In the Wind . . .

Mechanical failure

This morning while doing errands with Wendy, I noticed a lug nut on the tarmac next to our parked car. The inside thread was stripped bare, even shiny and smooth, and while the outside should have had six corners and six sides, only three corners and two of the sides were intact while the rest was rounded. I put it in my pocket and worried it with my fingers as we completed our errands and placed it on my desk when I got home. I have been glancing at it and handling it, wondering how it got so badly deformed. Was it cross-threaded onto the lug so aggressively that the thread was compromised? Did it fall off a car parked there? If so, how many other lug nuts were in such bad shape? How did the outside of the nut get rounded? Did other lug nuts on the same wheel suffer the same damage? It’s bad when a wheel falls off.

Take care of your machines.

For most of us, our cars are the most complex and sophisticated machines we own, and there are some simple maintenance procedures we follow to ensure smooth operation. The fact is that failure to take these steps can lead to serious damage and mortal danger. We change the oil every few thousand miles. When the engine is not running, the oil sits in a reservoir at the bottom of the engine known as the oil pan. When you start the engine, the oil pump brings oil to the top where it splashes about the camshaft and valves, and trickles down across myriad parts to be recirculated. If the oil gets dirty, it does not lubricate as well. If the oil runs dry, the engine parts heat to the point of welding themselves together. I once hit a rock with a lawnmower that cracked the oil drain plug inside the mower deck. The oil ran out, and the engine seized with a bang.

Did you ever notice how your car’s engine clatters for a few seconds when you start it on a cold morning? That is because the oil is extra thick and takes a moment to get to the top of the engine. Are you one of those drivers who starts the engine and immediately puts the car in gear? It would be better to wait until the oil gets to the top of the engine and the clattering stops before you put a load on the engine.

You are backing out of a parking space. You check your mirrors, shift into reverse, and start the car moving. When you shift into drive you hear a clunk from under the floor. Each of those clunks means a little extra wear on the transmission with its hundreds of precise interior fluid channels. I back out of the space, shift into neutral as I stop the car, then shift into drive before I start moving again. No clunk. It is an extra step, but I think it means my transmission will last longer. It is as easy to develop that habit as putting only one space after a period.

When my sons were young, they were delighted to find that they could cause the plumbing to make banging noises in the walls when they turned a bathroom faucet on and off at my parents’ house. My older son is now an expert fabricator with high-end welding skills, and we laughed together recently over that memory. They could have done serious damage to the house by breaking soldered plumbing joints inside the walls.

The same son was a wild driver early on. He loved going fast, he loved having smoke coming off his tires, and he pushed a series of cars to early ends, adding to the huge expense of many speeding tickets, cancelled insurance policies, and suspended licenses. When he finally broke those habits, he observed that it is lot less expensive to drive more conservatively.

Try it again without making noise.

The pipe organ is a musical wonder, and no other musical instrument has such complicated mechanical systems. Our habits at the keyboard and our attitudes toward our instruments can have a significant effect on their reliability. I do not need to mention the organist who habitually placed a sugary cup of coffee on top of the console stopjamb. I chided him about the ugly rings on the lovely, shellacked surface and warned about spills. The spill happened late on a Saturday night, and I was able to get the organ working a little before Sunday services, but removing the keyboards, replacing felt bushings, cleaning contacts, and regluing several of the sharp keys cost many thousands of dollars.

I do not need to mention the organist who played on a nineteenth-century mechanical-action organ and caused heavy bangs in the stop action because of the force he used on the drawknobs. The travel of those sliders is regulated and limited by little steel pins drilled and driven into the windchest tables. There are slots in the sliders that ensure the correct amount of motion, and the pins also fit into holes in the bottom of the toeboards, assuring that they are in the correct position. Slam, bang, thud hundreds of times every time he played, and the stops gradually grew softer and out of tune. Those guide pins were being driven out of their holes, and the sliders were traveling too far, going past the “full open” position, constricting the holes, and underwinding the pipes. That one was a $45,000 repair, removing all the pipes, lifting the toeboards and sliders, repairing the holes, redrilling the pins, then putting everything back together and tuning the pipes.

And I do not need to mention the organist who complained that the piston buttons were unreliable, demonstrating them to me with furious jabs from a powerful finger. Maybe, just maybe, the tiny contacts and springs that make those buttons work were prematurely worn by that vigorous action.

Just as I try to avoid that extra clunk when shifting my car from reverse to drive, you might listen to your console as you play. Does your technique cause extra noise at the keyboards? You might be causing excessive wear.

When I was a student at Oberlin, I had an important lesson about unnecessary noise. My organ teacher, Haskell Thomson, organized a winter term project for a group of us to be led by Inda Howland, the legendary teacher of eurhythmics and disciple of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze. For three days a week through the month of January, ten or fifteen of us bounced balls and performed other rhythmic exercises to the beat of the drum that always hung on a lanyard around Ms. Howland’s neck. Later in the month, we moved to practice rooms where we played for each other with her coaching and comments. I was working on Bach’s Toccata in F at the time, and I bravely powered through those familiar pedal solos with my pals huddled around the little organ. (If you think the acoustics in a practice room are dry, add twelve inquisitive pairs of ears to the mix.) When I finished, Ms. Howland referred to the noise of my feet on the pedalboard, “try it again without making noise.” That one comment had more impact on me than ten years of organ lessons, and I know my pedal technique improved from that moment on.

The most mechanical of musical instruments

A violin is nothing more than a curiously shaped box with a neck and four strings. The only things mechanical about it are the tuning pegs that use “friction fit” to maintain the exact tension to keep each string in tune. A trumpet has three valves that function like pistons, connecting tubes of various lengths as their positions are changed. A clarinet has eleven holes that are opened and closed by a system of levers operated by the player, and a piano key action has about ten moving parts for each note, mounted in neat rows.

Open the door of an organ case or organ chamber, and you face a complex heap of contraptions that somehow unify into a musical whole. There are bellows or reservoirs to store and regulate wind pressure, ducts to direct the wind throughout the organ, levers, switches, and wires connecting keyboards to valves, ladders and walkboards to allow technicians to clamber about inside. As it is the challenge to the musician to play the instrument with as little extra noise as possible, it is the job of the organ builder to make the machine disappear. The inherent mechanical nature of the instrument is minimized to allow the most direct communication between the musician’s brain and the listener’s ears.

Ernest Skinner, one of the most ingenious mechanical and tonal innovators in the history of organ building, invented the “whiffle-tree” expression engine. The origin of the whiffle-tree is the system of harnesses used to hitch a team of horses to a wagon that allows the force of the pull of each individual animal to be evenly added to the whole. Skinner made whiffle-tree motors with eight or sixteen stages depending on the size and glamour of the organ. They include large power pneumatics inside the machine connected to the marionette-like whiffle-tree that pulls on the shutter action, which are exhausted by a row of primary valves at the top of the machine. The motors are activated when you “close” the swell shoe, pulling the shutters closed. There is either a spring or a heavy counterweight with cable and pulleys to pull the shutters open when the motor is disengaged. To avoid the possibility of the shutters slamming closed, Skinner made the primary valve of the last stage smaller than the rest, constricting the exhaust, and slowing the motion of the shutters at the end of their travel.

While Mr. Skinner’s machine was effective at quieting the noise of closing shutters, I am reminded of a moment when operator error allowed expression shutters to make not only extra noise but visual distraction. A friend was accompanying a chorus on the organ in a music school recital hall and asked me to sit in on a rehearsal to listen for balance. She had chosen great registrations, so there was little to say there, but she was beating time with the Swell pedal, and since the shutters were fully visible as part of the organ’s façade, it was a huge distraction. We broke that habit.

