In the Wind . . .

Changing seasons

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

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

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

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

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

Stars in your eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newfangled

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

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

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

Notes

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

Everything’s under control.

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

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

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

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

New-fangled

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

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

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

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

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

Artifacts

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

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

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

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

It was a hacksaw.

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

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

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

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

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

It played.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Didn’t miss a Sunday.

Connectivity

It does not seem that long ago that packing a briefcase for a business trip meant gathering file folders and notebooks. Today, all my files are digital, and my briefcase is full of chargers for iPhone and iPad and the power cord for my laptop. I admit to carrying an HDMI cord with adapters so I can plug into the television in a hotel room and watch movies or other good stuff using laptop, iPad, or phone, and I carry an extension cord to be sure I can set up camp comfortably. I add to all that a Bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music and NPR programs with rich sound. There are a lot of wires in my wireless life.

My desk at home similarly includes wires that make the essential connections of my life, and I had to add one more yesterday. The printer in a drawer under my desk, happily connected to Wi-Fi, suddenly went hermit on me and refused to perform. I ascertained that the Wi-Fi connection had failed and spent most of an hour mucking around with passwords, straightened paper clips, and reset buttons . . . to no avail. If this had happened at our home in Maine, I would have jumped into the car (it was snowing) and driven forty-five minutes to Staples to buy a cord. Luckily, I was in New York, where Staples is immediately across the street from us. The only door I have to pass is an ATM. Even though it was snowing, I did not bother with a jacket and ran across to get the cord. I fished it through the hole I had made for the printer’s power cord, and I was back in business.

I suppose I will want to renew the Wi-Fi connection sooner or later, but as I only paid $125 for the printer, I may just buy another one rather than spending more time trouble-shooting. Wendy’s printer is working fine, as is all of our other wireless gear, so I feel safe assuming that the printer is the culprit. It is not all that long ago that I put paper directly into a typewriter, and there was no question about the need for connectivity.

§

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers were racing against each other to perfect the harnessing and application of electricity for everyday life. J. P. Morgan’s mansion at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street in New York City was illuminated by Thomas Edison in 1882. There was a fire that spoiled Mr. Morgan’s expensively appointed study that necessitated replacing a lot of wiring, but he was very proud to be on the forefront of that revolution and invited hundreds of people to parties at his home, encouraging them to marvel at the new equipment.

Three years earlier, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings had completed a 101-rank masterpiece of an organ for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not done the research, but I feel safe guessing that it was the largest organ in the United States at that time. (https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=7254) Just look at that Great Chorus! Though the organ now has electric action opening the pallets, it was built without electricity, with mechanical key and stop action and a human-powered wind system.

Within ten years of the completion of the organ at Holy Cross, organbuilders were experimenting with electric power in pipe organs. Builders like George Hutchings and Ernest M. Skinner were developing the electro-pneumatic actions with which we are familiar today. In 1906, Mr. Skinner completed his massive instrument (Opus 150) for the newly unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With four manuals and eighty-four ranks, it was among the first really large fully electro-pneumatic organs in the world, completed just twenty-four years after the Holy Cross organ. (http://aeolianskinner.organhistoricalsociety.net/Specs/Op00150.html) And by the way, it had electric blowers.

That was quite a revolution. It took barely a generation to move from tracker action, proven to be reliable for over five hundred years, to electro-pneumatic action—that new-fangled, up-and-coming creation that provided organists with combination actions, comfortable ergonomic consoles (decades before the invention of the word ergonomic), myriad gadgets to aid registrations, and, perhaps most important, unlimited wind supplies. Many organists were skeptical of the new actions, thinking that because they were not direct they could not be musical.

In spite of the skepticism, electro-pneumatic organs sold like fried dough at the state fair. Before the end of 1915, the Ernest M. Skinner Company produced more than 140 organs (more than ten per year), forty-six of which had four manuals. (Who would like to go on a tour of forty-six pre-World War I four-manual Skinner organs? Raise your hand!) The negative side of this is the number of wonderful nineteenth-century tracker organs that were discarded in the name of progress, but it is hard to judge whether the preservation of those instruments would have been advantageous over the miracles of the innovation of electro-pneumatic action.

And a generation later, what went around came around when the new interest in tracker-action organs surged, and scores of distinguished electro-pneumatic organs were discarded in favor of new organs with low wind pressure and lots of stops of high pitch.

§

Early electro-pneumatic organs relied on elaborate electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching systems for their operation. Keyboard contacts operated matrix relays to control keyboard and stop actions. Consoles were packed full of coupling and combination machines, inspired along with the development of the vast multiplication of switching systems that supported the spread of the telephone. The wiring diagram of a Skinner organ is remarkably similar to the old telephone switchboards where operators inserted quarter-inch plugs into sockets to connect calls.

