In the Wind. . .

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?

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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.

Music as community . . .

When I was offered the opportunity of joining the Organ Clearing House during the summer of 2000, I faced a critical choice. In addition to working independently as an organbuilder and technician, renovating and maintaining a gaggle of organs in the Boston area, I was also director of music at a large suburban Congregational church. I knew that the Organ Clearing House would sweep me into a busy travel schedule, and that I would have to make a choice.

That was a difficult decision on many levels. I had developed many friendships over my nearly twenty-year tenure at the church. For the first sixteen years, it was a privilege to work with the senior pastor, a kind and wise man and fellow sailor who preached beautifully and supported the music program vigorously. The privilege diminished after his retirement with a string of short-term successors who ranged from silly to terrible, but I valued my relationship with the choir enormously. We were fortunate to have a superb professional quartet joining the twenty or so volunteers, and we had a blast preparing and presenting all sorts of music from simple unaccompanied hymns to great oratorios with orchestra.

Each Thursday night, we opened our home after rehearsal, and at least half, sometimes all of the choir would show up. BYOB was the order of the day (though we made sure to have extra on hand, just in case), and we would order pizza or some appropriate substitute and spend a couple hours discussing the music we had worked on that evening, projects that various members were involved in outside the church, and simply nourishing our friendships. I have no doubt that the camaraderie of those many evenings enhanced our music-making by building special levels of trust and respect among that cheerful group of musicians.

Almost twenty years have passed since I faced and made the decision to leave all that and join the Organ Clearing House. I do not regret the choice, but I miss the fun and richness of working with that choir. Of all the aspects of playing the organ for worship, I miss most the pageantry of processional and recessional hymns—the movement of the sound of the choir through the building, the relationship between the choir and congregation, the ebb and flow of the poetry, and the wonderful feeling of producing all that acoustic sound to surround, lead, encourage, and inspire the congregation. As the choir mounted the chancel steps and split into the rows of center-facing choir stalls, I loved having eye contact with them as I played and they sang. Sometimes an exchanged wink would remind us of a joke, sometimes we simply reveled in the joy of it.

The living organ

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) was an innovative and inquisitive organbuilder and founder of the venerable firm C. B. Fisk, Inc. Charlie was revered by his coworkers for his Socratic teaching, inspiring creative thought by posing questions. He famously said, “The organ is a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to appear to be alive.” I have often written that it is the challenge, even the responsibility of the organbuilder to remove the mechanics from the equation. Practically, it is impossible. Every organ has some elusive click, buzz, or hiss. But careful attention to fabricating techniques and quality control, especially being sure that moving parts are identical in form and function can tame the wild beast within.

Some organs, especially undistinguished organs with electro-pneumatic action, can seem like industrial products with lifeless tone, but when I am working inside an instrument, there is a big difference in the sensations I feel whether the blower is running or not. When the blower is not running, the organ is static and lifeless. When the blower is turned on, I hear and feel the air surging through the windlines, filling the reservoirs and pressurizing windchests. There may be a few creaks and groans as wind vessels fill. The organ gains breath and comes alive.

Organs that are conceived, intended, and built to seem alive are those that can become part of a community of music making in a church. They join the choir in air-driven acoustic musical leadership, that unique type of tone that carries and blends so well.

At one with the machine

In his book, Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, the now retired first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, wrote sensually about his relationship with his violin: “When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” (page 5)

I have shared this quote in these pages several times over the years. When I first read it, I was touched by his eloquence about the intimacy of his relationship with his instrument, and I wondered further, what about the clarinetist or bassoonist who puts the business end of his instrument in his mouth. It does not get much more personal than that.

Compare that to the organist sitting on the bench at one end of a large room. She draws a simple stop, perhaps the most beautiful Diapason voice on the instrument, and plays a single note. If the organ has tracker action, the motion of her finger has moved a few levers to open a valve, releasing stored pressurized air to move into the pipe and produce tone.

If it is an electro-pneumatic organ, her finger has closed an electric contact (switch) sending current through a wire to an electro-magnet. The energized magnet moves a metal armature (valve), which opens one end of a pressurized channel to the atmosphere. The other end of that channel is closed by a leather pouch with a valve glued to it. When the pressure is released from the channel, the pouch collapses, pulling open the valve. It takes a lot more words to describe simply the motions of an electro-pneumatic action, and if it is a large instrument, there can be many more steps between key and valve including intermediate relays and switching. But in a well-built and well-regulated action, it all happens instantaneously.

That one motion of the organist’s finger sends a single tone across the vast space. It is similar to flipping a switch to turn on a light. But the lively thrill of playing the organ comes in the clever and seamless operation of the machine. Touch a button with your thumb and that single note releases a roar. Hold the note and flex your ankle, and the note gets softer. And to think you have done all this with a single note. Multiply those gestures exponentially, and you create a musical whole with an expressive range greater than that of a symphony orchestra, deftly skipping from one family of instruments to another, combining them, giving them solos, filling the room with complex tones.

Mr. Steinhardt is one of our greatest violinists. He can produce magic from that pound of spruce, producing a kaleidoscope of colors. He can shift from stentorian majesty to nimble coloratura. But Steinhardt’s kaleidoscope is miniscule when compared to the organist shifting from a mighty chorus of Tubas to a distant Aeoline. And the organist’s ability to superimpose a variety of tone colors simultaneously is unique in the world of music. The contrast between a Diapason and a Trumpet is the perfect example. The two voices may have the same volume level, but they are significantly different in harmonic structure. They can be compared one after the other, they can be contrasted, each being given an independent line of music, or they can be combined and played together. And that is just two stops. Multiply that by dozens or even hundreds, and the organist has a seemingly limitless variety of tone available at the touch of a finger. Or thousands of touches of fingers.

And that is where the seamless machine comes in. Recently, a colleague mentioned that he was using a sequence of forty-five pistons for a single decrescendo. What does that statement mean to a knowledgeable organist? First, it must be a huge organ to have that many pistons and enough stops to make that many meaningful changes in a single passage. Second, the organist is seeking a very grand, sweeping effect. Third, the organist is putting in a lot of work to prepare. Does it take an hour, two hours, or more of practice time to create such a sequence? Did he need to have a friend present to share in the listening as he made decisions? And we can assume (or hope) that this monumental organ is in a huge acoustic space. And that is one of the singular aspects of playing the organ—creating vast tonal structures in vast acoustic spaces. (I was right on all counts. It was David Briggs working on registrations for his new transcription of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City on February 26.)

