In the Wind: early organ building in the America

John Bishop

Changing seasons

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

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

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

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

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

Stars in your eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newfangled

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

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

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

Notes

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

John Bishop

On the road again

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania and Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

And back to Pennsylvania

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

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

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

Saying goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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.

John Bishop

Teachers

Elizabeth Swist was my first piano teacher. I was six years old. She lived with her mother, and their house smelled like boiled cabbages. It was about a mile walk—I know that for sure because I have driven the route watching my odometer a couple times. My lessons included the Hanon piano method and little novelty pieces that I played as loud and fast as I could; spinning wheels were a common theme in the music. My mother likes to tell how I came home from my first lesson, ran to our piano, played middle C and shouted, “I knew it. Middle C on Miss Swist’s (say it three times fast) piano is higher than ours.” Mother says she complained to the tuner, “I just paid $25,” but the tuner said I was right. It was an old second-hand upright, and he had not been able to bring it up to pitch. She tells that story every chance she gets; some of it might be true.

Miss Swist got married and moved into a house a little closer to ours that did not smell like cabbages. Mrs. Holderied, née Swist, helped me out of the beginner’s novelties into real music like Bach minuets and Clementi sonatas.

We moved from Westwood, Massachusetts, to nearby Winchester when I was ten, and I took up lessons with Edith Bolster, an elderly woman who lived in an apartment with two pianos. I do not remember meeting her partner, but I got an occasional glimpse of her lurking about. Ms. Bolster introduced me to Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the expressive qualities of the piano, and she encouraged me to play in recitals arranged by the various local piano teachers.

I was twelve when I had my first organ lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown at Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (later Episcopal Divinity School, now defunct) outside Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was the professor of homiletics there. The organ was built by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., in 1956, with three manuals including one of the earliest Rückpositiv divisions in the United States. I often rode my bike the eight miles over busy commuting roads through Somerville and Cambridge to get to my lessons. Dr. Cassels-Brown had been associate organist at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City during Alec Wyton’s tenure there. He seemed worldly to me and shared insights into the structure of music beyond stringing series of notes together.

I was a middle-schooler when Dr. Cassels-Brown showed me the Fibonacci series, how that sequence of numbers fit into the natural world and governed some of the flowing beauty of music. He also taught me to compare the characteristics of music of a given era between different nationalities—for example, eighteenth-century France and Germany—and how the different styles of composition reflected different types of organ building. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and I guess he was a thoughtful, conservative player. Sometimes, he asked me to sit with him during special services, turning pages and witnessing what went into structuring a worship service from an organ console.

After a couple years, Dr. Cassels-Brown recommended I shift to studying with John Skelton, organist of the First Congregational Church in Winchester, just a couple blocks from where we lived. The church had a brand-new, three-manual Fisk organ, and I was fortunate to have generous practice privileges there. Mr. Skelton had studied with Yuko Hayashi at the New England Conservatory and with Anton Heiller in Vienna, and was well connected with the exciting organ scene in Boston in the early 1970s. There were several young “boutique” organ companies in the area rejuvenating the concept of the mechanical-action pipe organ, and John made sure I got to hear recitals and attend workshop open houses, drawing me into that crowd as a young teenager. I remember an after-concert dinner at the Wursthaus (a long-gone favorite haunt of organists in Harvard Square) after an organ recital, at which someone pointed out that there were nine organists present who played for churches that had Fisk organs.

John Skelton understood and nourished my fascination with pipe organ tone, discussing the functions and construction of the various stops and allowing me to register the pieces I was learning. I loved listening to the organ’s voices as I chose them.

The harpsichord builder Carl Fudge was organist of my home church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where my father was rector. He led the junior choir, which was where I was first exposed to church music, and as my voice changed, I moved to the senior choir. Carl was supportive of my early studies and took me to organ recitals. I am especially grateful that I heard E. Power Biggs play on the Flentrop organ at the “Museum Formerly Known as Busch-Reisinger.” What a thrill it was to hear him play Charles Ives’s Variations on “America” as an encore following a recital of Baroque music.

Organbuilder George Bozeman was another mentor during my teenage years. His wife Pat sang in the choir at Epiphany, and together they took me around the circuit to concerts, workshops (George worked for the Noack Organ Company at the time), and social events. I worked in George’s new shop, Bozeman-Gibson & Company, during the summers of 1975 and 1976, after my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, my first real experiences as a newbie organbuilder.

Burton Cowgill was the music director at Winchester High School where I was put to work accompanying everything and everybody. I bet a lot of readers grew up as workhorse accompanists. As chorus director, Mr. Cowgill led us through a huge amount of sacred music, something that would likely get him in trouble today. The greatest hits of Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Gabrieli, among others, helped further my interest in that rich repertory. I accompanied rehearsals of the Madrigal Singers and hundreds of hours with productions of musicals (Oklahoma and Little Mary Sunshine). Mr. Cowgill encouraged me out from behind the piano, out of my comfort zone, to sing solos in a cappella pieces (“Fare thee well, my dear, I must be gone, and leave thee for a while. . . .”).

