In the Wind: Changing seasons

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

Wandering

When I was born, my father was rector of the now-long-gone Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was on Washington Street near the Sullivan Square “T” Station; there is a Brazilian barbeque restaurant in that location now. It was a small parish, but I presume there was a pipe organ—all churches had pipe organs then. I was four months old when Dad was named the first priest for the new Episcopal mission of Saint John in Westwood, Massachusetts, just outside Route 128 (now I-95), which was the first circular perimeter commuter highway in the United States. We moved briefly to a rented house in Westwood, and in 1958, before I was two years old, we were ensconced in the brand-new rectory adjacent to the church building. 

There was a pipe organ at Saint John’s from the start, with a juicy tidbit of American organ history to boot. It was built in 1959 by the Andover Organ Company, then owned by the thirty-four-year-old Charles Fisk. It had one manual, six stops, and a two-manual detached, reversed console, all mounted on a platform—a strange little setup until you realize that it was intended as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual organ, the Great and Pedal to be built later in a free-standing case as the parish grew and funds became available.

The mission building was a simple frame structure with a linoleum floor, and the organ sat down front on the left. The building was also designed to be expanded to greater glory, and that happened starting in 1963 when two towers were added with stained glass faces (I got bagged when at seven years old, I climbed to the top of the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower only to see my parents’ car coming up the road), and a rear balcony was built. My earliest organbuilding memory was seeing that organ hanging outdoors from a crane. The roof had been opened in two places and the organ, pipes and all, was hoisted to its permanent home. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home.

Dad was called to be rector at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966. That is where I had my first experience playing an organ. A new organ by C. B. Fisk was installed there in 1974. I took organ lessons at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a Holtkamp organ installed when Charlie Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, just three years before the Saint John’s organ. I continued my lessons at the First Congregational Church in Winchester on the new three-manual Fisk organ, went to Oberlin to wallow in the renowned fleet of instruments there, and went out into the world as organist and organbuilder.

I have worked for four organ companies including my own, I have served two churches as organist for a total of thirty years, and I have been director of the Organ Clearing House for twenty, a position that has had me in direct contact with hundreds of organs. I have played hundreds (thousands?) of organs in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, even on a Cavaillé-Coll organ in Antananarivo, Madagascar. My wife and I have traveled extensively in Greece where there are very few organs, especially on sailing vacations in the Ionian and Aegean seas, but while I could not get access to it, I laid eyes on a tiny pipe organ in a high balcony in a Roman Catholic church on the Island of Siros. I am thinking that our Greek trips might be the only times since my birth that I have gone more than a week without playing, hearing, or seeing a pipe organ. Until now.

As the Covid-19 pandemic started to break out in early March, we left New York City with extended family for our place in Maine. A few days before that, I visited an E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ built in 1872 (Opus 668) that has been in storage for ten years. My colleagues and I were pulling it out of the container to measure key components to prepare for laying it out in a new location. It was the last instrument I saw. It has been 117 days since I laid eyes on an organ.

Remembering

In April 2016, Wendy and I spent a long week in Great Britain. We sure saw a lot of organs on that trip. I loved seeing the fifty-two-stop Willis organ (1891) in the library of Blenheim Palace. Following the tour path through the building, one first sees the organ partially through an archway at the end of the vast room. The organ was built in the height of the Victorian Era, and it looks it, bedecked with opulent swirls and swoops of carvings and elegant inlaid decorations across the keydesk. Beautifully made mechanical stop actions are visible from the sides, as well as miles of lead tube for the pneumatic keyboard actions. Next to the organ hangs a framed photo of Henry Willis sitting at the console, apparently working on tonal finishing. The case had not been installed yet, and lots of the organ’s innards are visible.

Our host was Andrew Patterson who serves as a volunteer curator of the organ and plays many of the regular recitals. He pointed out a dent in the largest façade pipe of the C-side tower, close to twenty feet off the floor. The story goes that the palace was temporarily home to a school for boys during the Second World War, and the dent was the result of an indoor ball game.

When I was in high school, I was assistant organist at the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, home of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 283 (1860). George Bozeman was the organist, and he figured out how to create a position for me so I could be his regular substitute when he traveled for organ installations. The parish has diminished quite a bit over the years, but the grand organ is still in place hoping for restoration. It was in good shape for my time there, and I learned a lot from it.

I had agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary school chorus in late June, not long before my graduation. I attended a couple rehearsals, and it promised to be a fine event. One beautiful June Sunday, a couple of my pals came to church in Woburn to hear me play, and we took off for the beach after church. I got home that evening to phone messages wondering where I was. You guessed it. I missed the concert. Carl Fudge, the organist of Epiphany in Winchester, was in attendance because his daughter was in the chorus. He volunteered from the audience to mount the stage and to accompany the concert. I wonder if any readers have a lifelong blush from a moment like that.

In the summer of 1976, I worked for Bozeman-Gibson for a few months. The shop was just completing a one-manual organ for the chapel on Squirrel Island, Southport, Maine. John Farmer, long-time organbuilder in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was my senior in the shop, and we would take the organ to Maine for installation. But first, over the Independence Day holiday, we installed the organ temporarily in the crossing of Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross for Barbara Bruns’s performance of Handel organ concertos with the orchestra of the Handel and Haydn Society for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, held in Boston that summer. We worked hard through a couple nights getting the organ set up. In those days, the Orange Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA, aka “the subway”) ran on tracks elevated above Washington Street, and the trains roared past the dark cathedral all night. Other highlights of that convention included Farmer and me playing the appropriate parts in a piece for organist and two organbuilders by Martha Folts on and in the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel, and E. Power Biggs’s last public performance, Rheinberger with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fiedler.

After the convention, we dismantled the organ and drove it to Maine, where we loaded it onto the Squirrel Island ferry, a small vessel a lot like a lobster boat—it took three trips to get the organ there. The only vehicle on the island was the superintendent’s ancient beat-up pickup truck, which took many trips up the dusty road from the dock to the chapel laden with organ parts. A cold beer never tasted so good.