Along with “traditional” organs for churches and concert halls, the advance of electric actions fostered the theatre organ, a vehicle that allowed a musician to rollick through the countryside along with the antics and passions of the actors on the screen. The invention of double-touch keyboards expanded the scope of organ switching, as did the ubiquitous “toy counters” that duplicated the sounds of cow bells, train whistles, sleigh bells, thunder and lightning, car horns, and dozens of other sound effects that might have a use during a movie. Those novelty sounds were not synthesized, but produced by the actual instrument being manipulated, struck, shaken, or stirred by an electro-pneumatic device. Push the button marked “Castanets,” and a half-dozen sets of castanets sound across the Sea of Galilee. Ole!

The original switching system of a big electro-pneumatic organ is a thing to behold—electric relays in rows of sixty-one, seventy-three, or eighty-five (depending on the number of octaves in a rank, a windchest, or a keyboard). Each relay has a contact for each function a given key can perform. In a big four-manual organ with sub, unison, and super couplers every which way, multiple windchests for each division, and unified stops around the edges, one note of the Great keyboard might have as many as twenty contacts in various forms. Sometimes you see that many contacts physically mounted on each key, with miniscule spacing, and tiny dots of solder holding the connections fast. Spill a cup of coffee into that keyboard, and your organ technician will spend scores of billable hours cleaning up after you.

One organ I worked on for years was in fact two. The organ(s) at Trinity Church in Boston included a three-manual instrument in the chancel and a four-manual job in the rear gallery. Of course, both had pedal divisions. The console functioned as a remote-control device, its keyboards, stopknobs, pistons, and expression pedals operated a complex relay in a basement room directly below. The outputs for seven keyboards and two pedalboards (491), 175 stop knobs, 45 coupler tabs, 7 pistons, and 4 expression pedals (48 for shutters, 60 for crescendo) were in the cable going to the basement, a total of 826 conductors. But wait, there’s more. Since the combination action was also in the basement, the conductors from the combination action that operated the drawknobs and couplers were in the same conduit, bringing signals up from the basement. Drawknobs and couplers totaled 220, and each needed three wires (on coil, off coil, and sense contact)—660. All together, the console cable comprised 1,486 conductors.

When my company was engaged to install the new solid-state switching and combinations in that organ, we wired all the equipment to the existing relays in the basement and chambers, bought an orphaned console for temporary use and equipped it with new stop jambs with knob layout identical to the original, and set everything up with plug-in connectors. After the evening service one Sunday, we cut the console cable, dragged the original console out of the way, placed the temporary console, and started plugging things in. With just a little smoke escaping, we had the organ up and running in time for the Friday noon recital. One glitch turned up. One of my employees consistently reversed the violet/blue pair of conductors in our new color-coded cable so throughout the complex organ, #41 and #42 (soprano E and F) were mixed up!

When something goes wrong like a dead note or a cipher, physical electric contacts are fairly easy to trouble-shoot. Once you have acclimated yourself to the correct location, you are likely to be able to see the problem. It might be a bit of schmutz keeping contacts from moving or touching, it might be a contact wire bent by a passing mouse. Organ relays are often located in dirty basements where spiders catch prey, stonewalls weep with moisture, and careless custodians toss detritus into mysterious dark rooms. Many is the time I have seen the like of signs from a 1963 rummage sale heaped on top of delicate switching equipment.

Oxidation is another enemy of organ contacts that are typically made of phosphorous bronze wire that reacts with oxygen to form a non-conductive coating, inhibiting the operation of the contacts. Also, in a simple circuit that includes a power supply (organ rectifier), switch (keyboard contact), and appliance (chest magnet), a “fly-back” spark jumps across the space between contacts as a note is released. Each spark burns away a teeny bit of metal until after millions of repetitions the contact breaks causing a dead note. You can see this sparking clearly when you sit with a switch-stack with the lights off while the organ is being played.

You can retro fit a switching system by installing diodes in each circuit (which means rows of sixty-one) that arrest the sparks. You can replace phosphorous bronze with silver wire that does not oxidize, but you still have to keep the whole thing clean and protected from physical harm.

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Just as the telephone companies have converted to solid-state switching, so has the pipe organ industry. Solid-state equipment is no longer new; in fact, it has been around as long as electro-pneumatic organs were before the revival of tracker organs. But perhaps some of you don’t actually know what “solid-state” means. A solid-state device controls electricity without any physical motion. Circuits are built using semi-conductors. What is a semi-conductor? A device that conducts electricity under certain circumstances or in particular ways, less fully than a standard conductor. A piece of wire is a conductor. Electricity travels freely over a piece of wire in any direction.