Twenty years later, I was privileged to lead the music for Mr. Cowgill’s memorial service at the church where he had been director of music. The church’s choir was augmented by a couple dozen of his former students, including several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we offered some of the classics he had taught us (“I got a robe up in-a the Kingdom, ain’a that Good News”).

Leaving the nest

I started at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1974 with Haskell Thomson as my organ teacher. I had been a big fish in the little pond that was Winchester, Massachusetts, and quickly learned that I was not going to be such a big guy in Lake Oberlin. Mr. Thomson was a very tall man, impressive in the confines of the teaching studio. He did a lumbering dance, swinging his arms with the arc of the musical phrase, chanting, “and then to here, and then to there, and turn around and go to here.” He wanted the music to sweep purposefully to points of arrival, and he loved the motion of music. I especially remember learning Bach’s Fugue in E-flat, BWV 522ii (“Saint Anne”), for my senior recital, making those soaring passages of sixteenth notes in measure 100 fly with the encouragement of Mr. Thomson’s swooping about the studio.

Oberlin’s semester system leaves the month of January open for independent study, still known as “winter term projects.” Mr. Thomson organized a beauty for a group of us, a month of intensive eurythmics with the Dalcroze disciple, Inda Howland. She was elderly, and she had retired from regular teaching at Oberlin but came back for this special month. She wore long, colorful scarves and beads and carried a little drum so there was always a beat. We bounced and tossed balls and pranced about at her direction, and that month’s workshop gave me more insight into the motion and direction of music than any other period in my education. Twenty years later, I engaged a eurythmics instructor to work with the choir I was leading at our season-opening retreat on Cape Cod.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I started working with John Leek, the school’s organ and harpsichord technician. In addition to his work at the school, John had a growing business maintaining organs in the area, and I went off with him three days a week for the rest of my Oberlin career. This did not please Mr. Thomson, because it cut deeply into my practice and study time on campus, but John was teaching me to tune and how the actions worked in a wide variety of organs. I knew I wanted to spend a large part of my life working as an organbuilder, and this was my start.

I have written often about working with John and about John as a teacher. He was an old-world craftsman who had apprenticed in the Netherlands in a cabinet shop as a child and with an organbuilder as a teenager and married the daughter of the shop foreman. He had come to the United States in the 1960s to work for Walter Holtkamp and saw the job posting for Oberlin’s organ technician when working on campus for Holtkamp. We had tons of fun and countless adventures together, and by the time I left his shop, I had a foundation as a woodworker, a mechanical troubleshooter, and a tuner. I had participated in building three or four new harpsichords, two new mechanical-action pipe organs, and I knew how to releather regulators, pitman windchests, and countless other specialized pneumatic actions.

You’re in the big time now.

In the spring of my freshman year, I was hired as director of music at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, a large, multi-racial congregation at East Seventy-Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue with a four-manual Austin organ and a volunteer choir with a couple paid singers. I had several simple church jobs while I was in middle school and high school, but this was a big church in a big city, and the job came with some responsibilities beyond plodding through choir rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Roger Shoup was the pastor at Calvary, a big bear of a man who had been associate pastor there through the integration of the formerly all-white congregation. Roger was a devoted and prolific pipe smoker, and his vast collection of carefully seasoned pipes was on display in his office. When a well-meaning cleaning staff carried them all to the kitchen for washing in soap and water, Roger managed to keep his cool. (Keep away from my iron skillets.)

Roger was a great champion of my early ambition, making sure that there was money available to hire musicians (typically my pals from Oberlin) for special performances and for expanding the number of regular paid singers, again drawing from my classmates. He had the treasurer teach me how to create and manage a budget, counseled me on how to get along with the variety of personalities in that big rollicking diverse place, and let me know when my naiveté got in the way of my creativity. I count Roger among my most important teachers. He helped me grow up.

I have named eleven of my teachers, and I have skipped over dozens who had important roles in my education. Those eleven were all one-on-one teachers or mentors. Each had different methods of teaching and different ways of being. Some were quiet and encouraging, some were demanding, purposefully driving me to be better. They each gave me part of who I am as a musician, craftsman, consultant, and entrepreneur, and I am grateful to them all.

The art of the question

Charles Fisk (1925–1983) was one of the pioneering organbuilders active in the Boston area when I was a teenager, and there was so much excitement about the resurgence of tracker organs. In the early days of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the company worked in a long, low building that had been a rope walk for the fishing industry. The people who worked with Charlie in the 1970s and 1980s knew him as a Socratic teacher, the eponymous style of teaching by asking questions. He gave design problems to small groups of his employees and guided them to solutions with questions. Robert Cornell, who worked in the rope walk in those days, told me that Charlie would look at a solution and say, “That’s good. Is there another way to do it?” Over the years, I have talked with several people who worked closely with Charlie who remember fondly his unique and gentle approach to teaching. Encouraging his people to participate in design and problem solving was his way of ensuring that his company would outlast him. Bob Cornell supposed that was because Charlie knew his would not be a long life. He died of cancer in 1983.

