In the Wind. . . .

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

John Bishop

What’s it worth?

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

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

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

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

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

 

You must remember this . . . 

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

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

 

How much per stop?

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

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

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

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

 

Get real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Not responsible for valuables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

John Bishop

Who you gonna call?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”

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

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

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

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

• Seal the blower intake with plastic and tape.

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

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

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

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

 

Identification

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

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

 

Insurance

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

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

 

What makes good maintenance?

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

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

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

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

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

 

When you should call

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

You should call your tuner/technician when:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

When you should not call

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

Notes

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

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

Lorraine Brugh

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

SC: Yes, indeed.

 

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

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

 

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

SC: Yes.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

SC: I quite agree.

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

LB: Do you see the boys every day?

SC: Almost every day.

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

SC: That’s got to be done.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

There’s lots of that going on.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

LB: What about your own composition?

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

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

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

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

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

 

LB: Thank you for your time this afternoon.

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

Notes

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

John Bishop

Keeping up appearances

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

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

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

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

 

What you see is what you get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Hamburger Schnitger

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

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

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

 

What window?

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

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

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

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

 

A new way to look at it

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

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

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

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

§

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

§

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

John Bishop

The magic machine, 

The power of Aeolus, 

Combined for worship.

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

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

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

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

 

Is tracker action

Or electro-pneumatic

Better for good sound?

 

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

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

 

Good registrations,

Not formulaic, better

Chosen for their sounds.

 

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

 

Choruses of reeds

Add color, pizzazz, beauty,

Bring music to life.

 

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

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

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

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

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

Temperature change

Pulls the pitch of the Organ 

Like a rubber band.

 

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

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

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

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

 

Careful thought, good taste.

Everything in the right place,

Nothing too strident.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Good craftsmanship sings.

Sloppy work makes sloppy sounds.

Sharpen your tools, please.

 

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

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

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

 

Neatness in public.

Institutional hygiene,

A common shortfall.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Rambling through thoughts,

Combining memories with

Fresh observations.

 

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

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

John Bishop

It’s about time, it’s about space . . . 

Music is one of the most elegant ways we have to measure and control time. Time is about the generous breath an organist gives the congregation at the end of a line of a hymn and the beautifully paced pause between verses. Time is about never giving the listener or singer the sense that you’re in a hurry, even in a piece that is fast and furious.

Inspiration is a magical word that refers to innovation and new ideas and also to the intake of breath. One of the special moments in musical time is the sound of inspiration as a choir breathes in unison at the start of a piece. The music starts a full beat before the first note. All these examples are also about space, the breath between lines or verses, and the control and spacing of tempo. Thoughtful consideration of time and space are among the most important elements in a moving musical performance.

When I was a pup, just out of school in the late 1970s, I was working for Jan Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. One of our projects was the renovation of a Wicks organ in the cavernous and ornate St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio.¹ I don’t recall the exact date, but remember that the organ was built in the 1930s, comprising a big three-manual instrument in the rear gallery, and a modest two-manual organ behind the altar, all played from two identical consoles. The 1970s was the early dawn of solid-state controls for pipe organs, so our project was replacing the original stop-action switches with new analogue switches.

The job involved weeks of repetitive wiring, much of which I did alone, sitting inside the organ during daily Masses and the recitation of devotional rites. I heard “Hail, Mary” repeated hundreds, even thousands of times, led by the same faithful woman, so I not only memorized the text, but can still hear the quirky inflections of her voice, which I associate with the memory of the beeswax-and-incense smell of the church’s interior: “. . . and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, JEE-zus.”

The building is huge, and the acoustics endless, and there was a majesty about that repetitive chanting. It was even musical because the different tones of inflection lingered in the reverberation, turning the spoken word into song. Listening to that for countless hours allowed me insight into the origin of music. The later intonation of text as chant made the words easier to understand, and the natural succession of fauxbourdon embellishing the single line was the first step toward the rich complexity of today’s music.

A few weeks ago, Wendy and I attended a concert by Blue Heron, a polished vocal ensemble that specializes in Renaissance choral music. You can read about them, and hear clips from their recordings at www.blueheron.org. They are in the midst of a project titled “Ockeghem@600,” in which they are performing the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (1420–1497) over a span of about five years. The project includes performances of music by Ockeghem’s predecessors and contemporaries, providing a significant overview to the development of this ancient music.

That music roughly fills the gap between the origin of chant and the advent of tonal harmony, more than a hundred years before the birth of Sweelinck (1562–1621). Ockeghem and his peers were striving to take music in new directions, wondering what sounded good as chordal progressions, as counterpoint, and simply, as harmony. There is a sense of experimentation about it that reflects the genius of innovation. The performance we heard was at First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square, where the brilliant Peter Sykes is director of music. The building is a grand Victorian pile, and while it doesn’t have the endless acoustics of that stone interior in Lakewood, Ohio, it’s big enough to have spacious sound.

