In the Wind. . . .

The Kotzschmar Organ

At 2:23 a.m. on January 24, 1908, a fire started, ironically, in the wiring of a new-fangled fire alarm system that was housed in the office of the city electrician on the third floor of City Hall in Portland, Maine. Public alarm was quickly raised, but freezing temperatures hampered the operation of the primitive fire fighting equipment, and the building was completely destroyed.

City leaders lost no time recovering from the disaster. The New York architectural firm of Carrère & Hastings, newly famous for their design of the New York Public Library completed in 1908, was engaged to design the new building, which was built, decorated, and furnished in just a few years and was ready for dedication in the summer of 1912.

Less than four months after the City Hall fire, on April 15, 1908, Portland’s most highly revered musician, Hermann Kotzschmar, passed away. A German immigrant, he had been encouraged to move to Portland by Cyrus Curtis, an interior decorator, prominent citizen, and music lover, who had heard Kotzschmar perform in Boston. When Kotzschmar and his wife moved to Portland, they lived in the Curtis home until they were established and could find a home for themselves.

Hermann Kotzschmar became organist at First Parish Church in Portland, formed an orchestra and choral society, and was the beloved teacher of scores of young musicians. The friendship that developed between Curtis and Kotzschmar was so close that Cyrus Curtis named his son Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis (1850–1933). Cyrus H. K. Curtis made quite a success of himself, founding the wildly popular The Saturday Evening Post and The Ladies’ Home Journal, and later acquiring The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Evening Post, and The New York Evening Post. He amassed a vast fortune and was a prolific philanthropist.

After learning of Hermann Kotzsch-mar’s death, Cyrus H. K. Curtis approached his lifelong friend, Adam Leighton, former mayor of Portland and chair of the City Hall building commission, offering to purchase a huge pipe organ to be installed in the auditorium of the new City Hall as a gift to the people of the city of Portland. He commissioned the Austin Organ Company of Hartford, Connecticut, to build the organ, and wrote to Mr. Leighton, 

I have given them carte blanche to build [the] organ, unhampered by any organist or music committee, and without any prejudice or pre-conceived notions of my own, knowing that they are better qualified to build the right kind of instruments than I could be or any committee whose member might differ in their views as to what was best.

He continued, 

As this organ is to be a memorial to Hermann Kotzschmar, I have asked [Austin] to provide some sort of place in the organ front for a bust of Mr. Kotzschmar and I am writing Mrs. Kotzschmar for photographs of her late husband with the idea of putting them into the hands of the best sculptor I know.

The cost of the organ was not to exceed $30,000, and Curtis’s gift made necessary alterations in the plans for the building, at a cost totaling $23,244.75, which was quickly authorized by the City Council.

On July 1, 1912, Mayor Oakley Curtis and the Portland City Council approved the formation of a music commission of three persons who would serve three-year terms. The commission would be responsible for the maintenance of the organ and the selection and hiring of the municipal organist. The virtuoso Will C. MacFarlane was appointed the city’s first organist; he was on the bench on Thursday, August 22, 1912, for the dedication of City Hall and the Kotzschmar Organ. The program opened with Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, followed by a prayer and Owen Brainard of Carrère & Hastings presenting the mayor with the keys to the building.

Chairman Leighton gave a report to the assembly that included the announcement that the cost of the building was $930,934.34. His report concluded, 

And now, Your Honor, Mayor Curtis, please accept from the fellow members of the building commission their hearty good-will, along with the formal relinquishment of stewardship of this beautiful structure, which is destined, we believe, to enhance Portland’s title to the compliment it so often receives of being the most beautiful city of the New World.

Cyrus H. K. Curtis then took the stage:

Mr. Mayor: 

I present to the City of Portland through you, this memorial to Hermann Kotzschmar, who for more than fifty years was pre-eminent in this city as organist, composer, and teacher, a man who was loved by all classes for his kindly spirit, his high ideals, and his devotion to music.  

He cared little or nothing for material things or for fame­—he never sought them, but here is his monument—a monument to one who did something to make us better men and women and appreciate that indefinable something that is an expression of the soul.

Cyrus H. K. Curtis purchased three different Aeolian organs for his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and in 1926 he purchased the immense Austin organ (146 ranks!) for Irvine Auditorium in Philadelphia as a gift to the University of Pennsylvania. The depth of his devotion to the art of music is seen in the heritage left by his daughter, Marie Louise Curtis Bok, who worked at South Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School, teaching underprivileged children.¹ She realized the need for a high-quality school of music that would be available to anyone, and in 1924, founded the tuition-free Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in honor of her father, so the influence of Hermann Kotzschmar is actively alive in Philadelphia as well as in Portland.

The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ

The Kotzschmar organ had a wonderful career as a cultural icon in the center of the city’s artistic life. A succession of brilliant musicians served as municipal organist through the first half of the twentieth century. But by the 1970s, the organ had fallen onto hard times. The city’s budget was strained, and its leaders found it difficult to preserve the budget for the care and use of the organ ahead of essential services.

In 1980, Berj Zamkochian, organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, brought a group of friends to see the Kotzschmar Organ. Among them was Maurice Prendergast, late of Kennebunk, Maine, who was impressed by the organ but dismayed by its condition. A few days later, he visited the offices of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, and presented executive director Russ Burleigh with a check for $10,000 to be used for repairing the organ. As the organ was owned by the city, Burleigh felt that it would be inappropriate to accept the gift on behalf of the orchestra, and conferred with PSO president Peter Plumb. The idea of forming a non-profit group devoted to the care of the organ emerged, interested parties negotiated with the city to assume the responsibility for the care of the organ, and in 1981, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) was founded, with Peter Plumb as founding president.

A board of directors was established, fund raising began, and FOKO presided over critical repairs to get the organ back on its feet. Concert programming was renewed, and the organ regained its active presence. When the City Hall auditorium was renovated in the 1990s, the organ was removed from the hall for safe keeping, and the stage was significantly enlarged. Through heroic efforts by FOKO and the herculean devotion of organ curator David Wallace, in 1997 it made its triumphant return to the newly renamed Merrill Auditorium.

Transition and growth

Ray Cornils was appointed Portland’s tenth municipal organist in 1990.² Ray’s tenure of 27 years in that position is the longest in the history of the position. His consummate musicianship, his gracious and welcoming personality, his affinity for working with young people in FOKO’s vast educational efforts, and his skill at nurturing the complex relationships between FOKO and the City of Portland have been essential to the growth and success of FOKO. Ray was patient with the failing and recalcitrant organ, coaxing it through its dying breath on numerous occasions and helping scores of visiting organists navigate its treacheries. Ray’s ability to show the organ in its best light, no matter the circumstances, was central to its continued prominence.

Ray was equally essential to the lengthy task of the renovation of the organ, working with the organ committee through dozens of complex meetings, assisting in raising funds, and continuing as the ambassador for the Kotzschmar Organ. He helped play the organ out of the hall as the renovation began and played it back into Portland as a renewed instrument. In many ways, Ray Cornils has been “Mister Music” for the city of Portland and the state of Maine.

David Wallace first met the Kotzschmar Organ at the age of six, the beginning of his devotion to the instrument, and the formation of his career as an organbuilder. David’s zeal was essential to the organ’s survival through budget cuts, near abandonment, and the immense chore of bringing it back to life after the renovation of the hall. Although news reports heralded the return of the “restored” Kotzschmar Organ, David knew as well as anyone that its days were still numbered.

In 2007, the reality of the organ’s condition was made clear to the board of directors, and plans for a serious and comprehensive renovation of the organ were formed. You can read in depth of the history of that process, from startled realization, to the thrill of the organ’s second triumphant return to the hall in 2014 on FOKO’s website at www.foko.org/2012-renovation/.

