In the Wind . . .

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.

Youthful fantasies

Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, Massachusetts, was founded as a mission in September 1953, and services were first held in the Deerfield Elementary School at the end of Deerfield Avenue. A new church building was dedicated next to the school in March 1955, and my father was appointed the first full-time rector in October 1956. I was seven months old. We lived in a rented house nearby while the rectory was built adjacent to the church. I know from personal memory and family lore that we were ensconced in the new rectory before I was two years old. My earliest memories of those days included the bulldozers that were grading the lawn and building the driveway. My wife and sons would quickly agree that must have been the genesis of my fascination with heavy equipment, admittedly alive and well today as my sixty-eighth 
birthday approaches.

The Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts established Saint John’s as a parish in 1959, and that year the church acquired C. B. Fisk Opus 31 (then the Andover Organ Company), a one-manual, six-stop, mechanical-action organ mounted on a platform with a detached, reversed console. I learned later (!) that the organ was planned as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual instrument that could be completed if the new parish succeeded. At three years old, I did not yet know about detached consoles, but my child’s eyes remember where it was placed in the simple new A-frame building, itself designed to accept future enhancement.

Ten years after its founding, the parish mounted a campaign to build a parish hall and complete the church interior with formal decorations and furniture. Two towers and a rear gallery were added. A full-height stained-glass wall was installed behind the altar, a chancel with steps and altar rail was added, and hardwood pews were installed replacing the metal folding chairs.

Having spent a lifetime moving pipe organs, I am amused by the memory of my first organ relocation—that tiny Fisk organ hanging from a crane, pipes and all, being lifted from the front of the original sanctuary to its permanent home in the new rear gallery before the roof was closed. If I saw that happening today, I would run toward the crane operator, arms waving like a semaphore, shouting “Stop!,” but there it was, an organ hanging from a hook on a sunny day. I was seven. That same year, when my parents were not at home, I thought it would be fun to climb the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower under construction. It was a lovely view from the top, showing my parents’ car turning on to Deerfield Avenue, heading home. I got back down before they reached the driveway, but the guilt on my face was enough to spill the story.

Saint John’s organist’s name was Donald McFeely. He had the parish on the cusp of the tracker revolution, buying an organ from Charles Fisk and the Andover Organ Company before the founding of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in 1961. The Andover Organ Company completed the twenty-three-rank instrument in 1991, including the original six-stop organ as the Rückpositiv as planned by Charlie Fisk.

I remember several of the families of Saint John’s as friends of my parents, and as I write I realize what a heady time that was for them. It must have been thrilling to start with meetings to incorporate a mission, transforming it to a parish, and taking on two building programs in ten years. Through their commitment, effort, and money, they created a church that continues to thrive over seventy years later. My father was a young priest in his second appointment, and it must have been mind-boggling and life-altering for him to be at the helm of that rocket ship. Dad has been gone almost ten years, so I will never get to chat about that with him, but the notion adds to my admiration. By the way, I attended the Deerfield School, next door to our house, from first through third grades.

§

Since my first organ was a quasi-experimental dip into the early years of the Organ Reform Movement, it is ironic that the second organ in my life was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company at a time when Robert Hope-Jones (who grew into the genius behind theatre organs built by Wurlitzer) was working with Skinner. Dad was called as rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966, when I was ten years old. I was instantly pressed into the Junior Choir led by harpsichord builder Carl Fudge, the parish’s organist and choirmaster. As I think about it, the further irony is that Mr. Fudge as an early practitioner in the esoteric world of harpsichord building in the 1960s was saddled with an aging, wheezing, cadaver of an organ in such poor condition that my friends and I as ten-year-old choristers where well aware of its precarious state.

There was the Sunday when I heard my first cipher in the middle of a service. Mr. Fudge left the bench, crossed the chancel, reverenced the altar, returned with a ladder, reverenced the altar again, set the ladder against the impost, climbed up and pulled a pipe. He repeated the process to return the ladder, reverencing the altar twice more, wearing a black cassock through the entire sequence. I expect that his pious performance as the service progressed was calculated to draw attention to the organ’s failings, and it was only five or six years later that my father was involved in purchasing another organ from Charles Fisk, Opus 65, which was completed in 1973.

When I was twelve, I had my first organ lessons on the gleaming ten-year-old, three-manual Holtkamp organ in Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (ETS) in Harvard Square, later the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), now defunct. Though it has electro-pneumatic action, that organ was in the vanguard of experimental design with low wind pressures, classical choruses, and a Rückpositiv division (on a pitman chest) along the gallery rail. But my first experiences playing the organ during worship were on that home Skinner when Mr. Fudge allowed me to “noodle” a bit while he left the bench to receive communion, and later to play an occasional prelude or postlude.

It was not long before I went out on my own, taking a six-week gig playing on a three-manual Estey (long gone) at the Baptist church in Winchester, and then after Vatican II at St. Eulalia Catholic Church in Winchester on a Conn Artist. (You can’t make these things up.) My last high-school church organist position was at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played a three-manual, thirty-three-stop E. & G. G. Hook organ built in 1860, a very grand organ with real large-organ stops like 16′ Double Open Wood and 16′ Trombone with wood resonators.

Nostalgia

I am wallowing in childhood memories today because Wendy and I recently moved from Greenwich Village to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where my grandfather had been rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, just at the time when my family moved from Westwood to Winchester and I started to take organ lessons. It has been both fun and eerie to merge into life in Stockbridge, walking past the rectory on Main Street where my grandparents lived, counting the windows, and remembering the rooms that were so familiar when I was a teenager.