The island was buzzing with news of a recent faux pas. The island is roughly equivalent to a condominium corporation where homeowners own shares of the island and contribute to its upkeep. They had recently banded together for the construction of a water tower that brought “city” water to the island for the first time, eliminating the reliance on quirky wells. With construction complete, the tank was left full of a cleaning solution, and it was the superintendent’s job to empty it at a specified time and fill it with water. So he did, forgetting to open a valve allowing air into the tank as the fluid drained, and the tank collapsed inward with a big bang.

During the job, we took the ferry back to town for an evening or two and followed islanders’ recommendations to eat at Lobsterman’s Wharf in East Boothbay, Maine. My historically informed ongoing Oberlin education was enhanced by a local country-western band sharing such gems as I Just Kicked the Daylights Out of My CB Radio (Google™ didn’t turn it up for me, I wonder if it was an original?) and Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life, written and made famous by Bobby Bare and easily found on YouTube, which I later learned was Bill Clinton’s favorite country song. Forty-four years later, almost to the day, I am sitting at my desk in Newcastle, Maine, on the shore of the Damariscotta River, about six miles upriver from Lobsterman’s Wharf. We have often gone there by boat, tying up at their dock where I can hear the echoes of those two songs.

Adjacent to Lobsterman’s Wharf is the Washburn & Doughty Shipyard, famous for the construction of huge powerful tugboats that service the ports between Boston and New Jersey and move cargo, especially fuel, over the same waters. In July 2008, John Schwandt, then professor of organ at the University of Oklahoma, was staying with us while preparing for a concert on the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland. On July 11, John and I were sitting on a rock on the shore of the river when we noticed a vast plume of smoke to the south. Washburn & Doughty was on fire. The Boothbay Register reported that a 121-foot articulate tug barge and a 92-foot “Z-Drive” tugboat under construction at the time were towed to safety by the heroic efforts of lobstermen from East Boothbay and South Bristol across the river. The shipyard was rebuilt so quickly that local suspicion had it that plans and financing were in place for replacing the building before the fire started mysteriously.

Just a month before that riverside chat, I returned from my first trip to Madagascar. I had traveled on an invitation from Zina Andrianarivelo, ambassador from Madagascar to the United Nations, at the behest of Marc Ravalomanana, the Federal President. The president was also vice-president of the Protestant church there, and in preparation for an important upcoming anniversary, had asked the ambassador to “go back to America and find an organ for this church.” The cold call I received from Zina was the doozy of a lifetime, and I agreed to meet him in New York to discuss it. I was sure I was the only organbuilder at work at the United Nations that day.

I have written before about the travel plans that included no details about hotels or even a flight home. Once in the country, my name would be on a list for notification when there would be a flight back to Paris. Otherwise I had no itinerary whatsoever. Of course, I was treated handsomely. My flight arrived after midnight, I was met at the airport by snappily dressed presidential aides, treated to drinks in the VIP lounge, and whisked forty minutes to the capital where I checked into a room in a four-star, French-owned hotel reserved in the president’s name. As I ventured into the hotel restaurant for breakfast, a server informed me that my driver would be out front in an hour. Richard, the driver with a big government car, took me to the church where I met the ambassador, was given a cell phone, and was introduced to church officials who would show me the dozen or so churches the president wished to enhance with organs. 

I met Adolha Vonialitahina, a lovely young woman who had just graduated from Texas Christian University in a scholarship program instituted by the president. Adolha would be my translator and guide, so I had an entourage. The trip included many rich experiences, including a four-hour drive to Andasibe-Mantadia National Park where I saw lemurs in their natural habitat. We visited a church in Antananarivo (the capital city, colloquially known as Tanariv, or simply, Tana) where they showed me an organ in a non-descript plywood case. When I opened the fallboard I burst into tears. There was the familiar and distinctive gilded nameboard of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. I saw a lovely organ by Merklin in another church, reminding me that Madagascar was a French colony until 1963.

As I returned to JFK Airport, my wife Wendy was leaving for a trip to Jordan with a friend. We were in the airport at the same time. She saw my flight from Paris arrive, but we did not see each other in person, two ships passing in broad daylight.

Delivering an organ to a church in Arlington, Massachusetts, in about 1985, a co-worker slipped on a stairway. When he grabbed wildly to steady himself, he pulled a fire alarm and the city responded with vigor. We called him Sparky after that. And working in an organ loft in Manhattan, I forgot to turn off the smoke detector beam. When I walked in front of it, the horns started blaring. This time it was a big deal because there is a large and active day school in the building, and the FDNY knows to respond with intent. Fire apparatuses filled the cross street and blocked both Park and Lexington avenues. There must have been thousands of people affected, most singularly the rector who was in the shower in the sixth-floor rectory and came to the street with wet hair wearing a cassock. That memory is filed away next to the trip to the beach in 1974.

Twenty years ago, the Calgary International Organ Festival was my host for a project. The Calgary Stampede is held each year on the Fourth of July, a huge rodeo festival celebrating the end of the roundup and castration of the herd. When they asked what I liked to eat, I said since I am from New England, I would pass on Alberta seafood. One fellow rubbed his hands together and smiled, and off we went to Bottlescrew Bill’s Testicle Festival. They don’t taste like chicken.

Bottlescrew Bill’s, the 1976 American Guild of Organists Convention, my trip to Madagascar, the delivery of the organ to Squirrel Island, the tugboat fire, the fire alarm in Manhattan, and the missed concert in Winchester all happened within a week or so of the Fourth of July. Today is July 6th. I wonder when I will see an organ again.

Photo: Squirrel Island organ. Photo credit John Bishop.

Thar she blows.

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

Blower hygiene

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

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

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

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

Biggest in the fleet

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

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

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

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

Hurricanes

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

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

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

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

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

That ingenious business

Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, has resurfaced in public conversation as a character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical, Hamilton. In the king’s featured song, “You’ll be back” (in the style of The Beatles), the crazy king addresses the colonists, singing,

Why so sad? Remember we made an arrangement when you went away? Now you’re making me mad. Remember, despite our estrangement, I’m your man. You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me. . . . And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love. . . .