During the 2016 annual meeting of FOKO’s board of directors, Ray Cornils announced his retirement, to be effective after the traditional holiday concerts, “Christmas with Cornils,” in December 2017. A search committee³ was formed in October 2016, whose work started with the realization that the newly renovated organ could serve as a vehicle for a new life for the organization. Purposefully intending to remain open to structuring a new position around the talents of the next municipal organist, the committee solicited applications, reviewed recorded submissions, and selected six finalists who would travel to Portland for live interviews and auditions in May and June of 2017. After the auditions, the committee quickly reached a unanimous decision.

The Eleventh Municipal Organist

On Monday, September 18, 2017, the board of directors of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ voted unanimously to accept the recommendation of the search committee to appoint James Kennerley as Portland’s eleventh municipal organist. That evening, at its regular bi-monthly meeting, the Portland City Council welcomed an ensemble named Burundi Drummers Batimbo United in a colorful thunderous performance in City Council chambers. They took special action to change residency requirements for Class C board members of the non-profit Portland Fish Exchange, made several special proclamations brought forward by Mayor Ethan Strimling, and acted on the order to appoint James Kennerley as municipal organist, effective January 1, 2018.

James Kennerley began his formal musical education as a chorister at Chelmsford Cathedral, where proximity to the organ inspired his interest in the instrument. He holds degrees from Cambridge University and The Juilliard School, and the prestigious diploma as a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists. After holding positions at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut, and St. Mary the Virgin (Times Square) in New York City, he presently serves as organist and choirmaster at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch in New York City, where he directs a professional choir of 18 voices.

James won first place in the 2008 Albert Schweitzer National Organ Playing Competition and was winner of the 2013 composition competition of the Association of Anglican Musicians. He is active in New York and abroad as an organist, harpsichordist, singer, and conductor.

Recently, James and I sat together in my apartment in New York City to chat about the start of his work in Portland. He spoke eloquently about the role of the performer, bringing thought-provoking expression, musical and artistic statements both old and new, and outright entertainment to sacred congregations and secular audiences alike. But while serving a church is to be organist to the people of the church, serving as a municipal organist is to be an ambassador, a host, and a musician all at once.  

He expressed his excitement about getting to know the people of Portland and to drawing audiences to the city from afar. James and his wife, Emily, had gotten to know Portland earlier through visits with friends who live there—friends who consider Portland to be a hip and up and coming place to live, “the Brooklyn of the East Coast!” It is a city of about 65,000 residents (the size of a usual neighborhood in New York City), in a metropolitan area of about 250,000, and is home to a fleet of flourishing arts organizations including the Portland Art Museum and the Portland Symphony Orchestra.

The recent renovation of the Kotzschmar Organ is testament to the population’s commitment to the arts. It’s hard to believe that $2,400,000 could be raised for such a purpose in a city that size. By contrast, with all its cultural wealth, there is no public secular pipe organ in New York City.

James spoke of the newly renovated organ in the beautiful auditorium as a fresh canvas on which to paint a new musical picture. His vision as host is to welcome the city’s residents and visitors into City Hall, into a world of the arts including offerings from all disciplines.

By comparison, he spoke of the chef and owner of a fine restaurant, welcoming patrons into comfortable surroundings where an exciting world of things both familiar and unexpected is waiting.  Perhaps one weekend, we’ll depart from the usual menu and venture into an interesting world of exotic cuisine. Perhaps one week, we’ll invite a guest chef to approach the home stove and present something new to the neighborhood.

And as we talked, he took the restaurant metaphor further. He and Emily had just returned from a vacation in Europe, where they traveled off the beaten touristy path to remote villages in Spain where no one spoke English and where restaurants didn’t offer English menus. With little or no command of Spanish, and by cobbling together some understanding of Latin, and wisps of other languages, they ordered meals and were sometimes surprised by what turned up.

James compared that experience to the average citizen who shows up for a concert, is handed a menu in a foreign language, and takes his chances from limited knowledge as to what’s coming. The maître d’hôtel escorts the diner to his seat, unfolds the napkin, offers a glass of water, and explains the intricacies, the ingredients, and philosophies of each dish. The performer as host, as maître d’hôtel, can introduce a composer, place the music in the appropriate geographic and political context, and draw the average listener into an enlightened experience that is otherwise unattainable. The more you know about something, the easier it is to order and enjoy something unfamiliar.

The hot seat

The search committee established a tough audition process. Merrill Auditorium is a very busy place where time is at a premium, and the committee balanced the desire to hear the largest possible number of live auditions with the need to provide candidates with time to prepare at the organ. Candidates were given two hours of practice time to prepare one hour of audition performance. Just look at all those knobs. It was a daunting task.

James Kennerley had never played the Kotzschmar Organ before his audition, and in those two precious hours, he mined the tonal ore of the instrument to the deepest depths, and produced a program that included sophisticated serious music, glimpses into whimsy and fantasy, and a virtuosic romp of his own creation on the Brazilian smash hit, Tico-Tico no Fubá.  

Portland audiences, you have no idea how much you’re going to love welcoming James Kennerley as your eleventh municipal organist. Come early, come often. Bring your friends, lots of friends. We’ll be happy to recommend restaurants. It’s a big hall. There are plenty of seats. It’s going to be a blast.

Notes

1. Marie Louise Curtis’s first husband was Edward Bok, editor of her father’s magazine, The Ladies’ Home Journal. Their son, Curtis Bok, was Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Their grandson, Derek Bok, was president of Harvard University. Marie Louise Curtis’s second husband was the violinist Effrem Zimbalist, director of the Curtis School of Music. His son, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., was an actor, renowned for his starring roles in 77 Sunset Strip, and The F.B.I. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr’s., daughter, Stephanie, played Laura Holt in the NBC detective series, Remington Steele.

2. Will C. MacFarlane served two tenures, from 1912–1918, and 1932–1934.

3. Members of the search committee included John Bishop, Tom Cattell (president of the FOKO board of directors), Andy Downs (director of public facilities for the city), Elsa Geskus, Tracy Hawkins, Brooke Hubner (executive director of FOKO), Peter Plumb, Larry Rubinstein (chair), Harold Stover, and Mark Terison.

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine, is 100 years old, is about to undergo renovation--and Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure

It was a dark and stormy night . . .¹

In the early hours of January 24, 1908, a cold westerly wind gusting to thirty miles an hour buffeted Portland, Maine. With the temperature hovering in the mid-teens, the wind chill factor was between forty-five and fifty degrees below zero. Around 2 am, two men walking up Exchange Street toward Congress Street smelled burning rubber, noticed a red glow in City Hall, and ran to the Central Fire Station.²

Ironically, the fire was caused by a short circuit in Portland’s Gamewell Fire Alarm, which was housed in the city electrician’s office in City Hall. The fire, fanned by the strong winds, spread rapidly through the building. Firefighters responded from neighboring towns, but their primitive equipment was not equal to the emergency, and by morning the grand building was a smoldering wreck encased in ice. Government records were lost and the city’s fire chief was seriously injured, but there were no fatalities and the fire was confined to the single building.³

City leaders were quick to respond. Less than six months later, Mayor Adam Leighton announced the appointment of the famed architectural firm Carrère & Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library) to design the new City Hall, which would include a large auditorium. An Australian pianist visiting Portland pointed out that many British and Australian city hall auditoriums included large pipe organs, and Mayor Leighton called on his friend, the publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who responded with a gift to the City of Portland for a large concert pipe organ to be installed in the new auditorium. The organ would be named for Cyrus Curtis’s namesake. Mr. Curtis set two ground rules: the organ would be built by the Austin Organ Company without any direction or interference, and the cost should not exceed $30,000.⁴

The life of  the 

Kotzschmar

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ is 100 years old as I write today. As the City of Portland was forced to stop funding for the organ and its programming in the late 1970s, a not-for-profit organization called Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) was formed in 1981. You can read about the history of the organ and of FOKO at the website www.foko.org, and you can see the organ’s stoplist at www.foko.org/stop_list.htm.  

