In the Wind. . .

Spice is the variety of life.

Wendy and I love to cook. We send recipes from newspapers back and forth and thumb through cookbooks planning what the next fun will be. We have picked up the vernacular of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean dishes. We grill and smoke meat and vegetables outside at our place in Maine (running a smoker in a New York City apartment is frowned upon), and we even have a lamb-sized charcoal rotisserie that has produced several memorable holiday events.

Some years ago, my brother and his wife gave us an assortment of spice mixes from a local boutique, and I have been ordering stuff from them ever since. Something as simple as their Tellicherry peppercorns are a revelation. The name does not refer to a place of origin, but rather to the larger size of the peppercorns. Open the jar, take a whiff, and you know you are into something special. We have Caribbean seasoning with dried orange peel, chili peppers, and ginger that adds a dimension to grilled chicken. We have a Moroccan spice rub that is heavenly on grilled pork tenderloin with pilaf on the side, and a Merguez mix often found in lamb sausages that is marvelous on a butterflied leg of lamb.

We have an artisanal butcher near us in Maine (I often send him photos of my outdoor triumphs), three or four organic farms, and as we are on the Maine coast, there are lobster, oysters, clams, scallops, and all sorts of fish. We keep a small garden with basil, oregano, sage, and chives. I consulted for a private school in Thailand in 2010, where I learned a few magic hints about how to achieve authentic flavors, and my pad thai is a family favorite. Our daughter and son-in-law live in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, home of a wonderful middle eastern Halal market, and as our son-in-law is Greek, we have discovered rich sources of Greek ingredients in Astoria, Queens.

As the day ends, an hour and a half in the kitchen is a time for reflection, creativity, special little tastes, and marvelous aromas. Add to that the smell of woodsmoke and a cocktail, and all is right with the world.

Variety is the spice of life.

Consider the clarinet. While clarinetists know the differences from one instrument to another, to the untrained eye one clarinet looks pretty much like the next. The same applies to violins, flutes, trumpets, and pianos. But compare a monumental organ with hundreds of ranks of pipes to a three-stop continuo organ, and even a skilled organist might shake his head. It is hard to imagine that the two can be the same instrument. I have had rich experiences with dozens, even hundreds of organs of all shapes and sizes. Let me tell you about some of the organs I have known.

Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 (1951)

The organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (also known as the Mother Church), in Boston, Massachusetts, is a mighty instrument with 241 ranks, 166 stops (that’s right, lots of compound stops), more than forty ranks of reeds, ten sets of celestes, and forty-two independent ranks in the Pedal division alone. I was organ curator there for around fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, and managing its care was the challenge of a lifetime. While many organs of this scale had more modest beginnings and were gradually increased in size, #1203 was built as one opus number all at once, and its original design is breathtaking. It is three stories tall and three “departments” wide, with the thirty-eight-rank Swell division (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 5-1⁄3′ Quinte Trompette) at the center. The Solo division that includes the Cor des Anges on twenty-five inches of wind speaks through a round grille high in the room to the left of the organ. While I was sitting next to a colleague listening to Catharine Crozier’s recital at an American Guild of Organists convention, my friend leaned over and whispered to me, “This organ is a gold mine at mezzo piano.” And it is loaded with real gold, too. There is an acre of gold leaf on the magnificent display of façade pipes.

I was thrilled to play “First Night” concerts there several years in a row with a brass quintet from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and audiences of more than 3,000. Thinking that I would be the big man at the helm of that huge organ, I learned a lesson about the power of the bass line from Chester Schmidt, tubist for the BSO, whose rhythmic drive meant I had a tiger by the tail.

Bedient Pipe Organ Company Opus 42 (1994)

After he retired from a long ministry in Winchester, Massachusetts, my father was interim rector of Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is a lovely little church right on the fabled beach, with a rectory next door, a swell place to spend time. The organ is about as far as you can get from the Mother Church, tracker action with three stops, 8′ Gedackt, 4′ Rohrflute, and 2′ Praestant. Oh, and there is a pedalboard with a coupler. It is barely six feet tall, and sitting on the bench, you can wrap your arms around the case. While Dad was serving there, I played an evensong recital for the congregation, a program of sweet little pieces by Handel, Bach, Krebs, and the Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto. I’m a big guy, and I felt as if I was riding a tricycle.

An elderly couple, members of the church and one of the first couples to “come out” in Provincetown, gathered the money to pay for the organ by collecting returnable cans and bottles. They rooted through restaurant dumpsters, combed the beaches, collected empties from their friends, and they raised more than $25,000—a nickle at a time. It is a parish tradition to have a potluck dinner on the Fourth of July ahead of the fireworks display over the water. Tom tried a piece of cake and went back for a second piece. Thinking no one was looking, he swooped back and walked off with the entire cake. Someone whispered to the woman who had brought the cake, and she replied, “I’m glad he liked it.”

I maintained that organ for about twenty years, visiting once a year whether it needed it or not. The drive to Provincetown covers all points of the compass. After crossing the bridge from the mainland, you drive east to Orleans, north to Truro, west into Provincetown, and south to the church. It is about 115 miles from Boston, a long way to go for three stops.

Roy Carlson (ca. 1968)

I was director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, for almost twenty years where the Carlson organ had three manuals and thirty-six ranks. Every stop was useful, and several of them were beautiful; otherwise the organ was unremarkable. There were two open 16′ flues, Principal and Spitzflute, that spoke promptly and well, and two expressive divisions. I played this organ more than any other instrument I have known. The chapel was air-conditioned, so we worshipped there in the summer. We used the main sanctuary for forty Sundays each year, so I guess I played more than 750 services. Twenty weddings a year made the total nearly 1,500, plus recitals and more. I was comfortable at the organ, played all sorts of repertoire, and led the choir through all the usual masterworks.

There was a large, dedicated choir room under the chancel. It was a luxurious space, but a little musty as it was a basement room, so I bought a couple dehumidifiers to take care of the piano, the music library, and the people, but they did not seem to work. I had asked the custodian to maintain them, and it took a few weeks before I realized that he was filling the tanks.

For the 275th anniversary of the parish, our pastor, Mark Strickland, went for the gold and invited William Sloane Coffin to speak at the celebratory banquet. He accepted. The choir and I prepared a review of hymns that might have been sung in different eras of the church’s history. When we got to “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” the Reverend Coffin shouted, “I haven’t heard that one in years,” ran over to the choir, and joined in, every verse memorized long ago.

Flentrop Orgelbouw (1977)

Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, is a lovely Gothic building on Euclid Avenue, just east of downtown. I was a student at Oberlin and working for John Leek when the Flentrop organ was delivered there. John was a first-generation Hollander and friends with the people at Flentrop, and we were hired to help with the installation. The organ arrived from Rotterdam to the Port of Cleveland on the container ship Calliope, and we carried the bulk of the organ up the stone steps into the cathedral. I was used to the three-manual Flentrop at Oberlin that was dedicated in November of my freshman year, and was deep into historic performance practices, so I noticed with interest when I carried a box of expression shutters into the cathedral.

A small organ loft with a spiral staircase had been prepared, and we set up scaffolding towers on each side so we could hoist the heavy parts. I was on top of the growing tower with Jan Radenführer, the church’s sexton, when it looked as though we were going to run into the slope of the ceiling. Jan gave a shove and moved the tower from the top, an experience that informed me that, while I was not afraid of heights, I sure was afraid of falling. In those days I was the young strong guy. I wore a leather holster as if I was carrying a flag in a parade and walked slowly up a ladder with each shiny façade pipe hanging from my belt, while others above me balanced and guided them. Leaving the cathedral at the end of the day, we turned back to look at the organ, and the façade was basking in blue and red light from the afternoon sun shining through the stained-glass windows.

Daniel Hathaway was organist of the cathedral, a friend from my teenage days, and together we played four or five duo-recitals, four hands on the Flentrop and with the smaller Flentrop that had been installed a couple years earlier. Beethoven and Rossini sounded great in Werckmeister. Michael Jupin, who had been associate rector to my father in Winchester, was dean of the cathedral. My first wedding was held at Trinity with Mike, my father, two of my uncles, and my godfather as vested priests. That was the first big organ installation I participated in, and it was a formative experience to work and socialize with the talented people from the Netherlands.

Johann Georg Fux (1736)

In September of 2019, I spent a long week in Germany visiting a colleague organbuilder, and I made a few side trips to see and hear iconic organs. The organ by Johann Fux in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck is a knockout. The church is one of those Rococo masterpieces with side altars with spiraling columns, murals, and statues everywhere—an army of carved angels. The organ is in the second balcony, high enough that it looks small. One reaches the organ by climbing and climbing and climbing an ancient stairway at the front of the church and walking down the length of the building about fifteen feet higher than the floor of the organ—you approach the organ from above. That’s when you realize that while it has fewer than thirty stops, those are 32′ pipes in the façade. It is enormous. It is humbling to think of that beautiful casework, huge pipes, gorgeous keyboards, and complex mechanism being built with eighteenth-century technology and hoisted to that lofty place.

