In the wind. . . .

John Bishop

Who you gonna call?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

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

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

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

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

• Seal the blower intake with plastic and tape.

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

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

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

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

 

Identification

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

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

 

Insurance

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

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

 

What makes good maintenance?

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

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

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

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

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

 

When you should call

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

You should call your tuner/technician when:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

When you should not call

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

Notes

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

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

John Bishop

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.

Lorraine Brugh

Lorraine Brugh is currently resident director of Valparaiso University’s Study Centre in Cambridge, England. She is professor of music and the Frederick J. Kruse Organ Fellow at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.

The interview took place in Mr. Cleobury’s office in Gibbs Hall at King’s College, Thursday, October 31, 2017. At 5:30 that afternoon he led the choir in an Evensong for the Vigil of All Saints, with music by Byrd, Palestrina, and Tomkins.

Since the time of the interview, King’s College has announced that Stephen Cleobury will retire from King’s at the end of the 2018–2019 academic year.

 

Lorraine Brugh: I want our time to include what you’d like to talk about. I’ve thought of four areas I’d like you to comment on and you can add whatever you would like. Those areas are the recent Howells conference, the choir, worship trends, and personal notes. 

Just last weekend, the Herbert Howells Society met here in Cambridge, at St. John’s and at King’s College. You are its current president. What is its mission and current activity?

Stephen Cleobury: There are two organizations, the Herbert Howells Trust and the Herbert Howells Society. Both are, of course, dedicated to preserving the memory of this great man, and the Society is a collection of people who meet together for events such as we’ve just had this past weekend. The Trust is a particular body that allows us to make grants which help to support recording and performance of Howells’s works. These are funded from the royalties from Howells’s estate.  

 

LB: Would you commend particular organ works to American organists? Some play the Psalm Preludes but most of us don’t go much further.

SC: I think the Psalm Preludes are wonderful. There is a tantalizing aspect to those in my mind. Herbert Howells was acting organist at St. John’s College here in Cambridge during the Second World War. If I understand correctly, he used to come up at weekends and preside over the Sunday services. I imagine he might have improvised on the organ at that time. There may be lots and lots of psalm preludes up in the ether somewhere, but that’s just an idle speculation.

I can only speak of the pieces I know.  There are the rhapsodies, of which the best known is the C-sharp minor, which I played at the end of Evensong. That’s a very forthright piece with a quiet middle section, which is actually the opposite of almost all the psalm preludes that start quietly, rise to a climax and go down again.

The first rhapsody does more what the psalm preludes do: starts quietly and rises to a climax and subsides again, and I think it’s a very beautiful piece, completely different from the third. They are the two better known ones, the first and the third. 

Then there is the Paean which is in the same volume as Master Tallis’s Testament. They are the two pieces I know best from the collection Six Pieces for Organ. The Paean is the nearest thing Howells got to writing a toccata. It is very fast moving, with a lot of sixteenth-note movement. The metronome mark is quite fast. I once asked him if he really expected us to play it that fast and he said he did. I don’t know many people who can. And then Master Tallis’s Testamant, which I think is an outstandingly beautiful piece, in a modal G minor, and again rising, but ending with that little epilogue, that little envoi.  

Everything to do with Howells is about organ management. Organ management, while I wouldn’t say it’s a lost art, is now not always understood. We had a wonderful example of organ management by Nathan Laube who came to play here last year. I don’t think I’ve heard the organ managed better than that very often. By that I mean the ability to grade crescendos and diminuendos perfectly and to treat the organ really orchestrally.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that people have become a lot more interested in authentic performance style for Baroque and Classical music. And that’s absolutely fine; I’m completely signed up for that and do my best to keep up with trends in that regard. But I don’t see that it need also lead to an inability to manage the organ orchestrally.

I think a versatile organist should be able to do both of those things. The challenge for playing Howells is precisely that of managing the sound.

The Partita, which was the big piece I played on Saturday, does have some quite technically demanding writing. However, none of it (Howells’s music) is virtuoso writing in the sense that you’re playing something from the great nineteenth-century French repertoire, or later, Messiaen. It’s not technically that difficult.

It requires one to hold in one’s head the right sort of sound world. Because organ registration, certainly in late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century English usage, was approached rather differently from the way people naturally approach it now. This can be seen in the organ in the Albert Hall as it used to be. Today we have general combinations and sequencers (steppers), so we can be far too fancy with our registrations, too fussy, because it’s so easy to do, whereas in the old days mostly the pistons were pre-set so that you couldn’t easily change them. If you look at the way they were set, you would find that the crescendo was made by drawing the 8′ stops one by one, then the 4′ stops one by one, whereas now people would add a 4′ to a single 8′, then a 2′, and so on. That would have worked well at the Royal Albert Hall.

The nineteenth-century orchestra sounds different from a classical orchestra playing on period instruments; the duty of the organist is to reflect different sound worlds as best as can be done on any given instrument. So that’s why I say you need to hold in your head the sound world as best as you can that Howells had in his head. Listen to recordings of the old Gloucester organ made by Herbert Sumison.

 

LB: Do you think that the German and the north German organ tradition, which builds the sound vertically, has influenced organists today?

SC: Yes, I do. I think you can hear Howells’s music played with too many mixtures. I was talking to Jonathan Clinch about this on Saturday,¹ and the very interesting views he has on this. He quotes Howells on that subject:

a. Players were not using sufficient amount of foundation tone, and

b. People were too busy fiddling around with the registration that they lost a sense of musical pulse.

