In the Wind. . . .

John Bishop

When I was a kid . . .

 

KLH and WCRB

I grew up in the rectory of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector. Prominent on the shelves on the living room wall nearest the street was a KLH Model 24 “Hi-fi” and a collection of LPs. Dad wrote his sermons in the living room on Saturday nights using a typewriter set up on a card table facing the speakers of the KLH, listening to the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) on classical radio station WCRB. It was well understood that one entered that room on pain of death.

Once, a thief broke into the house, and the KLH was among the missing items. The police recovered a cache of stuff they thought might be ours, and asked my mother over the phone for details that would help identify it. She remembered that there was a Joan Sutherland recording on the turntable, and that turned the trick. The cache was returned with the record intact. Dame Joan saved the day.

WCRB was, and still is, the classical music radio station in Boston. When I was a kid, it was at 1330 AM and 102.5 FM (like so many things, those numbers have changed). The AM side was important because the Ford Falcon only had an AM radio. The theme music for WCRB’s afternoon rush-hour program, Drive Time, was the last movement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, op. 7, no. 6 (B-flat major), in a recording featuring Pierre Cochereau with a big orchestra. I thought his cadenzas were thrilling, but later realized they were “of a period,” romantic and virtuosic, un-Handelian. We heard that piece pretty much every day, singing along, and carrying the earworm through supper. WCRB was such a part of our family life that I played that concerto on my senior recital at Oberlin as a gift to my parents. I used a three-stop Flentrop chamber organ on the stage of Warner Concert Hall joined by a string quartet of friends and wrote my own cadenzas—a decidedly un-Cochereau-esque performance.

Richard L. Kaye was the manager of WCRB, and ultimately the chairman of its board of directors. He hosted a program called WCRB Saturday Night, which came on after the BSO concert, in which he presented humorous takes on classical music and introduced the Boston audience to British comedy. It was at his hands that I learned of the King’s Singers, Florence Foster Jenkins, the “Bricklayer” letter (www.lectlaw.com/files/fun28.htm), and heaps of other hilarity. Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…”) was a favorite, and Monty Python a staple.

Mr. Kaye’s greatest contributions were marathon fundraisers for the BSO. Each year WCRB would devote an entire weekend to the effort, featuring interviews with orchestra members and giving the audience the chance to make pledges in return for prizes, very much a model for the now ubiquitous NPR fund-raisers. One tee-shirt bore the phrase, “Beethoven Lives: 1770–1827.” I’m guessing that was Beethoven’s bicentennial year. There were contests for musical limericks and puns, with symphony tickets as prizes. One of my entries as a 16-year-old was “Of Korsakov only between movements.” I didn’t win. I’ve read that Richard L. Kaye was responsible for raising more than $3,000,000 for the BSO—in 1974 dollars.

 

Vinyl

My parents’ collection of recordings included lots of the favorite classical symphonies, and Dad subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, a mail-order record company with a “disc of the month” club. Two or three randomly selected discs would arrive in the mail each month. They were heavy on the baroque, which was fine with me, but I remember one in particular that featured the late McNeil Robinson and the choir of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Times Square in New York City. While I don’t remember the programming, I do remember that Neil improvised on that smashing Aeolian-Skinner organ between choral pieces. As a young pup of an organist, I was in the thrall of the sound of that organ and of the very idea that someone would create a piece of music out of thin air like that.

In those days, Gerre Hancock was organist at Christ Church (Episcopal, now Christ Church Cathedral) in Cincinnati. That was dad’s home parish, and he had gotten his hands on a couple LPs of “Uncle Gerre” leading the church’s annual Boar’s Head Festival. The “Title Song” was the Boar’s Head Carol, with organ improvisations between verses, and again, I was thrilled with the sound, the concept, and the power of that music. I feel lucky to have grown up to know both of those organists, and you can bet I told them both about how their recordings helped inspire my career.

 

Organs I knew

Ernest Skinner’s Opus 128—that’s an early one. It was built in 1905, the year that Robert Hope-Jones joined the Skinner Organ Company as vice-president, and it was in our home church. It was the first organ I played, and I thought it was pretty great. But from the beginning of my “organ awareness,” I knew it was in poor condition. It made all sorts of strange groaning and dying sounds, it had heaps of dead notes, and it ciphered. 

I have a vivid memory of the organist leaving the bench during a service, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), fetching a ladder, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), setting the ladder, and climbing to the chamber to pull a pipe, quelling the cipher, still wearing his black cassock—then repeating the solemn farce in reverse to return the ladder to its hook. Looking back on that, I’m sure he was delighted to stage that piece of theater. The Skinner was replaced by a two-manual tracker organ by C. B. Fisk (Opus 65) a few years later (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_65).

As a treble chorister, I was itching to take organ lessons. Dad was adjunct professor of homiletics at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he arranged for me to have lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown, professor of sacred music and chapel organist at the seminary, where the chapel organ had been built by Walter Holtkamp in 1956. That organ is just as old now as Skinner #128 was when I first played it. (Yikes!) It has electro-pneumatic action, a slider chest for the Great, and a Ruckpositiv, unusual for American organs at that time. Melville Smith was the organist when the Holtkamp was installed—he was also director of the nearby Longy School of Music. A young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs lived in the neighborhood, and his disciple Daniel Pinkham was also around. They were all leaders of a great revolution in organ design and playing, and I love to imagine evening conversations in that little organ loft during the installation. 

I rode my bicycle seven miles from home in Winchester to ETS for those organ lessons (when I was a kid . . . ). When I drive those narrow busy roads today, I can hardly believe I survived then—in the days before helmets.

A couple years later, my lessons moved to the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home of a three-manual Fisk organ built in 1972 (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50). John Skelton, a former student of Alastair, was the church’s organist, and he was my teacher through my graduation from high school in 1974. I was given practice privileges there, which was mighty convenient, as the church was just two blocks from our home.

George Bozeman was an organbuilder in the area, and his wife Pat was a member of the choir at the Parish of the Epiphany. George was one of several musicians in the area who encouraged my enthusiasm. He was organist of the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which has a marvelous three-manual organ built in 1860 by E. & G. G. Hook (http://database.organsociety.org/SingleOrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041). He offered me the chance to serve as his assistant, covering for him when he was away on organbuilding trips. It was about an hour walk or fifteen-minute bike ride from home (when I was a
kid . . . ), and I loved playing and practicing on that grand instrument. There was a Dairy Queen along the route. The Woburn Unitarian Church was across the square, home to another large three-manual Hook—that’s the one that was relocated through the Organ Clearing House to the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin, Germany—Die Berliner Hook.

William H. Clarke had been the organist of both those churches in Woburn through the 1860s and 1870s, oddly shuttling back and forth between the two. He was responsible for the installation of the organ in the Unitarian Church in 1870 and was the great and good friend of George P. Kinsley, the head voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Sometime just after that, Clarke moved to Indianapolis to start his own organ building company, taking Kinsley with him. Among the few dozen organs he built was a ten-stop job for the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, where my parents bought a summer home in 1969. That church only operated in the summer, and I was organist there for four summers. That was only a twenty-minute walk.

The First Congregational Church in Yarmouthport has a two-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I played on a lot, practicing in bare feet, and playing recitals once in a while. The pastor’s name was Carlton Cassidy—we called him “Hopalong.”

 

Biggsy

My father’s teaching position at the seminary came with a parking space. Harvard Square, a favorite haunt of our family, was a couple blocks from there. I loved the record department at the Harvard Coop (now Barnes & Noble) and spent all the money I could spare. It seemed that every time I went there, E. Power Biggs had released another recording. I snapped them all up, racing back to the KLH for hours of listening. One of my favorites was Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto as arranged for organ by J. S. Bach (BWV 596). Biggs recorded that, along with chorale preludes by Ernst Pepping, on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, Holland. I played it on a recital in 1972—I was 16 and never did get those pesky descending thirds in the fugue—and have played it dozens of times since. The organ in Zwolle was built in 1721—it’s 295 years old—and that contemporary music is just as viable there as Bach’s, which was written when the organ was new. Thanks to E. Power Biggs, I learned as a teenager that the pipe organ is all about timelessness. (I can play those thirds now!)

MBTA Commuter Rail trains run from Winchester to North Station in Boston. From there it was easy to take the Green Line subway to Boylston Street where I loved hanging out at the Boston Music Company and Carl Fischer’s, where George Kerr ran the organ music desk. He was a patient guide to an enthusiastic young musician on a tight budget, sharing stories of the famous musicians who came and went from his desk and offering me freebies—most of which I realized later was second-rate stuff he couldn’t sell. 

I bought Biggs’s editions and collections from George, dutifully dating each purchase. On March 4, 1970, I bought Festival Anthology for Organ ($3.00), and Treasury of Early Organ Music ($3.50), and on December 27, 1970 (Christmas money?), I bought A Treasury of Shorter Organ Classics ($2.00). Forty-six years later, they’re still on my shelf, chock full of my youthful fingerings (whose hands were those?) and naïve observations. Over the decades I’ve played from those volumes countless times, I treasure their presence in my library, and I can hardly express all I learned from Biggs through his publications and recordings.

I was surrounded by a group of organists who encouraged my interest in the organ, especially by taking me to concerts. I heard Anton Heiller and Fenner Douglass play the (first) Fisk organ at Harvard University, and thrill of all thralls, Biggs playing on “his” Flentrop organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall). One evening we heard him play all sorts of early music—Sweelinck, Bruhns, Buxtehude. At the conclusion of the published program, he sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and said to the delighted audience, “I’m happy to play another piece, but I’ve run out of baroque music!” (Baloney!) He gave us Charles Ives’ Variations on ‘America.’ I had never heard anything so cool. I’m guessing that was early in 1972, because the older of my two copies of “The Ives” is dated April 2, 1972. I must have been on the train to Carl Fischer’s the next weekend.

A favorite post-concert haunt of organists was The Wursthaus (long gone) in Harvard Square, an old-fashioned, old-world place that served beer by the bucket and classic soggy German dishes by the greasy pound. I sat with groups of organists at big round tables after concerts, and I recall one evening when someone noticed there were nine people present who played for area churches that had organs built by C. B. Fisk, Inc.