Christoph Hauser is organist of the Kloster. I attended a Sunday Mass and was delighted by his tuneful, humorous, even sassy improvisations. His affinity for the organ was obvious and infectious. I was to meet Christoph after Mass and assumed he would appear at the back of the room. Quite a bit of time passed before I spotted him, looking every bit the organist, standing down front. We climbed the ladder behind the organ and opened case panels, getting a good look at the beautifully made components. He showed me the newly restored bellows, and he played for me. The organ is lusty and colorful. There are gentle flute and string voices, the big choruses with tierces are ebullient and boisterous, and the reeds are authoritarian.

That an organ more than 280 years old could have such relevance to our modern ears is testament to the timelessness of a great instrument. I was in the building for barely three hours including the Mass, but that intimate time with the organ will always be with me. I am grateful to Christoph for his generosity in sharing it with me.

E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 (1860)

Woburn, Massachusetts, adjoins Winchester where I grew up. It was home to three organs by E. & G. G. Hook: Opus 646 (1872) in Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, Opus 553 (1870) in the First Unitarian Church, and Opus 283 in the First Congregational Church. Two are still there, but the Unitarian church closed in 1990, and Opus 553, beautifully restored, is now in the Heilig Kreuz-Passion Church in Berlin, Germany, where it is known as “Die Berliner Hook.” Organ builder George Bozeman was organist at the Congregational church when I was in high school, and he asked me to join him as assistant organist so I could cover for him when his work took him out of town.

Opus 283 is a large, three-manual organ with trumpets on the Swell and Great, lots of lovely color, a big Double Open Wood Diapason, and a walloping Possaune [sic] with wooden resonators. The case has elements of Moorish design with round towers with minarets, and the organ has a commanding position high in the front of the room. I played there with and for George for about two years and have been back to visit the organ many times since. This organ has a famous twin, Opus 288 (1860) in Saint John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine, making a spectacular pair of pre-Civil War instruments.

The Congregational Church was about two-and-a-half miles from our house, and I often walked the distance. One afternoon I arrived at the church and realized I had forgotten my key. No problem, one of the big windows was unlocked, so I opened it and climbed through. The thing is, the police station was next door. I told the friendly officer that I was the organist and had forgotten my key, and he believed me.

As my senior year of high school was ending and commencement was approaching, I agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary chorus in a school near my house. I attended a couple rehearsals, and all was well. Friends suggested we go to the beach after church. Sure, sounds like fun. When I got home from the beach, I learned there had been a slew of telephone calls. I had missed the concert. To deepen the embarrassment, it was the organist of my home church where Dad was rector, whose daughter was in the chorus, who answered the call from the stage if anyone in the house could accompany the concert.

Oh remember not the sins and offenses of my youth, but according to Thy mercy, think Thou on me, O Lord.

Photo credit: John Bishop

The beat goes on.

At Oberlin College, January is a month of independent study between the fall and spring semesters known as winter term. During the fall, students propose projects to their principal teachers for approval. Projects can be off campus, and sometimes they are vacations disguised as serious research. I do not remember much about some of my winter term projects, but winter term of 1977, my junior year, was special.

My organ teacher, Haskell Thomson, designed a project for me and about eight of my peers, inviting the legendary eurhythmics professor Inda Howland out of retirement to lead us in a month of rhythmic adventures. Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) invented eurhythmics, a discipline that draws on the natural rhythms of the human body to enhance the rhythmic content of musical performances. Legend has it that Dalcroze was struggling with a piano student whose playing was distorted by chaotic rhythm. Following a lesson, looking out his office window, Dalcroze happened to see his student striding confidently across the campus. Of course he had rhythm, the human body is intrinsically rhythmic. Dalcroze developed that realization into the eponymous course of study, and Inda Howland (1907–1984) was one of his disciples. She had completed her studies with Dalcroze at L’Institute Jaques-Dalcroze in 1934, the year she started teaching at Oberlin.

Ms. Howland was seventy years old and barefoot, wore long flowing Indian saris, and carried an exotic drum made in Bali. She was never without something that could share a beat. Our group of eight or ten performance majors was a pretty cocky band, and I remember haughty smirks passing about as we first met with Professor Howland, sitting in a circle on a classroom floor bouncing balls back and forth while counting aloud. Maybe next we’ll color by numbers, have milk and cookies, spread out the mats, and take a nap. But it did not take long for the depth of her mission to become clear. We listened to recordings, sang to each other, bounced those balls, and skipped around in circles, all the while applying the motion of our bodies to the rhythmic content of the music.

One session was held in an organ practice room so we could play for each other. I was working on Bach’s Toccata in F Major at the time, and I was a whiz with those snazzy pedal solos. Up and down the pedalboard I went, swiveling on that imaginary ball bearing, emphasizing the high notes with Bach’s unexpected accidentals (and probably providing a few unexpected accidentals of my own). When I was finished, my peers made the obligatory supportive comments, then Inda Howland made a simple formative comment. “Your feet make more noise on the pedalboard than the organ pipes.” She used the word “clattering.” I was approaching the pedal keys from inches above, my feet slapping the pedals, producing uneven rhythms. “Try the first pedal solo again with your feet on the keys.” Yikes. Many readers have likely had similar experiences, where a teacher asks you to try something for the first time in front of a group. She was right. I had been practicing and studying the organ for close to eight years by then, and no teacher had ever mentioned this. Okay, maybe no naps.

When I was leading church choirs, I held annual choir retreats. The last choir I worked with was at a Congregational church in Massachusetts, and the camp was Craigville, a delightful beachfront community on Cape Cod. Those late summer retreats were filled with rehearsals on new repertoire, introducing the choir to the plans for the year, open discussions with the clergy about the choir’s role in the parish, and social moments at meals and beach time. In addition, I invited eurhythmics instructors to join us to lead daily sessions, and it was a treat to witness an imaginative eurhythmics instructor warming up the choir before a rehearsal.

During that winter term project, we had three morning classes a week for four weeks, maybe twenty-four hours altogether spent with the witty, enthusiastic, sagacious Inda Howland. I’m grateful to Haskell Thomson for creating that experience for us. It had a profound impact on my understanding of music, my own musicianship, and the many singers who participated in those choir retreats with me.

Take care of your machines.

You get in your car, buckle up, start the engine, and put the transmission in Reverse to back out of a parking space. You check the mirrors, look over your shoulder, and start the car moving. You make the turn, drop the gearshift to Drive, the transmission gives a little thud, and the car changes direction without pause.

Or, you get in your car, buckle up, start the engine, and put the transmission in Reverse to back out of a parking space. You check the mirrors, look over your shoulder, and start the car moving. You make the turn, come to a stop, and while stopped, move the gearshift slowly through Neutral to Drive before moving forward. No thud. The brakes are designed and intended to stop the car. The transmission is intended to transmit (get it, transmission) the motion of the engine to the motion of the wheels, setting them turning in the direction you wish to go. If you habitually use the transmission to stop the car and change direction, you are mistreating the transmission. That little thud is the car saying “ouch.”

One of my sons has a bit of a racehorse in him. That is to our advantage when he is skippering our sailboat during a race and causes our broad-beamed, slightly chubby catboat to leave an entire fleet of sleek sloops in our wake. (There is nothing quite like swimming off your boat at anchor while waiting for the rest of the fleet to cross the finish line.) But he was well into his twenties when he realized how much his style of driving was costing him. Tires had to be replaced too soon, brake pads wore out quickly, and an entire car “bit the dust” sooner than expected, sooner than he wished, sooner than he could afford. He still rides a big motorcycle like the desert wind, but he now drives his car like an adult and comments on how long a set of tires will last.

You are having a fight at home and slam a door to make a point. (I have read about such things.) The screws in the hinges, the screws that hold the knobset in place, the mechanism of the knob and latch, and the nails holding the door frame together all take an extra strain and work a little loose, and a picture falls off the wall and its glass breaks.

You thunder down the stairs, the stair treads pull a little harder on the nails, and the stairs are a little squeakier the next time. You slam the door of a cupboard, a dishwasher, a washing machine, and each machine suffers a little under the extra force. 

While I know perfectly well that an inanimate object like a door or a stair tread, or a machine like a dishwasher or the transmission in your car, do not have feelings, using them with extra force necessarily hastens their failure. My lifetime of operating, building, and repairing machines, especially pipe organs, combined with Inda Howland’s comments about my clattering on the pedal keys has made me aware of the noise that results from operating just about anything with excessive force.