Saint Paul’s first building was a wood Gothic structure designed by Richard Upjohn and consecrated in 1844. The present stone building was designed by Charles McKim and consecrated in 1884. The organ was Hilborne Roosevelt’s Opus 127, also built in 1884, but it was drastically altered in the early-1960s, a project that included the addition of mixtures and mutations, the replacement of the original principal stops with ranks of tapered pipes, the addition of a pedal division and a couple unified reeds including a Krummhorn with electric action. I wonder if Hilborne Roosevelt ever heard a Krummhorn? Today I call it a scandalous treatment of a lovely venerable instrument, but when I was twelve and thirteen years old and allowed to practice on the organ, loud and shrill as it was, I thought it was the bees’ knees. I do not remember if I ever played a service there, but I know I played a recital or two—I’m sure my grandparents were very proud.

When I was a kid, we had family holidays in Stockbridge. Thanksgiving dinner in the rectory was a great treat, and my grandparents nurtured my nascent love of music by treating me to weekends at Tanglewood, just a few miles away. Those were my first solo trips away from home—my parents put me on buses and trains in Boston and grandparents picked me up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, quite an adventure for a thirteen-year-old.

Since I retired as a church organist when I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, we have not attended church regularly, but when we first moved to Stockbridge, we were quick to show up at Saint Paul’s. We went to the early service at 8:00 a.m. and were part of a congregation of five or six people. It was fun to meet a woman whose wedding had been performed by my grandfather and who had wonderful memories of him, but it was a pretty quiet affair. Shortly after, we learned that the rector had just received a call to move elsewhere, and after our first visit we went dormant.

A new rector was installed at Saint Paul’s eight weeks ago, and Wendy and I went to church there last Sunday, attending the 10:00 a.m. service along with more than forty others. It was great to hear the organ being played, though it is in terrible condition, and we were pleased with the good vibes, the singing of the hymns, and the fact that there were some people present who were younger than us. Maybe we will go back this time.

Altered states

I imagine we are all familiar with organs that have been altered, receiving new identities for better or for worse. Some are great successes. There are many organs built by the Skinner Organ Company and later modified by Aeolian-Skinner under G. Donald Harrison’s direction. Ernest Skinner hated that, but Harrison was able in many cases to retain the gravitas of the original organ while adding well-balanced choruses and mutations.

I had a long relationship with a 1906 Hutchings-Votey organ rebuilt by Kinzey-Angerstein in 1973 at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Holliston, Massachusetts. I joined the reorganized workshop of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and the organ at Saint Mary’s was one of the first I tuned after taking that job. The occasion was a recital by Daniel Roth, then titulaire of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, celebrating the appointment of Saint Mary’s longtime organist, Leo Abbott, as director of music for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston and the end of his tenure at Saint Mary’s. The organ retained its original 8′ and 4′ principals, wood flutes, manual reeds, and pedal stops. Daniel Angerstein had added upperwork to the Great and Swell creating two fine choruses and a smashing 16′ Pedal Trombone. It is a grand organ with lots of pizzazz, and the new tonal scheme added wonderfully to the original foundation of the organ.

The Holliston organ was so successful because the new stops were scaled and voiced to complete choruses based on the original foundations. The added pipes were purposefully constructed to exacting specifications based on the scales of the original stops, so all voices blend as if the entire instrument had been built at once. Too often, organ technicians of lesser skill add voices to an organ based on the notion of an ideal stoplist without considering the scales, construction, or even wind pressures of the new pipes.

Earlier this year I visited an organ in Texas that has small-scale Baroque choruses added in the 1960s to a nineteenth-century organ with broad scales and heavy fundamental tone. The differences in harmonic structure between old and newer pipes is striking. The tonal effect is jarring, confusing, and difficult to sing with. The firm that added the high-pitched stops must not have made any effort to create a blend between old and new. The stoplist looks fine, but the organ sounds terrible.

When the revival of classic organbuilding was getting traction in the early 1960s, many of the new organs were focused on high-pitched voices as were the “Baroque-izations” of older organs. It is ironic because the great classical instruments of Europe on which our revival was based are typically not shrill instruments. Their stoplists show fully developed choruses crowned with multiple mixtures, but their foundation stops are rich and full with thrilling harmonic development to support all that upperwork. When twentieth-century organbuilders began building new mechanical-action organs with low wind pressure and open-toe voicing, the challenge they faced, whether they knew it or not, was to figure out to deliver lots of air, not pressure but volume, to the largest pipes in the organ, and to voice those pipes so they could really sing.

§

It is fun to think about the first organs I knew, how my youthful impressions compared to my current thinking after playing, working on, and listening to hundreds of organs. As a thirteen-year-old, I was enthralled by the idea that I could play music on those keyboards and fill a church building with sound. I have been around organs with serious intent for about fifty-six years, and the evolution of my understanding of organ tone is still in process. I have learned slowly how scale (diameter) and wind pressure affect what an organ pipe can do. I have learned how the shape of a pipe’s resonator (the long part) affects the harmonic structure of its tone, so it stands to reason that two stops that emphasize the same harmonics will blend well together—that is a simple glimpse of the complex structure of a Cornet, especially when a reed stop is added to it. (Think d’Aquin noëls.)

I sat in a pew at Saint Paul’s last Sunday, delighted that the organ was being played, but critical of its collection of unrelated stops, however much I enjoyed playing it fifty-six years ago. (Oof!) The church has had some hard times over all those years, but it is fun to think that we might breathe some new life into it. Wendy and I live a fifteen-minute walk from Saint Paul’s. Maybe I could help?

There have been many organs in my life that were altered from their original state and transformed into something different. Some are marvelous successes, some are unmitigated disasters, and some (perhaps most) are the transformation of a fine instrument into one that is mediocre and uninteresting. A well-intentioned local organ technician may have terrific skills, but may not have the knowledge, wisdom, and experience to “out-Skinner Skinner.” If the organ you play most regularly does not have a trumpet, you probably could add one, but it should be as close as possible to the trumpet the original builder would have included if the organ was to be one stop larger. The added stop must be heard as part of the original organ and not as irrelevant braying. It is not the stoplist that makes an organ, it is the tonal structure.

I was at dinner recently with two beloved and admired colleagues who are collaborating on an important new organ. I asked them what they hoped to achieve with that organ. One replied, “I want to make an organ that sounds beautiful so lots of people will be happy to hear it.”