A great example of a semi-conductor is the diode I mentioned earlier that contains “fly-back” sparks when a circuit is broken. The diode can do this because it conducts electricity in only one direction. It has a wire on each end to connect to a circuit, and power can flow from the switch through the diode to the magnet (if you have installed it facing the right way!). When the contact is released, the power cannot come back through the diode from the magnet to the switch. Semi-conductor.

Some semi-conductors are in fact switches (transistors) with three legs. Apply power to one leg, and power flows through the other two. Integrated circuits are simply little gadgets that contain many transistors. Resistors are gadgets that reduce the flow of power by resisting it. The advance of electronics has been enabled by the reduction of size of these components. I have transistors in my toolbox that are replacements for common organ controls that are each the size of my pinkie fingernail. Huge! I have no idea how many circuits there are in my iPhone, but it must be millions.

I first worked with solid-state organ actions in the late 1970s. One job was in a rickety Anglican church on East 55th Street in Cleveland where we were installing one of the earliest Peterson combination actions in an old Holtkamp organ. The church had a dirt crawl space instead of a basement, and as the apprentice, it was my job to crawl on my belly with the rats (yup, lots of them), trailing cables from chamber to console. We followed the directions meticulously, made all the connections carefully, crossed our fingers, and turned it on. Some smoke came out. It took us a couple hours to sort out the problem, and we had to wait a few days for replacement parts, but the second time it worked perfectly. I do not believe we were very sure of what we had done, but we sure were pleased.

In around 1987, I became curator of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1202, 1951) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. With over 230 ranks and 13,000 pipes, the instrument had heaps of electro-pneumatic-mechanical relays. As I came onboard, wire contacts had started to break at a rapid rate, and as the switches were mounted vertically, when a contact broke, it would fall and lodge across its neighbors causing cluster ciphers. Ronald Paul of Salt Lake City, Utah, had been contracted to install a new solid-state switching system, and I was on hand to help him with many details. I was assuming the care of the organ from Jason McKown who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner at the Skinner Organ Company and cared for the Mother Church organ since it was installed. Jason was in his eighties and still climbed the hundreds of rungs and steps involved in reaching the far reaches of that massive organ.

Jason looked over all the shiny gear, bristling with rows of pins and filled with those fiberglass cards covered with mysterious bugs, shook his head, and said, “this is for you young fellows.”

Swing wide the gates.

Over the past fifty years, most of us have gotten used to solid-state pipe organ actions. In that time, we have seen the medium of connections go from regular old organ cable to “Cat5” to optical fiber. I know that some of the firms that supply this equipment are experimenting with wireless connections. I suppose I may be asked to install such a system someday, but while I am committed to solid-state switching and all its benefits, I am skeptical about wireless.

Forty years ago, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had a small and ancient electronic organ in the chapel. I was happy enough that I almost never had to play it, but there was one Thanksgiving Day when the pastor chose to lead an early morning worship service in the chapel. Halfway through that service, human voices blared out of the organ, decidedly irreverent human voices. The organ was picking up citizens band radio transmissions from Euclid Avenue in front of the church. I dove for the power cord. “Roger that, good buddy. Over and out!”

We have wireless remote controls for televisions, receivers, radios, even electric fans, and it is often necessary to punch a button repeatedly to get the desired function to work. And there was that printer yesterday, choosing idly to skip the bounds of our Wi-Fi router and booster, requiring the introduction of a new wire.

When I think of a wireless connection between the console and chambers of a large pipe organ, I imagine sweeping onto the bench, robes a-flutter, turning on the organ, pushing a piston, and garage doors throughout the neighborhood randomly opening and closing. Swing wide the gates, I’m coming home.

On the road again

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania and Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

And back to Pennsylvania

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

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

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

Saying goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

It’s all about birds.

The desk in my country office (Organ Clearing House East) is a special artifact, a three-by-eight-foot, five-quarter thick library table of quarter-sawn white oak, rescued from the basement of Saint John’s Chapel at the Episcopal Divinity School (now defunct) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That building is home to an organ built by Holtkamp in 1956, when Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, when E. Power Biggs lived a few blocks away, when Daniel Pinkham was Biggs’s twenty-something protégé, and when Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music, was organist to the seminary. When I was twelve, I had my first organ lessons there with Alastair Cassels-Brown. My father was an alumnus from the days when it was known as the Episcopal Theological School and later taught homiletics there.