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A violin typically weighs less than a pound­—400 grams is usual. The luthier labors for months with a half dozen pieces of wood, each of which weighs a few ounces. We weigh pipe organs by the ton, and the process of building an organ involves thousands of hours of managing hundreds of components, some of which weigh as much as a ton. You see that big tower crown with moldings and carvings, sitting on top of a forty-foot organ case? And how did it get there? That’s right. People put it there. Notice how it is just a foot or two from the ceiling arch? And what does that mean? Right. There could be no hoisting point above it. People put it there without mechanical assistance.

How do we build a ten-ton machine whose mechanical presence can vanish under the fingers of an artist? Here are a few of the myriad issues to be considered by the organbuilder.

Architectural design

The excellent monumental organ should claim a commanding architectural presence in its surroundings. The organ relies on the building for the projection and blending of its tone, and the symbiotic relationship should include visual harmony. In that sense, the organ is the mouthpiece of the building.

Tonal structure

If an organ is intended for liturgical use in a large space, it must include:

• a wide dynamic range with individual voices carefully planned so as to allow subtle gradation between different levels of volume;

• enough variety of tone to satisfy the requirements of congregational leadership, expressive accompaniment of solo voices and choruses, festival outbursts, and the realm of solo organ literature;

• multiple keyboard divisions, each with a specific purpose and individual character, and each blending seamlessly with all the others.

Limitless lungs

A mentor and colleague once shared his mantra with me, “Air is the fuel we burn to produce organ tone.” If we are setting out to produce monumental tone in a monumental space, we are going to need a lot of fuel. It takes a hurricane of air to make one big bass pipe go. Once in a while, when servicing an organ, I have occasion to lift one of those big babies from its hole, and let me tell you, until you have experienced ten or fifteen inches of wind blasting through that six-inch hole, you cannot have full appreciation of the amount of energy involved in the speech of that pipe.

Add to that one toehole the hundreds involved in the last fortissimo chord of French toccata, and you might get a sense of what’s going on. A six-note chord with a hundred stops playing equals how many toeholes? A large organ blower might be able to move ten thousand cubic feet of air per minute at whatever pressure the organ is running on. How big is ten thousand cubic feet? It’s fifty by twenty by ten feet. A professional bowling lane is sixty feet long.

The machines and reservoirs that create and store the pressure are accurately regulated to provide pressure at a steady and constant rate. If the pressure varies, so does the pitch and intensity of the tone.

Sensitive mechanics

I have stressed several times the importance of silence of the organ’s mechanical systems. Once again, it is impossible, practically, to make such a complex and monstrous machine disappear. The listener may hear a “thump” from the console during a big registration change, a squeak from an expression shutter, a click from a distant primary valve. The organist and the organbuilder or maintenance technician cooperate to correct and repair those conditions as they arise. I know I have spent hundreds of hours crawling around in organs looking for extraneous mechanical noises. On more than one occasion, it has turned out not to be the organ at all, but a light fixture above the nave ceiling that rattles when low FFF# is played. The last time the bulb was changed, the custodian did not tighten all the screws.

The keyboards are regulated so that all feel alike, and the “strike point” of each is at precisely the same level. All the keys travel the same distance and have the same spring tension and weight.

Windchest actions are silent and consistent. Precision is essential in fabricating the mechanical parts of a pipe organ. Each must have exactly the dimensions, density, and weight in order to ensure that each note performs the same as the rest. The standard for the best pipe organ actions is the repetition rate. In both tracker and electro-pneumatic organs, the action must be free and capable of repeating faster than any human fingers can move. While many musicians assume that speed of attack is essential to rate of repetition, the offending issue is more often the (lack of) speed of release.

With all these factors faithfully executed and carefully balanced, the pipe organ becomes the perfect extension of the musician. It is an acoustic pantograph, expanding the scale of musical thought according to physical settings.

Community spirit

That organ, so beautifully balanced and scaled to its environment, is not only an extension of the thoughts and inspirations of the organist, but for the entire community of listeners and singers. While plant life takes in oxygen and produces carbon dioxide, a transformation that is essential to the balance of life, a pipe organ takes in air and exhausts air. The same air that runs through the works and the pipes of the organ is inhaled by the singers, soloists, choristers, and congregants alike, who in turn produce musical tone in harmony with the instrument. The inspiration and exchange of air enables the inspiration and exchange of musical ideas, emotional responses, worshipful experiences, and the range of human interaction. Those sensations are measured in goose bumps.

The organ in the church where I played last was not extraordinary, but it was a good, solid, pretty complete three-manual electro-pneumatic organ. It was in good condition and everything worked, and the independent voices blended nicely into choruses, with solo singers, the choir, and with the congregation. It was a familiar part of the family, and together we rode its broad back through countless adventures. It was a magic carpet ride with plenty of seats and cup holders. I loved it.

Humble π

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”

Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.

But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr² (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.

Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.

Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.

Achimedes’ mental model

Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:

When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

The last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr³. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr²h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.

My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.

I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.

Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.

If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.

Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.¹ The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.

An American renaissance

As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.

There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.

A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.

In a nutshell

The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.

In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.

Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.

I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.

He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.

I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

Pipes, wind, and wood

During the 1960s and 1970s, a number of organ building firms were founded, dedicated to building mechanical-action pipe organs according to ancient principles. This proliferation has been generally called the “Tracker Revival,” among other names, but more to the point, it was a renaissance of the philosophy of building pipe organs in small workshops rather than in large factories. In the years leading up to World War II, the larger American organ building firms adopted mass-production practices and controlled expenses diligently, which diminished the artistic and musical content of the instruments.

