In the wind . . .

Color my world

Twenty years ago I was serving a New England Congregational church as music director, bringing the glories of the English cathedrals to the land of the Puritans. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. The moderator of the parish council was a curmudgeonly attorney who lived in an attractive house sited prominently on a corner lot along my route to the church. The Sunday after contractors finished painting his house, I teased that he had his house painted pink. He responded in his usual gruff way, “It’s Chippendale Rose.” Ha! My point. It was pink.

When placing organs in church buildings, we often leaf through the “swatch fans” provided by paint companies, and I always wonder who invents the names of paint colors. The website of the paint company Pratt & Lambert shows a cozy-looking room featuring the colors Pearl Tint, Toasted Wheat, Dusk Sky, and Gloaming. The P&L color experts deem this to be a winning combination. The first three names give clues as what the colors might be, but “gloaming?” What’s gloaming? Its root, glo-m, is an Old English word of Germanic origin that means “twilight,” and is related to “glow.” So gloaming refers to the glow of twilight. I would describe the color in the photo as a sort of dark ecru—“twilight” and “glow” mean something else to me than dark ecru.

The printer on my desk spoke to me the other day. A cute little chime rang and the screen informed me that I needed to replace the cyan cartridge. Cyan? It’s a sort of light blue. My printer has three color cartridges: cyan, magenta, and yellow. I think of primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, so I googled to learn that there are now at least three basic systems of blending colors, each based on three “primary” colors.  

The standard for photography, television, and video screens is an “additive” system that uses red, green, and blue. The standard for printing is a “subtractive” system that uses cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Combine those three colors and you get black.) The website I visited says artists still prefer the additive system that uses red, yellow, and blue.¹ That’s a relief! Seems to me that the world of art would be a different place if Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso had cyan, magenta, and yellow on their palettes as primary colors.

Colors in music

I’m a devoted fan of Captain John Aubrey, the principal character in Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In the first scene of the first novel, Jack meets Stephen Maturin (a physician, drug addict, and elite member of Naval Intelligence) at a concert by a string quartet. They are as different as two men can be, but after their introductory dispute they become firm and fast friends, and they share a love for music. Jack plays the violin (his “on land” violin is a Guarneri), Stephen plays the cello, and through the twenty-year span of the war, they spend thousands of evenings playing together in the captain’s cabin while enjoying their customary toasted cheese and Marsala.

In the second novel, Jack is promoted from the rank of Master and Commander (remember the Russell Crowe movie?) to Post Captain. That night, in his happiness, he dreamed about a painting owned by his old nanny, now wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man who had promoted him: 

Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!²

When I first read that passage I immediately compared it to playing the organ. We accept the traditional system of notes, harmonies, and tuning as common with all other instruments, but the organ is unique because of its range of color. A pianist or flautist can conjure up contrasting tone colors by varying the physical forces involved in playing their instruments, but if you sit at an organ console and compare a Cromorne to a Diapason, a Trombone to a Rohrflute, or an Open Wood to a Tierce, you realize that the organ is a collection of instruments that contrast and complement each other, and like the painter’s palette of colors, the organ’s drawknobs allow the musician to blend a finite number of basic timbres into a seemingly infinite number of color combinations.  

Express yourself in color

I’ve heard that some symphony conductors consider the organ to be the least expressive musical instrument because the basic unit of musical tone—one organ pipe playing one note—cannot be altered in volume or timbre. That fact is true enough, but it’s like saying yellow is a boring color because all it can do is be yellow. Pratt & Lambert shows me Old Linen, Buttery, Golden Glimmer, Bay Rum, and Colorado Sand as complementary shades of yellow, and I haven’t touched the blues, reds, or greens. It’s ridiculous and ignorant to say that a pipe organ is not expressive.

Let’s consider an eight-foot flute stop, a simple enough subset of organ tone. But is it a Flauto Dolce, Gedeckt, Melodia, Harmonic Flute, Rohrflute, Spitzflute, Koppelflute, Hohlflute, or Flûte Triangulaire? Nine different flute stops, each with a unique tone color, and each comprising pipes of different shape and construction. Could you discern between them in a hearing test? Could you name each one if shown photographs of the various pipes? Or do you just draw an eight-foot flute because you always use an eight-foot flute in this piece as if you were painting a wall yellow instead of Golden Glimmer?

Pratt & Lambert says:

The color of the sun, yellow is associated with laughter, happiness and good times. It can cause the brain to release more serotonin, which makes people feel optimistic. It even has the power to speedup [sic} metabolism and drive creativity. However, yellow can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to a cool palette of blues or grays. It can also work well with orange, red, olive green or brown.³

It would be easy to paraphrase this when discussing organ stops:

A Cornet can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to an Oboe, Cromorne, or Trompette. It can also work well with Principals at eight and four-foot.

Is your imagination strong enough to find ways to use that Cornet that will make people feel optimistic?

Clashing or harmony?

You and your partner are getting dressed for a party. She comes out of the bathroom, takes one look, and says, “You’re not wearing that, are you?” We all think we know when colors clash, but while there are some basic rules, you have to judge each comparison separately. Otherwise, it would be impossible for two shades of red to clash. I have a pairing of red shirt and red tie that I think looks great, but there are also a couple doozies of possible combinations of red hanging in my closet that Wendy would question, rightly.

When we register a piece of music on a particular organ, we have to judge each combination separately. It’s not safe to assume that because it sounded good on one organ, that it will also sound good on another.

In his wonderfully researched book, The Language of the Classical French Organ (Yale University Press, 1969), Fenner Douglass presents detailed information about the various “standard” registrations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French organ music. He opens Chapter 5 (Registration in the Classical Period) by citing the prefaces to various famous “books” of organ music, the Livres d’orgue of Corrette, Nivers, Lebègue, Boyvin, and many others. He boils all that data down into charts that compare the registrations for Le Grand Jeu, Fugue, Le Duo, etc. by all these composers. It’s terrific material for informing our playing today, but does it have any real meaning if we don’t hear those registrations on the specific organs? One chart shows that in 1676, Nicolas Lebègue uses Grand Jeu de Tierce for the left hand of Le Duo, while Dom Bedos suggests sixteen-foot foundations. Who is right? And what organs were they using?

Assuming the Möller organ in your church has all the correct names and pitches on the knobs as cited by Fenner Douglass, does the historically correctly drawn Grand Plein Jeu sound anything like what Lebègue was hearing? Simply and definitively, no. Douglass has given us a great gift by collecting this information, but you still need to use your ears.

Shutter bugs

Besides choices of colors, many modern organs have an additional dimension of expression. Enclosing a group of stops, usually all the stops of one keyboard, in a tightly and heavily constructed “box” with movable shutters on one or more of the faces, allows the organist to simulate control over the volume of a single organ pipe. This does not literally answer the conductor’s ignorant criticism because the pipe is still only speaking one pitch at one timbre at one volume level.
But it increases the organist’s palette of
colors exponentially.

When I was a teenager, a mentor listening to my preparations for a recital commented that if everyone used the Swell Pedal like I was, they’d have called it a crush. I was closing the box at the end of a phrase, and popping it open before starting the next phrase, using only half of the device’s possibilities—but I was still too green to realize that the expression is about more than volume. It’s also an important tool for the creation and manipulation of tone color.  

