In the Wind . . .

Thar she blows.

In the July 2023 issue of The Diapason, I shared that Wendy and I sold Kingfisher, the twenty-two-foot Marshall Catboat on whom we had more than ten seasons of special fun and adventure taking week-long cruises up and down the Maine coast, overnight sails to anchor in island coves or to friends’ houses for stayovers, and daysails with friends and family. Wendy and I worked hard with the decision because it meant giving up a special part of our lives, but we agreed to call it a wonderful chapter and move on to other things.

As it turns out, the summer of 2023 was a terrible time for sailing in Maine. People around here were joking that it had rained twice here this spring and summer, once for thirty-five days, and again for twenty-seven days. We sat watching the rain saying, “Sure am glad we don’t have a boat in the water this year.” And more profound, at least to me, in the last week of July I had surgery to repair torn rotator cuff muscles. An MRI showed two muscles separated from my shoulder, and the surgeon’s paperwork referred to a “massive tear.” My right shoulder started hurting last summer, and I know that handling the five-to-one mainsheet on Kingfisher had something to do with it.

I grew up singing a whimsical folk song based on a poem by Charles E. Carryl (1842–1920), set to music by Joseph B. Geoghegan (1816–1889). It was always close to the surface when we were sailing:
A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was “The Walloping Window Blind,”
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain’s mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow,
And it often appeared, when the
     weather had cleared,
That he’d been in his bunk below.

So, blow ye winds, heigh-ho,
a-sailing I will go.
I’ll stay no more on England’s shore,
so let the music play-ay-ay—
I’m off for the morning train
to cross the raging main,
I’m off to my love with a boxing glove
ten thousand miles away.
There are five more verses, each sillier than the last.

§

I am back at my desk, the fingers of my right hand poke out of the sling toward my laptop. I have recently had several conversations about large organ blowers with colleagues and clients, and I am thinking about organ wind. In July of 2021, Aug. Laukhuff GmbH, then the world’s largest supplier of pipe organ parts, went out of business. For many American organ builders, Laukhuff was the “go to” source for electric organ parts like slider motors, pallet pull-down magnets, drawknob motors, and keyboard contacts. Their catalog included thousands of widgets for building tracker actions like squares and roller arms, and Laukhuff was one of the most important sources of organ blowers.

Laukhuff blowers are found in hundreds of organs built or rebuilt in the last fifty years. They are quiet, reliable, and compact. Along with blowers built by the Swiss supplier Meidinger, they were a technological revolution. We are all familiar with the hulking subterranean roaring monsters that blow wind for organs built before 1950. I am not sure just when blowers started getting compact and quiet, but I am certain that the advances in the technology of fan blades that brought us jet engines and modern turbines are related. The legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying the Bell X-1 aircraft on October 14, 1947. It took a decade or two for that to translate into more efficient organ blowers, but I know they were ubiquitous by the time I got into the trade in the 1970s.

Organists from Praetorius to Dupré relied on human power to operate the bellows of their instruments. While playing the music of Buxtehude, Bach, and Mendelssohn, do we forget that those masters had to round up people to pump organ bellows to play even a single chord? Max Reger died in 1916, so we can assume he played organs with electric blowers later in his short life, but much of the grand, dense, complex organ music he wrote predated the electric organ blower.

Marcel Dupré wrote of a Sunday in 1919 when Claude Johnson, the chairman of Rolls-Royce, was visiting the organ loft at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. While Dupré was playing at full organ, the crew of pumpers fizzled out, and the wind supply died. Johnson quickly offered to donate an electric blower, telling Dupré to have the firm of Cavaillé-Coll draw up plans, but adding that they had better get permission from the cardinal archbishop since Johnson was an Anglican.

I have long loved and often written about the thought that Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1870 until 1933, and while I do not know the actual date, an electric blower must have been installed there around halfway through his tenure. Imagine playing that mighty organ for thirty-five years relying on human pumpers and climbing the stairs to the storied loft for the first time to flip a switch and play the organ alone. Remember that huge body of organ literature that are his ten symphonies were written before 1900. Twentieth-century organists have been able to take the luxury of unlimited, uninterrupted practice time for granted.

