In the wind . . .

What a winter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But baby, it’s cold outside.

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

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

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

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

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about pitch.

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

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

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

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

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

Mise en place

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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere you go, there you are.

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

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

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

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

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

How to run a railroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real estate rich

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

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

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

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

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

For the sake of the little ones

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

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

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

Turf wars

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

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

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

Row with the oars you have

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

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

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

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

Church bullies

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole package

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

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

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!

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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?

Installation

My son Michael works for an architectural fabrication company in Boston that manufactures design elements for buildings, such as corporate logos with programmed LED displays, sophisticated signage, and art installations. They’ve made signs for Logan Airport in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Public Theater in New York. Recently, Mike built a clock tower that also displays arrival and departure information for installation in the international terminal of Logan Airport. It is in the form of an airplane wing, mounted vertically, and was the gift of Swissair. It is made of aluminum with lots of curved edges and a fancy paint job.

Mike’s work is similar to building organs in that a product is built in a workshop and taken on the road for installation. It also means that father and son get to be tool geeks together.¹ As I have done scores of times in my career, Mike goes on the road with a crew, staying in hotels, eating meals on a per diem budget in restaurants, and dealing with the logistics of getting things done while out of town.

Wendy and I live on East 9th Street in New York City, between Broadway and University Place. It’s in the heart of the campus of New York University, a bustling and colorful place. The other day, HVAC equipment was being delivered to a building up the street. There were signs placed at the beginning of the block (it’s a one-way street) a week ahead of time, saying the street would be closed Saturday and Sunday. Early Saturday morning, a crane arrived, the street was closed, and workers spent two days hoisting the machines to the roof of the five-story building. We live on the tenth floor, so I could look down and see the commotion. I was interested that of the twelve workers on the roof, only two were wearing hard hats.

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Installing a pipe organ is a logistical tour de force. There’s often a lot of work to do on the building to prepare for the organ, creating a blower room, running wind lines, reinforcing floors, painting walls, and installing lighting. It’s fun to make a festival out of the delivery of the organ. Parishioners come to church on Sunday wearing work clothes, the truck arrives as the service ends, and organbuilders and parishioners work together to carry the organ parts into the church. Follow that with a pizza supper, and you’ve got a party and a fun introduction for a new organ in town. 

Some churches have wide driveways and parking lots that allow a big truck to back right up to the door, even sometimes putting the truck’s ramp right into the narthex. But one church where we installed an organ had a steep and winding driveway, and it was impossible to bring the semi-trailer to the door. We had to transfer the organ into a smaller truck and make several trips up the hill. It was a big organ, it was January, it was Wisconsin, and it was snowing. 

In smaller churches, we have the run of the place, taking over the kitchen for making lunches and working without interruption or inconvenience, just making sure that the sanctuary is clear for worship on Sunday. Remote locations can be difficult. We installed a residence organ in far northern Idaho, where it was a two-hour round trip to a hardware store, it took UPS extra days to make deliveries, and the Moose Knuckle Lodge was the only restaurant. Their kitchen had no ovens or fryers, just a griddle and a microwave oven, and we exhausted their menu pretty quickly.

A large, complex, and highly anticipated organ installation is under way now at St. Thomas Church in New York City. Dobson Pipe Organ Builders, Ltd., worked for years with the late John Scott, organist and director of music at St. Thomas, an active organ committee, and consultant Jonathan Ambrosino planning this immense and sophisticated organ. You can read a description and specifications of the organ at http://dobsonorgan.com/html/instruments/op93_newyork.html.

The organ will have 102 stops and will feature an elaborately carved and decorated case on the south wall of the chancel, opposite the magnificent north case designed by Bertram Goodhue for the church’s 1913 Ernest M. Skinner Company organ.

Preparing a stately stone building for the installation of a 64,000-pound pipe organ is a herculean task. The Great and Positiv divisions will be installed in the new case, cantilevered over the choir stalls. In order to keep all that weight from bearing on the church’s stone walls, a huge steel structure has been installed. There are a few spots in the organ where it’s obvious that the structural engineers and the organbuilders had to work together closely to get all that material to fit.

I visited St. Thomas Church the other day where Lynn Dobson and John Panning gave me a tour of the partially assembled organ. All of the windchests were in place, along with wind regulators, ladders, walkboards, and lots of sturdy racks for supporting large pipes. Another truckload of parts and pipes was scheduled to arrive the next day.

St. Thomas Church is on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 53rd Street, one of the busiest neighborhoods in the city. It is halfway between St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Trump Tower, next door to the hyper-popular Museum of Modern Art, and right in the heart of the legendary high-end shopping district. The sidewalks are always packed with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, and the Dobson workers have to unload four, maybe five semi-trailers parked at the sidewalk.