The organ was expanded by Austin in the 1920s and physically moved across the stage by a house-moving company in the 1960s. Merrill Auditorium was reconstructed in the 1990s and the organ was removed from the hall, to be returned when the hall was ready—on a shoestring budget, through the Herculean efforts of the organ’s curator and the FOKO Board of Directors. After a century of ups and downs, it’s great to report that programming has expanded to include significant educational outreach, bringing the pipe organ to public schools in the Portland area. FOKO has even had a portable three-rank pipe organ built that travels to schools to enhance these efforts. Hundreds of great organists have played recitals on the organ, and it remains a beloved icon in the center of Maine’s largest city. If you live in one of America’s more populous states, you may imagine Portland to be larger than it is. With an art museum, symphony orchestra, municipal organ, and opera company, the city boasts an unusually rich cultural life for its population of just over 66,000 people!

Over the past five or six years, the people of FOKO have come to grips with the fact that the Kotzschmar Organ is in failing condition. It sounds great, and has been played energetically and regularly all along. But to reuse a well-worn phrase, it’s time to pay the pipers, all 6,760 of them! To shorten the long story of a complicated path, FOKO, the City of Portland, and the people who love the Kotzschmar Organ have come up with the perfect gift for the organ that has everything in celebration of its hundredth birthday—the millions of dollars necessary for a full-blown, soup-to-nuts renovation, which will take place in the workshop of Foley-Baker, Inc. of Tolland, Connecticut. The City of Portland has set a bold example for government support of artistic and cultural activities by providing a matching grant of $1.25 million toward the renovation of the organ, an amount readily matched by private gifts. 

Centennial celebrations

The new City Hall and the Kotzschmar Organ were dedicated at two o’clock on the afternoon of August 22, 1912. At two o’clock on August 22, 2012, a large gathering of pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts were gathered in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn by the Sea in Portland in a plenary session concluding a week-long Centennial Festival celebrating the Kotzschmar Organ and its role in the life of the city. Michael Barone, host of Minnesota Public Radio’s Pipedreams, was moderator. The panel included the panoply of performers assembled for the festival: Scott Foppiano, Walt Strony, Peter Richard Conte, Fred Hohman, Fred Swann, John Weaver, and Municipal Organist Ray Cornils. (Felix Hell and Tom Trenney had left the festival early because of other concert engagements.)

A couple of hours later, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ hosted a Gala Centennial Banquet attended by about two hundred people. And on Wednesday evening, we enjoyed the Centennial Concert played by Ray Cornils, Peter Richard Conte, and the Kotzschmar Festival Brass. You can see the festival schedule, the specifications of the organ, and learn the history of the organ and of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ at the website, www.foko.org.

I serve on the board of directors of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, where I am chairman of the organ committee. Seems natural enough, doesn’t it, that someone serving as a volunteer on the board of a not-for-profit organization would take a role from his professional life? But there’s something very funny about it. Throughout more than 35 years working as an organbuilder, I’ve been involved in hundreds of conversations with organ committees from all sorts of institutions, but always as an organbuilder, as a contractor, never as the “customer.” Since the conversation about renovating the Kotzschmar Organ started early in 2007, I’ve been on the other side of the table. The organ committee and I prepared requests for proposals and sent them to a list of organbuilding firms, we reviewed and compared the various proposals we received, chose the contractor, and spent many hours in conference with the staff of Foley-Baker planning the project. It was an extraordinary learning experience, rounding out my understanding of the process of conception and planning of a major organ project, and I am grateful to Foley-Baker, the organ committee, and all my colleagues on the FOKO board for this very rich experience.

Wait, wait, when can we work? 

Planning the schedule of this project has been unusually delicate. Merrill Auditorium is a grand home not only for this wonderful organ, but for many other activities as well. It is home to the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Choral Arts Society, the Portland Opera, and the Portland Ballet. (How many cities of 66,000 people can boast such a lineup?)  Each year, many high schools, colleges, and universities hold their graduation exercises there, most of them accompanied by the organ. The City of Portland uses the auditorium for meetings and conferences, and very importantly, the hall is the premier venue in the State of Maine for all sorts of cultural activities, from rock concerts to comedians, from classical musicians to this summer’s live sell-out production of National Public Radio’s ubiquitous favorite show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! That means two things—thousands of people throng from all over the state to hear this wide variety of events, and the rental of the hall for high-profile programs is of primary importance to the operating budget of the auditorium.

The second major factor defining the delicacy of the schedule is the fact that it’s difficult to maintain an audience in a dark hall. The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ have cultivated an enthusiastic audience for the organ, comprising many local enthusiasts and countless tourists who plan their visits to Portland to coincide with concerts at Merrill Auditorium. How to maintain the presence of the organ and nourish the audience during its approximately twenty months of absence is the question that FOKO has been grappling with since the beginning of the conversation.

The five-week period necessary for the removal of the organ must have been the largest single block of time reserved since the hall was reopened after its renovation in 1997, for which the organ had been removed from the building.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that the conversation about the renovation of the organ started in 2007, just ten years after the Kotzschmar Organ was installed in Merrill Auditorium for the second time. As the auditorium had received a thorough facelift that included new theater seats, a renewed acoustical environment, and a new and larger stage equipped with all the machinery and gear necessary to support complicated theatrical productions, you can imagine that there was much fanfare about the organ’s return to the hall having been cleaned, repaired, and modified to fit the new environment. In fact, the word “restoration” had been used.  

When early in 2007, FOKO’s organ committee reported to the full board that the organ’s condition merited a thorough and very expensive overhaul, there was an eerie silence in the room. The next sound came from a board member who correctly commented, “I thought we restored the organ when the hall was rebuilt.”

In August 2007, FOKO hosted a symposium, inviting seven acknowledged pipe organ experts to visit and inspect the organ and participate in several days of both private and public conversation. Theatre organist Walt Strony, Thomas Murray, Joseph Dzeda, and Nicholas Thompson-Allen of Yale University, Peter Richard Conte and Curt Mangel of the Wanamaker Organ, and organ consultant and historian Jonathan Ambrosino were the invited guests. Craig Whitney of the New York Times, and author of All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003), served as scribe for the public round-table discussion. The result of the symposium was a unanimous recommendation by the participants that FOKO commission a professional survey of the organ’s condition, which would serve as the basis for a request for proposals for the renovation of the organ. Five years later, as I write today, the organ is being dismantled for its multi-million-dollar renovation.

The tricky “R’s” . . . 

From the very beginning of five years of conversations, FOKO board members have referred to this project as a renovation. In the world of the preservation of antiquities, the word restoration should be used very carefully. The word implies returning an artifact to its condition when brand new. If the Kotzschmar Organ were being restored, the five-manual console built in 2000 would be removed and the original either repurchased and restored (with its mechanical “ka-chunk” one-level combination action) or faithfully reconstructed, and the significant voices added by Austin in the 1920s (and paid for by Cyrus Curtis) would be removed. While the original organ was a glorious instrument, the various additions and modifications have improved the instrument for modern use by myriad artists.

The current project includes a faithful reproduction of the original Austin Universal Air Chest, which was significantly modified during the 1995–97 project, replacement of pipe valves and pneumatic note-motors with authentic parts supplied by the Austin Organ Company, and the addition of two new 32-foot voices. It would be inaccurate to refer to this project as a restoration. We believe that the effect, aura, and ethic of the original Austin organ will be retained and the essential character of the organ will not be changed. 

The centennial star parade

The Kotzschmar Centennial Festival was a brilliant convocation. The array of visiting artists was inspirational. It was both fun and rewarding to meet with the visiting faithful, many of whom were not professionals, but people so dedicated to the thrill of the pipe organ that traveling hundreds of miles to spend a summer week sitting in churches, conference rooms, and a concert hall is a joy. It was both thrilling and moving to see how the people of Portland came out to celebrate and support their most visible cultural icon. And in the light of all that, enriching for me to have such a broad opportunity to visit with my colleagues who have so much to offer on stage and at table.  