As we listened to the timeless sounds, my mind wandered to the devoted Hail, Mary women of Lakewood, drawing connections between the “spoken singing” I heard there and the explosion of innovation at the hands of the Renaissance composers. There were many homophonic passages, but also exploration into imitation (the forerunner of fugues) and melismatic polyphony. And along with the tonal innovations, those composers were learning to manage time.

Harvard University professor of music Thomas Forrest Kelly is an advisor to Blue Heron, and the ensemble recorded a CD of plainchant and early polyphony to accompany Kelly’s insightful book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,² in which he traces the invention and development of musical notation. In Chapter 3, “Guido the Monk and the Recording of Pitch,” Kelly examines how Guido of Arezzo, Italy, developed notation to indicate musical pitch around the year 1030, and in Chapter 4, we meet Leoninus, an official of the as yet unfinished twelfth-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, who is credited with developing notation for the recording of rhythm in music.

I recommend this book to anyone whose life revolves around reading music. Professor Kelly unveils countless mysteries about musical notation, including the origin of the names of the solfège scale. It is a compelling read.

§

There were some wonderful organs in the wood-frame-and-plaster New England buildings of my teenage life, but they certainly didn’t have much reverberation. I was around 25 years old when we did that work at St. James in Lakewood, Ohio, and it was one of the first places where I had freedom to play in such a huge acoustic. I was mesmerized by the sense of space. There was the obvious magic of releasing a chord and listening to the continuation of sound, but even more, I loved the way the building’s space gave the music grandeur. I had an epiphany as I played Widor’s ubiquitous Toccata. Suddenly, it wasn’t about 32 sixteenth notes in a measure, but four grand half-note beats. The harmonic motion was like clouds rolling across the sky, and the spaciousness of the room turned the sixteenth notes into chords. The music went from frantic to majestic. So that’s what Widor had in mind.

Take a minute with me on YouTube. Type “Widor plays his toccata” in the search field. Voilà! There’s the 88-year-old master playing his famous piece on the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris. It takes him seven full minutes to play the piece. Scrolling down the right-hand side of the screen, there was a list of other recordings of the same piece. I saw one by Diane Bish with 5:47 as the timing. I gave it a try and found that Ms. Bish was speaking about the performance and the organ for nearly a full minute, and she played the piece in less than 5/7 of Widor’s time. There sure were a lot of performances to choose from. Most of them were around five-and-a-half minutes long, and only a few were over six minutes. No one but Widor himself made it last for seven. Have we learned anything today?

More than 800 years after Leoninus started writing down rhythms at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, on November 15, 2015, a special Mass was celebrated there in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris two days earlier. Olivier Latry was on the bench, and as the priest consecrated the bread and wine, Latry set sail with La Marseillaise like only a genius cathedral organist can. The vast church was full, and emotions must have been running high. Latry established a powerful rhythm and gave the music a harmonic structure worthy of the towering room. His improvisation was about time and space in the extreme. It’s just over four minutes long, but it seems eternal, perfectly paced, and exquisitely scaled for the occasion. If I had been in that church, I would have needed to be carried out. Sitting at my desk in Maine, I’m weeping as I write. Watch it with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbwJACUxXdo.

The other day I had a meal with David Briggs, the virtuoso organist who is dining out these days on his capacious transcriptions of symphonies by Mahler and Elgar. How appropriate that he has been appointed artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Church buildings don’t get bigger, and pipe organs don’t get grander. That iconic church is a perfect stage for solo music-making on such a grand scale.

Like Notre Dame, but for only about an eighth as long in time, St. John the Divine has been the site of immense pageantry and ceremony. Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have preached there. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic there. Philippe Petit walked across the nave on a tightrope there. John Lindsay, Alvin Ailey, and Duke Ellington were buried from there. Elephants have paraded down the center aisle for the blessing of the animals. To walk and breathe in any building of that scale is to experience the ages.

It is no wonder that David could be master of such a space. He was bred for it. As a boy chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, he watched the organist out of the corner of his eye, waiting for him to draw the Pedal Trombone. He was organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where the renowned choir sings in one of the world’s largest college chapels, with one of the trickiest organ console placements in Christendom. From that hidden console, twenty-something David had the bench for some of the most visible services in history, as the Festival of Lessons and Carols is broadcast to hundreds of millions of listeners around the world. He has held positions at the cathedrals in Hereford, Truro, and Gloucester. He was born and bred to make music in huge spaces, a far cry from the frame buildings of my musical childhood.