Wendy and I were fortunate to see Hamilton in the first months of its run on Broadway and were thrilled by the whirling, swirling singing and dancing from the first moments. Sitting to my right was a curmudgeonly man who looked like Winston Churchill (though thankfully not as large) who did not crack a smile until King George made his mincing appearance.

The American pipe organ industry started in the eighteenth century before the birth of “Mad King George.” Johann Gottlob Klemm (1690–1762) was born in Dresden, Germany, where he apparently apprenticed with the great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753). Silbermann was nearly an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who was a great champion of Silbermann’s organs, though a little skeptical of the pianofortes Silbermann built late in his life. Klemm built the first organ for the church now known as Trinity Church Wall Street, New York (in a previous building at the same location), and lived in New York City’s Moravian community until 1757, when he learned that the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, needed an organ.¹

David Tannenberg (1728–1804) was born in Germany, moved to Zeist, the Netherlands, in 1748, and emigrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. He first worked as a joiner, and when Klemm arrived in Bethlehem in 1757, he became Klemm’s apprentice and assistant. After Klemm’s death in 1762 Tannenberg did no organ work for three years, but between 1765 and his death in 1804 he was involved in building more than forty organs.² As he grew older and became concerned that he had no apprentice who could carry on his work, Tannenberg obtained permission from the Moravian elders in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to write to elders in Herrnhut, Germany, asking them to send a suitable candidate. In response, Johann Philip Bachmann (1762–1837) arrived in Bethlehem on February 17, 1793. Two months later he married Tannenberg’s daughter, Anna Maria. Tannenberg and Bachmann worked together building organs until 1800 when tensions between them following Anna Maria’s suicide in 1799 led to their parting ways.³ While installing the organ in the Lutheran church in York, Pennsylvania, seventy-six-year-old David Tannenberg fell from a scaffolding on May 17, 1804, and died two days later.⁴

While most of David Tannenberg’s organs were built in Pennsylvania, he also built instruments for destinations in Albany, New York; Frederick, Maryland; and Salem, North Carolina. It is almost 500 miles from Bethlehem to Salem. I can drive that far in less than seven hours in air-conditioned comfort. It must have been a rough slog to transport an organ such a distance on eighteenth-century roads. There are only a few Tannenberg organs extant, notably the 1798 “Single Brothers’ House” organ restored by Taylor & Boody and installed in a new concert hall at the Museum of Early Southern and Decorative Arts in Old Salem, North Carolina.

Philip Bachmann built organs under his own name until 1821. An organ built by Bachmann in 1819 has been restored by Paul Fritts & Company in Tacoma, Washington, and is now available for installation in a suitable historic and architectural home. You can read the prospectus and see photos at the Fritts website: frittsorgan.com/opus_pages/galleries/bachmann_reconstruct/bachmann_prospectus.html.

Consider these dates. Klemm’s career in America started in the late 1730s—his organ at Trinity Church Wall Street was built in 1741, nine years before Bach’s death. Tannenberg’s career was in full swing in the 1770s, concurrent with the American Revolutionary War. Bachmann died in 1837 when Felix Mendelssohn was twenty-eight and Johannes Brahms was four years old. Klemm, Tannenberg, and Bachmann were all German-born American immigrants who built dozens of organs for the Moravian communities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina during America’s Colonial period. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791; he was twenty years old at the start of the American Revolution.

Three important books

Orpha Ochse (born 1925) received a Master of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1948 and a PhD in 1953. She is ninety-eight years old. The University of Indiana Press published her masterful The History of the Organ in the United States in 1975. The worn and be-scribbled hardcover copy on my desk in Maine is inscribed with my name and “Oberlin, 1975.” I purchased it from the Co-op Bookstore in Oberlin the year it was published. I was nineteen.

Ochse’s book includes the histories of hundreds of American organbuilders, both companies and individuals. She traces the connections between personalities telling us who worked and apprenticed for whom, who influenced whom, and who formed and dissolved partnerships. The book is organized by regions and eras (“Rural Society,” “Expanding Society,” “Industrial Society,” “the Twentieth Century”). The comprehensive index includes thousands of entries making it a necessary first tool for someone like me who spends each day in the office considering and discussing dozens of organs. Many of the biographical details I am including here came straight from Ochse’s book.

The History of the Organ in the United States was released in paperback in 1988 and is still available from the University of Indiana Press, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. If there is an organist in your life who does not own a copy, here is a great gift suggestion. Tell them I sent you.

Organbuilder Raymond Brunner (1949–2020) lived and worked around Lititz and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of many organs built by David Tannenberg and the other Moravian-Pennsylvania Dutch organbuilders. He wrote the authoritative history of that era of American organbuilding under the title That Ingenious Business, published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1991. It includes technical and mathematical information of interest to the sophisticated organbuilder and portrayal of daily life at the end of the eighteenth century, such as a drawing of a Sunday morning at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, with main floor and balcony packed with worshippers, the Tannenberg organ, a preacher gesticulating from the pulpit, and an usher with a stick chasing a dog. ’Twas ever thus. I last saw Ray at breakfast in New York during early planning for the restoration of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I am sorry he did not live to see it.

Stephen L. Pinel’s The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York was published by the OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, in 2021. It is a 624-page monster with appendices and indices that include many historical photographs, timelines, and detailed descriptions of most every Erben organ, alongside contemporary descriptions, reviews, often accompanied by newspaper articles. Its six pounds of minutia about one of America’s most influential organbuilders means that it is not a book for everyone, but a carefully researched, exhaustive tome of immense value.