When two or more manuals are coupled together, moving the expression pedals changes the emphasis from one tone color to another, taking the organ’s color spectrum from the finite number of possible combinations of stops to the infinite. Here’s a simple example. You might play the opening verse of a hymn on Great Principals with a Swell Trumpet coupled in, saving the more powerful Great Trumpet for later. Add to that registration the dimension of starting the verse with the Swell Box closed, and open it gradually as the choir comes down the aisle. The sound of the Trumpet is subtle at first, and blooms into being the principal ingredient of the aggregate color.  

Think of an “Old Master” painting. When Meindert Hobbema takes your eyes from the green of a tree canopy to the blue of the sky, he takes you through an infinite spectrum of colors. Compare that to the results of a color-by-number kit in which the boundary between one color and another is defined by a stark black line. And think of the artist making a drawing with charcoal or pastel, using her fingers to smudge the lines to create shading. Smudge is no better a description for the use of the expression pedals than crush, but the creative colorist at the organ can use the expression pedals to enhance the transitions from one color to another. That’s painting with sound, like Captain Aubrey’s colorful violin strings.

Stop, look, and listen

In these pages, I’ve often mentioned formulaic organ registration. You play the opening of a baroque Prelude and Fugue on Organo Pleno—Principals eight, four, and two, plus Mixture. You’ve always done it that way. Fair enough. That implies that the opening of Bach’s B-Minor Prelude (a high and screechy B) should be registered the same as his Dorian Toccata (middle of the keyboard canonic counterpoint). We are free to choose registrations that reflect the response of the specific instrument playing the specific notes in the specific acoustic. 

I think of my own performances of Bach’s B-Minor, how in the boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop episode of the fugue I always reduced the registration to flutes at eight and two. Always.

As I think about the opening of that great piece, I wince at the high B. What about starting on a smaller registration (that hymn registration I described earlier?) so the opening high B is less jarring. And here’s a radical thought. I know organs that simply don’t have stops that can be combined to give an impressive and dignified sound on that high B, so maybe I won’t play that piece on one of those organs—the ultimate registration discretion. There are other pieces.

Have you ever heard an organist play the opening pedal solo of Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne on anything other than pretty-much full organ, including reeds and mixtures, and manuals coupled to the pedals? Me neither. Why doesn’t someone play it on a four-foot flute? One of my favorite organ tones is a good clear Koppelflute, especially in a spacious acoustic. Would the Buxtehude cops storm into the church if I played that opening pedal solo on a four-foot Koppelflute? Would the first-time listener be disappointed?

If you, as an educated and experienced organist, went to an organ recital and the performer had the nerve to do that, would you be offended or disappointed? Are you just as happy to hear the same piece played with the same registration by every organist on every organ? Or are you excited when someone offers a fresh approach to an old warhorse? If we’re not listening as we register pieces, why should we expect the audience to listen?

Once when a colleague was demonstrating the organ in his church to me, he drew a huge combination of stops and told me that was his typical registration for postludes. Yikes. Easter I? Advent I? Pentecost XVIII? Bach? Widor? Stanley?

You go to a restaurant and order a chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. Delicious. Next week you go a different restaurant and order chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. And the next week, and the next. Different chef, different cooking temperature, different weather, but same ingredients. Can we think of a different way to cook a chicken breast?

How many different colors can you paint a front door and still be correct?

If we say Swell instead of crush, why do we call them stops? That seems limiting. Why don’t we start calling them Go’s? No matter how many of you agree with me, we’re probably stuck with stops. It would sound ridiculous for a politician to say, “We’re pulling out all the go’s.” But in your mind’s eye—and ear—think of them as opportunities, possibilities, or ingredients. If you’re listening when you draw stops, there aren’t many wrong answers. You’ll know if the tie clashes with the shirt. Have a blast. Put it on my tab. But hold the capers. They’re not my favorite.

Notes

1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/pricol2.html

2. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain. William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, London, 1972, page 421.

3. http://www.prattandlambert.com/color-and-inspiration/learn-about-color/…

Mazel tov to muscle tone

We have a close friend in Maine who has always taken pride in his self-sufficiency. He built his own house, and in the twenty-five years he and his wife have lived there, he has done all the maintenance and improvements himself. As it is a rural house, there is extra work involved, like plowing a half-mile driveway, clearing brush and trees, and mowing a large lawn. They are just across the river from us, so like us, they have waterfront chores like taking docks and moorings in and out of the water. He is a tough and stubborn guy in his early seventies, and last winter he had a stroke.

I visited him in the rehab center where he spent several very difficult months learning to walk with new limitations, straightening out his speech, and adjusting to his new circumstance in general. His right arm and hand are now pretty much useless, and he was lamenting the loss of his “chain saw arm.” He could not imagine how he was going to be able to get the snowplow off his pickup truck, and the dormers on their roof needed shingle repairs. During that visit, it was simply not crossing his mind that he would likely not be able to do those things again.

Wendy and I had dinner at their house last week and were brought up to date on all those issues. He hired someone to repair the shingles, a friend took the plow off his truck, and he decided they would not put the docks in the water this year. In fact, he put his boat on the market. And though his wife is energetic and sprightly, they are considering selling their house and moving into a condominium, or even, dare they admit, an assisted living facility. With all those changes imposed on their lives, my pal is grateful that his speech is fine, and that with some difficulty he is able to walk, but he is astonished at the uselessness of his arm. “It hangs off my shoulder; I know it’s there. It hurts and itches sometimes, but I can’t make it move.”

Since that dinner, I have been reflecting on the miracle that is the human body, and the incredible things people can learn to do. All of us who are born with bodies that are normal and complete start with roughly the same equipment. Some people have little dexterity. The private nickname we have for one friend is “Oops.” But then there is the fellow who can throw a ball ninety feet and reliably hit a target about one-foot square, and there is the woman who can jump, twirl, and somersault on a beam that is ten centimeters (3.9 inches) wide.

The world of music is full of incredible examples. The human hand is the same apparatus that handles the “neck end” of a violin or guitar, the keys of an oboe or piano, or the strings of the harp. Have you ever shaken hands with a harpist? What may seem to be the simplest instrument is perhaps the most miraculous—the human voice. Stop and think what an incredible feat it is to simply match a pitch with your voice. How do we know exactly the tension of the countless muscles involved that will create that A-flat out of thin air? A choir starting a piece, a cappella, with each member confident of the pitch, volume, and timbre, is a dramatic example of human muscle control.

No musician can play two identical performances of the same piece. We study, train, and practice, trying to make accurate plans for where our fingers will go, where we want to emphasize something, where we want to bring something forward. We write fingerings into our scores, intending to use the same sequence of fingers on each sequence of notes in the hope that we can eliminate confusion. But something always comes up in performance that was not part of the plan. Maybe we got distracted. Or maybe something wonderful happened that never did before. It’s a thrill when you surprise yourself in performance with a special lilt, a delicious ritardando, or a thrilling and dramatic crescendo.

It’s a control issue.

Let’s take that muscle thing a little further. My friend’s stroke did not spoil the muscles in his right arm; it interrupted the electrical gear that operates them. The human nervous system is the amazing wiring harness that transmits our thoughts into muscular impulses. Our bodies include several hundred “visceral” muscles, those that perform involuntarily, running such equipment as our hearts, eyelids, and diaphragms. There are something like 320 symmetrical pairs of skeletal muscles, those that we exercise control over. When I googled that, I was surprised to learn that there seems to be disagreement over the actual number, apparently because some muscles can be considered as part of more complex structures and not counted separately.

