In the Wind: Climate change

How does it work?

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

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

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

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

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

Press the key and the pipe blows.

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

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

Pipes and registrations

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

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

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

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

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

Wind

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

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

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

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

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

Windchests

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

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

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

It’s all about air.

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

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

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

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

A postscript

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

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

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

Mechanical failure

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

Take care of your machines.

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

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

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

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

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

Try it again without making noise.

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

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

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

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

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

The most mechanical of musical instruments

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

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

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

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

Things that go bump in the night

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

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

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

Going out with a bang

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

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

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

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

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.

Everything’s under control.

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

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

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

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

New-fangled

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

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

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

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

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

Artifacts

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

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

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

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

It was a hacksaw.

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

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

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

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

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

It played.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Didn’t miss a Sunday.

String too short to save

After my freshman year at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, I spent the summer working with Bozeman-Gibson & Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was 1975, and on my first day working in an organ shop, I was set up in the parking lot with sawhorses, a set of painted façade pipes, a can of Zip-Strip®, and a hose. If that wasn’t enough to send me running, I guess I was hooked. They were working on the restoration of an 1848 Stevens organ in Belfast, Maine, completing a new organ in Castleton, Vermont, and installing a rebuilt historic tracker (I do not remember the builder) in a Salvation Army chapel in Providence, Rhode Island. A lot of the summer was spent driving around New England between those organs, my first glimpse into the life of a vagabond organ guy.

During my sophomore year I started working part time for John Leek, the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. I spent the next summer working with Bozeman during which the company moved to their permanent workshop in Deerfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple hours of “barn building” each day after the organ building. I continued part time with Leek as long as I was a student and switched to full time after I graduated. Counting the summers and part-time work, I have been at it for forty-six years.

After Christmas of 2019 I retired from working on organs on site and in my workshop. No more weeks spent wiring organs, no more service calls, no more console rebuilds—my favorite workshop job. I hasten to add that I continue to run the Organ Clearing House, managing the sale of vintage organs, and keeping the crew busy. I am still working as a consultant and still writing monthly columns. They will have to snatch the MacBook® from my cold dead hands. I have not yet imagined a time when I would not be doing some type of work with pipe organs.

With the outbreak of Covid, Wendy and I left New York City for our place in Maine, bringing the families of two of our kids with us. My private workshop, the three-car garage, became a staging space for groceries for our expanded household as we quarantined everything we brought into the house. When winter turned to spring, we added a refrigerator beside the garage freezer. The workshop has always been at least part boatyard. I have a couple shelves of boat parts, the expensive stainless-steel screws we use around salt water, and there are several lengths of surplus line hanging on a wall. You never know when you are going to need some more line. It is also a gardening shed and kitchen overflow storage for the bigger pots and pans. Lobster pots, roasting pans, and canning jars live on the shelves above the fridge.

This sounds like a lot of clutter, but I still have not mentioned the cabinets, shelves, and industrial drawers full of organ parts and hardware I have accumulated over the years. One year I restored an Aeolian residence organ with its paper roll player. It was playable in the shop for a summer, and we had a string of dinner parties during which we would suggest a break before dessert and leave the table for an organ demonstration. Some of Wendy’s publishing friends and colleagues needed that to understand just what I do for a living. “It was always mysterious to me!” I have rebuilt four or five consoles here, refinishing cabinets, rebushing keyboards, and retrofitting solid-state controls and electric drawknobs.

I know I will keep most of the general hardware as long as we live here. It is handy to have hundreds of sizes of screws arranged in drawers to support home repair projects. This summer, I cut up several lengths of half-inch threaded rod and collected the necessary washers, nuts, and lock washers for a tool hanger I built in the shed. Mending plates, corner braces, and hinges will always come in handy. I have felt and punches to make pads for the bottoms of chair legs; I have lubricants and finishes for pretty much any purpose and big, well-lit workbenches. It is my own private hardware store. Funny, I still go to the hardware store most weeks.

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

Along with his organ work, John Leek built harpsichords, and as we made those keyboards and brass levers to control “choirs” of jacks, I learned about polishing. I have a bench grinder that spins abrasive wheels, wire wheels, and cloth polishing wheels. There is a drawer full of bars of polishing compound, a rake for dressing the cloth wheels, and the nasty wheel with an iron handle for dressing the abrasive wheels. I rejuvenated a rusty cast-iron skillet using the wire wheel. Handy.