Blower hygiene

It is common to find modern high-speed blowers ensconced within an organ case, which is only possible because they operate so quietly, but the old-time machines are typically located in remote rooms in basements or towers because they are so noisy. Ideally, those rooms are kept locked so unknowing, unauthorized people cannot get in, which means they get dirty and fill up with spiderwebs and other signs of critter life. The air intake for a blower should have a particle filter to ensure that no debris gets sucked into the organ’s interior. Sometimes we find that mounted on the door to the blower room. A fleck of sawdust or a carcass of a fly is enough to stop a reed pipe from speaking, to cause a cipher if it winds up on the surface of a valve, or a dead note if it clogs a windchest magnet. How would a fleck wind up there? Follow the air flow from the blower, through the regulators and wind lines, into the windchests, and up to the toes of the pipes as the notes are playing.

I once made the mistake of casually mentioning to the staff of a church that a blower room is dirty, only to find on my next visit that the sexton had taken my comment to heart and scrubbed the place. That may sound good and industrious, but he could have caused serious damage to the organ—to avoid such damage, we have protocols for cleaning a blower room. Here is mine. Shut off the power to the blower so it cannot be started accidentally. Vacuum the interior of the blower’s air intake, taking care not to push dust into the blower, and seal the intake by taping it closed with heavy plastic—a contractor’s trash bag and black Gorilla tape will do. Clean all the surfaces in the room with a vacuum cleaner, and scrub with water and detergent (be careful not to wreck the bellows leather). Wait twenty-four hours for the dust to settle. Clean the room again, and wait another twenty-four hours. Do not forget to clean the plastic seal on the blower intake. Now you can be sure that there is nothing floating around in the air so you can open the intake and start the blower. And now that I have described that process, I recommend you leave this work to your qualified organ technician.

That well-meaning guy who cleaned without protocol raised a shower of dust in the room. If the blower had been started soon after, the organ could have been wrecked by sucking dust into 
its innards.

Sometimes we find an organ blower in a hallway closet doubling as storage. You notice that the organ is suddenly all out of tune and find a stack of folding chairs on top of the static reservoir. Extra weight and higher pressure means bad tuning and spoiled pipe speech. Our rule when installing an organ is that all spaces occupied by organ components are designated “organ only” spaces. I had a Saturday emergency call from an organist reporting a wedding starting in ten minutes and the organ would not play. It took me forty-five minutes to get there, and I am guessing people were getting tired of the bagpipe on the front lawn, but it only took me a couple minutes to find a card table sucked up against the blower intake. No air, no organ. Tell that to the mother of the bride.

Biggest in the fleet

I am fortunate to have worked on some very large organs, so I have taken care of a few monster organ blowers. Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 was installed at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston in 1952. It has about 240 ranks of pipes including nine 8′ stops in the Swell, eight ranks of 16′ flues, and over forty reeds. It is about eighty feet wide, forty feet tall, and twelve feet deep. There is more than three thousand square feet of gold leaf on the façade pipes. Most of the organ is front and center behind that façade, three stories high with an iron stairway at the left end of the organ, and a jumble of ladders to the right. The Solo division is high above the organ, behind a round grille in the pendentive to the left of the arch that contains the main organ. In the days when I was in that organ a couple times a week, I knew how many stairs I climbed to go through the blower room to the Solo, but all I remember now is that it’s a lot. We measure the capacity of an organ blower in cubic feet per minute (CFM) at a given wind pressure. One hundred CFM at ten inches of pressure is more air than 100 CFM at three inches of pressure. The blower in The Mother Church organ is the size of a minivan and produces 30,000 CFM at ten inches. There is a step-up blower that gets air from the big one and increases it to twenty-five inches for the Cor des Anges (Horn of the Angels) immediately behind the Solo grill.

