In the Wind. . .

Everything’s under control.

It is early March, and there is two feet of snow on the ground in mid-coast Maine. Each foot came from a different storm. The bottom foot has a frozen crust making an awkward crunch halfway through. Farley the Goldendoodle’s legs are about twenty inches long, and he is just heavy enough to crunch the buried crust, so it is hard for him to do the things that dogs like (and need) to do outdoors.

It is overcast and snowing lightly now, and the wind is blowing frantic patterns in the water. We will be setting the clocks ahead this weekend, so it is about time to start thinking about the upcoming sailing season. On a sailboat, the sails are controlled by lines (they are never called ropes). Halyards raise and lower the sails, and sheets trim the sails in and out, adjusting their position relative to the wind. You might think that “sheet” refers to the sail, but you would be wrong.

Our sheet was new when the boat was built in 1999, and this was the winter to replace it. It is over a hundred feet long as it passes through a five-to-one ratio of blocks (pulleys) to provide the leverage needed to manage the large sail. I bought a beautiful piece of line, supple enough to manage all those turns without too much friction, and threaded it through the rig, ready for the first sail of the spring.

Besides halyards and sheets, all we need to control the boat (not counting the engine) is the steering gear that has a wheel, a rack-and-pinion gear system, and a rudder. That is called the helm, as in “Grandpa’s at the helm.” The more sails you have, the more lines and the more complex things seem. A large, square-rigged ship might have thirty or more sails, each with two sheets and two halyards, all running through countless blocks. It seems bewildering, but it is not nearly as many moving parts as a two-manual pipe organ with tracker action.

New-fangled

The introduction of electric actions in pipe organs around the turn of the twentieth century concerned organists who felt that electric actions would be slow and not as sensitive to the whims of the musician as the mechanical action that was in every organ until about 1890. I can make an argument for not being as sensitive—a well-built and carefully adjusted tracker action allows a special level of control that surpasses the on-off functions of electric contacts, but even the most intimate and sensitive of tracker actions commits the musician to playing a musical instrument by remote control.

A violinist cradles her instrument under her chin and generates tone with her touch of the bow against the strings. A clarinetist puts the instrument into his mouth and generates tone with the muscles inside his mouth coupled with air pressure from his lungs. It does not get any more intimate than that. The organist is either pulling on levers or flipping switches to control tone that is generated by a remote wind supply blowing through hundreds of static instruments, each of which can only play one note at one volume level. While a flutist can shape a phrase with intimate and intuitive breath control, for the organist any artistic nuance is achieved by purposefully operating a device—pulling on a stop, moving an expression pedal, changing keyboards. Altering the spacing and timing of notes and chords is about the only intuitive tool available. 

With the development of electric actions, organ builders introduced innovations to give the organist more control over the instrument. I marvel especially at the first combination actions. Some were contained inside the organ console, such as those built by Casavant or Ernest Skinner’s stupendous vertical selectors, and others were remote, stacks of machines placed in adjacent rooms or basements, connected to the console by cables containing hundreds of conductors. 

Think about a three-manual console with a hundred or more stop controls and a remote combination action. There are three sets of sixty-one wires and one of thirty-two for the keys and pedals. That is 215 wires leaving the console. Add forty pistons, and that is 255 wires. Add stop actions and on-off wires so pistons can operate the console’s many stop knobs, that is 555 wires. Add forty-eight for three sixteen-stage expression motors, add two for “bride signals.” You get the picture.

Think of all that multiplicity in the light of the four-manual, seventy-six-stop organ Mr. Skinner placed in Saint Thomas Church in New York City in 1913. It had seven pistons for each of five divisions (no generals), and a set button. That console and its related equipment was a commercially available, user-programmable binary computer built of wood, leather, and bits of metal built in Boston in 1913. I wonder if anyone still arrived at church on Sunday in a horse-drawn carriage in 1913? 

Artifacts

I have a collection of trinkets that reminds me of past episodes that I have kept for decades in all the places we have lived. In a top bureau drawer in a little monogrammed leather box given to me by my godmother when I graduated from high school, I keep my draft card from 1974. (The draft call ended in December 1972, but eighteen-year-old men had to register until April 1, 1975.) On top of that bureau, I keep a mug with the logo of Bohemian Trucking in Las Vegas, filled with pens and pencils. Bohemian Trucking bailed the Organ Clearing House out of disaster at the last moment when a moving company abruptly canceled the five semi-trailers we had arranged to move the Möller organ, Opus 5819, from Philadelphia to the University of Oklahoma for the American Organ Institute. Bohemian stepped in on a day’s notice with those five trucks. They are out of business now, but the mug is a fun reminder of a very dynamic couple of days. I remember vividly the phone call from the moving company that stiffed us. I was waiting at a baggage carousel at the airport in Philadelphia, getting ready to load the organ the next day.

I am not proud remembering my very public, very angry reaction. I am sure I frightened some people.

One trinket that stands out usually lives on top of a bookcase in my office. It is an eighteen-inch chunk of the console cable from Trinity Church in Boston’s Copley Square. It includes cables from three generations of that organ all bundled into one: the original 1926 four-manual, sixty-one-rank Skinner Organ Company Opus 573 located in the rear gallery; Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573A, which was a new three-manual, fifty-rank organ installed in the chancel in 1956; and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-ABC, which was the 114-rank combination of both chancel and gallery organs finished in 1961. There were electro-pneumatic coupler actions in the console cabinet, but all the switching and relays that controlled pitman and unit windchests of the nine divisions, the combination action, and controls for accessories like tremolos and expression were in a basement room directly below the console. Eighteen inches of that cable weighs almost eight pounds. I do not remember all the details, but doing math as I did earlier for a mythical one-hundred-stop organ, this cable has somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 conductors. It looks like more.

The 1926 cable was made by Skinner using white cotton-covered wire, wrapped in friction tape. (I like to call it hockey tape.) The second cable is again all white conductors, but it was commercially made as a cable with a woven cloth sheath. The newest one is something like what we use now, vinyl-clad cable with conductors insulated with color-coded PVC. Jason McKown, the old “Skinner Man” who maintained the Trinity organ for fifty years before me, told me that this was one of the first organs Aeolian-Skinner wired with color-coded cables, and the guy who did most of the wiring was colorblind so even with the color code, he did the wiring the old-fashioned way, ringing out each conductor separately. This artifact is my reminder of one of the more dramatic days in my career.

It was a hacksaw.

The double organ at Trinity Church has always been heavily used by brilliant organists who know how to give it a workout, and by around 1990 all the electro-pneumatic switching and combination actions in that basement room were wearing out. Phosphorous bronze contacts were breaking regularly, causing dead notes and cross ciphers as broken contacts fell inside the vertical switches causing clusters of notes to play simultaneously, a great way to annoy organists. There were also hundreds of switches in the chancel and gallery organ chambers in similar condition.

As I was curator of the organs, my Bishop Organ Company was engaged to install a solid-state control system. The whole process would be accomplished without the organ missing a Sunday or Friday noon recital. As I look back, I must have been nuts to agree to that, but I sure remember that the rector was not giving any ground. He was good at not giving ground. I worked with Brian Jones, the organist and director of music, to develop a scheme that involved buying a console for temporary use while the original console went to the workshop for renovation.

We built new stopjambs for the temporary console with layout identical to the originals, and wired all the keyboard, stop, piston, and expression outputs with new cables fitted with connectors. We pre-wired the hundreds of rows of switches in the remote room and chambers with new color-coded cables fitted with connectors, we hung the SSL control boards in all locations, and pre-wired all the inputs and outputs to and from those boards. With dozens of pitman and unit windchests, there were thousands of connections in the organ. There were more than 250 cables, each with a hundred conductors. Most of the rows were either sixty-one or seventy-three notes, so a lot of conductors were left over as spares, but you get the idea.

When every new connection had been made, all the connectors organized, and the organ was still playing on its original wiring, we brought the temporary console to the church. All six of us were ready when the 6:00 p.m. service ended that Sunday night. As the congregation was leaving, we fanned out across the building with our assignments. I gave myself the task (privilege?) of cutting that console cable. I used a hacksaw. It was breathtaking. I think it was the most thrilling and dreadful moment of my career. Two swipes of that saw blade and the organ was unplayable.

We dragged over forty feet of the old cable out of the conduit, more than a hundred pounds of copper wire, put the temporary console in place, ran the new cables through the conduit, and set about plugging in all those cable connectors. As each seventy-three-note switch was plugged in, the original organ wiring had to be cut away, and old and new wires had to be wrapped and dressed to keep the job neat. Working against the deadline of the Friday recital (would the organist have any time to practice?), we were ready to turn the organ on by Wednesday morning and play it from the new console. Every organ builder knows the rush of feelings when you turn that switch for the first time.

It played.

It was not perfect, but it played. SSL systems had an odd configuration with stop action and key action on opposite polarities of the organ’s direct current. In the original Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner wiring, all functions of the organ operated with positive “on” impulses and negative commons. SSL had the stop actions with negative “on” and positive grounds, so our preparation had to include running positive commons to all the stop actions, and during the switchover week we had to separate the stop action commons from those on key actions. We had the polarities of the stages of expression motors wrong. The first time we tried to operate an expression pedal, we blew a row of transistors. It was lucky that in those days we still had neighborhood Radio Shack stores and could quickly buy new transistors and solder them to the SSL boards. It cost just a few dollars, a few hours, and a big helping of anguish.