When you’re delivering to a church in a big city, there’s never a loading dock, and you can never put the ramp of a truck on the top step at the church door. You go to City Hall to purchase a parking permit that allows you to put cones on the street, but you still have to watch like a hawk that no one tries to sneak in and park. Five years ago, the Organ Clearing House delivered a three-manual organ to the Church of the Resurrection on East 74th Street and Park Avenue, a much quieter neighborhood than St. Thomas, but we still had to stand with heavy loads on our shoulders while Park Avenue people walked their ten-thousand-dollar dogs along the sidewalks.

And in that church, like most of the places we work, there’s not much going on in the nave during the week, so you can put furniture pads on the pews and stack the whole organ on them early in the week, knowing that most of the big stuff will be up in the chamber before the weekend. St. Thomas Church is open to tourists, and there’s a busy schedule of weekday services. They’ve built a temporary wall closing off a side aisle of the nave to create storage space for organ parts and a workroom for the organbuilders. But there’s not enough space to accommodate all the organ’s components, so the Dobson people have the incredible task of sorting and organizing the myriad parts and pieces so the succession of truck deliveries contain what is needed soonest. Leave one windchest leg at the shop by mistake, and the job could come to a halt.

The truck arrives the night before the scheduled delivery to take advantage of lighter traffic in the wee hours, and an army of workers spends the day carrying components and packages across the sidewalk and up the stairs into the church. The first time I was on such a crew for the installation of the Flentrop organ at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1977, an overseas shipping container was delivered to the sidewalk on Euclid Avenue, and the team spent the entire day carrying the organ up the 20 stone steps to the nave. The organ had come from Rotterdam, across the Atlantic Ocean and up the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Port of Cleveland on a ship named Calliope. 

There follows a ballet of hoisting and rigging. Floor frames, which position the legs of the organ’s structure and ground-level components, are assembled and leveled. The structure is installed and prepared to bear the weight of the windchests, which are then hoisted into place. Workers on the chancel floor are busy teeing up the next few pieces while those in the chambers are turning screws, fastening pieces into their permanent homes. It’s a little like a game of Tetris, with oddly shaped pieces drifting along a pipeline.

At St. Thomas Church, massive towers of scaffolding have been installed on both sides of the chancel. They are partially obscured by safety netting so it is difficult to see the chamber interiors from the floor. But once upstairs, it’s quite a spectacle. As many times as I’ve stood or worked in a partially assembled organ, especially a huge one like this, I still marvel at the process. Where else but in a large organ chamber do you see such a display of human handiwork? The 600-year heritage of organbuilding culminates anew with each installation. All the different functions of a large organ are intermingled into one fantastic whole.

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St. Thomas Church is a landmark for the world of church music. Since 1913 when the present building was opened, along with its new Skinner organ (Opus 205), the organists have been T. Tertius Noble (of free-accompaniment fame), T. Frederick H. Candlyn, William Self, Gerre Hancock, and John Scott. Daniel Hyde is the newly appointed successor to John Scott, whose tenure was sadly cut short by his sudden death.²

According to its website, the St. Thomas Choir School is “the only church-related boarding choir school in the United States, and one of only three of its kind remaining in the world.” The choir has an intense schedule. A recent article about the choir in the New York Times stated that the boys are singing more than 20 hours each week. A look at the church’s calendar makes it clear that the organbuilders have a lot to work around.

The new Dobson organ will be a workhorse, played dozens of hours each week, and heard by tens, even hundreds of thousands of people each year. It will be played by some of the finest organists in the world. It was a thrill to stand inside the partially assembled organ, thinking of all the wonderful music yet to come. I’m grateful to Lynn and John for welcoming me, and I sure look forward to hearing the organ. You can see many photos of the construction and installation of this organ on Lynn Dobson’s and Dobson Pipe Organ Builders’ Facebook pages. It’s worth a ramble!

In recent memory, there has been a string of exciting organ installations in New York, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. James’s Episcopal Church, Christ and St. Stephen’s, Fordham University, Grace Church, Church of the Ascension, Church of the Resurrection, and Marble Collegiate Church. The organ at St. Thomas Church will surely be a thrilling addition to the fleet.

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Social media is a techno-sociological phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. I have an active community on Facebook, which is mostly limited to professionals in the pipe organ world. While sometimes it seems the whole thing is actually a revolution by cats trying to take over the world, for the most part, I find it stimulating and edifying, and a wonderful way to keep in touch with my profession. It is mid-June as I write this column, and in recent weeks I have seen countless posts of church musicians and school music teachers wrapping up their program years.

