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.

What’s it going to cost?

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

Ballpark figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reeds

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

Keyboards

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

Climate

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

Casework

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

Console

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

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

What’s the point?

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

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

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

Let the building do the talking.

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

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

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

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.

As I drove I thought about various aspects of the world of the church organ

The magic machine, 

The power of Aeolus, 

Combined for worship.

Recently I’ve spent a couple long days in my car traveling to visit churches that are working to acquire pipe organs. It’s fun to talk with people who are excited about the future of their churches, and who are devoted to the power and beauty of great music in worship. I’m energized by those conversations. They are great opportunities to review what led me to spend my life with the organ, and to refresh my own philosophies about the majesty of our instrument, its origins, its purposes, and its uses. I love going into a building for the first time, learning how the local musicians and clergy use their building, and imagining how a new organ could enhance the life of the place. Yesterday I drove more than 600 miles for two of those meetings.  

Yesterday was also the day that Boston and surrounding communities were on alert because of the massive hunt for the surviving suspect in the bombing at the Boston Marathon. This story was personal—thankfully not because anyone I know was directly affected, but because it was our city, our neighborhood. Coverage on television showed the roads we drive, places we shop, places we take recreational and exercise walks, even trees I recognized. My son Mike and his girlfriend Nicole live close to the site of the horrific firefight in which one of the suspects was killed. A dog that’s afraid of thunder sure doesn’t like gunfire, and their household was up in the middle of the night experiencing all that terror first hand.

Being something of a news junkie, as I drove I fired up my iPhone to stream coverage from WBUR—the excellent NPR news station in Boston—whose reporters predictably droned on all day, whether or not they had any new information to share. There may have been fighting in Syria, protests over gun control, even a horrible deadly explosion in Texas, but you would have thought that Boston was the only city in the world for that one day. Having listened to that for the first 300 miles, after my first meeting I changed gears and switched to a great collection of organ music I keep at the iTips of my iFingers, and hurtled through the Poconos savoring the great heritage of our instrument.

The powerful music in my ears combined with reflections on the day’s great conversations and as I drove I thought about various aspects of the world of the church organ. 

Is tracker action

Or electro-pneumatic

Better for good sound?

I grew up in Boston during the height of the revival of tracker action in pipe organs, and was sure that a good clear tracker-action instrument was the one true form. I was in my twenties and working on renovating an Aeolian-Skinner organ when I started to understand the merits of a first-rate electro-pneumatic action. Later, when I was curator of the mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Church in Boston—a few hundred feet from the finish line of the Boston Marathon—I had the rich experience of hearing a different artist play the same instrument each week on the popular “Fridays at Noon” series. I was amazed to realize how many different ways there are to approach a single instrument, and how different the organ could sound from one week to the next.

Today I’m not able to name a favorite type of organ. I’m interested in good organs that are well chosen and effectively designed to meet the needs of the congregations that buy them, and to enhance the buildings into which they are installed.

Good registrations,

Not formulaic, better

Chosen for their sounds.

Give the same collection of tubes of paint to a succession of different artists, and you’ll get a succession of approaches to color. Place a succession of musicians on the same organ bench and you’ll get a wide variety of approaches. I’ve written before, and recently, about my dislike of formulaic registrations. Why do so many different people play the same piece with similar registrations? Why does one organist draw the same list of stops for a given piece, no matter what organ he’s playing? “I can’t play that piece here, there’s no two-foot.” Baloney. Learn to listen. And learn to hear. Find stops that sound good. If you have good taste and you listen, you can’t go wrong. The ghost of François Couperin is not going to rattle chains in your bedroom if you add a Principal, an Oboe, or a colorful flute to the Grand Jeu. 

Choruses of reeds

Add color, pizzazz, beauty,

Bring music to life.

“When they are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are horrid.” I care for an organ in Boston that has lots of beautiful flutes, terrific well-developed Principal choruses, rich Cornets, and lousy reeds. They are thin and harsh sounding. They resist tuning, and will hold pitch until my car leaves the block. The variety is disappointing—the Oboe sounds like a Trumpet—and to my ears they detract from the effect of the organ. It sounds great until you draw a reed.

A good chorus or two of Trumpets, a powerful Trombone, a contrasting softer sixteen-foot reed, and a couple colorful solo reeds like Oboe, Clarinet, or English Horn can transform an organ from ordinary to magical. Well-made reeds, well maintained, dominate the personality of any great organ.  

The great organbuilder Charles Fisk left us an apocryphal definition for a reed: “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.” Reeds are tricky. They’re expensive. They can be moody. And they’re wildly affected by outside forces like humidity and cleanliness. They’re the Venus Fly Traps of the pipe organ. Because they’re shaped like funnels, hapless flying creatures often their way in and can’t get out. And the leg of a moth or common housefly is more than enough to leave a hole in a melody.

