guts story about feeding habits, narrated in an emergency voice, as if normal feeding habits should be reported like war zones. (Oh no! Look what that alligator did to that egret!) The History Channel shares idiotic testosterone-induced antics that have nothing to do with history, and while The Weather Channel could teach us some fascinating science, you’re more likely to see poorly equipped, poorly educated “researchers” racing across Texas and Oklahoma, intending not to be hit by a tornado and acting surprised when they are.

Hollywood provides an endless supply of violent, gory fantasies, and full-length movies are instantly available to us, streaming through our laptops and phones, but what about live theater? When I was in high school, dozens of friends were gathered by the music department to learn, produce, and perform Broadway musicals. I’ll never forget the lyrics to the songs of Oklahoma! or Little Mary Sunshine, having pounded out the tunes on the piano hundreds of times, and watching my friends spread their thespian wings was a delight.

Those productions were more energetic and enthusiastic than artistic, and our Curly was no Alfred Drake (original Broadway cast, 1943), but that troupe of school chums sure got a taste of what’s involved in live theater. We dealt with stage fright, casting jealousy, embarrassing stage kisses, memory lapses, and missed cues, but that was really a life experience, giving us an appreciation of the emotion of acting. Two people on a stage can make an audience gasp, cringe, laugh, or cry. You see spittle flying between faces and realize the extent to which the actors have abandoned themselves in service of the story. I hope that Sam will appreciate and seek out live theater.

§

Wendy is a literary agent, working to enable authors selling their manuscripts to publishers and laboring to promote and advocate the books as they arrive on the shelves in bookstores. In many ways, her work parallels mine. Books and pipe organs are facing competition from electronic alternatives; both are viewed by many as outdated, even unnecessary. But just like a pipe organ, there’s no substitute for a real book. You feel its weight in your lap, you handle the pages, you can even write in it, leaving notes for yourself or for the next person to read. 

I’m proud that my kids grew up loving books, and that they love books as adults. Chris and Alex’s condo is alive with books—hundreds of books. We bring more each time we come, and we know that friends and family join us. Ben loves to sit in a lap to “read” a familiar book. He knows many of them by heart and recites along as you read, imitating inflections and correcting errors.

I trust that Sam will become an adult in a world that reveres the printed page, in which information is disseminated and discussed on paper and in which stories are told on paper. I trust that he will pass on that love to his friends and the family members that follow him. And I’ll be giving him books at every opportunity.

§

Books, music, theater, and art are all still in the mainstream of our culture. People who seek and appreciate them enjoy the wealth of knowledge and depth of expression of those who have preceded us. And through their exposure to the heights of human culture, they are open to the appreciation of less prevalent expressions. As participation in the American church has diminished, fewer members of society are likely to be familiar with pipe organs, or even have experienced them at all.

I imagine that Sam will be more familiar with the pipe organ than other kids in his classes—I’m looking forward to sharing my passion with him as part of his awareness of his family. And who knows, maybe he’ll take some lessons. 

I fully expect Sam to be familiar with video games—his father and uncle are products of the generation that started with PacMan and Mario Brothers and has since gone deeper into that world that I don’t understand. As our kids were the ones who understood how to program a VCR, my grandsons will be virtuosic in operating gadgets we haven’t dreamed of.

But I hope, and I’ll do all I can to guarantee, that his education will not only expose him to the wide world of culture, but also immerse him in it. He’ll be well versed in the latest games, movies, music, and art. And he’ll be familiar with Shakespeare and Shostakovich, Donatello and Don Giovanni, Brunelleschi and Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Bernstein and Sondheim. He’ll know the difference between Bach and Offenbach, and he’ll pass it all on with love and passion. I’m not pretending that he’s going to be an artist, an actor, or a musician, but intending that he’ll know enough about those things to care about them. I expect it of him, and I expect it of me. Lucky for all of us.

Notes

1. Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Laid-Back Labor” (Freakonomics blog), The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007.

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?

I’m impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life

Feeding your passion

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I caught the pipe organ bug when I was a kid growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts. My father was rector of the Episcopal church, and the organist was a harpsichord builder. I sang in the choir, took piano lessons, took organ lessons, had summer jobs in organ shops, accompanied all the ensembles at the high school and countless rehearsals for musicals, went to college to major in organ performance, and never looked back. When my kids were teenagers and well aware of how my career track had started, they commented freely on how difficult it was for them to face adulthood without having such a clear track in mind.