Students are saying goodbye to their important mentors, young organists are leaving academia to go out into the world, and choir directors are celebrating the bittersweet emotion of saying goodbye and looking forward to a few months with a lighter schedule. Lots of you out there are posting photos taken during year-end choir parties—festive gatherings of close-knit communities celebrating the time they’ve spent together. In many churches, the choir is the busiest volunteer group. While most committees meet monthly, the choir is together in the building twice a week, at least.

A few years ago, the music publisher J. W.
Pepper released a video interview with John Rutter, one of their most celebrated composers. I wrote extensively about that video in the July 2015 issue of The Diapason, and you can see the video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U. I’m reminded of this as I view the year-end posts. John Rutter says:

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

Musical excellence is, of course, at the heart of it, but even if a choir is not the greatest in the world, it has a social value, a communal value. . . . A church or a school without a choir is like a body without a soul.

While I’m not an active sports fan, I have been one for much of my life: my father and I had an unbroken streak of 25 consecutive opening-day games at Fenway Park in Boston, and I understand the value of teamwork in athletics. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why a public school system would cut a music budget in favor of sports. And this has nothing to do with the increasing awareness of the dangerous long-term effects of the more violent sports.

At its root, choral singing is a basic human activity. We must breathe to live, and when we exhale across our vocal chords, we gain the power of speech. If we sustain our speech, sustain our vowel sounds, we’re singing. Voilà! When we’re singing together, we’re exchanging our very breath.  

Many of you are a month away from bringing the choir back together for a new year. It’s not one of life’s frills, and it should never be a chore. “It’s something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls.”

Notes

1. Recently, we were gathering at hotel in western Massachusetts for a family wedding.  Mike arrived at the same time as Wendy and me, and walked over to my car to greet us. My car is a Chevrolet Suburban, which has a long, deep interior, so I’ve made a tool with a hook that helps me pull stuff toward the back where I can reach it. As I fished for a suitcase, Mike laughed and said, “That’s what separates us from the animals.” I think he was comparing me to a chimpanzee using a stick to get ants out of the ground!

2. I wrote about John Scott following his death in the October 2015 issue of The Diapason.

It works for me.

After I graduated from Oberlin, we lived in a rented four-bedroom farmhouse with a huge yard in the rolling countryside a few miles outside the town. Foreshadowing fracking, there was a natural gas well on the property that supplied the house. It was a great place to live, but there were some drawbacks. The gas flowed freely from the well in warm weather, but was sluggish in cold. The furnace was mounted on tall legs because the basement flooded. All the plumbing in the house was in a wing that included kitchen, bathroom, and laundry machines, but the basement didn’t extend under the wing, so the pipes froze in cold weather. 

After a couple winters there, we had wrapped the pipes with electrified heating tape, mastered how to set the furnace to run just enough when the gas well was weak, and learned to anticipate when the basement would flood so we could run a pump and head off the mess. 

Outside, there was a beautiful redbud tree, several huge willows, acres of grass to mow, and the residual effects of generations of enthusiastic gardening. One summer, the peonies on either side of the shed door grew at radically different rates. One was huge and lush while the other was spindly. I was curious until I investigated and found an opossum carcass under the healthy one. Not that you would read The Diapason for gardening tips, but I can tell you that a dead ’possum will work wonders for your peonies!

I wanted to care for that landscape, so I bought an old walk-behind Gravely tractor with attachments. I could swap mower for roto-tiller for snow-blower, and there was a sulky—a two-wheeled trailer with a seat that allowed me to ride behind when mowing. I remember snatching cherry tomatoes off the vines, hot from the sunlight, as I motored past the garden.

I was the only one who could get the Gravely to start, at least I think so, given that I was only one who used it. It had a manual choke that had to be set just so. Then, as I pressed the starter button with my right toe, I’d move the throttle from fully closed to about a quarter open, and the engine would catch. I’d run it at that slow speed for about ten seconds, and it would be ready to work. If I did anything different, it would stall.

The bigger the toys . . .

I learned a lot about machines from Tony Palkovic who lived across the street. He had an excavating business and owned a fleet of huge machines. One weekend I helped him remove the drive wheels from his 110,000-pound Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer to replace the bearings. It involved a couple house jacks and 6-inch open-end wrenches that were eight feet long and weighed a hundred pounds. He used his backhoe to lift the wheels off the axles, not a job for “triple A.” I admired his affinity for his machines, and it was fun to watch him operate them. The way he combined multiple hydraulic movements with his fingertips on the levers created almost human-like motions, and he liked to show off by picking up things like soda cans with the bucket of a 40-ton machine.

