In the Wind. . .

That ingenious business

Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, has resurfaced in public conversation as a character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical, Hamilton. In the king’s featured song, “You’ll be back” (in the style of The Beatles), the crazy king addresses the colonists, singing,

Why so sad? Remember we made an arrangement when you went away? Now you’re making me mad. Remember, despite our estrangement, I’m your man. You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me. . . . And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love. . . .

Wendy and I were fortunate to see Hamilton in the first months of its run on Broadway and were thrilled by the whirling, swirling singing and dancing from the first moments. Sitting to my right was a curmudgeonly man who looked like Winston Churchill (though thankfully not as large) who did not crack a smile until King George made his mincing appearance.

The American pipe organ industry started in the eighteenth century before the birth of “Mad King George.” Johann Gottlob Klemm (1690–1762) was born in Dresden, Germany, where he apparently apprenticed with the great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753). Silbermann was nearly an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who was a great champion of Silbermann’s organs, though a little skeptical of the pianofortes Silbermann built late in his life. Klemm built the first organ for the church now known as Trinity Church Wall Street, New York (in a previous building at the same location), and lived in New York City’s Moravian community until 1757, when he learned that the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, needed an organ.¹

David Tannenberg (1728–1804) was born in Germany, moved to Zeist, the Netherlands, in 1748, and emigrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. He first worked as a joiner, and when Klemm arrived in Bethlehem in 1757, he became Klemm’s apprentice and assistant. After Klemm’s death in 1762 Tannenberg did no organ work for three years, but between 1765 and his death in 1804 he was involved in building more than forty organs.² As he grew older and became concerned that he had no apprentice who could carry on his work, Tannenberg obtained permission from the Moravian elders in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to write to elders in Herrnhut, Germany, asking them to send a suitable candidate. In response, Johann Philip Bachmann (1762–1837) arrived in Bethlehem on February 17, 1793. Two months later he married Tannenberg’s daughter, Anna Maria. Tannenberg and Bachmann worked together building organs until 1800 when tensions between them following Anna Maria’s suicide in 1799 led to their parting ways.³ While installing the organ in the Lutheran church in York, Pennsylvania, seventy-six-year-old David Tannenberg fell from a scaffolding on May 17, 1804, and died two days later.⁴

While most of David Tannenberg’s organs were built in Pennsylvania, he also built instruments for destinations in Albany, New York; Frederick, Maryland; and Salem, North Carolina. It is almost 500 miles from Bethlehem to Salem. I can drive that far in less than seven hours in air-conditioned comfort. It must have been a rough slog to transport an organ such a distance on eighteenth-century roads. There are only a few Tannenberg organs extant, notably the 1798 “Single Brothers’ House” organ restored by Taylor & Boody and installed in a new concert hall at the Museum of Early Southern and Decorative Arts in Old Salem, North Carolina.

Philip Bachmann built organs under his own name until 1821. An organ built by Bachmann in 1819 has been restored by Paul Fritts & Company in Tacoma, Washington, and is now available for installation in a suitable historic and architectural home. You can read the prospectus and see photos at the Fritts website: frittsorgan.com/opus_pages/galleries/bachmann_reconstruct/bachmann_prospectus.html.

Consider these dates. Klemm’s career in America started in the late 1730s—his organ at Trinity Church Wall Street was built in 1741, nine years before Bach’s death. Tannenberg’s career was in full swing in the 1770s, concurrent with the American Revolutionary War. Bachmann died in 1837 when Felix Mendelssohn was twenty-eight and Johannes Brahms was four years old. Klemm, Tannenberg, and Bachmann were all German-born American immigrants who built dozens of organs for the Moravian communities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina during America’s Colonial period. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791; he was twenty years old at the start of the American Revolution.

Three important books

Orpha Ochse (born 1925) received a Master of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1948 and a PhD in 1953. She is ninety-eight years old. The University of Indiana Press published her masterful The History of the Organ in the United States in 1975. The worn and be-scribbled hardcover copy on my desk in Maine is inscribed with my name and “Oberlin, 1975.” I purchased it from the Co-op Bookstore in Oberlin the year it was published. I was nineteen.

Ochse’s book includes the histories of hundreds of American organbuilders, both companies and individuals. She traces the connections between personalities telling us who worked and apprenticed for whom, who influenced whom, and who formed and dissolved partnerships. The book is organized by regions and eras (“Rural Society,” “Expanding Society,” “Industrial Society,” “the Twentieth Century”). The comprehensive index includes thousands of entries making it a necessary first tool for someone like me who spends each day in the office considering and discussing dozens of organs. Many of the biographical details I am including here came straight from Ochse’s book.

The History of the Organ in the United States was released in paperback in 1988 and is still available from the University of Indiana Press, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. If there is an organist in your life who does not own a copy, here is a great gift suggestion. Tell them I sent you.

Organbuilder Raymond Brunner (1949–2020) lived and worked around Lititz and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of many organs built by David Tannenberg and the other Moravian-Pennsylvania Dutch organbuilders. He wrote the authoritative history of that era of American organbuilding under the title That Ingenious Business, published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1991. It includes technical and mathematical information of interest to the sophisticated organbuilder and portrayal of daily life at the end of the eighteenth century, such as a drawing of a Sunday morning at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, with main floor and balcony packed with worshippers, the Tannenberg organ, a preacher gesticulating from the pulpit, and an usher with a stick chasing a dog. ’Twas ever thus. I last saw Ray at breakfast in New York during early planning for the restoration of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I am sorry he did not live to see it.

Stephen L. Pinel’s The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York was published by the OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, in 2021. It is a 624-page monster with appendices and indices that include many historical photographs, timelines, and detailed descriptions of most every Erben organ, alongside contemporary descriptions, reviews, often accompanied by newspaper articles. Its six pounds of minutia about one of America’s most influential organbuilders means that it is not a book for everyone, but a carefully researched, exhaustive tome of immense value.