If you love pipe organ reeds and haven’t heard the terrific organ at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, you’re nuts. Get there. Reed tongue magician Manuel Rosales has festooned the instrument with the most exciting and colorful collection of reeds in captivity. Everywhere you look on those stop jambs there’s another cool-sounding Spanish word that translates to “fire.”

Ernest Skinner gave American organists a new vocabulary of reeds. He listened to the symphony orchestra and tinkered in his voicing room to create the Orchestral Oboe, the Flugel Horn, and his signature contribution, the French Horn. Boy, does a Skinner French Horn ever make an instrument special.

Temperature change

Pulls the pitch of the Organ 

Like a rubber band.

A rising tide floats all boats, and a rising thermometer hikes all flue pipes. While the flues change pitch with the temperature, the reeds stay still. Because there are fewer reeds than flues, we tune the reeds to follow the pitch of the organ. The more often we tune the reeds, the less stable they become.

The outstanding Trinity Choir at Trinity Church in Boston is renowned for the magnificent Candlelight Carols services they offer each year during the Christmas season; during my time with that organ, Brian Jones and the choir planned to make a recording based on that service that has since become a perennial favorite and best-seller. In order to be able to release the recording in time for the Christmas shopping season, the recording sessions happened in July. In a big center-city location like Copley Square with heavy traffic and the rumble of subway trains, it’s necessary to make recordings in the middle of the night. There was a heat wave. I remember lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, and sweating while listening to the most glorious of Christmas music. It was surreal. 

It was also a conundrum. Of course, Brian and associate organist Ross Wood wanted the reeds to be right in tune with the organ, but the instrument’s pitch was so high because of the extreme temperature (it was 100 degrees in the Solo box) the poor old reeds just didn’t want to go. The tuning wires were moved down on the reeds so as to reduce the curves of the tongues and stifle the sound of the pipes. What a challenge.

Like a rubber band, the organ’s pitch returns to normal with the temperature. If the organ is tuned at A=440 at 68 degrees, it will always go back to that, no matter how high or how low it has gone. Try not to over-tune your organ. If you can put up with the reeds being below the pitch of the rest of the organ for the summer, leave it be. Stretch a rubber band too many times, and it deforms or snaps.

Careful thought, good taste.

Everything in the right place,

Nothing too strident.

Perhaps the most famous of all reed stops is the State Trumpet in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. That one set of pipes must have thrilled more people than any other organ stop in the world. The trouble is, it has also influenced some of the most poorly chosen organ stops. When the State Trumpet hit the airways, every organist wanted one, and shrill, tinny, piercing “pea shooters” were installed in some of the most intimate churches.

Seems they forgot that the cathedral holds more than fifteen million cubic feet of air. In New York City, north-south blocks are 260 feet—twenty to a mile. The interior of St. John the Divine is over 600 feet. That’s the distance between the front doors of St. Thomas Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, kiddy-corner between 51st and 53rd Streets.

The sound of that powerful organ voice echoes around in that vast space as if it belongs there. There’s a good reason for that. It does. Take a look at this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxBzAfmLiM. Listen to the exclamation of the guy holding the camera. But don’t try this at home. Someone might get hurt.

(By the way, I often include links to websites, photos, and videos in my writing to illustrate my points. I don’t know if I’ve ever said directly that I expect you to look them up. I think you’ll enjoy this one. It’s grand. And don’t worry that those singing nearby are not always with the organ. After all, it’s a block away.)

The First Congregational Church in Anytown, USA might hold eighty thousand cubic feet. Think it through, people. There’s such a thing as big-city organ music, and we don’t need to do it in every church. I’ve seen those nasty little en chamades mounted on balcony rails not five feet over the heads of the unsuspecting bridesmaids.

In some churches, a sweet and gentle-sounding organ is a treasure. Loud music is not, by definition, beautiful music. Funny, not everyone knows that.

Good craftsmanship sings.

Sloppy work makes sloppy sounds.

Sharpen your tools, please.

A dull saw won’t cut straight. A dull drill bit tears at the wood. A dull chisel crushes fine wood grain rather that cutting. And a dull mind produces dull thoughts. When restoring a smashing organ by E. & G.G. Hook I was deeply impressed by the precision of the pencil marks left by the woodworkers. The men in that workshop sure knew how to sharpen a pencil. A pencil line that’s a sixteenth of an inch wide gives a margin of error of an eighth. And if you cut a piece of wood an eighth of an inch too short, you’re fired.