The conductors inside all those cables are arranged in groups of ten, each with a solid color and a “stripey” color—white with blue stripe, blue with white stripe, white with orange, orange with white, white with green, etc. Blue, orange, green, brown, slate repeats with group colors. When you finish those five pairs with white, you move to red with blue, etc., then black with blue, etc., then yellow with blue, etc., then violet with blue, blue with violet—groups of ten with white, red, black, yellow, violet. The first fifty wires are wrapped with blue, then you start over with white with blue. The pattern can be infinite. The point is that you can wire each end of the cable by yourself according to the code, rather than the old way requiring two people using a buzzer or a light to find the opposite ends of each wire.

All the pre-wiring on the temporary console, the remote room, inputs for each keyboard and stop to the SSL boards, and outputs from the boards to each of the hundreds of switches to the windchests was done by two of my employees. We generally used 32-pair cables that are specially made for pipe organs as they have enough conductors for sixty-one notes plus three spares, but since many (most?) of the windchests and ranks in the Trinity organ have seventy-three (super-coupler extensions) or more notes, we used 50-pair cable throughout the instrument. In 32-pair cable, the code goes only as far as yellow with blue, blue with yellow, the thirty-first and thirty-second conductors, then starts over with white with blue. The 50-pair cable goes through all fifty color combinations before starting over. I bother to explain that because those two people who were my wiring wizards were less used to 50-pair cables, and it turned out that one of them could not tell between the violet/blue–blue/violet pair, notes 41 and 42, the “E” and “F” above “soprano C.”

I sent the team across the organ double-checking and correcting those two conductors wherever they were reversed. We spent Wednesday and Thursday correcting the glitches. The recitalist practiced on Thursday night, and like every Friday morning during my tenure there, I tuned reeds until 10:00, the recitalist warmed up, and the audience arrived.

The rest was simple. We renovated the original console with electric drawknob motors, pre-wired it now that we were so good at it, brought it back to the church, and plugged it in. Plug-and-play for an organ with nine divisions. It took less than a day including the round-trip drive from the workshop twenty-five miles away.

I do not have an accurate count of how many conductors there are in that organ, how many violet/blue pairs were reversed, or how many transistors burned. I do not remember how late we worked into each evening. I sure do remember kneeling behind that console at 7:30 on a Sunday evening with a hacksaw in my hand, drawing breath, and hacking away. I was in my mid-thirties. I guess I thought I knew a lot. I had a few moments that week when I smelled smoke. I am sure I had moments that week when I smelled disaster. I know how pleased we all were when the organ played from the first moment the blower was on. Brian was congratulatory, and I never heard a word from the rector. 

Didn’t miss a Sunday.

Control freaks

A little over a year ago, I bought a slightly used 2017 Chevrolet Suburban. It replaced a 2008 Suburban that I drove 250,000 miles. I prefer buying cars that have 10,000 or 15,000 miles on them because I think the first owner absorbs the loss of the “new car value,” and I get to buy a fancier car for less money. The first Suburban was black. Wendy thought Tony Soprano while I thought Barack Obama. My colleague Amory said “Special Agent Bishop” when I arrived at his house to pick him up. But the funnier thing was that while sitting in an on-street parking spot in New York City in the big black car, people would open the back door and get in, thinking I was the limo they had ordered. That happened several times, and each time brought a good shared laugh.

I like to have big, comfortable cars because I drive a lot (between 1985 and 2018, I drove six cars a total of nearly 1,250,000 miles, which is an average of about 38,000 miles a year), and because I carry big loads of tools, organ components, and, um, boat stuff. I can put an eight-foot rowing dinghy in the back of the Suburban and close the door. The new Suburban gets about forty percent more miles to the gallon. But the biggest difference is the electronics.

Sitting at a stoplight facing uphill, I move my foot from the brake to the accelerator to start moving, and a sign on the dashboard lights up, “Hillside brake assist active.” I am told that I am Driver #1 for the auto-set feature for seats and mirrors (and steering wheel and pedals). I am told when my phone connects to Bluetooth or when Wendy’s phone is not present in the car. I am told when the rain sensor is operating the wipers. I am told when my tire pressure is low. I am told when I am following a car too closely. And to the amusement of friends and family, and a little excitement for me, the driver’s seat buzzes when I get close to things like Jersey Barriers, trees, or other cars. It sounds like the gabbling of eider ducks when they are rafting together in big groups at sea.

The feature I like best is Apple CarPlay. When my phone is plugged into the charger, my Apple icons show up on the dashboard touchscreen giving me easy and safe access to Apple Maps, Google Maps, hands-free messaging, and phoning. I can activate Siri with a button on the steering wheel and place a call or record a reminder, so I have no excuse for forgetting things. One of the icons is my Audible account so I can listen to my library of ebooks as I drive.

I expect there is a downside to all these gadgets. Any organbuilder knows that there is a whopper of a wiring harness snaking through the car and a CPU somewhere deep in the bowels of the vehicle, and I imagine that the most expensive repairs I will face down the road will be correcting cranky electronics.

One thing leads to another.

I am thinking about electronic controls because I was amused recently by a post on Facebook by Damin Spritzer¹ who wrote, “Does anyone else have anxiety dreams about Sequencers? *Laughs weakly and makes more coffee.*” There ensued a flurry of responses, some thoughtful and provocative, some ridiculous, and some downright stupid. This conversation brought to my mind several themes I have developed over the years about the advances of pipe organ control systems and various colleagues’ reactions to the relevance, convenience, and pitfalls of new generations of this equipment.

In the late 1980s, I took over the care of the heroic Aeolian-Skinner organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston, Massachusetts. With 237 ranks and well over 13,000 pipes, this was quite a responsibility. Jason McKown, then in his eighties, who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner in the 1920s, was retiring after decades of service, and before I arrived, the church had contracted with another organ company to install a solid-state switching and combination system. Jason’s comment was simple, “This is for you young guys.” I was present to help with that installation, and, of course, was responsible for maintaining it. That was before the days of effective lightning protection, and whenever there was a thunderstorm, we had to reprogram the Crescendo memory. I had a helper who memorized that huge list of stops, and I could trust her to drop by and punch it in.

Marie-Madeleine Duruflé played a recital at Boston’s Trinity Church for the 1990 convention of the American Guild of Organists. A few days before she was to arrive to prepare for her performance, the solid-state combination system in the organ stopped working and the organ went dead. The company that built the system sent a technician with a bale of spare cards, and we worked through two nights to get the organ running again, just in time for Madame Duruflé to work her magic.

The Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University is one of the great monuments of twentieth-century organbuilding. With more than a 165 voices and over 12,500 pipes, it is high on the magic list of the largest Skinner organs, and Nick Thompson-Allen and Joe Dzeda have been its curators for over fifty years. Nick’s father, Aubrey Thompson-Allen, started caring for the organ in 1952. That huge organ is played regularly by dozens of different people, and one might expect that a combination system with multiple levels would have been installed promptly there. But at first, Joe and Nick resisted that change, correctly insisting that the original equipment built by Ernest Skinner’s people must be preserved as a pristine example of that historic art and technology.

However, along with Yale’s teachers, they understood that the change would be a big advantage for all involved, including the durability of the organ itself. Knowing that the cotton-covered wire used in Skinner organs would soon be no longer available, they proactively purchased a big supply. At their request, Richard Houghton devised a plan that added 256 levels of solid-state memory while retaining the original combination action and retaining the original electro-pneumatic actions to operate the drawknobs and tilting tablets as pistons were pushed and settings engaged. Houghton was sensitive to all aspects of the situation, and the 1928 console still functions as it did ninety-one years ago, while serving the procession of brilliant students and performers who use that organ for lessons, practice, and performance. The addition of the new equipment was accomplished with great skill in the spirit of Mr. Skinner under Joe and Nick’s supervision. Neat bundles of green and red cotton-covered wire wrapped in friction tape connect the hundreds of circuits of the console to the new unit, just as if it had been installed by Mr. Skinner’s workers in 1928. A side benefit was the elimination of countless hours spent resetting pistons as each organist took to the bench, hours lost for valuable practice, hours when the huge blower was running to support that mundane task.

Next

The sequencers to which Dr. Spritzer was referring are accessory functions of the more advanced solid-state combination systems that allow an organist to set sequences of pistons whose individual settings are advanced during performance by repeatedly pressing a piston or toe stud labeled “Next.” In addition, some systems allow the organist to program which pistons would be “Next,” so some make all the buttons have that function, while others choose buttons that are easy to reach and difficult to miss.

There is a steep learning curve in gaining proficiency with sequencers. It is easy enough to punch a wrong button or to fail to insert an intended step, so double-checking before performing is advised. And malfunctions happen, leaving a performer stranded with an unintended registration in the heat of battle. In thirty-six hours, Dr. Spritzer’s post attracted 135 “Likes” and 185 responses from organists who have had those magic moments. The brilliant performer Katelyn Emerson chimed in, “When the sequencer jumped no fewer than 16 generals on the third to last page of Liszt’s Ad nos, and I landed on nothing more than an 8′ Gamba, I had nightmares for weeks.” Reading that, I thought, “If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.”

Here are a few other replies to Dr. Spritzer’s post:

“No music was written for sequencers, so I don’t use them.”

“Didn’t have to dream it. I lived it.”

“When forward and back are unlabeled brass pedals one inch apart, only mayhem will ensue.”