A moving experience

I have been involved in moving hundreds of pipe organs. Now that I am over the age of sixty-five, I have retired from active site work. I am not carrying heavy loads up or down stairs, climbing ladders with organ parts on my shoulder, walking backward carrying one end of a loaded pipe tray, or squiggling around on my ample belly under a windchest and around a reservoir to reach those last few windline screws. I am happy to leave all that to others. Along with gathering information about organs for sale, I correspond with clients and arrange the logistics for our jobs, such as scheduling truck transportation, ordering packing materials and lumber for crates, renting scaffolding, and planning travel and lodging for the crew.

When I joined the Organ Clearing House I faced a steep learning curve about the trucking industry. For the first few jobs I organized, I hired household moving companies with familiar names like Mayflower and Allied. One of those outfits carried a Beckerath organ for us from New York City to Los Angeles. The shipment was received by a crew from Beckerath who reported significant damage to the load. It was insured through the moving company, and an adjuster was dispatched to view the damage. The German crew told the adjuster that their methods of packing were different from ours, but in the awkwardness of different languages, the adjuster heard them saying that we did it wrong and the claim was denied. I replied that we were widely known for our many shipments without damage and asked if the adjuster would revisit our claim if I went to Los Angeles at our expense to present our case in person.

The organ had to be removed from the building in New York before a certain date and could not be delivered until after a certain date, so we were paying for several extra days for the loaded truck to sit waiting. As we discussed the claim, we discovered that the driver had used those extra days to visit family in the mountains of Tennessee, and police reports revealed that there had been a “mishap.” The claim was paid.

Loading an organ into another moving van in New Haven, Connecticut, I was chatting with the driver who happened to mention that it was good we were not shipping the organ to Canada because he had been banned from driving there because of a firearms violation. I called the dispatcher and demanded a different driver.

It was when a household mover stood us up that I learned a better way. The organ involved was the huge M. P. Möller (Opus 5819) from the 19,000-seat Philadelphia Civic Center that we were shipping to the University of Oklahoma for the then-nascent American Organ Institute, now sadly shuttered. The organ had only eighty-nine ranks, but they included four Tubas, a huge proportion of sixteen-foot stops, two whopping “thirty-twos,” two huge consoles (theatre and concert), and was so massively built that we figured we would need five semi-trailers to move it. The day before we were to start loading, I was waiting at a baggage carousel in the Philadelphia airport when the moving company called to tell me that they needed all their trucks for something else. My reaction attracted the attention of my fellow travelers.

Some months earlier, I received a call from Malcolm, an international shipping agent, who had an abandoned shipment of new organ pipes in a warehouse. An American organ builder had suddenly gone out of business before receiving the pipes from a European pipe maker. Malcolm found me through a Google search and asked for my help to sell them, which I was able to do quickly. After the call from the moving company, I pulled myself together, retrieved my keys from across the terminal, and called Malcolm. Sure enough, with only one day lost to the snafu, Bohemian Logistics of Reno, Nevada, sent us a truck each day for the rest of the week. Since then, Malcolm has arranged all our international shipments (except to Madagascar), sending organs to New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Bolivia, Japan, Indonesia, and Great Britain, among others.

Why not Madagascar? In 2008, we were sending an organ to Antananarivo at the request of Marc Ravalomanana, then president of the Republic, and he was using his considerable influence and staff to arrange for a shipping container. My colleague Amory Atkins and I flew to “Tana” to install it in time for an important anniversary celebration at the principal church of FJKM, the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar. Ravalomanana, who was also the president of the national church, would preach at the service. We were on a tight schedule, but the container was being delayed by customs at Toamasina, the country’s principal port. The president had just imposed unpopular new rules and regulations regarding imports, and the port authorities were retaliating by holding up his prize project.

Finally, the president brought in the military to sort things out, and the container was trucked to the presidential palace on the outskirts of Tana because city streets could not accommodate a large truck. With the help of the army, we transferred the organ onto a military flatbed truck, and our crew of soldiers rode on top of the load for the twenty miles to the church. It was a riot watching Amory give directions to the group of Malagash soldiers. A few months later, a popular uprising tossed President Ravalomanana out of office.

What you want in a truck

Most of the enclosed semi-trailers you see on the highway are simple big boxes with no equipment to secure a load. A truck backs up to a warehouse loading dock, and forklifts load them full of loaded shrink-wrapped pallets. The pallets are built to fit snugly in a standard truck, so it is not possible for the load to shift while the truck is in motion. Loading a pipe organ is like a huge and heavy game of Tetris. The crew studies the staged load and calculates what component would go where, filling voids with individually wrapped smaller parts and commercial padding.

Dave, the owner and one of the drivers of Bohemian Logistics, introduced us to “special commodities” fleets. Those trailers have vertical rails spaced every six or eight feet that have rows of holes like modular shelving to accept ratchet straps to secure things to the walls of the truck, and highway bars that reach from side to side, and can be used to brace uneven loads and to support decking, a second plywood floor inside the truck that can be loaded with well-wrapped larger metal pipes and the like. These specialty trucks are intended to handle unconventional loads like large trade shows and pipe organs, and are equipped with twenty- or twenty-five-dozen quilted furniture pads, hydraulic lift tailgates, ramps, and other assorted gear to help make an uneven load secure and easier to handle in and out of the trailer.

Bohemian Logistics ceased operations, and searching for a new source of special commodities trucks I found Roland Dickens, a dispatcher for Landstar Systems, a huge transit company with a considerable special commodities fleet. We have worked with Roland almost exclusively for the last ten years, and I have shared his name with many of our colleague companies. He is a whiz at sending us skillful drivers, and he plays and wins pool tournaments in Las Vegas.

