In the Wind: a challenge to organ tuners and technicians

Out and about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustatory tuning

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

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

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

Watch your step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the years

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

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

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

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

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

J. G. P. Leek

When I was a student at Oberlin (Class of 1978), students were not allowed to own cars, ostensibly to limit traffic and parking congestion in the small town. I lived in an apartment off campus during my senior year, and since it came with a parking space, I flouted the rule and bought a 1969 Mercedes 230. I put a great sound system in it—those cassette tapes were just the thing—and I felt like the big man driving around. It was in pretty good shape, but it was a nine-year-old Ohio car, and there were little fringes of rust here and there.

At a time when my rent was $175 per month, I splurged and spent $200 on four new Michelin tires. The next morning, I drove to the organ shop where I was working and proudly showed off the new tires. My boss, John Leek, quipped, “It’s like putting alligator shoes on a wino.”

John Leek died in Sandusky, Ohio, on November 15, 2019, just short of the age of ninety. Until a couple years ago, I called him on his birthday. We stayed in touch now and again, especially after he read about himself in this column, but I had not seen him in more than fifteen years. I dropped everything to drive to Ohio for his memorial service, but I am sorry I did not drop everything a couple years ago to visit him. I am grateful to him, I miss him, and I want to tell you about him.

His name bears the Dutch pronunciation. A bank teller commented, “Your name should be pronounced ‘leak.’” His quick quip, “Then it should be pronounced ‘Bea-thoven.’”

The wino crack was one side of John. He was able to squeeze the greatest delight from the smallest joke, and when it was a big joke, we would laugh all day. He could also be stern. He had been brought up in the rigorous system of apprenticeships in the Netherlands, starting with a cabinetmaker at a very early age and moving to organ shops in his hometown. His teachers had been tough, and so was he. He was quick with compliments and encouragement and equally quick with a hard lesson. I was late to work once. He was in the workshop, the doors were locked, and he waved me away, telling me to come back tomorrow. I was late to work only once.

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Johannes Geratus Petrus Leek was born in 1929 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, on the shortest day of the year, the youngest of eleven children. He apprenticed with Bernard Pels & Zonen in Alkmaar, and he continued his education in the workshops of Vermeulen, Wattell, and Verschueren. He served in the Dutch army shortly after the end of World War II. During his military service, John was seriously injured in a railroad accident. He recalled lying in the wrecked car realizing he was hurt, asking God for “twenty more years,” and then getting the creeps as the twentieth anniversary approached. I do not know the exact dates but suppose that accident happened in the early 1950s. He died last November about five weeks short of his ninetieth birthday—God granted that prayer.

After his time in the army, he returned to work in the organ shop of Verschueren. He and his wife Maria moved to the United States in 1961 as John went to work for the Holtkamp Organ Company under Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was working on the installation of the organ in Warner Concert Hall at Oberlin when he saw a notice on a bulletin board that the school was looking for a new organ curator. “That’s the job for me.” He worked for the school from 1964 until 1976, all the while gathering organ maintenance clients “on the side,” and he left the school to start his own company in the workshop building behind his house on Route 58 (Main Street), just on the southern outskirts of town.

Just as John was starting out on his own, in the fall of my junior year, I began working with him three days a week and summers, and continued in his shop full time from my graduation until 1984, when my wife and two toddler sons moved to Boston. John was my important mentor in the craft of organbuilding. He taught me to tune, how to read and cut a piece of wood, how to glue pouches, how to build and leather a reservoir. I learned why you want wood to have standing grain for pallets in slider chests and flat grain in keyboards. (Wood warps only between the growth rings. You do not want pallets to warp so their surface does not meet the windchest grid, and you do not want keyboards to warp so the keys come into contact with each other.)

He helped me grow through the awkward end of youth when I was sure I knew everything into the awkward beginning of adulthood when I began realizing how little I knew. He never hesitated to let me know when I was full of it, and he never hesitated to confess when he was. While still an organ performance major, I was increasingly aware that organbuilding was my first love. I wondered aloud to John about quitting school so I could work with him full time. “If you quit school, you’re fired.”

Whenever my weak apprentice attempts resulted in a mangled job, John nailed it to the wall over my workbench. It turned really funny when I came back later to visit and they were still there, warning my successor apprentices to pay attention.

Road trip

Early in the summer of 1978, just after I graduated from Oberlin, we were completing construction of a harpsichord for a former student of the conservatory who lived in Oakland, California. She asked John to deliver the instrument to her, and he invited me to make the trip with him to share the driving. His offer was that I would not get paid, but he promised we would stay in the best hotels, eat the best meals, gamble in Reno, swim in the Pacific Ocean, and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. John had a mustard-yellow Dodge van with a broad brown stripe (remember, those were the days of appliances in harvest gold and avocado colors), just the vehicle for such a caper, and off we went.

The trip is about 2,400 miles each way, and I suppose we drove between 400 and 500 miles each day because I remember it taking about a week in each direction. Anyone who has made a similar trip by land will appreciate our marveling at the rich agricultural heartlands, the prairies, the mountains, and the deserts. We drove all day through Iowa into Nebraska watching a huge weather system develop from the west all across the horizon, driving into light rain, and finally parking under a bridge for more than an hour waiting for the thunder, lightning, and hail to stop. We didn’t see a tornado, but that surely was on our minds.

When we stopped for gas just after entering Nevada, I put a dime in a truck-stop slot machine and won ten dollars. Bad. Very bad. We spent a night in Elko, Nevada, where we had a memorable meal in a Basque restaurant recommended by Howard Hanson, a member of Oberlin’s voice faculty. It is almost three hundred miles across flat arid land from Elko to Reno, and it seemed that we were staring at the distant mountains west of Reno all day, a visual effect that is hard to fathom the first time you see it. It was in a posh casino in Reno that I learned how it was bad that I had been sucked into the slot machine the day before. Inhibitions were loosened as the champagne was on the house, and I ran through all the quarters I could find (I think that may have been before there was such a thing as a dollar slot) while John got beaten up at a Blackjack table. It was interesting how often the dealer came up with twenty-one.

As we delivered the harpsichord, we spent two nights in the house with the customer and her physician husband, allowing us to visit San Francisco and fulfill a couple of John’s original promises. We were both smokers, and that was not allowed in the house. The second night, the good doctor brought home a preserved smoker’s lung in a jar and delivered a thoughtful lecture.