“I just stick to mechanical action.”

“You know, I’m a sequencer phobic. I’ve had situations where I hit it and it zipped up five pistons.”

“Petrified of the things . . . . Yes, that’s why I never use them.”

Any colleague organbuilder who has or might consider installing a sequencer in an organ console should jump on Facebook (or get a friend to help you), find Dr. Spritzer’s post, and read this string of responses.

There are two basic ways that piston sequencers work. One is that you set all the pistons you need, and then set them in a chosen sequence. You can reuse individual settings as often as you would like, and there is no meaningful limit to the number of steps in a saved sequence. You can go back and edit your sequence, adding or deleting settings mid-way through. This is sometimes referred to as the “American” system.

The “European” system is a little different. It runs through General pistons in order, then scrolls up to the next level of memory and runs through them again. The scrolling continues through all the levels. This seems limiting, because it specifies exactly the order in which you must set pistons, and if you want to return to a setting, you have to program another piston the same way. In both styles, there is typically an LED readout on the console showing the current step in the sequence, and which piston it is, and if there isn’t, there should be.

If there are so many pitfalls, why bother? One of the great things about the state of the pipe organ today is that there are so many brilliant players who concertize around the world. If you perform on twenty or thirty different organs each year, especially those with big complicated consoles, you might take comfort in finding handy gadgets that are common to many of them. If you are adept and comfortable using sequencers, you do not have to go fishing around a big complex console looking for Swell 1, Great to Pedal, General 22, Positiv to Great 51⁄3′, Great 6, All 32′ Stops Off. You just keep hitting “Next.” Some consoles are equipped with “Next” buttons up high, so your page-turner can press it. (If you need that kind of help, maybe you should try the autoharp.)

Some teachers discourage the use of sequencers. Stephen Schnurr, editorial director and publisher of The Diapason, wrote that he “forbids” his students to use them in public performances at Valparaiso University where he teaches. He confirmed my guess, that he is encouraging them to “stand on their own two feet” and learn to play the organ seriously “the old-fashioned way.” That reminds me of my apprenticeship in Jan Leek’s workshop in Oberlin, Ohio, where he made sure I could cut a piece of wood straight and square by hand before teaching me the use of the super-accurate stationary machines. Further, Schnurr believes it is important that students do not rely on sequencers so heavily that they are bamboozled when faced with a console that does not have one. After all, I would guess that well over half of all organs do not have piston sequencers.

Looking at the other side of the issue, a few months ago, the Organ Clearing House installed a practice organ at the University of Washington, specially intended to expose students to the latest gadgets. We expanded a Möller Double Artiste to include a third independent unified division and provided a three-manual drawknob console with a comprehensive solid-state combination action that includes a sequencer. The organ allows students to develop proficiency using a sequencer in the safety of a practice room. It also features two independent expression boxes.

The old-fashioned way

The Illinois organbuilder John-Paul Buzard drives “Bunnie,” his Model A Ford, across the picturesque countryside, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of fellow members of a club of Model A owners. It looks like a ton of fun and great camaraderie, especially as club members help each other through repairs. Nevertheless, I will bet he uses a vehicle that is more up to date in the context of daily life. I am not an expert, but I am guessing that the Model A would be taxed if pressed into the mileage-hungry travel routines of an active organ guy. The Michelin radial tires on my whiz-bang Suburban are much better suited for endless hours at, um, eighty miles-per-hour than the 4.75 x 19 tires on the Model A.

In 1875, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings built a spectacular organ with seventy stops and 101 ranks (Opus 801) for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. The company’s workshop was within walking distance, and Frank Hastings reveled in taking potential clients to see it. It was equipped with a pneumatic Barker lever to assist the extensive mechanical keyboard and coupler actions, ten registering composition pedals, and a fourteen-stop Pedal division, complete with four 16′ flues, a 12′ Quint, and a 32′ Contra Bourdon. Anyone familiar with the construction of such organs knows that represents about an acre of windchest tables.

Thirty-one years later, in 1906, the Ernest M. Skinner Company built a four-manual, eighty-four-rank organ (Opus 150) for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, New York. That organ had electro-pneumatic action throughout, pitman windchests, and an electro-pneumatic combination action with pistons and a crescendo pedal. That is a quantum leap in pipe organ technology in thirty-one years.

Look back to the iconic Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, France, built in 1860. This was likely the most advanced instrument of its time, and the myriad original mechanical and pneumatic registration machines are still in use. We can reproduce how Widor, Dupré, and countless other genius players managed that massive instrument (although the presence of an electric blower takes away some of the original charm—it must have been quite a chore to maintain a brigade of organ pumpers to get through performances of Widor’s organ symphonies). Louis-James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was the organist there when the instrument was new, but Cavaillé-Coll realized that he was not the equal of the instrument and championed Widor as the next titulaire. Widor exploited the vast tonal resources of that great organ transforming the art of organ playing, inspired and enabled by Cavaillé-Coll’s technological innovations.

Ernest Skinner, with his comprehensive combination-actions, helped enable innovative artists like Lynwood Farnam develop new styles of playing. Widor and Farnam were apparently not above using complex and newly developed controls to enhance their command of their instruments. Their organbuilders demanded it of them.

I first worked with solid-state combinations in the late 1970s. Those systems were primitive, and excepting the revolutionary availability of two levels of memory, they had pretty much the same capabilities as traditional electric and electro-pneumatic systems. As the systems got more complex, they were sensitive to flukes like lightning strikes, and their developers worked hard to improve them. Recently I commented to a colleague that we all know that Mr. Skinner’s systems could fail. A hole in a piece of leather could mean that the Harmonic Flute would not set on divisional pistons. He agreed but replied that a good organ technician with a properly stocked tool kit could open up the machine and fix the problem in an hour or so. Some organbuilders are now proficient with electronic repairs, while others of us rely on phone support from the factory and next-day shipment of replacement parts to correct problems.

§

I could repair almost anything in my first car. There were two carburetors, a mechanical throttle, a manual choke, and an ignition rotor. When you open the hood of my Suburban, you see some plastic cowls and some wires and assume there is a cast engine block down in there. To start the car, I step on the brake and push a button. The key must be present, but it stays in my pocket. If I leave the key in the car and shut the doors, the horn gives three quick toots, telling me that the car knows better than to lock the doors. But I suppose someday it will smirk, toot twice, and lock me out.

Next.

Notes

1. Dr. Damin Spritzer is assistant professor of organ at the American Organ Institute of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, artist in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. Matthew in Dallas, Texas, and an active international recitalist. You can read more about her at http://www.ou.edu/aoi/about/directory/spritzer-bio.

Passing eras

My mother’s grandmother died in Boston in 1959 when I was three years old. I have a dim memory of her and of sitting in the kitchen of her apartment in Boston’s Back Bay at the time of her death, where I was served Cheerios with blue milk, food coloring added by her maid. Granny Reynolds was born in 1867 and remembered her grandmother who was born in 1779. As I grew up, my grandfather made a point of reminding my parents and me of that to keep the milky memory alive. Now, in my early sixties in 2020, I can claim to remember a family member who remembers a family member born during the Revolutionary War. Mozart was twenty-three years old.

Jason McKown (1906–1989) was an old Skinner man. I met him in 1987 when I was engaged to care for the Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston (a few blocks from Granny Reynolds’s apartment), where Jason had been organ curator for fifty years. He was eighty-one years old and spry as a cat, easily negotiating the tall ladders and narrow walkboards, but he was eager to retire so he introduced me to another of his clients, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, home to the monumental Aeolian-Skinner organ with over two-hundred-forty ranks.

Jason had been caring for that organ since it was installed in 1952, and in order to ensure a smooth transition after I was appointed, the church retained Jason for six months to help me learn the ropes. And some ropes they were. Forty-one ranks of reeds (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 51⁄3′ Quinte Trompette in the Swell), over a hundred ranks of mixtures (including some harmonic doozies with 7ths and 9ths), and nearly fifty independent ranks in the Pedal. It is a model of engineering, three stories tall and three chambers wide behind an acre of gold-leafed façade pipes. Jason patiently shared his approach to the instrument, its strengths and weaknesses, and the history of repairs and adjustments. We were together at the organ all day every Wednesday for those six months, with Jason leading me around as he offered his hints and insights. After more than sixty years as a tuner, he was an accomplished keyholder.

Shortly before I started at The Mother Church, Ronald Poll of Salt Lake City had been contracted to install a solid-state switching and combination action supplied by Solid State Logic. Ron was the brother of Robert Poll, curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Mormon Tabernacle, and had just completed a similar project there. As Ron started installing the hardware at the various switching stations throughout the organ, I was still maintaining the extensive electro-pneumatic electrical system for its last few months of operation, and I quickly became familiar with one of the weaknesses Jason had mentioned. The machine-formed silver contacts in the vertical gang switches were breaking and falling like pine needles in the forest. There were scores of those switches operating windchest cutouts, single ranks with independent actions, couplers, offset bass chests, and the scores of magical effects found in a huge organ.

When the contacts were manufactured, the bends were formed too crisply, and the wires broke at the bends, with new failures appearing every week. What happened when they fell? They got tangled in the contacts below them and caused cluster-ciphers of five or six notes, terrible interruptions to the marvelous playing of Dr. Thomas Richner, organist of the church, known to generations of students and admirers as Uncle T. “Peepee” (he called everyone Peepee), he’d say, “there’s a little problem in the Pedal Ophicleide.” Some little problem, when a half-dozen notes sounded as one in a stop like that! One afternoon, I was pointing out to Jason how the rows of transistors on the big switching panels compared to the rows of contacts I was so busy repairing. He shook his head and said quietly, “this is for you young guys.”