Pulse was very important to Howells. When I worked at Westminster Abbey, long ago now, in the second half of the 1970s (1974–1978), Howells used to come to services sometimes when we were performing his music. I recorded some of it on the Abbey organ. Before that I arranged for him to come and hear me play his pieces. Everyone tends to think that Howells’s music is smooth and broad and redolent of English pastoral scenes. In fact, he was rather a dynamic and passionate man, and was certainly very keen on rhythmic pulse and clarity of texture. Those are two things that people don’t think of in connection with Howells but he really did want them. This might be interesting for American organists. One of the big differences a British organist finds when he/she goes to the United States to play is that you don’t have the stop called “Great and Pedal Combinations Coupled.” You have an independent pedal and you have to register the pedal separately, which is a really good discipline. Here we can get lazy because we have Great and Pedal Combinations Coupled. Here you can push Great Piston 3 and you get an appropriate pedal registration as well. In American organs you have to deal with the pedal separately. I think in Howells that is really important, since his pedal lines are often independent and care is needed to make them clear.

I remember one thing he pointed out to me is that when he writes a pedal point, he doesn’t just put down bottom D for two pages. It is always repeated, rhythmicized, or jumps the octave. He always wanted the pedal to be very alive. I take care when I play to register the pedal so that you can hear it clearly.

 

LB: Would you like to comment on the organ’s restoration?

SC: We are all thrilled with it. It is still recognizably the King’s organ, but it speaks with a renewed vigor and clarity. I’m particularly pleased about two new ranks, or actually two ranks that were replaced with different ranks. One is a 4′ flute on the Great, which you heard in the second movement of the Partita. It is very beautiful. We also introduced a proper Principal 8′ in the Pedal, which we didn’t have before. That’s given a whole lot more clarity to the Pedal. Now you can play Bach with a proper principal chorus. Formerly we had a Violoncello, a Geigen, a stringy stop. It wasn’t very good in Bach.

 

LB: The English organ was slow to develop the independent pedal. Is this a carry-over from that?

SC: Yes, I think it is. But David Willcocks in the 1960s had a lot of new upperwork put in the Pedal. We have had flutes at 16′, 8′, 4′, and 2′ and a 4′ Principal and mixture in the Pedal for quite a while now.

I arranged shortly after I came to have the Swell double trumpet (16′) made available on the Pedal, which is very useful for playing Bach. You can have the Great and Swell choruses coupled together, but you can access the 16′ reed in the Pedal independently.

Although classical Baroque organ music on an instrument like this is a compromise, there are lots of things you can do to make it have integrity.

 

LB: Both of these things would help with this integrity.

SC: Yes, indeed.

 

LB: You were also organ scholar at St. John’s. Did you overlap with Howells at all?

SC: No, well not at St. John’s. His service there was in the War, when Robin Orr was away on wartime service, just in the way Harold Darke was here at King’s when Boris Ord was away in the Air Force.

 

LB: And George Guest was there when you were there? 

SC: Yes.

 

LB: This collaboration with St. John’s each year—is that a result your being an organ scholar there?

SC: No, you’re talking about the annual Evensong service sung by both choirs. This had been started before I came here as organ scholar at St. John’s, and has probably been going since the early 60s. Originally it was connected with the Cambridge Music Festival, which took place in the summer.

It used to be described as “Evensong sung by the choirs of King’s and St. John’s to mark the opening of the Cambridge Summer Festival.” That has come and gone so we’ve lost that connection, but we have carried on doing the annual service.

 

LB: I think it’s nice to show that collaboration.

SC: Yes. We choose the repertoire carefully. Each choir is obviously slightly different in its style. We find that if you choose big repertoire like we did this year, like Blest Pair of Sirens by Parry, that sort of piece sounds better with more singers. Some repertoire sounds better sung by one choir or the other.

 

LB: I was here when you sang a Lassus Mass a couple weeks ago. That sounds best with a small choir.

SC: I quite agree.

 

LB: Americans are fascinated with the King’s College men and boys’ choir, and how they get trained.  What do you see for their future?

SC: I used a phrase the other day. I gave a speech at a charity dinner, a fundraiser for the Friends of Cathedral Music. In fact, it wasn’t my phrase, but it was actually given to me in the briefing notes. “We are not dealing with some kind of elite group. We are dealing with ordinary children doing extraordinary things.” And it is extraordinary what they do. They are ordinary kids, and they need to play around and be children. I suppose, if anything, what I try to do is to treat them as if they are ordinary people, not as superstars or anything, because they aren’t. But at the same time, you have to manage what they do here. They wear their Eton suits and walk through the college to the chapel. Visitors are coming in here, photographing them, for example, and we have to deal with and manage the issues that arise from that.

As far as the training of them is concerned, we do our best to offer them as broad a musical spectrum as we can. So each boy plays the piano and an orchestral instrument. We teach them theory, they have aural training and sight-reading. We also have a professional vocal coach who teaches them about singing. With children, I think that’s best done on a relatively straightforward and simple level.

Here I’m slouching in this chair, but I’m basically telling them to stand up straight, get their body alignment and balance in good shape, and then thinking about breathing and the easy production of sound, not forcing, just good basic habits.

 

LB: The older boys model the sound for the younger boys?

SC: Yes, that’s a good point. There are two aspects to the training they get.  You would have seen in the chapel boys in Years 6, 7, and 8. We also have boys in Years 4 and 5 back over the river at King’s College School. They don’t sing in the public services. Some of the Year 5s do. They get one-to-one training, small group training, but they’re also singing along with the older ones. It’s a mixture of specifically targeted instruction on the one hand and modeling, or I call it osmosis, seeping down from one generation to another. One of the things you have to remind the older boys is that they are role models for the younger ones, necessarily.

 

LB: I saw one of the younger boys relying on another older boy for cues during the Evensong last Saturday, I believe.

SC: I try to place them so there is an older boy next to a younger boy through the ranks.

 

LB: Could you speak about what goes into the preparation for Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols?

SC: I remember David Willcocks being asked this question. I heard him on a radio interview when I was very young. He gave a typically clever answer that “in a sense you are preparing all the time because every day you’re trying to make the choir sing as well as possible.” I’m not somebody who believes in suddenly trying to up the ante a week before. I try to do it on the basis that it’s what we’re doing every day. That’s not to say we don’t make obviously very special effort for the big occasions. 