On the bridge

I am thinking so much about teachers and teaching because recently a friend and I were privileged to witness a bit of Socratic teaching. This being our first summer without a sailboat, Wendy and I had promised each other we would look for a special experience on the water, and in early September, along with our old sailing friends Bill and Marlene, we went on a cruise in Alaska’s Inside Passage. We were on a small ship, about 250-feet long with only fifty cabins, operated in affiliation with National Geographic. There were fewer than 100 passengers and about seventy crew members including nine naturalists who guided hikes and Zodiac (small inflatable motorboats) excursions and gave evening talks about the geography, flora, and fauna of the area.

The captain had an “open bridge” policy, allowing passengers to visit the bridge without appointment unless there was complicated maneuvering going on. Bill and I spent a lot of time there, chatting with the captain and the chief mate, a young woman who had graduated from California Maritime Academy, a brilliant ship handler and authority figure, and on the last afternoon, approaching cocktail hour, Bill and I were on the bridge as the captain was teaching a young third mate how to drop anchor. “What are we doing?,” asked the captain. “Dropping anchor,” answered the mate. “What do we need?” “A place to drop the anchor.” The captain led the mate through establishing an anchor field on the chart plotter (the electronic chart on the sweeping dashboard), identifying an area a half-mile in diameter with a relatively flat, muddy bottom (it’s hard to anchor in rocks), far enough ahead that the ship could be slowed enough in time. We were traveling at 7-1⁄2 knots,¹ and the anchor field was five miles away.

The captain asked, “What should you do?” “Slow down.” “Right. Be sure you maintain just enough speed to steer when you’re ready to drop.” The mate eased back on the two three-inch throttle levers, and the engine RPM dropped from 1,100 to 890. Captain: “You have an anchor field, and you’re slowing down. What do you need now?” Mate: “Anchor watch” (the crew members whose job it is to operate the windlass that manages the heavy anchor chain). Captain: “Where are they?” Mate: “Off duty.” Captain raises an eyebrow. Mate says, “I’ll call the anchor watch.” Keys microphone, “Anchor watch to your bow station.”

The mate adjusted the throttle every few minutes, and the ship continued to slow to a little over one knot. As the ship’s image crept into the red circle on the chart that marked the anchor field, it slipped a little to starboard (to the right). Captain: “What do you see?” Mate: “We’re drifting to starboard.” Captain: “How do you respond?” Mate: “We’re in the middle of the anchor field, dropping anchor.” Captain does thumbs up with both hands.

Bill and I were surprised that the captain allowed us to stay on the bridge. I am sure he knew that we would be interested to watch the process, but I do not know if the mate had been prepared to receive his lesson with an audience. He sure was concentrating hard—it took more than a half hour for him to slow the ship enough to drop the anchor. The captain quipped that it was like watching paint dry.

Watching this, I tried to picture Charlie Fisk leaning on a drafting table, asking questions of his eager students. I thought of organ lessons when a question inspired a realization. And I imagined that third mate as a captain, twenty years hence, teaching his third mate how to drop an anchor in Sitka Bay, Alaska. As we traveled home the next day, Bill and I agreed that we had witnessed something special, a high point of our exotic trip. For some of us, how we get there is as interesting and thought provoking as being there.

Notes

1. A knot is a measure of speed, one nautical mile per hour. (It is not correct to say “knots per hour.”) A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, which equals 1,852 meters or about 6,000 feet.

Thomas Fielding

Organist and composer Thomas Fielding is director of music for the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist and music coordinator for the Office of Worship, Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio. He is a 2007 doctoral degree graduate of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where his principal teacher was Christopher Young. Previous studies were with Martin Jean and Robert A. Hobby. Fielding has taken first prize in the national Arthur Poister (Syracuse, New York) and San Marino (California) performance competitions, has won several national composition prizes, has been the recipient of several full-tuition scholarship awards at Indiana University and, as an undergraduate, won several music prizes offered by his alma mater Valparaiso University. He has played recitals on some of the world’s finest instruments, including two appearances at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, England. His scholarly work has been featured in The American Organist and The Tracker magazines. He was for four years the dean of the Central North Carolina Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

As an active and commissioned composer, Dr. Fielding’s works appear in the catalogs of Choristers’ Guild, GIA Publications, Selah, E. C. Schirmer, and Paraclete Press. His works have been performed by soloists, choirs, and orchestras throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia in addition to the 2016 American Guild of Organists national convention in Houston, Texas. His compositions also have been broadcast on National Public Radio on both Weekend Edition and Pipedreams. For more information, visit thomasfielding.com.