Working in the organ world as a player and builder for decades, I’ve known many people with similar experiences. After all, the young musician who is most likely to be accepted as a performance major in a recognized school of music is a person for whom regular and serious practice at their chosen instrument was a priority from an early age.

When I was in high school, I was the most accomplished organist in town under the age of twenty, and I was mighty pleased with myself. In my first week as an entering freshman at Oberlin, I remember being impressed—flabbergasted—at how wonderfully some of my classmates played. Winchester was a pretty small pond. I wasn’t such a big fish at Oberlin.

Passionate feeding

James Andrew Beard was a cook. He was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and he said that his earliest memory was watching Triscuits™ and shredded wheat biscuits being made at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland in 1905. Two years old? 

Having studied music and theater, Beard moved to New York City in 1937 (the same year that George Gershwin and Charles-Marie Widor died), hoping to forge a career in the wildly active Broadway scene. While he failed to find a niche on stage, he was a smash hit on the Broadway cocktail party circuit, to the extent that he founded a catering company called “Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.,” specializing in producing elaborate cocktail parties. He followed this with a cookbook called Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés. In 1946, he was the first to host a television cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC.

James Beard wrote more than twenty cookbooks, he founded several cooking schools across the country, and was an important advocate for the careers of many influential chefs, including Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. He was the original modern American “foodie.”

He was a mountain of a man, a man of insatiable appetites, of unflagging energy, and focused passion. When he died in 1985, his estate became a foundation, based in his Greenwich Village townhouse. Today, the James Beard Foundation has provided over two million dollars in scholarships for promising chefs, and the James Beard House hosts countless dinners each year, promoting the work of chefs chosen from around the world.

Medium-rare at 140

You’re giving a dinner party. You’ve worked hard to gather a list of great guests, organize a menu, shop for the food. You’ve made “the house fair as you are able, trimmed the hearth, and set the table.” The guests arrive, you mix drinks, set out hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation picks up quickly. You go to the kitchen and realize you’re in a pickle—the broccoli is overcooked, you forgot to make salad dressing, and in spite of the care you’ve taken with the temperature-time continuum, the meat is simply not done. (Never happened to me, but I’ve heard it from others . . .) 

We went to a dinner at the James Beard House last Friday. Wendy’s assistant, literary agent Lauren McLeod, is married to Chef Danny Bua of The Painted Burro in Somerville, Massachusetts. His creative approach to Mexican cuisine attracted the attention of the scouts, and he was invited to present a dinner—a very big deal for a young chef.

Danny and his team prepped the food in their own restaurant kitchen on Thursday. Before sunrise on Friday their truck was on the road, and they spent the day toiling in the unfamiliar cramped kitchen of the James Beard House. The menu was sophisticated and complex. There were five hors d’oeuvres, including Crispy Native Oyster Tacos with Cabbage-Jalapeño Slaw, Baja Mayonnaise, Cilantro, and Lime; and five entrées, including Avocado Leaf-Roasted Short Ribs with Spiced Red Kuri Squash, Masa Dumplings, Heirloom Kale con Plátanos, Cotija Cheese, and Red-Wine Cola Mole. Altogether there were fifteen different dishes (each with at least five major ingredients), sixty guests, and everything was served warm, plated beautifully, each table was served as one, and the houseful of New York foodies were full of praise.

It was the culinary equivalent of getting off a train, walking cold into an unfamiliar hall, and playing the entire Clavier Übung (all parts) on an instrument you’ve never seen before, from memory. Danny is passionate about his art, and it’s a mighty amount of work.

A memorable effort

Last Monday night, colleague and friend David Enlow played a recital at his home Church of the Resurrection on the 1915 Casavant organ we installed there, completed in 2011. Our daughter Meg came to the recital with Wendy and me, which meant a lot because while she’s familiar with my work as she sees it in the workshop, it’s fair to say that serious organ music is really not her thing. It was really nice to have that support from a family member, and David made it worth her while. At home later in the evening, Meg talked about how impressed she was with David’s focus and command over what he was doing, and knowing perfectly well that there is nothing easy about what he was doing, she was impressed by the apparent ease of it. His fingers and feet just flickered around the console as if there was nothing to it.