That trick of putting the car in Neutral when you stop before changing direction does not take any real time. It is a matter of gentle timing, like the simple push of a piston as you move into a developing section of a piece of music. The seasoned organist gives the piston a gentle tap at the precise moment, an infinitesimal movement. The Swell reeds kick in with the box closed, and the drama steps up a notch. But I remember standing next to the console of a big city organ at the start of a service call, listening to the organist report that he could not change pistons, watching the energetic thumb jabbing at the little ivory set button as if striking a punching bag. Of course, the spring was broken, and the button was jammed.

How many organists, playing in sight of their audience, have drawn a stop knob with histrionic flair, only to have the knob come off in their hand, or better yet, soar across the chancel in a parabolic arc?

Do you play an organ with mechanical stop action? The next time you register a piece, notice whether the mechanism is making any noise. Some organists tug on drawknobs with enough force to cause a bang with each motion. Many slider windchests have steel pins driven into the chest tables that correspond with slots in the sliders to limit their travel. Yank that knob with a bang a few hundred times, and the pin will pull out and the slider will move too far, likely resulting in partially closed note holes so pipes are underwinded. You cannot use that stop anymore, and it is an expensive repair because you have to remove ranks of pipes, rackboards, and toeboards to fix it. If you can hear a thud, clunk, or God help us, a bang when you pull stops, you are not doing it right.

Twinkle toes

Most organists have a special pair of organ shoes, usually light dance shoes with clearly defined heels and thin soles. The idea is that they help with accuracy on the pedalboard, but they have an important effect on the maintenance of the organ. Every organist should have a dedicated pair of organ shoes that are never worn outside. Where I live, it is likely to snow four months of the year. An organist who practices regularly on an instrument I maintained never changed his shoes. He came off the city streets and went straight to the organ. The pedal keys and the frame of the pedalboard and floor around the console were sullied and stained with salt, water, and city muck. The pedalboard springs and the screws were all rusty, and the pedal contacts were unreliable as they were clogged with the same muck. Of course, there were multiple dead notes on the pedalboard. This same organist broke two pedal keys by standing on them.

A wood pedal key is roughly the size of a hefty broomstick. If you are heavy and if you stomp on them, you will snap them in a heartbeat. I have heard organists justify standing on the pedals, saying they are not that heavy (I am), that [Casavant — Skinner — Austin, etc.] pedalboards can take it. I think Casavant wins the prize for building the sturdiest pedalboards, but the keys are still just sticks of wood at most one by one-and-a-half inches with a maple cap glued and screwed on. Some are far spindlier. Never stand on the pedal keys. It is a musical instrument, not a diving platform. Remember my moment with Inda. If the pedalboard stays quiet, the musicianship increases.

Tickling the ivories

We are used to seeing theatrical gestures at the keyboard from musicians such as Yuja Wang or Lang Lang, a great pounce on the keyboard with arms sailing overhead. But remember, the tone of the piano is sensitive to the touch on the keys. While I know that some of that is for stage effect, it is fair enough that a pianist might invent a grand gesture that would deliver more weight to the keys. While I know all about the theories of sensitive touch with mechanical key action, on both tracker and electric-action organs, the force with which you hit the keys has no impact on the amount of sound. It is nothing more than extra wear-and-tear on a tiny sensitive mechanism.

Do you rely on excessive pounding to play fast repeated chords? Three popular pieces come quickly to mind, the left hand of Widor’s Toccata, Mulet’s Tu es Petrus, and the echoing episodes in the third movement of the Vivaldi/Bach Concerto in A Minor. If you have to beat the keyboards to make those rhythms happen, you are not doing it right. The keys on organ keyboards travel something like ten or twelve millimeters. With your finger resting on the surface of the key, it takes but a nanosecond to accomplish that trip. The sound of the organ does not know the difference between a pounded key or a stroked key, but your organ technician does.

I wonder if Inda Howland would be pleased with my extension of her teaching to how I handle my car, but I would love her to know how important her teaching and observing was to me. An organbuilder is part artist, part mechanic. I have always appreciated the operation of good machines. I am still a sucker for a construction site. The operator of a payloader can lift five tons of gravel with the flick of a wrist. Let the machine do the work. An early lesson for a woodworker is let the tool do the work. For a musician, let the instrument do the work. It’s your job to conjure up beautiful sounds. It’s the instrument’s purpose to allow that. Be gentle and love the thing.

It’s personal.

There are many celebrated relationships between musicians and their instruments. In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, longtime first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, wrote of his affinity for his instrument, the sensual relationship between the musician and the instrument. He wrote of resting the violin under his chin, between his brain and his beating heart, wrapping his fingers around its neck. Those who play woodwind instruments take it a step further by placing the instrument in their mouths. To play a pipe organ, one sits at keyboards at least several feet from the source of the sound, and in many cases dozens, even hundreds of feet. Yet we think of Franck at Ste. Clothilde, Widor and Dupré at St. Sulpice, and Vierne at Notre Dame as classic pairings, like matching wine to a meal. During my many visits to the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, I have felt that Peter Conte’s affinity with the monster organ he calls “Baby” is on a par with those French masters.

Last fall, in the days of yore when I got on airplanes to fly places, I spent a week in Germany visiting an organ workshop as well as a couple special iconic historic organs. A highlight of that trip was the hours I spent in the Klosterkirche in Fürstenfeld (near Munich) with organist Christoph Hauser, experiencing the dazzling organ completed in 1736 by Johann Georg Fux. Christoph’s imaginative improvisations during the Mass, his brilliant playing, and the excitement with which he shared the organ with me all spoke of his love of the instrument. When playing such an ancient organ, one does not flail. The instrument defines the touch on the keys, and the player meets the organ on its terms. The smart musician leaves a session with such an instrument having been taught, and Christoph spoke eloquently of how his playing was informed by that organ. Inda Howland would have surely enjoyed that visit.

Photo: Christoph Hauser plays the Fux organ. (photo credit: John Bishop)

What’s important?

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture for the organ class at the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester, New York, Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. The following morning, I met with several Eastman students for an informal chat in one of the organ practice rooms on the fourth floor of the school. I wondered what advanced students of the organ are interested in today, what literature excites them, what their dreams and aspirations are, and I was surprised and delighted by the answer from one young man, “Beauty.” What a marvelous outlook from someone embarking on an artistic career.

As a student, I remember aspiring to the next challenging piece, to giving concerts, to holding an exciting church position, but I do not believe I was smart enough to boil the whole effort down so succinctly. I know I loved beautiful music and art, but I wonder if the quest for beauty was at the heart of my ambition? Driving home from Rochester the next day, I reflected on that comment, thinking of all the beauty that the pipe organ has brought to our world, with its vast repertory of music from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Samuel Scheidt to George Baker and Rachel Laurin, from the ebullient anonymous organs of the fifteenth century to the modern masterpieces of the twenty-first century.

Rural and urban beauty

Where we live in mid-coast Maine, the depth of winter has a rich beauty seen in the foamy salt-water ice and the crackle of snow under your feet when the temperature is below zero. We have walked the six-mile Farm Road in the state park next door on a midwinter midnight, lit by the moon alone, witnessing the noiseless swoop of a snowy owl gathering a vole. We have a transitional season here called “mud season,” when the surface of the lawn and driveway begin to thaw, but deep down everything is still frozen. You go in it up to your ankles, and our half-mile driveway is like pudding, slick and treacherous. When all this melds into spring, the forest comes alive with green, the birds return, the gardens reappear, and the air softens. As I write this, the early morning sun is reflecting off the water illuminating my office, especially magical even at twenty degrees when the wake of an oyster farmer’s boat sets the room in motion. This beauty is mirrored in the mountainscapes of our new home in western Massachusetts with melt-fed streams and rivers rushing toward the sea. In the high summer the rocky coast and active sea have inspired countless artists.

Urban beauty can be mesmerizing, like the countless architectural expressions and decorations of building façades as you walk along lower Broadway in New York City and the majestic sculptures in the city’s parks. There are the Art Deco masterpieces like the Edison and Chrysler buildings on Lexington Avenue, and the fifty-eight-story Gothic Revival Woolworth Building designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1913 at 233 Broadway. And then there are the churches. Think of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Saint Thomas Church three blocks apart on Fifth Avenue. Across the Avenue from Saint Patrick’s, one finds the Art Deco Atlas with the earth on his shoulders at Rockefeller Center.

In our new home of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church is a building designed by Charles McKim with a statue by Daniel Chester French, baptistry by Stanford White, and windows by John LaFarge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. The little church oozes beauty.