Things that go bump in the night

In the 1980s and 1990s, I was curator of the mammoth Aeolian-Skinner organ at First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, also known as “The Mother Church.” Dr. Thomas Richner was the organist, a colorful, diminutive man with a wry sense of humor and marvelous control over that organ with its nearly 240 ranks. My phone rang around eleven one evening, “Pee-pee” (he called everyone Pee-pee), “something terrible has happened to the organ. I closed the Swell box and there was such a crash.” That Swell division has twenty-seven stops and forty ranks including a full-length 32′ Bombarde, and there are four big windchests with four huge banks of shutters coupled together. I went to the church the next morning to find that the cable of the counterweight for the Swell shutters had broken, and several hundred pounds of iron had crashed onto the cement floor. Practicing alone late at night in a dark church, the poor man must have jumped out of his skin.

In the 1960s, organ builders were experimenting with electric motors to control the stops of slider chests, and one of our supply houses marketed Slic Slider Motors, grapefruit-sized units with a crank arm on top that rotated 135-degrees or so from “on” to “off.” I suppose they were among the first units to work reliably in that application, and lots of organ builders used them. The travel was adjustable, and they worked quickly. But the noise was unmistakable, schliK-K-K! I remember as a pre-organ builder teenager sitting in a big church listening to an organ recital, wondering what all that noise was. After a particularly large and noisy registration change, the mentor who had brought me leaned over and explained it. That was before I knew Inda Howland, but I am sure she would not have approved.

In the early 1970s, Laukhuff, the prominent German organ supply firm that recently and unfortunately ceased operations, developed a double-acting solenoid slider motor. It was housed in a steel case, and there were steel “stops” with heavy rubber bumpers attached to the shiny central shaft to limit the travel of the sliders. I maintained several organs that featured those motors. They worked beautifully until the rubber bumpers crumbled and fell off after thirty or forty years. The motion of the powerful motors was now limited by steel-on-steel, and they made an impressive hammer-on-anvil sound as they operated. I made a supply of replacement bumpers to keep in each organ punched out of woven green hammer-rail felt with a slit cut to the center hole so they could be popped onto the shaft without dismantling the motor.

Going out with a bang

During the “organ wars” of the 1960s and 1970s, “tracker detractors” chortled, “if it clicks and clacks, it’s a tracker.” Fair enough—lots of tracker organs have action noise, especially older ones. But the thousands of “pffts” from an electro-pneumatic organ are also often audible from the pews. Modern tracker actions have Delrin and nylon bushings to replace the metal-on-wood systems found in older organs and carbon-fiber trackers that do not slap at each other like traditional wood trackers.

It is easy and relatively inexpensive to include muffler covers to quiet electro-pneumatic actions, but I have often been in organs where a previous technician left the covers off for convenience, allowing the action noise to be clearly audible. And tremolos: how many of us have heard them set up a Totentanz with reservoir weights jumping and thumping and valves huffing and puffing? Screw down those weights before they bust a gusset in a reservoir and build a box around that pufferbelly. It is not helping the music.

Along with space-age materials that allow us to build quieter actions, we have space-age lubricants to keep things running smoothly. A squirt or two and the squeak is gone, and the part moves effortlessly. But there was a spray lubricant used widely in the early 1970s that worked fine for a generation but turned gummy as it aged. Several prolific organ companies used it to lubricate the sliders of windchests, and stop actions failed as the stuff gummed up the works. I had several jobs that involved removing the pipes, taking up toeboards and sliders, cleaning off the old goo with solvents, and spraying on a new lubricant. I hope the stuff I used will last longer than the original. There is an old joke about it being easy to spot the organ builder as he walks through town because all the dogs follow him, attracted by the smell of mutton tallow he used to grease the skids.

Part of the magic of the pipe organ is its ability to move from a whisper to a roar and back again. Part of the challenge of effectively playing an effective instrument is to preserve the music itself as the only noise. I’m grateful to Inda Howland for her keen observation of the bombast of my twenty-year-old self. Let the music play.

“It went zip when it moved and pop when it stopped. . . .”

In 1962 American songwriter and folksinger Tom Paxton wrote and recorded “The Marvelous Toy,” a nonsensical song with the catchy refrain that continued, “And ‘whirr’ when it stood still. I never knew just what it was, and I guess I never will.” As I was working out this essay in my mind’s ear, the song popped into my head, and I quickly found a raft of YouTube video performances including Tom Paxton himself singing with his grandson Sean Silvia, and the ubiquitous cover recording by Peter, Paul, and Mary released in 1969. The more you know about a machine, the easier it is to care for.

My colleague Amory and I were on the highway together—I was at the wheel, and Amory was half asleep in a highway-induced reverie when we passed a large truck whose trailer was a huge complex dedicated machine. Amory wondered half to himself, “What kind of machine are you?” I have always been fascinated by machines, what they do, how they work, and how to care for them.

I had a learning moment as a teenager mowing the lawn when the grass chute clogged. I stopped the engine, turned the mower over, cleared the clog, set it right side up, started it up, and continued mowing—for about thirty feet, when the three-and-a-half horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine stopped with a bang. While the mower was upside down, the motor oil ran out, and the engine ran about twelve seconds before it welded itself solid. It was like the proverbial customer in the auto parts store asking for a longer dipstick: “Mine doesn’t reach the oil anymore.” The other day, as Wendy and I were leaving our house in Maine to be gone for more than three weeks, I checked the oil in the backup generator and topped it off.

You are going to leave a parking space. You start your car’s engine, check the mirrors and back-up screen, put the transmission in reverse, and start the car moving backwards, steering so you wind up parallel with the curb. While you are still moving backward, you drop it into drive, the car gives a thud, and you start moving forward. At least that is what you do if you have no idea how the transmission (whether manual or automatic), universal joints, differential, crankshaft, and piston rods work. By changing the direction of your travel while the car is in motion, you have put excessive torque on all those critical parts and diminished the working life of your car’s drivetrain unnecessarily.

Try this: put the car in reverse, back out of the spot turning parallel to the curb, come to a complete stop as you move the gear shift to neutral, then shift into drive and start moving forward. No thud, no thump, no excessive torque, and you go merrily on your way.

Speaking of motor oil, I believe it is smart to let the engine run for thirty or forty seconds before you put the car in gear. When the engine is not running, all the oil is sitting in the oil pan at the bottom of the engine. When you start it, the oil pump pumps the oil to the top of the engine where the critical cams are opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves of the cylinders. If you put a load on the engine by moving the car before the oil is distributed throughout, you are adding unnecessary wear. Take a nice breath before you start rolling, and your camshaft will thank you. Have you ever noticed a light clattering sound just after starting the engine on a cold morning that goes away after a few seconds? That is the camshaft moving those valves, waiting for the oil to find its way to the top of the engine. I drive about 35,000 miles a year, and I have run six cars past 175,000 miles, three of those past 250,000.

After my parents retired to their home on Cape Cod, my tween-ish sons discovered that when you turned the faucets of the first-floor bathroom sink on, then off abruptly, you would get a loud clatter from the pipes within the walls. (I guess the plumber ran out of pipe clamps.) I told them how the rattling could lead to leaking joints hidden in the walls, but my mechanical wisdom fell on deaf ears. My older son Michael is as interested in all things mechanical as I am, and he grew into a career as a fabricator with superior welding skills and a vast knowledge of fasteners and connectors. He once described a project that required interior welding in eighth-inch stainless steel tubing. He reminisced about the banging of his grandparents’ plumbing, “We really were jerks, weren’t we?”