The soul of the machine

In The Soul of the New Machine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), author Tracy Kidder follows the development of a new generation of computer technology, and grapples with the philosophical questions surrounding the creation and advances of “high-tech.” We’re beholden to it (witness the lines at Apple stores recently as the new iPhone was released), but we might not be sure if the quality of our lives is actually improved. Yesterday, a friend tweeted, “There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.” Have you ever sat on a rock, talking with a friend, dangling your toes in the water until the rising tide brings the water up to your knees?

There’s a mystical place where soul and machine combine to become a pipe organ. The uninitiated might look inside an organ and see only mechanical mysteries. Many organs are damaged or compromised by uninformed storage of folding chairs and Christmas decorations within. But the organ is a complex machine whose inanimate character must disappear so as not to interfere with the making of music.

Musicians have intimate relationships with their instruments. In Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, page 5), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writes, “When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, in a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” 

No organist can claim such an affinity, not even with the tiniest, most sensitive continuo organ. Steinhardt refers to instruments that you “play at arm’s length.” More usually, the organist sits at a set of keyboards separated from the instrument by at least several feet, and sometimes by dozens or even hundreds of feet. And in the case of electric or electro-pneumatic keyboard actions, he is removed from any direct physical or mechanical connection with the instrument he’s playing. He might as well phone it in.

A pipe organ of average size is a complex machine. A thirty-stop organ has about 1,800 pipes. If it’s a two-manual tracker organ, there are 154 valves controlled by the keys, a system of levers (multiplied by thirty) to control the stops, a precisely balanced action chassis with mechanical couplers, and a wind system with self-regulating valves, along with any accessories that may be included. If it’s a two-manual electro-pneumatic organ, there are 1,800 note valves, 122 manual primary valves (twice that many if it’s a Skinner organ), and hundreds of additional valves for stop actions, bass notes, and accessories.

But the conundrum is that we expect all that machinery to disappear as we play. We work to eliminate every click, squeak, and hiss. We expect massive banks of expression shutters to open and close instantly and silently. We’re asking a ten-ton machine in a monumental space to emulate Arnold Steinhardt’s loving caress. 

It’s a “one-off.”

Most of the machines we use are mass-produced. The car you buy might be the 755,003rd unit built to identical specifications on an automated assembly line. If there’s a defect, each unit has the same defect. But while individual components in an organ, such as windchest actions, might be standardized at least to the instruments of a single builder, each pipe organ is essentially a prototype—one of a kind. The peculiarities of an organ chamber or organ case determine the routes of mechanical actions, windlines, and tuning access. The layout of the building determines where the blower will be located, as well as the relationship between musician and machine.

The design of the instrument includes routing wind lines from blower to reservoirs, and from reservoirs to windchests. Each windchest has a support system: ladders, passage boards, and handrails as necessary to allow the tuner access to all the pipes. An enclosed division has a frame in which the shutters are mounted and a mechanism to open and close the shutters, either by direct mechanical linkage or a pneumatic or electric machine. Some expressive divisions are enclosed in separate rooms of the building with the expression frame and shutters being the only necessary construction, but others are freestanding within the organ, so the organbuilder provides walls, ceiling, access doors, ladders, and passage boards as required. The walls and ceiling are ideally made of a heavy, sound-deadening material so the shutter openings are the only path for egress of sound.

What’s in a tone?

Galileo said, “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.” While it may not be immediately apparent, mathematics is the heart of the magic of organ pipes. Through centuries of experimentation, organbuilders have established “norms” that define the differences between, say, flute tone and principal tone. The physical characteristics of organ pipes that determine their tone are defined using ratios. The “scale” of the pipe is the ratio of the length to the diameter. The “cut-up” that defines the height of a pipe’s mouth is the ratio of mouth height to the mouth width. The “mouth width” is the ratio of mouth width to the circumference. The type and thickness of the metal is important to the tone, so the organbuilder has to calculate, or guess, what material to use in order to achieve just the tone he’s looking for.

Finally, the shape of the pipe’s resonator is a factor. A tapered pipe sounds different from a cylindrical pipe, and the taper is described as a ratio of bottom diameter to top diameter. A square wooden pipe sounds different from a round metal pipe. A stopped wooden pipe sounds different from a capped metal pipe, even if the scales are identical. When comparing the scale of a wood pipe to that of a metal pipe, the easiest criterion is the area of the pipe’s cross section—depth times width of the wood pipe is compared to πr² of the metal pipe. If the results of those two formulas are equal, the scale is the same.