During those months, as Jason and I shared lunches and coffee breaks, he told stories from his past. He remembered seeing the 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason from the Hutchings organ in Boston’s Symphony Hall, across Massachusetts Avenue from The Mother Church, chain-sawed into pieces and stacked on the sidewalk to make way for the new Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1134, 1947). He remembered talking with Marcel Dupré as the great French organist prepared a recital at King’s Chapel in Boston (Aeolian-Skinner Opus 170-A, 1946), asking how often the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice was tuned. “Not until the next cleaning.” Jason was a direct connection between Marcel Dupré and me.

Jason recommended me to a dozen or so other churches, one of which was especially meaningful. The Congregational Church of West Medford, Massachusetts, was home to Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 692 (1928), a lovely instrument with fourteen ranks. Jason was twenty-two years old when he worked on that installation, under the personal supervision of his employer, Ernest Skinner. The organ was fifty-nine years old when I became the second technician to care for it. Jason was a direct connection between Mr. Skinner and me.

Jason McKown and his wife Ruth were devoted members of Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, where the Bauhaus sanctuary housed a 1973 three-manual Casavant with a harsh angular case design. Jason did not much like that organ, but he maintained it until the end of his life with all the care and skill he gave to his favorite Skinner organs. In those days I drove an eight-passenger van; I ferried a carload of people from The Mother Church to attend his funeral in 1989.

Centre Methodist Church closed in 2007. The Organ Clearing House sold and moved the Casavant organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia. A new case was designed and built by QLF Organ Components, a subsidiary of Lively-Fulcher Organbuilders. Jason was not generous with his comments about the original Casavant case design. I think he would have liked the new one.

Chapters

My friendship with Jason spans eras. I was in my early thirties when I knew him, and over thirty years after his death, I value that he was my personal connection to Ernest Skinner. I admire his longevity, diligence, and devotion to the organs in his care, and I was influenced by his respect especially for Mr. Skinner’s genius. Though he knew it was too late for him to learn about solid-state organ controls, he was open to the new technology being installed in The Mother Church organ. Stories like the destruction of the old Symphony Hall organ told of how he had witnessed deep change in the name of progress.

When Jason first worked at The Mother Church, the fifteen-acre site included the Original Edifice (1894), the first church building built by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; “The Extension,” the marvelous domed wedding cake of a building (1906) that seats 3,000; and the Publishing Society, home of the renowned international newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. The site was transformed in 1971 with the construction of the new Christian Science Plaza with three new significant buildings, including a twenty-six-story administration building and a seven-hundred-foot reflecting pool, and the entire plaza was paved with bricks. Jason had been friends with the man whose life work was the creation and care of an extensive rose garden next to the church along Huntington Avenue. When the plaza was built, the rose garden was destroyed. Jason told sweetly of the heartbreak of his friend seeing his life’s work disappear.

Progress

I am a loyal fan of Patrick O’Brian’s marvelous series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I have audio recordings of all twenty-one books and often listen to passages in my workshop or as I drive. Captain Jack Aubrey, one of the central characters, is a skillful and courageous frigate captain, and his friend Stephen Maturin is a physician who travels on Jack’s ships as surgeon, which serves as cover for his central activity as a member of Naval Intelligence. Jack plays the violin, well enough to tackle the Bach Chaconne in D Minor, and Stephen plays the cello. As they sail around the world, they play the classics together deep into the night. Jack distinguished between his sea-going fiddle and the precious Amati that he kept at home. One night as they were tuning their strings, Jack’s steward Killick griped to the steward’s mate, “Scrape, scrape, screech, screech, and never a tune you can sing to, not if you were drunk as Davie’s sow.” Those stories are rife with adventure and intrigue. O’Brian was a devoted student of that history, writing dialogue using two-hundred-year-old figures of speech, and for this enthusiastic sailor, he accurately and dramatically describes the act and art of sailing big ships. 

As the wars dragged on toward 1815, steam-powered ships were being introduced. It was easy for Jack to understand the advantages of steam power, allowing a ship to sail directly into the wind or without any wind at all. Guns could be mounted facing straight forward and backward, while sailing ships were encumbered by sails and rigging in both those directions and limited to firing broadsides. If your ship had steam power, you had an immense advantage over sail; if you were sailing and encountered an enemy in a steamship, you were in grave peril. Nonetheless, one tradition-bound and slightly drunken admiral lamented loudly about the Navy contemplating losing its skillful sailors to “a hoard of mechanics.”

Steam locomotives powered railroads from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. Diesel powered (and diesel-electric) locomotives were first introduced around 1930. By around 1950, diesel locomotives were more powerful, more economical to maintain and operate, and safer than those powered by steam, and steam locomotives became a thing of the past. Many engineers revered the elegance of steam machinery and regretted their demise, but today with few exceptions, steam locomotives are limited to historical exhibits and attractions, and a troupe of hobbyist organbuilders I know.

Friends of ours have a huge old iron cook stove in their kitchen. Susan is a virtuoso with the cooktop lids, lifting them as she converses to drop in a log or two. She manages different levels of heat from one side to another and has pots of savory smelling stuff simmering away. The hulking thing sure does make the kitchen toasty warm on a cold night, but she uses the modern gas cooktop mounted in the counter for most of the cooking. Her curmudgeonly husband Barnaby thinks food tastes better from the wood stove, but he does not cook, ever, and Susan has her way. “Barnaby, have another bourbon.”

Charles-Marie Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris for sixty-three years. Something like halfway through his tenure the first electric blower was installed on the Cavaillé-Coll organ. By then he had written the ten organ symphonies that are the backbone of his output, played for thousands of Masses, hundreds of concerts, hundreds of funerals, weddings, and festivals. He must have spent thousands of additional hours at the organ practicing and teaching. Through all of that, the hundred-stop organ was pumped by human power. What a liberation it must have been for him to climb the steps to the organ loft, switch on the power, and play to an empty church using all the wind he wanted.

There are a number of modern mechanical-action organs built under classic inspiration that are pumped by reconstructions of ancient human-powered systems, and in the late 1990s I restored an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook (when my great-grandmother was one year old), including restoring the hand pumping system. Yuko Hayashi, the revered long-time professor of organ at the New England Conservatory of Music, brought her organ classes to that church so they could experience hand-powered organ wind, comparing both sources of wind playing the same passage of music. It is a fascinating study, helping us to understand just how music sounded when played centuries ago, but I doubt many of us would forsake the convenience and stability of the electric blower.

The passage of steam-powered ships and locomotives, Susan and Barnaby’s woodstove, and Widor’s hand-pumped organ are all examples of innovations replacing “the old way.” Many pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts are admirers of the old way. “If God intended us to have more than four general pistons, Mr. Skinner would have given us five.” But today’s conversation is not about venerable electro-pneumatic organs being replaced by modern trackers, and it’s not about historic tracker organs being replaced by modern electro-pneumatic instruments. It’s about the future of the organ, the future of all organs.

We can’t save them all.

In the 1920s, American pipe organ builders were producing twenty-five hundred new organs each year. Suburban churches had sixty voice choirs and sixty-stop organs, and a thousand place settings of monogrammed china. Those churches now have dwindling congregations, staggering fuel bills, and leaky roofs. In a world weakened by epidemic, smaller, weaker parishes are struggling like never before, and pipe organs are coming on the market like fireworks on the fourth of July. Hundreds of organs, many of them priceless historic artifacts, are glutting a market in which churches choose between pipe organs, electronic instruments, or no organ-based music at all.

My desk at the Organ Clearing House is proof of that. My inbox is full of pleas to “save this beautiful organ.” We can place only a fraction of the available instruments, and it is hard to justify encouraging a church to purchase an organ of poor quality and doubtful musical interest when so many wonderful organs are available. Once it was hard for me to condemn an organ to the knacker’s yard, but I have gotten over it. I know that there is a finite amount of money spent in the United States each year on pipe organs, and it feels like smart duty to see that as little as possible is spent on lesser organs. If we are going to have fewer organs, they might as well be the best.

An unwanted pipe organ is among the greatest of white elephants. This applies to instruments of high pedigree and important historical value as much as to small, simple, ordinary instruments. When progress means that a building has to go, whatever is inside goes with it. If it is a historical home with a beautiful organ, when time’s up, time’s up. If it is a spectacular church building, ravaged by time and weather and failing budgets, whatever is inside goes with it.

If you learn that a church in your neighborhood is planning to close, encourage them to think right away of the artifacts that should be saved. Pipe organs, stained-glass windows, and liturgical furnishings can all be preserved and relocated, but it takes time. If my first contact about an available organ is from the real-estate developer who bought the building and plans to gut the interior in two weeks, there is no hope. As it takes years for a church to decide to commission a new organ, it takes years for a congregation to embrace the idea of disbanding. Plan ahead.

Most importantly, we must care for our profession. Colleague organbuilders and organists must project their work in the music of the church as a rich gift. We have received our talents as gifts. It is our responsibility to nurture those talents and share them with the people in our churches, those in the pews, and those around the table at weekly staff meetings. Make them love what you do. I am tired of seeing memes showing the Dowager Countess of Grantham with pursed lips, saying that people who think the organ is too loud “don’t have any taste.” I am tired of seeing images of gag stop knobs engraved with “Rector Ejector,” or “Cut Pulpit Mic.” They may be good for a smirk between organists, but they imply an underlying disrespect that is not good for our future.