Introduction

Esquisses Byzantines and Carillon-Sortie are the two most frequently performed works by the enigmatic French composer Henri Mulet (1878–1967). A dedication printed on the front page of the score of Esquisses Byzantines refers to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur perched high on Montmartre in Paris. The typical interpretation of this cycle views Esquisses Byzantines as an external tribute to the empirical structure of the basilica; however, only the first five of the suite’s ten movements illustrate the architectural features of the building. The final five allude to different aspects of customs and rituals at the basilica. Curiously, the last two movements have Latin rather than French titles.

Mulet added four inscriptions referred to as “mottos” that strongly suggest a philosophical agenda. He finished the composition in 1908, but for no recorded or anecdotal reason did not publish the work until 1920. The first motto contains the dates 1914–1919. This suggests that the mottos were added at the time of publication.

From 1894 until 1940, a time when art and politics were entwined, ideologies and music in France were inseparable.¹ Jane Fulcher notes that composers “were indeed intellectuals, deeply engaged with public issues, symbols, and ideologies, and their evolution in this period cannot be explained by ‘pure’ stylistic development, or sporadic influence from other arts.”² Mulet was just such an intellectual, and his Esquisses Byzantines is a product of this movement.

The Archdiocese of Paris built Sacré-Coeur Basilica for specific theological and political reasons that are embodied in the towering motto that dominates the apse of the building. Because of their magnitude, two words stand out: Gallia Poenitens (France repents). Ideologically, the construction of Sacré-Coeur was an act of reparation for the sins of France committed during the 1789 Revolution and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Even though Mulet composed Esquisses Byzantines in 1908, he may have published it in 1920 to celebrate both the dedication of the basilica and the Allied victory in World War I. To fully understand the ideology of Esquisses Byzantines, an examination of the history of France’s love affair with the Sacred Heart of Jesus is called for.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in France

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is rooted in the concept of Christ’s humanity and the five glorious wounds of his Passion. Minor rituals dedicated to the Sacred Heart were found in late Medieval monastic writings. These became widely popular as a result of the visions of Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1648–1690), a French nun and mystic. At age 23, Alacoque entered Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial. Early in her novitiate, she had visions of the Sacred Heart pierced by a lance for the world’s sins and surmounted by a flame of love. Replete with the drama of Baroque piety, God’s message, sent to the world through Alacoque, was that of a vengeful deity seeking reparation and atonement for the numerous sins of France. These transgressions included material extravagance, moral decadence, and the apostasy of Protestantism. At one point, Alacoque received a vision of three demands of the Sacred Heart that needed to be fulfilled before France could receive abundant blessings from the Lord:
• France, through its king, should be consecrated to the Sacred Heart;
• an edifice should be built for this purpose;
• this historic compact should be recorded on the royal insignia.3

The first test of her prophecy occurred in June 1720, when the merchant ship Grand Saint-Antoine arrived in the port at Marseille. Despite the standard forty-day quarantine imposed on foreign ships, the bubonic plague spread from the ship and ravaged the city. By December, 50,000 people had died. The diocesan bishop, Henri François Xavier de Belsunce de Castelmoron (1671–1755), was well known for his love of public religious spectacles such as large-scale pilgrimages and massive processions. In the plague’s arrival, he saw God’s displeasure with the people of Marseille. In November and December Belsunce staged several penitential cortèges, and by spring 1721 deaths had fallen dramatically.

The plague was an invitation to penitence sent by an angry God whose patience with crime, heresy, and sin had been tested and exceeded. The Sacred Heart of Jesus was the best recourse, according to Belsunce, and his consecration of the city of Marseille to the Sacred Heart was the correct spiritual initiative to take in the face of the plague. The Sacré-Coeur had driven the plague from Marseille.⁴

When the plague returned in 1722 Belsunce cited ongoing moral corruption as its cause. The city’s principal governors again consecrated Marseille to the Sacred Heart on May 28. By autumn the plague had disappeared from the city. Marseille became the paragon for Catholic France of the power found in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The French Church experienced a far greater trial in the Revolution of 1789. Revolutionaries slaughtered scores of Catholic clergy and religious. For the Catholic Counter-Revolution, this civil disturbance was nothing less than another chapter in the ongoing war between good and evil.

For some, the religious policy of the Revolution was sure to bring down divine chastisement, for others, the Revolution was itself a chastisement. Profanations and wicked exaltations were the signs by which they recognized in the Revolution an evil of terrifying and unsurpassed strength.⁵

The demands made by God to Alacoque had not yet been fulfilled, and Catholic France was suffering for it. Meanwhile, the Catholic Counter-Revolution, fueled largely by rural conservatives, embraced the Sacred Heart of Jesus as its symbol. Convents and pious families churned out embroidered Sacred Heart emblems by the tens of thousands, and several militant priestly orders dedicated to the Sacred Heart were formed. “. . . The Sacré-Coeur emerged as the devotion and the image of Catholic resistance to the scourge of the Revolution.”⁶