I am something of a mechanical geek, which has allowed me to notice that controls of a backhoe, the most common piece of excavation equipment, are roughly equivalent to the nerves that operate our arms and hands. Each lever has opposite motions—left and right, up and down, flex and open—and the operator uses levers in combinations to make fluid compound motions. The boom extends, the bucket opens, the machine swivels all at once.

Watch a virtuoso musician playing a brilliant passage and think of all nerves firing to make those hundreds of muscles do exactly the right thing, at the right time, with the right amount of force. That’s some data stream.

Many musical instruments, including winds and strings, require the musician to participate in the production of tone, and the volume of every musical instrument is controlled by the muscular impulses of the musician. That is, every instrument but one. An organ pipe is perhaps the simplest of musical instruments, and certainly the least versatile. Any organ pipe can produce just one pitch at one volume level and one timbre. Period. Big deal. It is for that reason that many orchestral conductors consider the pipe organ to be expressionless. Conversely, I claim that a pipe organ, especially a large organ with electric stop action, is the most expressive of musical instruments. The catch is that the musician operates it remotely. The mechanics of the instrument serve as an artificial nervous system, allowing the musician to control the instrument. While I know I am opening a path for cruel jokes (he plays that organ like a Mack Truck!), there is a real analogy with that excavator operator causing a twenty-ton machine to move with fluid, human-like motion.

The musician’s workstation

I am thinking about organ consoles these days because I am working on one in my personal shop at our house in Maine. It is a three-manual job of modest size, about fifty years old, and I am refitting it with a new nervous system, that fantastic array of solid-state controls concealed in a series of small black boxes that have brought such sophisticated levels of control to the modern organist. Those black boxes were provided by a supplier who incorporated the original specifications of the organ, plus a slew of features that I wanted to add. There is a small LED screen at the heart of the control panel, the controls that control the controls.

The keyboards have been recovered and polished to provide a lovely visible sheen, but more importantly, a smooth surface to meet the musician’s fingers. There are no sharp edges or snags that could divert attention, or worse, cause injury. (I once covered a keyboard with blood from a deep slit in my finger caused by the jagged edge of a broken ivory, admittedly buried in my score enough that I did not look down until the piece was over.) The best keyboards are works of art whose beauty helps to inspire the musician.

All the stopknobs and pistons need to feel alike. A squeaky knob or a piston that clicks will distract the player and interrupt the flow. While it is impossible for everything to be perfect, the goal of the organbuilder is to make the machine disappear, or at least to minimize the machine’s ability to intrude on the sacred space between the musician’s heart and the sound of the pipes. I am requiring the musicians to take care of the arms, hands, and fingers part of the system.

Besides the switches and buttons that actually control the functions of the organ, the surrounding cabinet needs to be an inspiring workstation. The wood should be beautiful, the finishes smooth, the geometry perfect. All of these factors add to the console’s status as an extension of the musician’s body.

Cleanliness is . . .

There is a terrific hardware store in Damariscotta, Maine, the town that adjoins our village of Newcastle, and I go there at least every few days. It has a large parking lot with head-in spaces in front of the store, and a row of spaces you can enter from behind, leaving your car facing across an open lane at the store. There is typically a row of tradesman’s pickup trucks and vans lined up there, and I always notice which trucks are kept neat inside, and which have their dashboards piled high with soda cans, coffee cups, receipts, sandwich wrappers, tools, and hardware samples. I have used those observations to inform who I hire to help with our house. If a painter’s truck is covered with slobbers of paint and filled with empty coffee cups, I don’t want him in my house.

Traveling around maintaining organs provides the same experience. Some organ consoles are always clean and free of clutter, and some are nasty depositories that could have come straight from the dashboard of a plumber’s pickup truck with the same coffee cups, candy and food wrappers, nail clippers (ick), and hairbrushes. One organist I worked for had long thick gray hair and the console looked like the couch in a house with ten cats. Her hair tangled up in the pedal contacts causing dead notes. We called it the “Hairball Church.”

Often, those dirty consoles are out in the open in the front of the church for everyone to see. It’s hard to imagine why a musician would choose to present such a front for the worshippers. And it’s hard to imagine how a sloven could produce beautiful music from such a sty. I understand the value of having pencils, note pads, “stick-ems,” and even paper clips handy (though paper clips falling into keyboards have necessitated many an emergency call!), but you should take your trash with you when you leave. The one that really gets me is the half-sucked lozenge sitting on the open wrapper. You didn’t finish that lozenge? Really? A few paragraphs ago, I referred to an organ console as an extension of the musician’s body, perhaps a little idealistic if the console is a mess.

§

A modern solid-state organ console is loaded with creative functions that allow the musician ever higher levels of control over the instrument. Multiple levels of memory and piston sequencers are two concepts that were really not possible before the introduction of solid-state equipment. Like the old codger who starts a conversation with a grandchild with the words, “When I was your
age . . . ,” I like to share that it was a big deal when my high school purchased four four-function calculators (add, subtract, multiply, divide). But it was only a few years later, when as an apprentice, I participated in installing one of the earliest solid-state combination machines. A lot of smoke came out.

As incredible as these machines can seem, organ consoles built a century ago featured sophisticated functions requested by the pioneers of symphonic organ playing. Lynnwood Farnam was organist at Emmanuel Church in Boston when Casavant’s Opus 700 was installed there in 1917. That console featured such controls as:

• Piston “throwing off” all manual 16′ stops, also Quint 51⁄3′ and Tierce 31⁄5′

• Piston “throwing off” all subcouplers

• Swell octave couplers to cut off Swell 2′ stops

• Other manual 16′ and 2′ stops not to be cut off by octave or sub couplers.

What was he thinking? That was barely the time when you could expect a new organ to include an electric blower. (After sitting in storage for more than ten years, that organ has recently been renovated by Rieger and installed in a concert hall on an island in China.)

Mr. Farnam was involved in the design of another console that I have written about before, that of the new Skinner Opus 707 built in 1928 for Grace Church, New York City. Farnam’s dear friend George Mitchell was organist there, and together they dreamed up a behemoth console that could seemingly do anything. The console controlled a double organ, Chancel and Gallery, with a total of 167 stops and 133 ranks. There was a separate crescendo for each organ. Above the Gallery Crescendo pedal there were two toe studs, marked “Regular” and “Orchestral.” The Chancel Crescendo pedal could be programmed from the console, using a wire-and-plug system located in a drawer under the bottom keyboard. A programmable crescendo in 1928! Besides the two crescendo pedals, there were five expression pedals, with a sliding control switch that allowed the organist to assign any expressive division to any pedal.

It is amazing to think of that level of electrical control in a contraption built in 1928. It was the product of some of the world’s most creative musical minds expanding the expressive possibilities of the most complex and least personal of all musical instruments. It is as if a puppeteer added 320 symmetrical pairs of strings to the marionette, mimicking the repertory of human skeletal muscles.

Because of that heritage of creativity, combined with the added dimensions made possible with solid-state controls, the supposed least expressive of musical instruments eclipses the expressive capabilities of the symphony orchestra. It can be softer than the softest, louder than the loudest, and with a few flicks of fingers, create dramatic crescendos between extremes.

When Wendy and I lived in Boston, we had series tickets for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with seats near the curve just above the stage. During the first performance using the newly renovated organ, with Simon Preston playing the obligatory Organ Symphony by Saint-Saëns, we marveled at the facial expressions and communication between orchestra members as the super low notes came from the organ during the slow movement. No orchestral instrument can go as low as the organ, and it is partly because of the limitless supply of air that the organ can blow whistles that big.