Richard Mowen was one of the first drivers Roland sent us. He was a tiny wiry guy with a tiny wiry dog and a twangy southern accent; a member of our crew thought he was the spitting image of Bugs Bunny’s archrival, Yosemite Sam. Richard passed out bottles of his favorite cherry soda, cracked wise about our complicated load, swung himself aloft into the cab of his Kenworth, and took to the road with a blast from his horn. He has since retired but left behind a lot of memories.

It is a safe bet that Bob Mead transports more pipe organs each year than any other driver on the road. He is a favorite of ours and at least four other organ companies. He is devoted to the United States Armed Services and has “wrapped” his fifty-three-foot trailer with ceremonial photos depicting all the service branches along with a lengthy list of members of his family who have served. He is not available to us during December because he volunteers with Wreaths Across America, a nonprofit that places Christmas wreaths on every military grave in the country. He joins a huge fleet of trucks that meet in the downeast village of Harrington, Maine, where the wreaths are produced, and has the honor of leading a convoy into Arlington National Cemetery. I bet that colorful trailer wrap helped him secure that post. When the convoy leaves Harrington and heads south on Route 1 to I-295 to I-95, bridges over the highways are manned with platoons of police and firefighters, the fire trucks parked with their ladders raised in salute.

One of the first times Bob worked with us, we were dismantling the iconic Klais organ at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church (nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/StPeterLuth.html) on Lexington Avenue in New York City. (We called that job “Lex Luther.”) The church sold its land for the construction of the CitiCorp building at the corner of Fifty-third Street, and the development created a large contemporary worship space at ground level along with offices and gathering spaces for the church.

We were completing the job in the first days of February 2021, and the day before Bob was to arrive, a heavy snowstorm made a mess of the neighborhood. It seemed like a miracle that he drove down Lexington Avenue in the wee hours of the morning and parked his seventy-five-foot-long truck in front of the church as if he was going shopping. (That is the neighborhood where you can buy $50,000 purses.) Three weeks later, Bob joined us on Madison Avenue in Harlem where we had finished dismantling the glorious Roosevelt/Welte-Tripp organ (nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/AllSaintsRC.html#WelteTripp). This was a two-truck organ, so Bob’s city parking magic placed two semis on the street in front of the church. Have you ever tried to find a parking space in Manhattan?

Back in the day

It is difficult enough to move pipe organs with modern semi-trailers and interstate highways, but think about the days before internal combustion engines. Ellsworth, Maine, is a small town “downeast” on the Union River, north of Deer Isle, and about thirty-five miles west of Harrington, the wreath capital. John Black of Ellsworth, Maine, ordered an organ from E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 168) in the fall of 1853 as a gift to the Congregational Church of Ellsworth where he was a pew subscriber, planning for it to be installed before New Year’s Day of 1854. On January 4, 1854, Mr. Black wrote to the company, “I assure you gentlemen that it is a very great disappointment to me that you did not get the organ finished and here before the New Year, for our congregation had anticipated the pleasure of hearing it on Sunday, the 1st January.”

The next week, Black wrote to his shipping agent

Messrs. E. & G. G. have built and packed an organ which they wish to send down by first opportunity. . . . Since the violent storm we have had extreme cold—thermometer ranging many degrees below zero, but the weather has suddenly changed and today we have a very severe rain, the thermometer being at 38 above, causing our snow to disappear very fast.

It was early February before the schooner Abigail Haynes docked in Boston and received the shipment of the Hook organ. On March 7, Black wrote: “Capt. Lord has had a long and tedious passage but I have the pleasure to inform you that he has at last arrived safe with the organ, which will probably be received here today.” And on March 8,

. . . yesterday she arrived in the waters at Coggins Wharf at the end of Newbury Neck. She came from Boston to Bucks Harbor in 24 hours and has been ever since getting round to Newbury Neck [about forty-five miles by water]. The reach and all the passages among the islands being closed by ice, she is a long distance from here, but trams can cross the bay on the ice in all directions and as the sledding is good, her freight can be got up without much trouble.

Once the organ was safely at Coggins Wharf, the flurry of anxious letters stopped, so we do not know just when the organ was delivered to the church in Ellsworth and played for the first time, but the Hook opus list shows that #168 with two manuals and twenty-one stops was delivered in 1854. I picture a fleet of horse-drawn sleds crossing the ice to the ship to receive the crated organ. A bill of lading states that the cost of the shipment was $26.10. The Hook organ was replaced in 1912.¹

Wendy and I have sailed our Kingfisher in those waters around Stonington and Brooklin, Maine, Jericho Bay, and Blue Hill Bay to Newbury Neck. There are strong tidal currents swirling between the islands and the dozen or so bays in that area, and there are many rocks and ledges, so you had better pay close attention to where you are. We have a fancy new chart plotter mounted in the cockpit that shows our boat’s location within a few feet, and shows clearly all the dangers, including submerged rocks that you cannot see even in high tide that will tear the bottom off your boat in a heartbeat, and we only sail during the summer. We also have a diesel engine that keeps us out of trouble.

Captain Lord had nothing but primitive charts and a sextant. If he was blinded by snow or fog, he could either chance it or drop anchor. The Vineyard Gazette (Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod) of October 18, 1878, reported damage from a violent storm that included cows, chimneys, barns, and houses along with more than twenty ships destroyed. During that storm, the Abigail Haynes was dismasted in a collision with the schooner Florence Newell of Philadelphia.

Keep rolling.

I admire the guys who help us transport pipe organs. It is a special skill to get a shipment from one place to another on-time, especially when dealing with bad weather. Drivers like these replace the engines in their trucks every million miles or so and aim for records like two million accident-free miles. One driver shared his homespun wisdom about driving in mountains, “I can go down that hill too slow as many times as I want. I can only go down too fast once.”

We get to be friends as we see them repeatedly, and they draw genuine pleasure from being associated with our work. While many truckers come and go only from commercial warehouses with loading docks and huge tarmac aprons, our drivers must back their trucks into church parking lots and tight alleys. It is fun to watch a driver walk around his rig, pacing out distances, calculating how he will make it happen. And they always do. When they are loaded and getting ready to leave, the salutation is “shiny side up.”