Laypeople visiting a new organ often comment that they didn’t realize that people still have the skills of “old world” craftsmen. They see raised panels mounted in mortise-and-tenon frames, carvings and moldings, checkering and inlays worthy of the finest royal chambers. It’s thrilling to visit an organ shop where keyboards, casework, and wood and metal pipes are made. Great organbuilders have deep affinity for their materials. They choose the finest wood and purest metals, and work the stuff with respect and care. Measurements are precise, tools are sharp, cuts are clean, square, and accurate. It’s a pleasure to watch.

If the interior of an organ looks chaotic, it probably sounds that way.

Neatness in public.

Institutional hygiene,

A common shortfall.

Servicing pipe organs can be like cleaning other peoples’ bathrooms. Sometimes I think that if all the organists in the world suddenly disappeared, the companies that make and sell Kleenex™, cough drops, dental floss, hairbrushes, nail clippers, and Post-Its™ would instantly go out of business. An organ console in a worship space should not be considered a private office or place of refuge, especially if it’s visible from the pews. Nail clippers, really? Are you using them during worship? Imagine that distant snip–snip–snip during the sermon.

One organist I worked with, now deceased, had very long gray hair. It was routine for notes in the pedalboard to go dead because of being clogged like a bathtub drain.  

Lots of organists keep a special pair of shoes just for playing the organ. Some prefer especially supple petite shoes, some prefer slick soles or raised heels. Besides the pedagogic reasons for organ shoes, think of the guy who tramps through snow, ice, slush, and salt to get from his car to the church door, and sits down at the organ with dripping shoes. You can be sure he’ll be calling the technician to fix dead notes in the pedals.

And coffee cups. A ten-ounce cup of coffee can do a number on a stack of keyboards, especially if there’s sugar in it. I’m not making this stuff up.

The custodian finds that inside the door of the organ chamber is a great place to store a vacuum cleaner and extension cord. And there was the organist who called saying the organ was “sounding funny,” when the custodian had left a bucket of dirty mop-water on the reservoir. Let’s see, a gallon of water weighs about eight pounds, five ounces. A couple of them plus the weight of the bucket is enough to double the wind pressure in a low-pressure organ. And what if it spills . . . 

There was the Saturday morning emergency call from the organist saying that the church was full of people, bagpipes were playing, the bride and groom were ready, and the organ wouldn’t play. The lights came on with the blower switch, but not sound. Now that’s a real emergency because the bagpipes won’t stop until I get there. There was a card table up against the air intake of the blower.

I came up with the phrase institutional hygiene during a consultation trip. I was struck by how orderly everything was. Kitchen cupboards were immaculate, closets were neatly organized. All of the desks in all of the offices were trim and efficient, waste baskets were empty, gardens were cultivated and weeded. There was no huge stash of treasures left from last year’s rummage sale, and the Christmas pageant costumes were nicely hung on hangers. You didn’t have to move a pile of boxes to service the organ blower. I commented on this in the written report that I prepare at the conclusion of each consultation, and the music director wrote back to me that a previous pastor had purposefully established neatness as a feature of the life of the parish.

Rambling through thoughts,

Combining memories with

Fresh observations.

When I walk by myself for recreation and exercise, I often carry index cards so I can write down my thoughts. It’s so easy to come up with the perfect idea for solving a problem or the perfect phrase for a business letter, promise myself I’ll remember it, and then lose it altogether. That’s something I can’t do when I’m driving. I’ve tried Siri™, the oddball virtual assistant left to us by a cynical Steve Jobs, to record verbal reminders. (You can hold a button on your iPhone, summoning a quirky female voice asking if she can help.) But simple as it is to use, I know it’s bad to do while driving alone. Besides, the noises of the motion of the car seem to confuse her.

The organ is a deep and rich subject.  It has a terrific heritage. I hope I can live up to it.

The most important reason for assessing the value of a pipe organ is for the purpose of determining appropriate insurance coverage

What’s it worth?

When my kids were growing up, we were active in a small inland sailing club that ran weekly races from April to October. My son Michael was part of a group of five boys of the same age who were great competitors—one of them went on to race and win in the Olympics—and the five fathers had a blast supporting the boys as they competed in regattas in the fabled yacht clubs up and down the Massachusetts coast.  

Our club was a modest place—annual membership was less than five hundred dollars, and even when I had been elected commodore, I was not immune from the regular chore of cleaning up after the geese that occupied the docks whenever we were not on the premises. Many of the clubs we visited for races were rich and formal affairs, with stewards in uniform, and clubhouses with catering kitchens that could handle high-society wedding receptions. One breezy afternoon, my sailing-dad buddies and I were sitting in a boat in Marblehead Harbor doing duty on the safety committee, seaward of the mooring area that is home to some of the most beautiful pleasure boats in the area, and I commented that there must be a half-billion dollars tied to those moorings.

It seems as though we are preoccupied with the value of things. “That purse must have cost a thousand bucks.” “He has a million-dollar house and a hundred-thousand-dollar car.” “That organ cost forty-grand a stop.”