Are you surprised when I suggest that the organ is the least personal of musical instruments? I don’t feel that way when I play, rather I feel at one with the instrument, excited by the range of things I can make it do, excited by the way its sound rings in a huge room, excited by the way my musical impulses can make a whole room ring. It feels very personal to me, but as an organbuilder, I cannot separate all that from the fact that the organ is a machine operated by remote control. Like a pantograph that magnifies the size of a drawing using proportional levers, so the machine that is the organ magnifies the vision of the musician. But please, take your trash with you.

In perfect harmony

All musicians know what harmony is: chords, voice leading, dissonance, and resolution. We know harmony as one of the persnickety courses you’re required to take in school, in my case taught by a tyrannical and sometimes abusive professor. When you master the craft of harmony, or at least understand it enough to be dangerous, the magic of music is unlocked for you. You may have always known that Bach’s music was special, but dig into its structure and mathematics, and it becomes otherworldly. Paradoxically, the more you know about, the less you can understand it. I think it’s the mystical equivalent of how Rembrandt, Rubens, or Hobbema could mix linseed oil and pigment and make light flow from their paintbrushes.

But harmony is more than a mathematical exercise or an enigmatic code. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of managing the life of a community. Dictionary definitions use words like “pleasing,” “agreement,” and “concord.” 

How green is green?

I have vivid memories of two special moments in my childhood when I experienced something “live” for the first time. One was the first time I walked into Fenway Park in Boston with my father to see a Red Sox game. Dad was an avid fan, and I had watched dozens of games on (black and white) television with him. I’ve never seen grass so green as it was at Fenway that day. It was breathtaking, and I’ll always remember it.

The other was the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live on their “home field.” There was something about the sonority of those double basses that I knew could not exist anywhere else. And the scale of the thing—the sea of black suits, the amber hues of fifty or sixty stringed instruments with their bows moving precisely in parallel, the gleaming polished brass in the back row, the majestic proscenium arch, and of course, the huge display of gold façade pipes of the great organ. 

That impression has evolved over the years to include the idea that a hundred highly trained musicians spread out over a vast stage, playing simultaneously, is one of the great expressions of the human condition. I love witnessing the precision of all those instruments assuming playing positions, the conductor’s downbeat, and the instant expression of sound. It moves me every time. Young and old, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and from all races and backgrounds, baring their souls and their intellects toward a common result. What a world this would be if our politicians worked that way.

Let’s take it a step further. Strip those musicians of their paraphernalia. No violins, no piccolos, no drums, no hardware at all. What have you got? A choir. It’s elemental. The instruments are the human bodies themselves. Isn’t it amazing that you can give a pitch and have them sing it back, out of the blue? And I love the sound of a hundred people drawing breath at the same instant. It gives new meaning to the phrase, corporate inspiration!

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

While I know some musicians consider John Rutter’s choral music to be saccharine, or too sentimental, few of us would fail to recognize this opening line from one of his lovely Christmas carols. I think his music is terrific, not necessarily because of its intellectual content, but simply because it’s beautiful. I’ve been rattling on about harmony as if it’s the essence of music, but what about melody? A Mozart piano concerto, a Schubert song, and as far as I am concerned, anything by Mendelssohn draws its beauty first from melody. I think John Rutter is one of the best living melodists. 

Whenever I put a new piece by Rutter in front of a choir, invariably, they loved it. Congregations lit up with smiles, and people went home humming. Beautiful harmonies, catchy rhythms, gorgeous tunes. So what if it’s sweet and sentimental?

Rutter was born in 1945, which makes him eleven years older than me. But when I was fourteen years old, singing in the choir in my home parish, I saw his name in that green Carols for Choirs published by the Oxford University Press. He was in his twenties when he started creating those arrangements and newly composed carols, and a choir member once said to me, “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without John Rutter.” (She was referring to the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol with its snazzy organ licks.)

I’m not thinking about John Rutter because I’m yearning for Christmas. As I write, a late spring is finally beginning to look like summer in Maine, after a long harrowing winter. And besides, he has written plenty of music for other occasions. But the other day, while lurking about Facebook, I came across a brief video, The Importance of Choir, produced by J. W. Pepper, which markets Rutter’s music in the United States. It’s three and a half minutes long, with two basic camera angles, showing Rutter in the obligatory Oxford shirt (unbuttoned at the neck) and sweater, summarizing his long-gestated reasoning of why choirs are important. He says:

Choral music is not one of life’s frills. It’s something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls. You express, when you sing, your soul in song. And when you get together with a group of other singers, it becomes more than the sum of the parts. All of those people are pouring out their hearts and souls in perfect harmony, which is kind of an emblem for what we need in the world, when so much of the world is at odds with itself. That just to express in symbolic terms what it’s like when human beings are in harmony. That’s a lesson for our times, and for all time.

It may sound as though he’s describing a perfect choir—one that could hardly exist. But he continues, “Musical excellence is, of course, at the heart of it, but even if a choir is not the greatest in the world, it has a social value, a communal value . . . a church or a school without a choir is like a body without a soul.”

“Not one of life’s frills.” I love that. It’s such a simple statement, and it rings so true. When the human essence of the thing is described so eloquently, the concept is elevated to become essential. You can watch this brief but meaningful video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U, or type “John Rutter the importance of choir” into the YouTube search field. 

An important foundation of tomorrow’s choristers is the youth choir of the local church. Ideally, it’s a group of kids who dependably attend rehearsals, where they’re taught musical and vocal fundamentals. I remember wonderful experiences with the kids at my last church, when they responded to challenges and took pleasure in mastering complicated music. But it was a short season. That was a community where lots of families had second homes in ski country, and as soon as there was snow, off they went. Oddly, the kids often came to weekday rehearsals, but then missed Sunday mornings. 

And ice time. Holy cow. Peewee hockey teams jockeyed for reserved time at rinks, and since that time was so highly valued, coaches were happy to get a 5 a.m. slot. By the time the kids got to church at 8:30, they were beat up and exhausted. And in the schools, when budget time came around, arts and music (as if they could be separated) got cut long before football and even cheerleading.

And I’m talking about young kids in public schools. Take it to the next level where colleges and universities produce scholarships for athletes with sometimes only cursory academic requirements, and the priorities of an institution can really be questioned.

Take one for the team.

I’m not what you’d call an all-around sports fan, but I do love baseball. Our move last year from Boston to New York has made things complicated for me. There’s a precision about baseball—an elegance in the strategies. The application of statistics makes it the closest thing in sports to a Bach fugue. And since that first breathtaking glimpse of the greenest of green grass, I think I’m safe saying I went to hundreds of games with my father, who had the same seats for forty years. I love telling people that the two of us attended twenty-five consecutive opening day games at Fenway Park. That’s many thousands of hours, and I know that an important part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats (Section 26, Row 4, Seats 13 and 14—on the third base line).

And when they were playing well, it was a pleasure to watch the carefully choreographed 6-4-3 double play. Or a pitcher and first baseman trying to bluff a base runner. I think I understand the importance of teaching teamwork, which I suppose is the root of why there’s such a strong emphasis on sports in schools. But if choir, or band, or orchestra isn’t teamwork, I guess I’m missing something. 