Notes

1. The letters of John Black are quoted with permission from Woodlawn Museum, Gardens & Park of Ellsworth, Maine, the former estate of three generations of the Black family, Kathy Young, executive director.

Spice is the variety of life.

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

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

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

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

Variety is the spice of life.

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

Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 (1951)

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

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

Bedient Pipe Organ Company Opus 42 (1994)

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

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

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

Roy Carlson (ca. 1968)

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

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

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

Flentrop Orgelbouw (1977)

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

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

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

Johann Georg Fux (1736)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: John Bishop

Where it all begins

When I was growing up, my family had a summer home on Cape Cod where we grew enamored by a brilliant potter about five miles away. Scargo Hill Pottery was founded by Harry Holl, and over fifty years later his daughters still make the characteristic shaped dishes, mugs, and vases we grew to love. Harry worked with white porcelain that he accented with dark spots made by mixing the black sand from a specific nearby beach into his clay. He accented them with vibrant glazes. Our household and those of my siblings are rich with Harry Holl pieces; it is lovely to eat daily meals off such beautiful art and to have such ornaments on our walls and shelves.

From its beginning Scargo Hill Pottery has had a wonderful, almost spiritual side. There is a row of potter’s wheels in a sunlit spot with a translucent fiberglass roof and no walls, where you can stand and watch the artists create their products. I still think it is magical to watch a turned shape emerge from a lump of clay and become a useful vessel. From my earliest teenage years I have been in love with places where beautiful things were made. On many a summer evening, we piled into the car after supper to visit Harry and his troupe. The lovely outings were capped by a stop at Sea Breeze soft-serve ice cream conveniently located along the route.

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The 150-acre summer estate of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is a couple miles from where we live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. French is perhaps best known for two iconic public sculptures, The Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts, near “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” and the monumental statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He bought the property in 1896 and immediately commissioned the construction of a studio that became his principal workspace for the rest of his life. At that time there was train service from New York to Stockbridge; the Stockbridge station, long out of use, still stands just a couple miles from Chesterwood.

The studio is situated close to the house and has large glass windows providing plenty of natural light inside that feature broad views of Monument Mountain and the rest of the southern Berkshires. The principal work room is twenty-nine feet by thirty feet with twenty-six-foot-high walls allowing enough space for monumental equestrian statues. Since most of French’s work was to be installed outdoors, the design of the building included a working platform on railroad tracks with large doors that allowed him to move a massive work in progress outside so he could view it in natural light. He was so eager to work in the beautiful new space that he moved in two weeks before it was complete. The building included a reception room where he could receive potential clients and where his family had afternoon tea when the weather would not permit using the house’s grand south-facing porch.

The Minute Man was completed in 1875 for the centennial of the start of the Revolutionary War, before French acquired Chesterwood, but the Lincoln Memorial was completed in 1920. French designed Lincoln’s statue at Chesterwood, and a six-foot model is on display there. The full-scale statue was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers whose studio was on 142nd Street in the Bronx, New York. A four-foot bronze statue of a winged angel by Daniel Chester French, The Spirit of Life, stands in a portico at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge.

A visit to Chesterwood is an inspiration. It is thrilling to think of the wealthy and powerful people who traveled there to commission public art, and wonderful to imagine the brilliant and prolific artist toiling in the lovely studio in that bucolic setting, surrounded by family and friends.

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Another iconic artist’s studio is within walking distance of our house in Stockbridge. Norman Rockwell had been living in Vermont when his wife began treatment at a prominent psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, and Rockwell moved his family there in 1953. His first studio in this town was behind a large plate-glass window in the central storefront of Stockbridge’s Main Street, directly above the Back Room Rest, familiarly known as Alice’s Restaurant of Arlo Guthrie fame. He later built a free-standing studio with plenty of natural light on South Street. When the present building of the Norman Rockwell Museum was opened in 1993, the studio was moved to the new site where museum visitors can go inside to see Rockwell’s easels, paints, brushes, props, and tools.

Many hundreds of Norman Rockwell’s large-scale paintings were featured on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post and are inscribed in the artistic minds of millions of people around the world. I have been moved many times by sitting on the bench and playing the keys upon which the giants of organ music sat and played—Widor, Dupré, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and so many others. It is equally moving to see the stool on which Rockwell sat while painting his beloved three-dimensional self-portrait, his iconic Rosie the Riveter, and The Runaway.

Our place in Stockbridge backs up to the cemetery where every morning I walk Farley the Goldendoodle through the cemetery, past Norman Rockwell’s grave to the adjoining Naumkeag estate, a great place for him (Farley) to be off leash for his morning constitutional. Norman is there with two of his wives, his gravestone festooned with tubes of paint, paintbrushes, and little trinkets left in tribute to his marvelous career and influence on our cultural life. Our granddaughter has been swept up by Norman-mania, being sure to visit him each time she visits us.

That Ingenious Business

In 1990 the Pennsylvania German Society published a book by our late colleague, friend, and organ builder, Raymond Brunner about the Pennsylvania German organbuilders Philip Bachman and David Tannenberg, among many others. These were some of the first organbuilders active in the United States, and a few authentic examples of their eighteenth-century American-built organs are still extant. As the organ was the most complex device built by humans at that time, the phrase “that ingenious business” evolved around that local industry. Now we are surrounded by technological marvels—no eighteenth-century organbuilder could have imagined mobile phones, flat-screen televisions, or nuclear submarines, but the pipe organ remains one of our fascinating achievements.

Among my many pleasures of working with the Organ Clearing House is visiting the workshops where pipe organs are built. We have working relationships with many of the country’s fine organbuilders as we help them with their projects, providing truck transportation, rigging and hoisting, assembly and disassembly. I have been in dozens of organ shops both here and abroad, and I always marvel at the creativity and dedication of the people in them. My first shop visits were open houses at Fisk and Noack in the 1970s when I was in high school. Organbuilder George Bozeman was an early mentor. I sang with his wife, Pat, in the choir at my home parish, and they were generous, taking me to those magical places to see organs nearing completion and ready to be dismantled and shipped. My high school organ teacher John Skelton also shared those wonders with me.