There is a case of Parson’s sudsy ammonia on a high shelf. I think there are ten bottles left in it. It is a terrific solution for use in my ultrasonic cleaner. I have used it to clean reed shallots and tongues, little brass console parts like screws and switches. I will hang onto all this because there are lots of things around the house that need polishing, and Wendy’s engagement ring looks great after an ultrasonic swim in sudsy ammonia.

Totally tubular

I have worked on all sorts of pneumatic actions from different organ builders, many of which incorporate some type of rigid or flexible tubing. Seventy-year-old rubber tubing is likely to be crumbling apart. Quarter-inch (interior diameter) tubing is common to many different types of organs, so I have hundreds of feet of that in a coil, destined to be cut into six-inch pieces. There is about forty feet of three-quarter-inch (ID) heavy plastic tubing with nylon webbing embedded. It is made for high-pressure hot water in small gasoline engines, and it was great for use as pneumatic tubing in a big expression motor. I have coils of copper tubing and some straight lengths of aluminum and brass tubing. You never know when you are going to need some.

Parts is parts.

Sometime ago I got the idea that it would be clever to have a supply of the waxed boxes used for Asian carry-out food for storing specific organ parts. I used them for a while, decided they were ridiculous, and discarded most of the minimum order of 1,000 boxes, but some are still around. One is labeled “Schlicker console parts.” I installed a Peterson system in a Schlicker console. Having serviced many Schlicker organs over the years, I know that the little pressed metal toggles in the “ka-chunk” combination actions can wear and break or simply fall out, and here were two or three hundred of them going to waste. I used four or five for a service call repair, and I still have the rest of them. Pretty sure I am not going to need them again.

I have boxes of Austin magnets, Austin note motors, Kimber Allen keyboard contacts, pedalboard contacts, Heuss nuts, leather nuts, compass springs (for the pallets in slider windchests), pouch springs, fiber discs (for making pouches and valves), many sizes and styles of felt and paper punchings for regulating keyboards, and even coils of wire for stringing harpsichords.

For a short while I repaired and rebuilt harmoniums, and I have a heavy box full of the brass reeds. They must have been salvaged from derelict instruments. I do not remember where I got them, but I doubt I did the salvaging because I would have kept them separated and labeled by voices. I may have used ten of them, and the rest are here if anyone wants them. A soak in sudsy ammonia would help. Another box is full of keyboard ivories. I “harvested” them from old pianos and organ keyboards, and having a miscellany of ivories really is useful as you can pick through them to match color and size. While I used many of them for service call repairs and refurbishing old keyboards, I am probably finished with them now.

On the high shelf near the tubing, there is a stack of boxes of various types of windchest magnets. Some have pipe valves that work either electrically or pneumatically, others are the standard “screw cap” chest magnets for pitman and offset chests. And for those times when you are changing wind pressure, there are boxes of magnet caps with one-quarter-inch and three-sixteenths-inch exhaust holes. None of these will have household use.

There are about twenty three-foot cardboard tubes in the rafters containing skins of leather and yards of felt, fabric, and cork. There is enough material to releather a ten-stop pitman chest and a half-dozen reservoirs. There is pouch leather, gusset leather, alum-tanned leather for reservoir belts, and several types and weights of pneumatic leather. I am not sure how much of it I will use, but as I recently gave Wendy a big piece of thin black felt for a sewing project, I will assume it is worth keeping. Since it is up high, it is not in anyone’s way.

Twenty or thirty years ago, industrial chemists developed spray cans of graphite lubricant, perfect for treating windchest tables, sliders, and toeboard bottoms so slider stop action would work smoothly. Before switching to that, I mixed flake graphite with denatured alcohol creating a paste that I scooped with latex-gloved hands and rubbed over all the surfaces. It was a messy process, but when the alcohol evaporated, a rich, even coat of graphite glistened on the wood. Heaven help you if you spilled any on the floor. I have most of a gallon can of graphite that I guess I do not need anymore. I also have half a case of that graphite spray. I can use it on snow shovels to keep snow from sticking to them.