Later in that video, John Rutter challenges those who are responsible for institutional budgets to acknowledge the central importance of the arts and especially ensemble music in education, saying that it’s “ . . . like a great oak that rises up from the center of the human race, and spreads its branches everywhere.” To carry that thought a little further, as long as the squirrels don’t get there first, that great oak will drop thousands of acorns which, assuming good conditions, will grow to become tomorrow’s great trees.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why cuts in a school’s budget should affect the arts before sports. I know I’m biased, and I surely know that people will disagree with me, but to quote the late Robin Williams, “I’m sorry. If you were right, I’d agree with you.” Football is just a game, while music—learning to play an instrument or singing in a choir—is a centuries-old centerpiece of human expression. And the more we hear in the media about new understanding of the lasting effects of games like football on the human body, the more I wonder how it can be justified. Singing in a choir doesn’t cause concussions or brain damage, and it exposes students to the history of our culture in an important way. I’d say “it’s a no-brainer,” if it wasn’t so very brainy.

Tools of the trade

American jazz pianist Benny Green said, “A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” The development of harmony is a fascinating story of evolution. Pythagoras lived on the Greek island of Samos from about 570 BC to 495 BC. It was he who, listening to the blows of blacksmiths’ hammers on anvils, first noticed and described the overtone series, which is the root of all intervals. He must have had terrific ears, and his deductions about the math that became music are no less spectacular than Galileo and Copernicus sitting on a hilltop at night for long enough to deduce that the earth rotates on its axis while orbiting the sun.

The identification of the overtone series led to organum, where two voices chanted in parallel motion. Then, maybe an inattentive monk made a mistake and went up instead of down, creating a dissonance that demanded resolution. It only took a few hundred years for that brotherly slip to turn into the harmonies of Dunstable, Dufay, Ockeghem, Lassus, Sweelinck, Schiedemann, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest is history.

Our tyrannical music theory teacher helped us understand the tools and the building blocks of music—those rules that define the difference between the music of Josquin des Prez and Felix Mendelssohn. Major and minor, diminished and augmented chords are arranged in sequence—progressions—that lead the listener from start to finish of a piece. They are analogous to the ingredients that are combined to produce a luscious dish.

Make it up as you go along.

Last week, I was preparing an organ in New York City for a colleague’s recital. But since it was to be a program of improvisation, we agreed it couldn’t be called a recital. Taken literally, the word implies “reciting” something that has already been written. In the hours before the concert, he received themes submitted on-line and in person, and a program was distributed that listed the compositional styles he would be using: Classic French Suite, Baroque Prelude and Fugue, etc.

Improvisation is the realm of the jazz musician and the organist. There’s something about the organ that lends itself to monumental improvisation, and there’s something about improvisation that propels a musician to a different level.

There’s a parlor-stunt aspect to improvisation. Sometimes the themes are humorous, like that for The Flintstones, which was submitted by the audience the other night. We chuckle as we hear a tux-clad performer using the clichés of classic French organ registration to warble that tune, invoking visual images and lyrics associated with childhood Saturday mornings. Imagine Fred and Wilma wearing powdered wigs. But we marvel at the skill, and the knowledge of harmony, of regional and historical compositional styles, as he conjures up a never-heard-before majestic piece of music right before your eyes, or is it your ears?

It’s easy to figure why the organ, so deeply rooted in the history of the church, would be such a perfect vehicle for improvisation. The musical heritage of the church, of any church, is based on simple melodies such as plainchant and hymn tunes. And how much of the literature of the organ is based on tunes like Veni Creator Spiritus, or Nun danket alle Gott?

While improvisation seems like magic, it’s based on solid knowledge of the tools and building blocks of music. Don’t think for a moment that Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, or Ella Fitzgerald are just doodling. Charles Tournemire or Pierre Cochereau are not doodling. They’re serious, carefully constructed, thoughtful pieces of music.  If they weren’t, they would never survive the relentless scrutiny of recording, or of reconstruction for “re-performance.”

It’s not a frill.

Music. There’s something about it. Is that a trite thing to say? How did any of us get involved in music enough to bother with reading this journal? No musician purposely sets an educational course to financial success. It’s the love of it, the caring about it, the need for it. In choirs, we find community without parallel, human cooperation and collaboration that can serve as a model for everything else we do. In improvisation, we create masterpieces for the moment. When the last echo dies away, it’s gone, making space for another.

Hundreds of generations of scientists, philosophers, and artists have collaborated to give us this music, which inspires, thrills, and soothes us. It’s not a frill. It’s not an elective. It’s essential. Don’t waste your vote. ν

What a winter.

Our son Andy writes for a daily news service at the State House in Boston and gets to see his prose online and in print the next day. Writing for a monthly journal is a little different. You’re reading in May, and I can only hope that the giant gears that drive the universe continued to function properly and the weather is warm. 

I’m writing in March on the first day of spring. I’m in my office at our place in Newcastle, Maine, looking across the Damariscotta River, a dramatic and beautiful tidal river. We’re eight miles up from the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean, and the tide chart says that we’ll have an eleven-foot high tide just before 11:00 this morning, a couple hours from now, so the ice floes are drifting north toward town with the tide. I can barely see the sea ice on the river, because my usual view is all but obscured by the piles of snow outside.

A couple weeks ago, the weatherman predicted a heavy snowfall, to be followed by rain. There were already several feet of snow on the roof, so we hired some local guys to shovel the roof, fearing that the added weight would be too much. Those piles added to the drifts already in place to leave six feet on the ground outside my windows.

We’ve spent a lot of time outside this week in eight-degree weather because we have a new puppy, and in spite of the cold, we’ve heard the calls of eastern phoebes and cardinals right on schedule. The wicked weather must be unsettling for these denizens of springtime in coastal Maine. Think of the poor ovenbirds, who get their name from the oven-shaped nests they build on the forest floor.

We’ve had about 90 inches of snow here this winter, which is plenty, but it’s a foot-and-a-half short of the all-time record of 108 inches set in Boston this year. Last weekend, friends and family there were rooting for the predicted snowfall to exceed the two inches needed to break the record—“if we’ve been through all this . . . .” I trust they’re happy with their bitter reward. 

Subways stopped running, roofs collapsed, and houses burned down because fire hydrants were buried deep beneath the snow. Local school officials are debating whether to bypass legislated minimum numbers of school days, because it’s simply not possible to make up all the days lost to cancellations through the winter. And the New York Times quoted the city’s guide to street defects, which defines a pothole as “a hole in the street with a circular or oval-like shape and a definable bottom.” An actionable pothole is one that’s at least a foot in diameter and three inches deep. I wonder what they call a hole that doesn’t have a definable bottom.

But baby, it’s cold outside.

It’s been a terrible season for pipe organs. Long stretches of unusually cold weather have caused furnaces to run overtime, wringing the last traces of moisture out of the air inside church buildings. Concerts have been postponed, and blizzards have sent furious drafts of cold air through old stained-glass windows, causing carefully regulated and maintained pitches to go haywire. One Saturday night, a colleague posted on Facebook that the pastor of his church called saying there would be “no church” tomorrow. The sewers had frozen and the town closed public buildings.

One organ we care for outside of Boston developed a sharp screech lasting a few seconds when the organ was turned on or off. After spending a half hour tracking it down, it was easy to correct by tightening a couple screws and eliminating a wind leak, but it had been a startling disruption on a Sunday morning. 