John burst randomly into song many times each day. The simple chanted Alleluia from the Roman Catholic Mass was a several-times-a-day regular. Another was a short clip from a bawdy little Dutch song asking a woman named Elena why the baby poops green. Maria and I joined elbows and sang that one for their grandchildren on the morning of the memorial service. There were many others, all brief excerpts. I do not believe John knew the complete songs, but he sure enjoyed the clips. Over and over.

John and Maria had been naturalized as citizens of the United States in 1968. He thundered the first four words of the refrain of “This is My Country” each time a new wonder was revealed on that wonderful trip. It was a punctuating anthem for a man of deep faith marveling at the process of his life that had brought him to live and work in such a huge country with such diverse landscapes.

The twinkle in his eye

John and his family were members of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Oberlin, which was the site of his memorial service. When I worked for him, new carpet was being installed in the church, and the old had been given to a smaller church out in the countryside where the unworn sections would be enough to cover the floor. John volunteered the two of us to join a crew of parishioners removing the old carpet, which was loaded into his van and my pickup truck, where the huge roll hung over the back of my open tailgate. I was in the lead as we left on the delivery run, turning left from the church parking lot onto Lorain Street. I was stopped at the traffic light at the intersection of Main Street (Route 58) across from the art museum when I felt a strong push from behind. John had been careful to see that no traffic was coming, and, with a maniacal smile clearly visible in my mirror, was shoving me, carpet, truck, and all, through the red light into the middle of the highway.

In between organs, we built a screen porch on John’s house with a high peaked ceiling. Coming to the end of the project we were painting the floor. I was working my way out a corner with my back to John when I became aware of the quick whooshing of John’s brush flashing back and forth as he hurried to paint me into the corner.

Opus 1

In the fall of 1979, John signed a contract to build a new organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The organist there was Ben Dobey who had recently graduated from Oberlin as an organ major and was sure that while John had never built a pipe organ himself, he would be well able. Originally, the instrument was planned with twelve stops on two manuals, but the agreement was altered in December of 1980 to include the addition of an independent 8′ Octaafbass in the Pedal, which made necessary the construction of a separate case for the two pedal stops. You can see the specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8401.

The case is made of white oak with black walnut accents, drawknobs were made from a huge log of boxwood that John kept in the attic of the workshop, and the pipes were supplied by Jacques Stinkens of Zeist, the Netherlands. The slider windchests were made with sponsils, individual strips of wood fitted and glued between the ribs of the key channels to form the table surface, rather than the more usual plywood windchest table. With the experience of having built more than a dozen harpsichords, we made the keyboards in the shop. (That is when I learned about choosing slab grain.) In the first days of March 1982, I was standing at the drill press in the shop, drilling the holes in rackboards for the three windchests—start with the smallest holes so that if you make a mistake and drill an extra hole of a given size, it is easier to correct by making it bigger rather than smaller. (I have this memory exactly because those were the days of waiting for Pat to go into labor, and our first son Michael was born on March 4. I had quit smoking the previous New Year’s Eve.)

After the first week of the installation, the new organ case was standing in the church’s balcony with façade pipes in place. John and I sat proudly in the pews that Sunday as the congregation was gathering in the quiet church when a little girl near us took a look backwards and piped up clearly, “I like the old one better,” raising a polite Episcopal titter.

Patrick Summers, the current interim organist at Saint Alban’s, provided a great boost to my memory by forwarding the documents concerning the new organ from the church’s archives. As I read, John’s distinctive voice came alive. When petitioning the vestry to consider changing the schedule of payments from a list of completed components to one based on the calendar, John wrote (as Maria typed), “We would like to ask in a very polite manner from the Counsel to be paid each half year.”

John spoke English rapidly and fluently, but he never lost the grammar of his native Dutch. Coming into the shop in the morning, he would declare, “I feel myself good today,” typically followed by the ubiquitous Alleluia. (“Myself” was pronounced my-selliff, just as the name of his hometown was pronounced Allick-mar.) My primitive classroom German gives me, “Ich habe mich . . .” Although I had never been addressed by a nickname, in that workshop I was “Yonnyboy.”

Nunc dimittis

At John’s service I was reunited with his son James who runs the Leek Organ Company, his siblings Paula and Peter, their spouses and children, and his wife Maria. All of us bear the marks of the thirty-five years that have passed since my young family and I moved to Boston to start a new chapter, but the memories and stories flowed like it was yesterday. It was hilarious to hear the familiar stories as passed through the generations to John’s grandchildren, and it was fun to share some they had not heard.

John believed that there is a little voice in the head of a craftsman that pipes up when something is about to go wrong. “If you do that, you will stab yourself with that chisel.” I still hear that little voice and think of him. When I am tuning a chimney flute, I remember the moment he showed me how to hold the tool in the Congregational Church in Austinburg, Ohio, and I remember his teasing my beginner’s “yo-yo tuning” in the chapel at the College of Wooster. He insisted that I learn to tune with both hands and made me tune entire organs left-handed. There are some pipes you just cannot reach with your right hand.

John Leek was not a nationally known organbuilder, but he was widely known by generations of students at Oberlin that gave him an impressive reach. Many of my friends worked for him during their student years, and many other former students have commented in recent weeks about how generous he was with advice and goodwill. He built more than a dozen harpsichords and two pipe organs, renovated or restored dozens more, and performed thousands of service calls on hundreds of different organs. While I worked with him, we helped install four new Flentrop organs including the big three-manual instrument at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland. I believe his greatest legacy was as a teacher, sharing his old-world experience, knowledge, and insight with young craftsmen.

John and I worked regularly on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, releathering a division at a time and doing regular tuning visits. As we left the church one afternoon, a woman was contemplating a flat tire, and we offered to change it for her. When we finished, she thanked us profusely, declaring that there would be a special place in heaven for us. John replied, “Yes, tuning harps.”

Giants among favorites

I am often asked if I have a favorite organ, a single instrument that stands out among the multitude as the best, the most expressive, the most impressive, among the hundreds I have visited, played on, or worked on. I am never able to answer clearly by citing a single instrument. There are organs that have been important in my life, but great life experiences do not necessarily focus on superb organs. I am very proud of some of the projects I have done on simple organs that I was able to expand and improve so the congregations that own them were thrilled with the result.