The idea of building pipe organs by hand was revolutionary, and there was a steep learning curve for these artisans. Early in the twentieth century, most American organs used relatively high wind pressure. Four inches on a water column was common, and firms like the Skinner Organ Company routinely used pressures from four to six inches on the Great, six to eight on the Swell, and often included Solo Tubas on ten, twelve, and even twenty-five inches. Such high pressures in large organs were only made possible by the invention of the electric blower that could produce huge volumes of pressurized air. Historic European organs typically used pressures of three inches or less (remember that before about 1900 pipe organs were blown by human power), and twentieth-century American builders, starting more or less from scratch, had to learn anew how to make large organ pipes speak beautifully on low wind pressure.

A critical part of measuring wind pressure is volume. The output capability of an organ blower is measured in cubic feet per minute at a given pressure. And in a mechanical-action organ with slider windchests, the delivery of pressurized air from the blower depends on the dimensions of the windlines from blower to reservoir to windchests, of windchest tone channels, of pallet (valve) openings, toe holes sizes in both windchests and pipes, and many other minutia. Several years ago, I visited the huge Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while the people of Juget-Sinclair were at work on the renovation and was amazed to see that small paper tubing was used to provide wind for the behemoth 32′ façade pipes, demonstrating that in the 1950s, venerable European firms were also busy learning how to do great things with low wind pressure.

E. Power Biggs released his influential two-record set, The Golden Age of the Organ, featuring the organs of Arp Schnitger and the chorale preludes of Ernst Pepping in 1968. That recording was a bellwether, as important as any single document in the inception of the new age of organ building. I wore holes in those LPs as a teenager, poring over the published specifications, gobbling up Pepping’s cheerful leaping music, and forming a lifelong relationship with Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor. The gorgeous tones of the 8′ Principal in the Pedal with intertwining 4′ stops playing the violin are fully in my ears as I write.

John Brombaugh established his company in 1968 in Middletown, Ohio, and gathered a group of five partners that included John Boody and George Taylor. In the following years, an absolute who’s who of the twentieth-century pipe organ worked in Brombaugh’s shop, including many who went on to form their own companies. Brombaugh was one of the first to dig hard into the study of older organs in Europe, taking thousands of measurements, trying to learn what made those instruments sound so wonderful, and bringing that information back to the workshop to convert the numbers into music.

Ten years after starting the company in Ohio, when Brombaugh was eager to move the company to Oregon, George Taylor and John Boody chose to stay and form their own company in Middletown. As part of the dissolution of the partnership, Brombaugh passed on to them a contract for a new organ of two manuals and eighteen stops for the Presbyterian Church of Coshocton, Ohio. George and John set up shop in John’s garage to build the organ. It was completed in 1979, and Harald Vogel played the dedicatory recital.

As they were finishing the organ in Coshocton, they dreamed of purchasing a school building, thinking that with high ceilings, big windows, and wood floors, such a building would make a great workshop. George’s sister was graduating from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. George and John drove down to attend, and a college friend of George’s suggested an old school in town that was available. During a short visit, they immediately started talking about the price and bought the building for $11,000. More than forty years later, Taylor & Boody is still building organs there.

§

John Boody and I have shared a special bond as I maintained the E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ (Opus 635, 1872) in the First Baptist Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where John grew up and where his grandfather had been pastor. (Sadly, the church and organ were destroyed by fire on October 24, 2018.) We have been friends for a long time and have shared many a meal, wiling away convivial hours, and we have collaborated a few times. I spent a cheerful ninety minutes on the phone with John on January 10, 2021, hearing his thoughts about the history of Taylor & Boody.

John expressed gratitude for the opportunities he and George had to study European organs. He talked especially about their encounter with the 1702 Schnitger organ in the Aa-Kirk in Groningen, the Netherlands, where with Lynn Edwards and Cor Edeskes they had the privilege of removing the pipes from the iconic organ for exact measuring. They measured the windlines and other components of the wind system, measured critical dimensions of the windchests, and analyzed the structure of the organ. John spoke with reverence about blowing on those ancient pipes and how the experience defined the future of their work. “That really set the pace for us. That was before we plugged in a machine.” 

After that first organ in Coshocton, Ohio, several modest contracts came their way. Arthur Carkeek, professor of organ at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, advocated Taylor & Boody to build a twenty-two-stop organ for the First Christian Church in Vincennes, Indiana (Opus 4, 1981). There followed a twenty-stop organ in Cincinnati, twenty-four stops for Richmond, Virginia, and a couple of one-manual organs, before they got to Opus 9 (1985), a four-manual organ with fifty-two stops for Saint Joseph’s Chapel at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Late in our conversation, I asked John how he would define the work of Taylor & Boody. “It’s that sound we made at Holy Cross where we had all those lead pipes working together. We never built a squeaky organ like other people thought Baroque organs should be; our organs have that dark, chocolate, choral sound, the core of the organ was different. I think that really grabbed people’s attention, and that has worn well. And Grace Church, New York, still has that, and Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. So that has stuck with us. And I think that, for me, that’s what makes an organ an organ. It’s that Principal, choral sound.” Their first few organs were built with the memories of that Schnitger organ fresh in their minds, and the opportunity to build the large organ at Holy Cross established the identity of their work.

John and I talked generally about the work of some of our colleagues, and I made the comment, “there’s a group among us who tip their hat to Mr. Skinner every time they get out of bed.” 

Boody: “That’s good, and that’s bad. I would say we have to move ahead.” 

Bishop: “Somebody listening to what John Boody just said would answer, haven’t you been looking 300 years back ever since you first had a chisel in your hand?”

Boody: “No, exactly the opposite. We were looking to the future. We wanted to build organs that stand tall into the future, that people would love on their own merits.”

Bishop: “So how do you translate the influence of Niehoff and Schnitger into the future?”

Boody: “You have to go with the music. You have to think of all the mechanical parts and other components you make in the shop as a conduit to making music. And you have to think about how all those parts work together. We focused on the music.”

The means of Grace

The Taylor & Boody organ at Grace Church in New York (Opus 65, 2013) was both a departure and continuation in the history of their work. Wendy and I live at Broadway and East 9th Street in Manhattan (Greenwich Village), Grace Church is at Broadway and East 10th. While the organ installation was underway, I shared some grand evenings with John and his co-workers, both in neighborhood restaurants and in our apartment. They were working on a complex instrument (tracker action in three separate cases with a remote console, and an “action tunnel” under the floor of the chancel), and those evenings were bright and fun.