A church in New York City that is vacant because it merged with a neighboring congregation suffered terrible damage when an electric motor overheated, tripping a circuit breaker for the entire (poorly designed) hot-water heating system. Pipes froze and ruptured, the nave floor flooded ankle deep, and the building filled with opaque steam. A week later, when heat was restored, steam vented, and water drained and mopped up, the white-oak floorboards started expanding, buckling into eight-inch-high mounds, throwing pews on their backs, and threatening to topple the marble baptismal font.

My phone line and e-mail inbox have been crackling with calls about ciphers and dead notes, swell boxes sticking and squeaking, and sticking keys—all things that routinely happen to pipe organs during periods of unusual dryness. And I can predict the reverse later in the season—maybe just when you’re finally reading this—as weather moderates, humidity increases, heating systems are turned off, and organs swell up to their normal selves.

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

So sings the hapless Jud Fry in a dark moment in the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma!. He’s lamenting his lot, pining after the girl, and asserting to himself that the smart-aleck cowhand who has her attention is not any better than he. The lyrics pop into my head as I notice the winter’s effects on the woodwork that surrounds me. We have a rock maple cutting board inserted in the tile countertop next to the kitchen sink. The grout lines around it are all broken because the wood has shrunk. The hardwood boards of the landings in our stairwells are laid so they’re free to expand and contract. Right now, there are 5/16′′ gaps between them—by the time you read this, the gaps will be closed tight. I need to time it right to vacuum the dust out of the cracks before they close. And the seasonal gaps between the ash floorboards of the living and dining rooms are wider than ever.

The teenager trying to sneak up the front stairs after curfew is stymied in winter, because the stair treads and risers have shrunk due to dryness, and the stairs squeak as the feet of the culprit cause the separate boards to move against each other.

The other day, working in my home office in New York, I heard a startling snap from my piano, as if someone had struck it with a hammer. I ran up the keyboard and found the note that had lost string tension. Plate tectonics. Good thing the tuner is coming next week. 

As I move around in quiet church buildings, I hear the constant cracking and popping of woodwork changing size. Ceiling beams, floorboards, and pews are all susceptible. But it’s inside the organ where things are most critical. The primary rail of a Pitman chest shrinks a little, opening a gap in the gasketed joint, and three adjacent notes go dead in the bass octave of the C-sharp side because the exhaust channels can no longer hold pressure. And there’s a chronic weather thing in Aeolian-Skinner organs: The ground connections to the chest magnets are only about a quarter-inch long, and near the screws that hold the magnet rails to the chest frames, where the wood moves with weather changes, the ground wires yank themselves free of their solder and cause dead notes.

Let’s talk about pitch.

Fact: Temperature affects the pitch of organ pipes. You might think this is because the metal of the pipes expands and contracts as temperature changes, and while that is technically true, the amount of motion is so slight as to have minimal effect. The real cause is changes in the density of the air surrounding and contained by the organ’s pipes. Warmer air is less dense. If a pipe is tuned at 70°, it will only be in tune at that temperature. If that pipe is played at 60°, the pitch will be lower; if it’s played at 80°, the pitch will be higher.

While it’s true that all the pipes involved in a temperature change will change pitch together (except the reeds), it’s almost never true that a temperature change will affect an entire organ in the same way. In a classic organ of Werkprinzip design, with divisions stacked one above another, a cold winter day might mean that the pipes at the top of the organ are super-heated (because warm air rises), while the pipes near floor level are cold. 

There are all kinds of problems inherent in the classic layout of a chancel organ with chambers on each side. If the walls of one chamber are outside walls of the building, while the walls of the other back up against classrooms and offices, a storm with cold winds will split the tuning of the organ. I know several organs like this where access is by trap doors in the chamber floor. Leaving the trap doors open allows cold air to “dump” into the stairwells, drawing warmer air in through the façade from the chancel. This helps balance temperature between two organ chambers.

One organ I care for has Swell and Great in the rear gallery on either side of a large leaky window. The pipes of the Swell are comfortably nestled inside a heavy expression enclosure, while the Great is out in the open, bared to the tempest. A windy storm was all it took to wreck the tuning of the organ as cold air tore through the window to freeze the Great. It only stayed that way for a few days, until the storm was over, the heating system got caught up, and the temperatures around the building returned to usual. Trouble was, the organ scholar played his graduate recital on one of those days, and there was precious little to do about it.

One of the most difficult times I’ve had as an organ tuner was more than twenty years ago, caring for a huge complicated organ in a big city. The church’s choir and organists were doing a series of recording sessions in July, preparing what turned out to be a blockbuster bestselling CD of Christmas music, on a schedule for release in time for the holiday shopping season. It was hot as the furnaces of hell outside, hotter still in the lofty reaches of the organ chambers, and the organ’s flue pipes went so high in pitch that the reeds could not be tuned to match. It was tempting to try, and goodness knows the organists were pressing for it, but I knew I was liable to cause permanent damage to the pipes if I did. It was a surreal experience, lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweating to the strains of those famous arrangements by David Willcocks and John Rutter rendered on summertime tuning.

Mise en place

I started doing service calls maintaining pipe organs in 1975, when I was apprenticing with Jan Leek in Oberlin, Ohio. Jan was the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and had an active maintenance business on the side. I worked with him three days a week when I was a student, and loved driving around the countryside and rolling from church to church. (Many of my peers were trapped on that rural campus by a college that didn’t allow students to own cars.) I suppose in those days we did fifty or sixty service calls each year, and as my career expanded, there were some periods during which I was caring for well over a hundred organs, visiting each at least twice a year. I suppose the annual average has been around sixty a year, or 2,400 since those naïve days in Ohio. 

Each organ has peculiarities, and each has its own environment of climate and acoustics. The tuner-technician has to learn about each organ and how it relates to the building, as well as learning the ropes of the building itself. Over the years you learn where to find a stepladder, how to get the keys to the blower room, and most important, where to find the best lunch in town.¹

And speaking of peculiarities, organists crown ’em all. A professional chef has his mise en place—his personal layout of ingredients, seasonings, and implements that he needs to suit his particular style of work and the dishes he’s preparing. It includes his set of knives (don’t even think of asking to borrow them!), quick-read meat thermometer, whisk, along with an array of seasonings, freshly chopped or minced garlic, parsley, basil, ground black and white peppercorns, sea salt, and several different cooking oils. 

Likewise, the organist, both professional and amateur, sets up his own mise en place—cluttering the organ console with hairbrushes, nail clippers, sticky-notes, paper clips, cough drops, bottled water, even boxes of cookies. Sometimes the scenes are surprisingly messy, and these are not limited to those consoles that only the organist can see. Next time you’re at the church, take a look at your mise en place. Does it look like the workplace of a professional? If you were a chef, would anyone seeing your workspace want to eat your food? 

Care for the space around the organ console. Ask your organ technician to use some furniture polish, and to vacuum under the pedalboard.² Keep your piles of music neat and orderly, or better yet, store them somewhere else. Remember that what you might consider to be your desk or workbench—the equivalent of the chef’s eight-burner Vulcan—is part of everyone’s worship space.

Everywhere you go, there you are.

There’s another aspect of visiting many different churches that troubles me more and more. As a profession, we worry about the decline of the church, and the parallel reduction in the number or percentage of active churches that include the pipe organ and what we might generally call “traditional” music. But as I travel from one organ loft to another, peruse Sunday bulletins and parish hall bulletin boards, I’m struck by how much sameness there is. What if suddenly you were forbidden to play these pieces:

• Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (you know the composer)

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

• Nun danket alle Gott . . . (which of the two?)