The other day I received a call from someone at a wrecking company in a big midwestern city. His company was about to demolish a church building and the diocese wanted bids for dismantling and preserving the organ, a 25-stop instrument built in the 1890s. He assured me that the organ was “one of the 20 best in the country, worth at least a half-million dollars.” I didn’t want the conversation to end prematurely so I kept my thoughts to myself. It would certainly cost a half-million dollars to build the same organ today, but the actual cash value is more like $25,000. It’s worth what someone would pay for it.

When you reflect on the thousands of hours it takes craftsmen to build a fine organ, and the tons of expensive materials involved, it’s hard to accept that an organ would be worth so little, but at the risk of over-simplifying, there are two basic reasons: the high cost of renovating and relocating a pipe organ, and the huge number of redundant organs available around the United States and abroad.

You must remember this . . . 

Yesterday there was an auction at Sotheby’s in New York and a funny-looking piece of movie-prop memorabilia sold for $500,000—plus $102,000 in commissions. It’s a good thing it was a black-and-white movie, because I doubt the sickly green-and-yellow paint job would have added to the poignancy of the moment. As a musical instrument, the Casablanca piano is hardly more than a ruse. It has only fifty notes; it’s barely the height of a cheap spinet. A short video on the website of the New York Times showed artists playing it in an opulent room at Sotheby’s—it looked a little like an adult riding a tricycle. And in the famous scene with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (listening to “As Time Goes By”), the guy at the piano wasn’t even really playing. Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, was a drummer, crooning to the accompaniment of an offstage instrument while he pretended to play. Of course, the scene wouldn’t have worked if it were a full-size upright (like the one off which Lauren Bacall dangled her famous gams in front of Harry Truman¹) because the actors would have been hidden behind it.

I understand that the handsome price paid for the piano was not based on its artistic value. But in a world in which a cheap toy instrument would claim such a grand sum, and a magnificent pipe organ would be pretty much worthless, how do we assess and justify the value of a pipe organ?

How much per stop?

Think of a prospective home buyer calling a realtor and asking how much does an eight-room house cost? The realtor responds with a list of variables: how many acres of land, how many fireplaces, is there a swimming pool, central air, master bedroom suite, water view, three-car heated garage . . .? These are all basic questions that would have a big effect on the value of an otherwise simply described house. And we haven’t touched questions like new kitchen, Jacuzzi, great room with cathedral ceilings, or theater seats with cup-holders.

Asking an organbuilder “how much per stop” is equally meaningless. For fun, let’s think about an organ with three manuals and 60 stops. It might be located in a chamber with a simple façade of zinc pipes sprayed with gold paint. Compare it to what must be the most famous visual image of a pipe organ, the one built by Christian Müller in the St. Bavokerk in Haarlem, the Netherlands—you know, the one with the lions on top. (It actually has 62 stops, no borrows!) Imagine what it would cost to build that case today. Two million bucks, three million? I have no idea. But let’s say it would be two and a half million, and divide that by the number of stops. The case alone would cost $40,322.58 per stop. And we haven’t made a single tracker. Add forty grand per stop for the organ itself and we’re over eighty. Woot!²

It’s common to hear people in pipe organ circles talking about how a new organ cost “so much” per stop. It’s typically a prominent instrument in a central church or concert hall where the price of the organ has been publicized—or leaked. When the local newspaper publishes the “three-point-five” price tag of the organ, the smart organist looks at the specifications, does the math, and comes up with “so much” per stop.

I think that it’s counterproductive, even destructive, to refer to the cost of an organ as “so much” per stop. If an organist mentions at church that the organ in Symphony Hall cost fifty-grand per stop, the church looks at its 20-stop organ as a million-dollar asset, and worse, vows never to consider acquiring a new pipe organ. They fail to realize that the simple organ in their church would cost a fraction as much to replace.

Get real.

There are many factors that contribute to the price of an organ in the same way that a sunken living room affects the value of a house. Let’s consider a few of them.

There are plenty of organs out there that don’t have “swell boxes,” so we should consider the independent cost of building one. (We almost always call them swell boxes, even if they actually enclose a Choir, Positiv, Solo, or Echo division. “Expression enclosure” is a more accurate term.) A free-standing expression enclosure in an organ chamber might be something like a 10- or 12-foot cube of heavy hardwood construction. There’s a bank of shutters, carefully built and balanced, that are operated by a sophisticated motor. Consider the challenge of building a machine that can operate a thousand pounds of venetian blinds in the blink of an eye, silently. A well-designed and built expression enclosure might add $50,000 to the cost of an organ. And some organs have three or four of them.