An urban Erben

Henry Erben (1800–1884) was a premier organbuilder in New York City who built hundreds of organs for locations in New York, New England, and as far away as Texas and California. Imagine the logistics of moving an organ from New York to San Francisco in 1858. Calvary Church (Presbyterian) in San Francisco was formed in 1854 and commissioned an organ from Erben shortly after. The organ was completed in 1858 and loaded onto the clipper ship Caroline Tucker, which left New York on May 13, 1858, and carried the organ around Cape Horn “west about” to San Francisco.⁵

Erben’s father Peter (1771–1863) built organs and pianos and was organist at Trinity Church, New York (known now as Trinity Church Wall Street), into the 1840s. Thomas Hall (1791–c.1875) was an organbuilder who started working in Philadelphia around 1812. In that same year he installed an organ in Saint John’s Chapel in New York and was assisted by twelve-year-old Henry Erben. Hall moved to New York in 1817, and Henry became his apprentice. They formed the partnership Hall & Erben in 1821, which was dissolved in 1835.⁶ Between 1824 and his death in 1884, Henry Erben produced 1,333 organs, 250 of which were built between 1856 and 1860, the firm’s busiest five years.⁷ That’s more than an organ a week. In 1846 Erben built a new four-manual organ for Trinity Church Wall Street (replaced by Hook & Hastings Opus 2168 in 1907), where he quarreled publicly with the church’s organist, Dr. Edward Hodges, who had succeeded his father.

The Erben workshop was located on a corner of Canal and Centre Streets in lower Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Little Italy, one mile from Trinity Church. Erben’s largest intact extant organ was built in 1868 for what is now the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta (north of Little Italy), just six blocks north of the workshop. As I write, the Organ Clearing House is completing the dismantling of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s and shipping it to Brunner & Company in Pennsylvania for restoration. I was in the city last week as the project started and walked between those two churches. It was fun to imagine running into Mr. Erben as he walked the streets between his workshop and two of his important clients. Maybe I would treat him to a fruit smoothie, ubiquitous in the neighborhood today. I wonder what would amaze him most about modern organbuilding? Perhaps electric blowers?

Another Erben afloat

In 2006 the Organ Clearing House sent an Erben organ halfway around the world when the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem in Wellington, New Zealand, purchased a one-manual, six-rank organ built in 1847 from Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, Ellsworth, Maine. The Clearing House crew crated the organ and delivered it to the docks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was loaded into a container for its 9,000-mile journey.

The organ’s specifications are 8′ Open Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason Bass (1–17), 8′ Dulciana (18–56), 4′ Principal, 4′ Flute, and 2′ Fifteenth. There is a permanent coupler from the manual to the seventeen-note pedalboard.

That was the second time that organ traveled by boat. Ellsworth is a small coastal town with a population of about 8,400 located to the northeast of Penobscot Bay in a series of bays and waterways that defines Down East Maine. In the late 1840s there were about 4,000 people living in Ellsworth, and the town boasted nine sawmills, two gristmills, one tannery, eight brickyards, and thirteen shipbuilders, along with several other industries.⁸ There was plenty of work in Ellsworth. To drive there today, one winds along US Route 1, which crosses many bridges over water as it navigates Maine’s legendary rocky coast. It would have been an arduous trip by land in 1847, and traveling by sea was the most efficient and economical way to transport passengers and freight.

The Erben workshop was less than a mile from the docks in New York City, and the Episcopal church in Ellsworth is barely a block from the Union River. The Ellsworth organ traveled only slightly farther by land than the great organs at Old Saint Patrick’s and Trinity Church in New York, mere blocks from the workshop.

§

One of the highlights of visiting an organbuilder’s workshop is the fine woodworking that is such an integral part of the product. Hardwood frame-and-panel doors are as integral to a modern organ case as they were in centuries past, and many internal components sport dovetails and other classic joinery. We identify what variety of wood is being used by the smell in the milling room. There is no mistaking the difference in smell between sawing poplar or white oak.⁹

The same is true with boat building. Several of the coastal Maine towns with shipbuilding heritages are now home to small shops that build wooden pleasure boats by hand, and while organbuilders typically strive for perfectly square corners and straight lines, you hardly find any in a wooden boat. The bow comes to a point, midships swells to the maximum “beam” (width) and tapers back to a narrower stern. The hull often bulbs out a little from the top rails and tapers to a narrow keel below. Viewed from the side, the fairing line of the hull sweeps upward toward the bow. Every line and surface is a complex curve, which means the interior spaces are also full of curves and odd angles.

To start building a boat, the layout of the hull is drawn on the workshop floor looking something like a topographical map with increasing curved lines showing elevation. The keel is placed, and ribs are constructed according to the curves of the hull. The completed keel and ribs look something like a whale’s skeleton turned upside down. The outside of the hull is formed by “planking,” steaming and bending the planks, also called strakes, and fastening them to the ribs. The process reminds me of my years as an apprentice to John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, when we steamed boards until they were flexible and clamped them to a frame to form the bentside of a harpsichord. We had built a box just big enough to enclose the piece of lumber with a goofy rig using tea kettles on hot plates to produce the steam and the flexible tubing we use in organs to conduct the steam to the box. It was one thing to fire up that cute contraption and handle a piping hot board six feet long, one foot wide, and three-quarters of an inch thick. It is quite another to steam and bend a twenty-footer that is two inches thick and bend that around the ribs of a boat.

I witnessed this process on a large scale at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, where the 110-foot whaling ship Charles W. Morgan was being restored in the museum’s shipyard. Watching the workers fastening those massive thick boards to the ribs with wood pegs and bronze spikes was a glimpse back into the time when all ships were made of wood and no ships had engines.

Our boat, a Marshall catboat, had a reliable diesel engine in a spacious hold below the deck that I was happy to use when approaching a dock or mooring. I remember once watching a single-handed sailor leave a crowded mooring field in a large two-masted schooner under full sail. He let go of the mooring line, walked some forty feet back to the wheel, and away he went, weaving through the fleet as if he was rowing a skiff, harking back to the days when diesel engines were not an option, so seamen had to have real skill. Shortly after we bought our boat, I wrote an essay for Catboat Journal about the adventures Wendy and I had sailing her from the boatyard in Padanaram, Massachusetts (near New Bedford), to our house on the Damariscotta River in Maine, 250 miles in six days and five nights. I received an email from a fellow in California who would be teaching a course on handling catboats at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, not far from Ellsworth, saying if we happened to be near Brooklin he’d love to have us address the class. We “happened” to be near Brooklin at the stated date because we arranged our summer around it and had a week-long cruise that took us there.