That landmark organ with four manuals and seventy-six stops combines the Schnitger heritage of those marvelous “choral” choruses of lead Principals with the expressive range of the best Skinner organs. Acoustic scientist Dana Kirkegaard stipulated the construction of the expression boxes: two-inch-thick poplar lined on both sides with three-quarter-inch plywood, making a massive and dense enclosure, and shutters everywhere, even on the back of the box, shutters with an unusual range of motion, the whole providing an astonishing expressive effect. All that, plus a sophisticated solid-state combination action, sensitive mechanical action, and a few solo voices on really high pressure, combine to make an exciting instrument capable of countless effects. But wait, there’s more! Standing in the rear gallery, more than a hundred feet from the organ, are the lowest twelve notes of the 32′ Open Wood Diapason, all that remains of Skinner Organ Company Opus 707, built for Grace Church in 1928. Those twelve pipes were restored with a discreet wind supply and wired as an extension to the new 16′ Double Open Diapason of the Taylor & Boody organ, a fitting bottom to the grand new organ and testament to the musical history of the church.

Wind

As John Boody and I talked about the Grace Church organ, he spoke especially of the wind system. Superficially, we think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument. In fact, it is a wind instrument operated by keyboards. The organ at Grace Church has more than a dozen 16′ stops and twenty 8′ flue stops. Making an organ like that go is all about moving wind. John spoke proudly of the fellow in their shop primarily responsible for the wind system with large capacity wood wind ducts with curves for turns rather than right angles, those gentle turns moving the wind in different directions without creating eddies that can disturb the speech of the pipes. 

Multiple parallel-rise reservoirs ensure that there’s plenty of volume available to make those big sounds and that the wind is regulated effectively so there is no whiplash from a sudden shift from ffff to ppp. There is a lifetime of thought and experimentation in the wind system of each Taylor & Boody organ.

Pipes

There are a number of companies in the United States and Europe that make organ pipes to the specifications of the organ builders who order them. Pipe making is a complicated art that involves considerable specialized equipment for melting, blending, casting, planing, hammering, cutting, and soldering metal. It takes a lot of investment and effort for a small company to develop those abilities, but Taylor & Boody committed early to the idea that they should make their pipes. There is a room in their workshop with the cauldron for melting and mixing alloys and a ten-foot-long casting table. Molten metal is ladled and poured into a wood hod that runs on rails along the sides of the casting table. When the hod is full, two workers walk it swiftly down the table, leaving a thin pool of shiny molten metal. I have witnessed this process there, marveling at the moment a few seconds after the sheet is cast when the metal flashes over from liquid to solid.

When the sheet has cooled, it is rolled up like a carpet so it can be safely transported to the next steps in the process. John talked about the importance of the precision of making pipes. If a pipe is not neatly made, the voicer has to try to correct the pipe maker’s mistakes. John’s daughter-in-law B. J. Regi makes all the smaller pipes. John said, “she makes exquisite pipes. And you know, that’s the deal. If you go to start voicing an organ and everything’s lined up well, the mouths are beautiful, and the windways are pristine, you can make good sound right away.” Robbie Lawson heads the pipe shop, and B. J. helps him with the larger pipes. 

Wood

John Boody attended the forestry school at the University of Maine at Orono (he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in vocal performance) and has loved and respected wood throughout his career. Taylor & Boody has a sawmill where they cut all the lumber used in their organs. After it is sawn into boards, the wood is dried in a kiln made from a retired refrigerated (and therefore insulated) semi-trailer. The lumber is stacked neatly in piles, separated by the organ. In 2009, Wendy and I visited Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, and we spent a night with the Boodys. (We were treated to fresh eggs from John’s chickens for breakfast.) John showed us the huge oak logs from which the matching organ cases of the Grace Church organ would be made.

The sawmill provides the company with the most desirable wood, especially quarter-sawn white oak. Black walnut has beautiful grain patterns and rich color. It is very expensive to purchase from a hardwood supplier, and it is typically used only for decorative casework and furniture. But since walnut trees are plentiful in their area and they are messy to have in your yard, neighbors often cut down walnut trees and offer the logs to the T&B sawmill. This allows them to use the stable and beautiful wood to make action parts and wood organ pipes. Carefully milled, beautiful lumber is a hallmark of Taylor & Boody organs.

John’s affinity with wood is so widely respected that he has recently started writing a regular column for the journal of the International Society of Organbuilders called “The Wood Guy,” in which he answers colleagues’ specific questions and writes about the wonders of wood, that most natural of materials.

And the hope of glory

Eighty organs in forty years. Some are small continuo organs. Some are larger one-manual organs. Many are two-manual organs with twenty or thirty stops. There are a bunch with three manuals, and a couple of four-manual doozies. As the company produced all those organs, they also produced a clan. John has retired from the workshop, though he still runs the sawmill, the “light-duty” job for the older guy, and George is preparing to retire. John’s son Erik is running the company, and his daughter-in-law B. J. and son-in-law Aaron Reichert are both part of the workshop.

John is a prolific gardener. Looking at his Facebook page during the summer, you might think they were going to make zucchinis into organs. There is a swirl of grandchildren about. I recently saw a photo of a wee lass pushing a broom in the sawmill. It’s been a lifetime since those twenty-something partners were digging into that Schnitger organ in Groningen, understanding what the old master had to offer, and converting that experience into a creative career.

Halfway through our conversation, the name of a mutual friend and colleague came up, and John’s gregarious personality shone through. “He’s a dear man. And you think of our whole trade, we have great people. I love to go to APOBA meetings, I love to go to the AIO. Right down to the little one-man-shop guys, there are some great people out there.” John Boody and George Taylor have been faithful members of that band of great people. Their organs have influenced countless musicians around the world, and they reflect and amplify the harmonies of the workplace they founded in the schoolhouse on the hill.