I have heard some of our finest musicians play thrilling programs on magnificent instruments and come away from those experiences with gratitude for a life surrounded by great musicians and great organs. I have been moved by beautiful playing on exquisite smaller instruments and amazed by the relationships of beautiful organs with the acoustics and architecture of their buildings.

I have fond memories of the organs I knew when I was a teenager first learning to play, some of which I still see regularly, and memories of rich evenings with beloved colleagues—sitting with an organ, listening to its tones, experimenting with its mechanics, marveling at its design, historical importance, heritage—and then retiring to a restaurant for a great meal. I have visited many organs nearing completion in colleagues’ workshops and then heard them as finished instruments in their “forever homes.” And as director of the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that what seemed like a forever home for an organ can vanish, leaving the organ homeless. I am especially proud of some of those when we were able to find new homes for them and see them restored for a second century of use.

There are dozens, hundreds of organs I can think of that I love and respect as great technical, musical, artistic achievements, but there is not one that I can point to as the best or as my favorite. I will cite a few standouts.

Warner Concert Hall

I was an eighteen-year-old incoming freshman at Oberlin in November 1974, my third month as a grown-up organ major, when the grand Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. I was fortunate to have grown up in Boston where I heard many wonderful new mechanical-action organs, but the Flentrop dazzled me. Painted red and blue and wearing gold negligee, it looks fantastic in the mostly whitish room. I did the hard work of practice, lessons, studio classes, and required performances including my senior recital on that organ. After a long absence I had a chance to visit it again last summer, and as you read this, I will have attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that organ over the weekend of November 15, reuniting with dozens of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Basilica of Saint Martin

I visited Stefan Stürzer at Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Pfullendorf, Germany, in September of 2019. Manuel Rosales was there working on the earliest stages of the monumental organ they are building together for Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. Stefan, Manuel, Glatter-Götz’s then-new employee Felix Müller, and I had a chance to visit the Josef Gabler organ (completed in 1750) in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Weingarten, Germany. The only time we could schedule our visit was during a Mass on a Friday afternoon, but since the organ gallery is very high in the rear of the building, we were able to walk around chatting. In between leading hymns, psalms, and incidental music, the organist opened panels to show us inner workings, and he made a point of demonstrating some of the unique sounds of that remarkable organ, especially the haunting Vox Humana in the Brüstungspositiv (Rückpositiv).

There is a fascinating legend regarding that Vox Humana that had Gabler struggling to recreate the human voice exactly, and one attempt after many others fell short. The devil offered a deal: consign your soul to the devil, meet in a prescribed lonely place in the forest, and you will receive the secret for the perfect human voice, which turned out to be a piece of metal to be used to build the rank. It is not clear how Gabler got out of that pickle, but the organ was successful enough that the abbot presented him with enough wine to fill the organ’s largest pipe. (If the pipe was twenty-four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long, that would be around seven-hundred-fifty gallons.) The name of the city and abbey gives away the source of such a plentiful supply. I remember that as a remarkable encounter with a spectacular organ in the company of admired colleagues, pretty heady stuff. That night, Felix took the photo of me that shows every month at the top of the right-hand page of this column.

Saint-Sulpice

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential organs in the world. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré filled that organ bench for a hundred years as they taught generations of students. Imagine hearing Widor’s “Toccata” from the Fifth Symphony in that church for the first time. “Oh Maître, I hope you’ll play it again.” I attended a recital there played by Gillian Weir and could do nothing but weep. Putting my fingers on the keys played by Widor and Dupré for thousands of Masses and countless hours of practice was both humbling and thrilling.

Saint James

When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, around 1980, we renovated a large Wicks organ in Saint James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, with three manuals and twenty-eight ranks. It was located in an ample and high loft at the rear of the church with a small two-division sanctuary organ burrowed into the reredos, an unremarkable organ except that it was in a huge, resonant church and was a product of the period when Vincent Willis III of the great eponymous British firm was working at Wicks influencing their tonal schemes.

There was a lot of unification in the organ, so there was a lot of wiring to do, much of which I did alone in a Zen state, sorting and soldering row after row of wires while listening to a gaggle of women with an occasional added man reciting the Rosary for an hour after the end of the 8:00 a.m. Mass. By the time the project was finished, that sequence of prayers was forever etched in my brain, and when I hear it today, I can smell the soldering iron.

I mention this organ because it opened my twenty-something, tracker-action, early music eyes and ears to a new understanding of Romantic music. One afternoon I was playing the ubiquitous Widor “Toccata” (he sure did play it again, and so has almost every organist since), reveling in the effect of the piece in that vast rolling acoustic. I was used to playing it on smallish tracker organs that made it sound like pelting marbles on a metal roof. So that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Maybe there is something to this music.

“The Busch”

E. Power Biggs lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was neighbor to great thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Julia Child. After working with G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner to create an “experimental organ” in Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (now known as Busch Hall), Biggs commissioned a three-manual, mechanical-action organ by Flentrop Orgelbouw of Zaandam, the Netherlands, which was installed in the gallery of the resonant hall in 1957. That instrument quickly became world-famous as Biggs recorded there his brilliant and influential series of LPs, E. Power Biggs: Bach Great Organ Favorites. I was deeply influenced by those recordings, and I have met countless other organists “of a certain age” whose life paths were set by those recordings. As a teenager I heard Biggs play several recitals there, memories that have stayed with me for over fifty years, and I have visited the organ several times since. It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Flentrop organ on American organ building at that time, as the renaissance that was the revival of the classic craft was gaining traction.

Trinity on Copley

I worked at Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 until Daniel Angerstein closed the workshop to become tonal director for M. P. Möller in Hagerstown, Maryland. Dan and I worked out that I would assume the many service clients that led to the founding of the Bishop Organ Company. Jason McKown was a legendary old organ technician in the Boston area who had worked directly and personally with Ernest Skinner and told endless stories about Mr. Skinner and many famous organists and organbuilders. He was over eighty years old and eager to retire as curator of the marvelous double organ at Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, where there is a four-manual instrument by the Skinner Organ Company in the rear gallery and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in a chancel chamber. Jason had been caring for the organ for over fifty years. The building is a heavy, dense, grand place with interior decoration by John La Farge, and the organs sound spectacular there. Brian Jones, the organist there and an old friend, introduced me to Jason, and I became curator of the organs.