Felix Hell gave us a brilliant performance of Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on Ad nos ad salutarem undam. After the concert I caught a glimpse of John Weaver and Felix Hell embracing, the epitome of the deep experience between mentor and student. I’ve had many conversations with great teachers about the joy of working with gifted students, and that which I had with John Weaver at breakfast a couple days later was a classic about how a great performer takes what he learned from his teachers and builds on it as he matures as a performer and develops his vision of a given piece.

Thomas Heywood (www.concert
organ.com) travels the world with his wife Simone, who assists him at the console for his performances, and manages his career. Thomas has the hands and feet of a conjurer, allowing him to play fiendish passages, especially those in his own transcriptions, with abandon and most notably, joy. He bounds onto the stage as if he were winning an Oscar, then jumps on the bench and dazzles. He tested the repetition rate of the organ’s aging action with his reading of the Overture to William Tell.

Fred Swann and John Weaver shared a recital on Tuesday night, August 21. While we celebrate the brilliant young players who are bringing new life to the pipe organ, the opportunity to hear two such masters play on the same evening is to recall the majesty, dignity, and depth of musical interpretation that can only be achieved through a lifetime of practice, study, and thousands of performances. I doubt that anyone in the hall failed to recognize the significance of that collaboration.

Tom Trenney, Scott Foppiano, and Walt Strony helped us appreciate the versatility of the Kotzschmar Organ, which presents itself architecturally as a formal concert organ, but with its array of percussions like Harp, Marimba, Glockenspiel, drums, and Turkish Cymbal, can easily jump the line between the classical and the popular. Tom accompanied the silent film, Speedy, and Scott and Walt gave varied and colorful performances that showcased the widest ranges of the organ’s resources, and their creative and colorful personalities.

Fred Hohman honored the memory of one of Portland’s early municipal organists by playing transcriptions and original compositions by Edwin Lemare, whose virtuosity impressed early twentieth-century audiences, and whose creativity in understanding the capabilities of the organ console is still educating concert organists.

I’ve written before in the pages of this journal that I suspect Peter Richard Conte to be armed with universal joints in his fingers rather than the more usual “up-and-down” knuckles that hamper the rest of us. As an audience member sitting 100 feet from the console in the Grand Tier of the auditorium, I heard sweeping performances of familiar orchestral scores. As a friend who has often stood next to Peter as he plays, I know he’s capable of playing on four keyboards simultaneously while playing two independent parts on the pedalboard. You think it’s super-human and impossible until you see it up close.

Ray Cornils has served Portland as municipal organist since 1990. He, like Hermann Kotzschmar, must be the premier musician of the City of Portland and the State of Maine. His rapport with city officials, board members, and with the audience is a joy to witness, and his approach to his role, complete with sparkling costumes and a smooth croon of a voice as he addresses the audience at Merrill Auditorium, speaks of his understanding and appreciation of the role of leader of the city’s music.

Say good night, Gracie.  

During the last piece of the centennial concert, attentive audience members noticed a light turning on inside the organ, and several people sneaking across the organ behind the façade pipes. As the audience stood in ovation, Ray and Peter slid back onto the bench and launched into a fresh four-hands arrangement of Auld Lang Syne. The entire staff of Foley-Baker, Inc., some twenty strong in suits and hard hats, walked onto the stage with a huge stepladder, and started removing façade pipes as the audience sang and wept.

All this about a pipe organ? The pipe organ is the most complex of musical instruments, the most expensive, and the most difficult to care for. Organs are subject to the whims of weather, politics, and the global economy (try to solicit a leading gift from a donor whose portfolio has just crashed). For many, they are the symbol of lost ages, the ultimate icon of the dead white man. They are the timeless symbol of the church, which compels an ever-decreasing percentage of our population.

Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure. Can your town, county, state, or nation be persuaded to do the same? Never, never take pipe organs for granted.

Notes

1. Edward Bulwer-Litton, Paul Clifford (opening line), published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London, 1830. It is widely quoted as an example of “Purple Prose” celebrating the worst extremes in writing:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

2. Behind the Pipes: The Story of the Kotzschmar Organ, Janice Parkinson-Tucker, Casco House, 2005, pp. 2–3.

3. Lima Daily News, Lima, Ohio, January 24, 1908 (http://www.gendisasters.com/data1/me/fires/portland-cityhall1908.htm)

4. Behind the Pipes, p. 14.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Of the people, by the people, for the people . . . 

. . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

These words from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are in tribute to those killed during the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg of the American Civil War. In the eulogy he delivered after Lincoln’s assassination, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner said, “The world noticed at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” Sumner’s other claim to fame is as namesake of the Sumner Tunnel that connects downtown Boston to Logan Airport by passing under Boston Harbor.

Perhaps it’s rare for words like these to appear in the pages of a trade journal, and in today’s volatile political climate I know very well that I tread on dangerous ground. The relationship between politics and religion is strong and prevalent, though the United States Constitution specifically calls for the two to be separate. The differences in worship styles between Northeastern Anglicans and Southeastern Evangelicals are as vast as the wide range of styles found in the world of the pipe organ.

Like it or not, the pipe organ has been associated primarily with the church for some five hundred years. It’s hard to imagine what the pipe organ would be today were it not for the influence of the church. From the late Renaissance to the modern day, most of the music written for the organ comes from the church, and by extension, most of the organ music we might consider secular couldn’t have happened had the church not provided us with the parade of instruments that is our history. One might argue that the organ symphonies of Vierne or Widor are not ecclesiastical music, but without the Cavaillé-Coll organs in the grand churches of St. Sulpice and Notre Dame in Paris, I doubt those two masters would have gotten it together to write that music.

Some twenty years ago my friend and colleague, the widely respected organ historian Barbara Owen, commented, “We have to get the organ out of the church.” I was dumbfounded—I guess because I found I was too dumb to understand what she meant. How could the organ possibly survive without the church? It was the comment of another friend and colleague, Steven Dieck, President of C.B. Fisk, Inc., that enlightened me a little. To paraphrase Steve’s comment, large portions of modern society might never have the chance to hear a pipe organ—those people who would never be caught dead in church, or more to the point, those who would only be caught dead in church! After all, some people never go into a church unless they’re in a coffin.

The organs we find in concert halls, university auditoriums, and increasingly rarely, in municipal auditoriums are available to the general public without risk of exposure to the perceived perils of organized worship, and it’s the municipal organ that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The first American municipal organ appeared in 1864 when E. & G. G. Hook built a four-manual organ with 64 stops for Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. That organ was restored by the Noack Organ Company in 1982 and is still very much in use. Records show that Roosevelt built an organ with 129 stops for the Chicago Auditorium in 1889, the year that Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated as America’s twenty-third president, and three years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. I don’t know how many organs that large had been built before 1889—but it sure must have stood out as one of the great cultural icons of its day. And with what I know about the organs built by Hilborne Roosevelt, it must have been a knockout.

In 1882, Thomas Edison proved the practicality of the commercial and residential use of electricity by installing electric lighting in the home of J. P. Morgan at the corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street in New York. When the Roosevelt organ was built, the development of electrical applications was still in its infancy—the organ had tracker action. That’s a huge organ. The stoplist shows that there were indicators for low, medium, and high wind pressures—imagine the army of people needed to pump that organ.

In 1921 E. M. Skinner built a five-manual instrument with 150 stops for the new 13,000-seat Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland. Those were the days before radio and recordings, and it was expensive to hear the few great symphony orchestras across the country, so the municipal organ was the only way for many to hear live performances of great music. Accounts of the introduction of that organ give us a glimpse into the popularity of the public pipe organ. Following the dedication of the organ, Harold MacDowell, the Cleveland City Architect wrote: 

Despite the oppressive heat, the crowd which had been collecting since noon soon exceeded the capacity of the mammoth hall and long before the time set for the inaugural recital all seats were filled and more than 5000 men, women, and children were crowding the corridors of the colossal structure. The police which were out in large numbers were at first able to hold the crowd into a semblance of order, but soon gave up in despair as the eager mob swept all before it.¹

That means there were at least 18,000 people in attendance. A riot before an organ recital? Wow!