When I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area in the 1980s and 1990s, I had the care of that Holtkamp organ, the vehicle for my adolescent laboring over Bach’s Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, a few numbers from Das Orgelbüchlein, and Clérambault’s Suite du premier ton. During a service call, I scampered down the iron spiral stairs to the blower room in the basement,¹ where I noticed three or four oak tabletops standing against a basement wall with a heap of lumber from the corresponding trestles. I asked the guy from the buildings and grounds department, a cheerful old ally, if the tables had any future, and he said I was welcome to take them all. I took only one, heavy as lead, covered with spiders and mold. I brought it to my workshop in Newcastle, cleaned it up, re-glued a couple joints, and put a nice dark stain and lacquer finish on it.

Sitting at that desk as I write now, I think of my father, certain that when he was a student in early 1950s, he sat at this very table laboring over arcane theological texts. He has been gone more than six years, and his ninety-sixth birthday passed a few days ago. His relationship with this oak table may be imagined, but I believe it to be true.

I look across the lawn to the Damariscotta River, a tidal estuary with the Gulf of Maine about eight miles down, and these days (early June) my view is loaded with birds. We have just put out our birdfeeders, so goldfinches, purple finches, cardinals, blue jays, and four or five varieties of sparrows are darting back and forth, and our old friend the eastern phoebe is building her nest right over my office windows. She perches on a trellis a few feet away, glancing back and forth, and flits up above to work on her solid little mud-daubed nest. She has wised up a little. For the past several years, she built her nest on the crook of a downspout just outside the front door, where she was regularly interrupted by our coming and going. Nevertheless, she persisted and raised a neat little brood of chicks right in front of our eyes. There she is again, a bit of moss in her beak and her tail twitching.

The other day I stopped at Home Depot with a springtime list. I was busy with a thousand choices of light bulbs (it is not as simple as it used to be) when I became aware of the chorus of birdcalls in the vast open spaces above the orange shelves. I recognized chipping sparrows, song sparrows, and white-throated sparrows (“Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody”), and the lovely confused tumbling call of a robin, and I wondered if they had any chance of getting back outdoors during their lives. I suppose some are trapped forever, breeding indoors, perhaps forming new species like the “hardware sparrow, the kitchen-and-bath sparrow, or ironically, the lawn-and-garden sparrow.” Will the call of the plumbing sparrow be distinct from that of the electrical sparrow?

Olivier Messiaen

When Charles-Marie Widor retired as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, Paul Dukas was appointed his successor. His students included some of the greats of the organ world, including Jehan Alain, Maurice Duruflé, Jean Langlais, and Olivier Messiaen. Dukas frequently repeated to his students that they should “listen to the birds.” Presumably the idea was to keep their ears full of natural and spontaneous musical sounds, sounds that had both purpose and beauty. I guess that made them the sorcerer’s apprentices.

Olivier Messiaen grew to be both an admired composer and an ornithologist. Organists know well his devotion to birdcalls and how in his music he emulates birdcalls through the use of sophisticated combinations of mutations. His birdcalls are real, not imagined, collected from forests around the world with the help of his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod. Together, they recorded the calls, and he transcribed them into musical notation, amassing a collection of more than two hundred notebooks.

Messiaen was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1966 where he presided over a class of a dozen or more students each year. I recently met a student of his at a gathering of organists in New York City. We were seated next to each other with six others around a banquet table, in a large room alive with well-oiled conversation, and I was excited to hear a few stories about life as the student of such an innovative and revered composer and musician. Eager to hear more, I invited him to lunch a few weeks later.

Brian Schober, now organist of an Episcopal church in the New Jersey metropolitan area, was a member of Messiaen’s composition class from 1973 through 1976. He recalls that the class of around twenty students met in seminar three times a week. Messiaen was a kind and thoughtful mentor who was close to his students, supportive of them both personally and in class. Brian’s program was to last three years, but as the second year was coming to a close, he learned that the funding was ending. When he informed his teacher that he would be leaving, Messiaen responded by suggesting an alternative source of funds and helped him apply and receive it.

Messiaen showed his devotion to his students by arranging and attending performances of their music. In classes, he referred occasionally to his interest in birds, but he was also deeply interested in astronomy, Shakespeare, and the relationship of color to music. When listening to music, he perceived color, a concept that is often explored in literature.

One of my favorite stories is the twenty-novel saga of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and Stephen Maturin, the physician who travels with Jack as ship’s surgeon that serves as cover for his interest in the natural world and his activities as a naval intelligence agent. Jack plays the violin, Stephen plays the cello, and they play together in the Captain’s cabin as the various ships circle the globe.