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

Each of these is a beautiful piece. There are good reasons why we all play all of them, and congregations love them. The same applies to choral music. We could get the sense that if we took away “ten greatest hits,” no organist could play for another wedding. Take away a different “ten greatest hits,” and no organist could play another ordinary Sunday worship service.

I know very well that when you’re planning wedding music, it’s difficult to get the bride (or especially, the bride’s mother) to consider interesting alternatives. And I know very well that when you play that famous Toccata, the faithful line up after the service to share the excitement. It would be a mistake to delete those pieces from your repertoire.

But if we seem content to play the same stuff over and over, why should we expect our thousands of churches to spend millions of dollars acquiring and maintaining the tools of our trade? Many people think that the organ is yesterday’s news, and I think it’s important for us to advocate that it’s the good news of today and tomorrow.

The grill cooks in any corner diner can sustain a business using the same menu year after year, but if the menu in the “chef restaurant” with white tablecloths and stemware never comes up with anything new, their days are numbered.

This summer, when many church activities go on vacation, learn a few new pieces to play on the organ. Find a couple new anthems to share with the choir in the fall. You might read the reviews of new music found each month in the journals, or make a point of attending reading sessions for new music hosted by a chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Here’s a real challenge for you—work out a program of preludes and postludes for the coming year without repeating any pieces. Can you rustle up a hundred different titles? You never know—you might find a new classic. Remember—every chestnut you play was once new music! ν

Notes

1. In the days when I was doing hundreds of tunings a year, I made a point to schedule tunings so as to ensure a proper variety of lunches. As much as you may like it, one doesn’t want sushi four days in a row! It was tempting to schedule extra tunings for some of the churches—there was this Mexican place next to First Lutheran . . . Wendy would say I have a lot to show for it. 

2. It’s traditional for the organ technician to keep all the pencils found under the pedalboard.

The right tool for the right job

Parking a car in New York City is not for the faint of heart. I can reliably find a space in our neighborhood, as long as I remember to feed the meters ($3.50 per hour), and move the car, following street sweeping regulations, between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. every day except Sunday. If I park at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, I don’t have to do anything until the Monday morning sweepers. There’s an easy rhythm to weekday parking on East 9th Street. The entire street turns over for the sweepers, and like clockwork, at 8:30, the parking spaces fill with contractors’ trucks. There are six apartment buildings on our block, perhaps eight hundred apartments, and there are always a slew of home renovations going on. Co-op apartment buildings have rigorous rules stating the hours during which contractors can work,¹ so they all drive off between 4:30 and 5:00, and the whole street opens up.  

People in other neighborhoods enjoy “Alternate Side Parking” (ASP). There, parking is free, but cars must be moved at times designated on signs on every street, for example, 9:00 to 10:30 a.m., Monday and Thursday. At those times, car owners sit in their vehicles reading the newspaper, doing e-mail and crossword puzzles, and drinking coffee. An armada of police cars and tow trucks lurks at the end of the block until the appointed time, followed by the sweeper with lights flashing and horns blowing. No one doubts the sincerity of the enforcement of these regulations. The moment the posted time passes, motorists jockey to reclaim their spaces in a two-ton ballet that can get pretty comical.

The city maintains a website/app/phone service called 311 where they publish announcements such as snow-related school closings, and the blessed suspension of ASP for such reasons as religious holidays. When ASP is suspended, parkers get the relief of a few extra days of not having to move their vehicles. Funny when you think of it though—why have a vehicle if you have to go out of your way not to move it?

I have two secret weapons when I need to park my car for more than a couple days. One is a space in a commercial lot at 125th Street in Harlem, frequented by moving companies, bookmobiles, and bloodmobiles. It’s a thirty-minute ride on the subway, but it’s inexpensive and handy. The other came when we finished the installation of an organ in suburban New Jersey a couple years ago, and the pastor generously offered me parking privileges in their lot. It takes me almost an hour to get there by train, but if I’m not going to need the car for more than ten days, it’s worth the ride.

City slicker

Throughout my career, I’ve kept a fleet of tool bags, work lights, and vacuum cleaners in my car, taking for granted that I would always be able to park easily close to the job site and carry my tools inside. But when Wendy and I moved to New York City a couple years ago, I realized that I should create a “City Bag” that would stow enough tools for typical service calls and be light enough to be carried on the subway. Simple idea—but it turned out to be a tricky challenge. We work on organs with electric, pneumatic, and mechanical actions, which means I need to have several layers of specialized tools with me. Electrical testing equipment, soldering iron, tuning cones, voicing tools, pallet spring pliers are added to a collection of ordinary hand tools. You don’t need a wind-pressure gauge at every service call, but when you need one, you really need one, and Ace Hardware doesn’t carry them. And a good tool kit includes at least a dozen screwdrivers of different shapes and sizes—there’s always one ornery screw hidden behind a windchest leg that calls for an impossible angle. 

Besides tools, the conscientious organ technician carries an assortment of five or six different types of leather and felt for pneumatic repairs. He has little packages of replacement chest magnets and magnet armatures, leather and Heuss nuts for tracker action (and the special nut driver for the Heuss nuts), felt punchings for keyboards, screws, nails and brads, doodads and widgets. He has wood glue, contact cement, epoxy, and super glue, and he carries a tube of silicone adhesive (tub caulk), but he won’t admit to it. He has silicone lubricant, graphite, WD-40, a styrene candle stub (for lubricating screws), and oil and grease for blower motors. He has a couple flashlights and a fluorescent worklight with extension cord.

The terrific advances in battery technology means that cordless drill/screwdrivers are really useful, and there are some compact models that are surprisingly powerful. With a charger and one spare battery, you can work all day. Add that to your kit, along with a couple indexes of screwdriver and drill bits. I add a Tupperware container full of unusual bits. This includes bits I’ve filed fine and/or narrow for special applications, some extra long ones, and a messy heap of screws, just in case.

When I set out to assemble a City Bag, I found a neat, briefcase-shaped bag with lots of pockets, zippered compartments, a padded shoulder strap, and a little plastic tray with dividers to hold assortments of doodads. I stuffed it with hundreds of tools, bottles, vials, sandpaper, lens cleaners for my glasses, earplugs, band-aids, and all the scraps and paraphernalia I could think of. I included an electric meter, soldering iron, test light, and a wind-pressure gauge. Great, but it weighed a ton. 

I lumbered onto the 6 train to go to the Upper East Side for a service call and was exhausted by the time I arrived. And I was missing tools from the first moment. Over the next several sessions I kept a list of things to add, and tried again. During this period, my piano tuner came to our apartment twice, and I envied the backpack-shaped thing he carries. It seemed to include everything he needed, but of course, he just doesn’t need as much as I do to service pipe organs.

In the months before Easter I visited dozens of churches, some in New York where I lugged the City Bag on and off the subways, and some in suburbs and in Boston where I could use my car and the larger, more comprehensive sets of tools. But even then I was often missing things, or at least having to trudge back to the car for something. It was time to start over and get it right. I figured that after more than 40 years in the business, I should at least have a proper tool kit.

We spent a week at our place in Maine where I have a nice workshop. I dumped out both of my tool kits in separate piles and spread them out on a clean workbench. Now it was easy to compare the two, take an inventory, and complete them both by routing through drawers of old tools and buying a few new things. I decided not to worry about some details—it’s okay if diagonal wire cutters in the two kits have different colored handles.