When you’re counting stops on a published list, they all take up the same amount of space. But in reality, you can house hundreds of 61-note Tierces in the space it takes to mount a single octave of 16′ pipes. (The largest pipe in a Tierce is not much bigger than a paper towel tube.) Think of a 20-stop organ with a Pedal division that’s based on a 16′ Subbass, then add a 16′ Principal as the twenty-first stop. That one extra stop doubles the size of the organ’s case, increases the organ’s wind requirements by 40 or 50 percent, and increases the scope of the instrument in just about every way. Maybe that one stop increases the price of the organ by $100,000, or even $200,000, which then is divided over the total number of stops to achieve the fabled “so much” per stop.

Take it a step further and think of a 32-footer. A 32′ Double Open Diapason made of wood is worth a quarter of a million dollars when you combine the cost of pipes, windchests, racks and supports, and wind supply. The twelve largest pipes fill a large portion of a semi-trailer, and the cost of shipping, hoisting and rigging, and just plain lugging is hard to calculate. One large pipe might weigh a half-ton or more. Stops like this are relatively rare because they’re so expensive and they take up so much space—but most of the big concert hall organs have them. So that impressive “so much” per stop you read about in the paper includes dividing the cost of Big Bertha the Diapason across the rest of the stops. The price of the Tierce went up by ten grand.

When the Organ Clearing House is preparing to dismantle a pipe organ, we arrange for scaffolding and hoisting equipment, packing materials, truck transportation, and we figure the number of pipe trays we’ll need. We build trays that are eight-feet by two-feet and eight-inches deep. We usually figure one-and-three-quarter trays per real stop, which allows enough space to pack the pipes, small parts, shutters, and the odds-and-ends we call “chowder.” That figure works for lots of organs. A four- or five-rank Mixture fits in one tray, an 8′ string fits in one or two trays (low EE of an 8′ stop fits in the eight-trays), and an 8′ Principal fits in two or three trays. Most organs can be packed in seventy or eighty trays—the lumber for that many trays costs around $3,000.  

Sometimes we’re fooled. A smallish two-manual tracker organ built in the seventies might have a 16′ Bourdon and a Brustwerk division with five or six stops no larger than a skinny 8′ Gedeckt. The entire Brustwerk division can be packed in two or three trays. Compare that to the mighty M.P. Möller organ, Opus 5819, built for the Philadelphia Convention Center, and now owned by the University of Oklahoma. There are four 8′ Diapasons in the Great, all of large scale. We used 14 trays to pack those four stops. That organ ruined the curve—89 ranks packed in nearly 400 trays. Which organ was more expensive to build “per stop?”

Not responsible for valuables

Park your car at the airport or check a coat at a restaurant and you’ll read a disclaimer saying that management is not responsible for valuables. Each time we add a gadget to our daily kit, the importance of the disclaimer advances. We cringe when our car gets hit by a careless shopper parked in the next space, and we’re annoyed when a departing guest leaves a rut in the lawn. But we often fail to realize and respect the value of the organ in the church. Hardwood cases get beat up by folding chairs and organ chambers get used as closets. Façade pipes get dinged by ladders while people hang Christmas wreaths on the case, and we sweep the basement floor while the blower is running, wafting clouds of debris into the organ’s delicate actions.

There are two principal reasons for assessing the value of an organ. One is for the unfortunate moment when it must leave the building, and is being offered for sale, and the other is when an insurance policy is being established or updated. A third and less usual reason is when an organ is privately owned and is being considered as a donation to a not-for-profit institution.

If the organ is being offered for sale, especially when it has to be offered for sale, the value is defined simply by what someone would pay for it. And the closer the church building gets to demolition or a real estate closing, the lower the value of the organ. It’s usual for large and wonderful organs to sell for less than $50,000. In fact, it’s unusual for any existing pipe organ to sell for more than $50,000. Recently we organized the sale of a large three-manual tracker organ built in the 1970s—a wonderful instrument whose installation was a momentous occasion—but the price for the entire instrument was equal to the hypothetical cost of one stop in a new large organ.

You might think that a lovely 150-year-old organ by E. & G.G. Hook is priceless—but put it up for sale and you’ll find that it will claim twenty grand, far less than the price of a good piano, and a tiny fraction of the supposed value of a tinker-toy movie prop painted kindergarten green!

The most important reason for assessing the value of a pipe organ is for the purpose of determining appropriate insurance coverage. The instrument is worth the most to the congregation that is actively using and striving to care well for its organ. In 1991, Hurricane Bob raced up the East Coast, pushed a 15-foot storm surge into Buzzards Bay at the southern end of the Cape Cod Canal, and drenched eastern Massachusetts with six inches of rain along with heavy winds. The slate roof over the organ chamber in a church in suburban Boston was compromised and the nice little E.M. Skinner organ got wet. The insurance coverage was based on the original price of the organ, purchased more than 60 years earlier. The damage to the organ was moderate—limited to one end of a manual windchest and a couple offset chests, but when the cost of repairs was pro-rated against the insurance policy, the settlement offered would have covered the cost of a tuning.