A few years later, in the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the magnificent Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated on St. Cecilia Day, capping a week-long festival of workshops, round-table discussions, and concerts. Biggs was there as participant and to receive an honorary degree, and a classmate and I were deputized to meet Mr. and Mrs. Biggs and show them around the Conservatory. He asked us to demonstrate the practice organs for him (his fingers had been ravaged by arthritis) and answered our questions patiently and generously, moments an eighteen-year-old would never forget. When we were finished, he asked if there was a place to get a beer. Oberlin was a dry town then, but my friend and I walked the mile to Johnnie’s Carry-Out on the township border, and brought beer back to their room at the Oberlin Inn. I shared the story with my girlfriend Amy who was still back in Winchester finishing high school. She didn’t believe me, so she went to a record-signing event at the Harvard Coop, and asked Biggs if he knew me. “Oh yes, the bearded one.” Hah! Told you.

The summer of 1976 (I was twenty) was my second stint working for Bozeman-Gibson & Company. That summer, the company moved from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Deerfield, New Hampshire, and my co-worker John Farmer (now an active organbuilder in North Carolina) and I installed a new one-manual organ in the chapel on Squirrel Island, just off Southport Island and Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The only way to reach the island was by ferry, a small privately operated thing like a lobster boat. We caused quite a spectacle carrying the organ parts from the rented truck down the dock to the ferry and stacking them among the other passengers. It took three trips. That was lovely foreshadowing, as Wendy and I have had a house in that area for fifteen years, and we often sail around Squirrel Island.

Before the trip to Squirrel, Farmer and I took the organ on a detour to Boston where we installed it in the crossing of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in preparation for the 1976 American Guild of Organists national convention, where Barbara Bruns played a Handel Concerto with the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra. I had my AGO convention debut that week as Farmer and I played the organbuilder parts in a piece for organist, organbuilders, and electronic tape by Martha Folts. We stood inside the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel in Boston with the score on a music stand, slapping at square rails and rollerboards, stirring up a fine racket!

The highlight of the 1976 convention was “AGO Night at the Pops” at Symphony Hall with Arthur Fiedler, the Boston Pops, and E. Power Biggs. For one of his signature “Pops Extras,” Fiedler addressed the thousands of organists present, inviting us to sing along with the “next number,” and launching the orchestra into the introduction of “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah. Lord, what a thrill. Biggs played a Rheinberger concerto with the orchestra in what I believe was his last public performance. He died on March 10, 1977.

§

I was lucky to come up playing a fleet of wonderful organs, both new and old. In those days, new organs were being sold like fried dough at the State Fair, and I was treated to more than a dozen dedication recitals during those years. I was fortunate to live in that area where so many talented people were doing so much interesting work in and around organs. They were generous to me with their time and interest in my development. I’m grateful to them all and have tried to pass on the torch in their names to young people I meet who are interested in the organ.

It’s sobering to realize how many of those organs were new—some brand new—when I first knew them, and they’re all over forty years old now. Their leather, like mine, is showing signs of age.

John Speller

The Organ Historical Society’s 60th Annual Convention took place in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, with the Marriott Hotel in central Springfield as the convention headquarters. I arrived on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited on Saturday, June 27, and found the hotel conveniently located a short walk from the railroad station. Pre-convention events offered on Sunday morning and afternoon included visits to the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Daniel Chester French Estate, and a walking tour of the Springfield Quadrangle, though I opted instead to attend the Sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in Springfield, again conveniently located a short walking distance from the hotel.

 

Sunday, June 28

The convention proper began with Choral Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, with an augmented Cathedral Choir directed by David Pulliam, in which we were treated to the John Sanders Responses, Sumsion in G, and Stanford’s Te Deum in B-flat. Evensong was rounded off by a spirited performance of the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 5 on the fine 1953 Austin Opus 2195, rebuilt as a III/54 instrument by Theodore Gilbert Associates in 1985. 

Another short walk took us to St. Michael’s Catholic Cathedral, where we heard the first recital of the convention, given by Christopher Houlihan on the rebuilt 1929 4-manual Casavant organ, comprising a gallery organ in the fine Gothic case of the previous 1862 E. & G. G. Hook organ, and a chancel division in cases designed when the present organ was installed. This is the largest organ in Western Massachusetts. The program included the Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor by Henry Martin (b. 1950) of Rutgers University, commissioned by OHS member Michael Barone and previously given its première performance by Christopher Houlihan in New York City. Houlihan also treated us to one of Brahms’s earliest works, the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, WoO 9, and one of his latest works, the chorale prelude O Welt, ich muss dich lassen, op. 122, no. 11, effectively sandwiching the chorale prelude between the prelude and the fugue. Houlihan’s performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, was masterful, and indeed I think this was the best performance of the “Wedge” Fugue I have ever heard. The other major work in the recital was Vierne’s Symphony No. 4 in G Minor, op. 32, in which Houlihan effectively demonstrated the large mood swings that characterize this work. After this, it was a short walk back to the hotel for drinks and to explore the books, music, and recordings in the exhibit hall.

 

Monday, July 29

We boarded the buses early Monday morning for a day looking at organs in and around Westfield, Massachusetts. The day began with a recital given by Patricia Snyder on the 1977 C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 71, in First Congregational Church. This splendid little organ was ideally suited to the program of de Grigny and Bach that Ms. Snyder played. Next was a recital by Caroline Robinson on the 1897 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 78, relocated in 2008 from Pittsfield by the Czelusniak firm.to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Westfield. The organ is situated in a divided case in the gallery at the west end of the church, with the console on the north side, and is believed to be the second oldest Casavant organ in the United States. It has a warm, bold tone with rolling diapasons, but is brilliant enough to be effective in classical as well as romantic music. Ms. Robinson’s recital consisted of music by Brahms, Widor, Schumann, and Boëly.

Following these recitals, founding OHS member Barbara Owen gave a lecture on organ building in the Pioneer Valley. Three important organ builders had their workshops in Westfield—William A Johnson/Johnson & Son, Steer & Turner/J. W. Steer(e) & Son, and Emmons Howard. The Steere company was purchased by the Skinner Organ Company in 1921; the Westfield factory continued to run as a branch of the Skinner firm until 1929. The lecture was accompanied by slides illustrative of the history of all these companies.

After lunch we went to nearby Lenox, Massachusetts, for a recital on the famous Aeolian-Skinner, Opus 1002 of 1940, at the Serge Koussevitzky Music Shed of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. The “shed” is a fine semi-outdoor concert hall designed by Joseph Franz. James David Christie, who is the resident organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, gave an interesting concert, assisted by two members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Robert Sheena, English horn and oboe, and Cynthia Meyers, flute. The program included music by Johann Sebastian and Johann Bernard Bach, Georg Böhm, Marguerite Roesgen-Champion, Charles Callahan, Jacques Berthier, and Jean Langlais. The J. S. Bach piece was the Sonata No. 1 in B flat, BWV 525, transposed to G major and transcribed for organ and flute, a very interesting change from the usual version.

We then moved to the Church on the Hill (United Church of Christ) in Lenox for a recital played by Peter Crisafulli on the I/9 William A. Johnson organ, Opus 281 of 1869. In 1988, Andover Organ Company releathered the bellows and in 1991 carried out a thorough historically informed restoration. Crisafulli’s eclectic program ranged from No. 5 of the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, attributed to J. S. Bach but probably by Johann Tobias Krebs, to a modern piece, the Sonatina by Robert W. Jones. Altogether this was a pristine and delightful little organ. Next was a recital given by Adam Pajan on a later Johnson instrument, Johnson & Son Opus 805 of 1893, at the Unitarian-Universalist Meeting of North Berkshire in Housatonic, Great Barrington. The music included works of Arthur Foote, J. S. Bach, Brahms, and Mendelssohn.

The day culminated in the evening recital given by Bruce Stevens on the Hilborne L. Roosevelt organ, Opus 113 of 1882, at First Congregational Church, Great Barrington, an organ I have been longing to hear since I first heard of it around thirty years ago. I was not disappointed: it is a wonderful mellow, cohesive instrument. The chorus was perhaps a little lacking in brilliance for the Bach Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541, though Stevens’s performance was nevertheless very effective, and the instrument later proved more than capable of softer baroque effects in the Pachelbel Partita on ‘Christus, der ist mein Leben.’ The organ was at its best, however, in the performance of Max Reger. We heard both Reger’s Scherzo, op. 65, no. 10, and his Introduction and Passacaglia in D Minor, op. 96, in which the organ sounded absolutely magnificent. We then heard the suite In Festo Corporis Christi by Bruce Stevens’s former teacher Anton Heiller, and finally Wilhelm Middelschulte’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne for Violin Solo from the Partita in D Minor, BWV 1004. A feature of the Great Barrington Roosevelt is the striking façade of pipes stenciled in blue and brown on a background of gold. Small chunks of wood and plaster were glued to the pipes under the paintwork to create a rich three-dimensional effect that is most unusual and possibly unique.

 

Tuesday, June 30

We began the day with a recital by Michael Plagerman on the 1907 Emmons Howard organ in South Deerfield Congregational Church. If anyone thought that Johnson and Steere were the important organ builders in Westfield and that Emmons Howard was an “also ran,” this instrument and the other Emmons Howard organ we heard would definitely give the lie to such a thought. Emmons Howard may not have had quite such a large output as the other Westfield builders, but his instruments were certainly of equal quality. The conventioneers began by singing the chorale Vater Unser, after which Plagerman played Bach and Pachelbel chorale preludes on this hymn. We then heard a voluntary by the eighteenth-century English composer Maurice Greene, Franck’s Cantabile, and the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonata No. 2. The organ produced a grand effect—rich and powerful—and Plagerman brought forth some very pretty effects in the Greene.