Trinity Church has long been famous for noontime recitals every Friday, and I was there early every Friday morning for two hours of tuning. It was my habit to listen to Red Barber and Bob Edwards after the 7:30 a.m. headlines on National Public Radio in my car with a cup of coffee before going inside to tune.

Those Friday noon recitals meant I heard different organists play the organ every week. Some players were swallowed up by the complexity and sophistication of the big double organ with myriad controls and combinations. Others managed to tame the beast, and it sometimes seemed that the organ somehow knew when the person who slid onto the bench was going to give it a great ride. Over a period of about ten years, I heard more than 200 recitals there. Of course, there were many repeats, but hearing so many different approaches to a single organ was an important part of my learning.

A couple doozies

Once I was established at Trinity, Jason walked me the half mile up Huntington Avenue to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known familiarly as the Mother Church, home to Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, built in 1952. He had been caring for the organ since it was installed, and what an organ it is with over 150 stops and 237 ranks. Jason recommended me to the church as his successor, and I had a rollicking ten years learning the mysteries of taking care of a truly massive organ.

Many of the world’s largest organs, say those with more than 200 ranks, were originally built as more modest instruments and evolved into their present glory under a string of opus numbers. One of the many remarkable things about Opus 1203 is that it was built all at once under one giant contract. Also remarkable is that it was built under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps, who was only thirty years old at the time. I know I thought I was quite something when I was thirty, but I am sure I could not have produced such a massive organ with such a sophisticated tonal scheme.

This amazing organ was at the center of my professional life for around ten years, and I had many important experiences and lessons there. I have written about it in these pages many times because pretty much any time I start writing about organs, it is there lurking—no, looming in the background.

I had a conversation the other day with Bryan Ashley, who has been the organist there since 2009. He revels in the organ’s majesty and subtlety and told me that it is the honor of his life to play it each week. The church has supported the organ with meticulous care since it was installed. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, has been working there since I left nearly thirty years ago, doing usual tuning and service calls as well as a comprehensive renovation under the direction of Phelps in the 1990s. The brilliant concert organist Stephen Tharp played a landmark recital on the Mother Church organ on June 28, 2014, the closing recital for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. He premiered his transcription of Igor Stravinsky’s world-changing Rite of Spring in a riveting performance that I thought changed the world of organ recitals forever. His fierce rhythmic drive and dynamic, fiery registrations had the huge audience spellbound. In testament to the quality and condition of that massive organ built in 1952, Stephen told me that he practiced energetically for dozens of hours in preparation for his recital and never had to call on the technicians to correct anything.

The Mother Church organ came to mind, as it does frequently, when I was in Salt Lake City this past August for the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, where the famous Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Mormon Tabernacle was featured in several programs. The Tabernacle organ (Opus 1075) was built in 1945, just seven years and 128 opus numbers earlier than the Mother Church organ. It originally had 187 ranks and has been gradually expanded to today’s 206 ranks by Schoenstein & Company. It was built under the directorship of G. Donald Harrison who considered it his masterpiece, and rightly so. A quick look at the encyclopedic stoplist shows its vast variety of tone colors and combinations.

There is a fundamental difference between these two extraordinary organs. While both can be considered “American Classic” instruments, the Mother Church organ has lower wind pressures. The Positiv division is on less than two inches of wind; it is amazing that the eleven-stop pitman windchest can function on such low pressure. Along with lower wind pressures, the organ has what could be considered Baroque choruses with German nomenclature. Along with the Great, Swell, and Choir you would expect to find the Hauptwerk and Positiv with distinctly lighter tone.

Both organs are rich with multiple pairs of “celesting” stops, mutations at every pitch imaginable, and many mixtures of varying character. It is important to note that both organs are scrupulously maintained in terrific condition, reflecting the dedication of those two institutions.

Look it up.

I have been rattling from one organ to another, and I imagine some readers would be interested to see the stoplists. You are in luck. The Organ Historical Society has a broad and valuable database of organs across the United States. Visit pipeorgandatabase.com, click on “Instruments” in the upper left corner, then click on “View/Search Instruments.” That will open a form with blanks to fill in: Location (Church, Institution, etc.), City, State, Builder, Opus Number, etc. You usually only need to fill in a few blanks before the organ you are looking for pops up.

The database is a fantastic resource with photos and information about thousands of organs. The website is open on my browser whenever I am sitting at my desk, and I routinely search for information about dozens of organs. A little hint: if an organ has been rebuilt, it is likely you will find it under that company rather than the original builder. For example, you will find the Mother Church organ under Foley-Baker, not Aeolian-Skinner. Three cheers to the OHS for conceiving and continuing with that valuable project, essential to those who work with and research organs, and fascinating to all of us who are just plain interested.

If you visit the database and do not see an organ you play regularly or just know and love, go back to the original menu, click “Instruments,” and then click “Submit New Instrument Entry.” Your submission will be reviewed, someone may ask you a question or two, and then you will have contributed to a unique and valuable resource.

Next time we meet, ask me what’s my favorite organ. I’m thinking about that all the time; you may get a sassy answer.

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

Rites of passage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upside down and backwards

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

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

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

Make your house fair as you are able.

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

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

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

You are the steward.

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

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

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

May the force be with you.

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

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

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

Nothing is forever.

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

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

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

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

Passing eras

My mother’s grandmother died in Boston in 1959 when I was three years old. I have a dim memory of her and of sitting in the kitchen of her apartment in Boston’s Back Bay at the time of her death, where I was served Cheerios with blue milk, food coloring added by her maid. Granny Reynolds was born in 1867 and remembered her grandmother who was born in 1779. As I grew up, my grandfather made a point of reminding my parents and me of that to keep the milky memory alive. Now, in my early sixties in 2020, I can claim to remember a family member who remembers a family member born during the Revolutionary War. Mozart was twenty-three years old.

Jason McKown (1906–1989) was an old Skinner man. I met him in 1987 when I was engaged to care for the Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston (a few blocks from Granny Reynolds’s apartment), where Jason had been organ curator for fifty years. He was eighty-one years old and spry as a cat, easily negotiating the tall ladders and narrow walkboards, but he was eager to retire so he introduced me to another of his clients, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, home to the monumental Aeolian-Skinner organ with over two-hundred-forty ranks.