David’s program included the entertaining, the academic, the sophisticated, and the sublime. He spared us the ridiculous—you can go somewhere else for that. His command of the repertory, the instrument, and his own person—his technique—was obvious at every moment.

It’s for the birds

Kenn Kaufmann is a client of Wendy’s literary agency, and he and his wife Kim are close friends of ours. With the support of his parents, Kenn dropped out of school at sixteen and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States in a quest for a birder’s Big Year—an effort to see the largest number of bird species in a year. Birding is a big business, and there have been several recent movies that give a glimpse into what it means to devote one’s life to such an effort.

Kenn can look at an apparently empty sky and pick out all the birds. He knows their calls, their habits, what they like to eat, what they’re afraid of. He knows what trees they prefer and why, and he knows their migratory routes, schedules, and destinations. He has written several field guides, developing a new technique for the computer-manipulation of photographs to create the “ideal” example of each bird.  

Like so many of our musician friends, Kenn’s genius is communication. All of that knowledge and intuition would be lost if he couldn’t write or speak about it in such a compelling way. We’ve been with him when he leads big groups on bird walks and gives slide-show-lectures, and there’s never anyone in attendance unmoved by all the information, but even more, by the rich personality that has learned how it all fits into the big scheme.

Measured success

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) studied nuclear physics at Stanford and Harvard, worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and then committed to a career as an organbuilder. He clearly would have made more money working in the high levels of nuclear physics, but the pipe organ was his real love. Those who worked with him and still operate the company that bears his name remember him as a caring and thoughtful mentor who taught by asking questions, encouraging his students and co-workers to think well for themselves. Charlie was passionate about the pipe organ, and his contributions to the modern American organ can hardly be measured.

Charlie was one of the first modern American organbuilders to travel to Europe to study the “Old Master” organs, collecting meticulous measurements, and studying the relationships of the organs to the music of their day. I expect that his scientific background was integral to those studies—he must have had a great power of attention.

There are two Fisk organs in Winchester, Massachusetts, and at the time I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have such access to fine instruments. Ironically, my first real relationships with electro-pneumatic instruments happened in the practice rooms at Oberlin!

§

Every one of these people knew his career path early in life. I suppose we all know people who were forced into a career that was not their first choice: “I’m a lawyer, all your uncles are lawyers, your grandfather was a lawyer, and you’re going to be a lawyer.” Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham was a banker, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. It was when he realized the depth of his son’s dedication that Abraham Mendelssohn made peace with Felix’s career choice. I don’t know if Felix would have had much to offer the world of banking, but we surely would have been the poorer without the music he left us. The thought leaves me without words.

In the concert hall, there’s nothing like hearing a performance by a master musician who in middle age is still working toward the unattainable perfection he envisioned as a six-year-old. In a restaurant, there’s nothing like tasting a dish created by someone whose earliest memory is based on a fascination with food. In an examination room, there’s nothing like being treated by a doctor whose early dreams were to care deeply for the health of patients. And if you’re meant to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, be a great lawyer. We know a brilliant young woman who finished law school with a large debt, held a lucrative job long enough to pay back the debts, then dove into the world of law in developing nations.

Lovely idealism, isn’t it?

But what happens when the money runs out? Most organbuilders would love the luxury of unlimited time to get things right, but the organ is built according to an agreed price, and as they say in the real world, “Time is money.” Remember Charlie Fisk’s definition of a reed? “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.”

The tuner might like to have another eight or ten hours to get things “just so,” but the church is supposed to pay for that at an agreed hourly rate, and organ tuning is a line-item on the annual operating budget. To propose an increase in the tuning budget, the organist makes a recommendation to the Music Committee, which meets bi-monthly and makes recommendations to the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee makes recommendations to the Parish Council, and the Parish Council makes recommendations to the congregation at the Annual Meeting. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.)  

It’s mid-October now. The vote will happen on June 15. And during the Annual Meeting, someone’s going to ask, “If it costs $150 to tune a piano, why do we have to spend $2,500 tuning the organ?” 