We next heard an organ—perhaps the only surviving organ—built in 1868 by William Jackson of Albany in Holy Name of Jesus Polish National Catholic Church in South Deerfield. Jackson was the son of an organ builder in Liverpool, England. Jackson’s father was chiefly memorable for having built the first organ in England with a 1-1/7 foot stop. William Jackson trained with Gray & Davison in London before coming to the United States, which is evident from the Gray & Davison-style console of the South Deerfield organ. The recitalist, Larry Schipull, began with Niels Gade’s Three Tone Pieces, op. 22, and then—appropriately for an ethnically Polish church—played a transcription of a Chopin Fugue in A Minor. The Chorale Prelude on ‘Wie schön leucht die Morgenstern’ by Johann Christoff Oley featured the labial oboe on the Swell, perhaps the earliest stop of its kind in North America. We also heard the Andante with Variations in D of Mendelssohn and the Finale in D by T. Tertius Noble. The organ sounds grand yet bright and has a particularly beautiful Melodia.

Gregory Crowell then played the early William A. Johnson organ, Opus 54 of 1856, in First Congregational Church, Montague. Works of the eighteenth-century English composers Jonathan Battishull and Henry Heron were followed by Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 870, from Das wohltemperierte Klavier II, together with an Adagio by nineteenth-century German composer E. F. E. Richter and a Maestoso by an anonymous German composer of the same period. This is quite a charming little instrument with a very substantial Pedal Sub Base [sic]. We also took in a recital by Don VerKuilen at the First Congregational Church of Sunderland, home of an early Odell organ, Opus 109 of 1871, a relatively rare example of a New York-built organ in the Pioneer Valley. The program consisted of nineteenth-century American music and Seth Bingham’s Fughetta on ‘St. Kevin.’

Following lunch at the same church, we boarded the buses for a recital at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Springfield. This for me was one of the highlights of the convention. The church was built in 1962 during the pastorate of Father Basil J. Rafferty, who spared no expense to make sure that it was an outstanding example of modern architecture, with excellent acoustics and built from the finest materials. Much of the building is lined with marble in various hues, including a striking emerald green marble reredos. The stained glass is also extremely beautiful. The organ is a three-manual electro-pneumatic Lawrence Phelps Casavant, Opus 2750, built in 1963. The church was threatened with closure in 2005, but following the appointment of Father Quynh D. Tran as pastor in 2006 has taken on a new lease on life as a predominantly ethnically Vietnamese congregation. One would hope that this fine Casavant organ might inspire some parishioners to learn the instrument. The recital was given by Joey Fala. Fala, a native of Hawaii, has completed two degrees at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York, and is now undertaking graduate work in organ performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Fala promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. His varied program included Marcel Dupré’s transcription of the Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata 29, the Prélude from Franck’s Prélude, Fugue, and Variation, and Hyfrydol from Vaughan Williams’s Three Welsh Hymn Preludes. Fala’a program continued with Miroir by Dutch composer Ad Wammes and ended with the Te Deum, op. 11, by Jeanne Demessieux. The Casavant is a wonderful organ in excellent acoustical and architectural surroundings.

The evening recital featured Peter Sykes, assisted by his wife Victoria Wagner, playing the four-manual E.M. Skinner organ, Opus 322 of 1921, in the United Congregational Church of Holyoke. This is a very forthright Skinner organ—I found it a little brutal in the bass at times—in a vast and very beautiful church. Following an American folk tune, White’s Air, arranged by William Churchill Hammond, we heard Peter Sykes’s fine and now well-known transcription of Holst’s The Planets, op. 12. I have now heard Sykes’s transcription of The Planets on several organs in several states, but I thought this was the best performance I have heard. Sykes was able to produce some almost magical effects on the Skinner organ in the quieter passages.

 

Wednesday, July 1

The first recitalist on Wednesday was Monica Czausz, a young woman who also promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. A student of Ken Cowan, she has already received several awards in organ-playing competitions. The organ was Johnson Opus 424 of 1874 in Wesley United Methodist Church, Warehouse Point, Windsor, Connecticut, a lovely little organ in a very well-kept church. Ms. Czausz played selections from Widor, Schumann, and Saint-Saëns, as well as a haunting Adagio by Charles-Valentin Alkan and Will o’ the Wisp by Gordon Balch Nevin.

Next we travelled to Somers Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Somers, Massachusetts, for a recital by Christa Rakich, organ, with cellist Jeffrey Krieger of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The recital included Ms. Rakich’s own composition, Hommage à Pachelbel: Eleven Variations on ‘St. Anne,’ three pieces for cello and organ by Edward Elgar, and the Ricercar à Trois from Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079. The organ is a fine new tracker instrument by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 21 of 2014. 

We then went to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, South Hadley, Massachusetts, for the OHS Annual Meeting followed by a hymn sing led by Patrick Scott and featuring the church’s 1964 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 2791. At the meeting, we heard the exciting news that through the generosity of the Wyncote Foundation, founded with monies from the late Otto and Phoebe Haas Charitable Trusts, the Organ Historical Society offices, library, and archives are all to be housed in Stoneleigh, a 35-room mansion built in 1901 in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A presentation showing the plans for the new climate-controlled OHS headquarters was given by OHS member Fred Haas, son of Otto and Phoebe Haas, and also the chair of next year’s OHS convention in Philadelphia. I was particularly interested in the organ at St. Theresa’s used for the hymn sing, a Lawrence Phelps Casavant tracker originally built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. My late mother-in-law was for many years a member of St. Andrew’s, and so I knew the Casavant organ in its original location well. It was far from satisfactory, being architecturally out of keeping with the building, too loud, and excessively bright and screechy. The church put up with the instrument until 2005 when the then organist and choirmaster, OHS member Harry Kelton, persuaded them to buy a new Juget-Sinclair organ, which is as perfect an organ for the church as one might imagine. The Casavant organ was secured for St. Theresa’s in South Hadley through the Organ Clearing House and was installed in 2005 by Czelusniak et Dugal of Northampton, Massachusetts. Bill Czelusniak told me that no changes were made to the voicing apart from raising a few drooping languids and note-to-note regulation. The Casavant organ fits St. Theresa’s as though it had been built for it. The casework that was so out of place in Wellesley looks just right in the fine modern architecture of St. Theresa’s and the volume of the instrument is just right for the spacious acoustics of the church. Furthermore, the acoustics of the building boost the bass frequencies and absorb some of the upper frequencies, so the organ is perfectly balanced for the room. So now St. Andrew’s, Wellesley, and St. Theresa’s, South Hadley, both have ideal tracker instruments in their buildings. As I asserted above, it is as though the Casavant organ was built for the South Hadley church: the organ has at last found its true home.

The next venue was the South Congregational Church of Amherst, where Christopher Marks gave a recital on Casavant Opus 74 of 1896. This is believed to be the oldest unaltered Casavant organ in North America and was relocated to the Amherst church by Czelusniak et Dugal. The stoplist is interesting in being somewhat similar to many Cavaillé-Coll orgues de choeur, with a small Grand-orgue to 4 foot and a larger Récit to mixture and reed. The recital consisted of works by Pierné, Ropartz, and Widor. 

After this we made a short trip to the Jewish Community of Amherst for a recital by Vaughn Watson. The organ, a splendid little instrument, was built by Emmons Howard in 1900. The synagogue inherited the organ in 1976 when they purchased the building from the Second Congregational Church of Amherst, which had merged with First Congregational Church in 1970. Although the Jewish Community used the organ for a time, they had not used it recently and were excited to discover that it might still be played. Several members of the community were present and expressed interest and enthusiasm for the recital, so one hopes they may make more use of the instrument in future. The recital consisted of works by Bach, Schumann, and Mathias, after which the congregation sang “The God of Abraham Praise,” and Watson rounded off the program with Louis Lewandowski’s Prelude ‘Rosh Hashanah.’

For the evening concert we went to the First Church of Monson (United Church of Christ) for a concert on the organ, Johnson & Son Opus 781 of 1892, played by Rosalind Mohnsen. I suspect that the convention committee’s choice of Mohnsen to give a concert on the Johnson in Monson may have been a little tongue-in-cheek, but it proved to be an excellent pairing. The organ is a fairly comprehensive three-manual and includes—unusually for the period—a soft yet very effective 32-foot Pedal Quintaton. In addition to some well-known works such as Saint-Saëns Fantaisie, the recital included a number of interesting works that are not often played. These included Albert W. Ketelbey’s Sanctuary of the Heart, Karg-Elert’s concert arrangement of Handel’s The Harmonious Blacksmith, Alfred Hollins’s Concert Overture in C Minor, Toccata from Sonata No. 1, op. 40, by René L. Becker, and the Concert Sonata No. 5 in C Minor, op. 45, by Eugene Thayer. Of particular interest was Zsolt Gárdonyi’s playful Mozart Changes.

 

Thursday, July 2

We began the day with a visit to Heath Union Evangelical Church for a program given by Frances Conover Fitch on the very early William A. Johnson two-manual organ, Opus 16 of 1850. The instrument is interesting in that it appears to have been constructed as a G-compass organ but changed to C-compass during installation. Ms. Fitch demonstrated this very attractive little organ with a selection of works by Percy Buck, John Stanley, John Zundel, and Samuel Wesley. 

The next organ we visited at First Congregational Church in Shelburne was an eye-opener for me in a number of ways. The instrument was J. W. Steere & Son Opus 681 of 1915, an early example of a pitman electro-pneumatic action Steere. The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the work, both tonally and mechanically, every bit as good as the best work of Ernest M. Skinner during the same period. But what was also really impressive was that the organ is a hundred years old and still operating on its original leather, which as yet is showing no signs of giving out. This can be attributed to three factors—the use of very high quality vegetable-tanned (or perhaps even mercury-tanned) leather, the careful sealing of the leather against the atmosphere, and the absence of air pollution in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. The only changes ever made to the organ were the addition of an electric blower and the replacement of the original dry batteries for the action current with a rectifier. I was further impressed by how laid back the organist Carol Britt was about her recital. Unlike the other organists who spent the first few days of the convention frantically practicing for their recitals, Dr. Britt had practiced the previous week and came along on the bus with the rest of us and enjoyed listening to all the organs. She gave a faultless recital consisting of the Pastorale from Guilmant’s Organ Sonata No. 1, David Dahl’s Suite Italiana, and Lefébure-Wély’s Sortie in E-flat.

