In the Wind. . . .

John Bishop

We’re working on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Back to work

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

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

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

 

The work of life

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

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

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

 

Stop to think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Somebody play.

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

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

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

 

That leaves the rest of us.

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

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

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

Notes

1. Published by Beacon Press.

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

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

John Bishop

When it’s time, it’s time.

Old friends from New Haven came to New York for an overnight visit on Friday, April 13. We heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play at Carnegie Hall that night, and spent Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were taking the train home in the afternoon and had luggage with them, so we took my car to the museum, and I found a lucky parking space on East 79th Street. After lunch, we returned to the car to learn that I had misread the signs and had been treated to a bright orange envelope tucked under my windshield wiper. Oh well. It was in the mid-seventies that day, so I turned on the air conditioning. Nothing. We drove down Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Terminal with the windows open.

New York is a great place to live, but as we have the luxury of a house in Maine, there are a few things we try to do only in Maine to avoid the city surcharge. Among others, our dentist, veterinarian, and dog groomers are in Maine. (Besides the exorbitant cost, you should see some of the fru-fru rainbow jobs that come out of Greenwich Village Doggie Spas!) Groceries and staples like paper products and cleaning supplies are far cheaper in Maine, with many items at half the city price. And car repairs. Sitting in the waiting room of a Manhattan garage, you just know that creepy stuff is going on behind the scenes. I waited until I got back to Maine to have the air conditioning checked.

I drive a 2008 Chevy Suburban, that big black job used by the Secret Service, FBI, and Tony Soprano. It has three rows of seats, so there are two air conditioners. Can you tell where this is going? The service manager came to the waiting room with bad news. It would cost $2,500 to fix the AC, and the check engine light was on, which meant another $850 for a pressure sensor in the fuel tank.

Traveling back and forth between New York and Maine, and thousands of miles visiting churches, organ shops, and job sites, I surpass the mileage limits of any auto lease, and a lot of that driving happens with heavy loads in the car, sometimes towing trailers. I use cars very hard. I have long figured that it is best for me to buy a car a year or two old with low mileage, letting someone else use up the high retail value of a brand new car, then drive it until it will not go any further. Since about 1980, I have driven six cars over 225,000 miles, two of those over 275,000. About halfway through that list, I experimented with a Dodge Grand Caravan—a mistake because although with seats out I could carry loaded eight-foot pipe trays, it was not a truck, and the transmission left at around 189,000. That is a lifetime total of over 1,500,000 miles, or an average of 43,000 miles a year.

The Suburban had just 225,000 miles on it, but I could not see spending over $3,300 on repairs, so I went shopping. Now I am in a 2017 Suburban, silver this time, so people will not think I am the limo they ordered and climb into the back seat. Gotta love New York.

 

Parts is parts.

As I went in and out of car dealerships over the last couple weeks, I was thinking about the business of car repair and replaceable parts. Henry Ford really had something there, figuring that any item that you might sell a lot of could be made of carefully designed and manufactured parts, identical in every separate unit. Every dealership I visited had a little van with “Parts Shuttle” written on the sides. I do not know how many different models of cars Chevrolet makes and could hardly guess how many parts there are in each one, but I imagine that each dealership needs access to hundreds of thousands of different parts. Some things are closer to universal. Maybe they only need to stock six different oil filters, and the 5.3 liter V8 engine in my Suburban is used in pickup trucks and vans as well as SUVs, so hundreds of engine parts overlap ten or twelve models. But it’s still a lot of parts.

There are plenty of differences between a Chevrolet, a Ford, and a Toyota, but if you saw a piston from an engine by each maker, you would have to be an expert to tell them apart. Windshield wipers are pretty close to universal, with their overall length being the biggest difference. In fact, as the designers of vehicles seek the perfect aerodynamic shape, cars built by many different companies look more and more alike.

Recently, a colleague posted a photo of a broken organ part, asking if anyone knew how to replace it. I recognized it immediately. It was a Bakelite lever used in the console combination actions of Casavant organs in the 1950s and 1960s, about six inches long, with an axle hole in the middle, and forks at each end that “click” into place. They transfer the motion of the drawknobs between levels of the combination action, moving the traces that carry the toggles that allow the stops to be set on pistons. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly . . .) When one breaks, the stop cannot be set on or off any piston, and the stop action won’t turn on.

I recognized it because in about 1980, my mentor Jan Leek and I faced just such a repair in an organ in Rocky River, Ohio. It was an organ technician’s nightmare. The console was tightly surrounded by carpenter-built choir risers that had to be substantially dismantled to reach the access panels, and once we were inside, it took a couple days to wrestle the broken part out. The axle was common to about fifteen of the levers, and it was less than an inch from the framework of the console side. We happened to have some Bakelite in the workshop, and even knew where it was, so we were able to make a half dozen replacements. That repair must have taken sixty or seventy hours.

Early in the twentieth century, the Austin Organ Company developed a distinctive style of “modern” organ console. They are easily recognizable with two rows of stop keys above the top keyboard, unique piston buttons on stems like lollipops, curved maple expression pedals, and shallow-dip keyboards whose keys are about twelve inches long and pivoted in the center. The combination action is in a tray at the top of the console, with a horizontal trace for each piston that carries toggles that click up or down when you move the stop keys to create settings. When you press a piston, a double contact system activates a pick-magnet that pulls up a little pivoted lever at the end of the trace and fires a huge solenoid that moves a bar that engages the lever and pulls the trace. The toggles on the trace move the stop tabs according to the setting. (. . . that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her . . .) The action of that solenoid provides the signature “ka-thump” sound of a piston firing in an Austin console.

The general construction of these Austin consoles is also unique. There is a simple steel frame that supports the table on which the keyboards sit. The side case panels, which include the track for the rolltop, screw to those frames, the back-panel screws to cleats on the side frames, and the top sits on top of it all. Voila! The traces, toggles, pick magnets, and springs of the combination action are all interchangeable. It is a very simple system. I wish that Casavant console in Rocky River had removable side panels.