The organist might like to have another five hours to practice anthem accompaniments and postlude for the coming Sunday, but there’s a staff meeting, octavo scores to be filed, a bride to meet with, and then the sexton is vacuuming the nave. If I had a nickel for every organist whose dream was fulfilled by being offered a full-time position in a prominent church with a terrific organ, only to find that there was never time for practicing, I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ernest Skinner often added stops to his organs not specified in the contracts because he felt the building called for them. Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh were impoverished through much of their lives, and often couldn’t afford paint to put on canvas.

Throughout history, passionate, inspired people have had to find alternative means of support. That’s why I’m so impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life, like the concert organist who balances practicing and travel with the demands of the liturgical year or a university teaching schedule.

J. S. Bach had a busy professional life, was subject to the civic bureaucracy that employed him, and we know he spent at least enough time with his children to give them music lessons. A family that size must have taken up some of the old man’s time and attention. But he left a body of work that has inspired many generations of great musicians.

Mozart also left a tremendous catalogue of some of the most beautiful music ever written, but he died a pauper. Were he living today, he’d be playing the accordion in the subways of New York. Wouldn’t that be a treat!

Feeding a national passion

Subscribers to The Diapason must be well attuned to the importance of the arts in modern society. As I write, we are in the midst of the great crescendo of political chaos, watching two otherwise dignified men duke it out in the public forum. We’re hearing a lot about the balance of public priorities, and how the federal budget might be skewed in support of different points of view.

One thing we have not heard in stump speeches, televised debates, or from the talking heads super-analyzing everything that’s said, is a candidate standing up for the arts. I cannot see how a nation can fail to support the arts and humanities and consider itself a leader on the international stage. Is military might or the balance of trade more important than the cultural heart of a great people? We are the country of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein, of Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Virgil Fox, but I’ve read figures that compare the United States’ annual support of the arts with the hourly cost of warfare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an elected official talk passionately about the artistic culture—the passion—of our country. I think they’re missing something.

What is Performance? Part 2

I continue here the speculative, general, question-based, and perhaps somewhat philosophical discussion of performance. Next month I shall write about some practical aspects of this subject that tie into teaching in concrete ways, like helping students to grapple with nervousness, or to understand some of the ways in which performance as opposed to just learning and playing pieces can help with student development while enhancing the enjoyment and satisfaction that they get out of music. I will also continue the discussion, begun here, about performance as ritual and performance in the context of ritual.

Why do you perform?

Last autumn I attended a family party at which I saw a long-time friend of mine and my family’s. I hadn’t seen her in person in about 20 years, and therefore we were hurriedly catching up. Furthermore, since over those years we had moved into different phases of life—her from youth to middle age, me from early to late middle age—we canvassed some of the rather big questions. At one point she asked me, “So why do you perform? What do you want to happen when you are up there performing?” And my spontaneous answer (no time to make notes and an outline or to sleep on it) was, “I want to create the possibility that having been there will be important to at least some of the people in the audience.” 

That is not necessarily the spontaneous answer that I would give at another time. I say this not to suggest that I disavow it, or that I don’t think that it is a “good” answer, whatever that means. It’s just that there are probably many answers to that question that are valid at any given moment. This one took me by surprise when it popped into my head.

I believe that what I said that day is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it presents a nice mix of the self-important and the modest. It is immodest of me to suggest that what I do could be “important.” It also reminds us that when we offer ourselves to audience members as being worth their time and sometimes their money, we are making a claim that there is something good about what we are going to do. We should be upfront with ourselves about that and deal in whatever ways we think are best with the possible psychological implications of this for ourselves, hoping to be able to have a healthy self-esteem, leavened by questioning and working to get better, rather than vanity or hubris. 

We all know about the existence of unappealingly self-important performers. Perhaps some if not most of the people who come across to us that way seem very different to those who know them well. Maybe they would seem very different to us if we could see inside their heads. Famous performers are by definition both the people whose public personas we know the best, and people whom we don’t really, actually know. Perhaps some of them have let self-importance get the better of them. The awareness that I am staking a claim on listeners’ lives serves to remind me that I have an obligation to be serious about doing my absolute best—to try as hard as I can to make that claim on people’s time a legitimate rather than a vain one. 