An urban Erben

Henry Erben (1800–1884) was a premier organbuilder in New York City who built hundreds of organs for locations in New York, New England, and as far away as Texas and California. Imagine the logistics of moving an organ from New York to San Francisco in 1858. Calvary Church (Presbyterian) in San Francisco was formed in 1854 and commissioned an organ from Erben shortly after. The organ was completed in 1858 and loaded onto the clipper ship Caroline Tucker, which left New York on May 13, 1858, and carried the organ around Cape Horn “west about” to San Francisco.⁵

Erben’s father Peter (1771–1863) built organs and pianos and was organist at Trinity Church, New York (known now as Trinity Church Wall Street), into the 1840s. Thomas Hall (1791–c.1875) was an organbuilder who started working in Philadelphia around 1812. In that same year he installed an organ in Saint John’s Chapel in New York and was assisted by twelve-year-old Henry Erben. Hall moved to New York in 1817, and Henry became his apprentice. They formed the partnership Hall & Erben in 1821, which was dissolved in 1835.⁶ Between 1824 and his death in 1884, Henry Erben produced 1,333 organs, 250 of which were built between 1856 and 1860, the firm’s busiest five years.⁷ That’s more than an organ a week. In 1846 Erben built a new four-manual organ for Trinity Church Wall Street (replaced by Hook & Hastings Opus 2168 in 1907), where he quarreled publicly with the church’s organist, Dr. Edward Hodges, who had succeeded his father.

The Erben workshop was located on a corner of Canal and Centre Streets in lower Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Little Italy, one mile from Trinity Church. Erben’s largest intact extant organ was built in 1868 for what is now the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta (north of Little Italy), just six blocks north of the workshop. As I write, the Organ Clearing House is completing the dismantling of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s and shipping it to Brunner & Company in Pennsylvania for restoration. I was in the city last week as the project started and walked between those two churches. It was fun to imagine running into Mr. Erben as he walked the streets between his workshop and two of his important clients. Maybe I would treat him to a fruit smoothie, ubiquitous in the neighborhood today. I wonder what would amaze him most about modern organbuilding? Perhaps electric blowers?

Another Erben afloat

In 2006 the Organ Clearing House sent an Erben organ halfway around the world when the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem in Wellington, New Zealand, purchased a one-manual, six-rank organ built in 1847 from Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, Ellsworth, Maine. The Clearing House crew crated the organ and delivered it to the docks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was loaded into a container for its 9,000-mile journey.

The organ’s specifications are 8′ Open Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason Bass (1–17), 8′ Dulciana (18–56), 4′ Principal, 4′ Flute, and 2′ Fifteenth. There is a permanent coupler from the manual to the seventeen-note pedalboard.

That was the second time that organ traveled by boat. Ellsworth is a small coastal town with a population of about 8,400 located to the northeast of Penobscot Bay in a series of bays and waterways that defines Down East Maine. In the late 1840s there were about 4,000 people living in Ellsworth, and the town boasted nine sawmills, two gristmills, one tannery, eight brickyards, and thirteen shipbuilders, along with several other industries.⁸ There was plenty of work in Ellsworth. To drive there today, one winds along US Route 1, which crosses many bridges over water as it navigates Maine’s legendary rocky coast. It would have been an arduous trip by land in 1847, and traveling by sea was the most efficient and economical way to transport passengers and freight.

The Erben workshop was less than a mile from the docks in New York City, and the Episcopal church in Ellsworth is barely a block from the Union River. The Ellsworth organ traveled only slightly farther by land than the great organs at Old Saint Patrick’s and Trinity Church in New York, mere blocks from the workshop.

§

One of the highlights of visiting an organbuilder’s workshop is the fine woodworking that is such an integral part of the product. Hardwood frame-and-panel doors are as integral to a modern organ case as they were in centuries past, and many internal components sport dovetails and other classic joinery. We identify what variety of wood is being used by the smell in the milling room. There is no mistaking the difference in smell between sawing poplar or white oak.⁹

The same is true with boat building. Several of the coastal Maine towns with shipbuilding heritages are now home to small shops that build wooden pleasure boats by hand, and while organbuilders typically strive for perfectly square corners and straight lines, you hardly find any in a wooden boat. The bow comes to a point, midships swells to the maximum “beam” (width) and tapers back to a narrower stern. The hull often bulbs out a little from the top rails and tapers to a narrow keel below. Viewed from the side, the fairing line of the hull sweeps upward toward the bow. Every line and surface is a complex curve, which means the interior spaces are also full of curves and odd angles.

To start building a boat, the layout of the hull is drawn on the workshop floor looking something like a topographical map with increasing curved lines showing elevation. The keel is placed, and ribs are constructed according to the curves of the hull. The completed keel and ribs look something like a whale’s skeleton turned upside down. The outside of the hull is formed by “planking,” steaming and bending the planks, also called strakes, and fastening them to the ribs. The process reminds me of my years as an apprentice to John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, when we steamed boards until they were flexible and clamped them to a frame to form the bentside of a harpsichord. We had built a box just big enough to enclose the piece of lumber with a goofy rig using tea kettles on hot plates to produce the steam and the flexible tubing we use in organs to conduct the steam to the box. It was one thing to fire up that cute contraption and handle a piping hot board six feet long, one foot wide, and three-quarters of an inch thick. It is quite another to steam and bend a twenty-footer that is two inches thick and bend that around the ribs of a boat.

I witnessed this process on a large scale at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, where the 110-foot whaling ship Charles W. Morgan was being restored in the museum’s shipyard. Watching the workers fastening those massive thick boards to the ribs with wood pegs and bronze spikes was a glimpse back into the time when all ships were made of wood and no ships had engines.

Our boat, a Marshall catboat, had a reliable diesel engine in a spacious hold below the deck that I was happy to use when approaching a dock or mooring. I remember once watching a single-handed sailor leave a crowded mooring field in a large two-masted schooner under full sail. He let go of the mooring line, walked some forty feet back to the wheel, and away he went, weaving through the fleet as if he was rowing a skiff, harking back to the days when diesel engines were not an option, so seamen had to have real skill. Shortly after we bought our boat, I wrote an essay for Catboat Journal about the adventures Wendy and I had sailing her from the boatyard in Padanaram, Massachusetts (near New Bedford), to our house on the Damariscotta River in Maine, 250 miles in six days and five nights. I received an email from a fellow in California who would be teaching a course on handling catboats at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, not far from Ellsworth, saying if we happened to be near Brooklin he’d love to have us address the class. We “happened” to be near Brooklin at the stated date because we arranged our summer around it and had a week-long cruise that took us there.