It wasn’t only big cities that had municipal organs. Melrose, Massachusetts is about seven miles north of Boston. Today there are around 29,000 residents. In 1919 when the Austin Organ Company installed the 78-stop organ in Soldiers and Sailors Hall, just over 18,000 people lived in Melrose. As we learned in Cleveland, that’s just enough to make an audience.

If you’re interested in reading more about this heritage, visit the website www.municipalorgans.net, where you’ll find a chronological list of American Municipal Pipe Organs. You can click your way further in to find stoplists and histories of most of the instruments. Thanks to the creators of that website for making so much information available. I’m sure that was a labor of love!

Two cities in the United States still have important secular organs with seated municipal organists: San Diego, California and Portland, Maine. San Diego is home to the Spreckels Organ, housed in the Spreckels Organ Pavilion at Balboa Park. It’s one of the world’s largest outdoor organs, and though it must compete with the flight paths of San Diego International Airport, it remains a popular attraction. Municipal Organist Carol Williams and visiting artists offer weekly concerts. Like so many other cities, San Diego has been struggling to manage a deficit budget, and after much well-reported arguing, the City Council voted in 2011 to renew Williams’ contract for ten years, continuing the city’s sizable contribution to her salary. You can read an article about the city’s decision in the San Diego Union Times at https://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/aug/02/civic-organist-contract-renewed/?ap. The article cites that the city has a $40,000,000 deficit—but they approved funding of $286,000 for a ten-year contract for Williams. Compare that to Alex Rodriguez (aka A-Rod) of the New York Yankees who was paid $33,000,000 in 2009. That’s more than $203,000 per game, which is close to ten years for Carol Williams. According to www.baseball-reference.com, A-Rod’s aggregate salary as a baseball player is $296,416,252. That’s enough money for a thousand municipal organists for ten years. Play ball!

As the weather in Portland, Maine is nothing like that of San Diego, Portland’s Kotzschmar Organ is indoors, located in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall. Housed in an elegant case at the rear of the stage, and sporting a five-manual drawknob console, this grand instrument is the pride of its city. And while San Diego has just over 3,000,000 residents, the entire State of Maine has about 1,300,000 people, 64,000 of whom live in Portland, the largest city in the state. To put the scale of the state in closer perspective, the capital city of Augusta has 18,500 residents! 

The institution that was Curtis

Cyrus H. K. Curtis grew up in Portland, Maine. His father Cyrus Libby Curtis was an interior decorator and amateur musician who met the struggling immigrant musician Hermann Kotzschmar in Boston, and offered to help him establish himself in Portland. Kotzschmar became conductor and pianist for the Union Street Theatre Orchestra, in which Curtis played the trombone, and organist and choirmaster of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) where Curtis sang in the choir. Can you detect a pattern? As Kotzschmar was gaining traction in Portland, he lived with the Curtis family, and Cyrus Libby Curtis gave his son the name of his favorite musician, hence the initials H.K.

In the ensuing years, Kotzschmar founded choral societies and orchestras, performed as conductor, organist, and pianist in countless concerts, and taught a generation of the city’s musicians.

Meanwhile, Cyrus H. K. Curtis really made something of himself. He founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891 and subsequently launched the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Later he founded Curtis-Martin Newspapers, Inc., whose properties included the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Evening Post. Cyrus
H. K. Curtis made a lot of money, and he carried the musical influence of Hermann Kotzschmar all his life. He purchased three pipe organs for his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (Aeolian, Opus 784, 943, and 1374); he donated a 160-stop Austin organ to the University of Pennsylvania where it still stands, recently renovated, in Irvine Auditorium. He gave huge amounts of money to the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his daughter Mary Louise Curtis Bok founded the Curtis Institute of Music, named in honor of her father. Hers was a particularly classy honor as the Curtis Institute was founded nine years before her father’s death!

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At about 2:00 in the morning on January 24, 1908, a fire started in the city electrician’s office in Portland’s City Hall, ironically caused by an electrical short-circuit in the Gamewell Fire Alarm System that was housed in the office (pesky new-fangled contraptions). Because the alarm system was the first thing to go, the fire quickly went out of control and City Hall was destroyed. Coincidentally, Hermann Kotzschmar died on April 15, 1908. After plenty of discussion, the remains of the building were razed and the cornerstone for the new City Hall was laid on October 6, 1909, and on January 10, 1911, former Mayor Adam Leighton announced that Portland native Cyrus Curtis was donating a pipe organ to be installed in Merrill Auditorium of the new City Hall in memory of Portland’s most prominent musician.

The new City Hall was dedicated on August 22, 1912. Municipal Organist Will C. Macfarlane was at the organ. The program included Macfarlane’s performance of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, a report from the city building committee (Adam Leighton, chairman), presentation of keys to the building by Owen Brainard of the architecture firm Carrere and Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library and the House and Senate Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.), presentation of the organ by Cyrus Curtis, unveiling of the Hermann Kotzschmar bust by his widow Mary, and acceptance of the whole shebang by Mayor Oakley Curtis (no relation). Macfarlane also played his own compositions Evening Bells and Cradle Song, and a transcription of Kotzschmar’s Te Deum in F. Judge Joseph Symonds gave an oration, and representing the Catholic Bishop of Portland, Rev. Martin A. Clary gave the prayer and benediction. Must have been a lovely afternoon.²

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In January of 2007, the FOKO board asked the organ committee to investigate the possibility of some additions and major repairs to the organ. Specialists were called in to assess the questions and replied that the general condition of the organ was poor enough to make the work feasible. FOKO responded by inviting a group of widely respected experts to participate in a public symposium in August 2007 to discuss the organ in detail and develop recommendations for the future of the instrument. The participants were Joe Dzeda, Nick Thompson-Allen, Jonathan Ambrosino, Walt Strony, Curt Mangel, Peter Conte, and Tom Murray. Craig Whitney of the New York Times served as scribe and followed the event with a written report. As chair of the organ committee, I was moderator of the event. After years of study, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ and the City of Portland announced plans for the renovation of the organ. In September 2011, Portland’s City Council approved a grant of $1.25 million for the project. Just before the Council meeting, Mayor Nicolas Mavodone, City Manager Mark Rees, and two members of the City Council joined me on the stage of Merrill Auditorium for a tour of the organ. The mayor marveled at the thousands of pipes, took a slew of photos with his cell phone, and commented that he had stood on the stage dozens of times presiding over civic events without having any idea what was behind the organ case. He repeated those comments for the City Council and the members approved the funding unanimously. Watching both elected and appointed city officials discuss and approve the motion to care for that organ at such a meaningful level was a great experience for an organbuilder.   

FOKO is raising the balance to fund not only the organ’s renovation but to endow the positions of Municipal Organist and Organ Curator, and to extend the organization’s ambitious and effective education programs, bringing Maine’s schoolchildren together with the King of Instruments.

The renovation of the organ will be accomplished by Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut. Having completed similar projects on the organs of the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston (The Mother Church), Symphony Hall in Boston, and the Aeolian organ in the Chapel of Duke University, Mike Foley and the staff of FBI bring vast experience to this project.

To commemorate the centennial, FOKO will present a Centennial Festival of concerts and masterclasses starting on Friday, August 17, 2012, and culminating with a grand Kotzschmar Centennial Concert on the actual anniversary, Wednesday, August 22. Participating artists and presenters include Tom Trenney, Walt Strony, Mike Foley, Dave Wickerham, Frederick Hohman, Michael Barone, Thomas Heywood, Peter Conte, John Weaver, Felix Hell, John Bishop, and Ray Cornils.  

The festival will be housed at Portland’s Holiday Inn By the Bay. Details will be announced soon. Like a hawk, you should watch the website of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, www.foko.org. Summer in Maine is as good as it gets, the Kotzschmar Organ is a grand instrument, soon to be prepared for its second century. And you’ll never have a better chance to gather with such a list of luminaries in such an intimate city. Hope to see you there.

What’s it going to cost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballpark figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reeds

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

Keyboards

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

Climate

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

Casework

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

Console

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

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

What’s the point?