My first experience working in an organ shop was the summer of 1975, between my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, when I spent those months in the workshop of Bozeman-Gibson & Company. The shop was in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a building previously occupied by organbuilder Rostron Kershaw, and I spent my first day as a nascent organbuilder in the parking lot with sawhorses, façade pipes, Zip-Strip, hose, bucket, and rubber gloves. Oh, the glory of it. The parking lot was shared with a guy who transported chickens on a flatbed truck stacked high with wooden coops. I do not think he raised the chickens. I guess you would say he was trafficking in chickens, but the truck clattered in and out, and he was always happy to take the sawdust from the dust collection system to line his coops. Once when the bin was empty, he asked if we would plane some wood.

That summer, the company was working on the restoration of the wonderful 1848 George Stevens organ in the First Church of Belfast, Maine, and the installation of a new organ in the Federated Church of Castleton, Vermont. What an adventure it was for a nineteen-year-old enthusiast to spend the summer driving around New England, staying in motels, eating with a meal allowance ($1.50, $2.50, $3.50 for breakfast, lunch, dinner), and having my first hands-on experiences with organs. I returned the following summer and helped install the Bozeman-Gibson organ on Squirrel Island, an exclusive summer community off the Maine coast near Boothbay Harbor, six miles as the crow flies from our house in Newcastle.

Nearly fifty years later, I still marvel at the magic. I have a sense that it is improbable that we would be allowed, even encouraged to make something as otherworldly as a pipe organ. The variety of skills involved seems endless. An organbuilder is an architect, carpenter, woodworker, steel worker, electrician, leather worker, metallurgist, sculptor, acoustician, and musician. A comprehensive workshop houses familiar machinery like saws, drill presses, and planers, milling machines, and welders, and equipment you are not likely to see elsewhere like the cauldrons for melting soft metals, and especially the tables for casting the long sheets of metal used to make organ pipes.

François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles de Salelles (1709–1779, we know him familiarly as Dom Bédos) was a Benedictine monk and organbuilder who published a monumental treatise, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of Organbuilding) in 1778. Its volumes are packed with elegant engravings showing all facets of the trade including tools, workbenches, mechanical actions, wind systems, windchest layout, and clever exploded views of the interior of a complete organ. The cauldron and casting table are clearly illustrated, just like those found in modern workshops. I imagine that Dom Bédos built lovely big bellows to help tend the fires under his melting pot. Of course, today’s organbuilders do not have to stoke wood fires to melt their metal; a gas burner does the trick in a trice. Flipping through the pages of the good monk’s treatise shows how little has changed in the craft in nearly 250 years.

But how much has changed

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) is revered for the tremendous legacy of pipe organs his company produced for such churches as Notre-Dame and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, but along with over 500 instruments he was honored for the invention of the circular saw blade. How we take them for granted now. I still have the table saw I bought in 1987 when I started the Bishop Organ Company, and I have ten or fifteen circular blades for it, some of which have specialty uses. Most of them have carbide steel tips on the teeth that stay sharp through miles of cuts. Think of spending a day making thousands of wood trackers, maybe ten feet long with a cross section of 1.5 by 8 millimeters. You stand at that saw all day making cut after cut. It is monotonous, but you cannot let your mind wander because you really want precise cuts, and you want to keep your fingers. (I still have all mine after forty-nine years behind the saw.)

As repetitive and precise as that task is, besides the circular saw blade we have the added luxury of a shop-wide dust collection system. The good monk had none of that. He cut those trackers by hand. My mentor John Leek taught me to make long, straight saw cuts and to plane a board flat and parallel by hand before I was free to use the machines. It was a great learning experience. I hardly ever did that again, but that helped me imagine the time, effort, and concentration it would take to make an organ full of trackers by hand. Or think of making a keyboard by hand with sixty long straight cuts. When I worked for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, I built the four keyboards for the new console of a large organ in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I remember that the lowest few naturals of the bottom keyboard were a little wider than the others. I have not noticed anything like that in any of the historic organs I have visited. I recently had a fun exchange about that with the good people of the Red River Organ Company who maintain that organ now.

I had a root canal a couple months ago—not my first choice of how to spend a morning, but I had a good laugh with the endodontist when I told her that the smell of grinding my teeth reminded me of standing at a table saw cutting ivory or cow bone for keyboards. I was impressed by the array of teeny cutting tools she used with a compressed-air motor to drill so delicately into the roots of my teeth. She spoke softly to her assisting technician, “A 14, please,” “A 12, please.” Between gulps, I asked if those were bit sizes. Yes, but of course the numbers refer to length in millimeters, not diameter.

Drill sergeant

The art of organbuilding can be defined as the art of knowing where to put the holes. Each pipe in an organ needs at least two holes, a toehole to stand in and a rackboard hole that stands it up straight. In a slider chest, there are two more holes for each pipe, one in the windchest table and one in the slider. A ten-stop, sixty-one-note slider chest has 2,440 holes. Those in the windchest, sliders, and toeboards range from about ½ inch to 1¼ inches with some larger oval holes because the holes cannot be larger than the travel distance of the slider. The rackboard holes range from about ½ inch to 3 inches or more, with the largest pipes supported by felted “scallop” racks higher up on the pipe. Dom Bédos’s windchests did not have sixty-one note compasses, but he still had to drill thousands of holes just to hold up and blow the pipes. There are usually at least two holes in each key of a keyboard, one for a balance pin, and one for a guide pin. He built an organ with five manuals, each with fifty-six notes—that is 560 holes. He used a “bit-and-brace” drill with handmade bits. What skill, precision, and plain hard work 
was involved.