Photo caption: Taylor & Boody workshop, Christmas 2020 (photo courtesy Taylor & Boody Organbuilders)

Adventures and transitions

In the last six weeks, Wendy and I have attended three singular events involving three very different pipe organs. One was small and in poor condition, another was a grand instrument in an iconic church, and the third was so large as to be off the charts. Most instruments have little variations in size—a violin is a violin, a trumpet is a trumpet—but pipe organs span huge ranges of size as well as styles and even purposes. These events provided a fun overview of extremes.

We traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on April 5 to hear the brilliant young organist Anna Lapwood play a recital on the massive Midmer-Losh organ in Boardwalk Hall. No other organ in the world has ten 32′ ranks, and those are just ten of 447 ranks; the organ has 33,111 pipes. You can find the stoplist and list of ranks at boardwalkorgans.org. (See also the cover feature of the November 2020 issue.) There is an impressive restoration effort underway there, a daunting task being faced by a professional staff and a troupe of volunteers under the direction and curatorship of Nathan Bryson.

According to its website, the interior of Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long, 310 feet wide, and 137 feet high. Remember that a football field is 300 feet long, and you might imagine the scale of the place. Among the activities in the hall beside organ recitals are car races, tractor pulls, and rock concerts, and it is the only space in the world that has hosted an indoor helicopter flight. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was nominated to be a candidate for president of the United States during the Democratic National Convention in Boardwalk Hall.

The stage of Boardwalk Hall is 148 feet wide, and the main organ chambers flank the proscenium arch. The size of the organ and the number of expressive divisions were obvious to the audience as the organ chamber lights remained on throughout the concert. All the individual sections of the instrument were evident, and hundreds of huge shutters opened and closed suddenly and majestically.

Anna Lapwood is twenty-eight years old and has risen to international fame through her fantastic abilities, popular appeal, and masterful use of social media. Enter her name in search fields for Google, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, and one will find days of fun listening. She was recently appointed an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for her service to music. According to her official website, Anna “holds the position of director of music for Pembroke College (Cambridge), associate artist with Royal Albert Hall, and artist in association with the BBC Singers. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ award from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist.”

Knowing that this would be a popular event among organists and organbuilders, I bought our tickets for Anna’s concert at Boardwalk Hall immediately after they went on sale in early February, and Wendy and I enjoyed our seats at a table on the main floor. Since Boardwalk Hall’s seating capacity is over 10,000 we were not worried about missing the concert. While the main floor was nearly full, the audience of around 1,200 people had plenty of space to move around. We cruised the floor, drinks in hand, greeting old and new friends, and chatting with my admired colleagues who serve on the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, responsible for this, the most massive of organ projects.

Ms. Lapwood’s entry to the concert stage was one only possible at Boardwalk Hall. We heard the blast of a car horn, and a 1938 regency blue Chevrolet Master Sport Sedan entered the hall from the left wing. With horn blowing, British flag waving, headlights blazing, and the audience cheering, the uniformed chauffeur, owner Chuck Gibson, walked around to open the passenger door. Ms. Lapwood stepped out onto the vast floor clad in sparkles and gold shoes, mounted the stage energetically, and we were off. The program featured her transcriptions of Hans Zimmer’s music from Interstellar, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and my favorite, Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain.

I have attended dozens of organ concerts offered by serious, even stuffy artists, including many of those I have stuffily played myself. Organ music can be very serious, confusing, arcane, and difficult for lay people to understand and appreciate. Anna Lapwood’s arresting stage presence and honest enthusiasm for the instrument and the music she played filled the cavernous space with excitement. It was a thrilling evening, and that is one room that can truly support 32′ organ tone.

Goodbye, good friend

In November 2023 friend and colleague Brian Jones passed away. (See “Nunc dimittis,” January 2024 issue, page 6.) Brian had been organist and choir director at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston from 1984 until 2004 where he built a widely admired choir program, making brilliant use of the church’s resources and central location to attract wonderful singers to the program, both professional and amateur. Brian along with associate organist Ross Wood and the choir produced eight recordings including the wildly successful Carols for Choirs, which helped transform Trinity’s Christmas carol service into a must-go experience for Boston audiences, so popular that after several years they started offering it twice on a December Sunday. One year Wendy and I took her mother for drinks in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel before crossing Saint James Place to enter the church early enough to find seats. I was honored to serve as organ curator at Trinity during Brian’s tenure, and I wrote about some of the experiences we shared in the February 2024 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9).

Brian’s memorial service was held at Trinity on April 27, 2024. We had dinner with friends the evening before and spent the night at a fine hotel on Copley Square. As we approached the church on Saturday morning, we were greeted by Lydia, Brian’s beloved 1933 cobalt blue Chrysler Coupe, complete with rumble seat and oversized headlamps, parked in the same spot next to the church where I parked every Friday morning for my pre-recital tuning all those years ago. Lydia was a common sight among Brian’s friends, her “ooo-gah” klaxon horn heralding her imminent arrival. She once made an appearance at our house in Maine, that crazy horn blaring through the woods as she came down our long driveway. Seeing that car invoked memories of the immense pleasure Brian got from driving her around, his ebullient, toothy smile as he enjoyed the daylights out of corny, often racy jokes, and his joy of sitting around a table with friends and family.

Brian’s memorial service was a reunion of dozens of colleagues, some I had not seen in years. People came from great distances to be with him in spirit one last time in that great church where it had been Brian’s childhood ambition to serve as organist. The building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and decorated by John La Farge, is a symphony of crotch-matched marble, painted stenciling, rich dark woodworking, and a magnificent pair of organs, Skinner Organ Company Opus 573, revised, and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-C. A small herd of organists took turns at the great four-manual console, and Colin Lynch, Trinity’s director of music, led a large and enthusiastic alumnae choir.

The choir sang a collection of anthems including two great swashbucklers that I first heard sung by the Trinity Choir under Brian’s directions, pieces that he loved and that I taught the parish choir I was leading at the time. “Kyrie,” from Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, expresses the height of the French Romantic symphonic literature for organ as inspired by the stupendous expressive organs built in many of France’s great churches by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, including the doozy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where Vierne was organist from 1900 until his death at the organ console with his foot on low E at the end of his 1,750th recital at the church. The organ accompaniment is worthy of Vierne’s six great symphonies for organ, and the choir sings dramatic expressive passages culminating with a soaring soprano line in the closing statement of “Kyrie eleison.” The choir was rehearsing that piece as we entered the church, and I burst into tears. “I can name that tune in one note.”