An organist accepting a new position “if there will be a new organ” is an affront to church music. Maybe the place should have a new organ, but that should be the collective decision of a generous and worshipful community with the support and encouragement of the musicians, not an arrogant demand. You likely know more about church music than those around you, but with your help, they can love it as much as you do. That is what honors the links between you and the centuries-old procession of brilliance which is the heritage of our music and our instruments. That’s our future.

Photo: 1952 Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, The Mother Church Extension, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts (photo credit: William T. Van Pelt)

Mechanical failure

This morning while doing errands with Wendy, I noticed a lug nut on the tarmac next to our parked car. The inside thread was stripped bare, even shiny and smooth, and while the outside should have had six corners and six sides, only three corners and two of the sides were intact while the rest was rounded. I put it in my pocket and worried it with my fingers as we completed our errands and placed it on my desk when I got home. I have been glancing at it and handling it, wondering how it got so badly deformed. Was it cross-threaded onto the lug so aggressively that the thread was compromised? Did it fall off a car parked there? If so, how many other lug nuts were in such bad shape? How did the outside of the nut get rounded? Did other lug nuts on the same wheel suffer the same damage? It’s bad when a wheel falls off.

Take care of your machines.

For most of us, our cars are the most complex and sophisticated machines we own, and there are some simple maintenance procedures we follow to ensure smooth operation. The fact is that failure to take these steps can lead to serious damage and mortal danger. We change the oil every few thousand miles. When the engine is not running, the oil sits in a reservoir at the bottom of the engine known as the oil pan. When you start the engine, the oil pump brings oil to the top where it splashes about the camshaft and valves, and trickles down across myriad parts to be recirculated. If the oil gets dirty, it does not lubricate as well. If the oil runs dry, the engine parts heat to the point of welding themselves together. I once hit a rock with a lawnmower that cracked the oil drain plug inside the mower deck. The oil ran out, and the engine seized with a bang.

Did you ever notice how your car’s engine clatters for a few seconds when you start it on a cold morning? That is because the oil is extra thick and takes a moment to get to the top of the engine. Are you one of those drivers who starts the engine and immediately puts the car in gear? It would be better to wait until the oil gets to the top of the engine and the clattering stops before you put a load on the engine.

You are backing out of a parking space. You check your mirrors, shift into reverse, and start the car moving. When you shift into drive you hear a clunk from under the floor. Each of those clunks means a little extra wear on the transmission with its hundreds of precise interior fluid channels. I back out of the space, shift into neutral as I stop the car, then shift into drive before I start moving again. No clunk. It is an extra step, but I think it means my transmission will last longer. It is as easy to develop that habit as putting only one space after a period.

When my sons were young, they were delighted to find that they could cause the plumbing to make banging noises in the walls when they turned a bathroom faucet on and off at my parents’ house. My older son is now an expert fabricator with high-end welding skills, and we laughed together recently over that memory. They could have done serious damage to the house by breaking soldered plumbing joints inside the walls.

The same son was a wild driver early on. He loved going fast, he loved having smoke coming off his tires, and he pushed a series of cars to early ends, adding to the huge expense of many speeding tickets, cancelled insurance policies, and suspended licenses. When he finally broke those habits, he observed that it is lot less expensive to drive more conservatively.

Try it again without making noise.

The pipe organ is a musical wonder, and no other musical instrument has such complicated mechanical systems. Our habits at the keyboard and our attitudes toward our instruments can have a significant effect on their reliability. I do not need to mention the organist who habitually placed a sugary cup of coffee on top of the console stopjamb. I chided him about the ugly rings on the lovely, shellacked surface and warned about spills. The spill happened late on a Saturday night, and I was able to get the organ working a little before Sunday services, but removing the keyboards, replacing felt bushings, cleaning contacts, and regluing several of the sharp keys cost many thousands of dollars.

I do not need to mention the organist who played on a nineteenth-century mechanical-action organ and caused heavy bangs in the stop action because of the force he used on the drawknobs. The travel of those sliders is regulated and limited by little steel pins drilled and driven into the windchest tables. There are slots in the sliders that ensure the correct amount of motion, and the pins also fit into holes in the bottom of the toeboards, assuring that they are in the correct position. Slam, bang, thud hundreds of times every time he played, and the stops gradually grew softer and out of tune. Those guide pins were being driven out of their holes, and the sliders were traveling too far, going past the “full open” position, constricting the holes, and underwinding the pipes. That one was a $45,000 repair, removing all the pipes, lifting the toeboards and sliders, repairing the holes, redrilling the pins, then putting everything back together and tuning the pipes.

And I do not need to mention the organist who complained that the piston buttons were unreliable, demonstrating them to me with furious jabs from a powerful finger. Maybe, just maybe, the tiny contacts and springs that make those buttons work were prematurely worn by that vigorous action.

Just as I try to avoid that extra clunk when shifting my car from reverse to drive, you might listen to your console as you play. Does your technique cause extra noise at the keyboards? You might be causing excessive wear.

When I was a student at Oberlin, I had an important lesson about unnecessary noise. My organ teacher, Haskell Thomson, organized a winter term project for a group of us to be led by Inda Howland, the legendary teacher of eurhythmics and disciple of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze. For three days a week through the month of January, ten or fifteen of us bounced balls and performed other rhythmic exercises to the beat of the drum that always hung on a lanyard around Ms. Howland’s neck. Later in the month, we moved to practice rooms where we played for each other with her coaching and comments. I was working on Bach’s Toccata in F at the time, and I bravely powered through those familiar pedal solos with my pals huddled around the little organ. (If you think the acoustics in a practice room are dry, add twelve inquisitive pairs of ears to the mix.) When I finished, Ms. Howland referred to the noise of my feet on the pedalboard, “try it again without making noise.” That one comment had more impact on me than ten years of organ lessons, and I know my pedal technique improved from that moment on.

The most mechanical of musical instruments

A violin is nothing more than a curiously shaped box with a neck and four strings. The only things mechanical about it are the tuning pegs that use “friction fit” to maintain the exact tension to keep each string in tune. A trumpet has three valves that function like pistons, connecting tubes of various lengths as their positions are changed. A clarinet has eleven holes that are opened and closed by a system of levers operated by the player, and a piano key action has about ten moving parts for each note, mounted in neat rows.

Open the door of an organ case or organ chamber, and you face a complex heap of contraptions that somehow unify into a musical whole. There are bellows or reservoirs to store and regulate wind pressure, ducts to direct the wind throughout the organ, levers, switches, and wires connecting keyboards to valves, ladders and walkboards to allow technicians to clamber about inside. As it is the challenge to the musician to play the instrument with as little extra noise as possible, it is the job of the organ builder to make the machine disappear. The inherent mechanical nature of the instrument is minimized to allow the most direct communication between the musician’s brain and the listener’s ears.

Ernest Skinner, one of the most ingenious mechanical and tonal innovators in the history of organ building, invented the “whiffle-tree” expression engine. The origin of the whiffle-tree is the system of harnesses used to hitch a team of horses to a wagon that allows the force of the pull of each individual animal to be evenly added to the whole. Skinner made whiffle-tree motors with eight or sixteen stages depending on the size and glamour of the organ. They include large power pneumatics inside the machine connected to the marionette-like whiffle-tree that pulls on the shutter action, which are exhausted by a row of primary valves at the top of the machine. The motors are activated when you “close” the swell shoe, pulling the shutters closed. There is either a spring or a heavy counterweight with cable and pulleys to pull the shutters open when the motor is disengaged. To avoid the possibility of the shutters slamming closed, Skinner made the primary valve of the last stage smaller than the rest, constricting the exhaust, and slowing the motion of the shutters at the end of their travel.

While Mr. Skinner’s machine was effective at quieting the noise of closing shutters, I am reminded of a moment when operator error allowed expression shutters to make not only extra noise but visual distraction. A friend was accompanying a chorus on the organ in a music school recital hall and asked me to sit in on a rehearsal to listen for balance. She had chosen great registrations, so there was little to say there, but she was beating time with the Swell pedal, and since the shutters were fully visible as part of the organ’s façade, it was a huge distraction. We broke that habit.

Things that go bump in the night

In the 1980s and 1990s, I was curator of the mammoth Aeolian-Skinner organ at First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, also known as “The Mother Church.” Dr. Thomas Richner was the organist, a colorful, diminutive man with a wry sense of humor and marvelous control over that organ with its nearly 240 ranks. My phone rang around eleven one evening, “Pee-pee” (he called everyone Pee-pee), “something terrible has happened to the organ. I closed the Swell box and there was such a crash.” That Swell division has twenty-seven stops and forty ranks including a full-length 32′ Bombarde, and there are four big windchests with four huge banks of shutters coupled together. I went to the church the next morning to find that the cable of the counterweight for the Swell shutters had broken, and several hundred pounds of iron had crashed onto the cement floor. Practicing alone late at night in a dark church, the poor man must have jumped out of his skin.