However, my answer to my old friend was relatively modest, in that I didn’t say that I could make an entire room of listeners always have a guaranteed great experience. Maybe I should aspire to that, but I don’t really think so. To do so expressly seems to me like a denial of one of the most constant and true things about art, whether performing art or any other kind: namely that each person brings different needs, desires, tastes, expectations, etc., to any artistic encounter.

I am afraid that if I try to guarantee that I can reach every audience member, I will lose my focus on doing what I can do best, and on doing it as well as I can. Either I will be afraid to do what I really want and feel interpretively, for fear that it will run counter to what some part of the audience likes, expects, or wants, or that I will try to be sensationalistic in the way that I play. Either of these would open up a real risk of not reaching anyone. This is not to mention the possibility of utterly boring some listeners, annoying them, or leaving some people convinced that I am a bad performer, a bad musician, or even (since we sometimes make this leap) a bad person. Worrying about such things would make it impossible for me to perform in a way that expressed my own choices and feelings about the music that I was playing.

There are many things that I didn’t say in that answer that I could have said. For example, that I hoped to present as accurate a version as possible of the composers’ intentions; or that I hoped to give the audience pleasure—different from an “important” experience; or that I hoped to recreate the feeling of the time at which the music had been written; or that I wanted to elucidate the counterpoint or otherwise help listeners to understand the music from a compositional or structural point of view; or that I wanted to show the instrument(s) off to best advantage. All of these, and an infinite number of others, are wonderful possibilities. Each of the ones that I have listed here are things that I do think about and take into account. For me, they are perhaps secondary or instrumental. Any of them might help me to achieve the goal that I mentioned to my friend. For someone else, one of them or something entirely different might be a primary goal. 

I didn’t say that I wanted to garner the admiration of the listeners, or to be seen as a great virtuoso, or to get a good review. Omitting things like this is always under suspicion: perhaps I really feel them, but would be embarrassed to admit it.

The desire in performance

Years ago, a very fine performer once said to me that when he went out onto the concert stage the one desire that he had consciously in his mind was to avoid utter, abject humiliation. I was very young and inexperienced then, and my reaction to this was simply to be stunned: too much so, unfortunately, to ask him to explain further. My assumption now about what he meant then is something like this: that he knew that the combination of instrument, repertoire, preparation, worked-out interpretive choices, and so on, was such that if he could avoid just plain falling apart, the results would be very good. There was no middle ground. Part of what I took from this was that performing is hard. Not even the best performers can afford to take anything for granted.

How would you answer the question that my friend asked me? Would you consider it a good thing to ask your students? What sort of answers would you expect? What sort, if any, would you want? Are there possible answers that would raise a red flag?

All of the above is most directly about “pure” or abstract performance: that is, playing music for people who are there to listen to that music and who are in fact actually listening to it. Answers to any questions about what we are trying to achieve might be different for performance linked to an occasion or to a specific describable purpose. Accompaniment is such a situation. Settings in which the music itself is part of an overarching sequence, such as a church service, graduation ceremony, or sports event are also in this category. In these cases answers like “to help the soloist to feel comfortable” or “to enhance rather than undermine what the soloist is trying to do” or “to intensify the effect on the listeners (members of a congregation) of the words that they are singing and hearing” or “to make the graduates happy” come to mind. (Or “to help the Mets win?”)

Performance and ritual

What is the relationship between performance and ritual? Is every performance a ritual? Does thinking of performance as ritual help or hurt, or sometimes help and sometimes hurt, or perhaps some of both at the same time? I realize, thinking about the question and answer described above, that for me personally, musical performance is likely to be more powerful, and to have a greater chance of seeming important to more of the people in the room, if it has an element of what I experience as ritual. We are in a territory where people use words differently, so the possibility exists of words creating misunderstanding. My understanding of ritual is some sort of overall shape to the event as it moves through time. To put it another way, a feeling that, because of the way that the individual details of what is being done relate to each other as they move through time, the whole is indeed more powerful and meaningful than the sum of the parts. This is not something that needs to have been prescribed in advance by someone other than the participants, although it can.