In Post Captain, the second novel of the series, Jack has been injured in a battle and Stephen has prescribed some nasty medications. The battle was a stunning victory for the British, and as a result Jack was promoted from commander to post-captain. Newly promoted Jack and Stephen attended a party at the home of the admiral whose wife (known to Jack as “Queenie,” a sort of nanny from his youth) was showing off a recently acquired, somewhat salacious painting of an “as of yet unrepentant” Mary Magdalene:

[Jack] had gone to bed at nine, as soon as he had swallowed his bolus and his tankard of porter, and he had slept the clock round, a sleep full of diffused happiness and a longing to impart it—a longing too oppressed by languor to have any effect. Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, ‘Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?’ It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the ’cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!²

Knowing that Messiaen had strong impressions of color related to music, I wonder if he ever read that passage. It is a great concept, one that would be fun to associate with the organ. What if each stop of the organ produced a different color? I know, they do, but I do not mean tone colors, I mean 8′ Navy Blue, 4′ Crimson, 22⁄3′ Aquamarine, 2′ Lilac, and 16′ Burgundy. (I guess the aquamarine doesn’t go with the others.)

Brian talked of Messiaen’s love for New Caledonia, especially the species of birds native to the island territory. While writing his opera, Saint François d’Assise, Messiaen traveled to the saint’s home of Assisi and New Caledonia to research, record, and transcribe the birds Saint Francis would have known. Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah is another place that Messiaen made a point of visiting while touring in the United States. It was fun to hear the first-hand accounts of this innovative composer, musician, improviser, teacher, and gentle man.

New York City’s Church of the Ascension is a few blocks from our apartment. It is home to a spectacular new organ built by Pascal Quoirin in Saint-Didier, France. It is one of a very few French organs in the United States, and by many times the largest. Two gorgeous cases face each across the chancel, framing a magnificent, monumental mural depicting the Ascension of Christ by John La Farge. In a sense, it is actually two organs. As one, it is a three-manual mechanical action organ with classical French registrations and brilliant Baroque choruses. As the other, it is a big four-manual French symphonic instrument with radiating tiered stop jambs. Dennis Keene, long-time organist of the church (and successor to Vernon de Tar), was influential in the planning of this unique instrument, and one of his intentions was to include all the stops that Messiaen specified in his organ music.

One of the first recitals on the new Quoirin organ was played by Jon Gillock, who studied with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire in 1977. Jon played lots of Messiaen’s music, taking advantage of the carefully planned organ to present that mystical music authentically. After his studies in Paris, Jon played the New York premieres of many of Messiaen’s pieces for organ, including the first performance of all Messiaen’s organ music in one series.

Messiaen was organist at Sainte-Trinité in Paris from 1931 until 1992, nearly as long as Widor played at Saint-Sulpice. The Cavaillé-Coll organ with three manuals and about sixty-five stops, built in 1869 and rebuilt twice during Messiaen’s tenure, was the workshop for his tonal experiments. Sainte-Trinité is a vast interior space with grand acoustics. I imagine that Messiaen could picture open areas in his mind’s eye as he sat at the console producing the chirps, trills, and warbles of his beloved birds. Although Church of the Ascension lacks the aural spaciousness of Sainte-Trinité, one can certainly sense the great outdoors listening to the organ in that beautifully decorated Greenwich Village landmark.

How do they do it?

The hermit thrush has the most beautiful call we hear in our yard. It sings from a hiding place in the woods (it’s not kidding about the hermit part) just as the afternoon melds into evening. I am often outside on the patio with a cocktail in one hand and barbeque tongs in the other, watching the blur of activity around the backyard bird feeders, when the hermit thrush lets loose its lovely sounds. The call of the hermit thrush has been described as a waterfall flowing backward. One enthusiast wrote, “I heard this bird call in the woods, and wanted to know what it was. I went home and Googled ‘a bird that sounds like a sad flute,’ and there it was.” It is easy to find this gorgeous call on YouTube.

One of the things that makes it special is that it is diplophonic—there are two distinct and separate tones occurring at once, kind of like a sopranino trilling didgeridoo. I have seen oscilloscope displays that show this in real time. It is a marvelous example of the beauties and complexities of nature and an important reminder of our responsibility toward our fellow inhabitants of the planet. We are the ones with the gift of reason and the ability to understand. We are the ones who can help these creatures survive or spoil everything. The fact that we have cardinals in our yard is an anomaly. Ten years ago, they did not come this far north.

Regular readers recognize that I spend a lot time writing about boats and birds when I should be writing about organs. After all, this is a journal for organists and organbuilders. But isn’t a sailboat a tool that relies on the power and sophistication of the wind, just like an organ? And aren’t birds the ultimate examples of tonal variety?

Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator on Sixty Minutes for about as long as Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice, once wrote a column about nuts, those people who are nuts about one particular thing. We all know them, in fact, most of us are nuts about pipe organs. It is funny how many organ nuts are also railroad nuts, especially steam railroads. Bird nuts are equally nuts.

Kenn Kaufman, author of the Kaufman Field Guides, is one of Wendy’s clients, and we have spent many days in the woods around our house with him and his wife Kimberly, watching and listening for birds, insects, and any other little feature of the natural world. When Kenn was a teenager, his parents agreed to let him hitchhike the United States to pursue a “Big Year,” a race to see as many different species of birds as possible. His memoir Kingbird Highway, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1997, tells the story of racing back and forth across the country to look for the specific hard-to-find bird in the most out-of-the-way places, places like a dump in Texas to see a Mexican Crow. Really. Birding with Kenn is like staring at a blank sky, listening to him name off all the birds he is seeing. He really is seeing them. His big year was around 675 species. The current big year record in the American Birding Association is 836 species, set in 2016 by Australian John Wiegel. The worldwide big year record is 6,852 species, set by Arjan Dwarshuis of the Netherlands. Now that’s nuts.

The art of birding allows one to count hearing a song as a “sighting.” Just as Messiaen could see colors as he heard music, we can populate the woods around us by “sighting” the songs of the birds. Once you know a call, you hear it all the time. The calls of robins and goldfinches are similar, little successive trills of random sounding notes, but the goldfinch is something like the robin “up a sixth.” A raven looks like a punk-rock crow, and its deep rasping call sounds like a crow with a terrible attitude, a crow you would not want to meet in a dark alley.

Over at least five centuries, organbuilders have experimented with the shapes, scales, and materials of organ pipes. We who spend lots of time “up close and personal” with organ pipes, like when we are tuning, get to know intimately the differences between a Gemshorn and a Dulciana, a Trumpet and a Cornopean, an Oboe and a Flügel Horn, a Gedeckt and a Rohrflöte. Sitting in a pew, listening to the organ, I get pictures in my head of the little choo-choo train tops of the resonators of the English Horn, the tapered caps of the Koppelflöte, or the heavy lead of the Stentor Diapason. Their tones are as distinct as the differences between the calls of the greater black back gull and the great blue heron.

Learning to identify those “organ calls” is at the center of the art of registration. Imitating the natural world, we have been given the gift of tonal variety. Use it with care, cunning, love, and good taste.

Random associations

I am obliged to admit that while I was writing, a chirp from the background in my laptop lured me across to Facebook where a friend was making a sassy remark about something I wrote. I would not have confessed, but I stumbled on a brilliant video of Cecilia Bartoli singing “Agitate da due venti” from Vivaldi’s La Griselda. There must have been a whiz of a soprano student at the school where Vivaldi taught. If there was ever a magical display of tone production, variety of color, and management of wind, it was this woman singing this aria. Go on. I dare you. In fact, I require you. Send me a note and tell me what you think. It’s why we make music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4It44mYw2I.

Notes

1. These days, scampering isn’t what it used to be.

2. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain, W. W. Norton, 1990, page 421.

I remember when . . .

Leading up to Christmas of 2019, I decided to stop maintaining organs so I could concentrate more on the administration of the Organ Clearing House, especially the management of organ sales. I met with several colleagues asking if they would be able to take on more maintenance customers, and I wrote to my clients recommending those technicians for the care of the organs I thought they would be best suited for.

As the winter started winding down in early 2020, I was looking forward to missing the first holiday tuning season since I was a teenager, only to find that leading up to Easter of 2020, no one was tuning organs. Like pretty much everything else in our world, the whole business shut down as covid spread virulently around the world. 

No one has pronounced that the pandemic is over, and we are still hearing about spooky outbreaks, especially in big cities. But with a few reservations, life seems to have returned to something like normal. This past March, the organ tuners were out and about like never before, documenting each lapsed thermostat, each shallot-encased moth carcass, and each insistent vacuum cleaner on social media. I especially enjoy the posts of Richard Pelland, the prolific organ technician based in New Hampshire, who at my recommendation took on many of my former maintenance clients. His habit of posting videos of his assistant playing freshly tuned organs brings back memories of my mad dashes around the countryside, of the many lovely organs (and a few not so lovely), and of the satisfaction of completing a good tuning.

Would the average parishioner identify that great tuning as integral to the celebrations during Holy Week and Easter? Not likely. But they would go home after church with a tune in their head, and I always knew I was part of that. I believe that a well-tuned organ brings a smile or a raised eyebrow that sour notes cannot.