Brian Jones loved sublime pieces like the Vierne and the carols of John Rutter, and he had a soft spot for syrupy, nostalgic music. A beautiful reading of Adolph Adam’s O Holy Night was included in the recording Carols for Choirs, and Stephen Adams’s The Holy City was a perennial favorite. Colin Lynch and the alumnae choir gave us The Holy City with its dramatic sweeps and swoops, rolling triplets in the accompaniment bass line, and the treacly text that combine to make the piece a sentimental favorite:

And then me thought my dream was changed, the streets no longer rang, hushed were the glad Hosannas the little children sang, the sun grew dark with mystery, the morn was cold and chill as the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Hark, how the Angels sing Hosanna in the Highest, Hosanna to the King!

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Listening to that marvelous barnburner of an anthem, I remembered a moment during my time caring for the Trinity organs. I was sitting at the console, maybe planning the next hour of tuning, when a foreign tourist came up to the velvet rope, got my attention, and asked, “Can you play zee Holy City?” I gave him a chorus of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” and went down the steps to shake his hand.

Anyone who has attended a convention of the Organ Historical Society has witnessed the best of hymn singing as it is a tradition of the society that the audience/congregation sings a hymn at each recital. That Saturday morning at Trinity Church, Mr. Richardson’s massive roof was raised as the throng of organists and singers poured their emotional hearts into singing some of the great hymns of the faith led by that gorgeous heroic organ, all of them except me, because I cannot sing while weeping.

Brian’s grown children, Eliza and Nat, gave loving moving eulogies, speaking for Brian’s widower Mike and the entire family. Brian had a distinctive, often stentorian voice and a repertory of standard phrases always delivered in the same singsong fashion. Nat Jones’s imitations of his father were so authentic as to bring Brian into the room with us, both hilarious and unnerving. It was a grand morning remembering a grand man.

Why we do this

All that wonderful music in that beautiful place was a reminder of the magic that is the instrument we love so much. In a lofty setting like Trinity, the organ is a monumental presence. Years ago, when I still worked at Trinity, I was at a meeting on Cape Cod discussing the possibility of bringing an organ to a summer chapel there, when a retired Episcopal bishop hearing that I worked at Trinity referred to the organ there as a “weapon.” I am not sure that was the right word, but I think I know what he meant. That organ is a great example of an instrument perfectly suited to its room, with a range of expression from barely audible mystery to thundering triumph, all under the hands and feet of a single musician. The nerdy organbuilder in me sits in a pew picturing the thousands of pouches and valves flapping away inside the windchests, pouring air into thousands of pipes, lifting our spirits. It is mystical, magical, and majestic all at once. That’s why we do this.

Inaugurating a new ministry

Since we moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a couple years ago, Wendy and I have been attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street across from the Red Lion Inn. I have a previous personal connection with the parish as my grandfather, the Reverend Dr. George Douglas Krumbhaar, was rector there from 1960 to 1974, from when I was four years old until I graduated from high school. I have fond memories of holiday family visits to the rectory, and solo summer weekend trips when my grandparents treated me to concerts at Tanglewood. I practiced and played a couple recitals on the Roosevelt organ as rebuilt with neo-Baroque accent in the early 1960s, and walking around town as an adult fills me with memories from over fifty years ago.

Saint Paul’s is a beautiful building, designed by Charles McKim and richly decorated with appointments by John La Farge and Stockbridge resident Daniel Chester French.¹ Its stately location with adjoining rectory on the northeast corner of the main intersection gives it a local prominence, and its doors are perpetually open, welcoming the many tourists who visit for skiing in the winter and the countless artistic outlets during the summer.

On May 8 we were thrilled to join a throng of clergy, members, and guests attending the installation of the Reverend Samuel T. Vaught as the twentieth rector of Saint Paul’s. Father Sam is young, a newly minted priest, and this is his first appointment as rector of a parish. It was an involved and poignant service full of symbolism and hopefulness. Especially meaningful was the prayer of the new rector, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, yet you have called your servant to stand in your house and serve at your altar. To you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit.” He proved his youthfulness by delivering the prayer kneeling on the bare stone floor and when finished, standing smoothly with nary a grunt, creak, or stumble. Father Sam is ambitious, hoping to stay long enough to make a difference, and as one of the many silver-haired people in the congregation, I hope that his youthful enthusiasm will attract younger families to join the fun.

Saint Paul’s has the thoroughly picked over old bones of Hilborne Roosevelt Opus 127, built in 1884, the same year that the building was completed and dedicated. The replacement of principal stops with tapered pipes along with the addition of an especially narrow-scaled mixture, Scharff, Sesquialtera, and Krummhorn on electric windchests have obliterated much of the organ’s original character. I am pretty sure that Mr. Roosevelt never heard a Krummhorn. Besides the poorly conceived and executed alterations, the organ is in horrible condition. I have not mounted the steps to the organ loft buried in the base of the tower since my return to Saint Paul’s, but from sitting in the pews, I can list on my fingers which Bourdon pipes have cracks or fallen stoppers and which are dead, which manual notes are prone to ciphering, and which notes of specified stops are out of tune by more than two whole tones. Yikes. There is no choir, and there are two organists casually employed who take turns at the keydesk. Although there is not much of a music program, it is still nice to hear a pipe organ.

In addition to his priestly presence, Father Sam is an organist and pianist. I enjoyed a coffee date with him a few weeks ago during which he expressed the ambition that the church should have an appointed parish musician who could start a program involving solo and choir singing. Knowing that for at least the current moment there would be no money available for significant organ repairs or replacement, I offered to inspect the instrument and suggest what might be repaired with a little bit of local elbow grease, and I am pretty sure I could improve the tuning supposedly applied during Holy Week. While money was paid, it does not sound to my ears that much good happened.

In an age when many parishes flounder, it is fun to think of the possibility of reinvigorating this venerable parish that I have been associated with for more than sixty years. As a twelve-year-old, I thought the organ was great. As a sixty-eight-year-old, not so much. Here’s hoping and anticipating that the arrival of an energetic young priest will bring new life to the place. I think the town is ready 
for it.