Jason had been caring for that organ since it was installed in 1952, and in order to ensure a smooth transition after I was appointed, the church retained Jason for six months to help me learn the ropes. And some ropes they were. Forty-one ranks of reeds (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 51⁄3′ Quinte Trompette in the Swell), over a hundred ranks of mixtures (including some harmonic doozies with 7ths and 9ths), and nearly fifty independent ranks in the Pedal. It is a model of engineering, three stories tall and three chambers wide behind an acre of gold-leafed façade pipes. Jason patiently shared his approach to the instrument, its strengths and weaknesses, and the history of repairs and adjustments. We were together at the organ all day every Wednesday for those six months, with Jason leading me around as he offered his hints and insights. After more than sixty years as a tuner, he was an accomplished keyholder.

Shortly before I started at The Mother Church, Ronald Poll of Salt Lake City had been contracted to install a solid-state switching and combination action supplied by Solid State Logic. Ron was the brother of Robert Poll, curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Mormon Tabernacle, and had just completed a similar project there. As Ron started installing the hardware at the various switching stations throughout the organ, I was still maintaining the extensive electro-pneumatic electrical system for its last few months of operation, and I quickly became familiar with one of the weaknesses Jason had mentioned. The machine-formed silver contacts in the vertical gang switches were breaking and falling like pine needles in the forest. There were scores of those switches operating windchest cutouts, single ranks with independent actions, couplers, offset bass chests, and the scores of magical effects found in a huge organ.

When the contacts were manufactured, the bends were formed too crisply, and the wires broke at the bends, with new failures appearing every week. What happened when they fell? They got tangled in the contacts below them and caused cluster-ciphers of five or six notes, terrible interruptions to the marvelous playing of Dr. Thomas Richner, organist of the church, known to generations of students and admirers as Uncle T. “Peepee” (he called everyone Peepee), he’d say, “there’s a little problem in the Pedal Ophicleide.” Some little problem, when a half-dozen notes sounded as one in a stop like that! One afternoon, I was pointing out to Jason how the rows of transistors on the big switching panels compared to the rows of contacts I was so busy repairing. He shook his head and said quietly, “this is for you young guys.”

During those months, as Jason and I shared lunches and coffee breaks, he told stories from his past. He remembered seeing the 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason from the Hutchings organ in Boston’s Symphony Hall, across Massachusetts Avenue from The Mother Church, chain-sawed into pieces and stacked on the sidewalk to make way for the new Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1134, 1947). He remembered talking with Marcel Dupré as the great French organist prepared a recital at King’s Chapel in Boston (Aeolian-Skinner Opus 170-A, 1946), asking how often the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice was tuned. “Not until the next cleaning.” Jason was a direct connection between Marcel Dupré and me.

Jason recommended me to a dozen or so other churches, one of which was especially meaningful. The Congregational Church of West Medford, Massachusetts, was home to Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 692 (1928), a lovely instrument with fourteen ranks. Jason was twenty-two years old when he worked on that installation, under the personal supervision of his employer, Ernest Skinner. The organ was fifty-nine years old when I became the second technician to care for it. Jason was a direct connection between Mr. Skinner and me.

Jason McKown and his wife Ruth were devoted members of Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, where the Bauhaus sanctuary housed a 1973 three-manual Casavant with a harsh angular case design. Jason did not much like that organ, but he maintained it until the end of his life with all the care and skill he gave to his favorite Skinner organs. In those days I drove an eight-passenger van; I ferried a carload of people from The Mother Church to attend his funeral in 1989.

Centre Methodist Church closed in 2007. The Organ Clearing House sold and moved the Casavant organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia. A new case was designed and built by QLF Organ Components, a subsidiary of Lively-Fulcher Organbuilders. Jason was not generous with his comments about the original Casavant case design. I think he would have liked the new one.

Chapters

My friendship with Jason spans eras. I was in my early thirties when I knew him, and over thirty years after his death, I value that he was my personal connection to Ernest Skinner. I admire his longevity, diligence, and devotion to the organs in his care, and I was influenced by his respect especially for Mr. Skinner’s genius. Though he knew it was too late for him to learn about solid-state organ controls, he was open to the new technology being installed in The Mother Church organ. Stories like the destruction of the old Symphony Hall organ told of how he had witnessed deep change in the name of progress.

When Jason first worked at The Mother Church, the fifteen-acre site included the Original Edifice (1894), the first church building built by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; “The Extension,” the marvelous domed wedding cake of a building (1906) that seats 3,000; and the Publishing Society, home of the renowned international newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. The site was transformed in 1971 with the construction of the new Christian Science Plaza with three new significant buildings, including a twenty-six-story administration building and a seven-hundred-foot reflecting pool, and the entire plaza was paved with bricks. Jason had been friends with the man whose life work was the creation and care of an extensive rose garden next to the church along Huntington Avenue. When the plaza was built, the rose garden was destroyed. Jason told sweetly of the heartbreak of his friend seeing his life’s work disappear.

Progress

I am a loyal fan of Patrick O’Brian’s marvelous series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I have audio recordings of all twenty-one books and often listen to passages in my workshop or as I drive. Captain Jack Aubrey, one of the central characters, is a skillful and courageous frigate captain, and his friend Stephen Maturin is a physician who travels on Jack’s ships as surgeon, which serves as cover for his central activity as a member of Naval Intelligence. Jack plays the violin, well enough to tackle the Bach Chaconne in D Minor, and Stephen plays the cello. As they sail around the world, they play the classics together deep into the night. Jack distinguished between his sea-going fiddle and the precious Amati that he kept at home. One night as they were tuning their strings, Jack’s steward Killick griped to the steward’s mate, “Scrape, scrape, screech, screech, and never a tune you can sing to, not if you were drunk as Davie’s sow.” Those stories are rife with adventure and intrigue. O’Brian was a devoted student of that history, writing dialogue using two-hundred-year-old figures of speech, and for this enthusiastic sailor, he accurately and dramatically describes the act and art of sailing big ships. 