He invited another catboat sailor to share stories with the class, a veteran single-hander who sailed an older version of the same model boat. The important difference was his boat didn’t have an engine. Fogged in, sit and read. Bad weather coming, sit and read. Need to get ashore for emergency or otherwise, but no wind? Sit and read. We were having dinner at a pub after the class, chatting about our boats, and I told Bill how much I admired his career of sailing single-handed without an engine. His response, “Where do you keep the wine?”

Notes

1. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), page 15.

2. Ibid, page 52.

3. Ibid, page 62.

4. Ibid, page 53.

5. Stephen L. Pinel, The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York (Villanova, Pennsylvania: OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, 2021), page 165.

6. Ochse, page 151.

7. Pinel, page 18.

8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth,_Maine.

9. The smell of sawing ivory or cow bone reminds me of the worst day at the dentist.

Organs and boats (There he goes again.)

Mystic, Connecticut, is a fun destination for people like me with a love for saltwater sailing. The area was originally home to the Native American Pequot people, was settled by British colonists around 1640, and was one of the first ports in New England. It is now home to the Mystic Seaport Museum, which has a vast range of exhibits about the history of sailing in the region. The museum includes a large and comprehensive working wooden boat shop where many important historic vessels have been restored.

Ours is a catboat, one of a class of broad-beamed boats developed for nineteenth-century fishermen in New England, handy enough to sail alone with a large, single sail, stable in choppy water, with plenty of capacity for a large catch. Since Kingfisher entered our lives, we have been members of the Catboat Association with some 2,500 other catboaters. The membership is listed twice in the club’s directory, once alphabetically by last name, and once by the name of the boat.

Each January, the Catboat Association holds a three-day meeting in a large convention hotel a few miles away, and we have had several fascinating dedicated tours of the museum. A highlight of one of those visits was a private tour of the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in existence, undergoing restoration at the time. She was built in 1841, is 107 feet long, nearly thirty feet wide, and was launched after restoration in 2013. During the summer of 2014, she was sailed by a specially chosen crew on a tour of thirty-eight New England ports and is now on permanent exhibit in Mystic.

The director of the restoration was our guide, taking a couple hours out of his hard workday. He showed us how they steamed fifteen- and twenty-foot-long, six-inch-thick oak planks and bent them to fit the compound curves of the ship’s sides, fastening them with heavy handmade wood nails and caulking the seams with tar-soaked hemp. He also shared a remarkable story of the unique problems of material supply in that specialized authentic field.

A main central beam supporting the deck along the length of the ship was rotten beyond saving, and the shipbuilders were at a loss to replace it, when they received a chance call from a contractor who was starting the construction of a large new building in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Wendy and I lived in the Navy Yard for ten years, which is also home to the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy, and is an interesting place to visit. When we had dinner guests whom we knew would be interested, we carried a cocktail around to the Constitution, because the ship fired the Navy’s regulation “sunset gun,” using 7:00 p.m. as the “official modified sunset” in the now residential neighborhood.

Excavation was underway at the site of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital at the north end of the yard when the contractors unearthed more than a dozen huge oak beams unknown in modern times that had been preserved by being buried centuries ago by Navy shipbuilders. The contractor had the imagination and presence of mind to contact the Mystic Seaport asking if they were of any value, and the next day the seaport sent flatbed semi-trailers to collect them. We were shown the beam that had been chosen for the Charles W. Morgan. Anyone interested in historic preservation in any field such as the pipe organ would surely appreciate the fortuitous discovery.

Organ installation

It is mid-January, and I am not here to play with boats. We are spending long working days in the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, a neighborhood of the town of Stonington. The organ was built by Austin Organs, Inc., in 1979 (Opus 2926), with two manuals and fifteen ranks—a modest and simple organ with a clever scheme of borrowing to create a flexible pedal division.

After the start of the second decade of this century, the people of Saint Michael’s were planning a new building, and in 2013 we were engaged to dismantle and store the Austin organ. We would install the organ in the completed new building under a separate agreement. The new building was designed by architect Brett Donham (who also designed the recent renovation of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Boston, and Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, Brookline, Massachusetts), who happens to be a friend of Wendy and me with a summer home just a few miles from our house in Maine.

In the new building, the organ would be installed in a free and open space on the main floor of the building, a rare instance of a new ecclesiastical building with no limitations for the placement of an organ. My organbuilder colleagues will chuckle “too good to be true,” and they would be right. Fundraising fell short, plans for the new building were scrapped, and the existing building would be stripped to its very bones and rebuilt on the same footprint. We would install the organ in the same loft from which it was removed, but—wait for it—the ceiling would be eighteen inches lower over the Swell, stealing space from the organ to allow an enhanced HVAC system.

A colleague subcontractor releathered the Austin actions for us, and we started the installation about ten days ago. Remember the “too good to be true part?” Today is Sunday, and I put the last two cables on the console junctions this afternoon. The church and the organ will be dedicated on Saturday in a two-hour ceremony led by the bishop of the diocese along with combined choirs and brass instruments. We have a busy week ahead of us. We have built a new swell box, repositioned the Swell in relation to the Great to make the most of the available space, relocated the four largest pipes (the only ones that would not fit under the new lower ceiling), and hung the chimes on the wall. We will spend the next several days setting the pipes on the chests, installing the last few appliances (fan tremolo and its electric relay, expression motor, etc.).

The birth of a new building

The finished church building is lovely. The windows and oak wainscoting are bordered with attractive and colorful stenciled patterns, the walls are painted a rich brick red, new light fixtures with fancy controls and state-of-the-art bulbs illuminate the place effectively, and an intricate system of wood trusses supports the pitched ceiling, a huge change from the tacky dropped ceiling in the original building.

The high altar and reredos are made of wood but are receiving a faux-marble painted finish by the Golubovic family. Milan Church Restoration is run by Marco Golubovic, whose family came to the United States from Serbia in the early 1990s. His parents are the artists who marbleized the altar. We have been watching them with interest as they transform the primed-white structure to stone, making mixtures of tubed colored oils and lined oil, sketching “marbly” designs in pencils, and applying the colored veins to the wood with fine artist brushes, sponges, and the occasional finger-painted streak.

The “altar system” has a special feature. The altar itself is mounted on well-concealed wheels and can be used either as a free-standing fixture with the priest facing the congregation or can be pushed against the reredos under the centered tabernacle so the priest can celebrate Mass in traditional style with his back to the congregation.