But there is something funny about Austin consoles. A Massachusetts organ technician, William Laws, thought that design was just about perfect, and he waited until the original Austin patents expired, and immediately started producing “Austin Clones.” I learned this innocently enough thirty years ago, calling the Austin factory to order a new solenoid. In spite of the Laws nameplate, I assumed it was an Austin console. It was Gordon Auchincloss who took my call, and asked, “Is it an Austin or a Laws?”

Ernest Skinner was famous for his beautiful consoles. He worked incessantly developing the geometry of his consoles, striving for complete comfort for the musician. He used elegant materials, and machined controls were all specifically intended to have a signature feel to them. The half-inch travel of a stop knob, the quarter-inch motion of a piston button, and the superb action of the keyboards were all part of the experience of playing a Skinner organ. A Skinner combination action produces a unique “Phhht” at the press of a button, nothing like the Austin ka-thump. Harris Precision Products in California has developed two sizes of electro-magnetic drawknob motors that duplicate the feel of the Skinner drawknob, but gone is the pneumatic Phhht of the piston action. Even when a hundred knobs are moving at once, there is a minimal bump at the touch of a piston.

The funny thing about Harris drawknobs is that they are so well made, so easy to install, so reliable, and so quiet that many organbuilding companies use them. That is great for the organists because the knobs work perfectly, but gone is the individuality of different companies. Any experienced organist could tell the difference between a Skinner and an Austin console blindfolded, but Harris drawknobs are everywhere.

It’s the pipes.

The musical heart of any pipe organ is its pipes. That may seem a simple thing to say, but while it is easy to focus on knobs and keyboards, music rack lights, and blower switches, an organ is there to produce musical tone, and it does that by blowing air through pipes. We all know that an organ voice comprises a set of pipes, one for each note on the keyboard. Each pipe is unique with different length and diameter. It is possible to make identical sets of pipes. In fact, though I was never in the Möller factory while it was in operation, I am pretty sure they had identical “stock” ranks. I have worked on enough Möller Artistes to conclude that.

But when you make a rank of pipes, you cut sixty-one rectangles to make the cylindrical resonators, sixty-one pie-shaped pieces to make the conical feet, and sixty-one discs to make the languids. Each successive piece is a different size, the dimensions calculated using elegant mathematics. Three ratios make up the math of an organ pipe: the ratio between diameter and length (scale), the ratio between mouth width and circumference, and the ratio between mouth width and mouth height (cut-up). Even at its most mechanized, pipe making is a personal thing. I know of no robotic substitute for the pipe maker’s soldering iron. The quality of the pipe and ultimately its tone are the result of the mathematics and the skill of the pipe maker. The saying, if it looks good it will work properly, is nowhere truer than in the making of organ pipes. If the languid is loose inside the pipe, the speech will be poor. Because of all that, two ranks of pipes built to identical dimensions can never sound exactly alike.

There are many other factors that determine the sound of an organ pipe besides those three ratios. The composition of the metal is critical. Most metal pipes are made of a mixture of tin and lead. The most common spotted metal pipes are in roughly the range of 40%/60% to 60%/40% tin and lead. Go to 70%/30% or 30%/70% and you will have a different sound. The thickness of the metal is important to the quality of speech. A pipe made of thick metal will speak more reliably and more profoundly than one made of foil.

While the pistons from a Chevy or Ford look very much alike, the pipes from an Austin or a Holtkamp organ look nothing alike. And the pipes in organs by “handcraft firms” like Fritts, Richards-Fowkes, Fisk, or Noack look very different. I admit that I say that with over forty years of experience tuning organs by every builder you can think of, my eyes are as experienced as my ears. But the individual ethic, habits, tools, and philosophy of each pipe maker are different enough that no two craftspeople can make identical pipes.

What’s the difference?

Any good organ is a teacher, guiding a musician’s expression, inviting each musician to explore sounds and effects. Most organists participate in the choice of a new organ only rarely, if ever. And some organists only ever play on one instrument, whatever organ is owned by the church where they work. I get to play on many different organs in the course of any working month. It is one of the fun things about my work. I love experiencing and comparing different organs, gleaning what each organbuilder had in mind, mining the instrument for the richest sounds, the brightest colors, the most mystical effects.

I often refer to my tenure as curator of the organs at Trinity Church in Boston, the venerable pair of Skinner/Aeolian-Skinners matched with the magical LaFarge interior of the H. H. Richardson building. An important feature of the music program of that church continues to be weekly organ recitals, and as curator, I suppose I heard eighty or a hundred different people play that organ. For each player, the organ was different. Sometimes, the organ was victor and the experience was not so great. People could get eaten alive by the big unwieldy antiphonal beast. But the difference in the sound of the instrument as different masters played it was remarkable. Understanding how different organists could draw different things from a single instrument was one of the more important experiences of my organ education.

Likewise, I have heard single organists playing on many different instruments. That allows a glimpse into the musical personality and philosophy of the musician. Some seem to do the same thing with each instrument they play, while others bend their style and approach toward the instrument of the day.

I do not drive anywhere near as many different cars as I do organs. I drive Wendy’s car once in a while, and I drive rental cars when traveling on business, but almost all the driving I do is in that Chevy Suburban. Unlike the organ, I am not looking for means of expression when driving a car whether it is mine or not. When I mentioned to my colleague Amory that I was shopping for a car, he said, “Buy a Ford.” He drives a snazzy and beefy Ford pickup truck that’s perfect for his work. But I really liked my black Suburban. It was comfortable, quiet, and sturdy, all important for someone who has driven one-and-a-half-million miles. It is great for carrying tools and organ components, and for the boating side of my life, our eight-foot rowing dingy fits inside with the doors closed. Like a Skinner console, the geometry of the driving position fits me beautifully. (I know, I know, that’s a little romantic.) If all goes well, I will be driving the new one for 250,000 miles over eight or ten years. Come to think of it, it may be the last work car I buy.