He invited another catboat sailor to share stories with the class, a veteran single-hander who sailed an older version of the same model boat. The important difference was his boat didn’t have an engine. Fogged in, sit and read. Bad weather coming, sit and read. Need to get ashore for emergency or otherwise, but no wind? Sit and read. We were having dinner at a pub after the class, chatting about our boats, and I told Bill how much I admired his career of sailing single-handed without an engine. His response, “Where do you keep the wine?”

Notes

1. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), page 15.

2. Ibid, page 52.

3. Ibid, page 62.

4. Ibid, page 53.

5. Stephen L. Pinel, The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York (Villanova, Pennsylvania: OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, 2021), page 165.

6. Ochse, page 151.

7. Pinel, page 18.

8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth,_Maine.

9. The smell of sawing ivory or cow bone reminds me of the worst day at the dentist.

Changing seasons

I am writing in early October as the weather in New England is getting nippy. This is the first fall in our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where hillsides and mountain vistas are ablaze with natural color. We have completed the annual ritual of taking our boat Kingfisher out of the water after our tenth season with her. She is a “catboat”—no, not a multi-hulled catamaran. Catboats were developed as commercial fishing boats in the nineteenth century. They have a single sail with the mast mounted right in the bow so there is lots of sail area for power, and they are easy to handle alone. She is on stands “on the hard” at our boatyard in Round Pond, Maine, and last Saturday Wendy and I climbed aboard to fill tubs with dishes, utensils, pots and pans, bedding, and all the miscellaneous gear that seemed essential when still on the shelves at Hamilton Marine. We had taken most of the food off following our last sail, but there were still a couple bottles of booze in the locker. Nothing tastes better than the first gin and tonic at anchor by a remote island after a long day on the water. Fever Tree and limes are standards on our cruising shopping list.

For years, it has been part of my fall ritual to take our 450-square-foot sail to Pope Sails and Rigging in Rockland, Maine, for its annual cleaning, light repairs, and safe winter storage, but when I called Doug Pope last week to let him know I would be coming, he told me he was retiring and recommended Jenny Baxter who is buying Gambell & Hunter, a sailmaker in Camden, Maine. Jenny has been apprenticing with Grant Gambell for six years and is taking over his shop as he retires. She is about to move into a large commercial space and has purchased Doug Pope’s sail-cleaning equipment.

I drove to Gambell & Hunter’s old shop, which is housed in a barn in a residential neighborhood. Jenny was on the phone with her realtor when I arrived, and Grant came down in his stocking feet to help unload our sail into the shed. When Jenny got off the phone, she came down in bare feet to look over the sail and invited me upstairs to the sail loft, a large room with a spotless open floor, a couple stations with sewing machines, and racks of thread festooning the walls. Organ builders, if you ever need a custom-made rubber cloth windsock made to specifications, you will never do better than with a sailmaker. They know heavy fabric like you know poplar.

Camden is a legendary yachting center and is home to five or six large charter schooners. You can book a cabin for a week or two and sail the Maine coast with crews who prepare clambakes and boil lobsters onboard. Wendy and I have encountered the schooners several times during our cruises. We have seen guests diving off the boats at anchor and paddling kayaks into remote coves, and we have passed the schooners under weigh, their huge sails drawing the beautiful vessels at exhilarating speed. Jenny and Grant are a generation apart and grew up in different regions, but they both came to Camden, Maine, as young people to work on the schooners, serving on crews, running boats, and playing host to guests. They both developed their love of sailmaking while serving on those crews.

As an organbuilder and avid sailor, I have long understood that the two pursuits involve an attempt to control wind. I shared this thought with Grant and Jenny and learned that Jenny played the organ in high school. She assumed the organist position with arms and legs extended on the stool she was sitting on and mentioned how much she loves the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine. (I have served on the board of Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ for over twenty years.) Here’s wishing Jenny Baxter the best in her new venture, and I am looking forward to seeing her in the spring when it is time to put Kingfisher back in the water.

Stars in your eyes

When I was ten years old singing in the choir in my home church, the organist was a harpsichord maker, and I was captivated by the idea that he was playing on an instrument he had built. Today, I know dozens of people who are passionate about building pipe organs the way Jenny is passionate about sailmaking. I remember feeling special when I was assigned my first task for a teenage summer job in an organ shop, standing in the parking lot with a can of Zip-Strip and some gold-painted façade pipes on sawhorses. I admit that I am less enchanted by that same task today. I remember the adventure of going on the road to install an organ for the first time. I remember the thrill of hearing an organ come to life, turning on the wind for the first time, sounding the first notes, and seeing the glowing faces of the people in the church when they heard the first hymn played on their new organ.

Of course, I also remember difficult and demanding days, furiously heavy days, and disappointments when things would not work or did not turn out well, and I remember that special feeling when I made mistakes. Along with millions of Americans, I grew up watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports on Sunday afternoons, hearing the slogan, “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat,” watching a ski jumper’s spectacular wipeout repeated week after week. My mentor John Leek in Oberlin immortalized my apprentice mistakes by nailing them to the wall above my workbench. They were still there when I visited ten years after I left his shop.

That Zip-Strip summer was 1975, and I was employed by Bozeman-Gibson & Company after my freshman year at Oberlin. I was working on the façade for a rebuilt nineteenth-century organ we were installing in a Salvation Army Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island. The chapel was in a newish building that included offices and had some guest rooms where we were staying. Breakfast and lunch were served in the kitchen by an ex-con named Vinnie, pleasant enough, but for dinner we drove across town to the Salvation Army’s men’s service center where we stood in a cafeteria line with what seemed like hundreds of homeless men. It was a good learning experience for a young man from comparative privilege.

During the two summers I worked for Bozeman-Gibson, I helped with organ projects in Providence; Castleton, Vermont; Belfast, Maine; and Squirrel Island off Boothbay Harbor, Maine, which is seven miles from our house in Newcastle, Maine, as the crow flies in water that we have sailed for years. Last summer Wendy and I spent a night onboard Kingfisher at a mooring in Linekin Bay near Boothbay Harbor and sailed around Squirrel, with Wendy listening yet again to my reminiscing about that project forty-six years ago.