As the wars dragged on toward 1815, steam-powered ships were being introduced. It was easy for Jack to understand the advantages of steam power, allowing a ship to sail directly into the wind or without any wind at all. Guns could be mounted facing straight forward and backward, while sailing ships were encumbered by sails and rigging in both those directions and limited to firing broadsides. If your ship had steam power, you had an immense advantage over sail; if you were sailing and encountered an enemy in a steamship, you were in grave peril. Nonetheless, one tradition-bound and slightly drunken admiral lamented loudly about the Navy contemplating losing its skillful sailors to “a hoard of mechanics.”

Steam locomotives powered railroads from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. Diesel powered (and diesel-electric) locomotives were first introduced around 1930. By around 1950, diesel locomotives were more powerful, more economical to maintain and operate, and safer than those powered by steam, and steam locomotives became a thing of the past. Many engineers revered the elegance of steam machinery and regretted their demise, but today with few exceptions, steam locomotives are limited to historical exhibits and attractions, and a troupe of hobbyist organbuilders I know.

Friends of ours have a huge old iron cook stove in their kitchen. Susan is a virtuoso with the cooktop lids, lifting them as she converses to drop in a log or two. She manages different levels of heat from one side to another and has pots of savory smelling stuff simmering away. The hulking thing sure does make the kitchen toasty warm on a cold night, but she uses the modern gas cooktop mounted in the counter for most of the cooking. Her curmudgeonly husband Barnaby thinks food tastes better from the wood stove, but he does not cook, ever, and Susan has her way. “Barnaby, have another bourbon.”

Charles-Marie Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris for sixty-three years. Something like halfway through his tenure the first electric blower was installed on the Cavaillé-Coll organ. By then he had written the ten organ symphonies that are the backbone of his output, played for thousands of Masses, hundreds of concerts, hundreds of funerals, weddings, and festivals. He must have spent thousands of additional hours at the organ practicing and teaching. Through all of that, the hundred-stop organ was pumped by human power. What a liberation it must have been for him to climb the steps to the organ loft, switch on the power, and play to an empty church using all the wind he wanted.

There are a number of modern mechanical-action organs built under classic inspiration that are pumped by reconstructions of ancient human-powered systems, and in the late 1990s I restored an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook (when my great-grandmother was one year old), including restoring the hand pumping system. Yuko Hayashi, the revered long-time professor of organ at the New England Conservatory of Music, brought her organ classes to that church so they could experience hand-powered organ wind, comparing both sources of wind playing the same passage of music. It is a fascinating study, helping us to understand just how music sounded when played centuries ago, but I doubt many of us would forsake the convenience and stability of the electric blower.

The passage of steam-powered ships and locomotives, Susan and Barnaby’s woodstove, and Widor’s hand-pumped organ are all examples of innovations replacing “the old way.” Many pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts are admirers of the old way. “If God intended us to have more than four general pistons, Mr. Skinner would have given us five.” But today’s conversation is not about venerable electro-pneumatic organs being replaced by modern trackers, and it’s not about historic tracker organs being replaced by modern electro-pneumatic instruments. It’s about the future of the organ, the future of all organs.

We can’t save them all.

In the 1920s, American pipe organ builders were producing twenty-five hundred new organs each year. Suburban churches had sixty voice choirs and sixty-stop organs, and a thousand place settings of monogrammed china. Those churches now have dwindling congregations, staggering fuel bills, and leaky roofs. In a world weakened by epidemic, smaller, weaker parishes are struggling like never before, and pipe organs are coming on the market like fireworks on the fourth of July. Hundreds of organs, many of them priceless historic artifacts, are glutting a market in which churches choose between pipe organs, electronic instruments, or no organ-based music at all.

My desk at the Organ Clearing House is proof of that. My inbox is full of pleas to “save this beautiful organ.” We can place only a fraction of the available instruments, and it is hard to justify encouraging a church to purchase an organ of poor quality and doubtful musical interest when so many wonderful organs are available. Once it was hard for me to condemn an organ to the knacker’s yard, but I have gotten over it. I know that there is a finite amount of money spent in the United States each year on pipe organs, and it feels like smart duty to see that as little as possible is spent on lesser organs. If we are going to have fewer organs, they might as well be the best.

An unwanted pipe organ is among the greatest of white elephants. This applies to instruments of high pedigree and important historical value as much as to small, simple, ordinary instruments. When progress means that a building has to go, whatever is inside goes with it. If it is a historical home with a beautiful organ, when time’s up, time’s up. If it is a spectacular church building, ravaged by time and weather and failing budgets, whatever is inside goes with it.

If you learn that a church in your neighborhood is planning to close, encourage them to think right away of the artifacts that should be saved. Pipe organs, stained-glass windows, and liturgical furnishings can all be preserved and relocated, but it takes time. If my first contact about an available organ is from the real-estate developer who bought the building and plans to gut the interior in two weeks, there is no hope. As it takes years for a church to decide to commission a new organ, it takes years for a congregation to embrace the idea of disbanding. Plan ahead.

Most importantly, we must care for our profession. Colleague organbuilders and organists must project their work in the music of the church as a rich gift. We have received our talents as gifts. It is our responsibility to nurture those talents and share them with the people in our churches, those in the pews, and those around the table at weekly staff meetings. Make them love what you do. I am tired of seeing memes showing the Dowager Countess of Grantham with pursed lips, saying that people who think the organ is too loud “don’t have any taste.” I am tired of seeing images of gag stop knobs engraved with “Rector Ejector,” or “Cut Pulpit Mic.” They may be good for a smirk between organists, but they imply an underlying disrespect that is not good for our future.

An organist accepting a new position “if there will be a new organ” is an affront to church music. Maybe the place should have a new organ, but that should be the collective decision of a generous and worshipful community with the support and encouragement of the musicians, not an arrogant demand. You likely know more about church music than those around you, but with your help, they can love it as much as you do. That is what honors the links between you and the centuries-old procession of brilliance which is the heritage of our music and our instruments. That’s our future.

Photo: 1952 Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, The Mother Church Extension, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts (photo credit: William T. Van Pelt)

On the road again

In April 2021, after a year of Covid isolation and after I received my second dose of the vaccine, I went on a “bust out” road trip driving south from our home in New York City as far as Atlanta, visiting three colleagues’ organ shops, the installation of an organ where the Organ Clearing House crew was working, and a few iconic instruments. It was my reintroduction to the excitement of being out and about, seeing friends and colleagues, and getting my nose back in the business after being sequestered at our place in Maine during the worst of the pandemic. I wrote about that trip under the title “On the road again” in the July 2021 issue of The Diapason (pages 10–11). It was fun to recreate and chronicle some of my experiences on the road, and here I am to do it again.