If the real and current cost of replacement of a pipe organ is reflected in the insurance policy, not only will the organ be covered in the case of complete loss, but also the cost of repairing partial damage caused by fire, flood, vandalism, or even rodents would be covered. A thorough organ maintenance technician should regularly remind his clients of the importance of being sure that the organ is properly covered by insurance.

Just weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy brought terrific destruction to New England, especially New York City and the surrounding urban area in New Jersey and Connecticut. A few blocks from Grand Central Station, a section of the stone cornice of a thirty-story apartment building broke loose and plummeted through the roof of the church next door. The hole in the roof was right above the organ, while the trajectory meant that most of the rubble hit the floor in front of the organ. The stones caused minor damage to the organ, but it sure was raining hard. Hope the policy was up to date.

Notes

1. Before using the word gam, I checked the dictionary: “a leg, especially in reference to a woman’s shapely leg.” It’s derived from the Old French gambe, which means “leg.” Guess that’s how the Viola da Gamba got its name. Could we call the Rockettes a “Consort of Gambas?” 

2. I looked this one up too. I’ve often seen the word woot used on Facebook and assumed it means something like “woo-hoo.” Urbandictionary.com agrees, but adds that it’s also a truncation of “Wow, loot,” in the video-game community.

Keeping up appearances

Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue in New York City run north and south, parallel to each other a block apart. Together they form one of the world’s premier high-end shopping districts starting around 34th Street and continuing north. On Fifth Avenue, the shopping district ends at 59th Street, which is the southern edge of Central Park, a few blocks north of Trump Tower, and on Madison Avenue it continues north to perhaps 86th. That’s where you find the shops where people pay more for a handbag than I pay for a car. Saks Fifth Avenue, Shreve, Crump & Low, and Tiffany & Co. are some of the big landmarks. Rolex, Ferragamo, Versace, and Louis Vuitton continue the roster along with a host of lesser but equally dear names. The NBA Sportswear Store and the Disney Store are newer arrivals that cater to a different crowd.

Manhattan’s Upper East Side boasts some of the most expensive residences in the world. There’s a four-floor, 20,000-square-foot, 16-bedroom place on Central Park South that’s listed for $250,000,000. If you can afford a place like that, you can certainly afford a $100,000 handbag.¹

The sidewalks in that neighborhood are full of designer people with designer handbags, designer dogs, and designer facelifts, doing their expensive best to show the world who they are. While I expect many of them live in multi-million dollar homes and can actually afford all that, I’m sure there are people spending above the reasonable limits of their disposable income, going deep into holes to keep up appearances.

I’m reminded of an exchange I overheard 40 years ago in an auto parts store in Oberlin, Ohio, when a fellow customer asked the clerk for a CB antenna. The clerk asked what kind of radio he had, and the customer relied, “I don’t have a radio, I just want people to think I do.” That CB antenna had a lot in common with a $100,000 handbag.

What you see is what you get.

The pipe organ is the only indoor monumental musical instrument, and the only one with the possibility of having an architectural identity. Of course, many organs are housed in chambers, separate from the rooms into which they speak. Some of those have façades of organ pipes, while others have simple screens of cloth and wood. I’ve always felt that there’s something dishonest about concealing an instrument behind a grille. I love the feeling of walking into a building and knowing right away that I’m in the presence of a pipe organ. Whether the organ displays a simple fence of pipes with some woodwork surrounding to hold them up, or it has a grand decorated case, either freestanding or projecting from the front of a chamber, the visual information about the instrument is an exciting prelude to hearing it.

We can argue about when the development of the modern pipe organ began, but since I’m the one writing and there’s no one else here just now, and since I know I can back this up simply enough just with photos, let’s say that things were rolling along pretty well by the middle of the 16th century. By then, many organs had been built that had multiple manuals, stop actions that were easy to operate, and highly decorated architectural cases. An important feature of many of those cases was the fact that one could tell a lot about the content and layout of the organ with only visual information. The layout of the façade directly reflected the number of manuals, the principal pitches, and even the layout of the windchests.

There’s typically a Rückpositiv installed on the balcony rail, which is necessarily played by the bottom manual, because the tracker action would go down to the floor behind the knee panel (sometimes called kick-panel) and then under the pedalboard to the balcony rail. There’s an impost, the heavy molding that traverses the organ case above the console, forming the transition from the narrow base of the organ to the wider upper case. That upper case contains the Hauptwerk (Great), which includes the central Principal Chorus, the tonal foundation of the organ. The layout of that façade might show that the windchests are arranged diatonically (odd-numbered notes on one side, evens on the other), and it might further show that the trebles of the chests are arranged so major thirds are adjacent to each other. That’s when the “C side” (whole tones C, D, E, F#, G#, A#) is split, so one side reads “C, E, G#” while the other reads “D, F#, A#.” Likewise, the C# side of the organ is split so one side reads “C#, F, A” and the other reads “D#, G, B.”