In the 1960s, organ builders were experimenting with electric motors to control the stops of slider chests, and one of our supply houses marketed Slic Slider Motors, grapefruit-sized units with a crank arm on top that rotated 135-degrees or so from “on” to “off.” I suppose they were among the first units to work reliably in that application, and lots of organ builders used them. The travel was adjustable, and they worked quickly. But the noise was unmistakable, schliK-K-K! I remember as a pre-organ builder teenager sitting in a big church listening to an organ recital, wondering what all that noise was. After a particularly large and noisy registration change, the mentor who had brought me leaned over and explained it. That was before I knew Inda Howland, but I am sure she would not have approved.

In the early 1970s, Laukhuff, the prominent German organ supply firm that recently and unfortunately ceased operations, developed a double-acting solenoid slider motor. It was housed in a steel case, and there were steel “stops” with heavy rubber bumpers attached to the shiny central shaft to limit the travel of the sliders. I maintained several organs that featured those motors. They worked beautifully until the rubber bumpers crumbled and fell off after thirty or forty years. The motion of the powerful motors was now limited by steel-on-steel, and they made an impressive hammer-on-anvil sound as they operated. I made a supply of replacement bumpers to keep in each organ punched out of woven green hammer-rail felt with a slit cut to the center hole so they could be popped onto the shaft without dismantling the motor.

Going out with a bang

During the “organ wars” of the 1960s and 1970s, “tracker detractors” chortled, “if it clicks and clacks, it’s a tracker.” Fair enough—lots of tracker organs have action noise, especially older ones. But the thousands of “pffts” from an electro-pneumatic organ are also often audible from the pews. Modern tracker actions have Delrin and nylon bushings to replace the metal-on-wood systems found in older organs and carbon-fiber trackers that do not slap at each other like traditional wood trackers.

It is easy and relatively inexpensive to include muffler covers to quiet electro-pneumatic actions, but I have often been in organs where a previous technician left the covers off for convenience, allowing the action noise to be clearly audible. And tremolos: how many of us have heard them set up a Totentanz with reservoir weights jumping and thumping and valves huffing and puffing? Screw down those weights before they bust a gusset in a reservoir and build a box around that pufferbelly. It is not helping the music.

Along with space-age materials that allow us to build quieter actions, we have space-age lubricants to keep things running smoothly. A squirt or two and the squeak is gone, and the part moves effortlessly. But there was a spray lubricant used widely in the early 1970s that worked fine for a generation but turned gummy as it aged. Several prolific organ companies used it to lubricate the sliders of windchests, and stop actions failed as the stuff gummed up the works. I had several jobs that involved removing the pipes, taking up toeboards and sliders, cleaning off the old goo with solvents, and spraying on a new lubricant. I hope the stuff I used will last longer than the original. There is an old joke about it being easy to spot the organ builder as he walks through town because all the dogs follow him, attracted by the smell of mutton tallow he used to grease the skids.

Part of the magic of the pipe organ is its ability to move from a whisper to a roar and back again. Part of the challenge of effectively playing an effective instrument is to preserve the music itself as the only noise. I’m grateful to Inda Howland for her keen observation of the bombast of my twenty-year-old self. Let the music play.

How does it work?

It happened again. I sat at this desk for days mud wrestling with an unruly topic for this column. Twice I had more than a thousand tortured words on the screen, went upstairs for a break, and came back to Ctrl-Shift-A-Delete. But Anthony Tommasini, music critic for The New York Times, came to my rescue with his article under the headline, “Why Do Pianists Know So Little About Pianos?,” published November 12, 2020. This article was born as the outbreak of COVID-19 got rolling in New York City last March and his piano needed tuning, but his apartment building was locked down and workers from outside were not allowed in except for emergencies. “An out-of-tune piano hardly seemed an emergency.”

He quotes the brilliant Jeremy Denk as not knowing “the first thing about piano technology.” Denk, whose playing I admire deeply and who like me is an alumnus of Oberlin College, had the same issue as Tommasini when his building locked down, but convinced the superintendent of his apartment building that because playing the piano is his profession, his tuner should be accepted as an essential worker. It worked.

Tommasini singles out Mitsuko Uchida as one prominent pianist who is an intimate student of piano technology. He quotes her as saying, “you get stuck when the weight is different key to key, the piano has been sloppily prepared, and the dampers have not been adjusted—or the spring in the pedal.” She went on, finding trouble when “the pin underneath the key [guide pin] is dirty, or the other pin in the middle of the mechanism [balance pin] is dirty, rubbing, or slurping.” I love the word slurping in this context.

Tommasini reminds us that orchestral players know more about their instruments than most pianists, and that unlike pianists, orchestral players own their instruments and can carry them with them between performances. Vladimir Horowitz traveled with his own piano, but then, Horowitz was Horowitz. You tell him “No.” Unusual among modern pianists, Mitsuko Uchida travels with her own piano. When Tommasini asked her if the institutions where she plays cover that cost, she said “usually not.” But she went on, “I have no excess otherwise. I don’t need country houses, expensive jewelry, expensive cars, special collections of whatever.” I suppose her usual fees cover that cost and still provide her with lunch money.

Tommasini concluded the column: Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano, and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward, it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved.

Press the key and the pipe blows.

The pipe organ is the most complex of all musical instruments. It is such a sophisticated machine that other musicians, including some world-renowned orchestral conductors, consider it to be unmusical. While a violinist or clarinetist can accent a note by applying a touch more energy, what a single organ pipe can do is all it can do. The organist can accent a note by tweaking the rhythm—a nano-second of delay can translate into an accent—or by operating a machine. A twitch of the ankle on the Swell pedal does it, so does coupling a registration to another keyboard with a soft stop so a note or two can be accented by darting to the other keyboard. The creative organist has a bag of tricks that bypass the mechanics and allow the behemoth to sing.

I have been building, restoring, repairing, servicing, selling, and relocating pipe organs for over forty-five years, and I know that many organists have little idea of how an organ works, so I thought I would offer a short primer. If you already know some or most of this, maybe you can share it with people in your church to help them understand the complexity. In that case, it might help people, especially those on the organ committee, understand why it is so expensive to build, repair, and maintain an organ.

Pipes and registrations

A single organ pipe produces a tone when pressurized air is blown into its toehole. The construction of the pipe is such that the puff of air, which lasts as long as the key is held, is converted to a flat “sheet” that passes across the opening that is the mouth of the pipe. The tone is generated when the sheet is split by the upper lip of the mouth. This is how tone is produced by a recorder, an orchestral flute, or a police whistle. Organ pipes that work this way are called “flue pipes,” and there are no moving parts involved in tone production. Reed pipes (trumpets, oboes, clarinets, tubas, etc.) have a brass tongue that vibrates when air enters the toehole: that vibration is the source of the tone.

Since each pipe can produce only one pitch, you need a set of pipes. We call them ranks of pipes, with one pipe for each note on the keyboard to make a single organ voice. Additional stops are made with additional ranks. There are sixty-one notes on a standard organ keyboard. If the organ has ten stops, there are 610 pipes. Pedal stops usually have thirty-two pipes.

The Arabic numbers on stop knobs or tablets refer to the pitch at which a stop speaks. 8′ indicates unison pitch because the pipe for the lowest note of the keyboard must be eight feet long. 4′ indicates a stop that speaks an octave higher, 2′ is two octaves higher, 16′ is an octave lower. Some stops, such as mixtures, have more than one rank. The number of ranks is usually indicated with a Roman numeral on the stop knob or tablet. A four-rank mixture has four pipes for each note. The organist combines stops of different pitches and different tone colors to form a registration, the term we use to describe a group of stops chosen for a particular piece of music or verse of a hymn.

The length of an organ pipe determines its pitch. On a usual 8′ stop like an Open Diapason, the pipe for low CC is eight feet long, the pipe for tenor c° is four feet, for middle c′ is two feet, and the highest c′′′′ is about three inches. Every organ pipe is equipped with a way to make tiny changes in length. Tuning an organ involves making those tiny adjustments to hundreds or thousands of pipes.

Many organs have combination actions that allow an organist to preset a certain registration and recall it when wanted by pressing a little button between the keyboards (piston) or a larger button near the pedalboard to be operated by the feet (toestud).

Wind

When playing a piece of music on an organ, the little puff of air through each organ pipe to create sound is multiplied by the number of notes and the number of stops being used. Play the Doxology, thirty-two four-note chords, on one stop and there will be 128 puffs of air blowing into pipes. Add a single pedal stop to double the bass line and you will play 160 pipes. Play it on ten manual stops and two pedal stops, 1,384. A hundred manual stops (big organ) and ten pedal stops, 6,420, just to play the Doxology, a veritable gale.

Where does all that wind come from? Somewhere in the building there is an electric rotary blower. In smaller organs, the blower might be right inside the organ, in larger organs the blower is typically found in a soundproof room in the basement. The blower is running as long as the organ is turned on, so there needs to be a system to deal with the extra air when the organ is not being played, and to manage the different flow of air for small or large registrations. The wind output of the blower is connected to a unit that most of us refer to as a bellows. “Bellows” actually defines a device that produces a flow of air—think of a fireplace bellows. Before we had electric blowers, it was accurate to refer to the device as a bellows. When connected to a blower that produces the flow of air, the device has two functions, each of which implies a name. It stores pressurized air, so it can accurately be called a reservoir, and it regulates the flow and pressure of the air, so it can accurately be called a regulator. We use both terms interchangeably.