I personally feel that unless you’re trying to make it really good every day, you can’t suddenly click your fingers and expect singers to move into another gear for this or that occasion. Because children, especially young children, thrive on consistent expectation, they like to have the ground rules, whatever they are. It’s best to have ground rules, consistency.

Then from my point of view, the preparation is about planning the repertoire, and in a sense I am thinking about that all the time. I’m looking out for publishers catalogues. I get a lot of material sent to me (looking around the office, “a lot of this stuff has been sent to me”), and I do try my best to look properly at everything, because you just never know when a little gem will turn up. And so I have to get all of that organized and sorted out. And then toward the end of November we start in earnest preparing the actual music. We have a carol service for schools here where we air some of the repertoire. We are often asked to sing Christmas carols for a concert. This enables us to prepare gradually through the month of December.

 

LB: Is it your innovation to commission a new work each year?

SC: Yes, it is. I started that in 1983. When I first started doing it, I got some quite abusive letters from people asking what was I doing degrading this great tradition by introducing horrible, dissonant modern music. 

Now I tend to get the same reaction you are describing. People are keen to hear what it will be. I feel that’s a small achievement.

 

LB: No small achievement! I wonder how you keep the quality of men and boys from one year to the next.

SC: I remember a comment made by one of the choral scholars when he graduated some years ago, ten or twenty years ago, who said, “I really admire how you peg away every day at it.” And I think that’s what I do, I peg away at it.

 

LB: Do you see the boys every day?

SC: Almost every day.

We didn’t talk very much about the choral scholars who, of course, are an essential part of the Choir. They sometimes feel a bit neglected. We go on the concert platform, and everyone will applaud the little boys, and then the volume of the applause dies down when the men walk on.

I occasionally do it the other way around and send the men on first. It’s quite interesting to see what the audience does. It is not a question of a front row sixteen trebles with a backing group. All the men are an absolutely vital part of the whole.  

We do services with the men only once a week, and more than that in half-term. I really enjoy those occasions because it gives me a chance to work in detail, in depth, with the choral scholars in a way one actually can’t do when the children are there. They occupy a higher proportion of one’s attention, naturally.

 

LB: How many of the boys and scholars go on to study music professionally?

SC: Quite a few. It is difficult to put a percentage on it, but a significant number do. Just to mention a few of the organ scholars, there is Sir Andrew Davis in Chicago, Simon Preston, who is, sadly, no longer playing, and Thomas Trotter. That’s just three and there are a lot more.   

 

LB: Churches in the United States have increasing problems supporting church musicians. How does the Friends of Cathedral Music support church music?

 SC: Friends of Cathedral Music exists to help with funding. I think that funding is an issue for everyone. Everyone thinks the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) colleges are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich. We have to make our case for the chapel and the choir within the college as a whole over against educational imperatives, just as you might expect.

In a cathedral, the greatest call on funds is maintenance of the fabric. You can’t have a cathedral choir if the building is falling apart.

It becomes a matter of priorities. In the big London choirs where they are paying a dozen professional singers, it becomes expensive. So there is going to be a continuing need for financial support.

We get no support from central government. The money a cathedral has comes from its endowments if it has any, its lands and assets, if it has any, together with income from visitors.

For instance at Ely, those shops along the High Street, a lot of them belong to the cathedral, and the cathedral derives a rent from them. That’s part of what enables the cathedral to keep going.

Many of them now charge, as we do. I remember in Ely fifteen to twenty years ago, when they introduced charging, there was a lot of heart-searching, shaking of heads. People said it’s awful to charge people to go into a religious building.

One of the clergymen said to me it’s not really about that. It’s a choice. We either charge or we have to close down.

Here, King’s College Chapel is a private college chapel; there is no compulsion upon us to open it to the public. We choose to do so. To make it safe for people to be in there, to heat it, that costs us money.

I don’t subscribe to the argument that it’s a bad thing to charge.

 

LB: I think you do a good job of separating the worship times and the times the visitors can view the chapel.

SC: That’s got to be done.

 

LB: In the United States, each parish has to fund its own musicians, and they don’t have land and other support. There are increasingly fewer full-time musician positions. It’s a big issue in the United States, and our system is different than yours. Do you have any comment about our situation?

SC: I don’t have a solution to the problem. I just note what I see. Sometimes I look rather enviously at the level of funding that some of the churches have in the United States. Of course there is a difference. A given parish in the United States, whatever the denomination, has its parish role. Those loyal parishoners see it as a responsibility to see that it is properly funded.

The Church of England is a very different animal, partly because of the established link with the state. I think that, personally, one of the great things about it is that it’s theoretically there for everyone, of all faiths, or no faith. You can be baptized there, married there, and you could be buried there in the parish in which you live.

But there isn’t quite the same degree of community and of financial responsibility. It’s a rather subtle difference but it does makes a difference.

So I go to some churches in the United States that are fabulously well-funded. They have offices, and the director of music has quite a large staff. 

I do understand what you describe because I read about it. If there are fewer people attending church, you have less money coming in.

It’s different here; it’s different again if you go to Scandinavia or Germany where they have had the church tax, which is gradually being abolished in some of these countries. The church had it rather easy when it had the compulsory tax.

If the church loses this revenue, they’ll have to make it the responsibility of people voluntarily to support it.

 

LB: What you are looking forward to in future projects? How do you nourish your own spiritual life? Does this daily life nourish you?

SC: Goodness . . . . Well, forthcoming events: that’s relatively easy. We have our next United States tour in the spring of 2019, a short tour. I don’t know if we’re allowed to announce yet where we are going. We’re going to Australia in the summer of 2019. We have plans for the UK and Ireland in 2018, and this December we go to Athens.