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

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

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

Let the building do the talking.

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

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

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

Performance

Rockport, Maine, is a quiet, picturesque village nestled between the bustling towns of Rockland and Camden. It’s on the west shore of Penobscot Bay, which forms the east end of the region known as mid-coast Maine, and like the surrounding towns, Rockport is a combination of a working fishing harbor and home to many private pleasure boats. There are a couple of active boatbuilding workshops there, and dozens, if not hundreds, of moorings bedeck the enclosed harbor. The area is home to many high-end vacation residences, so there’s a strong market for good musical performances, and Rockport, with two excellent restaurants and a vintage opera house within a few doors of each other, is known for the many outstanding concerts presented each summer.

But not last Tuesday. After a terrific dinner, Wendy and I took our seats in the opera house for a concert presented by a string quartet that’s resident in the area, and we were immediately stricken by the backstage sounds of the cellist, feverishly practicing a narky passage that started with a very high note, followed by a dramatic downward flourish. He played it over and over, right through the concert’s starting time, never getting the high note quite right, and sounding more frantic with each repetition. It was a dreadful display.

Finally, the quartet took the stage. Their concert attire was sloppy, and their progress from stage door to their chairs was haphazard. They opened the program with a few lofty remarks about the piece they were about to play, and offered a lackluster reading. Though the printed program indicated that they would play two pieces before intermission, they left the stage after the first piece, and the cellist went right back to his nervous and ineffectual practicing, still never quite reaching that high note. The audience was left to wonder if this was the intermission. There were no cues offered by house lights and no announcement about alteration of the program. The quartet would be joined by a singer for the final two pieces, so I suppose it made sense to present them together without break, but the sequence was strange and unsettling, especially as it was accompanied by dozens more missed chances at that pesky high note. Dozens.

Once again, it was a relief when the anguish stopped and they took the stage. The singer was a young woman who grew up in the area and made good. She has performed in several major opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and she knew how to dress appropriately. Her beautifully chosen dress and carefully coiffed hair was in stark contrast to the sloppy, uncoordinated garb heaped on the four chairs. The first piece they offered together was by Respighi, an erudite work with elusive structure, and none of them managed to pull out any sense of form. Finally, in Samuel Barber’s shimmering Dover Beach, the soprano got some traction and pulled the quartet toward meaningful playing. Inexplicably, the gullible audience gave them a standing ovation. Must have been the singer’s family. At least we had a wonderful dinner.

Rockport is 45 minutes from our place in Newcastle, and we had them in shreds by the time we got home. The quartet has been resident in the area for over 20 years, and they’re supported by a not-for-profit board that raises funds and organizes their concerts. Maybe things are a little too easy for them. Their performance lacked any sense of passion or commitment to the music.

The Salt Bay Chamberfest is an annual event in Damariscotta, Maine, which adjoins our town of Newcastle. The concerts are held in a barn owned by the Damariscotta River Association. It’s not a converted barn, it’s just a barn with wood walls and roof, cement floor, folding chairs, and a concession stand selling wine and cheese. Last summer, we heard a program that included three pieces by Kaija Saariaho: Nocturne, Cloud Trio, and Je sens un deuxième coeur. (Later in the year, her opera, L’amour de Loin, was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera written by a woman to be presented there in more than a century.)

That concert ended with Arnold Schoenberg’s mystical Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, with Alan Gilbert, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, playing viola. Those musicians were used to performing in central formal venues, but they gave the same level of energy and commitment to their performance in the barn. It was rich and rewarding.

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I’ve long admired The Bobs, an a cappella vocal quartet formed in 1981 and now preparing their farewell tour. They write their own material in a rapid-fire hipster style, and they sing brilliantly in close harmony. I heard them live in a concert at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, a thousand-seat venue in Memorial Hall, just up the street from the museum formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger, home of E. Power Biggs’s iconic Flentrop organ. As we left the room after the concert, I was exhausted and assumed that most people present felt the same way. I reflected that those four performers spent enough energy to wear out the entire audience.

Just what is performance? Of course, performance is an artist presenting before an audience. Performers are actors, musicians, dancers, comedians, and various combinations of all those elements. But there’s more to it than sitting at an instrument, playing pieces of music. And, for the audience, the performance is more than simply sitting in a chair and listening.

There’s some kind of deal, some kind of relationship set up between performer and audience. Perhaps it’s tension—the audience is expectant and the performer intends to sate them. Perhaps it’s trust—the audience relies on the performer to present the music freely and accurately. Perhaps it’s risk—the performer interprets familiar passages in new ways, causing the audience to sit on the edge of their seats. And perhaps it’s the baring of soul—the performer exposes his inner person to the audience, willing to share his private thoughts from the stage.

Some years ago, Wendy and I saw Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul at the Trinity Repertory Theater. One scene involved a male character, a diplomat in a position of power, who offered to provide the woman the visa she sought in return for sex. There was a struggle of wills until the actress tore off her blouse and, naked from the waist up, consented to the humiliation. That act took my breath away as an expression of a performer, baring herself both literally and figuratively. Her nakedness was metaphorical, a shout of anger at the ugly behavior of the diplomat. Her ability and willingness to do that in anger, apparently spontaneously, was one of the most eloquent instants in any performance I have witnessed.

Oh yes, I hear you sniggering out there. Of course he would never forget that. But how many of us have had performance anxiety dreams in which we are sitting at the organ in front of a room full of people and realize in horror that we are naked? Given the number of times I’ve heard friends and colleagues relate similar dreams, I’ll answer my own question. Lots of us. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to realize that those images are related to the requirement and expectation that when we perform, we are baring our souls and our artistic psyches before our audiences. Are we ready for that?

One concept of performance, often repeated, is that the performer is a vessel through which the music passes. An iconic painting hangs on a wall, open to the enjoyment and interpretation of the viewer. There is no need for a middleman between the artist and the consumer. The greatness of a composer is nothing but squiggles on a page until an artist brings them to life. And in my experience, the best performers and the most exciting performances happen when the artist-as-vessel is a conveyor of energy. Not only do the squiggles become organized sound, but they become energized, dancing, flitting, or tearing across the room. The artist transforms the squiggles into force, and topknots are uprooted.

That’s the sign of a great actress, who seems to be a completely different person in every role she plays. Think of the great Maggie Smith as the imperious, scathing Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, and compare that to the homeless Mary Shepherd in The Lady in the Van. You Downton Abbey fans, if you haven’t met Mary Shepherd, you must.

Bigger than yourself

Sometimes, the artist-as-vessel gets carried away and grows bigger than the music. Physical histrionics are purposefully created, supposedly adding to the artistic experience. The unvarying result is the opposite. The music takes a back seat to the performer, and the audience is the poorer. It’s as if you’re watching a gymnastics meet rather than an artistic performance. I don’t mind an occasional flourish, or a toss of the head at the end of an exciting passage, but I dislike unnecessary movement that seems theatrically planned.

Le Poisson Rouge is a trendy performance venue on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It’s downstairs (one can only imagine what would happen if there was a fire), and you sit at tables where you can order (pretty good) food and (very good) drinks. It’s within walking distance of our apartment, and we’ve heard quite a few wonderful performances there. But there was this duo-piano concert, two sisters who were personifications of the too-flashy, too-theatrical musician. The first chord made me cringe: the pianos were not in tune with each other. Wendy put her hand on my elbow, and hissed, “Behave.” She was right. I consoled myself by scrawling commentary on the program throughout their performance. The two pianists spent the evening tossing their hair, throwing their hands in the air, and making what their coaches must have thought were alluring facial expressions. We often talk about that performance in social settings, and we invariably call them “The Kissy Sisters.”

In professional football, a team is penalized when a player displays histrionics. It’s officially called “excessive celebration.” What if you had a button on the armrest of your concert hall seat that allowed you to vote? Artists whose first and last names are the same would be banned from the field.