Once the Revolution was over, nineteenth-century France struggled to determine which political system would best serve it. Political regimes and forms of government changed repeatedly. The brief restoration of the Bourbon monarchy between 1814 and 1830 created the opportunity to consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart. Louis XVI had done so privately before the Revolution, but Louis XVIII, who ruled from 1814 until 1824, was too savvy a politician to engage in an act that could be so divisive to the nation. Another surge of fervor to fulfill Alacoque’s prophecy ensued when France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The pious French believed that these two wars were a divine condemnation of a nation fallen from grace. Bishop Félix Fournier (1803–1877) of Nantes proclaimed, “Defeat . . . was a punishment from God; it was the consequence of moral failure on a national scale.”⁷ Catholic France recognized these disasters as a call from God to repent and atone for its sins.

The National Vow and the construction of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur

In 1870 Alexandre Félix Legentil (1821–1889) became a refugee in Poitiers after the Franco-Prussian defeat, the patriotic trauma of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and the devastation of the Paris Commune. While there, inspired by similar building projects in Lyon and Marseille, he vowed to build a national church dedicated to the Sacred Heart. He quickly won the enthusiasm of Hubert Rohault de Fleury (1828–1910), his brother-in-law, and the support of Cardinal Pie, Bishop of Poitiers. Legentil and de Fleury were able to convince Parisian Archbishop Joseph Hyppolyte Guibert (1802–1886) to support their National Vow to the Sacred Heart and the construction of Sacré-Coeur. Guibert wanted to keep its text as apolitical as possible for fear of the Republicans. After some correspondence and negotiation on the exact wording of the vow, Legentil, Hubert Rohault de Fleury, and Cardinal Guibert opted for the following:

In spite of the misfortunes that ravage France, and perhaps of even greater woes that threaten it; in spite of the sacrilegious attacks committed in Rome against the laws of the Church and the Holy See, and against the sacred person of the Vicar of Jesus Christ; We humble ourselves before God, and, bringing together in our love the Church and our homeland, we recognize that we have been guilty and rightly punished. And to make appropriate amends for our sins and to obtain from the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ the forgiveness of our transgressions as well as the extraordinary relief that alone can deliver the Sovereign Pontiff from his captivity, and put an end to France’s misfortunes, we promise to contribute to the erection in Paris of a sanctuary dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.⁸

In fulfillment of the prophecy of Alacoque, multiple consecrations were made to the Sacred Heart. Along with its widely disseminated emblem, France only needed a church, and the National Vow ensured that this would happen.

After the far-left socialist Paris Commune was suppressed on May 28, 1871, the Third French Republic was quickly formed. Conservative royalist Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) was elected president. The following year, Archbishop Guibert formally approved the Sacré-Coeur building project on January 18. The endorsement of the National Vow by Pope Pius IX quickly followed in July 1872. Guibert wrote the following to Legentil and Fleury: “This temple, erected as a public act of contrition and reparation . . . will stand among us as a protest against other monuments and works of art erected for the glorification of vice and impiety.”⁹ These “monuments” refer to the massive rebuilding of Paris undertaken by Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) by order of Emperor Napoleon III during the Second Empire (1852–1870).

Guibert was keenly interested in choosing the right place for the new church. He considered consecrating several existing buildings, including the Paris Opéra and the Trocadéro. Both were constructed during Haussman’s renovation of Paris. The debate lasted for some time until Guibert visited the summit of Montmartre, the “Hill of the Martyrs,” and was overwhelmed by the magnificent view of Paris. During Roman Emperor Decius’s persecution of Christians in 250 A.D., Saint Denis, the first evangelist of Gall, was martyred on Montmartre. Saint Joan of Arc and other saints made pilgrimages to the site, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit order there. During the Commune, two royalist generals who were defending Montmartre from the Republican mob were also martyred there. The site had been used for various purposes throughout the centuries but was not for sale.

To secure Montmartre, Guibert made a petition to the National Assembly concerning the construction of the church. On July 23, 1873, the National Assembly passed a law that proclaimed the construction of Sacré Coeur a public utility (Paris). Meanwhile, the Republic appointed a new president, Patrice de MacMahon (1808–1893), Marshall of France and Duke of Magenta, whose main ambition was to establish a constitutional monarchy. Catholic sympathizers held the majority in the National Assembly, and the land was seized by the government by expropriation (“eminent domain”) and sold to the Archdiocese of Paris.

Although declared an act of public utility, the project received no tax funding. Rather, donations poured in from across the country from private “subscribers” who purchased construction stones that would bear their names. During the nineteenth century, Gothic architecture was considered the quintessential style; however, the Works Committee of 1872 chose a Byzantine concept proposed by Paul Abadie (1812–1884) from among the seventy-eight entries in a competition held for the design of the building. The style of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and San Marco Basilica in Venice inspired Abadie’s plan. Workers laid the cornerstone of the basilica on June 16, 1875, in the presence of President MacMahon, who donated a statue of the Sacred Heart that stands in the apsidal chapel in the crypt. Subsequent Republican regimes regarded the construction of the basilica as an incitement to civil war. They considered halting progress on the building in 1873, 1897, and 1899; but because the government would have had to reimburse the eight million subscribers some thirty million francs, work continued. Sacré Coeur was ready for consecration in 1914, but the outbreak of World War I delayed this until October 24, 1919.