John Bishop

Lunching with geniuses

I used to be an avid baseball fan. Starting with the “Impossible Dream,” the fabled 1967 season of the Boston Red Sox, I followed the hometown team aided and abetted by my father, who had grown up in Cincinnati following the Reds from the bleachers of Crosley Field. Dad had the same seats at Fenway Park for more than thirty years (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14), and he and I had an unbroken streak of twenty-five consecutive opening day games there, unbroken even when opening day coincided with Good Friday, and the priest and the organist had to make special arrangements! A big part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats, and though I do not follow the game anymore, I cherish the memories.

Some of my colleagues play Virtual Baseball, a well-organized game in which they build teams by drafting and trading “real” players and keeping track of their virtual teams based on the daily statistics of their players from the live major league baseball games. They track wins and losses, and if they have built good teams, play through the playoffs and World Series. It is very sophisticated and they are very devoted, and there is some wagering involved to keep things interesting.

Throughout my career, I have watched the progress of many organ companies, both domestic and foreign, and it occurs to me that we might develop an organbuilding version of Virtual Baseball. We would make up cards with photos and lists of skills of all the employees in all the workshops, document their contributions to the various organs they worked on, and build a virtual “dream team” of craftsmen. No? Perhaps not.

We follow the great names in organbuilding as avidly as the most enthusiastic baseball fan in a sports bar. We cite their great instruments, celebrate their innovations, and rattle off specifications, just like we rattled off great starting line-ups of history with our seatmates at Fenway Park. (Did Rico Petrocelli bat before or after Tony Conigliaro in the 1967 Red Sox?) We single out our organbuilding heroes, past and present, chronicling their careers and the instruments they produced.

We trace how organbuilders and organists influenced each other, and if you are anything like me, we imagine conversations between them. Gottfried Silbermann and J. S. Bach must have had lunch together a couple times, as did Aristide Cavaillé-Coll with Charles-Marie Widor, and Dirk Flentrop with
E. Power Biggs. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or even seated at the table for one of those meals. I have read that Bach played a couple pianofortes built by Silbermann and did not think much of them. Maybe after that the lunches were over. Cavaillé-Coll was a parishioner at Saint-Sulpice in Paris until his death in 1899, when Widor was in the middle of his tenure there and at the height of fame and creativity. Cavaillé-Coll was thirty-three years older than Widor and was largely responsible for Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice. That great organ was nearly forty years old at the time of Cavaillé-Coll’s death, and they must have talked about it frequently. I bet they had a regular weekly table at their favorite bistro and were sometimes joined by friends like Charles Gounod or Camille Saint-Saëns.

Robert Clicquot and François Couperin, Henry (Father) Willis and Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Ernest Skinner and T. Tertius Noble, and Charles Fisk and Daniel Pinkham are among other lunch partners I would love to have joined.

 

Let’s hear it for the little guys

It may be the genius luminaries of the field that we think of first, but lurking in their shadows are thousands of talented craftsmen and musicians, without whom the history of our instrument would be incomplete. William Horatio Clark (1840–1913) is one whose work has interested me because our paths have crossed several times. He was born into a musical family in Newton, Massachusetts, and took his first regular job as a church organist at the Unitarian Church of Dedham, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen. He subsequently was organist at the Berkeley Street Congregational Church in Boston (now the site of Morgan Memorial Collection Center on Melnea Cass Boulevard, very close to the location of the Hook workshop), and moved to the First Congregational Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1861, which is where I first came across his legacy.

The First Congregational Church of Woburn was built in 1860. It is an enormous wood-frame building whose 196-foot spire is reputed to be the tallest wooden steeple in North America. The magnificent three-manual organ by
E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 283) was also built and installed in 1860, and I was fortunate to serve as assistant organist there while I was in high school. The organbuilder George Bozeman was organist there, and as I remember it from my headstrong youth, he created the position for me partly as the terrific educational experience it was, and partly so I would be there to cover for him as his organ work required him to travel. My first organbuilding experiences were summer jobs in Bozeman’s shop in 1975 and 1976, and I am grateful to him as friend and mentor.

That was one of my first cracks at leading a choir, and I was naïve enough that it never crossed my mind that conducting from an attached keydesk was supposed to be difficult. Today, as I meet with organists and organ committees who cannot conceive of such a thing, I am grateful for that early experience. And what an organ. Thirty-five ranks of Civil War era tone color, brilliant choruses of Principals, two Trumpets, an Oboe and a Clarinet, and a doozey of a Pedal Posaune with wood resonators. As a seventeen-year-old I knew it was a wonderful organ, but I had no idea how fortunate I was.¹ You can see photos and specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041.

The Reverend Stuart Nutter came as a new pastor during my time there, providing my first experience with conservative evangelical preaching. I was not close with members of the congregation, but I recall that members of the choir were not happy with his messages. One winter Sunday, there was a tremendous roar as a huge load of wet snow slid off the roof and fell fifty feet to the parking lot. It seemed a sign that it was Pastor Nutter’s car that was utterly flattened, such a wreck that three of the wheels were broken off.

I do not know if William H. Clarke had anything to do with the planning of that Hook organ, but it is fair to assume that he was present for at least part of the installation, where he would have met Stephen P. Kinsley, the brilliant voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Clarke left Woburn in 1865, returned to the Berkeley Street church for a couple years, then returned to Woburn where he stayed until 1869, when he moved across Woburn Center to the Unitarian Church. It was no coincidence that E. & G. G. Hook installed their Opus 553 there the following year, also voiced by Stephen Kinsley. During my high school tenure, there were two tremendous three-manual Hook organs in my life.

I have a vivid memory of a recital played by James Busby at the Unitarian Church (currently organist at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island), joined by soprano Elisabeth Phinney. Together, they offered Bach’s Cantata 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. The organ included a Carillon (I think the knob said “Carrillons”), the first percussion stop in an American organ. It was a set of 29 metal bars struck by piano hammers, located above the top manual behind the music rack, and playable without wind using a mechanical coupler, and Busby used that distinctive voice as part of “Bach’s Orchestra.”