One of the little-known gems of the Pioneer Valley is the village of Florence, now part of Northampton, Massachusetts. The Victorian Annunciation Chapel was formerly a parish in its own right, but is now part of the consolidated St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish and is only used for one Mass each week. The organ, Steere & Turner Opus 305 of 1890, is the oldest organ in Northampton. It is a surprisingly powerful organ for its size. The recitalist was Grant Moss, organist of nearby Smith College in Northampton. The last time Dr. Moss gave a recital at an OHS Convention, our bus driver got hopelessly lost and we missed the recital, so I was delighted that I finally got to hear him this time. The program consisted of works by Healey Willan, Nadia Boulanger, Joseph Jongen, and Alexandre Guilmant.

We then travelled into the center of Northampton for a recital at the First Churches of Northampton, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Church. The church is a fine Victorian brownstone building with cast iron pillars and an outstanding Tiffany glass window. The celebrated preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was once the pastor. The organ is E. M. Skinner & Son Opus 507 of 1936, which retains the case and 16 ranks from the previous Johnson & Son organ, Opus 718 of 1889. Lorenz Maycher was intending to give the recital but had to withdraw owing to indisposition, and Charles Callahan graciously agreed to come down from Orwell, Vermont, and step into the breach. He played the Bourée in D of Wallace A. Sabin, Adoration by Florence Price, Nevin’s Will o’ the Wisp, and two pieces of his own composition, Folk Tune (1994) and Hymn-Fantasia on ‘Melita’ (2013)—altogether a very interesting and varied program that showed off the lovely voicing of the Skinner organ to good advantage.

We then returned to the United Congregational Church of Holyoke, where we had heard The Planets on Tuesday evening, for a recital by Christoph Bull in the monumental Skinner Chapel, an amazing neo-Perpendicular building with a vaulted apse. As a chapel, it is much larger than most people’s churches! Unlike the main church, the chapel has air conditioning, so the congregation has the main worship service there during the summer. The organ was Ernest M. Skinner Organ Company Opus 179 built in 1910–12. It was rebuilt in 1972–74 by the Berkshire Organ Company, and reconstructed again, more in keeping with the original design, by Czelusniak et Dugal in 1990–92. Christoph Bull began his recital with one of his own compositions, a rather exciting piece named Vic 1, short for Victimae Paschali Laudes, the Gregorian chant upon which it is based. He followed this with Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, an Invention in C Minor by William Joel, and a transcription of Ravel’s Boléro. Bull’s program continued with another entertaining piece composed by the recitalist, When Felix met J. S.—Mash-up of Mendelssohn and Bach. The organ retains much of its E. M. Skinner sound, but as this recital demonstrated it can handle many varied styles of repertoire well.

The convention proper ended with the evening recital on Thursday, although there was an additional optional day on Friday. The Thursday evening recital was given by Nathan Laube and was streamed live on the Internet. The webcast will be available on the OHS website under “Conventions” at www.organsociety.org. The recital featured the two organs of the Abbey Chapel, Holyoke College, South Hadley. Laube played the first half of the program on the large two-manual C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 84 of 1986, in the west gallery of the chapel. The program reflected Laube’s recent research in early European styles of music and included works by Buxtehude, Cabanilles, Poglietti, Rossi, and van Noordt. These came off extremely well on the organ, which I think in some ways is the best Charles Fisk organ I have ever heard. 

The second half of the concert was performed on the Abbey Chapel’s magnificent four-manual chancel organ, built by George S. Hutchings, Opus 436 of 1896, rebuilt by the Skinner Organ Co., Opus 367 of 1922, and again rebuilt by E. M. Skinner & Son, Opus 511 of 1938. Restoration work was subsequently carried out by William Baker in 2001 and Czelusniak et Dugal in 2013. The second half of Laube’s program included a transcription for organ of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G, op. 23, no. 5, Lynnwood Farnam’s transcription of Dupré’s Cortège et litanie, op. 19, no. 2, the third of Herbert Howells’s Three Psalm Preludes, op. 32, Joseph Jongen’s Sonata Eroïca, op. 94, and the Andante Sostenuto from Widor’s Symphony No. 9 (Symphonie Gothique). The program provided a very fitting close to a great convention.

 

Friday, July 3 

More than half of us were still around to board the buses for the optional extra day of the convention on Friday. We began the day with recitals on two early E. & G.G. Hook organs. The first of these was Opus 93 of 1849 in First Congregational Church, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. The recitalists were David and Permelia Sears, organ, and their daughter, Rebecca Sears, violin. Permelia Sears played a suite by Jacques Boyvin, which came off very well since the surprisingly complete specification of the organ includes a Tierce, Cremona, and other stops suited to eighteenth-century French organ music. Next Permelia and Rebecca Sears played a transcription for organ and violin of Arthur Foote’s Cantilena in G, op. 71. Permelia Sears’s final offering was the Introduction and Passacaglia from Rheinberger’s Eighth Sonata. Then, in honor of it being the day before July 4, David Sears played his own transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, specially written to exploit the G-compass of the Hook organ. The organ was originally built for the much larger First Congregational Church in Springfield, where it may have been used to accompany Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” when she visited the church in 1851. It makes a very grand sound in the rather smaller church in Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

The second early Hook organ we visited was also located in a rather smaller building than the one for which it was originally constructed. This was Hook Opus 48 of 1842 in the First Parish (Unitarian) in Northfield, Massachusetts, originally built for Third (later Unity) Church in Springfield. Lubbert Gnodde gave a short recital of works by Franck, Dupré, and Sweelinck. The instrument, though smaller than the Hinsdale one, again produced a rather grander sound than one might
have expected.

We had lunch on the attractive grounds of the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts, with lovely views of the surrounding hills. After lunch it was only a few yards to the school’s Memorial Chapel, built in 1901. Here we heard Rhonda Sider Edgington give a recital on Andover Organ Company Opus 67 of 1970. The program was made up entirely of works by composers born in the last century—Adolphus Hailstork, James Woodman, Margaret Sandresky, Daniel Pinkham, and Libby Larsen. The organ is a fine instrument in fine acoustics and though now 45 years old has weathered well. There is something to be said for the view that a good organ will never really go out of fashion.

Next we proceeded to the First Church of Deerfield, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here there is a 2003 organ by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 13, which was designed to be similar to the small village church organs in Thuringia that J.S. Bach would have been familiar with, by builders such as Trost and Hildebrand. The builders have done a remarkable job of fitting a II/22 organ into a case in the relatively shallow gallery that is a mere fourteen feet high. Margaret Irwin-Brandon gave a recital of works by J. G. Walther and J. S. Bach that was well suited to the instrument.

The final recital of the post-convention day was given by Daniel Romero on the organ of Our Lady of the Valley in Easthampton. The J. W. Steere & Son organ, Opus 504 of 1902, originally had a Weigle membrane tubular-pneumatic action that was never satisfactory, but this has now been replaced with an electro-pneumatic action by Czelusniak et Dugal, who also made additions, including a mixture, using Steere pipework. The organ has a rich, warm sound, not unlike a Skinner organ. The program unusually included a plainsong Credo sung by the congregation and accompanied on the organ. Also included were Duruflé’s Choral varié sur le thème de ‘Veni Creator,’ Philip G. Kreckel’s Silent Night, Harold Darke’s An Interlude and Charles Tournemire’s Improvisation sur le ‘Te Deum’ as reconstructed by Maurice Duruflé. And so back to the hotel for drinks and a dinner together before parting homewards by our several ways, God willing to meet again at the Philadelphia convention, June 26 to July 1, 2016.

Matthew M. Bellocchio

Matthew M. Bellocchio, a Project Manager and designer at Andover Organ since 2003, is a Fellow and past President of the American Institute of Organbuilders.

Andover Organ Company marks seventy years

by Matthew M. Bellocchio

Anniversaries invite us to reflect upon our past and contemplate how far we have come. As 2018 marks Andover Organ Company’s seventieth anniversary, this article will highlight its long and rich history, from its humble beginnings to its recent achievements.

Andover was founded in 1948 as a result of an Organ Institute organized by Arthur Howes, head of the organ department at the Peabody Conservatory, and held each summer on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Howes had traveled extensively in Europe and observed the developing Organ Reform Movement there. Originating in Germany in the 1930s from Albert Schweitzer’s writings, the movement sparked an interest in early music and performance practices, as well as the building of new organs that could authentically render early music, especially that of Bach. Howes started the Organ Institute to help spread the Organ Reform Movement in America. The faculty included such notable organists as Carl Weinrich (Princeton University), Ernest White (St. Mary the Virgin, New York City), and E. Power Biggs.

Tom Byers, a former Henry Pilcher’s Sons Organ Company employee who lived in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, attended the annual institute with his wife. He was inspired to start an organ company that would follow the institute’s philosophy. He chose the name “Andover” for its prestigious association with the Organ Institute and because of the advantages, in the pre-internet days of telephone directories, of appearing near the top of the alphabetical company listings. 

Byers chose the opening line of Psalm 98, “Cantate Domino Canticum Novum” (Sing to the Lord a New Song), as the company motto, which still appears on Andover’s letterhead. This underscored his philosophy of creating a new style of organ, one that looked and sounded differently from what most American organ companies were producing.

Despite its name, the company has never been located in Andover! It started out in the home of Tom Byers in Lawrence, just north of Andover, and later moved to a two-story wooden building in nearby Methuen. In 1979 the company purchased a three-story brick building in a former mill complex at 560 Broadway in Lawrence, where it has been ever since.

 

Leadership and people

Rather than having a single leader dictate the company’s course, Andover’s many talented employees have each contributed to the company’s development. The company has always been owned and run by its principal employees who, serving as its shareholders and board of directors, make decisions collegially.

Charles Fisk joined the company in 1955 as Tom Byers’s junior partner. Robert J. Reich, a Yale-trained electrical engineer, was hired in 1956, and Leo Constantineau, a woodworking teacher and professional draftsman, in 1957. In 1958, Byers left the company, and Fisk became the owner. Walter Hawkes, who had worked for Holtkamp, was hired as shop foreman. Later that year, Andover signed a new organ contract with Redeemer Lutheran Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The contract did not specify the type of action. But the result, premiered on Palm Sunday 1959, was the first new mechanical-action organ built by an American firm in the postwar era. That instrument, Opus 28, is still in use.