David’s performances and improvisations are informed by his innate understanding of space. While many musicians are baffled by long reverberation, he harvests it, molds it, and makes it serve the music. No building is too large for his concepts of interpretation. A great building joins the organ as vehicle for the flow of the music.

 

Bigger than the great outdoors

Bagpipes, yodeling, and hog-calling are all forms of outdoor communication with a couple things in common. Bagpipes were commonly used on battlefields for military communication. Yodeling traces back to the sixteenth century, when it was a means of communication between Alpine villages and by animal herders for calling their flocks. Hog-calling is for, well, calling hogs. The other thing they have in common is that they are all air-driven. Wind-blown acoustic tone is as powerful as musical tone gets. No one ever put a Plexiglas screen in front of a violin section.

Around 1900, Robert Hope-Jones, the father of the Wurlitzer organ, invented the Diaphone, a powerful organ voice with unusually powerful fundamental tone. The sound of the Diaphone carried so efficiently that the United States Coast Guard adopted the technology for foghorns, used to warn ships of coastal dangers. The pipe organ combines bagpipes, yodeling, hog-calling, and foghorns as the one instrument capable of filling a vast space with sound at the hands of a single musician.

Igor Stravinsky famously said of the organ, “The monster never breathes.” He was right. It doesn’t have to. It’s the responsibility of the organist to breathe. Playing that wonderful organ at Notre Dame, Latry has infinite air to use. That does not give him the mandate to play continuously, and he doesn’t. The recording I described shows him at the console in an inset screen. The space he leaves between chords is visually obvious—his hands are off the keys as much as they’re on. He uses every cubic foot of the huge space for his breathing. As Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.” A Zen proverb enhances that: “Music is the silence between the notes, and the spaces between the bars cage the tiger.”

Nowhere in music is the space between the notes more important than for the organist leading a hymn. You have an unfair advantage. According to Stravinsky, you can hold a huge chord until Monday afternoon without a break. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), the lung capacity of an adult human male averages about six liters. There’s a six-pack of liter bottles of seltzer in our pantry waiting to be introduced to whiskey, and it surprises me to think that my lungs would hold that much. It doesn’t feel that way when I’m walking uphill. But it’s a hiccup compared to the lungs of a pipe organ. With the privilege of leading a hymn comes the responsibility to allow singers to breathe.  

As you read, I imagine that you’re nodding sagely, thinking, “Oh yes, I always allow time to breathe.” Because of the amount of travel my work requires, I no longer lead hymns. I’m a follower. Frequently, as I gasp for breath, I wonder if my admittedly energetic hymn playing allowed those congregations time to breathe. I hope so.

I often write about my love for sailing. Friends seem surprised when I draw a parallel between a sailboat and a pipe organ, but for me, it’s simple. Both machines involve controlling the wind. You can describe the art of organ building as making air go where you want it, and keeping it from going where you don’t want it. When I’m at the helm, I harvest air, the same way David Briggs harvests space. I set the sail so it reaps maximum energy from the air. And to inform my organ playing, when I’m sailing, I use only a fraction of the air available. The huge volume of air above the surface of the ocean moves as a mass. Sometimes it’s moving slowly, and sometimes it’s flowing at great speed. I raise 400 square feet of canvas to capture thousands of cubic miles of moving air.³

Two weeks ago, we experienced a violent storm on mid-coast Maine. It blew over 60 miles per hour for 18 hours, and it rained hard. We were fortunate to avoid damage to our house, but friends and neighbors were not so lucky. Thousands of trees fell, there was no power, phone, or internet service for nine days, and it took emergency workers four days to open the road to town. I love wind. It’s my favorite part of weather. I love sitting on the deck with wind coming up the river. I love it when I’m sailing. But there’s such a thing as too much. That storm was too much. People in Houston and Puerto Rico know what too much wind can be.

When you’re playing a processional hymn, you’re Aeolus, god and ruler of the winds. You’re Zephyrus, god of the west wind. You have the wind at your fingertips. What a privilege, and what a responsibility. Use it wisely. Use it to create time and space. Use it to move a sailboat, not to knock down trees. Think of the spaces between the notes. Think of the clouds flowing across the sky. You’re the weather maker. You’re lucky.

 

Note: ‘It’s about time, it’s about space . . . .’ are the opening words of the theme song of a 1966 television sitcom by the creators of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ ‘Gilligan’ lasted three seasons while ‘It’s About Time’ lasted only one, a clear indication of the degree of artistic content. It has been an annoying earworm today as I try to conjure images far more grand.

 

Notes

1. There’s a slide show of photos of this church on the homepage of https://www.stjameslakewood.com/.

2. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

3. Ours is a 22-foot catboat with a single gaff-rigged sail.