Mrs. Phinney taught singing at the New England Conservatory of Music for thirty-two years. Her daughter Monique, also a singer, was one of my high school pals, and her husband Keith was director of music at nearby Bedford (Massachusetts) High School. I remember several great experiences when I was accompanying Monique in various local performances, and her parents were there as coaches.

William Clarke was thirty years old when the Hook organ was installed in the Unitarian Church and had moved back and forth between jobs six times. His longest tenure was the four-year stint at the Congregational Church in Woburn. He stayed with the Unitarians and their grand forty-five-rank organ for only one year, and showed up in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871 as the superintendent of school music. In 1873 he become organist of the First Methodist Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in 1874 he moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, to become organist of the First Baptist Church. While he was in Indianapolis he founded Wm. H. Clarke & Co., Church Organ Builders, enticing his friend Stephen Kinsley to leave E. & G. G.
Hook to become head voicer. If I were building a virtual organ shop, I would want to have Kinsley as my voicer!

After the Unitarian church closed,
E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 553 was dismantled by the Organ Clearing House, restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen, Germany, and installed in 2002 in Die Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin. Thomas Murray played the dedication recital. It is known as Die Berliner Hook-Orgel and is highly regarded in its unique situation as a nineteenth-century American organ in a German church.

Wm. H. Clarke & Company built fifteen organs that we know of, two of which have been part of my life. My parents purchased a little house in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), in 1968 where we spent summers, and where they moved after my father’s retirement. There are two historic organs in Yarmouthport, but it was at the Swedenborgian Church where I served as organist for the summer-only congregation. The organ had been built by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. in 1872, then rebuilt and modified by the Andover Organ Company in 1960. You can see “before and after” stoplists at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8978, a study of sign-of-the-times organ renovation.

Clayton Priestnal was pastor of the small congregation (he served a parish in Philadelphia during the winter) who was the epitome of Central Casting’s version of a rickety country minister. He was a slight man with the shaggiest eyebrows I had ever seen, who had a way of bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet for emphasis as he was preaching. He had established a relationship with the Highfield Theater of Falmouth, Massachusetts, a summer theater company that specialized in productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Cast members were conservatory voice majors from across the country, and a different singer came to Yarmouthport each Sunday to participate in the service, another great educational opportunity for a young organist. It was after my last summer on Cape Cod that I went to Oberlin, where I was reunited with several of the singers I had worked with in Yarmouthport.

The Wm. H. Clarke/Andover organ was a simple and small instrument, but it was lovely, and I loved playing on it. It was about two miles from home, and I did all that walking in bare feet, a memory that sends lightning bolts up and down my legs today. I played recitals each summer, and I know that instrument was an important part of my early education. In 2002, after I had joined the Organ Clearing House, I was invited to play another recital, the first of many lecture-recitals I developed. My topic was roughly the history of the nineteenth-century American organ, with special attention given to William Horatio Clarke. I was fortunate to learn that the Indiana Historical Society had considerable material about Clarke’s life, family, and work, which is the source of the biographical information I am sharing here.

As a student at Oberlin, I worked part-time and summers for Jan G. P. Leek, the ebullient organbuilder who was the school’s full-time organ and harpsichord technician until he left to start his own firm during my junior year. He was a first-generation immigrant, who apprenticed in the Netherlands as a child and came to Cleveland to work for Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was a great teacher and a lot of fun, and I stayed in his shop for four years after I graduated in 1978. It was from him that I learned the fundamentals of organbuilding and woodworking, tuning, and troubleshooting.  

One of the projects we did together was the restoration of another organ by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. This one in Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio, a commanding stone Gothic building with a tall spire that was visible from many miles away across rolling farmland. The church’s organist was a high school student from a farming family with thirteen kids, who had the presence of mind to organize the parish to fund the restoration of the organ. The project was guided by his dream that the organ should be “plaqued” by the Organ Historical Society, and we completed the work in 1980. You can see the specification of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=4256.  

Garth Peacock of the Oberlin organ faculty played the dedication recital. Part of the historical authenticity of our project was the restoration of the feeder bellows and hand-pumping system. The recital was to close with the singing of a hymn led by the hand-pumped organ, and I was the designated pumper. I do not remember which hymn it was, but I do remember the impish glint in Peacock’s eye (we could see other around the corner of the organ case) as he drew more stops, filled in the chords, and played octaves in the pedals, requiring me to flail the pump handle up and down like the clapper between the two bells of an alarm clock!

§

William Clarke moved from Indianapolis to Toronto where he became organist of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in 1884, then served Plymouth Congregational Church there from 1884–1886. From 1886 to 1888, he was organist of the First Baptist Church of Rochester, New York, and he returned to the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1888 where he served until he retired in 1892.

In his last years, he lived in Reading, Massachusetts (which adjoins Woburn), where he wrote a treatise on organ mixtures, a “Cheerful Philosophy for Invalids,” and a booklet on “Valuable Organ Information.” He wrote music for organ, edited anthologies of organ music and anthems, and worked as an organ consultant by correspondence until his death in 1913.

William Clarke was not a distinguished or renowned organbuilder, and his organs are not remarkable for their size, content, or innovations. Rather, they were good, solid, reliable church organs. The two that I have known didn’t include reeds, perhaps wise because neither Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, nor Bethlehem, Ohio, had organ tuners nearby in the 1870s.

Judging by the number of times he jumped from one short tenure to another, William Clarke may not have been the most stable or reliable of church musicians. Maybe he argued with the pastors. I imagine he was a colorful and exciting organist because of the number of times he was welcomed back for a second stint at a church where he had presumably left in a huff or been dismissed. I have played and loved organs he knew, built, and others that he presumably designed. I suppose he would have been an interesting guy to talk with. It would be my first choices to have lunch with Ernest Skinner or Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, but if neither were in town, I would be happy to sit with Mr. Clarke. I know some good lunch spots in Woburn.