The following year, Opus 35, a 33-stop tracker designed by Leo Constantineau and voiced by Charles Fisk, was built for Mount Calvary Episcopal Church in Baltimore, where Arthur Howes was organist. Fisk left Andover in 1961 to start his own company,
C. B. Fisk, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Andover was reincorporated with Robert J. Reich and Leo Constantineau as the new owners. Reich, who became the Tonal Director, revised Andover’s pipe scales to provide more foundation tone. Constantineau’s case designs gave the company’s new instruments a distinctive visual flair. 

Andover has been blessed with several dedicated individuals who each worked over fifty years at the company. Reich, who joined Andover in 1956, served as President and Tonal Director 1961–1997; he then worked part-time until retiring in 2009. Donald Olson joined the company in 1962 and became Andover’s general manager and visual designer in 1968. His elegant case designs were the hallmark of Andover’s new instruments for nearly four decades. He succeeded Robert Reich as President in 1997, stepped down in 2012 and then worked part-time until fully retiring in 2015. Robert C. Newton, who started at Andover in 1963 and headed the Old Organ Department for many years, retired in 2016.

Andover’s current President, Benjamin Mague, joined Andover in 1975. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Colby College and a Master of Music degree in organ from the University of Wisconsin. He served as Andover’s mechanical designer and later as shop foreman before becoming President in 2012. 

John Morlock, Andover’s Tonal Director since 1999, joined the company in 1976, working principally in the Old Organ Department. Don Glover, Andover’s in-house reed voicer, came to Andover in 2004 from the Reuter Organ Company.

Michael Eaton, Andover’s visual designer, joined the company in 1991. He also heads a maintenance team and serves as Treasurer and Clerk for Andover’s board of directors.

Andover’s present team of dedicated and talented people collectively possess over 350 years of organbuilding experience. Other current employees are Ryan Bartosiewicz, Matthew Bellocchio, Eric Dolch, Anne Doré, Andrew Hagberg, Lisa Lucius, Kevin Mathieu, Fay Morlock, Jonathan Ross, Craig Seaman, and David Zarges. Appropriately, more than half of Andover’s employees are church musicians or organists.

Andover has been the parent for many other New England tracker organ companies, having employed over its seventy years many talented individuals who later founded their own companies. These include Philip Beaudry, Timothy Fink, Charles Fisk, Timothy Hawkes, Richard Hedgebeth, Fritz Noack, Bradley Rule, J. C. Taylor, and David Wallace.  

 

Tonal style

Tonally, the early Andover organs were inspired by the Organ Reform Movement. At the time of Andover’s founding, few American companies were repairing old tracker organs; most just electrified or replaced them. Andover was the first to deliberately retain and renovate nineteenth-century trackers. But, adhering to the Organ Reform philosophy, Byers and his early successors often “improved” those organs tonally. It was not unusual for them to evict the string stops and replace them with mixtures and mutations. Andover’s new instruments came to be characterized by strong Principal choruses with bright mixtures, colorful neo-Baroque style flutes and mutations, and reeds that emphasized chorus over color. 

In the 1980s, as Andover began more frequently to work on significant nineteenth-century American organs, a gradual transition occurred. This was solidified in 1999 when John Morlock, who had started in Andover’s Old Organ Department, succeeded Robert Reich as Tonal Director.

Today, Andover’s tonal style may best be described as “American” and is grounded primarily in the best practices of the nineteenth-century New England builders, in particular the Boston firm of E. & G. G. Hook. Their organs, especially those from the firm’s “golden period” (1850s to 1870s), are admired for their remarkably successful blend of warmth and brilliance. Their pipe scales and voicing techniques worked extremely well in the dry acoustics of many American churches. 

When designing a new organ or reworking an existing instrument, we basically use the same scaling proportions between the various stops of the chorus that the Hooks used. We have found that doing so results in a principal chorus that is nicely balanced between fundamental weight and harmonic development.

Within this framework, adjustments are made to reflect or, in some cases, compensate for the acoustical properties found in each room. Each instrument needs to work and sound well in its “home” and be able to perform its tasks capably and effectively. Andover organs are designed to lead and support congregational hymn singing, as well as interpret a wide range of organ literature.

 

Maintenance

From the very beginning, organ maintenance was an important part of the company’s work. It created name recognition, established relationships with churches and organists, and provided a consistent revenue stream. Today, Andover maintains over 300 organs annually throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast—from northern Maine to South Carolina, from western New York to the islands off eastern Massachusetts. These instruments range in size from small one-manual trackers in country churches to the world-famous Great Organ (IV/116) in the Methuen Memorial Music Hall; and range in age from a few years to a historic 1762 Snetzler organ. 

We service all types of organ mechanisms—from traditional tracker action to modern solid-state relays and combination actions. Each spring and fall, we schedule extended maintenance tours to visit multiple instruments in a geographical area. This enables our customers to share the travel expenses. 

Many customers treat us like old friends. Occasionally, a church secretary or organist will call us and merely say, “This is so-and-so at First Parish Church,” not realizing that we have over three dozen tuning customers with that name!

 

Andover Organ firsts

As the leader in the mid-twentieth century tracker organ revival in America, Andover pioneered many innovations that are now standard in the industry. Opus 25, a two-manual built in 1958 for the Rice Institute (now University) in Houston, was an electro-pneumatic instrument utilizing slider chests with pneumatic pallets, one of the first examples of this pallet type. This was decades before the adoption of the “Blackinton-style” pneumatic pallet.

In 1961, Andover carried out the first historically sympathetic restoration of a nineteenth-century American organ: the 1-manual, 1865 E. & G. G. Hook Opus 358 at the Congregational Church in Orwell, Vermont (Andover Opus R-1.)  

Other significant Andover (AOC) restorations include: 

• First Presbyterian Church, Newburyport, Massachusetts (1866 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1974); 

• First Parish Church, Bridgewater, Massachusetts (1852 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1977); 

• South Parish Congregational Church, Augusta, Maine (1866 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1982); 

• Church on the Hill, Lenox, Massachusetts (1869 William A. Johnson/AOC 2001); 

• Old Whaling Church, Edgartown, Massachusetts (1850 Simmons & Fisher/AOC 2004); 

• Centre Street Methodist Church, Nantucket, Massachusetts (1831 Thomas Appleton/AOC 2008); 

• St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Haverstraw, New York (1898 Geo. Jardine & Son/AOC 2011); 

• St. Anna’s Chapel, Newburyport, Massachusetts (1863 William Stevens/AOC 2013).

Utilizing its expertise gained from restoring old tracker organs and building new ones, in 1963 Andover was the first company in the world to re-trackerize an old tracker organ that had been electrified. The instrument was the 1898 James Treat Opus 3 at St. George’s Primitive Methodist Church (now Bethesda Missionary Church) in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Other notable re-trackerizations: 

• First Presbyterian Church, Waynesboro, Virginia (1893 Woodberry & Harris/AOC 1986); 

• St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, Providence, Rhode Island (1851 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1989); 

• Westminster Preservation Trust, Baltimore, Maryland (1882 Johnson & Son/AOC 1991); 

• Sage Chapel, Northfield, Massachusetts (1898 Hook & Hastings/AOC 1996); 

• Unitarian Society, Peterboro, New Hampshire (1867 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 2003); 

• Christ Episcopal Church, Charlottesville, Virginia (1869 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 2012).  

The slider and pallet windchests used in most nineteenth-century organs were generally trouble free for many years. However, when heating systems were introduced into churches in the early twentieth century, problems developed. The solid wood chest tops (tables), just below the sliders, were made from a thin, wide plank of air-dried lumber. With constant heating the wooden tables dried out and cracked, allowing air to leak from one pipe hole to the next, resulting in “runs.” 

Andover was the first American company to replace a cracked, solid-wood table with a marine-grade plywood one. The routed bleed channels between the table’s wind holes were then carefully replicated and the entire table graphited, like the original. This type of table replacement is now standard in the industry. The first organ to receive this treatment, in 1965, was the 1897 George W. Reed, at the Baptist Church in Winchendon, Massachusetts. Sadly, the organ burned with the building in 1985. 

One of Andover’s most significant recent projects was the 2016 restoration of the wind system and key action in the 1892 Woodberry & Harris Opus 100 at St. Mary–St. Catherine of Sienna Parish in Charlestown, Massachusetts. With three manuals, 36 stops, and 41 ranks, it is the largest and most significant nineteenth-century organ remaining in original unaltered condition in the greater Boston area. 

The instrument’s action is entirely mechanical and incredibly complex. The three-manual, reversed detached console sits in the center of the gallery, while the pipes and windchests are in cases at either side of a large stained-glass window. Four levels of trackers descend from the keys to squares beneath the floor, then under the console towards the rear window, then turn off at right angles towards the sides, then turn off again at right angles towards the rear, then to squares which send them up to the rollerboards below the chests. The organ’s four divisions have a total of 17 sets of wooden trackers, totaling nearly a mile in length! A Barker machine lightens the touch of the Great and the manuals coupled to it.

The two large reservoirs were stripped and releathered in place. All four layers of trackers were disassembled, labeled, and brought to the shop for replication. Because of the organ’s historic significance, all the new trackers were made of the same materials as the originals but using modern machinery. Andover customized a miniature CNC router to notch the cloth-wrapped tracker ends and built a spinning machine to whip the threaded wire ends with red linen thread, just like the originals. The Barker machine was carefully releathered. “Now she runs like a Bentley,” said one of the instrument’s many admirers.

 

Rebuilding for reliability

A conservative restoration is the logical decision for an exemplary work by an important builder or a small organ in a rural church with modest musical requirements. But sometimes it is necessary to strike a balance between preserving the original fabric and updating it to suit modern needs. An organ that has already endured several unsympathetic rebuilds, or an aging instrument with unreliable mechanisms and limited tonal resources, in an active church or institution with an ambitious music program might be better served by a sympathetic rebuilding. This was the case with two of Andover’s most significant rebuilds.