The reason all these factors affect the tone of the pipes is that each different design, each different shape, each different material chosen emphasizes a different set of harmonics. The organbuilder, especially the voicer or the tuner, develops a sixth sense for identifying types of pipes by their sounds. He instantly hears the difference between a wood Bourdon and a metal Gedeckt, or between the very narrow-scale Viole d’Orchestre and the slightly broader Salicional. He can tell the difference between high and low cutup just by listening. Conversely, his intuition tells him which selections of stops, which types of material, what level of wind pressure will produce the best sounding organ for the building.

The keen-eared organist can intuit all this information. Why does a Rohrflöte 8′ sound good with a Koppelflöte 4′? You may not know the physical facts that produce the complementary harmonics, but if you’re listening well, you sure can hear them. Early in my organ studies, a teacher told me not to use a Flute 4′ with a Principal 8′. Fair enough. That’s true in many cases. But it might be magical on a particular organ. Ask yourself if a combination sounds good—if it sounds good, it probably is good.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If the organ is part machine and part mathematics, and the musician is physically separated from the creation of tone, how can it be musical or artistic? How can an organist achieve the sensitivity of a violinist or a clarinetist who have direct physical control over the creation of tone? If you don’t have a good embouchure, you don’t make pretty sounds.

While I’ve talked about mechanisms and the mystical properties of the sound of the pipes driven by their math, we’re still missing something. Without wind, we have nothing but a big pile of wood, metal, and leather. Wind is a lively, living commodity. It has character and life. It’s endlessly variable. Outdoors in the open climate, wind is capricious. Any sailor knows that. You can be roaring along with white water boiling from under your transom, sails and sheets taut, and suddenly you fall flat as the wind dies. Or it shifts direction a few points and instead of drawing you along, it stops you dead.

Inside our organs, we harness the wind. We use electric blowers that provide a strong steady supply of wind, we build windlines and ducts that carry the wind from one place to another without loss through leakage. We design regulators with valves that regulate the wind (we also call them reservoirs because they store the regulated pressurized air), and respond to the demands of the music by allowing air to pass through as the valves open and the speaking pipes demand it, and our windchest actions operate those valves as commanded by the keyboards under the hands of the musician.

When you’re sitting on the bench, or inside the organ chamber, and the organ blower is off, the whole thing is static, inanimate. It’s like the violin or clarinet resting on padded velvet inside a locked case. I’ve always loved the moment when the blower is turned on when I’m inside an organ. You hear the first rotations of the motor, the first whispers of air stirring from the basement, and a creak or two as reservoirs fill and the springs pull taut. Hundreds of things are happening. When the blower is running at full speed and all the reservoirs have filled, the organ is alive and expectant—waiting to be told what to do. And at the first touch of the keyboard, the music begins.

Defining the indefinable

Once we’re playing, we enter the world of metaphysics. Intellectually, we understand how everything is functioning, but philosophically, we can hardly believe it’s true. Combinations of stops blend to create tone colors that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Peculiarities of acoustics create special effects heard in one location, but nowhere else. The motion of the air is apparent in the sound of the pipes, not, as a wag might quip, because faulty balance or low supply makes the wind wiggle, but because that air is alive as it moves through the organ’s appliances.

It’s that motion of wind that gives the organ soul. This is why the sounds of an electronic instrument can never truly equal those of the pipe organ. Sound that is digitally reproduced and funneled through loudspeakers can never have life. The necessary perfection of repetition of electronic tone defies the liveliness of the pipe organ. Just like the mouth-driven clarinet, it’s impossible that every wind-driven organ pipe will sound exactly the same, every time it’s played. It’s the millions of nearly imperceptible variations that give the thing life.

This starts to explain how the most mechanical and apparently impersonal of musical instruments can respond differently to the touch of different players. I’ve written several times about our experience of attending worship on Easter Sunday at St. Thomas’s Church in New York, when after hearing different organists playing dozens of voluntaries, hymns, responses, and accompaniments, the late John Scott slid onto the bench to play the postlude. The huge organ there is in questionable condition and soon to be replaced, but nonetheless, there was something about the energy passing through Scott’s fingers onto the keys that woke the gale that is the organ’s wind system and set the place throbbing. It was palpable. It was tangible. It was indescribable, and it was thrilling.

§

My friend Tony cared about his machines, not just because they were the tools with which he made his living, but because their inanimate whims responded to his understanding. We survived in that beguiling but drafty and imperfect house because as we loved it, we got to know it, and outsmarted most of its shortcomings. And I had lots of fun with that old Gravely, taking care of it, coaxing it to start, and enjoying the results of the mechanical effort.

Tony’s D-9 moved dirt—lots of dirt. But the sound of the organ moves me. And because I see it moving others, it moves me more. It’s all about the air.