Distraction

Did I mention that the pianos were not in tune with each other? Those who present concerts must accept the responsibility to create a suitable setting for performers and listeners. There were several hundred of us in that room, in fifty-dollar seats with twenty-dollar drinks. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t money to hire a piano tuner. There were two lovely Steinway “B’s” on the stage—at least they brought in good instruments. But had the pianos been in good tune, it might have taken me two or even three measures to dislike the performance.

During performances at Carnegie Hall in New York, there are huge glass snifters full of Ricola™ lozenges placed throughout the lobbies and corridors, a nice touch of consideration for all concert-goers. I remember hearing a radio story years ago about the London Symphony introducing “Silent Sweets,” little hard candies wrapped in paper specially designed to be quiet when opening.

Coughing and rustling candy wrappers are small fry when compared to cell phones. We’re all used to the public announcements before performances, reminding audiences to silence their cell phones. Look across the audience of a big formal concert and guess how many cell phones are in the room. Out of 2,500 people, I bet there are fewer than a hundred who don’t have phones with them.

On Thursday, January 12, 2012, The New York Times reported: 

They were baying for blood in the usually polite precincts of Avery Fisher Hall. The unmistakenly jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept going on, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor. 

You can read the story at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally-stopped-but-….

Coughing, crying babies, cell phones, and late arrivals are all intrusions into the relationship between performer and audience. Some are unavoidable. There are times when you just can’t help coughing. But thoughtful audience members must do their best to preserve the full experience for those around them. There’s a lot to be said for bringing children to concerts, but there’s a continuum between the child’s gain and the collective loss of hundreds of listeners whose experience was marred. Cell phones? No excuse. But the poor guy whose phone spoiled the New York Philharmonic’s concert had a plausible explanation. The New York Times reported that his company had replaced his Blackberry with an iPhone that day. He thought he had silenced it at the start of the concert, but didn’t realize that the alarm was set.

The consummate performer

We all have memories of spectacular live performances. Organist Stephen Tharp played the closing concert of the 2014 convention of the American Guild of Organists. Boston’s 3,000-seat First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) was filled to capacity with what must be the most critical audience an organist can face, and Tharp let loose with a performance that was dazzling both technically and artistically. His reading of his own transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring took the audience places they’d never been. In the three years since, I’ve discussed that concert with dozens of others who were there, most recently last night. And while you’d think that the wide world could dredge up one fussbudget who would criticize, I’ve never heard it. The concept of organ concerts changed that night, and everyone present knew it.

Another instance displaying the consummate performer was the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires’s experience with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1999. She was engaged to play a Mozart concerto, checked which one by referring to the orchestra’s published schedule, and prepared the piece. Not a good source, apparently. Amazingly, the first reading with the orchestra was during an open rehearsal in front of an audience. Conductor Riccardo Chailly began Mozart’s Concerto No. 20 in D Minor. Pires gave a shocked look, buried her face in her palm, then told Chailly that there was a problem. As the orchestra played, he turned to her and said something like, “You played it last year. You’ll be fine.” And she was. By the time the orchestra’s introduction was over, she had pulled herself together, dredged her memory for the correct piece, and played it flawlessly. You can see a video of that incredible moment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS64pb0XnbI.

I doubt that I fully understand the physiology that makes some people able to perform. How can a major league pitcher throw a strike in a tense situation when millions of people are watching? How can an actress toss aside all modesty to be someone else in front of an audience? How can a musician maintain control of her body to perform such intricate motions in front of thousands? What drives people to do that? What expansiveness of spirit is necessary? What generosity? What intense concentration?

I may not understand it, but I sure am grateful for every opportunity I’ve had to hear someone play beautifully. All of us who perform at any level need to witness others doing it as often as possible.

John BIshop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Personal settings

Not long ago Wendy set the wallpaper-screensaver option on her PC so it would scroll randomly through her files of photos. Her machine often sits on the desk in her home office, which is next to our bedroom, so as it lazes through her photos I can see a travelogue of the vacations we’ve taken, family holidays, special parties we’ve hosted. Because our daughter Meg lives in Greece, we’ve been there several times, Wendy many more times than I, so there are lots of photos from islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas and ancient archeological sites. It’s fun to see them casually as I dress, pack and unpack suitcases, and move around the house.

Not to be left behind, I went to System Preferences/Desktop, then screensaver/iPhoto/Photos. I clicked “change picture (every minute),” “random order,” and “translucent menu bar” so I could keep working. Perfect. Worked like a charm. There’s a beautiful photo of our friend Michael by the shipwreck at the south end of Monhegan Island in Maine, there’s one of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, but oops, there’s one of the engraved data plate on the old Century motor of a huge organ blower. How romantic.

And there’s one of the interior of an expression box that I don’t recognize. I’m pretty sure it’s a Swell box (not Choir or Positiv) because there are a couple strings, Trumpets at sixteen, eight, and four, an Oboe, and Vox Humana.

I take hundreds of photos in the usual routine of my work, and my hard-drive says there are around 24,000 in files. Lots of them show beautiful places, lovely buildings, and spectacular organ cases, but most are intended to show details about the dozens of organs I visit every year. It’s not very good casual amusement, but it might be fun to spend a couple hours writing about what I see as random photos appear.

Here’s a photo of members of the Organ Clearing House staff loading a dumpster in front of a church on Central Park West in New York City. We’re a few blocks from the Dakota, the snazzy residential building where John Lennon lived, in front of which he was murdered, and where Yoko Ono still lives. Just across the street, immediately inside Central Park, is Strawberry Fields, the memorial to Lennon dedicated by Mayor Koch in 1985. It’s pouring rain, and some scrap-metal scavengers have shown up asking if they can take stuff from the dumpster. Sure, why not—so they load a couple dilapidated vans with galvanized windlines. There’s something poignant about discarding pipe organ parts. We don’t take it lightly, but there are some times when it’s best to give the heave-ho to material of poor quality that we feel doesn’t merit the effort of renovation.

George Taylor and Barbara Owen share a laugh in front of the organ built by David Tannenberg in 1800, restored by Taylor & Boody, and installed in a new recital hall at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Old Salem, North Carolina. Paula Locklair, director of the museum, is sharing the joke. This was taken during the dedication symposium several years ago. Peter Sykes played the dedicatory recital, which included the premiere of the commissioned work, Salem Sonata, by Paula’s husband Dan Locklair, composer-in-residence at neighboring Wake Forest University. This was a showcase restoration and I discussed it in detail at a recent conference in Montreal, where several colleagues and I were talking about the conundrums of restoration.

There’s a hair-raising catwalk across the top of the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University. You walk across just behind the façade pipes, occasionally bridging deep abysses and looking through the gaps between the pipes down into the vast auditorium. It’s one of hundreds of special views the organ-guys get that are difficult to describe and not for the faint of heart. It’s a little like the suspension bridges made of rope found in the Himalayas, strong enough to support a yak. There are thousands of wooden seats in Woolsey Hall, and this photo shows that quite a few have been replaced or refinished.

Lobster boats moored in Muscongus Bay off Medomak, Maine are bobbing in floating sea-ice. When we think of a difficult day at work in the organ chamber, we forget the challenging conditions in which other people work. As much as I love boats, I’d rather do just about anything in a pipe organ than spend a day hauling lobster pots on a rough wintry sea. It takes the myth out of the price of lobster. Please pass the butter.

During a recent trip to Bermuda, my colleague Amory Atkins and I completed the tonal finishing of a new pipe organ in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Hamilton. One afternoon after work we walked along Front Street, passing a huge cruise ship from the Holland America Line. The ship’s passengers were crowding all the stores, doing their best to part with their money during the time allotted. But lucky for the shops, we were to find out that we’d all have an extra day. Tropical Storm Maria came blasting through and the ports and airports were closed. I had to explain to Wendy that we needed to spend an additional unscheduled day on that little island.