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Like millions of American children starting in 1969, my sons grew up watching Sesame Street, which included feature segments about how things are made. I remember a montage of scenes from a Crayola factory showing how crayons are made, but the real standout was filmed at the Teddie Peanut Butter factory in Everett, Massachusetts, and featured the 1920s-flapper-style song by Joe Raposo, It Takes a Lot of Little Nuts to Make a Jar of Peanut Butter. The video flips from one machine to another as peanuts are roasted, ground, “a little salt, a little sugar makes the goo taste really good and keeps it pumping through the pipeline like a peanut-butter-pumper should.”

How do they shell those billions of nuts for peanut butter, or those big jars of shelled pecans, walnuts, or heaven help us, Brazil nuts. It is a small triumph to free a Brazil nut or pecan with a standard-issue nutcracker without chipping or breaking it. Jasper Sanfilippo (1931–2020) worked in his father’s nut business from the age of nine until 1963 when his father passed away. Jasper had a degree in mechanical engineering, and he developed high-volume machines for shelling all varieties of nuts. His company acquired the Fisher nut brand in 1995, which quickly became the best-selling brand of shelled nuts in the United States. You can still see his name on the back of any Fisher nut package.

His nut fortune allowed him to pursue his passion for machines, especially automatic musical instruments along with steam engines and locomotives, gramophones, carousels, slot machines, and penny arcades. His grand house in Barrington Hills, Illinois, Place de la Musique, is still operated as a museum that is used for charitable events and, predictably, conventions of various organizations devoted to the pipe organ. There is an immense Wurlitzer theatre organ at the heart of the collection. I was particularly fascinated by the machines that played four violins simultaneously. The violins are mounted upside down and arranged like a compass—north, east, south, west—and a circular bow surrounds and plays all four instruments at once. There are dainty metal padded fingers to damp the strings along the necks, little mechanical marvels adjusted by fractions of millimeters for correct tuning of every note.

Console etiquette

If you are an organist for a church or university, you are likely to be responsible for the care of the organ, a complex and sophisticated machine that is subject to mechanical failures and sensitive to climate changes. If you know a little about how it works, you can protect it from unnecessary wear and tear, just like sparing the drivetrain in your car by not changing direction abruptly.

Years ago, I maintained a simple little organ in Lexington, Massachusetts, that was notorious for dead notes in the pedalboard. The organist was an elderly woman with luxurious long, thick gray hair who kept a hairbrush at the console, and part of our routine was to pull out the pedalboard and sweep up the great clumps of hair that were interfering with the contacts. We called it the hairball organ.

Do not wear street shoes when you are playing the organ. Gritty bits of sand and debris will wreck the hard finish on the pedal keys and gather as abrasives on contacts, felt bushings, springs, and guides. You might be tracking water, snow, or heaven help us, salt. If you have ever left salt in a silver salt cellar, you know how salt corrodes silver. If your pedalboard is less than thirty years old or has been rebuilt in that time frame, your pedal contacts are likely made of silver. Salt from your street shoes means dead notes.

Organists have asked me many times whether it is okay to stand on a pedalboard. Don’t. There are some obvious variables. An antique pedalboard is likely to be more delicate than a modern one. Some builders are known for producing especially sturdy pedalboards. In my experience Casavant gets the prize. Theirs are frightfully heavy and very robust. I am a heavy guy, and I am certain I could stand safely on a Casavant pedalboard. But my weight or yours standing directly on the pedal keys is far more downward force that we generate by simply playing, so we would be crushing the felt down-stops (ultimately increasing the travel of the pedal keys) and pushing the contacts or tracker action past their normal “on” position (ultimately spoiling their adjustment). And should you fall through, you will cause terrible damage requiring expensive repair.

I once commented to an organist about the big coffee cup sitting on the stopjamb while he practiced: “If that ever fell into the keyboards . . . .” I got a huffy reply, but a few days later it was a contrite phone call. The cup was full, and the coffee was sugary. The organ was in a big, busy church, and we did not want to miss a Sunday, so I took the keyboards to my workshop one at a time, took them all apart, cleaned everything, and replaced several octaves of guide-pin bushings. That was the end of the coffee cup habit.

Our furry friends

My mentor John Leek was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who was friends with a gaggle of guys who worked for Flentrop. When I was working with John in the 1970s and 1980s, we did a lot of work for Flentrop, especially installing new organs. Hans Steketee, then president of Flentrop, came to John’s place for dinner and a shop visit, and John and I showed him a half-dozen reservoirs that we were releathering, telling him that we did a lot of that kind of work. “What do you do, put mice in the organs?” he asked. Have you known an organist who might leave half a donut on a napkin on the console keytable? Rodents like donuts. Please do not bring food to the console.

When I was a teenager, I practiced in a church in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, on an organ built by William H. Clark in the Swedenborgian Church. There was a terrible bang from inside the organ late at night that had me jumping out of my proverbial skin. The minister had set a Havahart trap inside the organ and caught his raccoon. I wonder how many nights that raccoon was lurking inside the organ while I rattled away at the keys. The tracker action for the Pedal Bourdon went across the floor. I imagine that would have been like the Caribbean dancers who jump between pairs of poles rhythmically moving back and forth while being held close to the ground. I hope my teenage playing was rhythmic enough.

Keep your eyes open for signs of rodents in your organ. A particular favorite lair for little mousies is in between the keyboards of your organ’s console. Searching for a rattling sound in the keyboards, I have found messy trails and stashes of acorns on the keyboard behind the nameboard, another chance to imagine a manic dance for a little critter as the organist practices a wicked toccata. (Once when returning to our house in Maine after a while away, we found a stash of acorns in a pillowcase on our bed, a cozy but temporary home for a furry family.) Keyboard mice add to their comforts by harvesting the felt from capped pipes and keyboard bushings to make little multi-colored nests.

During a service call in Osterville, Massachusetts, a pipe was not speaking because there was an acorn inside it. There were well-marked trails through the organ, across windchests and across the tops of capped pipes (many of which were stripped of their black felt), and a mouse had dropped his acorn into the pipe. He was not complacent about his loss, going down to the rackboard and gnawing at the mouth of the pipe trying to free his nut, without success.

Aeolus, keeper of the winds

One of the most important tasks in caring for a pipe organ is lubricating the blower and keeping the blower room clean. In many churches, the blower is a heavy, dark monster lurking in a murky or dusty basement lair that is likely to be full of spider webs and the assorted creatures that maintain and frequent them.

It is best to keep the blower room clean, and you may be inspired to bring in a shop-vac, but I recommend a protocol for cleaning a blower room that ensures the blower will not blast loosened dust into the delicate mechanisms of the organ. You should leave this to your organ technician:

• Turn off the power to the blower to ensure it cannot be started during the process. There is typically a heavy cutout switch on the wall next to the blower.

• Seal the air intake of the blower with plastic and tape.

• Clean all the surfaces of the room with a vacuum cleaner. Use a bucket and mop on the floor. Use a cleaning agent with damp rags on the blower and ducts. (I like Simple Green.)

• Let the room sit idle for at least twenty-four hours to allow dust to settle.

• Clean the room again.

• Let the room sit idle for at least another twenty-four hours.

• Remove the plastic and tape from the blower air intake, being sure that no free dust enters the blower.

You can now start the blower, being sure that no dust is blown into the organ.