Notes

1. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is best known for his monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Chesterwood, is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

On the road again

In the 1980 movie, Honeysuckle Rose, Willie Nelson played Buck Bonham, a country music singer looking for national fame. His life as a traveling music star is a strain on his marriage to Viv, played by Dyan Cannon; one thing leads to another, and not everyone winds up happy. The best thing that came out of that movie is the song, “On the Road Again,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Song and an American Music Award for Favorite Country Single.

In the 1980s I was working in an organ shop where some of us preferred classical music and some preferred rock and roll. In the days before earpods when music was played through speakers we had to compromise—ours was often country music. It was fun to make up words to go with the rhyming schemes, and some of the country songs of those days were simply hilarious. Bobby Bare’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life,” Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and Dolly Parton’s “Better Keep Your Hands Off My Potential New Boyfriend” (really) gave us lots of material.

“On the Road Again” seems full of hope, opening with a major sixth (“My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. . .”), with lyrics about the pleasure of “making music with my friends.” There is a sort of choo-choo-train-like rhythm underneath, and some lithe, right-in-tune harmonica playing. “Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway, We’re the best of friends, insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way is on the road again.”

My daily office routine includes lots of correspondence with people wishing to buy and sell pipe organs, and I keep a list of places that might be productive to visit, sort of like pins on a map. Several times a year, when those pins meld into a circle that I might drive in a week or so, I set off in my Suburban. I make a point of visiting any organ workshops that might be along the route, and I am often able to include errands for us or for colleague companies, like delivering a blower here, a rank of pipes there, or picking up a pedalboard—it helps pay for the gas. When I leave home, sappy as it may be, I think of the indefatigable Willie Nelson and dial up that song, fixing myself up with an earworm that will easily last a week.

§

Last December, Willie cheered me on as I headed for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. My first day out, I met with people at a church who are considering purchasing an organ and had dinner with my son in central Massachusetts. The following morning, I drove to New Holland, Pennsylvania, to visit New Holland Church Furniture, a company that builds miles of pews, thousands of chairs, hundreds of altars, and dozens of organ cases. The Organ Clearing House has helped with the installation of several large new organs with cases built by New Holland, and they have since engaged us to install a few other large pieces such as a cathedral reredos. I was given a lengthy tour of the facility and marveled at the production volume and values.

I was especially impressed by an extensive layout of curved pews in the shop for the floor and balconies of a large church under construction. It is one thing to build straight pews; all organ builders have equipment in their workshops for cutting wood straight. It is much more challenging to work with curves, especially because you would not necessarily use the same curved layouts in several different churches. The forms and patterns for gluing those long, curved boards are custom made for each location. And in this building, the balconies had layouts much different from the main floor, further complicating the job. Massive custom-built sanding machines finish those twenty-foot-long curves with the grain, as any good woodworker would.

Computer-driven machines were cutting out chair backs, pew ends, Gothic arches, and Stations of the Cross at dizzying rates. A procession of ten-foot-long pew seats, hanging from iron hooks like sides of beef, rode conveyors through a huge spray booth. Carts of chair frames rolled from gluing stations to assembly rooms. Engineers and designers stared at computer screens, moving pixilated lines around to create perfect drawings. Those drawings were fed into the machines that cut the wood. Semi-trailers were backed up to loading docks, ready to haul the finished products to their destinations. Seventy-five or eighty workers were toiling in the factory, combining artistry with automation, creating elegant furnishings for church buildings across the country.

New Holland is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I was sharing the roads with Amish families in black carriages drawn by single horses and large flatbed trailers drawn by teams of three horses, all with reflective triangles on the back. Driving around them in a big comfortable car with the heat on gently and music playing, I reflected on the contrasting lifestyles. I saw those buggies parked in the driveways of prosperous-looking farmsteads where oxen were waiting patiently to be harnessed to plows and reapers. It is quite a feat to make a living as a farmer in these times without burning diesel fuel.

Pennsylvania and Ohio

I went from New Holland to Wooster, Ohio, home of Wooster College, where I helped maintain the large Holtkamp in the chapel and smaller practice organs when I was working with John Leek in the 1970s. I drove by those buildings nearly fifty years after I first worked in them, reliving John’s often humorous, sometimes stern teaching. I remembered standing on a ladder behind the Great windchest as a fledgling tuner, confronted for the first time by a Sesquialtera II, Mixture IV, and Scharff III, struggling to decipher the relationships between all those tiny pipes.

I drove past the First Presbyterian Church where in 1980 Leek and I attended the dedicatory recital of Karl Wilhelm’s Opus 76 played by my organ teacher, Haskell Thomson. Jack Russell, professor of organ at Wooster College and a former student of Haskell’s, was organist at that church. Jack is still a friend, now located in the Boston area. Opus 76 is a grand three-manual affair with thirty-six stops, free standing pedal towers, and beautiful carved pipe shades. What I remember most about that recital was a cipher that stopped Mr. Thomson in mid-sweep (his students will get an inward chuckle from that), bringing him to the balcony rail to ask for assistance, an organbuilder’s nightmare.

While in Wooster, I visited the newly formed Greenleaf Organ Company founded by Samantha Koch and her husband Daniel Hancock. They are working on the renovation of a 1916 Hook & Hastings organ purchased through the Organ Clearing House by a church in Kansas. The organ had been in storage for years in Newcastle, Maine, where I live, and it was fun to see “my baby” getting a new lease of life. The folks at Greenleaf are smart and skillful, and I look forward to seeing lots of great projects come from that shop.

I drove from Wooster to Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to school forty-five years ago. My timing was bad as I arrived a few days after the holiday break started, so there were not many people around. I had breakfast with Randy Wagner, longtime executive at Organ Supply Industries (OSI) in Erie, Pennsylvania. OSI has been for decades the largest company supplying to the organbuilding trade in the United States.