I compared and combined the lists of stuff besides tools—leather, parts, lubricants, adhesives, solvents, and the like. Because the City Bag is necessarily smaller than the Car Bag, I had to make some tough choices, but I did save some space by switching to small containers of things. (I don’t need the 11-ounce WD-40, or the 8-ounce Titebond glue in the City Bag.)

I had grown to dislike my Car Bag. It was made of heavy nylon fabric, but it was square and bulky with hard corners, so it banged against my knees as I carried it. I found a new beauty with 60 pockets and a big center compartment. I added a second larger kit with wheels and collapsible handle that holds the cordless drill and lots of the other heavier stuff. And I got a couple of bungees so I could strap the Car Bag to the top of the Roller Board. Terrific. 

I stuck with the same briefcase style thing for the City Bag, but added a Big-Mouth satchel for the bulkier stuff and a totally cool collapsible two-wheel dolly, again with bungees. It’s heavy on the subway stairs, but rolls like a dream on the sidewalks—and when I go to a church and open my bags, those tools gleam and fairly jump into my hands.

It’s a tool thing.

People who work with tools have a thing about tools. My Facebook page is loaded with colleagues’ photos of new tools. One colleague posted a video he took aboard his new tractor while rototilling his voluptuous garden. “No texting while tilling!” Another friend shared photos of his stroke sander—a cool rig with very long belt of sandpaper that passes “360 feet of abrasive over the wood per second.” Several organ shops have recently acquired CNC routers, those pickup-truck-sized magical computer-guided rigs that take much of the hand labor out of building just about anything from wood.

Near our place in Maine, there’s an old-timer who runs a boatyard. He’s also the town’s harbormaster. The centerpiece of the place is an ancient truck-tractor (the front part of a semi-trailer truck) moored to the ground and fitted with a huge winch. A forty- or fifty-foot wooden sailboat is floated up to a huge car mounted on rails, balanced and secured on stands, and the powerful old diesel engine roars and belches as it draws the 80,000-pound boat out of the water. That machine is just as much a tool as the knife in his pocket.

A couple months ago, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City (5th Avenue at 91st Street) hosted an exhibition of tools. It included a remarkable variety of things from tiny pocket kits of gentlemen’s grooming tools, to a scale model of a 4,500-ton Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) with a cutting diameter of more than 50 feet. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a spectacular sculpture comprising thousands of hand tools suspended mobile-style, arranged with pass-through aisles. But the one that really got me was the “Tonometer” designed and built in 1876 by Rudolph Koenig (French, born in Germany, 1832–1901). It comprises 670 tuning forks that span the 49 semi-tones of four octaves (that’s almost 14 forks per semi-tone), which “afforded a perfect means for tuning any musical instrument.”² I wonder what Monsieur Koenig would have thought of the $9.95 Cleartune app I have in my iPhone.

Chimps do it.

Jane Goodall started studying chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika in 1960. I expect that most of us have seen films produced by the National Geographic Society that document her work. In November of 1960, she watched a chimp she had named David Graybeard poking pieces of grass into a termite mound, then raising the grass to his mouth. She didn’t understand what he was doing, so after he left, she tried it herself and found that the termites gripped on to the blade of grass. She realized that David was using the grass as a tool to feed himself by fishing the insects out of their otherwise inaccessible habitat. 

It’s funny to think that there is not much of a leap from a chimpanzee fishing for termites to a French scientist machining 670 tuning forks or to a modern crane or hydraulic machine. Of course our tools have gotten increasingly sophisticated and complex, but every tool shares the same conceptual origin—the adaptation of something to help us do work. Tomorrow, I’m joining a couple of my colleagues from the Organ Clearing House in Pittsburgh to dismantle an organ. Can’t wait to wheel those new kits into the building.

Government regulation

When I lived in rural Ohio, I had a neighbor who was a truck driver for a well-known chemical company. You might guess that his job was delivery of product. But no. They filled his truck with frightful waste, cracked the spigot at the back of the trailer, and sent him driving across the country, dribbling poison on the highways. It’s reasonable for the government to contain that sort of activity. 

In 2006, the pipe organ trade was involved in an example of government regulatory hooey when the European Parliament passed the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, which restricts the use of six substances in electrical equipment. It was aimed at the careless disposal of millions of cell phones and other personal electronics. Fair enough. I agree that we shouldn’t poison our rivers and lakes with lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, or polybrominated diphenyl ether. Each one sounds nastier than the last. (You can read more about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Direct….)

But wait: Pipe organs are electrical equipment, and it’s hard to hide that they have significant lead content. The European Parliament was talking about parts-per-million, while we measure our lead by the ton. Nevertheless, the restriction stood. The organ from a British cathedral was dismantled for restoration, and the new restriction would mean it couldn’t be put back together. The short story is that the international pipe organ community flung petitions back and forth across the Atlantic, and a loophole was created to separate pipe organs from
this restriction. 

The September 2014 issue of The Diapason included an excellent and troubling article by Anne Beetem Acker titled “The 2014 Ivory Trade and Movement Restrictions.” On February 11, 2014, President Obama issued an executive order effectively banning the trade and transportation of ivory, period. Ms. Acker describes the loophole: 

You may import an item containing ivory as part of a household move or inheritance, or as part of your own musical instrument or as part of a traveling exhibition as long as the item contains “worked elephant ivory that was ‘legally acquired’ and removed from the wild prior to February 26, 1976, and has not been sold or otherwise been transferred for financial gain since February 25, 2014.”³

That’s it. Until February 11, 2014, we at the Organ Clearing House considered ivory keyboards to be an asset. A simple organ built by Schantz or Reuter in the 1940s would have ivory keyboards, and because ivory is such a durable material, they would often be in perfect condition. I choose not to share my political views in this public forum. That’s not the point of this magazine or my regular column. But I sure wish my president had thought this one through a little better. To the best of my knowledge, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon are the most recent presidents who played the piano. I don’t know if Bill Clinton’s saxophone has any ivory on it.

I’ve had the thrill of an hour-long ride through the Thai jungle on a huge and gentle elephant. I am horrified by photos of majestic animals slaughtered for their tusks. I may be shortsighted and politically incorrect, so help me here. How in the name of tarnation will selling and moving a sixty-year-old pipe organ contribute to the slaughter of elephants?

I work with keyboard instruments every day. I talk regularly with dozens of colleagues across Europe and the United States. And I read the publications from our professional organizations like the Organ Historical Society, the American Institute of Organbuilders, and the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America. Excepting a few private conversations, Ms. Acker’s article is my first exposure to the severity of this order.

Some of my colleagues only build new organs, so are not affected by President Obama’s executive order. But the market for new instruments has been shrinking steadily for years, and many of us in the world of organbuilding find much, if not most of our revenue in the renovation and restoration of historic organs. 

On February 10, 2014, it was perfectly legal to dismantle an organ with ivory keyboards, load it in a truck, take it across state lines to your workshop, restore it, return it to the church, and be paid for your effort. Now it’s not. The fact that Obama’s language includes “trade and movement” implies that we couldn’t even do it for free. 

What do you think? ν

Notes

1. This is good for the quality of life as it limits noise to certain hours of the day, but surely adds to the cost of renovations.

2. Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, legend at tool exhibit.

3. Anne Beetem Acker, “The 2014 Ivory Trade and Movement Restrictions: New regulations and their effects,” The Diapason, September 2014, 28.

When it’s time, it’s time.

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

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

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

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

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

Parts is parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the pipes.

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

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

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

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

What’s the difference?

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

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

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

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