In 1979, I helped install the Flentrop organ in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, where I later played several recitals, and which was the site of my first wedding. The altar and pulpit in that church are made of richly veined marble that look for all the world as though they are made of blue cheese. The artists at work this week at Saint Michael’s are good at painting blue cheese. It is reminiscent of Homer’s account of the Greek god Poseidon who turned a Phaeacian ship into stone, punishing them for aiding his enemy Odysseus.

The Stations of the Cross are molded and carved pieces about thirty inches high and twenty-four inches wide. The figures and architectural images are colorfully painted, and each piece weighs about fifty pounds. The general contractor replaced the hardware and steel wire to hang them on the walls, similar to hanging a heavy painting in your home. The wire they chose was not up to the job, and last week two of the stations fell to the floor within twelve hours of each other. Late one evening, the priest and project manager removed the remaining twelve from the wall lest they, too, should fall. Fortunately, Milan Church Restorations also specializes in the restoration of liturgical art, and they were able to repair the severe damage to the plaster pieces on short notice. A different wire was chosen, and the pieces were quickly rehung.

The new sound system was tested and calibrated last week. I am not much of a fan of public address systems, and I have heard many that distort rather than enhance the spoken word. I have often noticed that the technicians who work with those systems are very good at counting, but their range is limited: “one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . .” It reminds me of the old vaudeville gag of a horse counting by stomping its feet. The techs were very proud to demonstrate that the microphones could handle anything they were offered. You could approach with voice meek and mild, the microphone pointing at your forehead, whimpering through a passage of scripture, or you could lean into it and thunder, fire, and brimstone. Goodness, he must have practiced that routine, and through it all, I was sitting on an upturned bucket, sorting wires at the junction in the back of the console (white with blue, blue with white, . . . violet with green, green with violet) with a PA speaker ten inches from my head. Actually, not through it all. After several minutes, I stood up, waved my arms above my head as if I was marooned on a desert island, and asked ol’ silver tongue to turn off the balcony speakers.

As we race toward completion, as the general contractor prepares to leave the building officially in a couple days, as the pastor paces around the building noting details, and as UPS delivers eight hundred new hymnals, we are aware of the sense of anticipation. They have been worshipping in a neighboring church for almost seven years, and they have missed their home parish. The pastor brings a small group of people into the building several times a day, and I have heard their exclamations, their excitement, even weeping. Some wander into the choir loft and shake their heads at the complexity of the pipe organ. Inwardly, we reflect that it is actually a very small and simple organ, but to them, who have never seen the innards of a pipe organ, it is as much a marvel as a Silbermann organ was to an eighteenth-century Alsatian vintner. It is certainly not my job to correct them, as in, “Actually, this organ is pretty simple.” It’s their organ, they’re proud of it, and they love it.

Let us remember a time when most every local, even rural church had a four-, six-, or eight-rank pipe organ that they loved and valued. M. P. Möller built over thirteen thousand organs, most of which were smaller “factory models,” as did Casavant, Reuter, Schantz, and others. While so many smaller churches purchase substitute instruments now, we celebrate those that own and cherish a real pipe organ.

My friend Jim

I have wired dozens of organs in my career. It is work I enjoy, and I draw from my experience as an organist to enhance my understanding of the complex wiring schemes. When I am sorting out cables, I can picture the musician using a particular function of the organ. I know why it is there, how it is used, why it is important, and I love hooking up those wires. (“She’s gonna use the Great to Pedal reversible a lot.”) Wendy is an avid weaver who revels in the complex patterns possible with the multiple shafts of the loom. There is a poetic similarity between weaving and organ wiring—both crafts create matrices with two axes, both rely on neatness and predictability for their beauty. (The trackers and stop actions of an organ with mechanical action also have rich parallels with weaving.)

My career started in the late 1970s, just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were becoming common. A few of the first organs I renovated and installed had electro-mechanical switching systems with phosphor-bronze contacts as developed by early twentieth-century organ building pioneers like Austin, Skinner, Casavant, and Möller, but since at least 1980, virtually every organ I have finished has included solid-state controls. The Austin organ at Saint Michael’s has analog switching—the simple relays (touch boxes) at the tail end of the keyboards in thousands of Austin organs. It is the first time in decades that I have wired an entire organ “the old-fashioned way.”

It is ironic, because my old pal Jim Mornar retired from Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc., at the end of 2019. Back in the 1980s when I was first working independently, I attended a couple informational seminars at the Peterson plant to enhance my understanding of their equipment. That is when I got to know Jim personally, and in the ensuing decades, with his help, I purchased dozens of systems from Peterson for rebuilding consoles and updating entire organ systems.

I have spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Jim, each call starting with casual banter and moving gradually toward the problem at hand. Often, it was “my bad.” “Did you connect the ground?” “Yes, of course, . . . oooh, . . . maybe not, . . . never mind.” Sometimes it was a serious puzzle. I would describe a problem in excruciating detail and could picture Jim’s hand rubbing his chin as if I was nuts. “That can’t be.” “It is.”

When placing a call to Peterson (answered by Marlene or Karyn) I would ask for Uncle Jim. (He is just a couple years older than I am.) They often told me he was on the phone. He would call back an hour later, just to get on a fifty- or sixty-minute call with me. I suppose his job was to talk on the phone, but I know he designed and built the systems I ordered.

There are hundreds of organists who have no idea how important Jim Mornar was to the effectiveness and reliability of the instruments they play. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.) Nice work, Jim. You are the best.

Going out in flames

I mentioned Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, which was recreated by architect Brett Donham after a significant fire in the 1980s. It is home to an organ built by George Bozeman & Company of Deerfield, New Hampshire, affectionately known by the Bozeman workshop as Orgelbrookline. I worked for George during the summers of 1975 and 1976, my first experience in an organ workshop. Early in the summer of 1976, we all participated in moving the shop to Deerfield from Lowell, Massachusetts.

When I was a young teenager, I sang in the choir of my home church with George’s wife, Pat, and together they were important mentors to me, introducing me to the world of the pipe organ, especially as it flourished in the heady days of the “tracker revival” in Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I will always be grateful for the care and attention they offered a young organ geek.