I have thousands of drill bits in my workshop—twist bits, multi-spur bits, Forstner bits (guided by the outside edge rather than a center pin), countersinks, and spade bits. To turn those bits, I have a little fleet of drill motors with rechargeable batteries and the drill press I bought with the table saw.

With your own eyes

If you have not already, I hope you all get to visit an organ shop sometime. Most companies that build new organs love to host open house events when an organ is ready to be shipped. Those events typically include food and drink, displays about how certain tasks and processes are accomplished, and the added excitement of visitors from the church where the organ is going. If you are planning a trip to an area that is home to an organ company, get in touch through their website or give them a call to ask if you might visit. At least they will put you on a mailing list for the next open house. There is an old gag about sausages—you might love to eat them, but you do not want to watch them being made. Watching the artisans at work in an organ shop will inspire your love of the instrument and will inspire your musicianship. It’s nothing like sausages.

Out and about

After Christmas 2019 I retired from maintaining pipe organs. With some forty-five years of racing about twice a year to get to every client during “tuning season,” I was looking forward to sitting back, watching my friends and colleagues as they blasted about doing Easter and spring tunings, but as it turned out, no one was doing any tuning that spring. In March of 2020 the world as we knew it shut down, churches closed their doors, and organ tuners across the country stayed home.

My tuning and service career started when I was a student at Oberlin during the 1970s, as I was fortunate to work three days a week for John Leek. If you are a regular reader, you have read about John before. He was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who apprenticed in various workshops in the Netherlands starting when he was a child. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whose reputation as an innovating organbuilder was widely known. While working on Holtkamp organs on the campus of Oberlin College, Leek saw that the school was advertising for a full-time organ curator. “That’s the job for me.”

He was still employed by Oberlin when I started working with him, but as he had developed a lively organ service trade outside of his work at the school, he soon left Oberlin and founded his eponymous company. I loved traveling around the area with him servicing organs from the start, going in and out of church and school buildings, working on a variety of instruments. Each client had distinct personalities, both personal and institutional. It was easy to tell if a place was well run or struggling, ambitious or complacent, progressive or conservative. There were people we looked forward to seeing and people we knew would be difficult. There were organs that were fun to work on, and a few that we dreaded. Some buildings were immaculately maintained, always neat and clean, and others were dirty, smelly, and cluttered.

I left John’s shop in 1984 with my wife and two toddlers to return to Boston where I grew up, joining the workshop of Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and taking a position as music director at a lovely Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. In my first weeks with Angerstein, Dan and I went on service calls together so he could introduce me to the more complex and important instruments, and I was soon exploring my home territory with helpers from the workshop, learning the tricks and foibles of each instrument and client.

Dan closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller for what turned out to be Möller’s waning days—that venerable firm closed in 1993—and I took on Angerstein’s service clients as I formed the Bishop Organ Company. Over the years I think I serviced more than 300 different organs, some for short periods, some for well over thirty years, and I know there was a stretch in the 1990s when I had close to 100 clients at once. I had a group of wonderful helpers, three of whom I taught to tune and who were my pleasant travel companions as we rolled around New England.

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We worked on a wide range of organs, from the mighty 240-stop Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston where we tuned once a week, to a three-stop positive organ by Bedient Pipe Organ. That Bedient organ is in Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is more than seventy-five miles from the Sagamore Bridge connecting Cape Cod to the mainland. It was seventy-five miles from the workshop to the bridge, so we would schedule another service call on the Cape to make the trip worthwhile. After all that driving, tuning that tiny organ was something of a lark. Once as we started that long drive home, my helper Mark was half asleep in the passenger seat, looking dreamily out the window. As we passed a car, I overheard him whimper softly to himself, “They have ice cream.” I took the hint, and we stopped at the next opportunity.

After his retirement, my father was interim rector at Saint Mary, and I played a short evensong recital on the organ. It was like riding a tricycle. The organ had been a gift from an elderly gay couple who had lived in Provincetown for decades who collected $30,000 worth of recyclable bottles and cans by rooting through the dumpsters behind restaurants and bars—600,000 bottles and cans.

I once got fired by a client after a long day of travel. When I was working with Angerstein, we did a renovation and expansion project on a small Hook & Hastings tracker organ on Martha’s Vineyard, a quaint but exclusive touristy island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Later, when I was working on my own, the organ ciphered on Good Friday, and I received a call from the organist informing me that Easter was the day-after-tomorrow. His panicky and self-centered demeanor was well remembered from the time of the renovation project. I was finished with my hundred-or-so tunings, and the program of Easter music at my church was ready to go, so on Holy Saturday I made the two-hour drive from home in North Reading, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole where you catch the ferry to the Vineyard. It takes most of an hour to get your car in line for the ferry, and it is a forty-five-minute trip across the water.

I got to the church around noon, opened the windchest bung board, found a pallet caught between two guide pins, pushed the pins apart with my fingers, closed the bung, checked the tuning of the Oboe, and drove back to the ferry terminal. The invoice I sent the next week reflected four hours of driving, four hours dealing with the ferry, the cost of mileage and ferry tickets, and my minimum hour-and-a-half service call. The organist was furious. “You were in the church for fifteen minutes and you’re charging me a thousand dollars? You’re never coming back here.” I would not have expected “I’m so grateful you could get here in time for Easter” from that guy.

I had another panicky call from an organist on a Saturday morning. A wedding was starting in an hour, and the organ would not play. When he turned on the switch, lights glowed, and he heard the blower, but no sound. The church was a half hour from home. By the time I arrived, there were limousines parked in front of the church, a bagpipe howling in front, and people pouring into the church. I raced up the stairs to the organ loft, verified that the organ was running, and the electric stop action was working. I went to the basement and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake. Easy fix. Here comes the bride.

John Leek and I worked for a Polish Catholic Church on the west side of Cleveland. At the end of each tuning day, we presented ourselves at the rectory where the pastor would ask what we like to drink, duck back inside, and return with bottles of booze and cash to pay for the tuning. It seemed like kind of a loose way to run a ship.