When I am performing in the form that is the most individual to me and over which I have the most control, a solo recital or concert of my own, and most especially one that I am presenting myself, I care a lot about the shape of the beginning and the end. It seems to me that the way that the transition from “normal” life into a performance is shaped can have a real effect on the listeners’ perceptions of the whole event. At the same time, that segue can have an effect on the performer’s focus. That may influence the feel and perhaps the performing results of only the beginning of the event, or it may carry over through the whole performance. 

Several years ago I decided to take notice of something that I had known about at the back of my mind for a long time: that I don’t like to be sequestered or hidden immediately prior to a concert. If I sit in a green room while the clock ticks towards the appointed time and audience members come in, I just get tense, nervous, distracted by thoughts that are not about the music. I can get into a state where I can’t quite feel or believe that I am someone who can play or whose playing deserves to be heard. I have now started to allow myself to arrange the pre-concert time the way that I like. I hang around the space, among or near the audience, or, on a nice day, outside the front door of the venue:  a place that feels relaxed and friendly to me. I am certain that this has resulted in at least the beginnings of my concerts being more effective. It may affect the whole of a concert. I don’t remotely think that this approach is the best for everyone, though I am sure that it would be for some. I believe that every performer should pay attention to this dimension of the act of performing and determine what feels and works best.

If I want to be out and about right before a concert, that implies that I am asking the audience to accept an opening ritual that is different from the traditional “lights dim and the performer walks in from the side, to applause.” I am comfortable with that. I like the feeling that the music arises from normal life and normal interaction, and my experience is that listeners also do. However, this is one of the reasons that I only expect to be able to shape the opening exactly the way I want to when I oversee the whole presentation. If at a particular concert venue there are expectations about the shape of the opening that are different from what I am describing and that are important to the audience, that is worthy of respect. The opening gestures can affect the listeners’ experience of the event, and the closing gestures can affect their memories of it.

There is one detail about the opening gesture/ritual of a concert or other performance that arises out of modern life, and it is tricky to handle—a mobile phone announcement. As an audience member, I react negatively to that warning, especially since it is the last thing that we hear before the beginning of a performance. But I am aware that there is a good reason to have it. If a cell phone goes off, that is very disruptive and damages the overall shape of the experience. Therefore, it is hard to decide not to do it. But I think that we tend to underestimate the effect on listeners’ appreciation of a performance when the beginning ritual is not about the music and is negatively tinged. (I do not have any cell phone warning at my own concerts, when it is just up to me. I have a feeling that as people get more and more used to engaging with their cell phones, remembering to turn them off will become such a matter of routine that no one in fact needs to be reminded.)

Composer, performer, and instrument

I have a thought about performance that I find interesting. There is a usual template that we apply to the whole process of musical consumption. The composer is the primary creator of the music. The performer is the “interpreter,” and thus the secondary creator: significantly less responsible for the reality of the music’s existence than the composer, but still with an important role to play. Instrument makers, when they are relevant, occupy third place. Their job is to create the tools that will best serve what the performer is trying to do, which serves the composer in turn. The instruments should always be borne in mind as part of the background to performance. I find it interesting to turn the whole thing around, by constructing an alternative template. Music exists in sound. Instrument makers create the means of producing sound, thereby creating musical possibilities. Performers make themselves adept at getting the best out of those instruments, thereby bringing the work of the instrument makers to life. Composers simply make suggestions as to various ways to get the best out of the instruments. 

I don’t expect any one to agree with this interpretation since it relegates the composer to a less important role. However, this way of looking at it seems to me to be an interesting corrective or means of achieving balance in thinking about what we are doing as performers. 

Finaly, a quick word about the illustration on the facing page. A few days ago, I was astonished to find a copy of the bulletin for the first church service I ever played. I wrote about that two months ago, and at that time never expected to see the program again. (It turned up in a box of items saved by my father.) I have included an excerpt here. I notice something that I didn’t remember: that the piece I played was divided into two sections, placed at two different spots within the service. This is a good example, if we accept that it was effective, of a ritual shape outside of the music itself changing the ways in which the music can work.

More to come . . .

What’s it going to cost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballpark figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reeds

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

Keyboards

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

Climate

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

Casework

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

Console

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

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

What’s the point?

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

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

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

Let the building do the talking.

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

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

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