And most important:

Be sure that the organ is properly insured. The church’s insurance policies may be overseen by a parish administrator or a volunteer member of the property committee. Investigate whether the organ is clearly named in the policy. Many churches have a fine arts policy that covers musical instruments, stained glass windows, communion silver, and any other artwork that may be present. It is usual for an insurance carrier to require an assessment from a neutral pipe organ expert, someone other than your usual organ technician. The assessment and coverage should specifically be for the organ’s replacement value. In the case of a total loss, the organ could be replaced. In the case of partial loss due to fire, flood, vandalism, or even rodents, the insurance adjuster will negotiate with organbuilders and advisers to determine an appropriate settlement based on the replacement value.

The officers, organists, and members of many churches are blissfully unaware of the status of insurance coverage, leaving their organs at risk. It is the responsibility of organists and organ technicians to raise this issue.

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When I was a kid, the television had rabbit-ear antennae, often festooned with tinfoil, and when the reception was poor (it was always poor), we would slap the side of the machine as if that would knock those delicate vacuum tubes into submission. I have watched organists jab hard at intermittent piston buttons and stop controls, thinking that would get them to work, when in fact that was the cause of the fault. All our machines are the product of human ingenuity as applied to the laws of physics. There is no such thing as a machine that works better when treated roughly. Be gentle with your machines, and they will serve you well.

How does it work?

It happened again. I sat at this desk for days mud wrestling with an unruly topic for this column. Twice I had more than a thousand tortured words on the screen, went upstairs for a break, and came back to Ctrl-Shift-A-Delete. But Anthony Tommasini, music critic for The New York Times, came to my rescue with his article under the headline, “Why Do Pianists Know So Little About Pianos?,” published November 12, 2020. This article was born as the outbreak of COVID-19 got rolling in New York City last March and his piano needed tuning, but his apartment building was locked down and workers from outside were not allowed in except for emergencies. “An out-of-tune piano hardly seemed an emergency.”

He quotes the brilliant Jeremy Denk as not knowing “the first thing about piano technology.” Denk, whose playing I admire deeply and who like me is an alumnus of Oberlin College, had the same issue as Tommasini when his building locked down, but convinced the superintendent of his apartment building that because playing the piano is his profession, his tuner should be accepted as an essential worker. It worked.

Tommasini singles out Mitsuko Uchida as one prominent pianist who is an intimate student of piano technology. He quotes her as saying, “you get stuck when the weight is different key to key, the piano has been sloppily prepared, and the dampers have not been adjusted—or the spring in the pedal.” She went on, finding trouble when “the pin underneath the key [guide pin] is dirty, or the other pin in the middle of the mechanism [balance pin] is dirty, rubbing, or slurping.” I love the word slurping in this context.

Tommasini reminds us that orchestral players know more about their instruments than most pianists, and that unlike pianists, orchestral players own their instruments and can carry them with them between performances. Vladimir Horowitz traveled with his own piano, but then, Horowitz was Horowitz. You tell him “No.” Unusual among modern pianists, Mitsuko Uchida travels with her own piano. When Tommasini asked her if the institutions where she plays cover that cost, she said “usually not.” But she went on, “I have no excess otherwise. I don’t need country houses, expensive jewelry, expensive cars, special collections of whatever.” I suppose her usual fees cover that cost and still provide her with lunch money.

Tommasini concluded the column: Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano, and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward, it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved.

Press the key and the pipe blows.

The pipe organ is the most complex of all musical instruments. It is such a sophisticated machine that other musicians, including some world-renowned orchestral conductors, consider it to be unmusical. While a violinist or clarinetist can accent a note by applying a touch more energy, what a single organ pipe can do is all it can do. The organist can accent a note by tweaking the rhythm—a nano-second of delay can translate into an accent—or by operating a machine. A twitch of the ankle on the Swell pedal does it, so does coupling a registration to another keyboard with a soft stop so a note or two can be accented by darting to the other keyboard. The creative organist has a bag of tricks that bypass the mechanics and allow the behemoth to sing.

I have been building, restoring, repairing, servicing, selling, and relocating pipe organs for over forty-five years, and I know that many organists have little idea of how an organ works, so I thought I would offer a short primer. If you already know some or most of this, maybe you can share it with people in your church to help them understand the complexity. In that case, it might help people, especially those on the organ committee, understand why it is so expensive to build, repair, and maintain an organ.

Pipes and registrations

A single organ pipe produces a tone when pressurized air is blown into its toehole. The construction of the pipe is such that the puff of air, which lasts as long as the key is held, is converted to a flat “sheet” that passes across the opening that is the mouth of the pipe. The tone is generated when the sheet is split by the upper lip of the mouth. This is how tone is produced by a recorder, an orchestral flute, or a police whistle. Organ pipes that work this way are called “flue pipes,” and there are no moving parts involved in tone production. Reed pipes (trumpets, oboes, clarinets, tubas, etc.) have a brass tongue that vibrates when air enters the toehole: that vibration is the source of the tone.

Since each pipe can produce only one pitch, you need a set of pipes. We call them ranks of pipes, with one pipe for each note on the keyboard to make a single organ voice. Additional stops are made with additional ranks. There are sixty-one notes on a standard organ keyboard. If the organ has ten stops, there are 610 pipes. Pedal stops usually have thirty-two pipes.

The Arabic numbers on stop knobs or tablets refer to the pitch at which a stop speaks. 8′ indicates unison pitch because the pipe for the lowest note of the keyboard must be eight feet long. 4′ indicates a stop that speaks an octave higher, 2′ is two octaves higher, 16′ is an octave lower. Some stops, such as mixtures, have more than one rank. The number of ranks is usually indicated with a Roman numeral on the stop knob or tablet. A four-rank mixture has four pipes for each note. The organist combines stops of different pitches and different tone colors to form a registration, the term we use to describe a group of stops chosen for a particular piece of music or verse of a hymn.

The length of an organ pipe determines its pitch. On a usual 8′ stop like an Open Diapason, the pipe for low CC is eight feet long, the pipe for tenor c° is four feet, for middle c′ is two feet, and the highest c′′′′ is about three inches. Every organ pipe is equipped with a way to make tiny changes in length. Tuning an organ involves making those tiny adjustments to hundreds or thousands of pipes.

Many organs have combination actions that allow an organist to preset a certain registration and recall it when wanted by pressing a little button between the keyboards (piston) or a larger button near the pedalboard to be operated by the feet (toestud).

Wind

When playing a piece of music on an organ, the little puff of air through each organ pipe to create sound is multiplied by the number of notes and the number of stops being used. Play the Doxology, thirty-two four-note chords, on one stop and there will be 128 puffs of air blowing into pipes. Add a single pedal stop to double the bass line and you will play 160 pipes. Play it on ten manual stops and two pedal stops, 1,384. A hundred manual stops (big organ) and ten pedal stops, 6,420, just to play the Doxology, a veritable gale.

Where does all that wind come from? Somewhere in the building there is an electric rotary blower. In smaller organs, the blower might be right inside the organ, in larger organs the blower is typically found in a soundproof room in the basement. The blower is running as long as the organ is turned on, so there needs to be a system to deal with the extra air when the organ is not being played, and to manage the different flow of air for small or large registrations. The wind output of the blower is connected to a unit that most of us refer to as a bellows. “Bellows” actually defines a device that produces a flow of air—think of a fireplace bellows. Before we had electric blowers, it was accurate to refer to the device as a bellows. When connected to a blower that produces the flow of air, the device has two functions, each of which implies a name. It stores pressurized air, so it can accurately be called a reservoir, and it regulates the flow and pressure of the air, so it can accurately be called a regulator. We use both terms interchangeably.