George retired, the company closed, and he continued to live in a cottage behind the main house on the property whose barn was the workshop, until recently when he offered the whole place for sale and moved to a retirement community. The Organ Clearing House had used the workshop for storage and a few small projects, and we removed our material in advance of the closing. The electricity had been shut off for quite a while as the building was barely being used. A few days after the closing, the new owner turned on the main switch and was checking some electrical circuits when there were sparks, and within a few minutes the building was engulfed with flames.

It was no longer George’s building and it was no longer an organ workshop, but it sure was sad to see it go down. The historic home of a creative company was lost.

Rites of passage. Thank you, George. Thank you, Jim.

One size fits all.

As a plus-sized organ guy whose shoulders are four or five inches wider than an airplane seat, I always sit in an aisle seat so I do not have to crunch up against my neighbor. Instead, I am regularly clobbered by the flight attendant’s cart and the sloppiest of my fellow passengers as they negotiate the trek to the restroom. Years ago, on a flight to who knows where, I was seated next to a young woman who was sitting with her legs curled under her on her seat. I marveled at her flexibility, and when we stood to deplane, I realized she was under five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds or less. We had paid the same price for our seats, and she was sitting perfectly comfortably while I was squeezed into my seat like toothpaste in a tube. Hats, mittens, or leggings might be sold as one-size-fits-all, but I know that really means they will be loose on small people and tight on large people.

So it goes with education. Modern public schools are governed by the demands of standardized testing as if every child in America needs an identical education. My son Chris teaches English as a second language in an urban public high school where his students are first- or second-generation immigrants who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese at home, as it is typical that their parents do not speak English. These kids cannot be expected to thrive if they are being held to the same standards as their classmates who grew up speaking nothing but English. It is a heinous form of discrimination.

My other son Mike did not finish high school but worked in a succession of bicycle shops as a teenager and graduated to specialized piping, building the complex networks of tubing in university research labs. When he told me he had learned to do internal welding on eighth-inch stainless steel tubing, I knew he was going to be okay. He has now had a fifteen-year career with an architectural fabrication firm where he builds high-end signage with complex electrical systems, like the miles of LED displays that encircle the guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. He built and installed all the road signs for Terminal B of Logan Airport in Boston (“Central Parking, Next Left”), interior signs for Madison Square Garden including the jumbotron, and the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. You might think that Mike is disadvantaged because he did not have algebra or calculus in high school, but he uses more complex mathematics at his workstation every day than many of us do in a lifetime.

I had an industrial arts class in middle school where I learned to use a stationary shear, a metal brake, rollers, and rivets making a half-pipe-shaped, sheet-metal firewood caddy with decorative black iron legs and hoop handle. That gold-painted beauty stood next to the fireplace in my parents’ home until they moved into assisted living forty years later. I had algebra in high school, but I sure spent a lot of days in my career as an organ builder developing the metal-working skills I learned when I was thirteen.

In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), Matthew Crawford wrote about the dwindling of public school industrial arts education as schools focused more on standardized testing and achieving 100% college admissions. The second paragraph of his book’s introduction begins, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” He goes on to describe how modern engineering focuses on “hiding the works” by designing machines so that you cannot tell how they are put together or how they work. Open the hood of a new car, and you can hardly tell there is an engine in there, and to keep our precious hands clean, some newer Mercedes models do not have dipsticks, as if it is not the owner’s responsibility to pay attention to whether there is oil in the engine.

In 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act that provided funding for manual training in public schools, both as part of general education and as designated vocational schools. Crawford cites that starting around 1980, 80% of public high school shop programs began to disappear.¹ Throughout the book, he makes the case that while some people flourish practicing law or managing businesses, many people are cut out to work with their hands, gaining the satisfaction of making or repairing something, what he calls “primary work.” He points out that surgery is a meeting of intellectual and manual disciplines. Standardized testing implies that a kid who is destined to be a plumber needs the same foundation as one who will be a musician or a corporate executive. Who can tell the future of a ten-year-old? You can’t. You provide all children with an education that includes academics, the arts and humanities, the industrial world, and sports, and hope that each child will be captivated by something—liberal arts for teenagers.

Simply reading the table of contents of Crawford’s book gives an overview of his point of view regarding the manual arts: “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts;” “The Separation of Thinking from Doing;” “To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff;” “The Education of a Gearhead;” “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional;” “The Contradictions of the Cubicle;” “Thinking as Doing;” “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement.” As an organ builder, I have spent much of my life negotiating and contemplating the differences between blue- and white-collar work, and I recommend this book as a good read with lively writing and philosophical musings from the life of a literary motorcycle mechanic.

Early in my career, living and working in Oberlin, Ohio, one of our friends taught diesel mechanics at the vocational high school. What could be more valuable to a rural farming community than a new generation of diesel mechanics? Let’s face it, we need plumbers and auto mechanics more than we need organ builders. Those kids at Voke-Tech were onto something.

Jack of all trades

David Margonelli was a woodworker whose shop was in Edgecomb, Maine, a few miles downriver from our house. His first woodworking project was a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox, a small shallow draft boat that could be sailed, rowed, poled, or sculled. He was interested in Shaker furniture early on, and over the years developed pieces that combined the Shaker tradition with elegant curves such as a chest of drawers with bowed front or a bow-legged dining table. He had an elaborate vacuum table set up in his shop, like that found in many organ building workshops used for gluing windchest tables to grids, that allowed him to use the pressure of the atmosphere to create his curved elements.

We have one of his tables in our apartment in New York. It is made of cherry with the signature bowed legs and a neat sliding mechanism to allow the addition of two leafs for larger dinners. It has been the host of countless wonderful dinners, and its graceful shape is a beautiful addition to our home. David was a gnarly old guy, very sure of himself, and proud of his designs and craftsmanship, and I loved visiting his shop as much as I love sharing meals at his table.