I met Randy in the 1970s when I was working for John Leek, and Leek and I traveled back and forth from OSI to deliver and pick up parts for our projects. Our relationship continued through my days with Angerstein & Associates, the Bishop Organ Company, and the Organ Clearing House. It is one of my longest collegial friendships. Randy retired to Oberlin where he cut his teeth working with Homer Blanchard in the 1950s. He shares with Barbara Owen the distinction of being one of two surviving participants in the founding meeting of the Organ Historical Society, held in the choir room at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1956.1

From Oberlin, I drove to Hartville, Ohio, for a quick visit with Charles Kegg of Kegg Pipe Organ Builders. Charles’s shop has a luxurious amount of space for his staff, with a snazzy collection of machines and equipment. His interest in automated musical instruments means that there are collections of paper rolls for player devices and a very rare machine that punches those paper rolls. Charles and I are collaborating on a project in New York City, and it was a nice opportunity to compare notes and questions.

And back to Pennsylvania

Organ Supply Industries in Erie, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest pipe organ companies in the United States and serves as a supplier to most of the independent organ companies around the country. My pal Bryan Timm, OSI vice president, gave me the “family rate” tour followed by a nice lunch. Their vast factory building is a wonderland where everything is on a huge scale, where forklifts stack organ parts sky high, and where the multiplicity of organ stuff boggles the mind. Eight pedalboards are lined up, in the early stages of their construction. A couple dozen keyboards are making their way through production. Thousands of the little dividers between coupler tablets roll off saws into boxes—the blanks that they are cut from look like houses and hotels from “Monopoly.” It takes hundreds of clamps to glue up things like the huge wood organ pipes from 16′ and 32′ open wood diapasons, and those clamps are stacked on carts, ready for the next project. Organ pipes of all sizes are under construction, and the countless forms and jigs needed to make pipes in an infinity of shapes and sizes are neatly organized in racks and shelves. Ranks of wooden pipes whip through their production department and wind up in crates labeled for shipment to organ companies all over the country. Huge woodworking machines seem to be everywhere, all connected with the metal ducts of the dust collection system that gathers tons of sawdust and plane shavings into hoppers, powered by immense vacuum motors.

OSI is something of a nerve-central for the American pipe organ industry. The bustle of activity through the various departments reassures us that pipe organs are being built across the country, and that talented and dedicated people are pouring their hearts into them.

I left Erie to visit an interesting vintage mechanical-action organ in a recently closed church in Canaseraga, a village of about 500 people in rural central New York, about sixty-five miles south of Rochester. Garret House (1810–1900) was the most prominent organbuilder in Buffalo, New York, of his time. He built a nine-rank, one-manual organ for Trinity Episcopal Church in Canaseraga, and my circle of pins included a snowy drive on long lonely country roads to meet with a small group of parishioners of the now-closed church. They were a cheerful band of lifelong residents, families who have been friends and neighbors for generations, and they are hoping we can find a new home for the lovely organ. Since I joined the Organ Clearing House, I have met with many such groups, sorry to have lost their church and eager for the organ to carry life’s breath to another congregation. Having gathered specifications, dimensions, and photographs, I was put in touch with the officer of the diocese who manages property. I hope we can offer the organ soon. Keep your eye on our website.

Saying goodbye

One of the sure effects of celebrating people I have known for forty or fifty years is the passing of treasured colleagues, mentors, and friends. Thomas H. Anderson was all of these. He was born in 1937 in Belfast, Ireland, and started as an apprentice in an organ pipe making shop when he was fourteen. He emigrated to the United States at age nineteen to take a job with the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. That was 1956, when Aeolian-Skinner built nearly twenty organs, including the beauty at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York (see footnote). Not long after that (not sure when), he started his own firm, the Thomas H. Anderson Organ Pipe Company. He purchased a home in Easton, Massachusetts, not far from Dorchester and Randolph, Massachusetts, where the Aeolian-Skinner facilities were located. His property included a handsome barn attached to the house that he converted to a workshop, and a long, low “chicken coop” where he stored large pipes and materials.

I first met Tommy around 1984 when I went to work for Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, less than ten miles from Tommy’s shop. What a convenience to have a pipe maker so close by; we frequently drove up and down Bay Road between the two shops. Daniel Angerstein closed his shop when he was appointed tonal director at M. P. Möller, and I started the Bishop Organ Company by assuming Dan’s maintenance business. At the same time, I assumed the care of the large Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, and I quickly had a list of rebuilding and restoration projects, most of which required Tommy’s help.

Tommy and his wife Susan grew up on the same street in Belfast. Once he was established in the United States, he went back to Belfast to marry her and bring her to join him in Easton. I imagine there were many letters between them in the interim, planning a life together in a new country. What a courageous decision it was for Susan to join Tommy here. They raised four children, six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all supported by Tommy, also known as Granda, hammering away in that workshop.

There are few craftsmen whose intuitive grasp of π can outstrip an organ pipe maker. When I was working in a shop every day, I could easily eye the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters, or between an inch and an inch-and-a-sixteenth. Tommy could hold a pipe in his hand and sense the width of the rectangle to cut to form an identical tube. Circles are the province of the pipe maker. It’s uncanny.

Susan passed away on December 31, 1996. Tommy passed away on December 30, 2023. His funeral service was held in Easton, just a mile from his house, on January 6, 2024. I was there with nine other organbuilders to meet his family and share stories of our work with him. One of his daughters remembered the chore of loading crates of newly made organ pipes into their van and delivering them to the Consolidated Freightways Terminal in nearby Canton, Massachusetts.

We were a group of old-timers, most of us had known Tommy for decades, and each of us know many organbuilders out there on the grapevine. None of us could remember hearing anything but lovely words about Tommy. He was kind, humorous, caring, diligent, and skillful—a valued and admired colleague. He made organ pipes. Tens of thousands of organ pipes. His work will sing on in dozens of churches around the country. He was a valued friend. He was a gentleman.

Notes

1. Pierre Cochereau, organist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to open the 1956 American Guild of Organists national convention with a recital on the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. During the months preceding that convention, G. Donald Harrison was racing to complete the organ. It was fiercely hot, and there was a taxi strike going on, so after a long workday on June 14, Harrison had to walk several long blocks to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner with his wife Helen, he sat down to watch Victor Borge on television and died of a heart attack. It is interesting to note that John Scott, future organist at Saint Thomas Church, was born on June 18, 1956, just four days after Harrison’s death.