Between the reservoir/regulator and the blower output, there is a regulating valve. Sometimes it is a “curtain valve” with fabric on a roller that operates something like a window shade, and sometimes it is a wooden cone that seats on a big donut of felt and leather to form an air-tight seal. In either case, the valve is connected to the moving top of the reservoir/regulator. When the blower is running and the organ is not being played, the valve is closed so no air enters the reservoir. When the organist starts to play, air leaves the reservoir to blow the pipes, the top of the reservoir dips in response, the valve is pulled open a little, and air flows into the reservoir, replenishing all that is being used to make music by blowing pipes.

Weights or springs on the top of the reservoir regulate the pressure. The organ’s wind pressure is measured using a manometer. Picture a glass tube in the shape of a “U,” twelve inches tall with the legs of the “U” an inch apart. Fill it halfway with water, and the level of the water will be equal in both legs. With a rubber tube, apply the pressure of the organ’s wind, and the level of the water will go down on one side of the “U” and up on the other. Measure the difference and voilà, you have the wind pressure of the organ in inches or millimeters. It is common for the wind pressure to be three inches or so in a modest tracker-action organ. In a larger electro-pneumatic organ, the pressure on the Great might be four inches, six inches on the Swell, five inches in the Choir, with a big Trumpet or Tuba on twelve inches. The State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on 100 inches. I used to carry a glass tube full of water into an organ, a risky maneuver. Now I have a digital manometer.

In a small organ, the blower typically feeds a single reservoir that regulates the flow and pressure and distributes the wind to the various windchests through wind conductors (pipes), sometimes called wind trunks. In larger organs, it is common to find a regulator in the basement with the blower, and big pipes that carry wind up to the organ where it distributes into various reservoirs, sometimes one for each keyboard or division. Very large organs have two, three, four, or more windchests for each keyboard division, each with its own reservoir. A large bass Pedal stop might have one reservoir for the lowest twelve notes and another for the rest of the stop. And speaking of big pedal stops, the toehole of the lowest note of something like a 16′ Double Open Wood Diapason can be over six inches in diameter. When that valve opens, a hurricane comes out.

Windchests

The organ’s pipes are mounted on windchests arranged in rows on two axes. All the pipes of one rank or stop are arranged in rows “the long way,” and each note of the keyboard is arranged in rows “the short way.” The keyboard action operates the notes of the windchests, and the stop action determines which sets of pipes are being used. Pull on one stop and play one note, and one pipe plays. Pull on five stops and play a four-note chord, and twenty pipes play. In a tracker-action organ or an electric-action organ with slider chests, the keyboard operates a row of large valves that fill a “note channel” when a note is played and a valve opens. The stops are selected by sliders connected to the stopknobs, which have holes identical to the layout of the holes the pipes are sitting in. When the stop is off, the holes do not line up. When the stop is on, they do, and the air can pass from the note channel into those pipes sitting above open sliders.

It is common in electro-pneumatic organs for there to be an individual valve under every pipe. There is an electric contact under every note on the keyboard, a simple switch that is “on” when the note is played. The current goes to the “primary action” (keyboard action) of the windchest. The stops are selected through various devices that engage or disengage the valves under each set of pipes. When a note is played with no stops drawn, the primary action operates, but no pipe valves open. The stopknobs or tablets have electric contacts similar to those in the keyboards. When a stop is turned on and a note is played, a valve opens, and a pipe speaks.

We refer to “releathering” an organ. We know that the total pipe count in an organ is calculated by the number of stops and number of notes. An organ of average size might have 1,800, 2,500, 3,000 pipes. Larger organs have 8,000 or 10,000 pipes, even over 25,000. The valves under the pipes are made of leather, as are the motors (often called pouches) that operate the valves. Releathering an organ involves dismantling it to remove all the internal actions, scraping off all the old leather, cutting new leather pieces, and gluing the motors and valves in place with exacting accuracy. The material is expensive, but it is the hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled labor that add up quickest.

It’s all about air.

We think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument, but that is not really accurate. A piano’s tone is generated by striking a string that is under tension and causing it to vibrate. That is a percussion instrument. The tone of the pipe organ is generated by air, either being split by the upper lip of the organ pipe or causing a reed tongue to vibrate. The organ is a wind instrument. When we play, we are operating machinery that supplies and regulates air, and that controls the valves that allow air to blow into the pipes. When I am playing, I like to think of all those valves flapping open and closed by the thousand. I like to think of those thousands of pipes at the ready and speaking forth when I call on them like a vast choir of Johnny-One-Notes. I like to think of a thousand pounds of wood shutters moving silently when I touch the Swell pedal. I believe my knowledge of how the organ works informs my playing.

A piano is more intimate than a pipe organ, though technically it is also played by remote control as a mechanical system connects the keys to the tone generation. I am not surprised, but I am curious why more pianists do not make a study of what happens inside the instrument when they strike a key. I believe it would inform their playing. A clarinetist certainly knows how his tone is generated, especially when his reed cuts his tongue.

I have always loved being inside an organ when the blower is turned on. You hear a distant stirring, then watch as the reservoirs fill, listen as the pressure builds to its full, and the organ transforms from a bewildering heap of arcane mechanical gear to a living, breathing entity. I have spent thousands of days inside hundreds of organs, and the thrill is still there. 

That’s about 1,800 words on how an organ works. My learned colleagues will no doubt think of a thousand things I left out. I was once engaged to write “Pipe Organs for Dummies” for a group of attorneys studying a complex insurance claim. It was over twenty-five pages and 15,000 words and was still just a brief overview. Reading this, you might not have caught up with Mitsuko Uchida, but you’re miles ahead of Jeremy Denk.

A postscript

In my column in the November 2020 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9), I mentioned in passing that G. Donald Harrison, the legendary president and tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner, died of a heart attack in 1956 while watching the comedian-pianist Victor Borge on television. The other day, I received a phone message from James Colias, Borge’s longtime personal assistant and manager, wondering where I got the information. I have referred to that story several times and remembered generally that it was reported in Craig Whitney’s marvelous book, All the Stops, published in 2003 by Perseus Book Group. Before returning Colias’s call, I spoke with Craig, who referred me to page 119, and there it was.

I returned Mr. Colias’s call and had a fun conversation. He told me that he had shared my story with Borge’s five children (now in their seventies). He also shared that when Victor Borge was born, his father was sixty-two-years-old, so when he was a young boy, he had lots of elderly relatives. His sense of humor was precocious, and when a family member was ailing, he was sent to cheer them up. Later in life, Borge said that they either got better or died laughing. I guess G. Donald Harrison died laughing.

Photo: Tracker keyboard action under a four-manual console, 1750 Gabler organ, Weingarten, Germany. (photo credit: John Bishop)

Organs and boats (There he goes again.)

Mystic, Connecticut, is a fun destination for people like me with a love for saltwater sailing. The area was originally home to the Native American Pequot people, was settled by British colonists around 1640, and was one of the first ports in New England. It is now home to the Mystic Seaport Museum, which has a vast range of exhibits about the history of sailing in the region. The museum includes a large and comprehensive working wooden boat shop where many important historic vessels have been restored.

Ours is a catboat, one of a class of broad-beamed boats developed for nineteenth-century fishermen in New England, handy enough to sail alone with a large, single sail, stable in choppy water, with plenty of capacity for a large catch. Since Kingfisher entered our lives, we have been members of the Catboat Association with some 2,500 other catboaters. The membership is listed twice in the club’s directory, once alphabetically by last name, and once by the name of the boat.

Each January, the Catboat Association holds a three-day meeting in a large convention hotel a few miles away, and we have had several fascinating dedicated tours of the museum. A highlight of one of those visits was a private tour of the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in existence, undergoing restoration at the time. She was built in 1841, is 107 feet long, nearly thirty feet wide, and was launched after restoration in 2013. During the summer of 2014, she was sailed by a specially chosen crew on a tour of thirty-eight New England ports and is now on permanent exhibit in Mystic.

The director of the restoration was our guide, taking a couple hours out of his hard workday. He showed us how they steamed fifteen- and twenty-foot-long, six-inch-thick oak planks and bent them to fit the compound curves of the ship’s sides, fastening them with heavy handmade wood nails and caulking the seams with tar-soaked hemp. He also shared a remarkable story of the unique problems of material supply in that specialized authentic field.

A main central beam supporting the deck along the length of the ship was rotten beyond saving, and the shipbuilders were at a loss to replace it, when they received a chance call from a contractor who was starting the construction of a large new building in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Wendy and I lived in the Navy Yard for ten years, which is also home to the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy, and is an interesting place to visit. When we had dinner guests whom we knew would be interested, we carried a cocktail around to the Constitution, because the ship fired the Navy’s regulation “sunset gun,” using 7:00 p.m. as the “official modified sunset” in the now residential neighborhood.

Excavation was underway at the site of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital at the north end of the yard when the contractors unearthed more than a dozen huge oak beams unknown in modern times that had been preserved by being buried centuries ago by Navy shipbuilders. The contractor had the imagination and presence of mind to contact the Mystic Seaport asking if they were of any value, and the next day the seaport sent flatbed semi-trailers to collect them. We were shown the beam that had been chosen for the Charles W. Morgan. Anyone interested in historic preservation in any field such as the pipe organ would surely appreciate the fortuitous discovery.

Organ installation

It is mid-January, and I am not here to play with boats. We are spending long working days in the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, a neighborhood of the town of Stonington. The organ was built by Austin Organs, Inc., in 1979 (Opus 2926), with two manuals and fifteen ranks—a modest and simple organ with a clever scheme of borrowing to create a flexible pedal division.