John Farmer, who has run his organ company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for forty years, and I were working together on the Squirrel Island organ. It was completed in the workshop in time for us to install it in the crossing of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts, for a concert of the Handel & Haydn Society during the 1976 American Guild of Organists national convention with Barbara Bruns playing a Handel organ concerto. The one-manual, eleven-rank organ was a perfect fit for that music. The convention ended with AGO Night at the Pops with Arthur Fielder, E. Power Biggs, and the Boston Pops Orchestra playing Rheinberger in what I believe was Biggs’s last public performance. (He died in March 1977.) Boston’s Symphony Hall was filled with two-thousand organists. At the end of the concert, Fiedler faced the audience and said something like, “We thought that you would know some of the words.” The orchestra gave those introductory measures, and the audience swept to its feet and bellowed “Hallelujah” like it’s never been sung before or since.

John and I packed up the organ and drove it to Boothbay Harbor where we loaded it onto the private ferry for Squirrel Island—it took three trips. We carted it up the dirt road to the non-denominational chapel in a rusty old pickup truck, the only motor vehicle on the island. We slept in the house of the superintendent of the island, who was also a lobsterman, so there was lobster meat in the scrambled eggs in the morning, and we were given the use of a motorboat so we could go to the mainland for restaurant dinners. We ate at the Tugboat Inn in Boothbay Harbor and Fisherman’s Wharf in East Boothbay, both of which are still there. Fisherman’s Wharf in 1976 is where I first heard Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life by Bobby Bare (Bill Clinton’s favorite country song according to Mr. Bare himself, as seen on a YouTube video) and I Just Kicked the Daylights Out of My CB Radio, composer unknown, sung by a raucous country band. That would have been less than two weeks after that triumphant concert at Symphony Hall in Boston. Who says I’m not well-rounded?

What an adventure it was for a twenty-year-old with stars in his eyes. I was asked to visit the organ ten years ago to update the assessed value of the organ for their insurance policy and rode out to the island on the same ferry, refreshing my memories of that wonderful adventure as a fledgling organbuilder.

The wind

In 1995, I restored an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings (Opus 466, 1868) and relocated it to the Follen Community Church (UUA) in Lexington, Massachusetts. The project included the restoration of the feeder bellows so the organ could be pumped by hand. Yuko Hayashi brought her organ class from New England Conservatory to Follen several times to experience the difference between the sound of the organ when pumped by hand or fed with an electric blower.

When that project was finished, one of the first recitals was played by Peter Sykes, and unbelievably, there was a power failure midway through. Organ historian Barbara Owen volunteered to pump. As she walked up the steps to the platform, she faced the audience and recited verses from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem, The Organ Blower, excerpted here:

No priest that prays in gilded stole,
To save a rich man’s mortgaged soul;
No sister, fresh from holy vows,
So humbly stoops, so meekly bows;
His large obeisance puts to shame
The proudest genuflecting dame,
Whose Easter bonnet low descends
With all the grace devotion lends.

O brother with the supple spine,
How much we owe those bows of thine!
Without thine arm to lend the breeze,
How vain the finger on the keys!
Though all unmatched the player’s skill,
Those thousand throats were dumb and still:
Another’s art may shape the tone,
The breath that fills it is thine own. . . .

This many-diapasoned maze,
Through which the breath of being strays,
Whose music makes our earth divine,
Has work for mortal hands like mine.
My duty lies before me. Lo,
The lever there! Take hold and blow!
And He whose hand is on the keys
Will play the tune as He shall please.

Never was a memorized verse inserted so deftly. Judging from the graffiti we find around the pump handles of historic organs the reality is that pumping the organ was less lofty than what Mr. Holmes observed or imagined.

I have heard stories about how organists resisted the development of electric playing actions at first, claiming that being separated from their instruments by wires would make playing impersonal. They got over that quickly as the Skinner Organ Company, to name one, built its 301st organ in 1920. I have never heard any hint that organists resisted the introduction of electric organ blowers.

Marcel Dupre’s Recollections, published in translation by Ralph Kneeream, relates a story Dupré told of a Sunday morning at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. His visitor in the organ loft was Claude Johnson, one the directors of Rolls-Royce. (Johnson had commissioned Dupré’s Fifteen Pieces, Vêpres du commun des fêtes de la Sainte Vierge, opus 18, which are dedicated to him.) Dupré was improvising on full organ after the Mass when the organ wind stopped. When Johnson asked what the trouble was, Dupré replied that the five men who were pumping the organ stopped when they got tired. Johnson went behind the organ, gave them some money, and Dupré started playing again, but not for long. When the wind died again, Johnson announced that he would give an electric organ blower to Notre-Dame and asked Dupré to have Cavaillé-Coll develop a plan, adding, “Since I am an Anglican, it would probably be wise to have the Cardinal’s approval.”¹ Dupré wrote that this happened in 1919. I can only assume that he was correct, but that seems pretty late in history for such an important church to get its first electric blower.

Newfangled

In the nineteenth century, officers in the British Navy opposed the introduction of steam-powered vessels, complaining that the long tradition of sailors would be reduced to a mob of mechanics. They were overlooking the fact that a steam-powered vessel would be deadly to a sailing ship as it could operate against wind and tide or without wind at all. While commercial shipping converted quickly to internal combustion propulsion, sailboats have been popular as pleasure craft without interruption. Kingfisher has a twenty-horsepower diesel engine mounted in a spacious compartment under the deck of the cockpit that allows us to “sail” to and from docks and moorings, mostly without incident.

We bought Kingfisher from the boatyard near New Bedford, Massachusetts, where she was built. That first summer, we sailed her 250 miles home to Maine. We did not sail at night, so the trip took six days and five nights. Later, I wrote an essay about our maiden voyage for Catboat Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Catboat Association. A guy in California, who would be teaching a class for sailing catboats the next summer at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine (about seventy-five miles from home by water), emailed me suggesting that if we happened to be nearby at that time, he would love to have us address the class. The Wooden Boat School is a mecca for sailors, and we made sure we would just happen to be there, planning our summer’s cruise around this very event. It was a thrill to have our fiberglass boat on a guest mooring there.

Joining us as a casual commentator for the class was Bill Cheney, widely known in our area for his virtuoso sailing of a catboat, the same model and make as ours with one substantial difference—his boat has no engine. At dinner after the class with the students and their instructor, Bill and I were regaling the table with stories when I admitted that I am not the sailor he is because I am happy to have the engine for close maneuvering and for getting places when there is no wind. His response, “Where do you keep your wine?”