Notes

1. I had my weekly lessons and practiced after school on a three-manual organ by
C. B. Fisk: http://www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50. When I got to Oberlin as a freshman in the fall of 1974 (the Flentrop in Warner Hall was dedicated that November), I was surprised to learn that some of my peers had never played a pipe organ before.

I’m impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life

John Bishop

Feeding your passion

 

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I caught the pipe organ bug when I was a kid growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts. My father was rector of the Episcopal church, and the organist was a harpsichord builder. I sang in the choir, took piano lessons, took organ lessons, had summer jobs in organ shops, accompanied all the ensembles at the high school and countless rehearsals for musicals, went to college to major in organ performance, and never looked back. When my kids were teenagers and well aware of how my career track had started, they commented freely on how difficult it was for them to face adulthood without having such a clear track in mind.

Working in the organ world as a player and builder for decades, I’ve known many people with similar experiences. After all, the young musician who is most likely to be accepted as a performance major in a recognized school of music is a person for whom regular and serious practice at their chosen instrument was a priority from an early age.

When I was in high school, I was the most accomplished organist in town under the age of twenty, and I was mighty pleased with myself. In my first week as an entering freshman at Oberlin, I remember being impressed—flabbergasted—at how wonderfully some of my classmates played. Winchester was a pretty small pond. I wasn’t such a big fish at Oberlin.

 

Passionate feeding

James Andrew Beard was a cook. He was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and he said that his earliest memory was watching Triscuits™ and shredded wheat biscuits being made at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland in 1905. Two years old? 

Having studied music and theater, Beard moved to New York City in 1937 (the same year that George Gershwin and Charles-Marie Widor died), hoping to forge a career in the wildly active Broadway scene. While he failed to find a niche on stage, he was a smash hit on the Broadway cocktail party circuit, to the extent that he founded a catering company called “Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.,” specializing in producing elaborate cocktail parties. He followed this with a cookbook called Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés. In 1946, he was the first to host a television cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC.

James Beard wrote more than twenty cookbooks, he founded several cooking schools across the country, and was an important advocate for the careers of many influential chefs, including Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. He was the original modern American “foodie.”

He was a mountain of a man, a man of insatiable appetites, of unflagging energy, and focused passion. When he died in 1985, his estate became a foundation, based in his Greenwich Village townhouse. Today, the James Beard Foundation has provided over two million dollars in scholarships for promising chefs, and the James Beard House hosts countless dinners each year, promoting the work of chefs chosen from around the world.

 

Medium-rare at 140

You’re giving a dinner party. You’ve worked hard to gather a list of great guests, organize a menu, shop for the food. You’ve made “the house fair as you are able, trimmed the hearth, and set the table.” The guests arrive, you mix drinks, set out hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation picks up quickly. You go to the kitchen and realize you’re in a pickle—the broccoli is overcooked, you forgot to make salad dressing, and in spite of the care you’ve taken with the temperature-time continuum, the meat is simply not done. (Never happened to me, but I’ve heard it from others . . .) 

We went to a dinner at the James Beard House last Friday. Wendy’s assistant, literary agent Lauren McLeod, is married to Chef Danny Bua of The Painted Burro in Somerville, Massachusetts. His creative approach to Mexican cuisine attracted the attention of the scouts, and he was invited to present a dinner—a very big deal for a young chef.

Danny and his team prepped the food in their own restaurant kitchen on Thursday. Before sunrise on Friday their truck was on the road, and they spent the day toiling in the unfamiliar cramped kitchen of the James Beard House. The menu was sophisticated and complex. There were five hors d’oeuvres, including Crispy Native Oyster Tacos with Cabbage-Jalapeño Slaw, Baja Mayonnaise, Cilantro, and Lime; and five entrées, including Avocado Leaf-Roasted Short Ribs with Spiced Red Kuri Squash, Masa Dumplings, Heirloom Kale con Plátanos, Cotija Cheese, and Red-Wine Cola Mole. Altogether there were fifteen different dishes (each with at least five major ingredients), sixty guests, and everything was served warm, plated beautifully, each table was served as one, and the houseful of New York foodies were full of praise.

It was the culinary equivalent of getting off a train, walking cold into an unfamiliar hall, and playing the entire Clavier Übung (all parts) on an instrument you’ve never seen before, from memory. Danny is passionate about his art, and it’s a mighty amount of work.

 

A memorable effort

Last Monday night, colleague and friend David Enlow played a recital at his home Church of the Resurrection on the 1915 Casavant organ we installed there, completed in 2011. Our daughter Meg came to the recital with Wendy and me, which meant a lot because while she’s familiar with my work as she sees it in the workshop, it’s fair to say that serious organ music is really not her thing. It was really nice to have that support from a family member, and David made it worth her while. At home later in the evening, Meg talked about how impressed she was with David’s focus and command over what he was doing, and knowing perfectly well that there is nothing easy about what he was doing, she was impressed by the apparent ease of it. His fingers and feet just flickered around the console as if there was nothing to it.

David’s program included the entertaining, the academic, the sophisticated, and the sublime. He spared us the ridiculous—you can go somewhere else for that. His command of the repertory, the instrument, and his own person—his technique—was obvious at every moment.

 

It’s for the birds

Kenn Kaufmann is a client of Wendy’s literary agency, and he and his wife Kim are close friends of ours. With the support of his parents, Kenn dropped out of school at sixteen and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States in a quest for a birder’s Big Year—an effort to see the largest number of bird species in a year. Birding is a big business, and there have been several recent movies that give a glimpse into what it means to devote one’s life to such an effort.

Kenn can look at an apparently empty sky and pick out all the birds. He knows their calls, their habits, what they like to eat, what they’re afraid of. He knows what trees they prefer and why, and he knows their migratory routes, schedules, and destinations. He has written several field guides, developing a new technique for the computer-manipulation of photographs to create the “ideal” example of each bird.  