After the start of the second decade of this century, the people of Saint Michael’s were planning a new building, and in 2013 we were engaged to dismantle and store the Austin organ. We would install the organ in the completed new building under a separate agreement. The new building was designed by architect Brett Donham (who also designed the recent renovation of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Boston, and Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, Brookline, Massachusetts), who happens to be a friend of Wendy and me with a summer home just a few miles from our house in Maine.

In the new building, the organ would be installed in a free and open space on the main floor of the building, a rare instance of a new ecclesiastical building with no limitations for the placement of an organ. My organbuilder colleagues will chuckle “too good to be true,” and they would be right. Fundraising fell short, plans for the new building were scrapped, and the existing building would be stripped to its very bones and rebuilt on the same footprint. We would install the organ in the same loft from which it was removed, but—wait for it—the ceiling would be eighteen inches lower over the Swell, stealing space from the organ to allow an enhanced HVAC system.

A colleague subcontractor releathered the Austin actions for us, and we started the installation about ten days ago. Remember the “too good to be true part?” Today is Sunday, and I put the last two cables on the console junctions this afternoon. The church and the organ will be dedicated on Saturday in a two-hour ceremony led by the bishop of the diocese along with combined choirs and brass instruments. We have a busy week ahead of us. We have built a new swell box, repositioned the Swell in relation to the Great to make the most of the available space, relocated the four largest pipes (the only ones that would not fit under the new lower ceiling), and hung the chimes on the wall. We will spend the next several days setting the pipes on the chests, installing the last few appliances (fan tremolo and its electric relay, expression motor, etc.).

The birth of a new building

The finished church building is lovely. The windows and oak wainscoting are bordered with attractive and colorful stenciled patterns, the walls are painted a rich brick red, new light fixtures with fancy controls and state-of-the-art bulbs illuminate the place effectively, and an intricate system of wood trusses supports the pitched ceiling, a huge change from the tacky dropped ceiling in the original building.

The high altar and reredos are made of wood but are receiving a faux-marble painted finish by the Golubovic family. Milan Church Restoration is run by Marco Golubovic, whose family came to the United States from Serbia in the early 1990s. His parents are the artists who marbleized the altar. We have been watching them with interest as they transform the primed-white structure to stone, making mixtures of tubed colored oils and lined oil, sketching “marbly” designs in pencils, and applying the colored veins to the wood with fine artist brushes, sponges, and the occasional finger-painted streak.

The “altar system” has a special feature. The altar itself is mounted on well-concealed wheels and can be used either as a free-standing fixture with the priest facing the congregation or can be pushed against the reredos under the centered tabernacle so the priest can celebrate Mass in traditional style with his back to the congregation.

In 1979, I helped install the Flentrop organ in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, where I later played several recitals, and which was the site of my first wedding. The altar and pulpit in that church are made of richly veined marble that look for all the world as though they are made of blue cheese. The artists at work this week at Saint Michael’s are good at painting blue cheese. It is reminiscent of Homer’s account of the Greek god Poseidon who turned a Phaeacian ship into stone, punishing them for aiding his enemy Odysseus.

The Stations of the Cross are molded and carved pieces about thirty inches high and twenty-four inches wide. The figures and architectural images are colorfully painted, and each piece weighs about fifty pounds. The general contractor replaced the hardware and steel wire to hang them on the walls, similar to hanging a heavy painting in your home. The wire they chose was not up to the job, and last week two of the stations fell to the floor within twelve hours of each other. Late one evening, the priest and project manager removed the remaining twelve from the wall lest they, too, should fall. Fortunately, Milan Church Restorations also specializes in the restoration of liturgical art, and they were able to repair the severe damage to the plaster pieces on short notice. A different wire was chosen, and the pieces were quickly rehung.

The new sound system was tested and calibrated last week. I am not much of a fan of public address systems, and I have heard many that distort rather than enhance the spoken word. I have often noticed that the technicians who work with those systems are very good at counting, but their range is limited: “one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . .” It reminds me of the old vaudeville gag of a horse counting by stomping its feet. The techs were very proud to demonstrate that the microphones could handle anything they were offered. You could approach with voice meek and mild, the microphone pointing at your forehead, whimpering through a passage of scripture, or you could lean into it and thunder, fire, and brimstone. Goodness, he must have practiced that routine, and through it all, I was sitting on an upturned bucket, sorting wires at the junction in the back of the console (white with blue, blue with white, . . . violet with green, green with violet) with a PA speaker ten inches from my head. Actually, not through it all. After several minutes, I stood up, waved my arms above my head as if I was marooned on a desert island, and asked ol’ silver tongue to turn off the balcony speakers.

As we race toward completion, as the general contractor prepares to leave the building officially in a couple days, as the pastor paces around the building noting details, and as UPS delivers eight hundred new hymnals, we are aware of the sense of anticipation. They have been worshipping in a neighboring church for almost seven years, and they have missed their home parish. The pastor brings a small group of people into the building several times a day, and I have heard their exclamations, their excitement, even weeping. Some wander into the choir loft and shake their heads at the complexity of the pipe organ. Inwardly, we reflect that it is actually a very small and simple organ, but to them, who have never seen the innards of a pipe organ, it is as much a marvel as a Silbermann organ was to an eighteenth-century Alsatian vintner. It is certainly not my job to correct them, as in, “Actually, this organ is pretty simple.” It’s their organ, they’re proud of it, and they love it.

Let us remember a time when most every local, even rural church had a four-, six-, or eight-rank pipe organ that they loved and valued. M. P. Möller built over thirteen thousand organs, most of which were smaller “factory models,” as did Casavant, Reuter, Schantz, and others. While so many smaller churches purchase substitute instruments now, we celebrate those that own and cherish a real pipe organ.

My friend Jim

I have wired dozens of organs in my career. It is work I enjoy, and I draw from my experience as an organist to enhance my understanding of the complex wiring schemes. When I am sorting out cables, I can picture the musician using a particular function of the organ. I know why it is there, how it is used, why it is important, and I love hooking up those wires. (“She’s gonna use the Great to Pedal reversible a lot.”) Wendy is an avid weaver who revels in the complex patterns possible with the multiple shafts of the loom. There is a poetic similarity between weaving and organ wiring—both crafts create matrices with two axes, both rely on neatness and predictability for their beauty. (The trackers and stop actions of an organ with mechanical action also have rich parallels with weaving.)

My career started in the late 1970s, just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were becoming common. A few of the first organs I renovated and installed had electro-mechanical switching systems with phosphor-bronze contacts as developed by early twentieth-century organ building pioneers like Austin, Skinner, Casavant, and Möller, but since at least 1980, virtually every organ I have finished has included solid-state controls. The Austin organ at Saint Michael’s has analog switching—the simple relays (touch boxes) at the tail end of the keyboards in thousands of Austin organs. It is the first time in decades that I have wired an entire organ “the old-fashioned way.”

It is ironic, because my old pal Jim Mornar retired from Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc., at the end of 2019. Back in the 1980s when I was first working independently, I attended a couple informational seminars at the Peterson plant to enhance my understanding of their equipment. That is when I got to know Jim personally, and in the ensuing decades, with his help, I purchased dozens of systems from Peterson for rebuilding consoles and updating entire organ systems.

I have spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Jim, each call starting with casual banter and moving gradually toward the problem at hand. Often, it was “my bad.” “Did you connect the ground?” “Yes, of course, . . . oooh, . . . maybe not, . . . never mind.” Sometimes it was a serious puzzle. I would describe a problem in excruciating detail and could picture Jim’s hand rubbing his chin as if I was nuts. “That can’t be.” “It is.”

When placing a call to Peterson (answered by Marlene or Karyn) I would ask for Uncle Jim. (He is just a couple years older than I am.) They often told me he was on the phone. He would call back an hour later, just to get on a fifty- or sixty-minute call with me. I suppose his job was to talk on the phone, but I know he designed and built the systems I ordered.

There are hundreds of organists who have no idea how important Jim Mornar was to the effectiveness and reliability of the instruments they play. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.) Nice work, Jim. You are the best.

Going out in flames

I mentioned Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, which was recreated by architect Brett Donham after a significant fire in the 1980s. It is home to an organ built by George Bozeman & Company of Deerfield, New Hampshire, affectionately known by the Bozeman workshop as Orgelbrookline. I worked for George during the summers of 1975 and 1976, my first experience in an organ workshop. Early in the summer of 1976, we all participated in moving the shop to Deerfield from Lowell, Massachusetts.

When I was a young teenager, I sang in the choir of my home church with George’s wife, Pat, and together they were important mentors to me, introducing me to the world of the pipe organ, especially as it flourished in the heady days of the “tracker revival” in Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I will always be grateful for the care and attention they offered a young organ geek.

George retired, the company closed, and he continued to live in a cottage behind the main house on the property whose barn was the workshop, until recently when he offered the whole place for sale and moved to a retirement community. The Organ Clearing House had used the workshop for storage and a few small projects, and we removed our material in advance of the closing. The electricity had been shut off for quite a while as the building was barely being used. A few days after the closing, the new owner turned on the main switch and was checking some electrical circuits when there were sparks, and within a few minutes the building was engulfed with flames.

It was no longer George’s building and it was no longer an organ workshop, but it sure was sad to see it go down. The historic home of a creative company was lost.

Rites of passage. Thank you, George. Thank you, Jim.