Notes

1. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, trans. and ed. Ralph Kneeream, Belwin-Mills, 1972, 69.

Everything’s under control.

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

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

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

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

New-fangled

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

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

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

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

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

Artifacts

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

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

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

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

It was a hacksaw.

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

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

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

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

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

It played.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Didn’t miss a Sunday.

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

String too short to save

After my freshman year at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, I spent the summer working with Bozeman-Gibson & Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was 1975, and on my first day working in an organ shop, I was set up in the parking lot with sawhorses, a set of painted façade pipes, a can of Zip-Strip®, and a hose. If that wasn’t enough to send me running, I guess I was hooked. They were working on the restoration of an 1848 Stevens organ in Belfast, Maine, completing a new organ in Castleton, Vermont, and installing a rebuilt historic tracker (I do not remember the builder) in a Salvation Army chapel in Providence, Rhode Island. A lot of the summer was spent driving around New England between those organs, my first glimpse into the life of a vagabond organ guy.

During my sophomore year I started working part time for John Leek, the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. I spent the next summer working with Bozeman during which the company moved to their permanent workshop in Deerfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple hours of “barn building” each day after the organ building. I continued part time with Leek as long as I was a student and switched to full time after I graduated. Counting the summers and part-time work, I have been at it for forty-six years.

After Christmas of 2019 I retired from working on organs on site and in my workshop. No more weeks spent wiring organs, no more service calls, no more console rebuilds—my favorite workshop job. I hasten to add that I continue to run the Organ Clearing House, managing the sale of vintage organs, and keeping the crew busy. I am still working as a consultant and still writing monthly columns. They will have to snatch the MacBook® from my cold dead hands. I have not yet imagined a time when I would not be doing some type of work with pipe organs.

With the outbreak of Covid, Wendy and I left New York City for our place in Maine, bringing the families of two of our kids with us. My private workshop, the three-car garage, became a staging space for groceries for our expanded household as we quarantined everything we brought into the house. When winter turned to spring, we added a refrigerator beside the garage freezer. The workshop has always been at least part boatyard. I have a couple shelves of boat parts, the expensive stainless-steel screws we use around salt water, and there are several lengths of surplus line hanging on a wall. You never know when you are going to need some more line. It is also a gardening shed and kitchen overflow storage for the bigger pots and pans. Lobster pots, roasting pans, and canning jars live on the shelves above the fridge.

This sounds like a lot of clutter, but I still have not mentioned the cabinets, shelves, and industrial drawers full of organ parts and hardware I have accumulated over the years. One year I restored an Aeolian residence organ with its paper roll player. It was playable in the shop for a summer, and we had a string of dinner parties during which we would suggest a break before dessert and leave the table for an organ demonstration. Some of Wendy’s publishing friends and colleagues needed that to understand just what I do for a living. “It was always mysterious to me!” I have rebuilt four or five consoles here, refinishing cabinets, rebushing keyboards, and retrofitting solid-state controls and electric drawknobs.

I know I will keep most of the general hardware as long as we live here. It is handy to have hundreds of sizes of screws arranged in drawers to support home repair projects. This summer, I cut up several lengths of half-inch threaded rod and collected the necessary washers, nuts, and lock washers for a tool hanger I built in the shed. Mending plates, corner braces, and hinges will always come in handy. I have felt and punches to make pads for the bottoms of chair legs; I have lubricants and finishes for pretty much any purpose and big, well-lit workbenches. It is my own private hardware store. Funny, I still go to the hardware store most weeks.

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

Along with his organ work, John Leek built harpsichords, and as we made those keyboards and brass levers to control “choirs” of jacks, I learned about polishing. I have a bench grinder that spins abrasive wheels, wire wheels, and cloth polishing wheels. There is a drawer full of bars of polishing compound, a rake for dressing the cloth wheels, and the nasty wheel with an iron handle for dressing the abrasive wheels. I rejuvenated a rusty cast-iron skillet using the wire wheel. Handy.

There is a case of Parson’s sudsy ammonia on a high shelf. I think there are ten bottles left in it. It is a terrific solution for use in my ultrasonic cleaner. I have used it to clean reed shallots and tongues, little brass console parts like screws and switches. I will hang onto all this because there are lots of things around the house that need polishing, and Wendy’s engagement ring looks great after an ultrasonic swim in sudsy ammonia.

Totally tubular

I have worked on all sorts of pneumatic actions from different organ builders, many of which incorporate some type of rigid or flexible tubing. Seventy-year-old rubber tubing is likely to be crumbling apart. Quarter-inch (interior diameter) tubing is common to many different types of organs, so I have hundreds of feet of that in a coil, destined to be cut into six-inch pieces. There is about forty feet of three-quarter-inch (ID) heavy plastic tubing with nylon webbing embedded. It is made for high-pressure hot water in small gasoline engines, and it was great for use as pneumatic tubing in a big expression motor. I have coils of copper tubing and some straight lengths of aluminum and brass tubing. You never know when you are going to need some.

Parts is parts.

Sometime ago I got the idea that it would be clever to have a supply of the waxed boxes used for Asian carry-out food for storing specific organ parts. I used them for a while, decided they were ridiculous, and discarded most of the minimum order of 1,000 boxes, but some are still around. One is labeled “Schlicker console parts.” I installed a Peterson system in a Schlicker console. Having serviced many Schlicker organs over the years, I know that the little pressed metal toggles in the “ka-chunk” combination actions can wear and break or simply fall out, and here were two or three hundred of them going to waste. I used four or five for a service call repair, and I still have the rest of them. Pretty sure I am not going to need them again.

I have boxes of Austin magnets, Austin note motors, Kimber Allen keyboard contacts, pedalboard contacts, Heuss nuts, leather nuts, compass springs (for the pallets in slider windchests), pouch springs, fiber discs (for making pouches and valves), many sizes and styles of felt and paper punchings for regulating keyboards, and even coils of wire for stringing harpsichords.

For a short while I repaired and rebuilt harmoniums, and I have a heavy box full of the brass reeds. They must have been salvaged from derelict instruments. I do not remember where I got them, but I doubt I did the salvaging because I would have kept them separated and labeled by voices. I may have used ten of them, and the rest are here if anyone wants them. A soak in sudsy ammonia would help. Another box is full of keyboard ivories. I “harvested” them from old pianos and organ keyboards, and having a miscellany of ivories really is useful as you can pick through them to match color and size. While I used many of them for service call repairs and refurbishing old keyboards, I am probably finished with them now.