The 1876 E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 828 at St. Joseph Cathedral in Buffalo, New York, was built as a showpiece for the 1876 “Centennial Exposition” in Philadelphia and purchased afterwards by the cathedral. Major changes were made to the organ by Tellers-Kent Organ Company in 1925 and by Schlicker Organ Company in 1976. By 1996, the organ was virtually unplayable during the winter months and a decision of whether to replace it or rebuild it was imminent. In 1998, the cathedral decided that “the organ need not be replaced, but rather completely rehabilitated.” At the same time, the organ’s tonal palette needed expanding to better serve the musical needs of the cathedral and to enable it for use in concerts and recitals.

A team from Andover dismantled the organ in July 1999, loaded it into two moving vans, and transported it back to Lawrence, where eighteen employees labored for more than a year to clean, repair, and expand the instrument. In undertaking this immense job, Andover sought to retain and restore as much of the original as possible. The entire organ was cleaned, and the black walnut case stripped of coats of dark varnish and restored to its original finish. The façade pipes were stripped and repainted in their original designs with colors that harmonized with the cathedral’s interior.

All the original chests and pipework were rebuilt and repaired. The manuals were expanded to 61 notes and the pedals to 32. The two original reservoirs were releathered and two new ones constructed. The Choir is now unenclosed, as it originally was, the Swell box is back to its original size, and the Solo is restored to its original position.

Many of the missing original pipes were replaced with pipes salvaged from the Hook 1877 Cincinnati Music Hall organ, Opus 869. Other compatible Hook organs were visited to develop pipe scales appropriate for the additions to the cathedral organ, which were voiced in the Hook style. The organ is now far closer to its original sound than it has been since the 1923 electrification and rebuilding.

A new floating Celestial Division on a slider windchest was added. This division was based on contemporary E. & G. G. Hook solo divisions, as typified by the organs in the Cincinnati Music Hall and Mechanics Hall, Worcester. There is an 8′ Philomela copied from the 1863 Hook at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, an original Hook 4′ Hohlpfeife, a 2′ Harmonic Piccolo, a Cor Anglais, and a few more modern stops stops such as a French Horn, Dolcan Gamba with Gamba Céleste, Spitzflöte and Spitzflöte Céleste. 

Thomas Murray played the rededicatory recital on June 11, 2001. The St. Joseph Cathedral organ will be featured in a recital by Nathan Laube during the American Guild of Organists Northeast Regional Convention, July 1–4, 2019.

In contrast to the Buffalo cathedral organ, the 1902 Hook & Hastings Opus 1833 at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, was a modest two-manual, 18-rank instrument. After nearly a century of use and constant winter heating, the windchests and actions developed serious problems. The original console was replaced in 1946. When the replacement console failed in 2004, a one-manual tracker was put in its place to serve as a temporary instrument until the chapel organ could be rebuilt. 

Our lengthy experience with Hook & Hastings organs taught us that their early electro-pneumatic actions were cumbersome, slow, and difficult to repair. Therefore, in our 2014–2015 rebuilding of the organ, we reused the pipes, windchests, and most of the original parts as the basis of an expanded instrument with a new electric action.

We built a new, solid white oak console in the style of the Hook & Hastings original, with a lyre music rack and elliptically curved stop terraces. To meet the demands of a twenty-first century music program, this reproduction console has state-of-the-art components, including a record/playback module. The façade pipes were stripped and repainted with a new decorative treatment that harmonizes with the Italian Renaissance-style case and chapel. As a crowning flourish, the cross surmounting the case was painted in faux lapis lazuli.

Most of the organ was crammed within the small case, with Swell above Great and the wooden Pedal 16′ Open Diapason pipes at each side. Behind the Swell, in an unfinished gallery, were the organ’s large reservoir and Pedal 16′ Bourdon. We moved the Pedal Open Diapason pipes to the rear gallery and added a Pedal 32′-16′-8′ Trombone and 8′-4′ Principal there. Judicious additions to the Swell expanded its resources. There was sufficient space inside the case behind the Great chest to add a seven-stop unenclosed Choir division.

The end result of these tonal changes and additions is an instrument of 40 stops, 34 ranks, and 1,994 pipes that is more versatile and appropriate for its expanded role. It still sounds very much like a Hook & Hastings organ, but one from an earlier and better period of the firm’s output.

 

Façade firsts

The company’s work with historic organs gradually led to pipe façade restorations as well. In 1967, Andover was the first American company to make restorative paint repairs to a painted and stenciled pipe façade, at the First Congregational Church in Georgetown, Massachusetts (1874 Joel Butler). Thirteen years later, in 1979, during its rebuilding of the 1884 Geo. S. Hutchings Opus 135 at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vermont, Andover carefully stripped a coating of green paint from all the façade pipes, documented the original designs and colors underneath, and repainted the pipes in their original colors and stenciling—another first.

Andover’s Opus 102 (1992) at Trinity United Church of Christ in York, Pennsylvania, was the first new American organ in the modern era to feature painted façade pipes with nineteenth-century style colored bandings. The upper façade flats of this organ contained another first: “frosted tin” pipes, which feature the natural, unplaned finish of the cast tin sheets. This gives them the light color of tin, but with a dull, non-reflective finish.

In recent years, Andover has worked with historic painted decoration conservator Marylou Davis to create new painted-pipe decorations in historically inspired styles. The most notable example of this collaboration is the 82-rank Andover Opus 114 (2007) at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore. This was the first twenty-first century American organ façade to combine polychromed and monochrome texture-stenciled pipes, frosted tin pipes, and numerous hand-carved pipe shades, grilles, finials, and skirtings in the casework. 

Opus 114 is also Andover’s first dual-action, double organ. The 13-rank, electric-action gallery organ can be played from its own console or from the front organ’s three-manual mechanical-action console. Likewise, the entire front organ can be played from the two-manual gallery console through couplers and general pistons. The organ’s four matching cases (two in chancel, two in gallery) perfectly suit the church’s Gothic architecture and fool many people into thinking that they were reused from a 19th-century organ. 

Andover has never been afraid to fit an organ around a prominent window. This reflects our design philosophy that an organ should look as if it has always been part of its environment. And in most churches, the window was there long before the organ. Fighting the window can sometimes be a losing battle. Opus 115 (2007) at Church of the Nativity in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Opus 118 (2014) at First Parish Church in Wayland, Massachusetts, illustrate Andover’s creative approach in dealing with windows.

In Raleigh, the modern clear glass window was front and center, at the top of the space where the organ would go. We designed the organ case to frame the window’s central orb and cross. The polished tin façade pipes match the brightness from the window. The organ also serves as a reredos for the altar, which stands in front of it. Looking from top to bottom, one sees the window, the organ, and the altar—light, music, action. The church was very pleased with the result, as were we.

In the 1820 Federal Period meetinghouse in Wayland, there was an elegant Palladian window in the center of the back wall of the rear gallery. Because of the semi-elliptical curve of the gallery’s rear wall, the only apparent organ placement with such a floor plan was in the center. Thus, all the previous organs had blocked the window. Andover’s design put the detached console in the center, by the railing, and divided the organ into two cases that frame, rather than cover, the Palladian window. The choir members sit in the space between the console and cases and benefit from the natural backlighting provided by the window. Again, everyone was pleased with the results.

Seventy years after its humble beginnings, Andover has much to celebrate: 118 new organs and 533 rebuilds/restorations. Andover’s wide-ranging work in building, rebuilding, restoring, and maintaining pipe organs is well-recognized, and best summarized by its mission statement: “Preserving the Past; Enhancing the Present; Inspiring the Future.”

www.andoverorgan.com

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

Give it your life

For many people, a job is just a job. I’ve seen film clips of people working in industrial-scale meat packing facilities, flailing away at a relentless marching army of animal carcasses, videos that often accompany news stories about occupational injuries. Near where we live in Maine, there is a long tradition of monotonous food processing in the seafood business. If it was your job to shuck clams in a busy cannery, you were likely to put a knife through your palm at least once in your career.

Forty years ago, I had a landlord in Ohio who worked in the nearby Ford factory. Paul was an ebullient, fun-loving guy whose job was a means to an end. His skilled position came with a high hourly wage that enabled his muscle-car hobby. He played an aggressive game of poker and approached his fun at full throttle. He seemed proud to be the only one in his circle of friends who had flipped a car end-over-end in his driveway. His son had paid a high price for that lifestyle, confined to a wheelchair as the result of a teen-age sledding accident that involved adult beverages used childishly. That Ford factory was not the pride of Paul’s life. He did not consider his work there as his life’s mission. It simply allowed him to support his family and have fun.

My father was an Episcopal priest. Because of his service on Guam in World War II, he was not ordained until he was nearly thirty, but he was a priest every day of his life until his death a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday. That was his calling, and he was faithful to it through his last breath.

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who helps writers prepare their manuscripts and sell them to publishing companies. Her work brings richness to my life as I am exposed to her clients, sharing meals with them, and learning about their passions. A university professor who is passionate about Civil War history is just as devoted to his trade as any musician or instrument builder I have known. He puts down his fork, and with arms waving, describes a slavery document he has discovered, demonstrating its significance to concurrent events. When two or more are gathered, it is comparable to the table full of organbuilders talking earnestly into the night about mixture compositions or the best brass for reed tongues.

Some of the writers I have met are not devoted for life to a particular study but to the art of storytelling, whether fiction or non-fiction. One of Wendy’s clients, environmental journalist Katherine Miles, has written books about an Irish famine ship, celebrated because not a single immigrant died on board in ten years of constant voyages; about Super Storm Sandy and the inadequacies of weather forecasting in the United States; and about earthquakes. Did you know there is a nuclear power plant, built on a geological fault line, twenty-four miles north of Manhattan? What could happen? Google “Explosion at Indian Point Power Plant” and you will find newspaper stories with headlines like, “Explosion closes Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City; no danger of radiation leak.” (New York Post, November 8, 2010). Kate’s next book is in the mill right now. Bet you’re interested to know what it is about.

 

A modern Renaissance

I am thinking today about people who are passionate about their work because two colleagues, seniors in the field of organbuilding, are traveling together in Morocco, posting photos on Facebook as they go. Gene Bedient and John Brombaugh, two berets in a land of fezzes, are seen at an olive market, in the Medinah of Marrakech, at the Grand Mosque in Casablanca, and returning from an evening at Rick’s Café. One photo shows John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back. I commented, “I’ve had jobs like that.”