Last week I drove as far west as Chicago from our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two things inspired this trip. The Organ Clearing House was installing a relocated organ by Gabriel Kney (Opus 93 from Dallas, Texas) at the Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana, and I was promoting an exceptional organ built by M. P. Möller (Opus 5881 from Chicago, Illinois) that had been donated by organ historian and architect William H. Barnes and his brother and mother in honor of his father, Charles Osborne Barnes, who had been a longtime member and trustee of the church.

I was on the road for seven nights, stayed in five different hotels, and drove just over twenty-five-hundred miles. I love that kind of driving. My first experiences with long-distance driving were as a student at Oberlin when I drove back and forth between school and home in the Boston area, growing familiar with Interstate 90. During the summer of 1978, just after my graduation from Oberlin, my mentor John Leek and I drove to Oakland, California, to deliver a harpsichord we built. That trip was a great lesson about our country because while it is a one-day drive from Boston to Oberlin, it is a five or six-day drive from Oberlin to San Francisco. Just as I thought I was going west when I went away to school, a school friend who grew up in northern Wisconsin thought he was going south.

Kegg Organ Company

I left home on Saturday morning, spent that night outside Cleveland, met my friend Charles Kegg for breakfast on Sunday morning in Hartville, Ohio, and visited his workshop, which is in a 16,500-square-foot building, beautifully equipped for the specialized work of building pipe organs. The immense rooms are carefully planned and nicely maintained. There is a fleet of orderly stationary machines and workstations. Various components and structures of a large organ under construction occupied big areas of the abundant floor space. The company had just upgraded the HVAC system to include air filtering, heating, and air conditioning, replacing the noisy old hanging gas heaters of yesteryear.

I was especially interested to see one of Charles’s specialties and passions, the machine built by M. P. Möller to produce rolls for their automatic organs. It is a stately structure with an intricate mechanism that transfers musical notes into holes in the paper rolls. Möller rolls are big and heavy, a large-format version of the more familiar Aeolian rolls. Charles was working with the now-shuttered American Organ Institute at the University of Oklahoma to rejuvenate the machine and make new rolls to aid in the understanding of that brilliant technology developed early in the twentieth century. Along with his active interest in automatic musical instruments, Charles and his company are building beautiful new organs with electric-valve actions, versatile symphonic specifications, and exquisite consoles.

Saint Meinrad School of Theology

I left Hartville to drive across Ohio, through Cincinnati and past Louisville, Kentucky, to Saint Meinrad, Indiana, the town next to Santa Claus near the southern tip of the state. Saint Meinrad is a thriving Catholic seminary on a beautiful remote campus. There is a prominent archabbey with an organ by Goulding & Wood in the principal chapel, and the school operates industries that produce high-quality caskets and peanut butter.

In addition to the archabbey there is a chapel honoring Saint Thomas Aquinas, where the Organ Clearing House was installing an organ built in 1980 by Gabriel Kney (Opus 93) for the First Community Church of Dallas, Texas. Susan Ferré was the consultant for the design and construction of the project. Debra Dyko, the theological school’s organist, found the instrument listed on the OCH website and went to Dallas within a week to audition the organ. The sale was completed quickly, and less than a month later, the OCH crew was in Dallas dismantling the organ.

I arrived when the installation was well along. The case was up, windchests in place, action connected and functioning, and the wind system was complete. I was able to help connect the solid-state slider control and combination mechanisms including the installation of a new 24-volt DC power supply for the Heuss slider motors. I “retired” from working on-site with the crew at the end of 2019, and it was nice to have tools in my hands again for a few hours. This was a classic relocation project. The organ is well suited for the building visually and tonally. It is well built, so it went back together easily and will be a reliable instrument for decades of further use, and it was a great fit physically and visually—there were no alterations required. Fred Bahr of John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders accomplished tonal finishing of the organ in May.

. . . and speaking of Buzard . . .

I left Saint Meinrad on Tuesday morning to drive to Champaign, Illinois, to visit John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders. I had a nice lunch with John-Paul Buzard that included rich conversation about organbuilding philosophies, the history of his company, and conversations about past and future collaborations. The company, affectionately referred to as “Buzco” (as seen on the license plates of company vehicles), is in a former women’s residential hotel in downtown Champaign. It is a four-story building with rental apartments on the fourth floor (The Organ Loft Apartments) and three floors of offices, workshops, voicing studios, and erection space.

A large, four-manual organ for Saint George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is under construction, and I saw a big section of the framework and structure of the instrument in the erection space, windchests being assembled, wind system components being built, pipes in the voicing rooms, and the console partially assembled. The long corridors down the center of each floor serve as storage rooms and are wide enough to allow passage between stacks of organ components.

The Buzco service department has a separate workshop in a building across the street devoted to large-scale repairs of organs they maintain. There is a well-equipped woodworking shop, leathering station, stocks of wiring supplies, and lots of projects in progress on workbenches. Keeping renovation and repair work separate from the construction of new organs makes it easier to keep track of things.

I visited with the brilliant organist Katelyn Emerson at McKinley Presbyterian Church where she played for me on the 1994 Dobson Opus 63. We sat in a pew talking for an hour or two about the organ, its music, and her upcoming studies in Britain. Katelyn’s husband, David Brown, is a longtime member of the Buzard shop, a dear friend with whom I correspond regularly. I was delighted to sit between Dave and Katelyn at the rollicking dinner that evening hosted by John-Paul that included his wife and daughter along with several other members of the Buzco team.

Given by the master

William Harrison Barnes (1892–1980) was an authority on pipe organ construction and a consultant responsible for the design of some four hundred instruments. He grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1910. In 2008, the high school celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the three-manual pipe organ that Dr. Barnes donated to the school. His home church was Epworth United Methodist Church of Chicago where his father, Charles Osborne Barnes, was a longtime member and trustee. A plaque on the wall of the church dedicates the 1931
M. P. Möller organ (Opus 5881) to the loving memory of Charles Osborne Barnes, naming the donors as Mrs. Charles O. Barnes and her two sons, William H. Barnes and Harold O. Barnes.