Material handling

In industrial catalogues, material handling is the section that includes dollies, carts, pallet jacks, and all the tools and equipment used to move things around. You can buy a Drum Dolly, a two-wheeler designed specifically to handle 55-gallon drums or a refrigerator dolly—you can guess what that’s for. A refrigerator dolly is a two-wheeler with straps to hold the load in place, and rubber belts that move over wheels on the back so you can haul the fridge up stairs. I have used mine for hauling reservoirs upstairs to choir lofts. The upright freezer in the garage needs to be defrosted occasionally. That can be a nasty job, but it is pretty simple here, and we have been “eating it down” in preparation. Soon, I will move the last few things into the top of the Covid fridge, wheel the freezer through the overhead door, and stand it in the dooryard facing the sun with the door open. It takes a few hours, and there is no need to catch the water.

I have a come-along, a tool with a steel cable, hooks on both ends, and a long handle that pumps a ratchet. I bought it when we were installing an organ and realized it needed to be a few inches to the left. A half-dozen pumps of the handle was all it took to scootch the organ to its proper place. I have not used it on a job since, but we have a half-mile wooded driveway that trees fall on occasionally. I can often hitch a chain to loops on my car and drag a tree out of the way, but several times I have used the come-along tied to another tree to do the job when I cannot make the angle with the car. We also use it to pull the dock out of the water. I am keeping that.

The opposite of the come-along is a house jack that I have used often when releathering reservoirs. After the hinges are glued to the ribs, the pairs of ribs are glued to the body and top, and the belts are glued on all around, you have to open the thing fully before gluing on the gussets. You are stretching all the new material and glue, and it can be a heavy lift, especially on a large reservoir. I have done it with blocks and levers, but a hand-pumped hydraulic house jack is just the ticket. When our daughter wanted to convert a small shed into a pottery studio, our son-in-law and I jacked up the shed and repaired its structure. I will keep the jack.

Another tool I used when gluing reservoirs is the big double-boiler you see keeping soup warm in a cafeteria line. Having hot wet rags is essential when using hot glue, and I have a Sharpie mark on the front for the little volume knob, setting the temperature high enough to soften excess glue, but not so hot that I cannot put my hands in it. When I was gluing four or five reservoirs at once, the pot would be hot all day, and I would change the water every hour as it got dark with the glue. We like to give big parties, and a steaming pot of clam chowder would be just the thing for a chilly fall cookout, but I think this appliance has too many miles on it for use in food service. It is handy for soaking labels off jars.

My Rubbermaid® rolling table has ball-bearing casters and a load limit of 500 pounds. I know it can bear more than that. It is about the same height as my workbenches and the rear end of my Chevy Suburban, so I can wheel a windchest or reservoir from the back of the car to the workbench without lifting anything, and it is perfect for moving lumber between planer, table saw, and cut-off saw. I can also wheel groceries from the car to the Covid fridge, and I have even used it to wheel our eight-foot fiberglass dinghy to the car. Yes, you can put an eight-foot dinghy in a Suburban and close the door. I get fussy when other people in the family leave stuff on my rolling table because I like to keep it free for the next use. I’m keeping it.

One of our kids bought a couple big inflatable rubber swim toys. I especially like the Grandpa-sized pink inner tube with its five-foot dragon tail, lots of fun for swimming off the dock with our grandchildren, and it is convenient to have an air compressor with a big assortment of fittings. It saves fifteen minutes of huffing and puffing when you could be in the water. The fifty-foot air hose hangs on a steel column between garage bays, so it only takes a moment to set up to check the air of the tires on cars parked outside.

Perspective

There is almost no end to the list of tools, materials, supplies, and equipment in my garage workshop. I am still using most of the tools for projects around the house. This summer I built a neat set of drawers using quarter-sawn oak to match my library table desk. I am just starting a new “private drive” sign for the top of the road using birch lumber left over from a set of bookcases I made for Wendy’s office. I will use a pin-router to make the lettering. Wendy is a talented and productive weaver, and there is nothing like an organ builder as tech department for a house with two looms.

I hope this little tour is informative to organists who might not know much of what is behind the service technician who works on your organ or the organ company that built or rebuilt it. Mine is a light-duty shop, a delight for me to work in alone or with a colleague or two. It is especially nice in the summer with the overhead doors open. I keep thinking I will not do any more organ work there, but it is easy to imagine a time when our crew is working nearby and something needs to be releathered quickly. I might just bend the rule.