Like so many of our musician friends, Kenn’s genius is communication. All of that knowledge and intuition would be lost if he couldn’t write or speak about it in such a compelling way. We’ve been with him when he leads big groups on bird walks and gives slide-show-lectures, and there’s never anyone in attendance unmoved by all the information, but even more, by the rich personality that has learned how it all fits into the big scheme.

 

Measured success

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) studied nuclear physics at Stanford and Harvard, worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and then committed to a career as an organbuilder. He clearly would have made more money working in the high levels of nuclear physics, but the pipe organ was his real love. Those who worked with him and still operate the company that bears his name remember him as a caring and thoughtful mentor who taught by asking questions, encouraging his students and co-workers to think well for themselves. Charlie was passionate about the pipe organ, and his contributions to the modern American organ can hardly be measured.

Charlie was one of the first modern American organbuilders to travel to Europe to study the “Old Master” organs, collecting meticulous measurements, and studying the relationships of the organs to the music of their day. I expect that his scientific background was integral to those studies—he must have had a great power of attention.

There are two Fisk organs in Winchester, Massachusetts, and at the time I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have such access to fine instruments. Ironically, my first real relationships with electro-pneumatic instruments happened in the practice rooms at Oberlin!

§

Every one of these people knew his career path early in life. I suppose we all know people who were forced into a career that was not their first choice: “I’m a lawyer, all your uncles are lawyers, your grandfather was a lawyer, and you’re going to be a lawyer.” Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham was a banker, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. It was when he realized the depth of his son’s dedication that Abraham Mendelssohn made peace with Felix’s career choice. I don’t know if Felix would have had much to offer the world of banking, but we surely would have been the poorer without the music he left us. The thought leaves me without words.

In the concert hall, there’s nothing like hearing a performance by a master musician who in middle age is still working toward the unattainable perfection he envisioned as a six-year-old. In a restaurant, there’s nothing like tasting a dish created by someone whose earliest memory is based on a fascination with food. In an examination room, there’s nothing like being treated by a doctor whose early dreams were to care deeply for the health of patients. And if you’re meant to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, be a great lawyer. We know a brilliant young woman who finished law school with a large debt, held a lucrative job long enough to pay back the debts, then dove into the world of law in developing nations.

 

Lovely idealism, isn’t it?

But what happens when the money runs out? Most organbuilders would love the luxury of unlimited time to get things right, but the organ is built according to an agreed price, and as they say in the real world, “Time is money.” Remember Charlie Fisk’s definition of a reed? “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.”

The tuner might like to have another eight or ten hours to get things “just so,” but the church is supposed to pay for that at an agreed hourly rate, and organ tuning is a line-item on the annual operating budget. To propose an increase in the tuning budget, the organist makes a recommendation to the Music Committee, which meets bi-monthly and makes recommendations to the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee makes recommendations to the Parish Council, and the Parish Council makes recommendations to the congregation at the Annual Meeting. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.)  

It’s mid-October now. The vote will happen on June 15. And during the Annual Meeting, someone’s going to ask, “If it costs $150 to tune a piano, why do we have to spend $2,500 tuning the organ?” 

The organist might like to have another five hours to practice anthem accompaniments and postlude for the coming Sunday, but there’s a staff meeting, octavo scores to be filed, a bride to meet with, and then the sexton is vacuuming the nave. If I had a nickel for every organist whose dream was fulfilled by being offered a full-time position in a prominent church with a terrific organ, only to find that there was never time for practicing, I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ernest Skinner often added stops to his organs not specified in the contracts because he felt the building called for them. Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh were impoverished through much of their lives, and often couldn’t afford paint to put on canvas.

Throughout history, passionate, inspired people have had to find alternative means of support. That’s why I’m so impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life, like the concert organist who balances practicing and travel with the demands of the liturgical year or a university teaching schedule.

J. S. Bach had a busy professional life, was subject to the civic bureaucracy that employed him, and we know he spent at least enough time with his children to give them music lessons. A family that size must have taken up some of the old man’s time and attention. But he left a body of work that has inspired many generations of great musicians.

Mozart also left a tremendous catalogue of some of the most beautiful music ever written, but he died a pauper. Were he living today, he’d be playing the accordion in the subways of New York. Wouldn’t that be a treat!

 

Feeding a national passion

Subscribers to The Diapason must be well attuned to the importance of the arts in modern society. As I write, we are in the midst of the great crescendo of political chaos, watching two otherwise dignified men duke it out in the public forum. We’re hearing a lot about the balance of public priorities, and how the federal budget might be skewed in support of different points of view.

One thing we have not heard in stump speeches, televised debates, or from the talking heads super-analyzing everything that’s said, is a candidate standing up for the arts. I cannot see how a nation can fail to support the arts and humanities and consider itself a leader on the international stage. Is military might or the balance of trade more important than the cultural heart of a great people? We are the country of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein, of Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Virgil Fox, but I’ve read figures that compare the United States’ annual support of the arts with the hourly cost of warfare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an elected official talk passionately about the artistic culture—the passion—of our country. I think they’re missing something.

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

John Bishop

A saint of our own

Sometime in the middle of the second century Anno Domine, a young Christian woman who had made a faithful vow of virginity was married to a man named Valerian. During the wedding, she sat alone and sang to God professing her faith. The bride, Cecilia, substantiated her previous vow by appearing before Valerian with an angel protecting her. Around 180 AD, the young couple suffered martyrdom for their faith under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the time of her death, Cecilia asked the pope to convert her home to a church.

In 1585, Pope Sixtus V released a papal bull founding the National Academy of St. Cecilia, naming her as the patron saint of music. We celebrate the Feast of St. Cecilia on November 22, which is today, as I write.