Experts

In a suburb of Boston, there’s a three-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I rebuilt in the 1990s. It’s an electro-pneumatic organ built in the 1920s that had received a full-blown tonal revision in the 1960s, when American organbuilding decreed that eight-foot tone was no longer desirable. You know the drill. Strings were cut down to become mutations, an eight-foot Diapason was converted to the fattest Chimney Flute you’ve ever seen, and the resulting specification looked something like a cross between a Schnitger and a Schlicker. The organ was installed across the rear gallery at a time when the church had no choir, and access from the stairs to the console was a narrow, short, awkward passage through the organ, past an electro-pneumatic relay, over a few windlines, and a serious duck under the façade’s impost. The organist had hung a sign there that read, “Smack Head Here.”

We did a big job there that involved a new structure and new windchests intended to allow easier access to the gallery for musicians—there’s a choir now—and to allow easier access for maintenance. The church’s organist was a good friend and an excellent, imaginative musician who had been there for many years, and with whom I had lots of fun until his untimely death.

After a couple false starts with new musicians who didn’t last very long, the church was happy to announce they had engaged a young woman with strong credentials, especially as a choral conductor. When I met her, I was disappointed to realize that her keyboard experience was limited to the piano. She had no experience playing the organ at all. She asked me some questions about the stop knobs, such as, “What are these for?” I gave her a quick introduction to the art of registration, and offered to introduce her to colleagues who were good organ teachers. She responded that she didn’t think it was a big deal, and she’d pick it up naturally.

The American Idol syndrome

In the last several years, “reality TV” has taken a strong place in our entertainment life. There are a number of shows that focus on creating stars. I don’t watch them, so I don’t really know the difference from one to the other (maybe you think that means I’m not qualified to write about them!), but I do see contestants, ostensibly selected through earlier auditions and winnowing, performing in front of studio audiences and panels of judges. I’m sure that many of the finalists, who automatically become huge stars, are legitimately talented and well trained, but from what little I’ve seen, I know that plenty of them have learned their acts by imitating others. Through decades as a church musician, having been married to a singer, and friends with many others, I know enough about singing to tell when someone is well trained—or not.

Like that newly hired musician who didn’t think organ registration was such a big deal, I have the sense that our culture is accepting of the idea that great performers “just happen,” implying that there’s no real need to actually learn how to do something. Why should we study if we can answer any question by Googling with our phones? Why should we attend a conservatory of music if we can “just pick it up?”

I’ve been reflecting on expertise, on the concepts of excellence and the sense of assurance that comes with the intense education and practice that fosters them. Of course, I think of my many colleagues, who as organists sit at a console as though it were an extension of their bodies, whose manual and pedal techniques are strong enough that once a piece is learned, there’s no need to raise concern about notes. You know it when you see it. Playing from memory is accepted as the normal way to play. Several times now, I’ve seen an organist come to town to play a recital, spending days registering complicated pieces on an unfamiliar organ, but never opening a score—in fact, not even bringing a score into the building.

A great thing about the human condition is that we don’t have to limit ourselves to appreciating great skill in any one field. Whenever I encounter excellence, whenever I witness someone performing a complicated task with apparent ease, I’m moved and excited. 

Everyday and ordinary

There are lots of everyday things we witness that require special skills. In our work at the Organ Clearing House, we frequently ask professional drivers to thread a semi-trailer through the eye of a needle, driving backwards and around corners. It’s not a big deal if you know how to do it. And when I’m in the city, I’m aware of delivery drivers and the difficult work they have to do. Think of that guy who delivers Coke to convenience stores, driving a semi-trailer in and out of little parking lots all day, and all the opportunities he has to get into trouble.

I once saw a video of a heavy equipment operator cutting an apple into four equal pieces with a paring knife that was duct-taped to the teeth of a backhoe bucket. Take that, William Tell! If you want to get a sense of the skill involved in operating a crane, go to YouTube, search for “crane fail,” and watch some clips that show skill lacking. You’ll have a new appreciation for the operator who makes a heavy lift without tipping his machine over and dropping his load.

Where we live in Maine, there are lots of lobstermen. Their boats are heavy workhorses, usually thirty or forty feet long, with powerful diesel engines, and plenty of heavy gear on board. It’s not a big deal because it’s an everyday and ordinary part of their lives, but I marvel at how easily they approach a crowded dock. Recently I saw one fisherman run his boat sideways into a slot on a dock—imagine the equivalent in a car as an alternative to parallel parking.

Any homeowner will know the difference between a plumber with skill and one without. If he goes home wet, he needs to go back to school. And you want to hire a painter whose clothes are not covered with paint. If he’s covered with paint, so are your carpets.

I appreciate all of those people who do work for us, and love watching anyone doing something that they’re really good at.