Beauty expressing horror

In the May 2017 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–17, my column was titled, “Music in terrible times.” Wendy and I had just heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Dimitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, nicknamed the Leningrad Symphony, in Carnegie Hall. Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, and began closing off all roads in and out of Leningrad, the last being closed on September 8, isolating and imprisoning three million residents. I wrote:

. . . during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Shostakovich began work on the Leningrad Symphony in September 1941. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia that October, and he finished work on the piece there on December 27. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre in Kuibyshev premiered the work on March 5, 1942. The Leningrad Symphony had been evacuated, and there were only fifteen members of the city’s radio orchestra left in town. For the Leningrad premiere, musicians were drawn from the Russian army to fill out the orchestra. I wrote:

If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

It is ironic that eighty years after the siege of Leningrad that decimated a great Russian city, the tables are turned, and the Russian army is inflicting the same misery on a neighboring country. We learn nothing from history. How many years of peace have there been during my lifetime?

In that essay, I also wrote about the bombing of Coventry, England, the destruction of that ancient cathedral, and the dedication of the new cathedral for which Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was commissioned. Britten combined the text of the Latin Requiem Mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, commander of a rifle brigade who was killed during World War II at the age of twenty-five.

I opened that issue with this quote from Leonard Bernstein, dating from the days of the Vietnam War:

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Bedazzled by the Baroque

Visiting older organs in Europe, I have been amazed by the level of decoration. During my career as an organbuilder, I have made windchests, keyboards, tower crowns, curved stop jams, impost moldings, all the many components that make up an organ, but every part of every organ I have worked on was made using power tools. Whether I was using a big stationary machine like a table saw or thickness planer or an electric hand tool like a sabre saw, router, or simply a screwdriver, it is still hard work to build an organ. When I stand near a monumental organ built in an earlier time, I think of the incredible labor and dedication it took to mill logs into lumber by human power, to make flat and smooth panels, and to build the elaborate moldings on an impost or tower crown. And as if that was not enough effort, so many of those organs are festooned with statues of lions and angels blowing trumpets, adding to what is necessary to hold up the organ, all for the sake of beauty.

Johann Georg Fux completed the organ for the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, in 1736. Its thirty-five-foot-tall case is a riot of statues, gilded pipe shades, and moldings. Case panels at keyboard level are painted as faux marble. The organ’s thrilling sounds provide a huge dynamic range and variety of tone color. The instrument is placed in a second balcony thirty feet or more above the floor of the nave. It took superhuman effort just to get all that material up there. But if all that was not enough, Fux created a nameboard above the top keyboard with a marquetry pun on his name (German for fox) showing a fox stalking a goose. It must have taken him a week or more to create that image using a knife to shape pieces of wood. I marvel at the dedication to beauty behind an instrument like that.

It is fitting that the organ should be so elaborate because it is placed in a high-Baroque masterpiece of a building with explosions of carved, gilded, and painted beauty everywhere you look. Side altars sport carved spiral columns, shaped like the DNA helix. The pulpit bears a dozen carved images depicting biblical scenes, and the vaulted ceilings are covered with frescos. No effort was spared to pack the place with beauty. Christoph Hauser, organist of the Klosterkirche, has a deep appreciation for the majesty of the place, and his improvisations fill the building with the exuberant voice of the organ.

I attended Mass there in autumn 2019, and after the congregants left, Christoph showed me highlights of the building, demonstrated the organ, and allowed me to open case panels so I could admire the work of our ancestors in the craft. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of workers poured their hearts and souls into the creation of that magical place and that awe-inspiring organ. All this happened forty years before the American Revolutionary War, when American architecture was mostly limited to wood frame structures with little or no decoration.

The beauty of creativity

Beauty is central to the world of pipe organ builders. My work brings me the privilege of visiting many organ shops around the country where I witness craftspeople devoted to beauty. A beautiful architectural case takes shape on a CAD drawing. A tonal director sifts through the numbers and math that will define the organ pipes that will be ideal for the acoustics of a room and the needs of a congregation. A woodworker sorts through rough boards, choosing the right grain patterns for the best visual patterns, and mills, cuts, joins, sands, and finishes the structure, case, and decorations of the instrument. A pipe maker melts, casts, scrapes, hammers, and cuts the metal, forming the exact shapes and soldering the seams. The voicer coaxes the tone of the pipes, introducing them to their music.

In 2018, Dobson Pipe Organ Builders completed a magnificent new organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. That project included the design and construction of an unusually ornate case on the south side of the chancel. It seems a miracle that the materials, skill, and ambition still exist to create something that beautiful.

In 2013, Taylor & Boody completed a new organ for Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York City. There are two beautiful cases facing each other across the chancel, each of which includes a passageway from altar rail to side aisle allowing congregants to pass through and down a few stairs after receiving communion. A craftsman local to the builders’ workshop in Virginia was commissioned to create black iron railings to help the people down the stairs, stunning touches of beauty, elegant in their simplicity.

La Belle Époche

Ten years ago (or was it more like fifteen?) Wendy and I were in Paris, France. Before the trip, I wrote to a colleague saying I would be in town and wondered if we might meet for lunch. Her reply, “Gillian Weir is playing at Saint Sulpice on Tuesday night. Meet me in the Choir.” Nice invitation. Dame Gillian played
J. S. Bach’s partita, Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig, one of my favorites of Bach’s music, and Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte. I sat with her in the Choeur, gazing around in that huge iconic church, listening to a brilliant musician playing that rich music on the spectacular organ, wondering what could be more beautiful? And the punchline? At the end of the concert, my friend said, “In Paris, we don’t play Messiaen on the Left Bank.”

I was recently reminded of the “Intermezzo” from Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, that colorful, jocular dance that is played far less frequently than the grand and virtuosic opening movement of the symphony. It’s been a Class A earworm for me since. What a beautiful piece, and what great fun. There are many photos of Widor showing a range of facial expressions from dour to serene, but I have never seen one that shows the twinkle in the eye or hint of a smile from a humorist capable of such a frolic. Contrast photos of Widor to the many of Camille Saint-Saëns with the humor of his most bubbly piano concertos evident in his face.

Listening to Dame Gillian playing Widor’s organ all those years ago inspired my daydreams of what it must have been like to be in Paris in Widor’s heyday, the Belle Époche. Visual artists like Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gaugin were producing works of great beauty, while at the same time, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Debussy were revolutionizing the musical arts. The organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was building musical masterpieces that included technical and mechanical inventions, driving the musicians who played his organs to new worlds. We must always remember that without Cavaillé-Coll’s genius, we would not have the music of Franck, Widor, Tournemire, Vierne, and all who followed them onto those marvelous benches. It would be difficult to identify a time and place where more expressions of beauty were created.

Reading the memoir of Marcel Dupré, Recollections (as translated from the original French), gives a glimpse into what that time was like with lunchtime gatherings that included artists, musicians, and authors all outdoing each other as raconteurs. Dupré wrote of sitting in awe in the presence of Widor and his friend Camille Saint-Saëns. Wouldn’t it be grand to know what they were talking about?

§

We see rich decorations everywhere in beautiful churches. Pulpits, lecterns, pews, windows, and altars are individual works of art. It is a special challenge to add a monumental piece of furniture such as a pipe organ to those surroundings in such a way that the organ enhances and improves the building. When it does, the effect is breathtaking. The whole effect inspires worship, even before the organ blower is turned on. Add to that the rich tones of the organ, beautiful singing from choir and congregation, and the vast repertory of sacred music, and it is easy to understand what that young man in Rochester was getting at.

We train our bodies to do this magical thing, striving to overcome physical limitations so we do not stand in the way of our artistic expression. We learn to understand the most complex of musical instruments. We learn to alter its voice for each circumstance. We learn to train choirs and to choose literature appropriate for each moment so the worship of thousands will be enriched. Musical performance is momentarily bringing to life the creations of other artists recorded by notation in print or the instantaneous creation of musical forms through improvisation. The presence of beauty is so necessary in this tangled and complicated world, necessary to inspire hope, caring, and exultation. I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on why we do all this. It is worthwhile and worthy of our best.

Let’s hoist a few.

On September 24, 2023, Alyson Krueger published an article in The New York Times under the headline, “My Running Club, My Everything,” telling of the culture of running clubs in New York City in which twenty-five or more people gather at a specified meeting place and run together for four or five miles. She described an outing of the Upper West Side Running Club that met at the American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at Eighty-First Street) where members ran a loop around Central Park and wound up at the Gin Mill on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-First Street, one block west of the museum. I chuckled as I read because the Gin Mill is a favorite after hours haunt of the Organ Clearing House crew. I wonder how many of you reading this have sat there with our guys?