Industrial hygiene

Photo caption: Boardwalk Hall showing the locations of organ chambers and the adjacent Trump Hotel: 1, Right Stage chamber: Great, Solo, Solo-Great, Grand Great, Pedal Right; 2, Right Forward chamber: String II, Brass Chorus; 3, Right Center chamber: Gallery I, Gallery II; 4, Right Upper chamber: Echo; 5, Left Upper chamber: Fanfare, String III; 6, Left Center chamber: Gallery III, Gallery IV; 7, Left Forward chamber: Choir; 8, Left Stage chamber: Swell, Swell-Choir, Unenclosed Choir, String I, Grand Choir, Pedal Left. (photo credit: Historic Organ Restoration Committee)

In this year of Covid, we have stepped up our personal hygiene. We are wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and not touching public surfaces. We are reciting the alphabet or the Lord’s Prayer while washing our hands. In an earlier column, I suggested the famous hand-washing lines from Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” If you recite it with feeling, you can easily get twenty seconds from it. A meme suggested, “I’ve used so much hand sanitizer that the answers to my eighth-grade social studies test appeared on my wrist.”

Over forty-five years of working on pipe organs, I have used the words “industrial hygiene” to describe how a congregation keeps its buildings. A few years ago, I visited a church in the Pacific Northwest where the rector told me that when he started his ministry there, every nook and cranny was stuffed with junk. He spent a lonely late evening walking through the building, looking into closets, desk drawers, kitchen cabinets, and mechanical spaces, determined to remove anything unneeded to reclaim usable space in the valuable building.

With the support of the vestry and lots of volunteer labor from the members, dumpsters were loaded with the detritus of years of neglect, cabinets were scrubbed, and closets were painted. New ministries were developed, and by the time I visited the place, the building was neat and clean and bustling with all sorts of activity.

This topic comes up in these pages occasionally, typically inspired by the current flow of work of the Organ Clearing House. Loyal readers will recall the organist who called in a panic on a Saturday as a wedding was about to start and the organ wouldn’t. I bolted to the church, walked through the throng of limo drivers, bagpipers, bridesmaids, and groomsmen to the cellar stairs under the organ and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake.

I served a large church in a suburb of Boston as director of music. When I went to the church to audition for the position, I noticed that the stalls in the men’s room were wobbly. They were still wobbly when I left the position seventeen years later. Two years ago, we installed an organ in a small church in rural New Jersey. The building was about thirty years old, attractive and simple, but I was most impressed by the beautifully furnished and equipped restrooms. After decades of experience with crumbling facilities in aging buildings, this made the job much more pleasant. When I commented on this to the pastor, he told me that he was disappointed in the condition of the restrooms when he arrived and thought the good people of the church deserved better. That is a nice way for the church to welcome you.

In one church, we had to climb an iron ladder and walk across the attic to reach the door of the organ chamber. The life-sized plywood cut-outs that formed the Nativity scene for the front lawn were in the attic, and there was the manger, the size of a baby’s crib, laden with a hay bale with a wisp of smoke curling toward the ceiling as its innards decomposed. I lugged it down the ladder to the hallway, went to the office to report it to the secretary, and left the building for lunch. When I came back an hour later, the hay bale had been dutifully returned to the attic. I am pretty sure there would have been a fire if I did not drag it down again, this time outside to the driveway.

Going for the first time to a church with a large organ, I went to the basement to inspect the blower. There was a big old Spencer Orgoblo safely ensconced in a fireproof enclosure that was chock full of junk: a four by eight plywood sign announcing the 1968 church fair, some baby carriages that I supposed failed to sell in 1968, boxes of books, and a hanger rack festooned with abandoned choir robes. Another organ is out of tune, and by the sound of it, we figure there is something wrong with the wind pressure. Yup, a stack of folding chairs lying on the reservoir. That will do it.