We have exciting recording plans for a Bruckner Mass, and possibly some more Rutter. And we’ve got a recording coming out of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

There’s lots of that going on.  

I think as far as a personal spiritual journey is concerned, as with probably the majority of people, that barometer goes up and down.

I know that Cardinal Hume used to say at Westminster Cathedral, even someone like him, “it’s hard to believe all of this sometimes. Some days it’s harder than others.” That’s something I share with a lot of people.

As to how I perform my job here, I see it as an enabling thing. I want to enable particularly the young people in the choir to experience this wonderful music through liturgy well-conducted.  

I don’t seek to influence them in what they should believe about it. I’m simply laying before them the opportunities, and they take from them what they want. 

It’s really the same in terms of the congregation. So I’m saying, here I am. I’m trying to do this music as well as I can today, and you’re coming to our service. You’ll meet lots of different people, from the college, the university, the town, or visitors from Australia, or Papua New Guinea, and, of course, America. Some will be what one might call card-carrying Christians, some will be lapsed Christians, some will have no particular religious belief or knowledge at all. That’s what makes us very different from a community church in America as we’ve been talking about. Some people think that would devalue the experience for me. I actually think the complete opposite of that.

One of the particular problems the church has today is that it’s easily perceived as being exclusive. If you don’t fit a particular pattern . . . we don’t need to go into the question of gender and sexuality, but we know about all that.

Whereas I think, it’s a cliché, of course, that everyone should be made welcome, whatever their religious standpoint or lifestyle. So if someone comes to the service and hears “Like as the Hart” by Howells, for example, and is moved by that and spiritually nourished by that, that’s great. 

It’s not my concern whether they’re going to go to the altar and receive communion the next day or not. Those are separate issues. I’m not intending to sound detached about that, but I genuinely feel that.  

There’s another thing I believe in strongly. There’s another side of that coin. I say to the choral scholars (since it’s not necessary for the children at that stage, as they haven’t developed their views), “well look, if you don’t believe this, or don’t agree with it, you still have to behave in a professional way. There are people in the chapel every day for genuine religious reasons to say their prayers, and they don’t want to see you behaving in a way that distracts from that.”

I do insist on what I call a proper professional decorum. It’s important to me that the choir conducts itself properly.

 

LB: I think that clearly shows. Who have been your own greatest influences?

SC: I was a boy chorister at Worcester. The organist there was Douglas Guest, who’d been an organ scholar here in the late 1930s. The first experience of anything is very formative. Then Christopher Robinson came to be organist there and taught me to play the organ. Harry Bramma was there, a great teacher. Then in Cambridge there was George Guest, of course, whom I worked closely with at St. John’s. I also had good contact with David Willcocks during those years; I played for his rehearsals with the Cambridge University Musical Society. Within the field of church music I would say those are the people.

 

LB: What about your own composition?

SC: I’m not really a composer. I think I can turn in some fairly decent arrangements. I don’t see myself as a composer of original music. I have composed some pieces and people have been nice about them.

One of the privileges I had when I worked with the BBC singers as chief conductor for ten years was to do a lot of contemporary music, a lot of premières. I found it fascinating to be in close contact with composers. I could tell you a lot about composers from that angle.

One thing that is true of the best composers I’ve met is that they are absolutely consumed with a need, almost a physical need, a mental need certainly, to compose music. It’s something they absolutely have to do.

I don’t feel that kind of an urge to compose. I teach students here to do harmony and counterpoint, so I know how to put the notes on the page in order to do an arrangement. I know how not to write parallel fifths.

It’s the same with going into the musical profession. I remember Herbert Sumison at Gloucester used to advise young people, “If you are thinking about entering the music profession, is it something your innermost feelings make an imperative? If not, you’re much better going off and doing something else and keeping music for your leisure and enjoyment.”

 

LB: Thank you for your time this afternoon.

 SC: I look forward to seeing you again in the chapel.

Notes

1. Dr. Clinch presented a lecture on Howells’s piano music at the Howells Society gathering, October 28, 2017.

John Bishop

We’re working on it.

This is a lovely moment to be writing. It’s about 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting at the dining table in our house in Maine, with a nice view down the river. It’s 19 degrees and snowing, with wind from the northeast at eight-to-ten. Wendy left here yesterday for an important engagement in Providence, bugging out a day early to beat the bad weather. I’d say I’m alone in the house, except Farley the Goldendoodle is here with me. A half hour ago, I lit the dining room woodstove, so it’s nice and cozy. To complete the lovely scene, there’s a boat coming up the river. Did I mention that it’s snowing?

The Damariscotta River is a tidal estuary, 12 miles from the Gulf of Maine to the bridge between the villages of Newcastle (where we live) and Damariscotta. We’re about eight miles up from the ocean. The river is fully tidal­—the water rises and falls an average of about ten and a half feet, twice a day—and it’s renowned for aquaculture. Farmers raise mussels and oysters in large waterborne plots that they rent from the towns. Mussels grow underwater hanging from ropes, and oysters grow in half-submerged flat baskets that float on the surface, and the farmers tend them using 20 to 25 foot skiffs with outboard motors.

One summer, our daughter, Meg, worked for an oyster farmer. It was back breaking work, leaning out of boats to turn those baskets, and digging in the mud for the natural oysters. The farm was just down the road, so she could come home for lunch, muddy and tired, but happy with the dozen oysters she’d share with her mother. She tanned dark brown and went back to school strong and slim. But catch my key word there. Summer. If you’re going to work on the water, you might as well be out on a boat in the sunshine. The magic ends when that little boat is churning upriver against a bitter wind during a snowstorm, whitecaps breaking over the bow, covering the farmers in freezing salt spray. It’s much nicer work to be sitting by the fire, writing.