Gustatory tuning

When scheduling a slate of tunings, I kept two criteria in mind, geographic proximity and what would be for lunch. Some organs would command a full day a few times a year. On other days we might visit two, three, or even four organs. Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard for ten years, a neighborhood of Boston across the harbor from the city where our neighbor was the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. The Episcopal church in Charlestown was a service client with a neat little two-manual tracker organ. The organist there was a pal who was happy to hold notes, so that church was often an easy fourth stop of the day, getting me home in time for cocktails.

We had pairs of churches close to each other, each pair associated with a nice place for lunch, and I scheduled things so we had a variety of lunches. You would not want to have Mexican food two days in a row. We had a nice range of cuisines including Vietnamese (Harvard Square), Chinese (Boston University), Mexican (Worcester and Quincy, Massachusetts), Thai (Back Bay, Boston), Italian (Newton, Massachusetts), fried seafood and clam chowder (Cape Cod)—you get the idea.

Several of the organists of churches where we tuned often joined us for lunch, allowing fun conversations about what was going on in each church. I paid attention to what music was out in the choir rooms, what music was piled around the organ console, and what notices were posted on bulletin boards, so I had a comprehensive working knowledge of dozens of church music programs, all of which informed my work at the church where I was music director (as well as organ tuner).

Watch your step.

If you are paying attention, maintaining a lot of instruments is an education in organ building. It is a delight to work on a well-designed, well-engineered, well-built, and well-voiced organ. How easy it is to move around inside an organ and how easy it is to reach things that will always need attention is an important reflection on the quality of an instrument. No church wants to hear that an ordinarily simple repair would involve a week of dismantling other parts of the organ to gain access to the offender.

I maintain an organ in a large, central building in New York, built by a widely known and respected builder, that includes a common brand of solid-state controls for switching and combination actions. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the “brain” of the system was installed inside the console in a way that the interchangeable circuit boards could not be removed, making normal maintenance impossible without removing the entire unit from the console and stressing the immense jumble of ribbon cables that connect it to the organ. That Medusa-like tangle made my blood run cold.

We like to see neat wiring on junction boards in an organ, every wire in its proper place, soldered evenly, tied and dressed so it will be easy to troubleshoot in the future. Sometimes we are confronted by tangled messes of wires that show no order or logic. The weight of cables is hanging directly from delicate contacts, odd wires are laced about, and there is no logic from one row of pins to another. You just know by taking a glance that the mess will be unreliable, and it is difficult, sometimes hopeless to dig down to find the wire in question.

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Organs enclosed in free-standing cases are often among the best built, but they can be difficult to service because one must reach everything from walkboards outside the back of the case. If there are seven or eight stops on the Great, that tin façade seems a mile away, and the treble pipes of the Principal down at rackboard level are often out of reach, especially if they are cone-tuned so you cannot use a long tuning iron. Staying with the Great as example, you might find three or even four reeds at the back of the windchest (16′ Trompette, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Vox Humana, 4′ Clarion), and two or three compound stops buried behind them (Mixture VI, Scharff IV, Sesquialter II). It is a stretch to reach over those hulking reeds to get to those tiny mixture trebles. As you get used to such an organ over the years, you realize which big reed pipes you can remove to gain the angles needed.

The lowest notes of the 8′ Gedeckt are probably tubed off the main chest and mounted on the case wall, but they are far away, and they can be especially tough to handle because if the pipe is sharp you must reach the pipe with two hands, one to hold the pipe and the other to move the cap higher on the pipe. Sometimes I asked a helper to hang on to my belt to keep me from falling into the pipes.

Ernest Skinner cared a lot about the serviceability of his organs. Stable ladders, ample walkboards between windchests, and sturdy tuning benches above the pipes make tuning comfortable and safe for both the tuner and the instrument. There are no surprises like treacherous spongy boards underfoot as you pass through the organ. We hope for this quality in any organ, but some are spooky. You must figure out what can bear your weight. A good rule for when you are walking somewhere in an organ where you have not walked before is do not put all your weight on anything without trying it gently first.

Over the years

Over years I learned the priorities and interests of the many organists I worked for. For one, I would always double check all the expression boxes, shutters, motors, and mechanisms, knowing that he used them constantly and considered them an important part of his playing. For another, it might be the trebles of the flutes, making sure that solo stops like orchestral reeds or harmonic flutes were in tune with each other, especially if there were antiphonal pairs of similar stops.

I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each organ, which reeds would need attention, the trebles of stopped wood flutes, keyboard contacts, and recalcitrant tremulants. I also learned which firms build organs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and, most important, beautiful. In my conversations with many organists, I learned what features of an organ made it most useful to the working musician, and how effectively it led the church’s music, especially congregational singing.

It is fun to reflect on how much easier that work is in the age of the mobile phone. Thirty years ago, while on the road doing service calls, I had to find pay phones to let people know if I was running late and to maintain my schedule. I had a memorized list of gas stations that had phone booths that were likely to be available. If I had to call a vendor with questions about the systems of an organ, I would ask in the church office if I could use the phone and sit facing away from the secretary so I could not see her angry glare when I had tied up the church’s only phone line for too long. Today you have your phone with you all the time (and it has a flashlight). If you are explaining something to a technician at Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Organ Supply Industries, or one of our other valued suppliers, you can snap a photo and send it instantly. What could be easier?

In several churches where I tuned for decades, I outlived generations of staff members and could be relied on to find a stepladder, to know where the controls for HVAC equipment were located, and how to program the electronic tower chimes. (I like to call them Bongatrons.) It is fun to think back on tens of thousands of miles driven, thousands of satisfying repairs—it is fun when you solve a knotty problem and get an organ back on its feet—endless conversations with musicians, clergy, and staff members. I had running jokes and teases with people I saw twice a year.

What an adventure, what a privilege, and what an education. Thanks for the great ride.