St. Cecilia is often depicted in statues, paintings, stained glass, and tapestries. Typically, she is carrying a small portative organ, and often, she’s depicted mishandling it. Assuming the Saint to be of average height, the organ is 18 or 24 inches high, with perhaps 20 notes. She’s looking off to one side, and the organ droops out of her hands, a few pipes slipping loose—I imagine that in a few seconds the pipes will clatter to the ground. I’ve asked around a little, but haven’t found anyone who has a good explanation or theory for why it’s okay for the good saint to be so careless! If anyone in the Organ Clearing House did that, they’d be on a bus home pretty quick.

Musicians throughout the Christian world celebrate St. Cecilia Day, honoring her memory for professing her faith through song. Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and George Frideric Handel are among the many who composed music dedicated to the saint. Benjamin Britten was born on the Feast of St. Cecilia in 1913 and aspired to write a piece in homage to the saint, but struggled to find an appropriate Latin text. W. H. Auden wrote the poem that Britten set to music in his Hymn to St. Cecilia.

November 22 is the date of a few auspicious musical events. In 1928, Ravel’s Boléro was premiered in Paris, and in 1968, The Beatles released their album, The Beatles, known by music lovers as “The White Album.”

Singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote his own homage to St. Cecilia, released in 1970 in Simon & Garfunkel’s album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. According to the website Genius.com, Simon has said that his lyrics are a reflection on St. Cecilia as an elusive muse, depicted as a troubling lover (“ . . . you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily . . .”). I don’t know if Purcell or Handel had such struggles—both have much richer catalogues than Paul Simon—but we have heard from Benjamin Britten’s partner Peter Pears, that as W. H. Auden submitted his poem to Britten in installments, he included hints as to how Britten might become a better artist. Ouch!

 

Gathering horsefeathers

I was a freshman at Oberlin in the fall of 1974, and that year on November 22, the grand Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. E. Power Biggs, Charles Fisk, Harald Vogel, and Dirk Flentrop were among the luminaries who participated in roundtable discussions, and Marie-Claire Alain played the opening recital. I don’t remember the program, but I do remember the encore. She eschewed the usual fireworks and offered Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40). Mr. Biggs received an honorary doctorate of music.

The Flentrop organ was dedicated to the memory of George Whitfield Andrews, longtime professor of organ at Oberlin, and was funded by Oberlin alumnus Frank Chapman Van Cleef, whose wife had studied with Dr. Andrews, and whose family members had been students at Oberlin in every decade but two of the school’s existence from its founding in 1833 until the 1970s! After graduating from Oberlin in 1904, Van Cleef earned a degree in law at Columbia and later founded a financial management firm in New York. He retired in 1948 and returned to Oberlin. I recall meeting him during that week in November of 1974 in the hallway by Haskell Thomson’s teaching studio. We were introduced, and I thanked him for his gift. He was 94, I was 18.

Frank Van Cleef is not the first wealthy elderly patriarch to be encouraged to write a memoir. Gathering Horsefeathers is the third installment in a trilogy, a goofy history of his life with his family, replete with tales of designing houses, arguing about shrubbery, killing rattlesnakes (really?), and ultimately, rallying his family to donate the funds for the new organ. I was amused to note that early in his career, while he and his first wife were planning the construction of their first house, they lived on the twenty-second floor (looking south) of One Fifth Avenue in New York. That building is a few blocks from where we live in Greenwich Village—I can see it through my office window if I swivel my chair. Looking south provides an expansive view of Washington Square Park, and in 1928, there wasn’t much else that tall except the 57-story Woolworth Building (built in 1913) on Broadway, between Park and Barclay Streets, across from City Hall Plaza, one and a half miles away.

The story of the Flentrop organ fills the last pages of Van Cleef’s book, presumably placing the experience as a high point in his life. He tells how Oberlin president Robert Fuller (his next door neighbor) and professor of organ Fenner Douglas came to him (by appointment) one evening, inviting him to support the project. As he tells it, his son John (Oberlin ’31) was present, and later the family agreed that Frank, his four children, and their spouses would support the entire cost of the project.

My musty copy of this little book has been on the shelves of all the offices in which I’ve worked. I bought it that weekend in Oberlin because I had met the man, and I suppose I read it then. As I read today, I reflect on the dozens of people I’ve met who have given generously to fund the design and construction of new organs.

Horsefeathers? The jacket flaps explain. They’re the long hairs on a horse’s fetlocks, and they have no particular purpose. (I know that Mr. Van Cleef was a horseman because he was on horseback when he killed the rattlesnake!) In his words, horsefeathers are “something you do for the public good, something that has no use for you.”

 

Some old friends

Mr. Van Cleef’s gift provided a platform for the education of hundreds of organists. 1974 was the heart of the Orgelbewegung movement—the time when American organists and organbuilders were in the thrall of classic styles of organ building and playing, when so-called “factory built” organs lost favor among many. In retrospect, I think that the movement was less about the oft-repeated battle between tracker and electric actions, but the realization that the collapse of the economy in 1929 and especially the economic impact of World War II led to the diminution of artistic integrity of American organs.

The Aeolian-Skinner organ in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel was considered “second-class,” and the town was crawling with Flentrops. Including the organ in the Episcopal Church, practice and teaching organs, and the big red one in Warner Hall, there were more than a dozen Flentrops in town.

It’s a long time since I played on that organ, but I remember it vividly. It was a thrill to sit surrounded by the cases, those huge pedal pipes visible in the corner of your eye. Leaving behind all the conflicting philosophies and vitriol that gushed in those days, that organ simply sounded beautiful. Each knob you drew brought a new touch of magic. The sound was lively, the action immediate and personal. That organ was mighty important to my formation as an organist.

 

Harvard Square

When I was growing up in the Boston area, Harvard Square was just the place. In 1956, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. installed a three-manual organ in St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School). Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music, was the organist of the chapel, the young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs (who had taught at Longy) lived nearby, and Daniel Pinkham was Biggs’s young protégé. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall while that organ was being installed, with its (terribly) low wind pressures, exposed Great and Positiv chests, and open toe holes. Those musicians, at the core of the revival movement, must have had some fascinating conversations in that crowded loft.