Any organ blower has a motor and an enclosed fan. On most blowers, the fan is mounted directly on the shaft of the motor, but once the fan assembly exceeds a certain length and weight, the shaft is continued through the fan housing and supported at the other end by a bearing assembly something like the wheel of a car. The bearings at both ends of such a shaft have some sort of lubrication device, usually either a grease fitting or an oil bath with a bronze ring on the shaft that acts as a wick to bring oil up to the top of the bearing. The fans are big wheels fixed on the shaft with vanes fastened to them with rivets.

The French organist Pierre Pincemaille came to Portland, Maine, in April of 2004 to give a recital on the Kotzschmar Organ, the hundred-stop Austin located in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall. When he turned on the blower for one of his practice sessions, there was a series of big bangs, and the blower failed. Several fan blades had come loose inside the blower as their rivets wore out, and metal shards were everywhere. The blower received an instant emergency repair, and the show went on. It was determined that eighty years of sudden starts had eventually wrecked the rivets, so as part of the repair, the blower’s power supply was equipped with a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD), which starts the motor and brings it up to speed slowly, exerting less torque on those rivets.

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City houses a magnificent organ, originally a Kilgen, with 142 ranks. The Choir loft is thirty feet above the floor of the nave, and the organ blower is another fifteen feet higher in a large room in the south tower. It has a forty-horsepower motor that moves enough air to produce majestic sounds in that magical, immense building.

Hurricanes

Two locally improbable things happened in Boston in 2004. The Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918 to raise money for the first production of No, No, Nanette. That started the eighty-six-year drought known locally as “The Curse of the Bambino.” The team sponsored publicity gags like exorcizing the field, hoping for a win. In the 2004 American League Championship, the Yankees won the first three games, the Red Sox won four in a row to win the pennant, then swept the Saint Louis Cardinals in four straight games. (I thought the excitement was going to kill my father.)

And in 2004, the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Boston Symphony Hall was rebuilt by Foley-Baker, Inc. That was improbable because Seiji Ozawa, the symphony’s music director, was not a lover of pipe organs. Ozawa retired in 2002, and the organ was completed in 2004. Quick work for a large organ.

Wendy and I lived next to Symphony Hall in those days (and across the street from The Mother Church) and had series tickets with terrific seats in the first balcony above the stage. We attended the concert when the organ was first used—you guessed it, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony. Simon Preston was the organist. When the organ entered pianissimo in the first movement with deep low notes supporting shimmering registrations, we watched the orchestra members winking, nudging, and smiling at each other, getting the chills hearing those profound bass notes, sonorities that no other instrument can achieve.

Installing the windchests for huge pedal stops like 32′ Bourdon and 32′ Double Open Wood and testing notes before the 2,000-pound pipes have been placed has taught me exactly how much wind comes out of the windchest toeholes when a note is played, enough to blow off a top knot at thirty feet, an absolute hurricane of air to make a single note sound. That controlled and regulated gale of wind makes those unique sonorities possible.

It is thrilling to stand inside a big organ when the wind is turned on. You hear the blower start to turn, air entering the organ, reservoirs filling one after another, until the whole system is charged with air pressure and the instrument fairly trembles with life and anticipation. Each reservoir is equipped with a regulating valve and weights calculated to store and deliver wind at a specific pressure. Each reservoir has windlines leading to one or more windchests. When a note is played, a valve opens to allow wind into the toe of a pipe. Play one note, and there is barely a ripple. Draw a hundred stops or more and play forty or fifty notes a measure as in a flashy French toccata, and thousands of valves are blowing thousands of pipes. It’s almost unimaginable, but the fact that it’s true is the magic of the pipe organ.

Music as community . . .

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

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

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

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

The living organ

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

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

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

At one with the machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

Architectural design

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

Tonal structure

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

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

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

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

Limitless lungs

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

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

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

Sensitive mechanics

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

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

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

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

Community spirit

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

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

Make me an instrument.

I have been involved in the world of building musical instruments since I was about twelve years old as the organist of my home church, where my father was rector, was the harpsichord and clavichord builder Carl Fudge. On occasion, he brought one of his instruments to the church for a special performance, and at that tender age I was fascinated by the concept of playing an instrument you had built yourself. I have thought about that continually in the past fifty-plus years, so my feelings and perceptions have become more sophisticated, but I know I was in awe of Carl’s skill as both instrument maker and musician. Visiting his workshop, I was further enthralled, I started taking organ lessons, and my life’s path was set.