Protection

An extension of the importance of good building hygiene is the care of the organ when contactors will be raising dust around the instrument. If you get wind that the people of your church are thinking of any sort of renovation inside the sanctuary, it is important to be sure that the well being of the pipe organ is part of the plan. Your organ technician should be involved, consulting with contractors to establish the extent of protection. Common precautions include:

• putting Ziploc® baggies over the tops of reed resonators, or if the planned work is extensive and extra messy, removing the reeds from the organ and packing them in crates;

• disconnect any expression actions so the shutters can be fastened in the closed position;

• cover any exposed divisions with at least two layers of plastic (so the dirty outer layer can be removed without dumping debris onto the pipes);

• cover an organ case with at least two layers of plastic, taping the seams to be airtight;

• build a sturdy framed box over a detached console, because you know those painters are going to stand on top of it no matter what you say. Remove the pedalboard and bench to safety;

• disconnect power to the blower so it cannot be turned on inadvertently and suck all that nice dust into the organ’s internal mechanisms. Cover the blower air intake with plastic taped firmly in place;

• inspect every area that contains organ components and take appropriate measures;

• be sure not to allow contractors to remove any of this equipment. They will protest that they will be careful, but they will not know the degrees of sensitivity of the instrument. All work relating to protecting the organ should be accomplished by a professional pipe organ company.

This work is expensive, time consuming, and can be inconvenient. In September of 2020, the Organ Clearing House covered a large, new freestanding mechanical-action organ to protect it while the sanctuary was painted. The painting was to be completed so the organ could be recommissioned in time for Christmas. It was completed in mid-December, but because of Covid-related travel restrictions, it would not be possible for the organ to be playable until early February. It was an immense disappointment for all involved, especially considering that this would be only the second Christmas for the new organ. But the valuable and mighty, yet delicate instrument was preserved safely from invasion. Had the organ not been protected, the long-term effects could hardly be calculated. Reed pipes would no longer tune or speak reliably. Adjustment of the action would be compromised. The console cabinet would certainly have been damaged (it is an awful sight to see a drawknob snapped off), and the sound of the flue pipes would have been dulled by accumulation of dust in their mouths. If dust had made its way into the wind system, abrasive dust would speed the deterioration and corrosion of sensitive action parts.

This summer, the Organ Clearing House will clean an organ that was not protected when the ceiling and walls of the nave were sanded and painted, the floor was sanded and refinished, and carpet runners on three aisles were torn up and replaced. Our project will include removing and cleaning all the pipes, vacuuming and polishing the case, dismantling the keydesk to remove abrasive dust from keyboard bushings, cleaning windchests, and “flushing” out the wind system. The façade pipes have elaborate stenciling, recently restored, thus requiring special handling. This work will be exponentially more expensive than covering and protecting the organ before the start of building renovation. And while we have techniques and protocols for handling organ pipes and components with care, partially dismantling the organ will upset its stability so that it will take time after reassembly for the organ to settle down tonally and mechanically.

Water works.

In early January, a water main broke on Lexington Avenue in New York City, and a neighboring church was flooded. Lower-level offices and meeting spaces showed high-water marks on walls and furnishings. Music libraries and filing cabinets were submerged, along with all the trappings and equipment you would expect to find in a busy Midtown church. Only an inch or so of water stood on the floor of the sanctuary, so the free-standing pipe organ was not directly affected, but the amount of moisture introduced inside would necessitate a vigorous, invasive cleaning process. The only way to protect the organ from the remediation was to remove it from the building, and because of the importance of getting the cleaning under way as soon as possible, the organ would be removed immediately. The speed at which that decision was made was a tribute to the commitment of the parish to its organ that is now safely in storage with no schedule established for its return.

Thar she blows . . . .

Atlantic City, New Jersey, is on the southern Jersey shore in an area of rich farmland and state forests. It is about fifty miles north of Cape May, the southern tip of New Jersey that juts out into Delaware Bay, and 125 miles south of New York City. The state’s coastline is famous for beaches, summer bungalows and mansions, shellfish (especially crabs), and boating, but only Atlantic City is a mecca for gamblers. The city is home to nine full-fledged casinos, gaudy complexes with huge hotels and restaurants, high-end shopping, performance spaces, and, of course, acres of gambling floors with armies of one-armed bandits, blackjack, craps, and roulette tables, and (no doubt) secret back rooms where bad things happen.

The city’s waterfront sports a famous boardwalk above the long beach where gamblers can celebrate their winnings, or more likely lament their losses. It is lined with ice cream and salt water taffy shops, al fresco dining, souvenir vendors, and all the hustle-bustle you would expect to find at a popular seaside resort. And there are two immense pipe organs, one of them simply as big as they come.