In Boston, we live in a building that originally served as a warehouse for the Boston Naval Shipyard in the neighborhood known as the Charlestown Navy Yard. Our neighbor is the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. Keeping with naval tradition, the ship fires a gun at sunrise and sunset. Since it’s a residential neighborhood, here and here alone, the Navy observes a modified sunrise that occurs conveniently at eight a.m. A couple years ago, a family moved into a neighboring condo and was dismayed by the disturbance. They tried to start a neighborhood movement to get the Navy to stop firing the guns. The Navy didn’t budge. One of the historic buildings in the neighborhood is a ropewalk built in 1837, which supplied rope for the U.S. Navy until the shipyard closed in 1975. It’s more than 1,100 feet long inside. You can find videos on YouTube that show how rope was made in ropewalks—there’s one still operating in the U.K.

This summer we dismantled a tiny two-manual organ built in 1986 by Casavant for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Osterville, Massachusetts. This is on Cape Cod, about an hour-and-a-half from Boston—a beautiful and upscale vacation community where the high season is in the summer. Karen Crosby is the church’s energetic and effective music director, who took the choir on tour to England last year, and who brings such beautiful music to that little parish. The congregation has undertaken a significant rehabilitation of their building, which was originally built as a summer mission, and we have removed the organ to storage for safekeeping. Doesn’t look as though it will be back for Christmas because the building project is a little behind schedule.

Now there’s a big organ. There are two 32-foot ranks mounted horizontally along the back wall of the String Division in the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia: Contra Diaphone and Contra Gamba, both with 24-inch scale. Good heavens, that’s a big expression chamber! And there’s John Bishop standing casually in front of them wearing a terrible necktie and the ID badge of the AGO national convention. When I was a kid and didn’t know any better, I had the impression that the Wanamaker Organ was a freak show that existed only to be huge. When I was growing up in Boston, the tracker revival was in high gear, and new organs by Flentrop, Fisk, Andover, Noack, and Bozeman were everywhere. Why would anyone need more than 20 ranks to get their point across? More than 400 ranks, how decadent. Oh remember not the sins and offenses of my youth, but according to Thy mercy look Thou on me, O Lord!

Our friend and Wendy’s client Kenn Kaufmann is a brilliant naturalist with an unusual life story. He left home as a young teenager, with his parents’ blessing, setting out on a Big Year—criss-crossing the country in an attempt to set a record for sighting the most species of birds in twelve months. His memoir, Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997, now available in paperback), is a lovely piece of writing describing this adventure, tracing the history of his teen-age romances, and his realization that it was more important to learn about the habits and lifestyles of the birds rather than accumulating the most sightings. He has since launched a series of outstanding field guides. He serves regularly as an instructor at an Audubon Camp on an island near our house in Maine, and most years he and his wife Kim spend a few days with us coming or going. Here’s Kenn photographing moths on our back porch. If you leave outdoor lights on all night you’ll attract dozens of species of moths, from little pink guys that look like bubble-gum stuck to the clapboards to the huge and dramatic Luna moths that hang out most of the day. Kenn and Kim have shown us that our neighborhood is exceptionally rich in biodiversity, adding greatly to our appreciation of the world around us. There is more to life than pipe organs!

One of the privileges of working in church buildings is to be surrounded by beautiful and inspiring architectural features. But I’ve serviced this little Hook & Hastings organ for 25 years, tuning twice a year as well as a couple of minor overhaul projects, and I can’t escape the notion that the light fixtures in the nave look like milking-machines.

In the old days when inspecting an organ in preparation for proposing a renovation, or for offering an organ for sale, I sat on the organ bench and laboriously wrote down the specifications, trying hard to get the spellings and accents right, and accounting for all the console controls. After the introduction of digital cameras, I realized I could get all that with a few photos. There are hundreds of photos in my machine of stop jambs, keyslips, pedalboards and toestuds, and coupler rails. It would be quite a quiz to see how many I could identify by sight alone. I didn’t recognize the last two I saw. I assume they’re neatly stored in folders that identify the organ. I hope so.

That was a large organ—an entire truckload of reservoirs and wind regulators. Funny how a small instrument can get all its wind from a single wedge-bellows. There must be 75 regulators in this truck. Last week we took out an old organ that had been powered by a five-horsepower Spencer Orgoblo. It took six guys to get it down the front steps of the church and into our truck. At the same time, we were helping the organbuilder get the components of the new organ into the gallery. Our guy Dean carried the blower for the new organ up the stairs on his shoulder.

Stephen and Lena Tharp work at the console of the Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine. Stephen played a terrific recital there last summer and we grabbed a few days for a quiet visit before they returned to New York. This is the Kotzschmar Organ, named for Hermann Kotzschmar, a prominent musician in Portland who was sponsored by the father of publishing magnate Cyrus H.K. Curtis. (The H.K. stands for Hermann Kotzschmar—old man Curtis named his son for the admired musician!) After City Hall was destroyed in a spectacular fire that started by negligence in a fireworks factory and burned more than half the city, Cyrus Curtis offered to donate a concert organ to the City of Portland for installation in the new auditorium. 2012 brings the centennial of this venerable organ, and the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (a local not-for-profit corporation that supports and operates the organ) is announcing the centennial renovation of the organ. The Portland City Council has voted to extend a bond issue to provide more than a million dollars toward this project. During a choral concert in the auditorium on November 6, city officials and officers of FOKO announced the capital campaign that will fund the thorough renovation of the organ, effect repairs to the hall, endow the positions of Municipal Organist and Organ Curator, and support continuing exciting educational programs that FOKO offers to the community. How’s that for a city with 64,000 residents?

And there I am on the day of our wedding, wearing a snazzy white linen jacket and pink necktie—much better than the flowery job I was wearing in Philadelphia. Wendy and I were married at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine in August of 2005—what a lucky day for me. St. Andrew’s is the first church building designed by Henry Vaughan. He was in his twenties, and the local legend has it that he painted the ceiling frescos himself. His last church building was the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—some ascendancy. The church has a neat little organ by George Hutchings, and dear friends Stuart Forster and Michael Murray shared the bench for the wedding. This was just on the heels of the landmark decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and then Chief Justice Margaret Marshall allowing same-sex marriages, and Stuart and Michael were married two months later in a grand affair at the Methuen Memorial Music Hall. Organist Robert Lehman and the choir of Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut (another Henry Vaughan building!) provided the music.

Early this past summer the Organ Clearing House rescued a marvelous organ by Ernest Skinner, built in 1911 for Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The organ had fallen into disrepair in the 1960s, and as organs like this were rapidly falling out of favor at that time, there was no effort made to repair it. It has 66 ranks, a four-manual bat-wing console, and it includes some of the landmark voices found only in such instruments, like a behemoth of a 32-foot Double Open Wood Diapason, and a high-pressure Tuba at sixteen, eight, and four—the sixteen-foot octave has wood resonators. The college intended to demolish the organ, but people in the music department spoke up, and Nelson Barden and I went to visit. At our suggestion, Williams College provided much of the funding to salvage the organ. This photo shows the Danger Asbestos enclosures in the auditorium, as contractors were deep in the complicated renovation of the building while we were dismantling the organ. It was a ballet among football players, all of us jockeying for space, complying with OSHA regulations, and astonishing the contractors with the bulk of the instrument as it emerged from the organ chamber.

Here’s Martin Pasi, organbuilder near Seattle, Washington, wearing a blue workshop apron and a huge smile. I was working in that area transporting material from Tacoma to storage on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands, almost as tough a duty as this summer’s job in Bermuda, and I took time to participate in a Pipe Organ Encounter. This was a great group of teenagers, teachers, and enthusiasts visiting Martin’s shop to see an instrument under construction (if I remember right, it was the humdinger he built for the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Omaha) and a demonstration of organ-pipe-making. Martin is a wonderful pipe-maker, and he dazzled the group by how quickly and beautifully the two-foot-long pipes were formed in his hands. It was like watching him pull rabbits out of a hat.

Goodness, this could go on all night. I’m past the preferred number of words and I still have tens of thousands of photos to look through. As these photos flit past on my desktop, I reflect that this is a rich and exciting adventure. Thanks to all my family, friends, and colleagues who have been part of it.