In 1993, the poet Donald Hall wrote Life Work, a slim book of musing about what it means to work at what matters to you.¹ Early in his career, Hall was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, living a suburban life of cocktail parties and dealing with the mechanics and minutia that are the workings of a large institution. His marriage failed, and he took a lifetime risk, leaving the security of tenure and pension and moving onto the rural New Hampshire farm where his grandparents had lived to focus on writing. He supported himself writing reviews, magazine articles, and several books, while working endlessly on his poetry. He describes how a brief poem would travel through scores, even hundreds of drafts. He also describes the repetitive annual routine of his grandfather’s farming—how the changing seasons drove the succession of work days through plowing, planting, harvesting, milking, haying. His grandfather’s unfailing work ethic was inspiration to a lifetime of writing.  

In Life Work, Hall wrote about his friendship with the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986). Moore is best known for monumental bronze sculptures located across the world. He worked in the abstract, creating small-scale clay models as he explored shapes, and increasing the scale as he passed through multiple “drafts” of each work before committing them to the eternity of bronze. Hall reflected on artists’ passion, as they devote their lives to their work. Creating monumental sculpture in bronze requires immense dedication, and handling the materials involved is heavy physical work. Is that harder work than the dogged pursuit of a poet, demanding of himself hundreds of drafts of an 80-word poem?

The other day, I stacked this year’s cord of firewood in the usual place along the north wall of the garage. It had been delivered by a dump truck and was in a knee-high pile near the stack site. It took me two hours to move two tons of wood from below knee level on to a stack with more than half of it above waist level.² That work was like Donald Hall’s grandfather’s chore of tossing forkfuls of hay into the loft of the barn, a necessary seasonal chore. Some of that wood is burning in the stove now.  

Henry Moore moved tons of clay from table height to the extremes of height of his largest pieces. I suppose he carried clay in buckets up ladders. His hands would have been iron-hard like those of the hay-pitching farmer.

 

Back to work

Michelangelo’s famous marble statue,
David, is about 17 feet tall and weighs nearly 12,500 pounds. I love the (perhaps) apocryphal quote from Michelangelo when he was asked how he accomplished such a masterpiece: “All I did was chip away the stone that didn’t look like David.” That leads me to wonder what the original stone weighed. Was it twice as much, three times as much as the finished statue? Let’s say it was 30,000 pounds—fifteen tons. First, that rascal was cut from a hillside in Carrara near Italy’s Ligurian coast, then moved almost 90 miles to Florence. That would be enough of a challenge today with heavy trucks, hydraulic lifting equipment, and modern highways. Imagine it with ox-drawn carts, levers, and muddy, rutted hilly roads.

And once that mighty stone was in place, Michelangelo had to remove 17,500 pounds of marble chips. Popeye had nothing on him for hands and forearms. He would have had stone chips in his eyes and fierce aches and pains at the end of the day. It’s meaningful to appreciate this work of art from that point of view, that the result of such extreme physical labor would be the emergence of the monumental, elegant, sensual figure taking life under the tools of the master. Just how did he know which chip was part of David and which wasn’t? There are some pretty sensitive areas there that would be a shame to whack with a chisel.³

I wonder if he knew that the immense toil of quarrying and transporting that stone and chipping away almost nine tons of marble to reveal that image would leave five centuries of viewers in awe, moved to tears by the beauty, majesty, and humanity of that image.

 

The work of life

When you visit the Noack Organ Company in Georgetown, Massachusetts, you’re greeted by a display of photographs of all the instruments built by the firm. They’re currently working on Opus 162 for St. Peter’s Church in Washington, D.C. Fritz Noack retired in 2015, and Didier Grassin is the active leader of the company. Didier reports that he has been responsible for the last three Noack organs, and that the first “real organ” built by Fritz Noack was Opus 9, so Fritz’s career spans 149 organs. What a remarkable achievement. Think of that in terms of tons of tin and lead, hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber, perhaps tens of thousands of sheets of sandpaper. You know why you need more sheets of sandpaper? Because you wear it out with elbow grease.

In a 50-week year of 40-hour weeks, a worker produces 2,000 person-hours. If there was an average of seven people in the Noack shop over the years, that would make 14,000 person hours each year.  Opus 9 was built in 1962, so Fritz’s career spanned 53 years during which he produced 149 organs in 742,000 person hours. Let’s guess that a quarter of those hours (185,500) were spent on service, maintenance, tuning, rebuilding, and other work not related to the numbered organs. That would mean that 556,500 hours were spent building 149 organs—an average of 3,735 hours per organ. I suppose that some took fewer than 2,000 hours, and a few probably took 10,000 or more.

That’s a staggering amount of work and a splendid heritage. The display of photos on the workshop stairway shows the development and maturation of an artist as well as the progression of styles of expression in American organ building. Nice going, Fritz.

 

Stop to think.

Have you ever been in the presence of a new monumental organ? Have you touched one, played one, or just sat alone in the room gazing at it? Every surface is made smooth by the hands of a craftsman. Hand-turned drawknobs gleam. Maybe there’s an exquisite bit of marquetry on the music rack, and snazzy carvings on the key-cheeks. Tilt back and look up at the tower crowns. They might be 30 feet off the floor, but every one of the myriad miter joints is perfect, ready for close-up inspection.

Have you been inside such an organ? Row upon row of gleaming pipes, each row a unique voice waiting to be called
on. Precise matrices of mechanical parts, some massive and powerful for stop actions, some feathery and light for keyboard actions. Or if the organ uses electricity in its actions, you’ll find neat bundles of wires, carefully obscured, carrying the complex signals that are the music.

I spend a lot of time around pipe organs. Some are ordinary, unremarkable, and some are downright awful. But those instruments add to my appreciation, my awe of an organ produced by true craftspeople. The Organ Clearing House is frequently engaged by other firms to assist in the installation of new instruments. We always regard that as a special statement of trust, as we are allowed an intimate look into the ways and work of the individual firm. Often the paperwork and specifications that precede a job are beautifully crafted, forming a prelude to our relationship with the instrument itself.