The Gin Mill has a happy hour routine with discounted drinks, and if you are anything like a regular and the bartender knows you, it seems as if you are charged by the hour. Your glass gets magically and repeatedly refilled, and the closing check is a nice surprise. I have spent quite a few evenings there, but our boots-on-the-ground crew has spent dozens. In 2010 the crew spent most of the summer hoisting organ parts into the chambers at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, followed by hoisting pints and other concoctions at the Gin Mill. Numerous subsequent projects have allowed reunions with the friendly staff there—friendly to good natured partyers, but hard on bad apples.

Since so many of our projects involve hoisting organ components in and out of balconies, towers, and high chambers, I spend a lot of time talking with scaffolding vendors around the country. I have first-name relationships with reps in a dozen cities, as well as with our personal representatives from national scaffolding vendors. We own several electric hoists, including one with a 100-foot reach purchased for that job at Saint John the Divine that can hoist a 2,000-pound load 100 feet in two minutes with a soft start and stop. A multiple-week job like that means that someone has held a finger on the up or down button for dozens of hours. We like to ship our own hoist across the country because specialized rental equipment like that can be hard to find and in poor condition. In a usual setup, the hoist is hung from a trolley that rolls on an I-beam so a heavy load like a four-manual console or ten-stop windchest can be lifted clear of a balcony rail, trolleyed out over the nave floor, and safely lowered. Safely for the console, safely for our crew.

The bells, the bells

Wendy and I left our apartment in Greenwich Village on the heels of the pandemic and moved early last year to bucolic Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, about five miles from the New York border. Our house is three doors up Church Street from Main Street where stands the granite Children’s Chime Tower on the Village Green that is shared by the First Congregational Church. After we moved in, we were delighted to learn that we can hear the largest bell ringing the hour, every hour, from the house—no more wondering what time it is in the middle of the night.

The tower was built in 1879, the gift of David Dudley Field II, son of David Dudley Field, pastor of the Congregational Church, and his wife, Submit (really). David II was a prominent New York politician and attorney who represented William Magear “Boss” Tweed in his Tammany Hall embezzlement trial. (Tweed died in prison.) David II dedicated the tower to his grandchildren, stipulating that the chimes should be played every day from “apple blossom time to first frost.” His grave is in the Stockbridge Cemetery, just across Main Street from the Chime Tower. My grandfather was rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge when I was a kid, and I remember sitting on that green with my grandmother at picnic suppers listening to recitals on the chimes. The music was simple as there are only eleven bells, but since it was more than fifty years ago, I remember it as grand. That tradition continued until recently when the timber frame supporting the chimes was deemed unsafe due to an infestation of carpenter ants.

The big bell continued to ring every hour until a storm caused a power failure last spring, stopping the clock at 2:16. The clock was not reset after the storm, leaving us wondering about the time during the night. At the last town meeting, the citizens approved rebuilding the chimes with a new steel frame, refurbishing the chimes’ playing action, replacing the roof, and re-pointing the stone work.

I was returning to Stockbridge last week from our place in Maine and saw a large crane set up next to the tower. I went home, unloaded the car, walked back to the green with Farley the Goldendoodle to see what was going on, and I found three men from the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, preparing to hoist the bells back into the tower. They had removed them earlier in the week, placing them on a flat-bed trailer owned by the town so they could be driven to safety overnight at the public works yard a half-mile away. The new steel frame was in place, and they were hoisting the bells with their new striking mechanisms back into the tower.

In the twenty months since we moved to town, we had only heard the largest bell as it tolled the hours, but now, as the people from Verdin were putting things together and testing the new actions, I heard all the bells for the first time in more than fifty years. At least one of the technicians knew how to play a little so a few hymns and a couple children’s songs wafted up the street to our house. Before they left town, they set and started the clock, freeing it from 2:16 to cover all 720 minutes of the twelve-hour cycle. The morning after the first night of tolling the hour, I was walking Farley a few minutes before 7:00 and ran into our neighbor Marty with Brody the Labrador at the poop-bag kiosk across from the tower. When the bell tolled the hour and we were chatting about the return of the bells, Marty told me that Stewart across the street used to play the chimes and was looking forward to volunteering again when the rest of the work on the tower is complete and the chime goes back into service. I suppose I will, too.

Doing it the old-fashioned way

After Wendy and I visited Florence, Italy, in May 2023, I wrote about the hoisting equipment designed by Filippo Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of the cathedral there. He had won the design competition in 1418, and construction started in 1420 on what is still the largest unsupported dome in the world. Brunelleschi’s hoisting gear was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill on the floor of the cathedral, a rig that was a lot messier and required more maintenance than what we use on our job sites. He made use of blocks and tackle, the same as used to handle the rigging of sailing ships. It is fun to picture workers hauling hay into the church to feed the oxen, and I suppose there was a poop-bag kiosk there also.

The real genius of Brunelleschi’s hoist was the crane at the top that could transfer stones weighing thousands of pounds laterally to every spot in the circumference of the dome. In the world of rigging, it is one thing to hoist a heavy load vertically; it is a very different challenge to move horizontally from under the hoisting point.

We marvel at ancient feats of lifting. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, is believed to be between four- and five-thousand years old. It includes some thirty stones, some as heavy as twenty-five tons. The stones came from a quarry sixteen miles away—simply bringing them to the site was effort enough. In most American states, the weight limits on tandem axles of commercial trucks are between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds. Rhode Island has the highest limit, 44,800 pounds, which is about the weight of one of the stones at Stonehenge. The Grove crane that was helping my friends from Verdin hoisting bells is a robust machine with a fifty-ton lifting capacity. The engineers and laborers at Stonehenge would have been pleased with help from Gary the crane operator.

We visit iconic churches in Europe built in centuries past and admire their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs. The monumental organ completed in 1738 by Christian Müller at the church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has 32′ pipes in the pedal tower. As modern organbuilders, we know how much work it is to handle things like that. Those eighteenth-century craftsmen worked very hard.

I was twenty-one years old when my mentor John Leek and I helped a crew from Flentrop in Zaandam, the Netherlands, install the three-manual organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. The organ has a beautiful twenty-five-foot mahogany case topped with a massive crown with heavy moldings that stands on a pedestal balcony something like fifteen feet above the floor. The balcony is shallower than the organ case so when you are up on top, you look straight down to the floor.

There is a polished 16′ Principal in the façade, and come to think of it, we installed that organ using technology and equipment similar to that used by Brunelleschi, lifting everything to the balcony and into the organ using a block-and-tackle with hemp rope. Looking back, it would have been a lot more pleasant had anyone thought of using nylon rigging rope like you find on a modern sailboat because that hairy, prickly hemp was hard on our hands. The heaviest piece of the organ was the impost frame with the huge moldings that form the bases of the case towers and the rigid structure that connects the lower and upper cases. I suppose it weighed around 1,500 pounds; so instead of oxen, there was me and a young guy from Flentrop pulling on the rope. We were much neater and easier to maintain than Brunelleschi’s oxen. My sixty-seven-year-old shoulders and back could no more do that kind of work now than fly me to the moon.

To lift the big shiny façade pipes up to the case, a co-worker picked up the top of the pipe and climbed a ladder from the nave floor to the balcony as others moved the toe end toward the ladder, bringing the pipe to vertical. I wore a leather harness around my waist as if I was carrying a flagpole in a parade, we placed the toe of the pipe in the cup, and I climbed the ladder, toe following top as the others above me balanced and guided it into place. Today I stand in a church gazing up at the organ, remembering doing that work, incredulous. I am not half the man I used to be.

I have been with the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years, watching my colleague Amory Atkins set up scaffolding and hoisting equipment on dozens, even hundreds of job sites. There is still plenty of hustle to the work, but the I-beams, trolley, and electric hoist all supported by steel scaffolding make for a much safer and less strenuous work site.

Making the impossible possible

When I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area in the 1980s, we had a releathering project in the large organ of one of Boston’s great churches. As usual, we started the job with a string of heavy days disconnecting organ components covered with decades of city grime and removing them from the organ for transportation to our workshop. After we had wrestled a particularly awkward and heavy part down the ladders and out of the building, one of my employees announced that now he thought he understood organbuilding. “It’s squeezing into tiny spaces to remove screws you can’t reach, to separate a part of the organ the size of a refrigerator that’s covered with mud and sharp pointy things and carrying it down a ladder next to a Tiffany window.”

He was right. A big manual windchest might weigh 800 or 1,000 pounds, more for a large console. If we are planning to dismantle or install a Skinner organ that has one of those wonderful electro-pneumatic harps, we might plan an entire day to handle that single specialty voice—they are big and heavy and include row after row of little prickly things that dig into your hands, arms, and shoulders. When I hear a harp in service playing, recital, or recording, my mind jumps instantly to the titanic struggles I have had moving them. They sound so ethereal in a lofty room, but they are pugnacious bulky brats to handle.