Between the reservoir/regulator and the blower output, there is a regulating valve. Sometimes it is a “curtain valve” with fabric on a roller that operates something like a window shade, and sometimes it is a wooden cone that seats on a big donut of felt and leather to form an air-tight seal. In either case, the valve is connected to the moving top of the reservoir/regulator. When the blower is running and the organ is not being played, the valve is closed so no air enters the reservoir. When the organist starts to play, air leaves the reservoir to blow the pipes, the top of the reservoir dips in response, the valve is pulled open a little, and air flows into the reservoir, replenishing all that is being used to make music by blowing pipes.

Weights or springs on the top of the reservoir regulate the pressure. The organ’s wind pressure is measured using a manometer. Picture a glass tube in the shape of a “U,” twelve inches tall with the legs of the “U” an inch apart. Fill it halfway with water, and the level of the water will be equal in both legs. With a rubber tube, apply the pressure of the organ’s wind, and the level of the water will go down on one side of the “U” and up on the other. Measure the difference and voilà, you have the wind pressure of the organ in inches or millimeters. It is common for the wind pressure to be three inches or so in a modest tracker-action organ. In a larger electro-pneumatic organ, the pressure on the Great might be four inches, six inches on the Swell, five inches in the Choir, with a big Trumpet or Tuba on twelve inches. The State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on 100 inches. I used to carry a glass tube full of water into an organ, a risky maneuver. Now I have a digital manometer.

In a small organ, the blower typically feeds a single reservoir that regulates the flow and pressure and distributes the wind to the various windchests through wind conductors (pipes), sometimes called wind trunks. In larger organs, it is common to find a regulator in the basement with the blower, and big pipes that carry wind up to the organ where it distributes into various reservoirs, sometimes one for each keyboard or division. Very large organs have two, three, four, or more windchests for each keyboard division, each with its own reservoir. A large bass Pedal stop might have one reservoir for the lowest twelve notes and another for the rest of the stop. And speaking of big pedal stops, the toehole of the lowest note of something like a 16′ Double Open Wood Diapason can be over six inches in diameter. When that valve opens, a hurricane comes out.

Windchests

The organ’s pipes are mounted on windchests arranged in rows on two axes. All the pipes of one rank or stop are arranged in rows “the long way,” and each note of the keyboard is arranged in rows “the short way.” The keyboard action operates the notes of the windchests, and the stop action determines which sets of pipes are being used. Pull on one stop and play one note, and one pipe plays. Pull on five stops and play a four-note chord, and twenty pipes play. In a tracker-action organ or an electric-action organ with slider chests, the keyboard operates a row of large valves that fill a “note channel” when a note is played and a valve opens. The stops are selected by sliders connected to the stopknobs, which have holes identical to the layout of the holes the pipes are sitting in. When the stop is off, the holes do not line up. When the stop is on, they do, and the air can pass from the note channel into those pipes sitting above open sliders.

It is common in electro-pneumatic organs for there to be an individual valve under every pipe. There is an electric contact under every note on the keyboard, a simple switch that is “on” when the note is played. The current goes to the “primary action” (keyboard action) of the windchest. The stops are selected through various devices that engage or disengage the valves under each set of pipes. When a note is played with no stops drawn, the primary action operates, but no pipe valves open. The stopknobs or tablets have electric contacts similar to those in the keyboards. When a stop is turned on and a note is played, a valve opens, and a pipe speaks.

We refer to “releathering” an organ. We know that the total pipe count in an organ is calculated by the number of stops and number of notes. An organ of average size might have 1,800, 2,500, 3,000 pipes. Larger organs have 8,000 or 10,000 pipes, even over 25,000. The valves under the pipes are made of leather, as are the motors (often called pouches) that operate the valves. Releathering an organ involves dismantling it to remove all the internal actions, scraping off all the old leather, cutting new leather pieces, and gluing the motors and valves in place with exacting accuracy. The material is expensive, but it is the hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled labor that add up quickest.

It’s all about air.

We think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument, but that is not really accurate. A piano’s tone is generated by striking a string that is under tension and causing it to vibrate. That is a percussion instrument. The tone of the pipe organ is generated by air, either being split by the upper lip of the organ pipe or causing a reed tongue to vibrate. The organ is a wind instrument. When we play, we are operating machinery that supplies and regulates air, and that controls the valves that allow air to blow into the pipes. When I am playing, I like to think of all those valves flapping open and closed by the thousand. I like to think of those thousands of pipes at the ready and speaking forth when I call on them like a vast choir of Johnny-One-Notes. I like to think of a thousand pounds of wood shutters moving silently when I touch the Swell pedal. I believe my knowledge of how the organ works informs my playing.

A piano is more intimate than a pipe organ, though technically it is also played by remote control as a mechanical system connects the keys to the tone generation. I am not surprised, but I am curious why more pianists do not make a study of what happens inside the instrument when they strike a key. I believe it would inform their playing. A clarinetist certainly knows how his tone is generated, especially when his reed cuts his tongue.

I have always loved being inside an organ when the blower is turned on. You hear a distant stirring, then watch as the reservoirs fill, listen as the pressure builds to its full, and the organ transforms from a bewildering heap of arcane mechanical gear to a living, breathing entity. I have spent thousands of days inside hundreds of organs, and the thrill is still there. 

That’s about 1,800 words on how an organ works. My learned colleagues will no doubt think of a thousand things I left out. I was once engaged to write “Pipe Organs for Dummies” for a group of attorneys studying a complex insurance claim. It was over twenty-five pages and 15,000 words and was still just a brief overview. Reading this, you might not have caught up with Mitsuko Uchida, but you’re miles ahead of Jeremy Denk.

A postscript

In my column in the November 2020 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9), I mentioned in passing that G. Donald Harrison, the legendary president and tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner, died of a heart attack in 1956 while watching the comedian-pianist Victor Borge on television. The other day, I received a phone message from James Colias, Borge’s longtime personal assistant and manager, wondering where I got the information. I have referred to that story several times and remembered generally that it was reported in Craig Whitney’s marvelous book, All the Stops, published in 2003 by Perseus Book Group. Before returning Colias’s call, I spoke with Craig, who referred me to page 119, and there it was.

I returned Mr. Colias’s call and had a fun conversation. He told me that he had shared my story with Borge’s five children (now in their seventies). He also shared that when Victor Borge was born, his father was sixty-two-years-old, so when he was a young boy, he had lots of elderly relatives. His sense of humor was precocious, and when a family member was ailing, he was sent to cheer them up. Later in life, Borge said that they either got better or died laughing. I guess G. Donald Harrison died laughing.

Photo: Tracker keyboard action under a four-manual console, 1750 Gabler organ, Weingarten, Germany. (photo credit: John Bishop)

Breathtaking

My father was, among many other things, an ardent and slightly kooky baseball fan. He grew up in Cincinnati watching the Reds at Crosley Field and started a lifelong relationship with the Boston Red Sox when he was in seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was eleven years old in 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream, when the Red Sox won the American league pennant behind the bat and fielding of Carl Yastrzemski. I think it was that summer that Dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time.

I will never forget my glimpse of all that beautiful green grass as we entered the stands from the scrum in the tunnels beneath. After watching dozens of games on black-and-white television it was breathtaking, and as I write that word, I imagine that I can feel the gasp. It took my breath away. A couple days ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about Iranian women being allowed to watch a live soccer match for the first time in forty years. (Google “Iranian women soccer,” and you will find a slew of stories.) One woman interviewed brought a tear to my eye when she mentioned “all that green grass.” I knew just what she was feeling, except that I have always taken my access to major league sports for granted.

I had the same sort of feeling the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live in Symphony Hall. I had never heard anything like those double basses. My breath was taken away again when I stepped into a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night in real time. It looks great on a coffee mug or a t-shirt, but that is not the same.