Going to pot

One of my earliest memories witnessing excellence came from a potter named Harry Holl on Cape Cod, near where our summer home was when I was a kid. His studio was set up as a public display in a rustic setting surrounded by pine trees and lots of exotic potted plants. He always had apprentices, interns, and associates around, so there was lots of action. There was a row of pottery wheels arranged under a translucent fiberglass ceiling, so there was lots of sunlight in which to work. Clay was stored in great cubes. They were roughly the size of sacks of cement, so I suppose they weighed seventy-five or a hundred pounds. There was shelf after shelf of large plastic jars full of glazes in the form of powder. It was a favorite family outing to drop in there to see what was going on, maybe buy a coffee mug, then stop for ice cream on the way home.

Harry’s work is easily recognizable. For example, the signature shape of his coffee mugs is both beautiful and practical. It seems almost silly to say that his mugs are easy to drink from, but it’s true—the shape fits your lips, so there’s seldom a drip. That’s simply not true of every mug.

Harry Holl’s art is most recognizable through his glazes. He studied with a Japanese ceramicist whose experimentation with glazes inspired Harry. A material common in much of his work is black sand that’s found at a particular beach on the Cape. Harry would go there with shovel and buckets to harvest the stuff, and go home to blend it into the colored glazes. Firing the glaze in a kiln results in beautiful black speckles that enhance the rich colors.

The best part of witnessing the work of this unique artist was seeing him at the wheel. He wore leather sandals and a long gray beard. His hands and forearms were deeply muscled. And the relationship between his eyes and his hands was miraculous. He’d drop a lump of clay on wheel, wet his hands, and caress the lump into the center of the spinning wheel. With one hand cupped and the other thumb down, a coffee mug would sprout from the lump—and another, and another. Or you’d watch a five-pound lump of clay turn into twelve dinner plates or cereal bowls, measured quickly with a well-worn caliper as they sprouted. 

Other signature pieces were beautiful pitchers, bird feeders, birdbaths, and lamps. The Harry Holl lamp that my parents gave me as a wedding present thirty-five years ago is sitting on my desk as I write. And on the dinner table most evenings we use the dinner plates they gave Wendy and me as a house-warming present when we moved into our home in Maine.

Dodging the draft

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who works with writers, helping them sell manuscripts to publishers. One who stands out is Donald Hall, who has written hundreds of poems, essays, and books. He has written extensively about countless subjects—I think he’s particularly good with baseball (the most poetic of team sports), and he has written insightfully and eloquently about Work—comparing his work as a writer to that of his farmer grandfather, to sculptors, and other strong craftsmen. I recommend his book, Life Work, published by the Beacon Press.

His most recent publication is the essay, Three Beards, published in the online version of The New Yorker magazine. Read it at www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/three-beards.html. It starts:

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did.

Donald Hall’s writing is mesmerizing. It lilts along like a piece of music, casually using words we all know but never use, using them as parts of common speech just like they should be. When’s the last time you used the word raffish? You might imagine the brilliant old man—did I mention that he’s eighty-four years old?—whacking away on a computer keyboard, words flying across the screen like a stock ticker. But you’d be wrong. He writes in longhand on a tablet. And he wrote fifty-five drafts of this essay. Fifty-five!

I do a lot of writing, but I seldom write new drafts. Rather, I take the easy route and reread what I’ve written, editing on the screen as I go. A good final trick before hitting “Send” is to read a piece aloud to myself. That’s when I find I’ve used the same word twice in a paragraph, and that’s how I tell if something reads awkwardly. But fifty-five drafts? 

Hall’s fifty-five drafts are what makes it sound as though he writes in a flash, and when I read something of his aloud, it sounds like a friend talking to me.

For the birds

Another of Wendy’s clients whose work I admire is Kenn Kaufman, an ornithologist and chronicler of nature. He has little formal education—he dropped out of school as a teenager to hitchhike around the country building a “Big Year” list of bird species. His book Kingbird Highway (published by Houghton Mifflin) is the memoir of that experience. He traveled 20,000 miles, crisscrossing to take advantage of the particular times when rare species are most easily seen. Part of that experience was meeting a girl who lived in Baltimore and shared his passion for birds. While Kenn’s parents had allowed his crazy sojourn, Elaine’s father was more protective, and when Kenn was leaving her area to go to Maine for a round-trip on the ferry Bluenose, known to promise the best sightings of pelagic (open ocean) birds, Elaine’s father seemed unlikely to allow it.

Kenn writes that he slept in the woods the night before his boat trip, and when he arrived at the terminal, there she was, having found a way to get from Baltimore to down-east Maine on her own. He wrote: “If I could have looked down the years then, and seen everything from beginning to end—the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce—I still would not have traded anything for that moment.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a more eloquent or concise story of a love affair and marriage than that.