The thrilling rumbles of big 16′ and 32′ stops do not happen anywhere else in music, but again, my mind jumps to the herculean task of moving such things. The pipes, racks, and windchests of a 32′ Double Open Wood weigh many tons and will fill half of a semi-trailer. One of the marvels of the pipe organ is the idea that a single pipe might be approaching forty feet in length including pipe foot and tuning length, weigh close to a ton, and can produce only one musical tone at one pitch at one volume level. What a luxurious note.

When I meet people at social events, they are invariably surprised when they learn about my work. “A pipe organ builder. I didn’t know there were any of you left.” Another common comment is someone remembering the organ looming high in the back of the church and if they ever gave it any thought, they assumed that it was part of the building. Not so. Every organ in every building anywhere in the world was put there intentionally by craftsmen. They had to figure out how to mount and secure each heavy component. Think of the sprawling sixteenth-century organ case at the cathedral in Chartres. It gives the impression that it is somehow hanging from the stained-glass windows, but 500 years ago, those workers built scaffolding clear up to the clerestory windows and hoisted and lugged the heavy woodwork and huge pipes to their lofty spots.

Twenty years ago, we were delivering a three-manual organ to a church in suburban Richmond, Virginia. There was a big organ case with polished façade pipes, five large windchests, all the machinery and ductwork for the wind system, seventy or eighty eight-foot pipe trays full of nicely packed pipes, the console, and all the mysterious looking bits and pieces that make up a full-sized pipe organ. Parishioners volunteered on a Sunday afternoon to help unload the truck, and by day’s end the sanctuary was jam packed with carefully made, expensive looking stuff. I had worked with the church’s organ committee and governing board to create and negotiate the project and knew several of the people involved very well. After the dust had settled that evening, one of them came up to me and commented, “John, it wasn’t until this moment that I understood why organs cost so much money.”

Preservation by relocation

News of churches closing crosses my desk ever more frequently and shows up as rants on social media forums at the same pace. I read comments claiming that a closing is “criminal” or “unconscionable” as if reasonable and caring people did not spend years discussing how to manage an albatross of a building with the tithes of fewer and fewer congregants. In the early 1990s, I renovated a large three-manual organ at the First Baptist Church of Arlington, Massachusetts, and continued to maintain it until a couple years ago. There were 150 pledging families at the time of the organ project. By the time I retired from maintaining organs, there were fewer than fifty families struggling to maintain the huge stone building with a 1,000-seat sanctuary and monogrammed china service for 1,200.

As we completed that project, I got to know Eleanor Metcalf, an elderly church member who played the organ, practiced at the church, and substituted occasionally for the regular organist. She had grown up in the Baptist church in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where she studied with the organist as a teenager and loved to sit in a particular pew where she had a view of the organ’s pedalboard. She was a lifelong fan of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532, which she said she could never play herself, but was thrilled to watch her teacher whip through those opening scales on the pedals. When she and her husband celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they engaged me to play a recital for their family and guests on the Watertown organ. Of course they sat in her favorite pew, and of course I played Bach’s D Major. A few years after that, the Watertown church closed, as the congregation had dwindled past sustainability. The building was subdivided into condominiums, and the organ, which was not of great distinction, was discarded.

Last week I received a call from a member of the Belmont-Watertown United Methodist Church, a congregation created ten years ago by the merging of the Belmont and Watertown churches, saying they were interested in selling one of their organs. (Belmont, Watertown, and Arlington, Massachusetts, are neighboring towns, about five miles west of Boston.) I had maintained the organ in the Belmont church for years, and as it too lacked distinction, I was glad to hear that they wished to sell the exceptional organ in the Watertown church.

As it happened, I was planning to drive between our homes in western Massachusetts and coastal Maine the next day so it would not be far out of my way to make a quick visit to Watertown. Wendy sealed the deal by reminding me that there is a spectacular Middle Eastern grocery store in Watertown. The congregant, Laurel, told me the story of their decision process that led to the merging of the congregations ten years ago. The Watertown church has a long history of outreach that led to dozens of weekly meetings of self-help and social organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the like. The merged congregations had been worshiping in the Belmont church, renting the Watertown sanctuary to a Korean congregation, and continuing the outreach programs in the Watertown building.

They have recently decided to sell the property in Belmont and the large stone parish house that adjoins the Watertown church building, which will be converted to condominiums, and redevelop the church to accommodate the merged Methodist congregation and all the outreach activities. The church building includes a large sanctuary, an adjoining fellowship hall, and a large basement with classrooms and open space. The chancel, which contains the organ in side chambers, will be separated from the nave to create an additional large meeting room, which explains the idea of selling the organ in the interest of its preservation.

. . . and what an organ

While the organs in the Belmont Methodist and Watertown Baptist churches were unremarkable, the Watertown Methodist church has a spectacular instrument, Skinner Organ Company Opus 459 (1924), with four manuals and thirty-four ranks. Skinner produced many organs of this scale based on a scheme of expression and flexibility. This organ has four enclosed divisions (Swell, Great, Solo, Echo), three sets of Celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Flauto Dolce), three 8′ Open Diapasons, nine reeds, a two-stop Echo division (Chimney Flute and Vox Humana with Chimes), and a Harp/Celesta. It is full of lavish extras like celestes that start at low C and sixteen-stage expression motors. A creative organist can do anything with an instrument like this. As I write in mid-June, the organ will appear on the website of the Organ Clearing House in the next few days. I wonder if it will still be available as you read this in early August.¹

Laurel told me how the congregation loves that organ and respects its heritage, and though they are heartbroken at the thought of losing it, they know they would never be able to fund the necessary renovation. When I visited the other day, the organ had not been used for six years. When I started the blower, there were dozens of ciphers and only a few notes on a few stops that played. From that perspective, the organ seems like a wreck, but when I climbed around inside the two chambers I marveled at the “like new” condition. Scrolls on reed pipes were neat and tight, everything was standing straight, and there was none of the tuner’s detritus we often see laying on perch boards or in corners. I imagine that in the ninety-eight years since the organ was built, no inept service technician ever entered the organ chambers. I understand and respect the decisions made by the board of trustees of the merged congregation, and I am confident that another congregation will acquire and restore the marvelous organ for another century of inspiring use.

Another transplant

In the June issue of this magazine, I wrote about visiting the Organ Clearing House installation of an organ by Gabriel Kney at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.² That organ became available when the church that commissioned it in 1980 decided to divest itself of real estate and use the proceeds of the sale to create a fund forming the core of a church devoted entirely to public service. Once again, the decision was the result of years of reflection and discussion as they realized that it did not make sense for the ever-smaller congregation to try to sustain a complex physical plant. The people of that church were thoughtful, creative, and eager to continue serving the community as effectively as their resources would allow, and they are pleased to know that their organ is now being used daily in the chapel of a flourishing seminary.

From Passaic to Ingelheim

Around the year 2000, the First Presbyterian Church in Passaic, New Jersey, was experiencing decline in membership and was saddled with a large complex building it could no longer afford to maintain or operate, and it entered into an agreement with a neighboring growing congregation to swap buildings. I do not remember the details of the deal, but I know that the result was that each congregation wound up in a building of appropriate size. The swap was completed with the understanding that the Presbyterian church’s Skinner organ (Opus 823, 1930) remained their property, and that the organ could be removed when it was sold.³ In 2008 we organized the sale of the organ to the Evangelische Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany.

The organist of the Saalkirche, Carsten Lenz, was enamored by Skinner organs and had long dreamed of importing one to Germany. He first visited me at the Organ Clearing House exhibition booth during the 2002 convention of the American Guild of Organists in Philadelphia. Later, we met in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Skinner organs. It took several years for his church to raise the funds and negotiate the sale, but in 2008 we dismantled the instrument and shipped it to Klais Orgelbau, who renovated the organ and installed it in Ingelheim.

This was another example of the “smallish” four-manual organs by the Skinner Organ Company with thirty-nine ranks and thirty-six stops including four 8′ Open Diapasons, four celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Echo Viole, Dulciana), eleven reeds, three expression boxes, and a Harp/Celesta. Sorry, no two-stop Echo. Like the Watertown organ, this scheme developed by Mr. Skinner defines an exceptionally versatile and expressive instrument. I was excited to visit the organ in Ingelheim in 2019 and pleased that while Klais had made some modifications to the instrument, the Skinner organ was otherwise intact and recognizable in its new home. Carsten gave me an energetic demonstration and tour and told me that German organists have responded to it enthusiastically.