Boardwalk Hall is perhaps best known as home to the Miss America Pageant—“There she is, Miss America . . . .” It is a capacious place with more than 10,000 seats built in 1929, large enough to have hosted the first-ever indoor college football game and indoor helicopter flight. It has been host to political national conventions (Lyndon Johnson was nominated as the Democratic candidate there), concerts, and even rodeos. And it is the home of the world’s largest musical instrument, the mystical, magisterial, mammoth Midmer-Losh organ with 449 ranks over seven manuals and a total of 33,112 pipes. You can see the bewildering stoplist in the November 2020 issue of The Diapason, pages 1, 14–20, and at boardwalkorgans.org.

Over the last several years, the Historic Organ Restoration Committee has undertaken the painstaking, mind-boggling restoration of the Boardwalk Hall organ and the large Kimball organ in the adjoining 3,000-seat Adrian Phillips Theater. The curatorial staff, assisted by volunteer organ builders, has been methodically moving from one chamber to the next, bringing the long dormant instrument back to life. Nathan Bryson, the organ’s curator, told me that 238 of 449 ranks (about 53%) are now in restored and playable condition.

The mammoth console is in a decorated cylindrical booth at the right of the stage. It towers over people standing next to it and looks like a D-cell battery from the other end of the room. The console booth has doors that close to protect the keyboards and hundreds of stop tablets. Nathan told me that the last time there was an indoor car race, there was a wreck and a chunk of a rubber tire slammed into the doors. Good thing they were closed. Indoor car racing? If we are used to worrying about protecting an organ from some contractor’s dust, how can you protect eight big organ chambers from an automobile race? Nathan explained that they close all the expression shutters (there must be thousands), and run fans inside the chambers blowing outwards to inhibit the influx of dust. It is all in a day’s work when you are caring for the largest organ in the world.

Nathan and his staff faced a challenge larger than indoor car racing and rodeos. On February 17 (Ash Wednesday), just after 9:00 a.m., the neighboring Trump Hotel, part of the Trump Casino complex, was demolished by implosion using 3,000 sticks of dynamite. Years ago, I maintained a small organ that was at the “street end” of a church directly across from the town’s library, the same organ with the card-table wedding. The town had built a sorry addition to the library in the 1950s that was to be demolished. I learned about the event through an emotional call from the organist. Shock waves from the blast had wrecked the organ’s tuning. It was not such a big deal, it was a small organ with everything easy to reach, but when I first read about the intention to demolish a high-rise hotel with over 900 rooms, I wondered about the safety of the organ.

Boardwalk Hall is immediately adjacent to the casino complex, the windows of the organ workshop look directly at the three-or-four-story casino, about two feet away. The hotel was on the other side of the casino. A year before the event, representatives of the demolition company toured the hall and the organ. Overseas shipping containers were stacked outside to protect the hall from falling rubble. To control dust during the implosion, windows and doors were sealed with plywood and plastic, HVAC ducts were sealed with plastic, and organ chamber doors were sealed with plastic, towels, and sandbags.

The Echo division in the Right Ceiling Chamber (#4) would be closest to the action. Lacking the funding to remove the division to safety, Nathan and his staff removed the 16′ Basson, an exceedingly rare stop built by Welte with free reeds and papier-mâché resonators, and they took sample pipes from the other ranks so that they could be reconstructed if damaged.

The staff had learned earlier about the presence of dust in the building when a high-pressure wind line burst off its flange and raised enough dust to set off the building’s fire alarms. As the time of the implosion approached, they set up a video camera to record the event in the hall. Officials cleared the building, and the hotel fell, cheered by the large crowd that had gathered. Videos of the event blanketed the internet. If you are interested in watching it, you’ll have no trouble finding it.

At 11:15 a.m., the staff received the “all clear” notice to reenter the building. When they viewed the video, they were able to see a slight wave of dust move across the hall, enough to worry an organ curator, but nothing like a rodeo or car race.

Congratulations to Nathan Bryson and his staff of four full-time and two part-time technician/restorers for bringing that mighty organ through disruptive events like no other. I encourage you to visit the website to read about the unique instrument, follow the progress of the restoration, and if you choose, click the “Donate Now” button on the home page. They still have 211 ranks to go, five times the size of what we would call a good-sized organ.