On the high shelf near the tubing, there is a stack of boxes of various types of windchest magnets. Some have pipe valves that work either electrically or pneumatically, others are the standard “screw cap” chest magnets for pitman and offset chests. And for those times when you are changing wind pressure, there are boxes of magnet caps with one-quarter-inch and three-sixteenths-inch exhaust holes. None of these will have household use.

There are about twenty three-foot cardboard tubes in the rafters containing skins of leather and yards of felt, fabric, and cork. There is enough material to releather a ten-stop pitman chest and a half-dozen reservoirs. There is pouch leather, gusset leather, alum-tanned leather for reservoir belts, and several types and weights of pneumatic leather. I am not sure how much of it I will use, but as I recently gave Wendy a big piece of thin black felt for a sewing project, I will assume it is worth keeping. Since it is up high, it is not in anyone’s way.

Twenty or thirty years ago, industrial chemists developed spray cans of graphite lubricant, perfect for treating windchest tables, sliders, and toeboard bottoms so slider stop action would work smoothly. Before switching to that, I mixed flake graphite with denatured alcohol creating a paste that I scooped with latex-gloved hands and rubbed over all the surfaces. It was a messy process, but when the alcohol evaporated, a rich, even coat of graphite glistened on the wood. Heaven help you if you spilled any on the floor. I have most of a gallon can of graphite that I guess I do not need anymore. I also have half a case of that graphite spray. I can use it on snow shovels to keep snow from sticking to them.

Material handling

In industrial catalogues, material handling is the section that includes dollies, carts, pallet jacks, and all the tools and equipment used to move things around. You can buy a Drum Dolly, a two-wheeler designed specifically to handle 55-gallon drums or a refrigerator dolly—you can guess what that’s for. A refrigerator dolly is a two-wheeler with straps to hold the load in place, and rubber belts that move over wheels on the back so you can haul the fridge up stairs. I have used mine for hauling reservoirs upstairs to choir lofts. The upright freezer in the garage needs to be defrosted occasionally. That can be a nasty job, but it is pretty simple here, and we have been “eating it down” in preparation. Soon, I will move the last few things into the top of the Covid fridge, wheel the freezer through the overhead door, and stand it in the dooryard facing the sun with the door open. It takes a few hours, and there is no need to catch the water.

I have a come-along, a tool with a steel cable, hooks on both ends, and a long handle that pumps a ratchet. I bought it when we were installing an organ and realized it needed to be a few inches to the left. A half-dozen pumps of the handle was all it took to scootch the organ to its proper place. I have not used it on a job since, but we have a half-mile wooded driveway that trees fall on occasionally. I can often hitch a chain to loops on my car and drag a tree out of the way, but several times I have used the come-along tied to another tree to do the job when I cannot make the angle with the car. We also use it to pull the dock out of the water. I am keeping that.

The opposite of the come-along is a house jack that I have used often when releathering reservoirs. After the hinges are glued to the ribs, the pairs of ribs are glued to the body and top, and the belts are glued on all around, you have to open the thing fully before gluing on the gussets. You are stretching all the new material and glue, and it can be a heavy lift, especially on a large reservoir. I have done it with blocks and levers, but a hand-pumped hydraulic house jack is just the ticket. When our daughter wanted to convert a small shed into a pottery studio, our son-in-law and I jacked up the shed and repaired its structure. I will keep the jack.

Another tool I used when gluing reservoirs is the big double-boiler you see keeping soup warm in a cafeteria line. Having hot wet rags is essential when using hot glue, and I have a Sharpie mark on the front for the little volume knob, setting the temperature high enough to soften excess glue, but not so hot that I cannot put my hands in it. When I was gluing four or five reservoirs at once, the pot would be hot all day, and I would change the water every hour as it got dark with the glue. We like to give big parties, and a steaming pot of clam chowder would be just the thing for a chilly fall cookout, but I think this appliance has too many miles on it for use in food service. It is handy for soaking labels off jars.

My Rubbermaid® rolling table has ball-bearing casters and a load limit of 500 pounds. I know it can bear more than that. It is about the same height as my workbenches and the rear end of my Chevy Suburban, so I can wheel a windchest or reservoir from the back of the car to the workbench without lifting anything, and it is perfect for moving lumber between planer, table saw, and cut-off saw. I can also wheel groceries from the car to the Covid fridge, and I have even used it to wheel our eight-foot fiberglass dinghy to the car. Yes, you can put an eight-foot dinghy in a Suburban and close the door. I get fussy when other people in the family leave stuff on my rolling table because I like to keep it free for the next use. I’m keeping it.

One of our kids bought a couple big inflatable rubber swim toys. I especially like the Grandpa-sized pink inner tube with its five-foot dragon tail, lots of fun for swimming off the dock with our grandchildren, and it is convenient to have an air compressor with a big assortment of fittings. It saves fifteen minutes of huffing and puffing when you could be in the water. The fifty-foot air hose hangs on a steel column between garage bays, so it only takes a moment to set up to check the air of the tires on cars parked outside.

Perspective

There is almost no end to the list of tools, materials, supplies, and equipment in my garage workshop. I am still using most of the tools for projects around the house. This summer I built a neat set of drawers using quarter-sawn oak to match my library table desk. I am just starting a new “private drive” sign for the top of the road using birch lumber left over from a set of bookcases I made for Wendy’s office. I will use a pin-router to make the lettering. Wendy is a talented and productive weaver, and there is nothing like an organ builder as tech department for a house with two looms.

I hope this little tour is informative to organists who might not know much of what is behind the service technician who works on your organ or the organ company that built or rebuilt it. Mine is a light-duty shop, a delight for me to work in alone or with a colleague or two. It is especially nice in the summer with the overhead doors open. I keep thinking I will not do any more organ work there, but it is easy to imagine a time when our crew is working nearby and something needs to be releathered quickly. I might just bend the rule.