As thrilling as it is to see a finished organ, working with an instrument in pieces is the best way to appreciate what goes into it. Once when we were delivering a new instrument to a church, unloading thousands of components from a truck and laying them out on blankets across the backs of the pews, a parishioner commented to me, “Watching this for three minutes has told me more about why the organ is so expensive than hundreds of hours of committee meetings.”

We select organ parts in the correct order, carry or hoist them to their spot in the loft, lay them out and screw them together. Perfect. Just like it was made that way! After the many thousands of hours spent making all that stuff, it’s a touch of magic to put it all together in its final location. In 1977, I had the privilege of helping install the new Flentrop organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, a three-manual organ with Rückpositiv and a tall mahogany case perched on a beautiful loft. In those days, I was the 21-year-old brute who did some of the heaviest lifting, so I was in the thick of it as we installed the gleaming polished façade pipes. That’s a special kind of work, handling 700-pound polished pipes, 30 feet off the marble floor. Leaving the church at the end of that grueling day, we turned to look back at the instrument. The façade pipes were bathed in the deep tones of blue and red as the afternoon sun poured through the stained-glass windows, and I burst into tears. Some tough guy.

The philosophy of that organ was grounded in the heritage of eighteenth-century northern European instruments. Careful planning was involved in determining pipe scales, case dimensions, wind conveyance, and mechanical action. But don’t forget for a moment that the splash of sunlight sparkling on the polished tin and gold leaf was part of the plan. It was making music before the blower was hooked up.

Flentrop Orgelbouw was founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop (1866–1950). His son, Dirk (1910–2003), grew up working for the family firm and assumed leadership control in 1940. During his tenure, the firm produced around 250 organs and restored more than 100 instruments, another wonderful example of a life’s work devoted to the organ.

 

Somebody play.

Once an organ is built, we need someone to play it. In the last several years, the editors of The Diapason have been recognizing rising young stars through the program “20 Under 30.” These brilliant young artists are chosen from fields of more than 100 nominations, all of which reflects the extraordinary level of musicianship and artistry from the younger generations of organists. It seems to me a thrilling upswing in this noble art, which is essential to ensuring the future of the fabulously expensive art of building organs.

Recently, Stephen Tharp posted a tidbit informing us that he had played his 1,500th organ recital. Now in his mid-40s, Stephen is a consummate artist, dazzling audiences with rich and thrilling performances. He serves as artist-in-residence at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where his full-time job is to practice many hours every day, always working on music to feature in the next tour. That work is comparable to Donald Hall’s multiple drafts of each poem—hundreds of hours of intellectual and artistic toil, always developing new pedagogic skills to further the freedom of artistic expression. It takes countless repetitions and hundreds of hours of knuckle busting nit picking to absorb and express a complex score. It takes motivation, diligence, fervor, and devotion to take a program of music from the printed page and pass it through an organ, turning it into audible art. It’s a life’s work to build a repertory and to nourish a creative soul capable of such sophisticated expression.

Recently, I watched the BBC documentary, Simon Rattle: The Making of a Maestro, an hour-long look into the development and career of that brilliant musician. (You can find this easily on YouTube: just search “Simon Rattle Documentary.”) His love and ability as a musician was the force behind the rejuvenation of an entire city. Under his leadership, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was established in a terrific new performing arts center, transforming the town and its population. What an eloquent example of the power of music.

 

That leaves the rest of us.

I’m no Simon Rattle. The fate of the city doesn’t hang on my success. I’m also not the old-time farmer, doggedly moving from one chore to the next at the behest of the seasons. I’m fortunate to work in a field that I care about. And I value the examples of geniuses around me, and the geniuses that came before who helped define all the expressions of humanity—the Humanities. Writers, painters, sculptors, philosophers—artists in general have collaborated to form the human condition.

Sometimes the organ seems to us to be the center of the universe, and for many of us, it is the center of our universe. But in reality, it’s an eloquent part of a much larger whole, perhaps using its noble voice to speak for other artists. We are not living in normal times, and we are not the first society to have that experience. In response, we are called to “hold fast to that which is good,” to proclaim the necessity of the arts in our lives. We do that by living artistic lives in whatever capacity we can.

Leonard Bernstein famously said, “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Substitute strife, confusion, injustice, or anger for the word “violence,” and follow the great artists who have paved the way for us. And be sure you’re paving the way for those who follow in any way you can.

Notes

1. Published by Beacon Press.

2. I know it was two tons because I guessed three, Wendy doubted it, and I googled it!

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo).

John Bishop

Installation

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

§

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

A century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively

John Bishop

As it was in the beginning

Every student of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach learns early how much more there is to it than meets the untrained ear. There’s no contesting that he was a genius of melody and harmony, but when you start digging into the mathematical structure of his music, you quickly get the sense that the depth is infinite. We might take for granted the seamless counterpoint between the obbligato and the chorale tune in the ubiquitous Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Cantata 147), Nun danket alle Gott (Cantata 79), or Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Cantata 140), but if we think it through even superficially, we’re baffled by how the harmonic progression of the obbligato anticipates the relative cadences at the end of each phrase of the chorale.

We learn about the Fibonacci series, a simple and infinite progression of equations that starts with zero and one, and continues so that each successive number in the series is the sum of the previous two (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3 . . . 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). Use that series to chart the entrances of a fugue subject.¹

Or use the formula of numbering the letters of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.). Add up BACH and you get 14. Add up
J. S. BACH and you get 41. Look for those two numbers recurring in Bach’s music—how many notes in a fugue subject, how many measures, etc.? Start digging and you’ll find you’re figuratively sweeping a beach. There’s no end. I haven’t tried it with Anna Magdalena, but I’ll bet it’s a gold mine. Maybe a good pick for the lottery.