Longtime readers of this column will recognize that one of my favorite subjects is writing about one’s relationship with one’s instrument. In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet wrote:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.

Lovely, isn’t it? What a poetic description of a musical relationship. But his next sentence throws most of the rest of us under the bus.

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. . . . To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.¹

In that light, I imagine Steinhardt would equate organists with truck drivers, sliding onto the bench, flipping a switch to turn on a ten-horsepower motor, and playing the instrument by remote control, twenty, fifty, or a hundred feet away.

I hope he likes it.

Nearly thirty-five years ago, my siblings, mother, and I commissioned a local artist to paint a picture of the red barn behind our parents’ house on Cape Cod in honor of dad’s retirement. We sent her photos of the barn, and she visited there several times in secret. The painting was to be unveiled at “the party” in front of family and friends, and there was an air of excitement, but when the cloth was removed there was silence. It did not look like our barn. The proportions were akilter, and the shadow of a nearby tree fell across the grass and the barn’s wall in a way no shadow could exist under the sun. It was a stunning moment, a much better story now than an experience then.

§

I have just reread John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker (Harper Collins, 2007), which follows the commissioning and construction of a new violin for Eugene Drucker, violinist of the Emerson String Quartet. (Drucker and Philip Setzer have equal billing, swapping “first chair” duties back and forth.) Drucker had commissioned the legendary luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz of Brooklyn, New York, to build an instrument to complement the Stradivari instrument that he uses in most performances, but which has a temperamental “personality,” especially when the quartet’s travels take them from one climate extreme to another in a short period. The Strad is slow to recover.

Marchese provides plenty of background information including biographical data about Guarneri, Stradivari, and the other Cremonese luthiers. He spent countless hours with both Drucker and Zygmuntowicz, interviewing them and observing them in the workshop, teaching studio, and concert stage. As Sam chose the wood for Gene’s violin, Marchese related stories about the harvesting and aging of wood; luthiers have collections of pieces of maple and spruce that have aged fifty years since they were harvested and milled. The stability of such aged wood is essential to the luthier. We learn of Sam’s apprenticeship and education as a luthier, how he was privileged to take detailed measurements of a dismantled Strad, and how he created a detailed map of the various pieces of the fiddle, measured to the thousandth of an inch. We hear him speaking with and addressing his colleague luthiers at conferences and restaurant tables. Throughout the book, I could hear the undercurrent: “I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it.”

Spoiler alert: Sam finished the violin in time to present it at Gene’s fiftieth birthday party amid excitement and congratulations. Gene plays the instrument for his friends, uses it in concert, and practices on it. He swaps back and forth between the new instrument and his trusty Strad. He wants to love it, but just cannot get there. Ultimately Sam acknowledges that he failed to captivate Gene with the new instrument. I recommend this book to anyone who owns and cares for a musical instrument, and to anyone who builds those instruments.

A bargain at twice the price

Nowhere in Marchese’s book is the actual price of a Zygmuntowicz violin stated, but a quick internet search at least implied to me that it is around $100,000. That is about the price of a new Steinway “B,” the seven-foot piano so prevalent in teaching studios and smaller recital halls. A Steinway “B” weighs nearly 800 pounds—the instrument costs $125 per pound or about $9 an ounce. A Zygmuntowicz violin weighs about fourteen ounces, about $7,143 per ounce. By comparison, think of the $15,000,000 Strad at $1,071,429 per ounce.

As a pipe organ builder, I marvel at the idea that a fourteen-ounce violin might be worth $15,000,000. You can build a mighty pipe organ for that amount; in fact few organs have ever cost that much. And does that mighty organ weigh 100,000 pounds? It is a bargain at $150 a pound or $9.38 an ounce. Why would anyone want to buy a violin when they could have a pipe organ?

Let’s buy a pipe organ.