Making things

Before we moved to New York City, Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Our building had been an electrical warehouse for the Navy Yard, which actively built ships from 1801 until 1975. It is a building that once had forklifts racing around inside, so the ceilings were nice and high. Our living room windows looked across Boston Harbor to the Coast Guard base, the Custom House, and into the heart of Boston, and we had “cocktail chairs” in front of the sixth-floor windows where for ten years of evenings we watched the Wednesday night sailboat races, foolish non-seamen in overpowered speed boats, and the constant flow of commercial shipping including the mammoth Liquid Natural Gas tankers whose captains looked us in the eye from their towering bridges.

The Navy Yard still functions formally as a military base as it is home to the USS Constitution, the Navy’s oldest commissioned warship. One of the oldest buildings in the Charlestown Navy Yard is the Ropewalk, built of heavy granite blocks and completed in 1838, where most of the rope used by the United States Navy was made until it closed in 1970. Imagine the floor plan of a building designed expressly for making rope, over 1,300 feet long and 45 feet wide. That is more than twice the length of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. One of my walking routes included the length of the building that is almost exactly a quarter mile, and I wondered what sort of machinery was used for all that twisting and winding. Take a look at this video to see an antique ropewalk in operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5mo2I2c0Q.

The Maine Maritime Museum is on the site of the Percy & Small Shipyard in Phippsburg, Maine, where dozens of wooden sailing ships as long as 444 feet were built through the nineteenth century. The museum is adjacent to the Bath Iron Works, famous for having launched a new destroyer every twenty-five days during World War II with Rosie the Riveter riveting a river of rivets. Now, the Bath Iron Works is known for producing new Zumwalt Class destroyers.¹ The museum includes a diorama of the J. T. Donnell Ropewalk in Bath, Maine, which adjoined Percy & Small and provided the shipyard with rope. When you are building six-masted schooners you need lots of rope, and the ropewalk was a wooden structure some 1,200 feet long with a stationary steam engine at one end to power the equipment. A legend by the diorama shares a quote from The Bath Times in 1883:

John D. Smith of this city, a ropemaker at the J. T. Donnell ropemaking factory, has done a large amount of walking in his life. He is sixty-four years old and has worked at ropemaking for forty-five years working as a handspinner, in which time he has spun 69,940,666 fathoms [six feet] of thread, walking ten miles a day to do this, which in the forty-five years of spinning would aggregate the enormous distance of 140,400 miles [six day weeks for forty-five years]. Of this, one-half the distance has been accomplished walking backwards . . ., the equivalent of backing a distance nearly equal to around the world three times.

Reminds me of the quip about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels. (Mr. Smith probably didn’t wear high heels.)

Color my world with a spring in my step.

Children have grown up watching Sesame Street since 1969. I was thirteen, and I had just landed my first paying job as a church organist, so I was above “strings and sealing wax,” but fifteen years later the show was a staple for my sons. As a lifelong machine geek, I loved the segments about how things are made, all of which are easy to find online. There is a humdinger about making crayons accompanied by a brilliant musical tone poem. My favorite is “Peanut Butter,” the jazzy flapper-style song written and performed by Joe Raposo that accompanies a tour through a peanut butter factory featuring smiling workers in what look like Krispy Kreme hats pushing the important looking buttons to run the machines. I especially like the shot of a broad stream of peanut butter oozing out of a press and into the pipes that lead to the jars as Raposo sings, “he keeps it pumpin’ through the pipeline like a peanut-butter-pumper should.” What great teaching.

Among the many factories I have toured are a potato chip factory (no free samples but a gift shop at the end), a major brewery (free samples), and an auto assembly plant (no free samples). When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin in the early 1980s, we were building an organ for Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia, and we planned to make the sliders in the style of Flentrop, double sliders of Masonite, the holes connected with little leather tubes, with hundreds of springs between them to press the two sliders against chest table and toeboard.

No hardware store could have supplied the thousands of identical fine coil compression springs we would need, and we found the Timms Spring Company in Elyria, Ohio, perfectly situated to supply the several large car makers in the area. The company had around twenty employees, most of whom were tool-and-die makers, and the factory was full of machines. Timms would receive an order from a car maker for a million specialized springs, and a machine would be set up to make them that would then run on its own for a week or two gobbling up coils of wire and filling bins with springs.

We brought a sample (probably borrowed from a Flentrop organ we serviced) and met Bill Timms, the third generation of the spring-making family. Bill gave us a fascinating tour around the factory explaining the purpose of each spring being made and gave us lots of free samples. We watched as a toolmaker set up a simple jig to copy our spring by hand and returned a week later to pick up our order.

Organ shops

Visiting a pipe organ workshop is a special treat, educational and eye-popping for both the layperson and the organbuilder. I have visited dozens of shops across the United States, in Great Britain, and in Europe, and while I like to think I know a lot about the building and history of organs, I always learn something fresh. It is fun to compare how different workshops approach common tasks like building windchests and reservoirs, racking pipes, or making wind connections. Different firms have particular products or processes they have developed of which they are particularly proud, different firms have thoughtfully designed console layouts that distinguish them from others, and different firms specialize in different types of windchest actions.

The organbuilding firm of Harrison & Harrison in Durham in Great Britain moved into a new well-equipped building in 1996, where one can pass from one department to another witnessing the deep skills of a venerable firm at work. Immediately upon entering the building, one sees displayed in an elegant frame a cast gold medallion and a letter from Queen Elizabeth II dated November 20, 1997: 

Prince Philip and I are delighted and deeply impressed with the marvelous work of restoration of the fire damaged area of Windsor Castle. Being anxious to show our appreciation of the skill and dedication, which you and others have devoted to it, we have this special medallion struck to mark the completion of the restoration and it comes with our grateful thanks. [Signed] Elizabeth R

The organ involved in the Windsor Castle restoration is a new instrument of seven ranks in the “Private Chapel” built in 1997. Harrison & Harrison has produced a vast list of important and well-known organs including those at King’s College, Cambridge, Durham, Ely, and Exeter cathedrals, Royal Festival Hall, Westminster Abbey, Winchester Cathedral, and Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. We have all seen several of those organs on television. I especially like the thought that the marvelous organ in Westminster Abbey was built for the coronation of George VI in 1936—imagine the feelings of nervousness, expectation, and pride those organbuilders must have felt. When I visited that workshop in 2016, the organ from King’s College was in the shop for renovation. I got a kick out of noticing the pipe crate labeled “Solo Tuba,” the stentorian tenor melody under a certain verse-six descant ringing in my ears. My visit to Durham included a tour of the H&H cathedral organ with operations manager Jeremy Maritz, setting the standard that one Double Open Wood Diapason is not enough. There’s one on each side of the choir, one of which goes to 32′.