A couple weeks ago I spent a week in Germany visiting an organbuilder’s workshop to discuss a future project. An American colleague was also visiting to give first lessons in voicing organ pipes to a bright young apprentice. And while I was there, I visited three historic organs. Two were iconic eighteenth-century masterpieces, gleaming away in their natural habitat. The third was a beauty built in Boston in 1930 for a church in Passaic, New Jersey. What are you doing in Germany?

A glass of wine, Herr Gabler?

The Basilica of Saint Martin is perched on a hill in eponymous Weingarten, the principal town in a region known for growing grapes and producing wine. I had my first glimpse of its towers as I turned a corner passing Burger King. It is a town of about 24,000 people with a long and complicated history of changes of government and processions of Lord Mayors and Abbots. The exterior of the huge building is simple enough, and it is surrounded by the dormitory-like buildings of what was one of the largest monasteries in Germany.

I first saw photos of the organ built by Joseph Gabler when I was a kid, most likely after that first baseball game because my organ lessons started when I was twelve. Visually, it is at the top of the list of all-time greats, on a par with and wildly different from the Müller organ at Haarlem, you know, the red one with the lions. Enormous organ cases decorated with faux-marble swirl around six huge round windows, everything festooned with putti, moldings, carvings, and virile statues to Rococo extremes. I entered the Basilica of Saint Martin from the west end, under the organ, so my first view of the place was down the three-hundred-foot nave, across a fantasyland of decoration. The arched ceiling, nearly a hundred feet up, is adorned with murals in which painted drapery crosses borders to become real drapery.

When I turned around to look at the organ for the first time, I had two quick impressions. In spite of the 32′ façade pipes, it is up so high that it does not look very big, and its magnificent gaudiness cannot possibly be captured in a photograph. There is so much going on visually that I could not take my eyes off it. It is when you climb the many stairs (I forgot to count) to the organ loft that you find out how big it is. You can hardly see the top of the organ. The biggest façade pipe is 32′ DDDD (the two largest are inside the cases). The loft must be fifty feet across, and you could imagine that there are three or four independent organs up there until you realize that the console is up six steps on a platform that allows tracker action to run every which way, and the floor boards between the base of the console platform and the two cases on the gallery rail have iron rings so they can be lifted to access the mechanics.

I visited Weingarten with the three colleagues from the workshop. Stephan Debeur, organist at the abbey, had only limited time coinciding with my visit, so he invited us to join him at the organ while he played for Mass on Friday evening. The steps to and from the organ console were especially squeaky, making me nervous about distracting the worship, but Stephan assured us that he regularly had visitors while playing, and because of the size of the place, it was not an issue. In the lapses between playing, he led us around, opening access doors so we could see interior pipes and action. He kept his ears on the action downstairs and darted back to the console at appropriate moments. I was amused as he played the role of cantor, braying without amplification down the length of the immense church while accompanying himself on that spectacular organ.

He made a point of demonstrating the Vox Humana, an iconic stop in an iconic organ, a stop of such beauty that a legend grew around it. Joseph Gabler experimented with countless combinations of metal and wood, striving to build the pipes that would perfectly imitate the human voice and failing frequently to his disappointment. The legend has him approaching Satan to exchange his soul for the perfect piece of metal, and that idyllic voice was born. Stephan played “Ich ruf’ zu dir” from J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40), alternating the solo voice up and down by octaves in subsequent lines. Gorgeous.

The organ has many singular features. Every façade pipe is a speaking pipe, even the teeny ones lofted above the high center window. Gabler had planned to have an entire division in that location but settled for running long tubes to conduct wind to those pipes from a windchest far below. There is a stop called La Force (The Power), which plays forty-nine pipes simultaneously on low C of the pedalboard. I was sorry not to hear it, as it is apparently not conducive for use in a simple evening Mass. I guess I will have to go back.

There is a voice in one of the Positiv cases with twenty pipes of solid ivory. Take a look at your lathe, remove the motor, and pump the thing with a foot lever, and try to make an ivory organ pipe without chipping it. And while you are at it, note that the massive drawknobs and their square shanks are also solid ivory. There is elaborate marquetry everywhere you look, on banisters, newels, and console panels. There is hardly a square inch that lacks added ornamentation.

Every time I hear an instrument built in another age, I am struck by the timelessness of the sound of a pipe organ. The organ at Weingarten predates American Guild of Organists console standards by more than 150 years, and it is an awkward sit at first whack. But Stephan ably demonstrated that a modern organist can easily play a modern Mass, changing stops like a conjurer, sending beautifully balanced voices across the immense space. Perched on that six-step platform, he has a spectacular view to the altar, surrounded by mammoth organ cases. It is thought to be the first pipe organ built with a detached console.

When Gabler completed the organ in 1750, the delighted monks presented him with a bonus—enough wine to fill the largest pipe. Assuming that 32′ DDDD has a diameter of twenty inches and dusting off my π, that is about 22,600 cubic inches, which is almost ninety-eight gallons. A standard pour for a glass of wine is five ounces. Herr Gabler could entertain a lot of friends with 2,500 five-ounce glasses.¹

Follow the Fox to Munich.

When I asked my friend Stephen Tharp which organs stand out in the neighborhood I was visiting, he all but blurted out Fürstenfeld. The organ in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck was completed by Johann Georg Fux in 1736. The church, though smaller than that in Weingarten, is still immense, and sports the same degree of fantastic opulent decoration. There are side altars with spiraling columns in every bay, angels with sunbursts, carvings, and murals everywhere. Once again, the organ is placed so high in the church that it looks small at first. But though it has fewer than thirty stops, it has a 32′ façade. The tallest pipes are mounted on the impost that is well out of reach from the floor. I guess the organ is over forty-five feet tall.

With Stephen’s help, I met the organist Christoph Hauser after Mass on Sunday morning, so I attended Mass to hear the organ well from the floor. It was dazzling. Christoph’s playing was colorful, thoughtful, rhythmic, and inspirational. It was all improvised excepting the hymns and congregational responses, and that ancient organ filled the room with the liveliest tones, both delicate and charming, and full ablaze.

After Mass, I returned the hymnal to the rack and wandered about keeping my eyes on the rear of the room, assuming that Christoph would appear there. A few moments later, I noticed a dapper gent at the front of the room, looking exactly like an organist (you bet I was profiling). Turns out that the stairs start in a sacristy next to the chancel. And such stairs. Once again, I forgot to count, but this organ is in a second balcony, and there were plenty of them. We passed the antique mechanism of the tower clock, the size of a small car with counterweights as big as oil drums hanging from cables high above. The stairs changed from stone to wood, the stairwell grew narrower, and my tuner’s knees along with all they support was barely a match for the thirty-something spry organist I was chasing. We arrived into a gallery that spanned the length of the room, passing through narrow arches at each bay, until we reached the organ. The organ loft is about ten steps down from the gallery allowing a grand view of the side of the organ case, but it was not until I got down those stairs to stand on the same floor as the organ that I could appreciate its size. The 32′ façade pipes are topped by ornate crowns laden with putti, carvings, and more sunbursts, and are mounted on an impost that is well out of reach.

If Weingarten has the oldest detached console, does Fürstenfeld have the tallest two-manual organ?

Speaking of AGO standards, the Fux organ has “short and broken” bass octaves. Both keyboards and the pedalboard are missing the lowest C#, D#, F#, and G#. What looks like E is actually C. What looks like passing from F# to G is actually D to G. Christoph agreed that it took some adjustment, and now that he is used to it, he has to think twice when moving to more usual keyboards. After lots of digging, he determined that Bach’s Dorian Toccata is the only large piece by Bach with a big pedal part that he can play on the organ. I invite and encourage you to type “Hauser Fux Dorian Toccata” into your YouTube search bar. Hang on to your hats: it is a thrilling ride.