John apprenticed with Charles Fisk and Fritz Noack and worked as a journeyman for Rudolf von Beckerath. In 1971, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to study historic European organs. He founded his fabled firm, John Brombaugh & Company, in 1968 in Germantown, Ohio. In 1977, the firm was reorganized as John Brombaugh & Associates, Inc., and moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he continued building trend-setting instruments until his retirement in 2005.

Gene Bedient founded the Bedient Organ Company in 1969. When he retired in 2010, it was reorganized as the Bedient Pipe Organ Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, LLC, and continues to produce fine instruments with some of Gene’s former employees at the helm.

The Noack Organ Company, founded in 1960, and C. B. Fisk, Inc., founded in 1961, were among the first of a wave of new firms founded by young men passionate about the pipe organ, especially as it was built in Northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with Brombaugh and Bedient, other firms that followed included Hellmuth Wolff (1968), Karl Wilhelm (1966), and Bozeman-Gibson (1971).

Some of the earliest work on tracker-action organs in the United States was accomplished by the Andover Organ Company, founded in 1948 at the very cusp of “The Movement,” operated and owned for several years by Charles Fisk, and continuing seventy years later as prominent builders and restorers of pipe organs. Fisk founded his eponymous firm in nearby Gloucester, Massachusetts, close to his family’s summer home, and Noack came from Germany to work with Fisk, so the early location of the Andover Organ Company can be traced as a principal reason why so much mid-twentieth-century activity in the pipe organ world was centered in Boston. The proximity of the New England Conservatory of Music added to the excitement with its vibrant community of young organists arriving in town every year.

Here are a few more regional tidbits. E. Power Biggs lived on Highland Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became organist of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Harvard Square in 1932. He was famously fired from that position because the rector felt that his concert career was detracting from his work at the church. On January 2, 1935, Charles Fisk, a boy chorister there at the time, noted in his diary “I went to choir practice, Mr. Bigs [sic] wasn’t there.”¹ As an apprentice with Walter Holtkamp, Fisk worked on the 1956 installation of the organ at St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (my father’s alma mater and the site of my first organ lessons). Melville Smith, the director of the neighboring Longy School of Music and organist for the seminary, was an early proponent of the resurgence of tracker organs.  

There must have been a moment when Smith, Biggs, Holtkamp, and Fisk were together in that cramped loft, discussing one of the first modern Rückpositiv divisions. It would have been around that time when Biggs commissioned the now-revered organ by Flentrop for installation at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall), as the organ was installed in 1957. C. B. Fisk was founded just four years later.

§

If you made a list of every American organbuilding firm founded in the United States between 1960 and 1975, and a list of all the people who worked for them and tried to draw lines to connect all the relationships, it would look like the Etch A Sketch^® you got for Christmas in 1966 after you tried to color in the whole screen. Take it back a step: Charles Fisk apprenticed with Walter Holtkamp in the mid 1950s, John Brombaugh worked with both Noack and Fisk before starting his firm, George Bozeman worked with Otto Hoffman in Texas, then with Noack. Fritz Noack once said he figured that most organ guys in the United States whose first name is John worked for him at one time. That list would include Brombaugh, Boody, Dower, and Farmer (but not me!).

A new wave of firms emerged during the 1970s, including Taylor & Boody (who both worked with Brombaugh) and Richards-Fowkes (who both worked with Brombaugh), you get the picture.

Because of a few posts on Facebook, I am painting a picture of a dramatic movement within the worlds of arts and humanities. While it is hard to pin down exactly who started it, E. Power Biggs is a good guess. Between 1942 and 1958, Biggs hosted a weekly radio program on the CBS Radio Network, using the experimental, trendsetting Aeolian-Skinner organ at Busch Hall, the organ replaced by the new Flentrop in 1958. The radio broadcasts were abruptly cancelled shortly after the installation of the Flentop organ. His revered recording, Bach: Organ Favorites was released in 1961, the same year as the founding of C. B. Fisk.

Unlike the chairperson of the fund-raising dinner whose life is ruined for leaving someone off the list of people to thank, I know very well that I am unable to name everyone who has been important to this movement. But as I look at the photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, I reflect on how that grand generation of inquisitive masters has passed the baton to their successors.

Charles Fisk died of cancer in 1983 at the age of fifty-eight. As someone who is just turning sixty-two, I admire Charlie’s profound contribution to the world of the organ, and the wider world in general. His company’s website (www.cbfisk.com) includes a beautifully written biography of Charlie and of his philosophies. The bottom of that page bears a quote from him: “The organ is a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to seem to be alive.” That philosophy stands as mantra for that generation of organbuilders and all who follow them. One might say, a mantra for a Montre.

John Brombaugh, Karl Wilhelm, Fritz Noack, and George Bozeman are in their eighties. Gene Bedient, John Boody, George Taylor, and Manuel Rosales are in their seventies. Collectively, these masters and their peers are responsible for the creation of hundreds of individual instruments. But there is so much more. Along with luminary performers like Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and John Eliot Gardiner, they changed the world of music. Through their intensive studies of instruments built by earlier masters, they brought a new vitality to our instrument, and inspired generations of musicians to explore the symbiotic relationships between historic repertory, the people who played it, and the instruments they played it on.

I do not intend this to be read as though the classically inspired tracker-action organ is the way, the truth, and the life. I like to think that the “organ wars” of the 1970s and 1980s are over. I am often asked which type of organ I prefer, and I always answer that I prefer good organs. My favorite organ is the best organ I have heard today. An important result of the narrowly named “tracker organ revival” is that the emphasis on excellent craftsmanship inspired new understanding of the work of geniuses like Ernest Skinner, who built organs in a comparatively huge factory with hundreds of workers but maintained a level of quality and history of innovation that allow his century-old organs to sing like Fisk’s ideal as a living organism. It has been nearly forty years since the Organ Clearing House first added a Skinner organ to the list of available instruments, joining the seemingly endless list of organs by Hook & Hastings, Hutchings, and Jardine.

That revived awareness has led to the heritage of firms like Schoenstein, Lively-Fulcher, and Nichols & Simpson who specialize in building high-quality electro-pneumatic organs with deep artistic content. Likewise, we are blessed with a generation of young organists who are comfortable playing on any style of instrument, placing the beauty of the music above bias regarding the medium. If an artist can revel in playing the music of Bach on an organ by Silbermann or Paul Fritts, so can an artist revel in playing her own transcription of a Wagner overture on an organ by Skinner or Schoenstein. The Skinner organ informs the performance of the transcription as fully as the Silbermann informs Bach.

§

There is a historic building in our little village in Maine that has been home to a fine fresh seafood market on the left side of the ground floor. The symmetrical right side housed a leather shop until recently—the two businesses share a set of three central steps up from the sidewalk. A couple years ago, August Avantaggio, a local young man who is the son of the beloved, now deceased area surgeon, fulfilled his lifelong ambition of opening a butcher shop in the space next to the fish market. He was joined right away by two thirty-something guys who are as passionate about their work as any lifelong organbuilder is about our instrument. They source the meat they sell from local organic and free-range farmers, and they cut and package it expertly. I was in the store one afternoon (those who know me can easily guess that I am in there frequently) looking for something good for supper, and spent a few extra minutes watching Ryan take apart a side of beef. I asked him to narrate for me, and when he started with the Latin names of the various muscles, I knew I was talking with someone who cares about his work.

The Riverside Butcher Company is the antithesis of the punishing and cruel industrial meat packers I mentioned at the outset. They offer the finest products using the finest materials, and the apex of craftsmanship. You could almost be describing an organbuilding shop. Of course, things are a little a more expensive there. But one bite of that $7 per pound whole chicken, perfectly roasted, provides a symphony of sensations. It just is that much better. Last fall, Wendy and I hosted a reunion of her father’s extended family. They are all of German heritage and we thought a sausage cookout with a tub of sauerkraut would be a big hit. August pointed me to a website with hundreds of recipes for sausages, and I conferred with Ross to choose just the right ones. What fun it was to pick up fifty pounds of custom-made sausages and run the grill that evening.

There are lots of ways to criticize the impact Facebook has had on our culture, but when I see a photo of John Brombaugh with a monkey on his back, and another of Gene Bedient standing in a picturesque Moroccan square, I felt a fun connection to the band of people who are my colleagues in this unique compelling field. My work with the Organ Clearing House is special to me because it brings me into direct contact with so many of you—you who have elevated the art through life-long dedication.  

Building a single pipe organ is an expression of ambition and joy mixed with moments of confusion, questioning, anxiety, and uncertainty. Building a hundred pipe organs expands all that exponentially. Working together with a band of like-minded people, all working in parallel, produces more than just a lot of organs, more than a trade, more than a movement. It is an expression of the best of the humanities. And it comes at a time in our history when celebrating the best of humanity is heartwarming, reassuring, and necessary.  

Good work, friends. Keep it up, pass it on, and feed the monkey.

Notes

1. Craig Whitney, All the Stops, Public-Affairs, 2003, p. 86.

John Bishop

Trash or treasure?

My great-grandfather Cheney was a silk trader in the first years of the twentieth century. He and his seven brothers built a large and prosperous business with weaving mills and a distribution center in Manchester, Connecticut. Reproductions of several original Cheney Silk advertisements that were published in Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post hang on our walls today. Austin Cheney died decades before I was born, but his wife, my great-grandmother, lived to be 104 years old, and was part of my life until I was in my thirties.

She was born in 1890 (Brahms was 57 years old) and lived long enough that my two sons, her great-great-grandchildren, sang at her funeral. She told stories of traveling to China with her husband for the silk trade, around Cape Horn on the last clipper ships. It was our tradition that my parents would take my three siblings and me to visit her every year on Columbus Day, where we would romp through the enormous house (there was a playroom with a swing on the third floor) and be treated to an elegant lunch at her magnificent dining table. She grew up in Brooklyn Heights, in an age when that was one of the fanciest neighborhoods in New York, and her inbred accent had a hilarious note to our modern ears. Adjusting the lunch menu to suit the pleasure of grade-school children, we were served “Hamboigers,” as though they were being hawked by vendors at Ebbets Field. And lunch was always “Poifectly grand!” After lunch, she would smoke her one daily cigarette. When she reached her 100th birthday, she increased that nasty habit to two each day, and sure enough, she died a few years later.