The workshop of Taylor & Boody in Staunton, Virginia, is housed in an old public school building with huge windows and high ceilings, a spacious, airy, and well-lighted place to work. Since the firm was founded in 1979, they have built nearly ninety mechanical-action organs, developing a great reputation for excellent workmanship. Most of their instruments show the influence of the North European Baroque, with tonal schemes that allow lots of versatility. They ensure their own supply of high-quality wood by harvesting carefully chosen trees, cutting them into lumber in their sawmill, and drying them in the adjacent kiln. It is a kick to walk around the yard among stacks of lumber designated for particular opus numbers. When Wendy and I visited there in 2009, we stayed in the apartment above the sawmill and saw the huge oak logs destined to become the wonderful innovative organ for Grace Church in New York City. We have a fond memory of John Boody showing us his “free-ranging” moveable chicken coop and giving us fresh eggs for our breakfast.

Taylor & Boody is one of a number of firms that casts pipe metal to their own specifications. Watching the casting box being pushed down the long table leaving a shining pool of molten metal behind is something special to watch, especially the magic moment a few seconds later when the elixir turns into solid metal. The transformation from liquid to solid is instantly apparent. It seems like alchemy. The idea that freshly cast metal and those huge oak logs would soon be a pipe organ epitomizes the craft we celebrate.

Schoenstein & Company in Benicia, California (the gateway to Napa Valley), mirrors the dedication to quality at Taylor & Boody, building organs in a style worlds apart. They are widely respected for the sophisticated tonal structures with versatile orchestral voices, double expressions, and powerful solo voices, and their elegant consoles are superbly appointed with accessories unique to them. One look at an expression shoe and you know it is a Schoenstein organ. Schoenstein purchased their building in 2004, leaving the 1928 workshop in downtown San Francisco. They have since raised the ceiling of one room to forty-two feet, creating an erecting space, and added a wing for pipe shop, voicing room, and archives. The attention to detail is unparalleled—the company logo is stenciled on the propane tanks of the forklift. Jack Bethards and his skilled staff are working with a clear vision, strongly influenced by the fabled companies of the early twentieth century. The firm has just completed a grand organ with four manuals and seventy stops, including a 32′ metal façade, for the new Basilica of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando, Florida.

Glatter-Götz in Pfullendorf, Germany, is housed in a new facility built for them shortly after the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall organ was completed. When I was there in the fall of 2019, vast fields of sunflowers were in bloom as I drove to the little village. There is a one-story façade facing the street, effectively concealing the two-and-a-half story rear of the building. There is a huge slanted roof covered with solar panels allowing second floor offices at one end of the building and lofty open areas with plenty of space for erecting organs and handling long lumber. You enter at the end of the building where the lunchroom is to the left, the voicing room to the right, a corridor ahead to the workshops, and a long stairway to the suite of offices. All the workspaces have lots of big windows, plenty of clean bench space, storage areas for lumber, and fasteners, leather, and organ parts are neatly organized. There were two organs being assembled when I visited, one for Marietta, Georgia, and another older instrument being renovated for a music school in rural Russia. The next-door neighbor is a farm implement dealer, so a parade of tractors runs back and forth outside.

Paul Fritts & Company occupies an attractive architect-designed (craftsman style?) building in Tacoma, Washington. I visited there in April 2019 with my colleague Amory Atkins (it was Amory’s birthday) while we were installing an organ at the University of Washington. Organs for the First Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, and the Chapel of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, were standing in the shop when we visited. The Lorain organ was complete and ready for shipment. I was especially impressed by their CNC (computer numerical control) router. It is housed in a separate building to separate the considerable noise from the rest of the workshop. It is as big as a bus and capable of drilling entire windchest tables with dozens of different hole sizes, milling the many sizes of wood reed boots, and mitering wood windlines, all by programmed computer control. The machine chooses and inserts bits as necessary and calmly progresses from one task to another while the organbuilders work on other tasks in the workshop across the way. We had a birthday dinner with Paul and college pals Bruce and Shari Shull in Tacoma, then drove back to our hotel in Seattle in a wicked rain squall, crowned by a complete double rainbow. Happy Birthday!

C. B. Fisk, Inc., moved into a new purpose-built facility in 1979. That building has been expanded significantly since, with tall erecting space added, and a large wing containing several department workshops. The first organ to be built and assembled in the new shop was Opus 68, a three-manual, twenty-seven-stop instrument for the Southwick Music Complex of the University of Vermont. Close to ninety new organs have been built in that building, which, like others I have described, is superbly equipped and spacious enough for nearly thirty people to be at work with all the tools and supplies they need.

Charles Fisk founded the eponymous company in 1961 in an old ropewalk building in Gloucester, Massachusetts. C. B. Fisk “lifer” Bob Cornell, who has been with the firm for fifty years, remembers that the ropewalk was actually built for making nets for the city’s fleet of fishing trawlers. (Remember George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm.) There was a twenty-foot-high room at one end where organs could be erected, and an attached structure over 120-feet long where the nets had been made and the various workspaces for the organ company were placed. Bob remembered poison ivy growing through openings in the walls, and that the long floor slanted away from the tall building as the land sank into the nearby bog causing window frames to become trapezoidal. About ten people worked in that shop. The landmark organs for Kings Chapel in Boston (1963) and Harvard Memorial Church (1967) were built in the ropewalk.

What groundbreaking work happened in that shop as the innovative and Socratic Charlie Fisk, with a loyal group of disciples, dug into the history of organbuilding and developed the signature style that has been so influential. The company has now built over 150 organs in distinguished venues all over the world. Those fledgling organbuilders may not have walked 140,000 miles, but they sure changed the content of the industry.

Each of these companies has a well-developed website with photo galleries, opus lists, and workshop tours. Happy visiting. And buy good organs.

Notes

1. Just to show that the Navy can have a sense of humor, the first launch of the futuristic evil-looking Zumwalt class ships was the USS Enterprise commanded by James Kirk. 

Photo:

The Fisk Ropewalk, moving day to the new shop, Charles Fisk loading the van (photo credit: Robert Cornell)