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester with Bach’s Magnificat in D (BWV 243), writing a nicely researched paper and leading the church choir I directed through a performance. I was amazed to chart the sequence of movements and find the architectural symmetry, and the piece has been with me ever since. It includes some very nice examples of “word painting,” where the music illustrates the text. One of those beauties is the last chord of the alto aria. The text is Esurientes implevet bonis, et divites dimisit inanes (He hath filled the hungry with good things, the rich he hath sent away empty). The alto soloist is accompanied by basso continuo and two flutes in a beautiful duet with lots of parallel sixths. The figures repeat many times (maybe a Fibonacci number?) with a lovely cadence at the end of each, but at the closing cadence, the flutes leave out the last resolving note, sending the rich away hungry with a wafted dominant-seventh chord.

The opening movement is a rollicking jubilation with full orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani like only Bach could do—bouncing chords and driving rhythm. As the piece nears its end, there’s a boisterous reprise of the opening figure driving toward the final Amen. The text for the reprise is Sicut erat in principio (As it was in the beginning)—terrific.

 

Turn, turn, turn

Another part of my undergraduate days was the purity of the music we were focused on. The resurgence of interest in organs with mechanical action was in full swing— there were dozens of companies around the country digging in the history of the trade and creating wonderful new instruments with mechanical action and low wind pressures, and we as students of playing were in the thrall of the quest for authenticity in our performances. When we laid out a concert program, we were careful to consider the progression of keys, and the juxtaposition of historical styles and epochs. Including a transcription of a romantic orchestral piece was unthinkable. We considered them decadent. And the symphonic electro-pneumatic organs on which they were played were considered decadent. As I look back on those days, I see how easy it is to dismiss something about which you know nothing.

 

Chickens and eggs, smoke
and fire, and trees falling in
the woods

César Franck (1822–1890) is generally considered to be the first of the composers of Romantic French organ music, the father of the style. His melodic and harmonic languages exploited the resources of the organs of his day, and his use of tone color foreshadows the voluptuous orchestral intentions of the great masters who followed him. 

Consider this incomplete list of Franck’s successors:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937)

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971)

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939)

Louis Vierne (1870–1937)

Henri Mulet (1878–1967)

The span between Franck’s birth and Dupré’s death is nearly 150 years. The lives of all these revered composers were intertwined. Two of them were born in the same year, and three of them died in the same year. They were each other’s teachers and students. They lived near each other. They must have heard each other play. Think of the Sunday evening dinner after someone’s recital, a festive bistro table with cheese, wine, and cigars, and Pierné and Tournemire arguing about Widor’s registrations. I don’t know enough of the personal relationships between these men to certify such a possibility, but it’s fun to imagine. I’ve been at quite a few of those post-concert tables, at which no one is in doubt! 

Keeping in mind those organist-composers, consider the genius organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll who lived from 1811 until 1899. Monsieur Cavaillé-Coll was eleven years old when Franck was born, and Tournemire and Vierne were twenty-nine when he died. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cavaillé-Coll was putting magnificent organs under the hands of a bevy of marvelous composers. He was the constant among them, and his mechanical and tonal genius influenced that entire epoch of music. From one monumental organ to the next, he gave his colleague musicians new voices to try, new registration aids, and radical concepts like progressive wind pressures that increased as you went up the scale. The highest notes of Cavaillé-Coll’s Trumpets and Harmonic Flutes soared across the vast stone naves like little comets. What would Widor’s music have been without those heart-rending trebles?

Some of the more rewarding moments of my career have been those spent with clients brainstorming about the capabilities of an organ console as it relates to the tonal resources of the organ. What if the Solo French Horn could be played from the Great, and if so, what if there were divisional pistons under the Great keyboard that affected the Solo stops?

Imagine the conversation between organist and organbuilder involving “what-ifs” like that, before there had been a full century of whiz-bang electric and solid-state gizmos for organ consoles. If you had only ever drawn heavy mechanical stop actions by hand, how would you like an iron pedal that would throw on the principal chorus with one heave of the hips?

Or this: 

 

Cavaillé-Coll: “We could place the reeds and mixtures of the Swell on a separate windchest that you could turn on and off with a lever next to the pedalboard. Any stops you had drawn on that chest could be accessed at once. We could call it a Ventil² because it turns the air on and off.” 

Saint-Saëns: “Yes, please.”

 

There’s a famous portrait of Franck seated at the console of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ at Ste. Clotilde in Paris, his left hand poised with raised wrist on the (I assume) Positif manual, and right hand drawing a stopknob. Take a look: http://www.classicalarchives.com/composer/2536.html. Man, that knob travels far. It’s out about five inches and it looks like he’s still pulling. Franck’s face wears a thoughtful expression—maybe he’s wondering how far does this dagnabbit knob move, anyway? Reminds me of the Three Stooges pulling electrical conduits out of the wall.  

During his lifetime, Cavaillé-Coll introduced dozens of state-of-the-art gizmos. You can bet lunch on the fact that the drawknobs on the famous organ console at St. Sulpice (built in 1862) don’t move that far. For images of that spectacular console, take a look at
www.stsulpice.com.

Let’s skip forward 50 or 60 years. Ernest Skinner installed a new organ with four manuals and 77 voices at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City, the same year that T. Tertius Noble was appointed organist. New York’s Grand Central Station was opened that year ten blocks from St. Thomas (the centennial has just been celebrated), as was the Oyster Bar Restaurant, which is still located in the station. I imagine a power lunch at the brand new Oyster Bar during which Skinner and Noble argued about whether the 16-foot Swell reed should be available independently on the Pedal at 4-foot. They must have disagreed about something, and it must have been quite a show.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s widely understood that Cavaillé-Coll was the great innovator, creating marvelous new devices and watching what the musicians could do with them. I think that the early twentieth-century version was more a collaboration between organist and organbuilder—they took turns influencing each other. Americans were being introduced to new technological marvels every day. I can picture a client asking, “If J. P. Morgan can have electric lights in his mansion on Madison Avenue, why can’t I have one on my music rack?” Think of the lucky organist who was the first to have one!