Henri Mulet and the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur

On October 17, 1878, three years after work began with laying the cornerstone of the new church, Henri Mulet was born. Sacré-Coeur was a constant presence throughout his childhood, as he was reared in its shadows. Henri’s entire family was musical. Gabriel, his father, was a celebrated choirmaster of Sacré-Coeur from 1886 to 1903. Blanche Victorie Patin Gatin, his mother, played the harmonium both in the provisional chapel erected on the site and later in the unfinished great church.¹⁰ From her, Henri learned to play the organ and piano.¹¹

In his day, Gabriel Mulet received widespread acclaim as the master of the choir of Sacré-Coeur and as a composer of liturgical music. Although forgotten today, his works include the 1894 Cantata à Jeanne d’Arc and a Tantum ergo for choir and large orchestra composed in 1900. He also composed the text and music for a “Chant Populaire” for the dedication of the great bell of Sacré-Coeur, simply titled The Savoyarde.
The Bulletin de l’Oeuvre du Vœu national notes that the hymn’s “music constitutes a model of imitative harmony.”¹² Sacré-Coeur historian Father Jacques Benoist further opines that this influence is obvious in Mulet’s Esquisses Byzantines.¹³ In Gabriel’s hymn, the choir sings the pious text, while a recurring “strike” on low C of the organ pedals marked “Savoyarde” represents the tolling of the massive bell. This tolling bell effect is somewhat akin to the oscillating octaves heard in Henri’s “Campanile” movement, thus suggesting that Henri may have learned something about musical composition from his father. Additionally, father and son collaborated on a pious “Cantique pour la Communion,” O Mon Jésus, with a text by Gabriel and music by Henri. The work was published in 1900 by Le Beau, a small religious publishing house that Leduc assimilated in 1905.

In 1889 Henri Mulet enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied organ and composition with Charles-Marie Widor. Mulet was generally a musical conservative, and because of his birthdate, he is considered a Middle-Impressionist composer.¹⁴ Although he only composed for fifteen years, 1896–1911, one can group his compositional output into three broad stylistic periods. In 1911 he appears to have stopped composing abruptly. “He was hostile to the changes and innovations of the twentieth century, and his style remained strongly rooted in the symphonic organ of Cavaillé-Coll of the nineteenth century.”¹⁵ In 1937 he retired from his final church position at Saint Philippe-du-Roule and the Paris musical scene because his colleagues and even the church’s authorities preferred “modern” music to Franck and his contemporaries.¹⁶

In 1924 Mulet’s colleague and friend Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931) offered Henri the position of professor of organ at the Schola Cantorum where he taught until 1931. The Schola, founded as a foil to the Conservatoire’s emphasis on theatrical music, emphasized formal technique over originality. The Schola’s sacred music curriculum was an exemplar of the principles for church music dictated in the 1903 Motu Proprio by Pope Pius X. This explicitly ultramontane document idealized Gregorian chant and Roman-style polyphony as best suited to the Catholic liturgy. The Schola implemented the papal agenda.

Especially significant here is that the Schola Cantorum did not just define musical values that it considered to be “national,” it established a “code” that associated them with genres, styles, repertoires, and techniques. . . . French nationalist leagues taught the Republic that music could be invariable as a form of "representation”—that it could help shape perceptions when surrounded by a discourse that imbued it with ideological meaning.¹⁷

Mulet seems to have been a papal sympathizer. Aware of the demands that Pope Pius X made of Catholic musicians, he acquiesced. Many like Messiaen did not. In 1921 Mulet presented a lecture to the General Congress of Sacred Music in Strasbourg titled, “The Harmful and Anti-religious Tendencies of the Modern Organ.” The article, published in 1922, critiques the Hope-Jones cinema organ and its use in church. Mulet called it the “Antichrist.” Although Mulet played the cinema organ during his time at Draguignan, his distaste for its liturgical use comes from the papal dictum: “They are also anti-religious because the orchestral organ leads to the performance of transcriptions of orchestral music and even of music for the theatre, which is formally condemned by our Holy Father Pope Pius X.”¹⁸

Eventually Mulet withdrew from public life. He spent his last years at the convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Draguignan. He died there on September 20, 1967, elusive, secretive, and largely forgotten. No obituary was published, and the location of his grave has been forgotten.

Esquisses Byzantines as Mulet’s spiritual testament

Esquisses Byzantines is a programmatic set of pieces. Its first five movements describe the physical structure of the basilica, and the second five relate aspects of its ideology, customs, and rituals. Three programmatic “mottos” that Mulet added to the piece at the time of publication hint at this ideological schema. Together, these mottos strongly suggest that Mulet’s work is a kind of sermon on the power of the devotion of the victorious French to the Sacred Heart.