When an orchestral musician purchases an instrument, whether new or “experienced,” it is a personal transaction. The musician is choosing and paying privately. At Eugene Drucker’s level, the price can be a family sacrifice. That money might have gone toward a vacation home or a boat, but the serious musician cannot function without an instrument of high enough quality to inspire his creativity.

The purchase of a pipe organ is typically a community event. When an organ shows signs of failing or when people within an institution advocate for a new instrument, a committee is usually formed to study the situation. Many of these committees engage consultants to inform and advise their work. Organ companies are solicited for proposals, a budget is established, a decision is made, and the hard work begins: raising the money.

The iconic four-manual, seventy-five-rank Flentrop organ in Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, Washington, was purchased for $165,000 in 1965. In today’s economy, that is about enough money for the copper 32′ Prestant that dominates the façade. The same organ today would cost something like $2,000,000. A three-manual organ with forty stops is likely to cost $1,000,000. That is a lot of money for a congregation to raise, and regardless of the price per pound, it is a lot of money for a small community of people to pay for a musical instrument.

I like to compare that process with a tennis club deciding to build a swimming pool. A few members come up with the idea on a hot afternoon, the elected leadership gets involved, and contractors offer estimates. Perhaps the membership would be assessed to raise some of the money; perhaps members would be solicited to make donations; perhaps there would be a mortgage to be offset by increased membership dues. Whether it is a tennis club building a swimming pool or a church commissioning a pipe organ, there would likely be a parliamentary process of proposing, discussing, and voting, except in those institutions with authoritarian leadership.

I have long believed that the easy part of the process is building the organ. With decisions made and money raised, an organ builder receives some of that money and gets to work doing what he knows how to do.

I hope they like it.

My comment about building an organ being the easy part notwithstanding, it is a complex task. Where do you start? What is it going to sound like? A point of departure is the determination of scaling of the organ pipes and the wind pressure. The length of organ pipes is pretty much given by the physics of musical tone. To produce low CC, the lowest note of the keyboard, on a unison stop, the speaking length of the pipe from mouth to tuning point is eight feet. The question is, what should the diameter of the pipe be? Are you hoping to achieve a brilliant “baroquey” sound with narrow scales, a lush romantic sound with wide scales, or something in between? Higher wind pressure translates easily into more powerful tone, though there are plenty of examples of low-pressure organs with bold voices.

You can study examples of organs in comparable buildings, measuring the scales and other dimensions of the pipes, and maybe altering the numbers for slightly smaller or broader scales. Some organ builders are brilliant at imagining the tone of a particular scale within a building and designing the rest of the voices to be compatible with the first. For a more certain study, it is increasingly common for an organ builder to bring a portable organ with wind supply and a collection of sample pipes of different dimensions allowing him to compare different scales and wind pressures. It is an expensive process involving travel, lodging, and shipping the equipment and supplies, but if the organ has a million-dollar price tag, it is a modest investment. There is no substitute for producing actual tones in the actual acoustical environment.

Think of the myriad individual projects that make up a completed organ. Artisans are building windchests, reservoirs, keyboards, consoles, wind conductors, mechanical or electric actions, casework, ladders, walkboards—the list can seem endless. And what about ornate decorations like pinnacles, pipe shades, and putti?

Like Sam Zygmuntowicz choosing the wood for a new violin, the organbuilder is on a constant search for good materials. I remember my mentor John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, in the 1970s purchasing a rare log of boxwood seven or eight feet long and eight inches in diameter for making the sharp keys of his organs and harpsichords, and gorgeous European beechwood for harpsichord bridges and nuts (the slim rail ahead of the tuning pins that lifts the strings off the pinblock). He ordered them through his friends at Flentrop Orgelbouw in Zaandam, the Netherlands, who shipped them to Cleveland in the sea-going container that delivered the brilliant Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland. Each time we set out to make a set of keyboards, we lopped a piece off that boxwood and milled it into those familiar tapered shapes.