From our twenty-first century perspective, one of the most remarkable but overlooked facts about the huge body of nineteenth-century French organ music is that it was all conceived, composed, practiced, and performed on hand-pumped organs. They may be hundred-stop jobs, but they were hand-pumped. It must be that the electric blower was the single most important innovation in the history of the organ. Widor started his work at St. Sulpice in 1870. I do not know precisely when the first electric blower was installed there, but let’s guess that Widor played that instrument for 35 years relying on human power to provide his wind-pressure. At five Masses a week—again, I’m just guessing—that would be 8,750 Masses. Kyrie eleison.

All the photos I’ve seen of Widor show him to be serious, even dour, and the little herd of pumpers in the next room must have been a distraction, snickering and shirking. But I imagine he cracked a smile the first time he turned on the new blower and sat down to play in that great church, alone with his thoughts and imagination. Having the luxury to sit at the console for hours in solitude must have been a revelation. Organists on both sides of the Atlantic were freed to exploit their imaginations and their instruments.

 

Step right up . . . 

Since the beginning of civilization, people have been flocking to share the latest in entertainment. In the fifth century B.C., a stadium was built at Delphi, high in the Greek mountains. It could seat 6,500 spectators, had a running track that was 177 meters long. There’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater on the same site, built in the fourth century, B.C. I doubt they would have gone to the trouble if people weren’t going to come. Today we crowd into IMAX theaters, elaborate cruise ships, and huge arenas. We’ve been celebrating the “latest thing” for hundreds of generations.

In 1920, a monumental antiphonal pipe organ was the latest thing. Today we joke about “cockpit syndrome”—teasing each other that our consoles look like the cockpits of airplanes. But there was no airplane to compare to the cockpit of a 1915 Skinner organ with four keyboards, a hundred stopknobs, and dozens of buttons, switches, and lights. Think of the impression it must have made to a parishioner, alighting from a horse-drawn carriage onto a cobblestone street, and encountering that gleaming organ console in the chancel. It could have been the most complicated and bewildering thing he had ever seen.

The organist must have been revered as a conjurer, a certified operator of one of the most complex devices in existence. They were the technical equivalents of today’s air traffic controllers, nuclear power engineers, and voodoo software writers, but they were musicians first. It’s no wonder that we read about thousands of people cramming huge municipal auditoriums to hear organ recitals. Attending concerts of a symphony orchestra was expensive, reserved for the elite. At City Hall, or in the church, one wizard could play an overture by Beethoven with grand effect, and no one was sent away empty.

And play them they did. With the electric blower grinding away for endless hours and an ever-increasing array of clever console controls, those organists could experiment with fingerings, and learn to access complicated registrations that were changing continuously, bringing complex orchestral scores alive single-handedly. And as a twenty-year-old I had the nerve to dismiss it as decadent. I hang my head.

Last Monday, the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists presented their annual President’s Day Conference. The subject was Transcriptions Alive! (Many thanks to my friends and colleagues who were involved in the planning.) On Sunday evening, theatre organist Jelani Eddington played a recital on a large Wurlitzer in Brooklyn. And on Monday, Michael Barone, Peter Conte, and Jonathan Ambrosino presented talks about various aspects of the art, hosted by the Riverside Church. The day concluded with a recital by Thomas Trotter played on the great Aeolian-Skinner organ of the Riverside Church, the home bench to Virgil Fox, Frederick Swann, John Walker, and so many others.

Michael Barone must be the best deejay the serious organ world has ever had.  Using a nicely chosen string of recorded examples, he made the point that organists have been playing transcriptions of other types of music for some 450 years. Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) played choral music on the keyboard, and Barone’s demonstration flicked cleverly back and forth between the sung and played versions. Tempo and pitch were consistent, the differing factor being the tempered scale of the organs’ keyboards. Good choirs sing in pure intervals.

J. S. Bach transcribed his own orchestral music for the organ, along with concertos by colleague/rival composers such as Vivaldi, Ernst, and Walther. I reflect that while I was ready to dismiss playing transcriptions of orchestral music on the organ, I surely was learning the sprightly stuff that Bach himself transcribed. It was good enough for Bach, but apparently not good enough for me. Point taken. I hang my head.

The terraced dynamics of Bach’s organs were perfect for the terraced dynamics of the Baroque concerto grosso. A couple centuries later, the marvelous expressive capabilities of the symphonic pipe organ were equal to the expressive demands of complex Romantic orchestral scores, chock full of contrasting simultaneous solos (which are not synonymous with duets), and crescendos and diminuendos of all speeds and scopes.

We as organists are blessed with the wealth of literature written especially for our instrument. It comes in all shapes and sizes. It has national inflections and accents that are instantly recognizable to us. You may never have heard the piece, but the instant you hear that Grand Jeu you smell soft ripe cheese and the taste of rich red wine wafts through your imagination. But that doesn’t have to keep us from playing any music on the organ. Any music that sounds good is fair game.

Transcribing orchestral and choral scores to organ keyboards is as old as the instrument itself. Technological advances in organ building between 1875 and 1925 allowed the art of transcription to reach new heights. Later, we spent some fifty years reflecting on the past—that which came before all that innovation, and went to great lengths to resurrect old ideas of instrument building and playing. Sicut erat in principio. And a century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively. Sicut erat in principio. Cue trumpets.

 

Notes

1. Fibonacci gave us the system of numerals we use today (0,1), finding them easier to use and more flexible for complex computation than the older Roman System (I, V, X, etc.). The Fibonacci series applies to many aspects of nature, from the breeding of rabbits to the structure of the Nautilus shell. A quick Google search will give the interested reader a lot to think about.

2. Ventil comes from the same root as vent—the French and Latin words
for “wind.”