I’ve stood next to Kenn on the shore of the ocean, looking across an empty black sky, and Kenn rattles off the birds he sees. Have you ever heard of Confusing Fall Warblers, thirty or so different species that all look alike, and whose plumage is completely different at different times of the year? They don’t confuse Kenn. And I’m fond of the accurate scientific birding term, LBJs. Translation? Little Brown Jobs. Ask Kenn.

During his “Big Year,” Kenn realized that identifying birds is interesting and fun, but not very meaningful if you don’t know anything about them. He has observed, researched, and written about the lifestyles and habits of all the species. His book, Lives of North American Birds (Houghton Mifflin), looks like a reference tome, but it’s a wonderful read. And his field guides are handy, interesting, informative, and in a single paragraph description of a bird, Kenn inserts humor, sarcasm, and simple pleasure along with the facts.

Sitting with Kenn at a dinner table, or better yet, in the woods and fields or at the beach, I’m amazed and impressed by the depth of his knowledge, experience, and appreciation of his subjects.

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts
when I do this.

I know, I know, don’t do that.

In the June issue of The Diapason, I wrote about safety in the interior of pipe organs, and finished by describing the collapse of a 130-year-old ladder that dropped me six feet to land on my back—the experience that taught me once and for all that the older we get, the less we like falling. Oof! 

I described my encounter with EMTs, two of whom had grown up in that particular church, and all of whom agreed that my weight, when coupled with the lack of an elevator, was an issue for them. (I had a similar experience after a vehicle accident in 1979, when an overweight female EMT grunted from her end of the stretcher, “J____ C_____, is he heavy!”) I wrote about an ambulance ride across the river from Cambridge to Boston, and a long afternoon in the emergency room (thanks to Wendy for that long and supportive sit), ending with the news that I had a cracked vertebra.

That seemed to be healing well until a month later, when pain shot down my right leg and my right foot went numb. A herniated disc had pinched my sciatic nerve, and the shrill pain could have been described as stabbing, except for the fact that it was constant. It lasted four weeks.

My current favorite encounter with deep skill and knowledge was my brief relationship with an orthopedic surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, just blocks from our apartment. After an unpleasant visit with a specialist at another hospital, this was my quest for a second opinion. The guy walked into the room looking like a million bucks, dressed in a well-tailored suit and nicely matched, stylish, and colorful shirt and tie. He greeted me as though he cared how I felt, shared and explained my X-ray and MRI images, and then drew a terrific cartoon of “my” spine, naming the vertebra, showing exactly the issue that was causing the pain. Later when I was being prepped for surgery, one of the medical students (my doctor is a professor at the Harvard Medical School) said that he is famous for those drawings.

The doctor assured me that the surgery was simple and predictable, and that I could expect the pain to diminish quickly afterwards. In fact, when I awoke from anesthesia, the pain was gone. Simply gone. And two hours later I walked out of the hospital.

I could feel his confidence the moment I met him. His professional manner was both comforting and reassuring. He certainly has studied his subject. I’m so glad he didn’t think he’d be just be able to “pick it up.” He’s given me my leg back. His name is Andrew White, and if you’ve got trouble with your spine, you should go see him. Tell him I sent you.

A writer’s best friend

I’ve written here about a couple writers I admire, both of whom I met through my wife Wendy who is their literary agent, and who edits their work. She has edited many of our renowned and beloved writers, and she works hard to keep me honest. Late one afternoon, I was walking to her office in Boston to meet her after work, and ran into one of her clients, an admired juvenile judge—we had met recently at a party. He was carrying his latest manuscript in a shoe box, and said to me, “She’s given me so much work to do!”

I’ve learned from Wendy the value of a good editor. And it has been a privilege and pleasure to work with Jerome Butera, editor of The Diapason. My file shows that I wrote In the wind… for the first time in April of 2005. That makes this the one-hundredth issue of my column that has passed through Jerome’s hands. At 2,500 words a pop, that’s 2,500,000 words, which is a lot of shoveling. Through all that, Jerome has worked with me with grace, humor, friendship, and an occasional gentle jab. I value and honor his judgment, guidance, and support. Many of you readers may not be aware of his presence over so many years. Take it from me that Jerome’s contribution to the life and world of the modern American pipe organ is second to none, and the equal of any. Best of luck and happiness to you, Jerome, and thanks for all your help.

And welcome to Joyce Robinson, who has been there for years, learning the ropes while sitting next to the master. We’re looking forward to lots more fun. Best to you, Joyce, and many thanks. Here’s hoping you have a fun ride.