The body of Christ

Carolyn Manning of the Red River Organ Company in Norman, Oklahoma, posted a photo taken during an Easter tuning from high in the rear of the lofty sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of Corpus Christi, Texas. The longest resonators of the Trompette-en-Chamade were visible in Carolyn’s photo, as was the console I helped build around 1986. I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and we rebuilt and expanded the four-manual Reuter organ there. Dan Angerstein, a terrific voicer, was in the thrall of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and Lawrence, Kansas, became something close to Paris on Shoreline Boulevard in Corpus Christi, across the street from the Gulf of Mexico.

We did our best to reconstruct the classic shape of Cavaillé-Coll’s grand consoles. My shopmate, pal, and wicked wag Jack Carr built the cabinet, and I built the curved and terraced stop jambs and the four keyboards. I do not remember the exact dates, but I sure remember that the installation trip was in the heart of summer, a big deal for this life-long northerner. The church’s vacation bible school was going on while we were there, and I have a hilarious memory of the church’s organist, wearing a “coat of many colors,” having been put in charge of a live camel. This had not been his first choice, and he was not mincing words.

A local electrician was on the job with us, ostensibly helping identify the many cables running from the two organ chambers in the front of the church to the Antiphonal organ and the Trompette-en-Chamade. He was using live current to “ring out” the different cables. It turned out that there were speaker wires from the PA system in the same conduit that looked just like organ cables, and when he touched those with his hot wire, we heard such a sound. I am pretty sure that was the end of those speakers. The big reed had been given in memory of a young parishioner who was killed in Vietnam. The drawknob is engraved “Trompette Boyd.”

Our flight from Boston to Houston at the beginning of that installation was my first trip in first class. My coach seat had been double-booked with a guy who was refusing to move. I was rewarded for my ambivalence, and I took full advantage of the perks of first class even though it was a morning flight.

It was fun to see Carolyn’s post, reminding me of that job from so long ago. It’s nice to know that the organ is still being used and cared for.

§

I do not have a tally of how many organs I have maintained, but I know it is in the hundreds. My tuning career started in Oberlin, Ohio, when I was working for John Leek. John was the organ and harpsichord technician for Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music and had a healthy side business of maintaining instruments in that general area. I worked with John part time and summers while I was student and shifted to full time after I graduated. During my junior year, John left the school to concentrate on his business. Altogether, I worked with John for about seven years, during which time we built several new harpsichords and two organs together. We renovated and releathered a small fleet of organs and went on hundreds of service calls together. We took care of organs in big city churches and in tiny hamlets far out in farm country. We covered an area from Toledo and Cincinnati to the west, to Erie and Pittsburgh to the east.

The biggest trip I took with John was to deliver a harpsichord we built for a woman in Oakland, California—she had been a student at Oberlin and admired John’s instruments. It was the summer after I graduated, and John proposed the trip to me saying it would take two weeks. I would not get paid (I suppose he was not getting paid either), but we would stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants. We would gamble in Reno, see the Golden Gate Bridge, and swim in the Pacific Ocean. Of course I’d go.

We loaded his butterscotch-colored Dodge van and headed west. It is about 2,500 miles from Oberlin to Oakland, and we drove 500 or 600 miles each day. We marveled at the open spaces, hunkered down under bridges to sit out thunderstorms, and drove all day from Salt Lake City with the mountains of Nevada dead ahead that never seemed to get closer until we reached them. When we stopped for gas after crossing into Nevada, I put a dime in a slot machine, received a little cascade in return, and was all ready for Reno. We stayed overnight in Elko, Nevada, and ate dinner in a Basque restaurant recommended by Oberlin voice professor Howard Hatton. And we got creamed in Reno. My meager cash supply disappeared, and John played a few hands of blackjack—it was remarkable how often the dealer got twenty-one.

Arriving in Oakland, we carried the harpsichord into the house, and unpacked and set it up. John tuned it and fiddled with the voicing. We went outside for a cigarette and were admonished by the client’s physician husband about the dangers of smoking. The next evening, he brought home a cancerous lung in a jar for our viewing pleasure.¹ That jaunt with John was the first of many cross-country trips I have made carting about instruments.

One summer, John and his wife Maria wanted to add a large screened porch to their house, and he flung the resources of his company at the job. He made a nice drawing of a post-and-beam structure, and off we went. There would be a lofty pitched ceiling, stained and varnished plywood wainscoting, and a floor of wide pine planks. We cut mortises and tenons on the machines in the workshop and assembled the frame and shingled the roof. We made screened frames to fill the window openings, and we painted everything. Painting the floor, I had my back to John, but heard a big increase in his industry. I turned to find him rushing to paint me into a corner.