When Pastor Max Kuecker of Epworth Church contacted me about organizing the sale of the organ and shared its history with me, I imagined a scenario in the offices of M. P. Möller when staff members looked at each other and agreed that with the Barnes family involved, this had better be an exceptional instrument, and I was curious to see it. The church had waited until after the proverbial last minute to address the future of the organ as our first contact was after the sale of the building with real estate closing just weeks away. Since our company would be working in Saint Meinrad, I combined the two interests and planned my trip.

The people at Möller did deliver an exceptional organ. There are twenty-two ranks in three manual divisions with one independent pedal rank, 16′/8′ Bourdon, enclosed with the Swell. The Choir division is located across a stairway from the main organ chamber and has shutters facing two rooms. One set of shutters speaks into the stairwell and through a grille that opens into the choir loft, the other opens into the adjacent Sunday School chapel, and the Choir organ is playable as a separate instrument from a two-manual console in the chapel. Each console has a cut-out switch to close and disable the shutters that are not to be in use. An eight-octave rank of flue pipes that starts at 16′ (1–24 stopped, 25–37 open, 38–56 open harmonic, 57–97 metal) sits on a unit chest allowing it to be used as a pedal stop and at different pitches on the keyboards while the ranks of the main pitman chest are distributed between the two keyboards.

There are four 8′ diapasons on the organ, two in the Great and one each in the Swell and Choir, and the Great 8′ Second Diapason is extended as a pedal stop with a marvelous octave of 16′ Diaphone pipes. There is plenty of power, and the Choir 8′ Dulciana and Swell 8′ Muted Viol disappear as whispers when the boxes are closed. You can learn more about this organ here: pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/9216.

When I posted Opus 5881 for sale on our website and promoted it on Facebook, I was not surprised to have immediate responses from congregations interested in acquiring it, and as I planned my trip, I invited the organists of those churches to meet with me while I was visiting the church. I shared the organ with representatives of two churches, one of which was quick to act, and while as I write the transaction is not officially completed, it sure looks as though we will be dismantling that organ in July. I’ll let you know when the deal is complete.

The corner of Oak and Walnut

I left Chicago on Friday morning for the six-hour drive to Orrville, Ohio, where the Schantz Organ Company has been on that street corner for 121 years. Organ architect Eric Gastier greeted me and showed me through the storied workshop where nearly twenty-five-hundred organs have been built, an average of about twenty organs a year. We were joined by Jeffery Dexter, vice president and tonal director, for conversations about the history and operation of the company.

The deep heritage of the company is evident everywhere in the huge shop building. Heavily worn wood floors tell the history of the countless footsteps and cartwheels required to build one organ, not to mention twenty-five hundred. Jigs and patterns for dozens of specialty components hang on the walls, and personal workstations are decorated with family photos and mementos and lifetime tools. There is specialty equipment everywhere like a power-vented workstation for soldering metal windlines, mechanized rollers with crank handles for turning tiny tuning slides, tapered and straight mandrills for shaping organ pipes, and ancient carts for the storage and transportation of hundreds of clamps. There is a huge belt sander, wide enough to accept the largest windchest, and an elegant walnut-wainscoted conference room with raised panels that only an organ shop could build. My tour took us through a seemingly endless maze of rooms, both large and small, each dedicated to a specific facet of the art of making pipe organs.

There are very few workshops remaining in the world in which pipe organs have been built by the thousand. I have visited the shops of Austin, Reuter, and Casavant, but am hard-pressed to think of another North American shop with such a legacy. I think of the thousands of truckloads of organs that have rolled away from the loading dock and down the residential street to Main Street where you can drive across the railroad tracks and find a highway.

Whiling away the time

What do you do while you are driving twenty-five-hundred miles alone? My work with the Organ Clearing House has brought me close to the American trucking industry, as I wrote in the April 2022 issue of The Diapason (pages 10–11). Because we maintain DOT (Department of Transportation) and FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) numbers, to Wendy’s amusement I receive several trucking magazines. Glancing at them occasionally, I know that Walmart is America’s largest trucking company. My observation is that Amazon must be becoming a close second—their trucks are everywhere. Landstar, the company we use, has a solid presence on the country’s highways. Taking attendance is a mindless occupation as white lines stream past.

Highway warning signs can be amusing, like the one on I-90 in western New York that says, “Correctional facility ahead, don’t stop for hitchhikers,” or the huge tourist stop and museum in eastern Pennsylvania with a sign that reads, “Be prepared to see more than you expected.” For years I have loved listening to “books on tape” while driving, the concept updated now to Audible.com. As a devoted sailor, I listened to Joshua Slocum’s famous memoir, Sailing Around the World Alone, for the third time. I especially love the moment when he frightens away a pirate attack by scattering upholstery tacks on the deck of his oyster sloop, Spray. I wonder if the pirates got shoes after that.

A couple months ago, Wendy introduced me to a series of podcasts called Sticky Notes hosted by the conductor Joshua Weilerstein, artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Switzerland. In each of the dozens of hour-long episodes, Weilerstein analyzes a different piece of music using many recorded examples, delivered in a rapid vocal cadence. During this trip I listened to his thoughts on the Bach cello suites and Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. I didn’t agree with everything he said (the recording he used of Beethoven’s Eroica was too fast), but I found it engaging to argue with him while I was driving. As an enthusiastic young musician with an impressive career unfolding, Weilerstein has given much thought to the music he performs, and his insights are rewarding, informative, and reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s iconic Young People’s Concerts on television with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Download the Sticky Notes app, and you’ll see a big library of compelling lessons.

That Ingenious Business . . .

. . . is the title of an authoritative book about the Pennsylvania German organbuilders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, written by the late organbuilder Raymond J. Brunner and published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1990. It reflects a comment by a bystander, a contemporary of David Tannenberg, the greatest of that tribe of craftsmen. I am reminded of that phrase whenever I visit an organ shop. Each of the three shops I visited last week has a distinct personality, an aura that reflects the philosophy of its founder, whether living and active or gone for generations. Each building speaks of the passion behind this fascinating art, and each displays craftsmanship at its Old World finest combined with cutting-edge materials and equipment. My thanks to Charles Kegg, John-Paul Buzard, Eric Gastier, and Jeffrey Dexter for sharing their work with me. I am the richer for it, and I promise I won’t pick up any hitchhikers.