Camden, Maine, a coastal town an hour or so east from us, is home to a little shop that sells handmade leather goods where I bought a bag made of supple black leather that I use as a second briefcase. It is just the size of an iPad or letter-sized paper folded in half and has three zipper compartments with enough space for a phone/iPad charger, hand sanitizer, pens, a Moleskine notebook, and a bottle of water. It has a long, adjustable leather strap so I can carry it around my neck, and I take it to local meetings and on short trips when I know I am not going to need my MacBook. I never met the artisan who made it, but I appreciate the accurate cutting of the material, the careful hand stitching, and the thoughtful usefulness of the design.

Early in 2013, I was tuning a venerable Hutchings organ in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a 127-year-old ladder collapsed under me. I had a classic view of a receding ceiling and landed flat on my back on the miraculously flat and uncluttered floor of the organ. (If I had landed on a windline, I would have never walked again.) Following surgery and rehab, and our first season with our new sailboat (we called it the Sciatica Cruise), I contacted those clients whose organs were particularly treacherous and suggested (required) that we would install new ladders, handholds, and railings to reduce the risk of accidents. There is a little metal fabricating shop in our neighboring village of Damariscotta, Maine, where two guys cut and weld iron to make things like gear for commercial fishing boats amidst a gallery of tool calendars. I took them drawings for a collection of railings and ladders, and it is a lot safer to work in those organs now.

All these skills and the specialized tools involved are part of the art of organ building. Add to them sophisticated electrical systems, mechanical and structural engineering, architecture, and the musical realm of voicing and tuning, and you approach the complete organ builder.

It takes a village.

Having spent countless hours and days on job sites, bringing organs in and out of churches and maintaining those in place, I reflect frequently on the wide range of trades and vocations. An organ builder must be conversant with musicians, clergy, and the lay or professional leaders who operate churches and equally at home with custodians, electricians, HVAC workers, and the plumbers who install overhead sprinkler systems. We deal with building and fire inspectors, insurance adjusters, and lumber vendors. And working with the Organ Clearing House, almost every job involves scaffolding and trucking. It is funny to deal with a big-city pastor and a scaffold delivery driver from Queens, New York, in the same morning, especially when it turns out that the pastor is the tough customer while the driver is a sweetheart who just wants to get things right.

In 2004, we dismantled a huge M. P. Möller organ in a chamber above the 125-foot-high ceiling of a 19,000-seat convention center. As it was in the union city of Philadelphia, we started the project with a meeting that would define who would be allowed to do what work. Representatives of the unions for riggers, laborers, and carpenters were present along with administrators of the University of Pennsylvania, which owned the site. I described how delicate organ parts can be in spite of their industrial appearance, and the guy from the riggers’ union assured me that their men had vast experience. “We’ve been rigging in Philadelphia for 100 years, we’re the guys who moved the Liberty Bell.” I quipped, “Are you the ones who cracked it?” He did not think it was funny, but there were audible snickers around the table. The laborers insisted they should be in the organ chamber with us, moving the crates around. In the end, I won the point that we “owned” the organ chamber, that no one but us could handle organ parts until they were packed, but as soon as a crate or organ part got to the riggers’ rope we could not touch it again. We found out that “touch” really meant touch. Later in the job, one of our guys was on the floor guiding the laborers about how to place and stack crates, and he pushed a loaded dolly a few feet. A whistle blew, the work stopped, and I had to go to an emergency meeting with the unions to smooth things over.

Mike, one of the riggers, showed up one morning looking pretty rough. His pal told us that he had been in a bar the night before that had a boxing ring set up where patrons could wrestle with a bear, and the bear had won. Hughie (six foot, eight inches tall) stands out in my memory. The union was requiring him to attend anger management classes because he had beat up a highway toll collector as he passed through the booth. (Who gets that angry in that short a time?) We got along famously, and I will never forget the goodbye hug he gave me when the job was finished. The music theory classes I had at Oberlin had nothing to do with preparing me for Hughie’s hug, but I am sure that my knowledge of theory and harmony has informed my tuning.

§

We are all aware of the decline of “electives” in public schools like home economics, industrial arts, and the arts in general. The focus on college acceptance and standardized tests seems to hinder a thorough education. It is a common sentiment now that public schools could and should offer courses in life skills like family budgeting, tax preparation, investing, and auto maintenance, things that all of us need to know and learn on our own later if our parents do not teach us.

I repeat the quote from Matthew Crawford’s book, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” When I visit an art museum, I marvel at the manual skills of painters, sculptors, potters, and jewelers from centuries and millennia past. If you have never held tools in your hands, never tried to carve a piece of wood, or never put brush and paint to canvas, you will have less understanding of the magic that is around you. Visit the ancient sites in Greece or Rome, and imagine the knowledge, skill, and singular sense of purpose necessary to build the Colosseum, a 10,000-seat amphitheater, or craft an ornately decorated pottery urn.

When I was an apprentice in John Leek’s shop in Oberlin, Ohio, he taught me how to plane a rough board by hand before letting me loose on the thickness planer. That was a great lesson about sharpening and handling tools and understanding the flow of grain in a piece of wood so my plane would not tear chips out of the surface if I worked against the grain. That experience enhanced my appreciation of the historic organs I have visited and worked on in the United States and Europe. That iconic fifty-foot-tall organ case in Haarlem is made of lumber that was planed and cut without electric tools and machines. I get blisters on my hands just thinking about it. Since the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, we have seen video footage of the wooden superstructure of that building, made by artisans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Felling trees, milling them into huge beams, transporting them from the forest to the city, and hoisting them hundreds of feet in the air with only the power of humans and oxen to haul wagons and turn winches is practically beyond belief.

Wendy and I are in New York City this week, and because of some complicated twists of schedule, a friend is staying in our house in Maine taking care of Farley, the Goldendoodle. She called at five o’clock Saturday evening saying there was no running water in the house. I walked her through resetting the pump at the wellhead without results, so I called Darren, the plumber. Meanwhile, I told her that she had three flushes (there are three toilets), after which she could use the outhouse. Darren was at the house in fifteen minutes, cleaned the filter at the pressure tanks (of course, the filter), and Cassie had water again. Take good care of your plumber, pay his bills promptly, and he will take good care of you.

Notes

1. Michael B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), p. 11.