Worthy of preservation

I have mentioned two organs that I deemed unworthy of preservation. Both were useful, serviceable instruments that enhanced worship and brought pleasure to listeners. Remember Eleanor Metcalf worshiping in Watertown as a teenager in the 1930s in the thrall of that organ. You might think there must be some place for it. But the fact is, there are hundreds of organs available at any given time, and it is a good year when we place more than twenty. If I can offer a masterpiece like the Skinner in Watertown, it is hard to justify encouraging a church to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ordinary or even mediocre instrument. View it through a wider lens. There is a finite amount of money spent on pipe organs in the United States each year. Isn’t it our responsibility to see that most of it is spent on excellence?

There is an exception to this idea. The church that owns and loves a reliable, useful organ, one that might not merit the cost of preservation through relocation, should be encouraged to keep it in good condition, even if it needs an expensive renovation like releathering. I am not thinking of a wreck of a pipe organ that has been “improved” by unqualified technicians. Eleanor’s church in Watertown maintained their organ well until they realized that the entire campus was beyond their means.

Former glories

I mentioned 1,200 sets of monogrammed china to provoke the image of a parish hall set up for a huge dinner, backed up by a professional kitchen that could produce that volume of food, tuna casserole being the 1950s equivalent of loaves and fishes. There are photos of just such an event hanging in the parish hall of that church, the men wearing identical skinny ties and white shirts under their jackets and the women with updos. In the age of TV dinners and cars with tailfins, suburban Protestant churches around Boston were packed on Sundays, home to softball and bowling leagues, and the huge buildings they left to their descendants have become impossibly expensive to maintain.

Over twenty years with the Organ Clearing House, I have spent hundreds of hours in church buildings that have been closed. I have heard about how much a church meant to lifelong parishioners. They have shown me photos of their children’s baptisms and weddings and parents’ funerals, and now they are reduced to clearing decades of churchy stuff out of a building. What do you do with 500 pew Bibles, fifty choir robes, a hundred bottles of Elmer’s glue, or a library of choral music? In at least one church, the last-standing loyal parishioners were members of the “Disbursement Committee.” Without exception, these people are heartened to know that their organ will have new life, metaphorically carrying the life’s breath of their church to worship somewhere else. While it is always sad to see a church building breathing its last, it is a privilege to be able to preserve a good organ.

Some years ago, I visited a church building in New Jersey that had been purchased by a new congregation. It was a large, elegant structure in a prominent downtown location with hardwood paneling on the front of the wrap-around balcony and a big Austin organ down front. The original congregation had abandoned the building without any planning. It was during the last service that the people were informed that it was the last service. They simply closed the doors and put the building up for sale. The bulletins were in a dusty heap at the ushers’ station, the water glasses were on the pulpit, the altar flowers were long rotted, and that Sunday’s anthem was heaped on the choir room piano. It was the only church I have visited that was closed without years of careful, thoughtful planning. There must have been some angry people after church that day. I wonder if there was a coffee hour.

It is more usual for a closure to happen after years of deliberation. If two congregations are merging, which building is retained? There are likely to be conflicting sentimentalities competing with practicality. One building might be better suited for redevelopment for another purpose. It can be tricky to build condominium residences in a Gothic building. What do you do with thirty-foot stained-glass windows? In some cases, one building is chosen, but the better organ from the other building is moved. Each individual case is a sad story. Each involves personal and community loss. But this trend is undeniable, inevitable, and in most cases, unavoidable. It is not useful to rattle along on social media about criminal negligence, irresponsibility, or thoughtlessness. It just is.

I am impressed by the story I have learned about the churches in Belmont and Watertown. I think they are being creative with their heritage and their resources. I am sorry that the wonderful Skinner organ will have to leave town, but I know it is worthy of proper restoration, and I expect it will be easy to find it a new home.

Good old Mr. Skinner

When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, we were all in the thrall of modern tracker organs built on classical models. I did not understand or appreciate Mr. Skinner’s ideals; in fact I admit I was disdainful of them. Of course, the trumpet and mixture should be on the Great. What sense does it make to bury them in the Swell? Wait. I get it. More of the “meat” of the organ is under expression. Couple the Swell to the Great and start the verse with the box closed. It is a great effect to put the wind at the back of the processing choir by opening the box slowly.

The Ernest M. Skinner Company built its first four-manual organ for Grace Church in New York City (now home of a smashing organ by Taylor & Boody) in 1902. The organ in Watertown, built in 1924, is the 103rd four-manual Skinner, most of which are modest in size with fewer than forty ranks. This scheme was a wonderful subset of Skinner’s prolific career with imaginative use of a relatively small number of voices combined with seemingly lavish excesses of construction.

I have listed some of the attributes of Opus 459. G. Donald Harrison joined the Skinner Organ Company in 1927, three years after the Watertown organ was installed. In 1936, the newly formed Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company installed the iconic organ at Church of the Advent in Boston (Opus 940),4 long recognized as a near perfect example of the American Classic organ with three fully developed principal choruses, a Positiv division, and several mutations. Under its two names, the company produced 481 organs between Watertown and Church of the Advent, a little over forty a year.

Ernest Skinner grew bitter in his old age as the style of organ he developed fell out of favor. Walter Holtkamp, Sr., rebuilt the Skinner organ at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While that project was underway, Holtkamp saw the elderly Ernest Skinner standing forlorn and alone at a function of the American Guild of Organists. He thought to himself, there is one of our greatest organ builders and no one wants to talk with him. He walked up to Skinner and introduced himself as Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland. Skinner, who was hard of hearing, snapped back, “Cleveland? One of my finest organs is in the art museum there, and some damn fool is trying to change it.”

Notes

1. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/22899.

2. organclearinghouse.com/sold#/3085-gabriel-kney-dallas-tx.

3. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/23629.

4. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/7407.

Giants among favorites

I am often asked if I have a favorite organ, a single instrument that stands out among the multitude as the best, the most expressive, the most impressive, among the hundreds I have visited, played on, or worked on. I am never able to answer clearly by citing a single instrument. There are organs that have been important in my life, but great life experiences do not necessarily focus on superb organs. I am very proud of some of the projects I have done on simple organs that I was able to expand and improve so the congregations that own them were thrilled with the result.

I have heard some of our finest musicians play thrilling programs on magnificent instruments and come away from those experiences with gratitude for a life surrounded by great musicians and great organs. I have been moved by beautiful playing on exquisite smaller instruments and amazed by the relationships of beautiful organs with the acoustics and architecture of their buildings.

I have fond memories of the organs I knew when I was a teenager first learning to play, some of which I still see regularly, and memories of rich evenings with beloved colleagues—sitting with an organ, listening to its tones, experimenting with its mechanics, marveling at its design, historical importance, heritage—and then retiring to a restaurant for a great meal. I have visited many organs nearing completion in colleagues’ workshops and then heard them as finished instruments in their “forever homes.” And as director of the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that what seemed like a forever home for an organ can vanish, leaving the organ homeless. I am especially proud of some of those when we were able to find new homes for them and see them restored for a second century of use.

There are dozens, hundreds of organs I can think of that I love and respect as great technical, musical, artistic achievements, but there is not one that I can point to as the best or as my favorite. I will cite a few standouts.

Warner Concert Hall

I was an eighteen-year-old incoming freshman at Oberlin in November 1974, my third month as a grown-up organ major, when the grand Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. I was fortunate to have grown up in Boston where I heard many wonderful new mechanical-action organs, but the Flentrop dazzled me. Painted red and blue and wearing gold negligee, it looks fantastic in the mostly whitish room. I did the hard work of practice, lessons, studio classes, and required performances including my senior recital on that organ. After a long absence I had a chance to visit it again last summer, and as you read this, I will have attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that organ over the weekend of November 15, reuniting with dozens of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Basilica of Saint Martin

I visited Stefan Stürzer at Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Pfullendorf, Germany, in September of 2019. Manuel Rosales was there working on the earliest stages of the monumental organ they are building together for Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. Stefan, Manuel, Glatter-Götz’s then-new employee Felix Müller, and I had a chance to visit the Josef Gabler organ (completed in 1750) in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Weingarten, Germany. The only time we could schedule our visit was during a Mass on a Friday afternoon, but since the organ gallery is very high in the rear of the building, we were able to walk around chatting. In between leading hymns, psalms, and incidental music, the organist opened panels to show us inner workings, and he made a point of demonstrating some of the unique sounds of that remarkable organ, especially the haunting Vox Humana in the Brüstungspositiv (Rückpositiv).