John Leek passed away in the fall of 2019, and I drove to Oberlin for his funeral. It was wonderful to see Maria and their children Paula, James, and Peter. A week later, Maria wrote me a note thanking me for coming, which inspired another flood of nostalgia—her handwriting had been on my paychecks for seven years.

§

Dan Angerstein had a large stable of service clients, and when he closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I assumed most of those accounts—that was the foundation of the Bishop Organ Company located in North Reading and then Wakefield, Massachusetts. When I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, I continued the care of most of those organs as the BOC morphed into the OCH. By the time I stopped doing service work in early 2020, there were still seven organs I had been caring for since 1984—thirty-five years. There were six instruments built in the late 1980s whose care I assumed when they were new. I was the only technician to work on them for the first thirty-plus years.

Shortly after I started the Bishop Organ Company, I became curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ (four manuals, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church) in Boston, and of the double Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church on Copley Square. Jason McKown had cared for the Mother Church organ since its installation in 1952 and had worked for Trinity for over fifty years. He was in his mid-eighties when I met him, and he introduced me to many of his clients as he was finally ready to retire. Jason’s tenure at the Mother Church was extended so he would overlap with me for six months to show me the ropes of caring for such a large organ. We tuned there every Wednesday, and Jason’s countless stories were an important part of my education.

As a young man, Jason had worked personally with Ernest Skinner installing his Opus 692 at the West Medford Congregational Church in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1928 and had maintained it ever since. I worked there until 2009 when the church closed and the building was sold.2 Between us, Jason and I maintained that organ for eighty-one years.

Less is more.

When I mention Skinner Organ Company Opus 692 (1928) in West Medford, Massachusetts, I remember the pristine interior of the instrument. It was still playing on its original leather and had never been altered. This reminds me of another Skinner organ less than ten miles away that I have written about recently, Opus 459 (1924), which was sold through the Organ Clearing House to Galilee Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Both organs had been regularly maintained and well used, and neither show the familiar wear-and-tear damage of stretched tuning scrolls, out-of-round pipes, cotton balls left in mixture pipes, or spare wires looping about.

The only other century-old organs I have known in like-new condition are those in small remote churches that had never seen organ technicians. The organs might be full of spider webs and coal dust from obsolete heating systems, but the pipes and interior components could be straight from the factory. Ironically, organs that have never been maintained are the best candidates
for restoration.

I offer a challenge to all my colleague organ tuners and technicians. Leave each organ looking as though no one has been inside. Do not harm the organ in the interest of forcing it into tune. Do not leave little piles of your rubble. Do not leave obvious evidence of quick-and-dirty repairs. I know this is a tall order. I know that many churches are struggling financially and are unable to fund proper repairs. I am sure you will often have to take my admonition with a grain of salt, but I encourage you to respect the instruments you work on and the people who built them.

Those of you on social media, please keep sharing your experiences with the organs in your care. 

Retirement project

Retired organbuilder Gene Bedient has set about building a new two-manual tracker organ for his home and has documented the process intricately and intimately on Facebook. Starting with making open 8′ bass pipes from wood and progressing through building windchests, keyboards, actions, bench, and lately moving the completed base of the organ into the house with the help of neighbors, he has posted hundreds of photos with colorful descriptions of each step in the process. Every now and then, he posts a photo of the drawings so we have an idea of what the finished organ will look like. I recommend you follow Gene’s page and scroll through the last couple years of his documentation. This is a much more creative use of Facebook than photos of your cats or your savory breakfast.

Gene discusses the materials he is using, shows photos of complex gluing setups, and acknowledges the occasional need to “split the difference” to make something line up perfectly. His workshop is in the garage that adjoins the house, and while it is a tiny space and this is not the tiniest of residence organs, Gene’s photography provides a fascinating educational experience for anyone interested in how a pipe organ is built. I am eager to follow the continuation and culmination of this project.

As I write, I have been corresponding with Gene about his project, and he offers this statement about “Bedient Opus # Undecided”:

This home organ is for practice purposes and has only two stops—the lower manual, Principal 8, and the upper manual, Flute 4. Each manual couples to the Pedal. No manual to manual coupler. The lower manual is suspended action. The upper manual keyboard pivots in the center and pushes the top-of-grid pallets up to play, like the French Positif and Echo actions. It is the hope that two beautiful stops and two contrasting but light and responsive key actions will make the organ a pleasure to play.

Thank you, Gene, for sharing your exciting project so generously.

Notes

1. I stopped smoking two years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1981, when my first wife Pat was pregnant with our first child. Michael was born the following March into a smoke-free home.

2. I was in touch with the new owners of the building asking if they had plans for the organ. They replied that they did not plan to use it but did not want to remove anything original from the church building. I check in every now and again.