Mulet was reclusive and not at all interested in displaying his biography for public scrutiny. He rarely commented on his pieces or music in general. Our knowledge of Mulet, his music, and his temperament comes to us mainly in the form of anecdotes by one of his closest friends, Félix Raugel (1881–1975). The theories in this article cannot be verified in first-person writings by Mulet; likewise, the personal significance of his compositions is vague. Raugel was ignorant of the programmatic meanings of Mulet’s music. Even Henri’s wife Isabelle really did not understand him.¹⁹

Mulet completed Esquisses Byzantines in 1908 but did not add the dedication—“In memory of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre, 1914–1919”—until its 1920 publication. These dates are critical: they are of World War I. Many people believe that Mulet composed the work between 1914 and 1919. This is incorrect. He added those dates to the motto, and they refer only to the motto and not the actual years of composition.

Primed to be dedicated on October 17, 1914, the festivities for the dedication of the basilica were postponed because the previous July, war with Germany intervened. At the onset of the war, the French did not know if God would take pity on them, but many believed the spiritual reparations moved him to do so. Faced with the prospect of another humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany, the French bishops sought to fulfill God’s demands to France almost as soon as the war began. “As early as 1914, the Bulletin’s columnist recalled that France had not responded to the three main demands made of it in 1689. Therefore, the Lord can hardly cover it with glory!”²⁰ At the time, conservative Catholics were overwhelmingly monarchists. Modern secular forms of government had been condemned decades earlier in the “Syllabus of Errors” issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864. Pope Pius X reinforced this condemnation with his “Oath Against Modernism” in 1910, which was professed by all religious and many lay Catholics. The French bishops consecrated the entire country to the Sacred Heart on its feast day, June 11, 1915, and many allied banners displayed an emblem of the Sacred Heart:

In March 1917, soldiers from France, England, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania, and Russia gathered in Paray-le-Monial with their banners on which a Sacred Heart was affixed. They met again on June 15, 1917, in Montmartre for a day of Catholic soldiers of the Allied armies, where they renewed according to the formula of Cardinal Amette [of Paris] their solemn consecration to the Sacred Heart. Montmartre is therefore naturally regarded by the allies as the center of the expansion of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus throughout 
the world.²¹

Only at the end of that bloody conflict was the Basilica finally consecrated. A victorious France—led by the fiery oratory of [George] Clemenceau [sic]—joyfully celebrated the consecration of a monument conceived of in the course of a losing war with Germany a generation before. Gallia Poenitens at last brought its rewards.²²

For Catholic France, this victory was the direct result of the intervention of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the fulfillment of the prophecies of Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. In the Savoyarde hymn, Gabriel Mulet foretells this in the ninth stanza: “You will shout the Hosanna of glory / When our soldiers, Happy Day, / Will come back with victory / Under the flag of the Sacred Heart.”²³

The basilica was finally consecrated on October 24, 1919, and the people of France recognized it as a symbol of the Allied victory in the war.

The High Altar was consecrated by Cardinal Amette, Archbishop of Paris, and thirty bishops consecrated the other thirty altars—fifteen in the Basilica, and fifteen in the crypt. At midday, the Pontifical High Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Vico, Prefect of the Congregation of Rites.²⁴

Had Mulet composed a mere tribute to the basilica’s architecture, the dates on the score’s dedication might likely be those of the entire time of construction from cornerstone to consecration (1875–1919). Instead, Mulet chose the dates from the beginning of World War I to its formal end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Moreover, English speakers tend to limit the meaning of the word memoîre to its cognate translation “memory.” This might suggest some nostalgia or sentimental longing for something in the distant past, perhaps a reflection on Mulet’s childhood lived in the shadow of the basilica or as if the building had been destroyed; however, memoîre can also mean a thesis or proposition needing defending.²⁵ Mulet’s proposal may have been that the Sacred Heart of Jesus and his church saved France. One may view Mulet’s work as not only a celebration of the consecration of the building but also a celebration of the Allied victory that Catholics attributed to the divine intervention of the Sacred Heart. In this light, the motto may even be a defense of the prophecies of Alacoque.

The fourth movement, “Chapelle des Morts” (“Chapel of the Dead”), bears the inscription: “In venerable memory of His Eminence Cardinal Guibert whose empty tomb in this chapel is still waiting for the fulfillment of his last will.” The Chapelle des Morts in the basilica’s crypt includes the tomb of Cardinal Guibert, surmounted by a statue of him presenting a miniature of the basilica to God. Additionally, the tomb of his successor, Cardinal Richard, is there as is an urn containing the heart of Alexandre Legentil. Despite the plural name and multiple tombs found in this chapel, Mulet singularizes Cardinal Guibert.