That may seem complicated, but it’s a simple reordering of the notes that results in lovely symmetrical visual appearance. Also, in an organ tuned in a historic temperament, when major thirds are adjacent, chords draw beautifully in harmony with each other.

If there are three manuals, the top one might be a Brustwerk (literally, “Breast Work”) located above the music rack and below the impost. That division would be based on a higher Principal pitch, and would contain smaller, lighter stops—likely an 8′ stopped flute such as a Gedeckt, a single 4′, mutations, upper work, and a reed with short, fractional resonators such as a Schalmei or Regal.

The top manual of a three-manual instrument could also be an Oberwerk, a separate division above the Hauptwerk at the top of the case. If there are four manuals, you might have both Oberwerk and Brustwerk in addition to the Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv.

Some people are better at judging measurements than others, but I’m guessing that if challenged, most anyone could tell the difference between 16 and 32 feet. And, you could also pretty easily guess at a succession of lengths, each half as long as the one previous. So you know all you need to know to judge the pitches of the divisions in an organ with classic case design. If you’re sure that the largest pipes in the pedal towers are 16-footers, then you can tell that the Principal pitch of the Hauptwerk is 8′, the Positiv is 4′, and the Brustwerk is 2′. If the Pedal has 32′ Principal, the Hauptwerk is 16′, the Positiv is 8′, and the Brustwerk is 4′. In a four-manual organ, the Oberwerk is likely to be an 8′ division, with smaller scales than the Hauptwerk.

Are you not sure you could tell the difference between a 16′ or 32′ pipe? Sixteen feet is a length or width measurement for a room in an average home. Our bedroom in New York is about 16 feet long. If you could get a 32-footer into your living room, you live in a big house!²

Werkprinzip is a twentieth-century term coined to describe an organ that’s arranged in clearly defined divisions that can be easily identified by viewing the façade. This simple and elegant style of organ design evolved from the simplest ancient organs where the keyboard of the Positiv division was on the back of the Positiv case, and the organist had to turn around to play it.

The Hamburger Schnitger

Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was a prolific organbuilder whose work influenced all of organ history since then. Forty-eight of his organs survive, a great achievement by modern standards. But when you realize that he accomplished all that without electricity, power tools, trucks, or even FedEx, Mr. Schnitger’s output seems staggering. I was introduced to his work as a kid by E. Power Biggs’s 1964 recording, The Golden Age of the Organ. Biggs was right in choosing that title. Schnitger’s organs were the epitome of the high Baroque with thrilling voicing, marvelous complex actions, and stunning architectural cases.  

One of his largest organs is in the Jacobikirche in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city. It has four manuals, 60 stops, and is a terrific example of a classic Werkprinzip organ. There are two 32′ pedal towers, a 16′ Hauptwerk, and an 8′ Rückpositiv visible. There are two additional divisions that cannot be identified just by looking at the façade, an 8′ Oberpositiv (at the top of the organ), and an 8′ Brustpositiv above the keydesk.³

The façades of the Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv cases reflect the windchest layout of major thirds. On either side of the large center towers, there are fields (flats) of façade pipes arranged with the largest in the center, the pipes getting smaller in each direction. I don’t know exactly which note is in the center of the flats, but by counting the pipes in the center and side towers, I’m guessing that it’s A# (below middle C) on the left, and B (below middle C) on the right. So starting in the center of the lower left flat and going toward one side, the pipes would be A#, D, F#, A#, D, F#—and in the other direction C, E, G#, C, E. To the right of the center tower, starting in the center, you have B, D#, G, B, D#, G#—and in the other direction C#, F, A, C#, F. If you’re confused, just think of these sequences as every other whole tone.

What window?

The First and Second Church in Boston, Massachusetts, is located at the corner of Berkeley and Marlborough Streets in the neighborhood known as the Back Bay. The fifth church building on that site was a large stone Gothic structure, built in 1867 with a large rose window and a tall stone steeple. The building housed a large Aeolian-Skinner organ—no coincidence, as William Zeuch, vice-president of Aeolian-Skinner, was organist of the church from 1930 until 1958, and famously played weekly organ recitals on Sunday afternoons to huge audiences.