There is a fascinating legend regarding that Vox Humana that had Gabler struggling to recreate the human voice exactly, and one attempt after many others fell short. The devil offered a deal: consign your soul to the devil, meet in a prescribed lonely place in the forest, and you will receive the secret for the perfect human voice, which turned out to be a piece of metal to be used to build the rank. It is not clear how Gabler got out of that pickle, but the organ was successful enough that the abbot presented him with enough wine to fill the organ’s largest pipe. (If the pipe was twenty-four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long, that would be around seven-hundred-fifty gallons.) The name of the city and abbey gives away the source of such a plentiful supply. I remember that as a remarkable encounter with a spectacular organ in the company of admired colleagues, pretty heady stuff. That night, Felix took the photo of me that shows every month at the top of the right-hand page of this column.

Saint-Sulpice

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential organs in the world. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré filled that organ bench for a hundred years as they taught generations of students. Imagine hearing Widor’s “Toccata” from the Fifth Symphony in that church for the first time. “Oh Maître, I hope you’ll play it again.” I attended a recital there played by Gillian Weir and could do nothing but weep. Putting my fingers on the keys played by Widor and Dupré for thousands of Masses and countless hours of practice was both humbling and thrilling.

Saint James

When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, around 1980, we renovated a large Wicks organ in Saint James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, with three manuals and twenty-eight ranks. It was located in an ample and high loft at the rear of the church with a small two-division sanctuary organ burrowed into the reredos, an unremarkable organ except that it was in a huge, resonant church and was a product of the period when Vincent Willis III of the great eponymous British firm was working at Wicks influencing their tonal schemes.

There was a lot of unification in the organ, so there was a lot of wiring to do, much of which I did alone in a Zen state, sorting and soldering row after row of wires while listening to a gaggle of women with an occasional added man reciting the Rosary for an hour after the end of the 8:00 a.m. Mass. By the time the project was finished, that sequence of prayers was forever etched in my brain, and when I hear it today, I can smell the soldering iron.

I mention this organ because it opened my twenty-something, tracker-action, early music eyes and ears to a new understanding of Romantic music. One afternoon I was playing the ubiquitous Widor “Toccata” (he sure did play it again, and so has almost every organist since), reveling in the effect of the piece in that vast rolling acoustic. I was used to playing it on smallish tracker organs that made it sound like pelting marbles on a metal roof. So that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Maybe there is something to this music.

“The Busch”

E. Power Biggs lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was neighbor to great thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Julia Child. After working with G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner to create an “experimental organ” in Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (now known as Busch Hall), Biggs commissioned a three-manual, mechanical-action organ by Flentrop Orgelbouw of Zaandam, the Netherlands, which was installed in the gallery of the resonant hall in 1957. That instrument quickly became world-famous as Biggs recorded there his brilliant and influential series of LPs, E. Power Biggs: Bach Great Organ Favorites. I was deeply influenced by those recordings, and I have met countless other organists “of a certain age” whose life paths were set by those recordings. As a teenager I heard Biggs play several recitals there, memories that have stayed with me for over fifty years, and I have visited the organ several times since. It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Flentrop organ on American organ building at that time, as the renaissance that was the revival of the classic craft was gaining traction.

Trinity on Copley

I worked at Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 until Daniel Angerstein closed the workshop to become tonal director for M. P. Möller in Hagerstown, Maryland. Dan and I worked out that I would assume the many service clients that led to the founding of the Bishop Organ Company. Jason McKown was a legendary old organ technician in the Boston area who had worked directly and personally with Ernest Skinner and told endless stories about Mr. Skinner and many famous organists and organbuilders. He was over eighty years old and eager to retire as curator of the marvelous double organ at Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, where there is a four-manual instrument by the Skinner Organ Company in the rear gallery and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in a chancel chamber. Jason had been caring for the organ for over fifty years. The building is a heavy, dense, grand place with interior decoration by John La Farge, and the organs sound spectacular there. Brian Jones, the organist there and an old friend, introduced me to Jason, and I became curator of the organs.

Trinity Church has long been famous for noontime recitals every Friday, and I was there early every Friday morning for two hours of tuning. It was my habit to listen to Red Barber and Bob Edwards after the 7:30 a.m. headlines on National Public Radio in my car with a cup of coffee before going inside to tune.

Those Friday noon recitals meant I heard different organists play the organ every week. Some players were swallowed up by the complexity and sophistication of the big double organ with myriad controls and combinations. Others managed to tame the beast, and it sometimes seemed that the organ somehow knew when the person who slid onto the bench was going to give it a great ride. Over a period of about ten years, I heard more than 200 recitals there. Of course, there were many repeats, but hearing so many different approaches to a single organ was an important part of my learning.

A couple doozies

Once I was established at Trinity, Jason walked me the half mile up Huntington Avenue to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known familiarly as the Mother Church, home to Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, built in 1952. He had been caring for the organ since it was installed, and what an organ it is with over 150 stops and 237 ranks. Jason recommended me to the church as his successor, and I had a rollicking ten years learning the mysteries of taking care of a truly massive organ.

Many of the world’s largest organs, say those with more than 200 ranks, were originally built as more modest instruments and evolved into their present glory under a string of opus numbers. One of the many remarkable things about Opus 1203 is that it was built all at once under one giant contract. Also remarkable is that it was built under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps, who was only thirty years old at the time. I know I thought I was quite something when I was thirty, but I am sure I could not have produced such a massive organ with such a sophisticated tonal scheme.

This amazing organ was at the center of my professional life for around ten years, and I had many important experiences and lessons there. I have written about it in these pages many times because pretty much any time I start writing about organs, it is there lurking—no, looming in the background.

I had a conversation the other day with Bryan Ashley, who has been the organist there since 2009. He revels in the organ’s majesty and subtlety and told me that it is the honor of his life to play it each week. The church has supported the organ with meticulous care since it was installed. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, has been working there since I left nearly thirty years ago, doing usual tuning and service calls as well as a comprehensive renovation under the direction of Phelps in the 1990s. The brilliant concert organist Stephen Tharp played a landmark recital on the Mother Church organ on June 28, 2014, the closing recital for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. He premiered his transcription of Igor Stravinsky’s world-changing Rite of Spring in a riveting performance that I thought changed the world of organ recitals forever. His fierce rhythmic drive and dynamic, fiery registrations had the huge audience spellbound. In testament to the quality and condition of that massive organ built in 1952, Stephen told me that he practiced energetically for dozens of hours in preparation for his recital and never had to call on the technicians to correct anything.

The Mother Church organ came to mind, as it does frequently, when I was in Salt Lake City this past August for the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, where the famous Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Mormon Tabernacle was featured in several programs. The Tabernacle organ (Opus 1075) was built in 1945, just seven years and 128 opus numbers earlier than the Mother Church organ. It originally had 187 ranks and has been gradually expanded to today’s 206 ranks by Schoenstein & Company. It was built under the directorship of G. Donald Harrison who considered it his masterpiece, and rightly so. A quick look at the encyclopedic stoplist shows its vast variety of tone colors and combinations.

There is a fundamental difference between these two extraordinary organs. While both can be considered “American Classic” instruments, the Mother Church organ has lower wind pressures. The Positiv division is on less than two inches of wind; it is amazing that the eleven-stop pitman windchest can function on such low pressure. Along with lower wind pressures, the organ has what could be considered Baroque choruses with German nomenclature. Along with the Great, Swell, and Choir you would expect to find the Hauptwerk and Positiv with distinctly lighter tone.

Both organs are rich with multiple pairs of “celesting” stops, mutations at every pitch imaginable, and many mixtures of varying character. It is important to note that both organs are scrupulously maintained in terrific condition, reflecting the dedication of those two institutions.

Look it up.

I have been rattling from one organ to another, and I imagine some readers would be interested to see the stoplists. You are in luck. The Organ Historical Society has a broad and valuable database of organs across the United States. Visit pipeorgandatabase.com, click on “Instruments” in the upper left corner, then click on “View/Search Instruments.” That will open a form with blanks to fill in: Location (Church, Institution, etc.), City, State, Builder, Opus Number, etc. You usually only need to fill in a few blanks before the organ you are looking for pops up.

The database is a fantastic resource with photos and information about thousands of organs. The website is open on my browser whenever I am sitting at my desk, and I routinely search for information about dozens of organs. A little hint: if an organ has been rebuilt, it is likely you will find it under that company rather than the original builder. For example, you will find the Mother Church organ under Foley-Baker, not Aeolian-Skinner. Three cheers to the OHS for conceiving and continuing with that valuable project, essential to those who work with and research organs, and fascinating to all of us who are just plain interested.

If you visit the database and do not see an organ you play regularly or just know and love, go back to the original menu, click “Instruments,” and then click “Submit New Instrument Entry.” Your submission will be reviewed, someone may ask you a question or two, and then you will have contributed to a unique and valuable resource.

Next time we meet, ask me what’s my favorite organ. I’m thinking about that all the time; you may get a sassy answer.