Her house was enormous, and it was richly decorated with huge dark wood furniture, heavy draperies, and the countless priceless ornaments that would be gathered over a lifetime of trade with China and Southeast Asia—“the Orient,” as she put it. Our Columbus Day lunch was served on porcelain dishes with elaborate patterned edges and gold-leaf trim, and our (powdered!) milk was poured from a cut crystal decanter into matching stemware. The pantry that connected the dining room to the kitchen was stacked with endless varieties of such tableware. I knew much of the same stuff in my grandparents’ house, and inevitably, several sets wound up in my childhood home and later, in my own adult homes.

Keeping in that tradition, in preparation for my first wedding, my fiancée and I chose our own china pattern and received a generous collection of beautiful dishes that we seldom used. Today, Wendy and I favor more contemporary handmade china, and while we still have some of those fancy old sets, we never use them. Furthermore, our children have no interest in them. There are boxes of dishes in our basement, still taped and labeled from when we moved almost twenty years ago. They are white elephants, and I have no idea what we will do with them.

 

Visions of sugarplums

If I have learned nothing else in nearly twenty years working with the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that a vintage pipe organ can be the ultimate white elephant. In today’s money, it costs hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to build a new organ, but older redundant organs are routinely given away, and seldom sell for more than $20,000. I have dashed the hopes of many widows who have approached me, asking for help to sell the organ that their husbands had stored in their garages. I receive a few photos by email, see odds-and-ends of organ pipes, feet sticking up higgledy-piggledy out of cardboard boxes, and reply that I see no resale value. “He told me it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” or, “My car has been sitting outside in the snow for thirty-five years.” I have heard some pretty bitter comments.

I also hear regularly from real estate developers: “We bought a church building and are converting it to condos. . . .”
They have done some research into the value of organs and expect to pay a third of their mortgage when they sell the organ. “Oh, and by the way, we’re starting demolition next week.” That organ is worth exactly nothing, unless Mr. Developer is prepared to pay to have the organ dismantled and stored. A lot of good organs have been destroyed under those circumstances.

Mr. Developer might suggest that he is willing to give it away in return for a suitable tax deduction. Fair enough. But he is likely imagining that an assessment of the organ would show a number approaching the cost of a new organ. The IRS knows that trick. IRS Form 8283 allows a taxpayer to declare the value of a non-cash contribution. That category covers a wide range of gifts from artwork to real estate, and a pipe organ is under that blanket. The form includes a field where an appraiser enters the Fair Market Value (FMV) of the gift and signs his name to it, attaching a description of the credentials that qualify him to appraise a pipe organ. The instructions that accompany Form 8283 defines FMV as “the price a willing, knowledgeable buyer would pay a willing, knowledgeable seller when neither has to buy or sell.” If I was selling an organ to an organbuilder, asking $900,000 because that would be the cost of the same organ new, I would take some abuse and not sell the organ.

If I appraised an organ for a price approaching that of a comparable new organ, it would not take an auditor or tax attorney very long or very much imagination to open the website of the Organ Clearing House and look at the asking prices of a half-dozen available organs. If there are so many organs available for under $20,000, how can this one be worth $750,000? That’s when the sassy or aggressive appraiser is accused of fraud.

 

It would be a shame.

For anyone who loves the organ, it is unimaginable that an instrument might be scrapped, but it happens, and it happens often. The principal reason is simply that there are so many instruments on the market and a growing number of reasons why instruments become redundant. Churches close and merge every day, and active churches eschew traditional artistic values in favor of electronic substitutes for pipe organs or forms of worship leadership that do not involve anything resembling an organ. If we take in four or five times as many new listings as we are able to sell, the backlog grows fast. Naturally, a church or other institution that is searching for a vintage organ will choose a good instrument over a mediocre one, so since we already have dozens of modest and uninspiring organs built by Möller, Wicks, or other comparable builders in the middle of the twentieth century, there is no good reason to support adding more to our list. 

In many cases, time is the greatest enemy of an organ. Anyone who has served a church that has acquired a new organ will know that it takes a long time to conceive and execute a plan. A committee might spend a year or two educating itself, researching builders, and comparing proposals. Raising the necessary funds is a huge undertaking that takes lots of time and effort. It is somehow amusing, while at the same time annoying, that a church that has gone through the lengthy process of ordering a new organ starts thinking of removing the old one at the last minute.

When asked how long it might take to sell an organ, I often respond that in this business, a year is like a lightning bolt. If your church is planning for a new instrument, planning renovation or expansion that will eliminate the existing space for the organ, or moving toward closing altogether, the possibility of a future for the organ depends on how much time is available.

Of course, it is possible to dismantle an instrument and place it in storage. However, it is rare that a church or organbuilder would fund such a plan without having an assured future for the organ. At the Organ Clearing House, we are often offered organs for free, assuming that we would bear the cost of dismantling. But dismantling an organ of average size typically costs $15,000 to $20,000. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to dismantle a large instrument, and storage of any organ represents a hefty monthly cost. And remember, it is much easier to buy or sell an organ when it is assembled and playable.

Occasionally, I receive a call from someone wishing to visit our showroom. That is a nice thought. It would be fun to have twenty or thirty organs set up and playable in a big room, but the economics of such a business plan are untenable. 

 

Maybe it’s not worth it.

There is a finite amount of money spent on organ projects in the United States each year, and it is my point of view that we should do our best to see that it is spent on fine instruments whenever possible. The exception to that rule is the church that owns what might be categorized as an “ordinary organ” that serves well. They should be encouraged to provide for major repairs and timely renovation, taking any opportunity to improve it. Having said that, I have frequently advised churches to scrap a substandard organ in poor condition and start over. As a descendant of a silk-trading family, I know that you cannot make a silk purse out of sow’s ear.

§

I have spent a lot of time in church buildings that have been closed. It is always a sad sight, and sometimes downright eerie. A few years ago, I visited one in metropolitan New Jersey, that busy area just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It was a huge campus, the carcass of what was once a huge and vibrant congregation with a 1,200-seat sanctuary featuring gorgeous woodwork, a graceful surrounding balcony, and a relatively new large pipe organ. There were dozens of offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms, a large gymnasium, chapel, and two elegant function halls, one of which had a stage with real fly space for changeable sets.

Interestingly and perhaps irresponsibly, the leadership of the parish had given the parishioners little warning that the place was in dire straits. The building had been closed about four years earlier, but besides the coating of dust over everything, it was as if they had a last worship service, turned off the lights, and closed the doors. The water glass was on the pulpit, orders of worship stacked at the usher’s station, a few forgotten coats hanging in the narthex, choir folders in a heap on the table, unopened mail in the office, even stuff in the refrigerators, long past the status of science experiments. I imagined that there must have been some mighty unhappy people going home from church that last Sunday at noon.

The other end of that spectrum is the church that faces the music and forms a disbursement committee. Arriving at a church to assess or dismantle an organ, I have seen bands of volunteers moving through a building, collecting all the stuff it takes to run a church, from hymnals to choir robes to pianos. They are pushing wheelbarrows through the hallways loaded with bottles of Elmer’s glue, Christmas pageant costumes, copiers, and enough ancient computer equipment to start a museum. And for crying out loud, it is time we finally got rid of that rummage sale sign that has been behind the organ blower since 1963.

Because of the care they have taken planning the sad job of closing the place, there was time to find a new home for the organ, and I have been able to witness how important the organ was to the parish. They bring me family photos showing baptisms, weddings, and funerals with the organ forming a dignified background to those special family events. It is a bittersweet but rewarding experience when the parishioners of a former church have the opportunity to hear their beloved organ playing in its new home, with wind blowing through the same pipes to lead a new congregation.

 

Tips of the trade

If your church is planning a project that will affect the placement of the organ, put the organ on the top of the list. The leadership might be so excited about the new project that they forget about the organ. First, seek professional advice to assess whether the organ is worthy of reuse. If it is a nondescript modest organ in poor condition, it is a safe bet that it would never be purchased. In that case, it could be offered for parts, or simply discarded. Problem solved.

If the organ has artistic, musical, and historical features that would merit the cost and effort of renovation and relocation, you can increase the possibility that it will be preserved by following a few simple steps. Accomplishing all this ahead of time will help avoid the need to scurry if the schedule gets advanced.

• Make recordings. If an organ must be dismantled before it is sold, good recordings of the instrument can be essential. Record the organ leading hymns in live worship, playing organ literature, and demonstrating various stops. Feature good stops doing what they are intended for­—don’t play three chords on an Oboe or Clarinet, play a lovely melody.

• Gather any files or archives relating to the organ. Many churches keep records of repairs, releathering, tuning, original contracts, etc. These documents can be useful to those who would assess, move, and renovate the organ.

• Measure the organ accurately. If it is situated in a free-standing case, measure height, width, and depth to at least the closest inch, and round up, not down. If it is located in chambers, measure the chambers, windchests, and other large components, and measure the heights of the largest pipes. You can also draw a schematic of the internal layout of the instrument. This is best accomplished by your organ technician, who would understand which measurements are the most important.

• Photograph the organ, inside and out. Include detailed close-up photos of the keyboards and stop controls, pipes on windchests (especially treble pipes, so their condition can be easily seen), mechanical components under windchests, etc.

Put the organ on the market as early as possible. There is no need to wait until you are finished using it. It is common to offer an instrument for sale, stipulating that it will be available “after Easter of 2020.” That would allow time for interested parties to visit and audition the organ. Also, if prospective buyers know that you are running out of time, they’ll be inclined to offer less and less for the organ. If people are auditioning the organ a year before it must be removed, and are leaning toward buying it, they will be motivated by the possibility that another party could come in and outbid them.

In this business, facing the music can mean saving the music. Over the years, I have learned through bitter experience that we cannot save all of them. Not even close. But if we are smart, and if we plan ahead, we have a better chance of saving the good ones.