Mr. Skinner goes to Ingelheim.

In 2008, the Organ Clearing House sold Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 823 (1930) to the Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany. The church’s organist Carsten Lenz had long intended to import a Skinner organ to Germany, and this exciting transaction happened after four years of conversations, lots of touring around the eastern United States, and a frightening heap of paperwork. The organ was shipped to Klais Orgelbau in Bonn where it was releathered, renovated, and reconfigured under the supervision and with the advice of Skinner experts Sean O’Donnell and Nelson Barden.

The church in Passaic, New Jersey, where the organ was originally installed, had been purchased by a new congregation, and the decorated façade pipes were to stay in place, so Klais produced a new case of contemporary design including new pipes to replace the original speaking façade pipes from 16′ and 8′ Diapasons. The organ was originally placed in deep chambers in a large room with plaster walls, carpeting, and lovely pew cushions. The new setting has the organ placed in a new shallow case in a high balcony on the center axis of a brick and stone room. The thoughtful installation included placing the large wood pedal pipes in front of the exposed Great division to control the egress of tone. Even with that precaution, it was still necessary to hang heavy sheets of felt in front of the Great to balance the tone in the lively acoustics.

I was delighted to see the shellac, ink lettering, distinctive racking styles, and beefy expression shutters we know so well from long experience with Skinner organs. I was delighted to hear the distinctive tones of Mr. Skinner’s specialty voices so far from home. And I was delighted to hear Carsten describe how German audiences have responded to the unique sounds of the Skinner organ.

We have heard criticism about exporting American organs, expressing the feeling that they should stay at home. I have two thoughts to share. Skinner #823, like many of the instruments we have shipped overseas, was on the market for five years before the church in Ingelheim purchased it. Better to be sent overseas than never to be heard again. And for the last seventy years, American organists and organbuilders have been influenced by European traditions. Reciprocity is a good thing. Germany has a five-hundred-year history of building pipe organs, but no one in Germany has ever built a Skinner organ. There is nothing else like it. Seems we can teach them a thing or two, especially, according to Carsten, when American organists come to play!

§

It is impossible to fully describe the experience of visiting a single fine pipe organ, writing a paragraph about each individual voice or chorus, describing the feel of different keyboards, the intricacies of design, the quirks, the chirps, and the foibles. In the mid-eighteenth century when the Weingarten and Fürstenfeldbruck organs were built, there was no other machine made by humans quite as complicated as a pipe organ. With more than seven-thousand pipes, the Weingarten organ is large by modern standards, and its console placement is visionary.

Returning to AGO standards, or what we are used to in organs, the twenty-nine-stop Fürstenfeld organ has only one reed, 16′ Trompas² in the Pedal (prominently displayed in Christoph Hauser’s recording of the Dorian Toccata). How can you play an organ with no manual reeds? Shut up and sing, that’s how. And by the way, most of the mixtures include tierces, and full organ sure sounds as though there are manual reeds.

I shared my thrill and thrall on Facebook after each of these visits and received a comment about Weingarten that stood out. “I’ve always thought that organ was a little soft in the church. I’m sure Gabler did his best.” Oof. Herr Gabler’s worst is far better than the best of most organbuilders, even after 2,500 glasses of wine.

Notes

1. You can see the specification of the Gabler organ at Weingartern here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_the_Basilica_of_St._Martin_(Wein….

2. Yes, it really is 16′ Trompas. You can see the specifications of the Fux organ at Fürstenfeldbruck here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgeln_der_Klosterkirche_Fürstenfeld.

Photo: The organ that inspired back surgery, 1886 George S. Hutchings Opus 156, Korean Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts (formerly Pilgrim Congregational Church) (photo credit: John Bishop)

Rites of passage

Almost twenty years ago, I gave up the joy of serving churches as organist and director of music. I served two churches, one in Cleveland and one in suburban Boston, for over twenty-five years, concurrent with my work as an organbuilder. I was offered the opportunity to join the Organ Clearing House as director during founder Alan Laufman’s final illness. Alan passed away in November of 2000, and as I started my new job with its heavy travel schedule, I realized that I would not be able to sustain my work as a church musician. I had great experiences with semi-professional choirs in both churches and loved my role as a worship leader, especially before the retirement of the creative and supportive senior pastor in the last church. (He was followed by a fool who made it a little easier to give up the work.) It was a huge adjustment to my professional and artistic being, but it was nice to have weekends free for the first time in my life, especially as Wendy and I had just acquired our house in Maine.

I was first involved maintaining pipe organs when I started working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio (see this column in the February 2020 issue, pages 12–13) in 1976. Since I moved to the Boston area in 1984, I have maintained scores of organs with as many as 120 clients at one time. Since we moved to New York City five years ago, since I started a consultation business, and since the Organ Clearing House has grown ever busier, I realized last fall that I was unable to meet the needs of those clients and their organs in a timely, reliable fashion, and decided to retire from organ maintenance while continuing with the other work and while starting new ventures.

After forty-five Christmas tuning rushes, after countless arrivals at churches to find that the heat wasn’t on, after hundreds of panicky emergency calls from organists, and after one serious injury caused by a rickety antique ladder collapsing under my (admittedly excessive) weight, I look forward to a calendar free of day-at-a-time toolbox lugging, free of messy organ consoles, and free of unscheduled vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, chattering tourists, and unannounced funerals interrupting my work.

Funny, even without all those appointments, my calendar is still filled, but it is filled with new ventures, and with the effects of Anno Domini taking their toll on my physical being, I am excited about this change. I met last fall with a couple local colleagues, asking about their willingness and ability to take on new clients, and I have just finished the last round of correspondence recommending them to the last round of my clients. I still have a lot of church keys to return, but otherwise I am officially finished. I do not want to lose my last skills (after twenty years, getting on an organ bench is not like getting back on a bicycle), so I have retained just one client here in New York. It is a synagogue that operates on a different cycle than the Christian churches, it is a large, interesting organ that is easy to get around in, there is an elevator from street level to the balcony, and it is just a couple blocks from where I get my hair cut. The organist is a good friend, and I know I will enjoy going there several times each year. It is the perfect retirement service client.

I started maintaining organs in the Boston area when I joined the shop of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and when he closed his shop to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I started my own business and assumed most of his service clients. I served five of those churches for thirty-six years, and in each of those, I outlasted multiple pastors, organists, custodians, secretaries, and music committee chairs.

I have written about specific experiences on the tuning road periodically in this column, so I do not need to tell you about the wedding that was delayed because there was a card table against the intake of the blower. I do not have to tell you about the time I was fired for sending a bill for almost $1,000 for a service call that took fifteen minutes. (It took six hours of driving and three hours on a ferryboat to make the round trip on Good Friday!) I do not have to tell you about the furious organist who called in the middle of a recording session saying the whole organ was out of tune, insisting that I drive two hours right away to find that high F-sharp of the Pedal Clarion was off speech. (A resourceful organist might have isolated the problem and turned off the stop.) And I do not have to tell you about the night that Madame Duruflé gave me a big hug and kiss in the midst of a post-convention recital scrum, thanking me for helping make her Boston recital a success.

But as I reflect on that long career of caring for organs, I thought I would share a few observations from the desk of an itinerant organ worker.