My father taught homiletics at E.T.S, and when I was clamoring to have organ lessons, he took me to Alastair Cassels-Brown, the chapel organist. The Holtkamp was the second organ I ever played. The first, ironically, was the 1904 E. M. Skinner organ at the Parish of the Epiphany in nearby Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad was rector, and I was about to “baritone” out of the youth choir to join the adults. The Skinner was in dreadful condition and was replaced in 1974 with a new organ by Fisk.

I was also excited to be allowed to practice on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at Christ Church (Episcopal), Zero Garden Street, in Cambridge, the church famous for its Revolutionary War-era bullet hole and its “George Washington sat here” pew. Daniel Hathaway was the organist there and was very kind to me. Many years later, I was to maintain that organ, build a new console for it, and then arrange for its sale as the church purchased a new organ from Schoenstein in 2006. The Organ Clearing House dismantled the Aeolian-Skinner for shipment—it was rebuilt by Quimby Pipe Organs and installed in a church in Sugarland, Texas. 

 

The Busch

After having given weekly radio broadcasts for sixteen years on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, in 1958 E. Power Biggs commissioned Flentrop to build a three-manual organ for the resonant but intimate room. Shortly after its installation, Biggs presented the Flentrop to the world through his record-breaking series of recordings on Columbia Masterworks, Bach Organ Favorites. (It’s still the best- selling series of solo classical recordings.) A few days ago, friend and colleague John Panning, of the Dobson Organ Company, posted photos of the organ on Facebook. His caption read: 

 

Yesterday I enjoyed the opportunity to play what I consider the most influential 20th-century organ in the United States. The 1958 Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum was not the first Organ Reform instrument in the country, but E. Power Biggs’ many recordings of it brought the gospel of the Orgelbewegung to an enormous audience, including me. Even today, jaded by subsequent developments, it still impresses as a tremendously beautiful organ.

I first heard that Flentrop as a young teenager when mentors took me to hear Biggs play several recitals. At the conclusion of one of those programs, chock full of Sweelinck, Buxtehude, and Bach, Mr. Biggs sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and told us that he’d be happy to play another piece, but that he’d “run out of baroque music” (yeah, right!), and gave us Charles Ives’s Variations on ‘America.’

 

Calliope

In Greek mythology, Calliope was one of the nine muses, representing eloquence and epic poetry. She defeated the daughters of the King of Thessaly in a singing competition, but instead of receiving a cash prize, professional concert management, and a recording contract, Calliope turned her opponents into magpies. Calliope was the name of the ship that left Rotterdam in the spring of 1977, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed up the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Erie to the Port of Cleveland where it delivered the Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

I was working for Jan Leek, a native of the Netherlands, who had immigrated to the United States in 1961 to work for Walter Holtkamp. When they were installing the Holtkamp in Warner Hall at Oberlin, John noted that the school was looking for an organ technician, and knew that was the job for him. I worked for Jan part-time and summers when I was a student, and as he left the school to form his own company, I worked full time with him for four years after I graduated. Jan, as a true Dutchman, was friendly with the folks at Flentrop, and we were engaged to help with the installation of the big three-manual organ at Trinity Cathedral. 

It was the summer before my senior year, and the first time I had participated in the installation of a large organ. We arrived at the cathedral to meet the truck bearing the overseas container. I carried a couple things up those stone stairs that were not featured in the Oberlin Flentrop—including a tied bundle of Swell shutters. What goes around, comes around! And there was Daniel Hathaway on the front steps of the cathedral, just arrived from Cambridge to start his magnificent tenure as director of music.Daniel and I played several duo-recitals using the cathedral’s two Flentrops (there’s a fifteen-stop job on a platform that rolls about the nave), treating audiences to Beethoven symphonies (3, 5, and 6), and Rossini overtures played in Werckmeister III.

Michael Jupin had been the associate rector of the Parish of the Epiphany when Dad was rector—he was now dean of Trinity Cathedral. Pat Quintin and I were married in that church in October of 1979 with my father officiating, assisted by his former assistant, my grandfather, uncle, and godfather (all priests). For the rest of his life, Dad loved to tell the story of how I shouted registration suggestions to Daniel Hathaway down the length of the nave during the wedding rehearsal the evening before. (Yup, I did that. . . .)

The organ’s main case is twenty-five feet tall, and the whole thing is perched on a high loft. There was scaffolding and lots of heavy lifting. I was outfitted with a rig of leather straps like the flagpole carrier in a parade, so I could put the toe of a big tin façade pipe in a little cup strapped to my waist, and climb a ladder using both hands while co-workers preceded me sixteen feet above, balancing the top. My knees are almost sixty years old now, and things are different.

All the façade pipes were in place, and as we left the cathedral, we turned and looked back at the organ. The late afternoon sun was flooding the organ with red and blue light, and I burst into tears. Organs still do that to me.

 

And on the other hand . . . 

Those Flentrop organs are terrific instruments, and they played a huge role in the history of the pipe organ in America in the twentieth century. But in those days, I also learned about the beauties of electro-pneumatic action, especially working with Jan Leek in the big Aeolian-Skinner at Church of the Covenant in Cleveland. And when I returned to Boston in 1984, I was lucky to get to care for the tremendous organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square. The regular Friday noontime recitals were an important part of my education, as each week I heard a different artist playing the same organ. Some were terrified of it, some would have rather played a tracker, and some made magic happen.

Now, more than forty years out of high school, I’ve worked with and played hundreds of instruments. Of course, some are unremarkable, but most of them bring to mind a story, a lesson learned, a mystery revealed, or simply a great place to have lunch nearby. I remember where I was the moment I grasped the concept of electro-pneumatic actions, the time the blower was running backwards, and the two times I’ve fallen. It’s fun to think back about those that stand out and how their histories are interwoven with my experience. I’ve had plenty of conversations with friends and colleagues about the organs that influenced them and played important roles in their careers, and I bet lots of readers are remembering their favorites right now. I’d love to hear your stories.