There’s a story about that rose window. Leo Collins was organist at First and Second Church from 1964 until 1997. Shortly after he started there, interested in the newly emerging movement of the return to classic styles of organ building, he assembled an organ committee to research the possibilities of replacing the Aeolian-Skinner with a new tracker organ. Rudolf von Beckerath was invited to propose a new organ, and he traveled to Boston to present his design to the committee. Predictably enough, his drawing showed a tall free-standing organ case with pedal towers in front of the rose window. An elderly and proper woman, denizen of the Back Bay, asked him, “Mr. Beckerath, what about our window.” He replied, “We have covered windows lovelier than this.”

That project never happened because the building burned in 1968, leaving only the east wall with the rose window and the steeple. A new building was designed by architect Paul Rudolph that incorporated the remains of the stone edifice. Leo got what he wanted. The church commissioned a fine mechanical-action organ by Casavant Frères (Opus 3140, 1972) with three manuals and 64 ranks.⁴ I assume that the organ was paid for with the help of the insurance settlement after the fire. I first tuned the Casavant organ when I joined the staff of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and six organists later, I still maintain the instrument.

While it may seem apocryphal, the story about Beckerath and the rose window was told to me by Leo Collins, who was present at that meeting. That’s a good way to lose a job.

A new way to look at it

The Casavant organ at First Church in Boston is a great example of a modern Werkprinzip organ. If you’ve been paying attention as you read, you can tell instantly just by looking at the photo that the Pedal has a 16′ Principal, the Great (at the top of the main case) has an 8′ Principal, and the Positiv has a 4′. The modern adaption of the style allows for a large Swell division above the keydesk. You can see that the Great and Positiv are arranged in major thirds: the largest pipes in each of the spiky towers, from left to right, are C, C#, D, and D#. So the “C” tower has C, E, G#, C, E, G#­. The next has C#, F, A, C#, F, A. The next has D, F#, A#, D, F#, A#. And the last has D#, G, B, D#, G, B.

Though you can’t see it, behind the shutters, the Swell is arranged in major thirds, mirroring the Great and Positiv.

The arrangement of the Pedal tower is unconventional. There are three towers that start with C, C#, and D, so minor thirds are adjacent. That means that tuning the Pedal is arpeggios on diminished chords. I assume that the three-tower arrangement is for visual effect. The three spiky pedal towers nicely answer the four of the main case. Perhaps Paul Rudolph was involved in that design.

While tuning the minor-third Pedal division is arpeggios on diminished chords, tuning the major-third divisions provokes a parody on the main theme of Johann Strauss’s An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), which starts with the three notes of a major triad. Altering that theme by playing two adjacent major thirds, with the answering treble triads adjusted accordingly, provides a comical effect—just the right tonic after tuning all the mutations and mixtures in that fully equipped organ.

§

While I’m talking about pipe organ façades, there’s another interesting thought to share. Many organ cases, both ancient and modern, have large towers in their façades. Some are round or multi-sided in plan, while some are “pointed,” triangular in plan. It’s easy to identify them as purely architectural elements, but they also conserve space within the organ case, as they bear the largest pipes of an organ outside the confines of the case. Giving them rounded or pointed profiles also diminishes the width of the entire instrument. Standing five or seven 32′ pipes next to each other would add up to a lot of additional width.

§

Of course, many wonderful organs have been built with clearly defined internal divisions whose façades don’t reflect the internal design. The massive Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris is a good example. There is a massive wood case festooned with a procession of larger-than-life statues that take up so much space that it’s a wonder the sound can get out at all. What appears to be a Rückpositiv is actually concealing the back of the console. Of course, that’s not a reflection on the quality or content of the organ, just another way to present the instrument as a monumental work of visual art.

I’ve been in many churches where a modest organ is concealed behind a huge case. In some of those cases, the organ is a small, cheaper replacement for a much larger original instrument. But sometimes, the monumental case was designed by the architect of the building, and there was no funding for an instrument of appropriate size. That’s the equivalent of the guy in the auto parts store who didn’t have a radio but wanted an antenna for appearances, or buying a $100,000 handbag to imply that you live in a $100,000,000 house. Who’s going to wash the windows?

Notes

1. Maybe you think I’m kidding. Google “Hermès crocodile bag” and see what you get.

2. Our standard pitch designations refer to the “speaking length” of a pipe, which is the measurement from the bottom of the pipe’s mouth to its tuning point. Almost all façade pipes are two or three feet longer than speaking length to allow for the height of the pipe’s conical foot, and any “false length” at the top to allow for a tuning slot at the back. So a 32′ façade pipe is often close to 40 feet long. A standard semi-trailer passing you on the highway is 53 feet long. I’ve been working with pipe organs for more than 40 years, and I still marvel at the idea of a 32′ organ pipe, a thousand-pound whistle that can play one note at one volume level.

3. You can see the specifications of the Hamburg Schnitger organ here: http://www.arpschnitger.nl/shamb.html.

4. You can see the specifications of the First Church Casavant organ here: http://database.organsociety.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=23152.