Upside down and backwards

The health of the church universal has diminished substantially in the last thirty-five years. As director of the Organ Clearing House, I see that more dramatically than many. Tomorrow I am visiting a huge stone Gothic building in Manhattan that was a Roman Catholic church. It once housed thousands of worshipers at a time, surrounding them in artistic glory. It is empty now. There are puddles of water on the nave floor and chains on the front doors. The immense and opulent four-manual organ is mute. We are waiting for permits to be approved so the organ can be removed.

But diminutions are visible even in churches that are functioning and relatively healthy. Earlier in my career, most churches had at least one full-time person in the office in addition to clergy. The ubiquitous parish secretary was typically the one who really knew what was going on in the place. Today, many have been replaced by answering machines, out-sourced accounting firms, and messaging through a website. It is increasingly difficult to get personally in touch with someone to ensure that the heat will be turned on before a tuning, and the pleasant banter with church staff over a cup of scorched coffee is a thing of the past.

Each church also had a sexton or custodian who cared for the building and did routine maintenance on machinery like oiling motors and changing filters. Today it is common for churches to hire cleaning services that come weekly, while volunteer members of the property committee look after the mechanical things. In my opinion, that approach is backwards, even oxymoronic. Any church building of any size has mechanical equipment like furnaces, boilers, pumps, blowers, and elevators that are much more complex and sophisticated than anything found in a usual home. It makes more sense to me to hire a stationary engineer to visit the building four times a year to service machinery and invite volunteer church members to clean the place.

Make your house fair as you are able.

Bet I just set you a’whistling, “Love, the Guest, is on the way.” My Facebook page is dotted with photos of organ consoles labeled, “. . . my office today . . . .”
True enough. An organ console is a workstation, comparable to an office cubicle or computer station. But it is also part of a musical instrument, located in a sacred and public space, and I do not think it is appropriate to keep it looking like a dirty bathroom. As a parishioner, I do not like seeing piles of books on the organ console. I know you want to keep paper clips, post-its, Kleenex, and lozenges handy, but I have always been a little offended by nail clippers, hairbrushes, paper cups, used Kleenex, and the like. I think they signal disrespect. Maybe you could use a neat little box, or a pencil case like you had in grade school. If your fingernails need to be clipped, do it at home. I do not want to hear that snipping sound from my pew. “Our Father (snip), who art in heaven (snip) . . . .”

Good console hygiene helps the reliability of the organ. Paperclips falling between keys, sticky stains from spilled soda or sugary coffee, or crumbs from that quick bagel or donut will cause sticky keys, ciphers, and dead notes. The most noticeable physical feature of the elderly female organist at one church was her waist-length gray hair. It was dramatic and lovely, until we had to fix dead notes in the pedal keyboards caused by great hairballs mixed up in the pedal contacts. Disgusting. She kept a hairbrush at the console, and I suppose she passed the time during sermons preening. I know from experience that I would rather pull recently deceased bats out of reed pipes. If you as the staff member who uses the organ do not show your respect for the value of the instrument, you are less likely to find support from funding committees when it becomes necessary to spend a lot of money on it.

During service calls and consultation visits, I make a point of observing how well a building is kept. Are trash cans emptied, kitchens clean, and floors swept and mopped? Is the choir library strewn about the choir room? Is the organ chamber and blower room full of extraneous stuff? Is the basement a repository for thirty-year-old rummage sale signs and moldy pageant costumes? All these things reflect the attitude of a parish toward its valuable real estate.

You are the steward.

You may be a famous recitalist with advanced degrees from a conservatory of music and organist of a big city church with a huge organ, or you may be a converted pianist who plays a simple instrument in a small rural church, but you are both stewards of that instrument. It is likely that no one else in the building knows as much as you do about the organ, and it is your responsibility to see that it is well cared for. You do not have to be a very sophisticated musician to notice when a note is dead, when the shutters do not work, or when the tremolo will not turn off. When the furnace stops working, a specialist is called. When the organ stops working, a specialist should be called. If you do not know anyone who services organs, ask your local chapter of the American Guild of Organists, ask your diocesan or denominational headquarters. They would be able and willing to offer guidance.

Get to know your technician. A responsible organ technician can tell a lot about how an organ is used by snooping around a little, seeing what volumes of music are on the console or in the choir room, or reading a discarded Sunday bulletin. But I always preferred to have a personal relationship with each organist. If you are confused or concerned about something, call your tuner. It is part of a technician’s job to help the musician know their instrument better, to know why and how temperature affects the pitch of the organ, to know simple facts about how to take care of it. Besides, service call chats are a great way to take the pulse of a congregation.

A responsible organ technician will keep the organist aware of larger maintenance issues that are looming. It is likely that a fifty-year-old organ with electro-pneumatic action will need to be releathered pretty soon. If the technician takes the time to show the organist what a pouch or pneumatic looks like, and how a failure of leather will affect its operation, the church in turn will be less surprised to learn that the organ will soon need hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. Even the largest and wealthiest churches need to plan ahead.

May the force be with you.

Another regular feature of my Facebook page is a meme, often featuring the dowager Lady Grantham, sneering at congregants who report that the organ is too loud. In the nearly twenty years since I “left the bench” and had opportunities to hear other organists at work, I have observed that many of them do play too loud too often. An organ that is equipped with howitzers for the glory of Easter should be played with good taste and sensitivity on Pentecost 23. I propose a courtesy tax. For each time you use the en chamade, you give up coffee for a week. It is tiring to stand through five verses of a hymn with mixtures on throughout, and it borders on offensive to have powerful reeds featured in each selection. You as the organist are used to all that power. Those in the pews are not.

The glory of the pipe organ is apparent in its quietest voices as much as in its powerful choruses. And the whole point of the instrument with its myriad voices is the palette of tone colors. As you go from one verse to another, mix it up a little. Play one verse on principals alone. Play another with the melody on an Oboe or Clarinet. Read the text of the hymn. Does it imply anything about the registration of the organ? Or do you plow through “. . . oh
still small voice of calm . . .” like a runaway train with whistles blowing?

As you are the steward of the condition of the organ, you are also the steward of its favor with the congregation. I love a powerful organ as much as the next person. I have played two hundred-rank organs in huge buildings with the high-octane brass players from a major symphony orchestra. It is thrilling. But I have also set a church full of people to weeping, including myself, as the organ shimmered gently in candlelight with an occasional punctuating note from the chimes. Make beautiful music. Do not wield a weapon.

Nothing is forever.

When I was having my first organ lessons fifty years ago, there was a vital and active community of pipe organ professionals in the Boston area. Companies like Fisk, Noack, Andover, Bozeman, and Roche were digging into the exciting world of classically inspired tracker-action organs. My mentors took me to workshop open house parties and recitals on a regular basis. Many of the concerts were followed by convivial dinners at local restaurants, and I was in the thrall of it all. The New England Conservatory of Music was a centerpiece of that activity, and it did not occur to anyone that the heady environment might be temporary.

There are still many prosperous church music programs in the Boston area, but the organ department at NEC is gone, so fewer young and brilliant organists are coming to town, and many of the churches where I serviced organs for well-known creative musicians have given up on their organs. The church that I served for so long as director of music still employs an organist, but they formally decided to stop maintaining the organ. I was stunned when I called to schedule a tuning, and the pastor got on the line to inform me.

If you share catty comments on social media when a member of the congregation suggests that the organ is too loud, if you think your parish owes you the finest organ, you are not serving the parish or the world of the pipe organ very well. This is not about you. It is about your role adding beauty, depth, and meaning to the worship of a community of faith.

When I lived in rural Ohio, a neighbor who was a soybean and corn farmer commented that a particular seed for corn was advertised as especially productive on good ground. “I can grow anything on good ground. What I need is something that grows well on my fields.”

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.