John Boody of Taylor & Boody organbuilders in Staunton, Virginia, specializes in harvesting trees and sawing lumber for their instruments. His appreciation of the beauty of wood allows the artisans there to choose ideal boards for special places. Gorgeous woodgrain patterns on organ benches, around keytables, and casework is a hallmark of their instruments, and John’s care with quarter-sawing and drying the lumber produces especially stable material. In 2009, Wendy and I visited John and Janet Boody as part of a trip to Washington, DC, and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, Monticello. We stayed in an apartment above John’s sawmill and saw the stacks of dried oak boards that would become the case of the new organ at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City.

George Bozeman, another of my mentors, held the concept that wind is the fuel we burn to make organ tone. Any pipe organ has a complex system to produce wind pressure (the blower), transport it to reservoirs and windchests (wind ducts), and regulate it to an exact and steady pressure (reservoirs, also known as regulators). “Bellows” is a term universally used to describe reservoirs/regulators, but I understand a bellows produces wind pressure, as found in the hand-pumped organs of earlier years, or the bellows next to your fireplace. A reservoir stores pressurized air, and a regulator regulates the pressure with internal valves that allow air to flow to the windchests only when the organ is being played and wind is being consumed. Both reservoir and regulator refer correctly to those components of a modern organ wind system, as the pressure is created by an electric blower. Steady, reliable pipe speech relies on steady, reliable wind pressure.

There are two basic types of structure for pipe organs. Some instruments have interior “skeletons” of wood or steel that support windchests, reservoirs, expression boxes, and the ladders and walkboards necessary to reach them all. Others are supported by their free-standing cases. The upright styles of the lower case support the impost, the heavy frame that includes the bases of round or pointed towers. In the case of the Flentrop in Cleveland I mentioned earlier, the impost was by far the heaviest single part of the organ, and the core of its structure. The upper-case panels and styles fit into mortices in the impost and in turn supported the majestic tower crowns. The Pedaal and Hoofdwerk windchests sat on the impost.

In either type of construction, the musical stability of the instrument is a direct factor of its structural stability, especially with mechanical key action, as any motion in the structure affects the adjustment of the action. Organ pipes must be supported to stand perfectly vertically, especially when the pipe metal is soft, as gravity will grab any leaning pipe and try to pull it to the ground. Reed pipes need special support because they are skinniest and weakest at the bottom of the resonator where it intersects with the pipe’s boot. Any organ builder or technician can tell stories about larger reed pipes collapsing on themselves, sometimes breaking free of their supports and crashing down on neighboring pipes.

The proof is in the pudding.

With beautiful wood chosen, accurate actions built and adjusted, wind system regulated and free of leaks, it is time for the pipes. It is a magical moment when an organ produces its first musical tones in its new home. Sometimes we let people in the church know when we expect to sound the first notes. We have already had the excitement of turning on the blower for the first time, experiencing the organ coming to life. People gather, a rank of pipes is placed in their holes, and an out-of-tune hymn is played. After thousands of hours in the workshop, days or weeks of heavy lifting, and precise fitting, the heart of the enterprise comes clear.

What about Eugene Drucker’s reaction to his new instrument? Will the new organ be all everyone hoped for? The local organist will have the strongest reaction, the choir and other musicians who will use the instrument follow suit. The people in the pews will have their opinions. In 1982, John Leek and I installed a new organ we had built at Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The previous organ was a nondescript “asparagus patch” of exposed pipes with little stature; our instrument had a tall case of oak and walnut with classic pointed towers and moldings and shiny façade pipes. We delivered the organ on a Sunday afternoon, and by the following Sunday the case was standing, giving the impression of being complete. John and I sat in the pews as the congregation filed in, found their seats, and craned their necks to see the new organ in the rear balcony. In the quiet of the moment, a young girl cried out, “I liked the old one better.”

Notes

1. Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

Mechanical failure

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

Take care of your machines.

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

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

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

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

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

Try it again without making noise.

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

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

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

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

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

The most mechanical of musical instruments

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

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

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

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

Things that go bump in the night

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

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

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

Going out with a bang

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

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

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

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

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.

Pipes, wind, and wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The means of Grace

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

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

Wind

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

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

Pipes

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

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

Wood

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

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

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

And the hope of glory

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

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

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

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