The son of a farmer, Guibert was born on December 13, 1802, in Aix-en-Provence. After several years at a Sulpician major seminary, he became a Missionary of Provence on January 25, 1823. On August 14, 1825, in Marseille he was ordained a priest. He received three successive bishoprics: Viviers in 1842, Tours in 1857, and Paris in 1871. He was elevated to the College of Cardinals on December 22, 1873. His appointment to Paris was hardly a “promotion,” for all three of his predecessors had been assassinated in office. Guibert initially refused the appointment, but Pope Pius IX mandated his acceptance of the post. He was installed as archbishop in Notre-Dame Cathedral on October 27, 1871. He died on July 8, 1886. According to multiple biographers, the two tremendous achievements of his tenure in Paris were the construction of the basilica and the establishment of the Catholic University (Institute) in 1875.

Guibert was the principal representative of the ultramontane movement in France. Ultramontanism, which translates “beyond the mountains (Alps),” was an unorganized movement of conservative nineteenth-century Catholics that emphasized absolute, centralized papal authority. The movement arose in the 1860s when the Italian Unification movement conquered the Papal States. The ultramontane Catholics supported the restoration of the Papal States without compromise. Concerning papal authority, Guibert writes: “The Bishops desire order; they respect authority, which is the principal foundation of society. The hand of the Church has never been seen in revolutions. You will do well to direct your attention and solicitude elsewhere.”²⁶ And again: “The republic has received neither from God nor from history any promise of immortality.”²⁷ Guibert’s writings highlight an ardent desire among conservative Catholics to restore the French monarchy and practical papal sovereignty. The Republic was the enemy.

Before his death, Guibert directed that his Requiem Mass should be simple and that the money that would have been spent on an elaborate funeral be given to the poor. At first, he was laid in state and was buried in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. His remains were later transferred to the Chapel of the Dead in Sacré-Coeur. A Latin inscription on his tomb states that he was interred there in 1922, thirty-six years later. Mulet’s motto suggests his indignation that Guibert’s remains were still missing from the Chapel of the Dead in 1919. Whether this indicates that Mulet supported Guibert’s ideology is debatable, but he seemed to admire the cardinal enough to bring attention to his empty tomb.

The fifth movement, “Campanile” (“Bell Tower”), bears the inscription “All white, it towers over the vastness of the countryside from afar.” The basilica sits on Montmartre, one of the highest points in Paris. Guibert chose this site because of the view of the city that it affords; however, Mulet chose the word “campagne” rather than “ville” or “Cité,” perhaps because he felt that the bell tower is the pinnacle point not only of Paris but of the entire country. He reinforces this by identifying the bell tower, not the basilica as a whole, as this zenith point. “Campagne” can also mean a military or political campaign. This could be Mulet’s deliberate allusion to the evangelical mission of the basilica and to call all of France to penitential conversion.

By 1912 the bell tower of Sacré-Coeur was complete and thus was not finished when Mulet wrote his work in 1908. Because of this, Mulet may have had an idealized vision of the belfry and the entire basilica in mind. The bell tower and its great drone bell, “La Savoyarde,” were sources of great pride among Parisian Catholics. Catholic churches have named, blessed, and consecrated bells for centuries in a rite known as the “baptism of bells.” The formal name of the great bell of Sacré-Coeur is Françoise Marguerite of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, colloquially known as La Savoyarde. The bell was cast at the Paccard foundry in Annecy-le-Vieux. Francis Albert Leuilleux, Archbishop of Chambery, and the bishops of Savoy initiated its creation; the clergy and upper and lower classes of the province funded it, hence the nickname La Savoyarde.

Weighing nineteen tons, La Savoyarde is the largest bell in France and the sixth largest in Europe. It arrived at Montmartre on October 16, 1895. A team of twenty-eight horses pulled it into Paris. Its arrival was a huge public spectacle attended by hundreds of thousands of Parisians. It was formally baptized on this date by Cardinal Archbishop Richard of Paris. A souvenir booklet from the occasion tells us, “The voice of the bells is the voice of God,”²⁸ and that, “It is, thank God, this terrible Savoyard, of a size and weight to resist all the attacks of the demolishers and the shock of all future revolutions.”²⁹ “It is, in all respects, the most beautiful bell that has been made to this day. It is the largest, the richest, and the most harmonious that exists in France. She is the queen of the world’s bells. We can only delight in it: it is the Bell of the Sacred Heart.”³⁰ By using the word “campagne” to include all territories outside of the city of Paris, Mulet may very well have been advancing the mission and message of the basilica for all of France and even the world.

The most interesting and vastly popular movement that suggests an ideological program for the Esquisses Byzantines is its final movement: “Tu es petra et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus te” (“You are the rock and the gates of Hell will never prevail against you”). Mulet’s manuscript that Leduc presumably used for publication, now in a private collection, shows that at the time of composition, Mulet titled the work simply “Toccata.” Mulet scribbled this out and added the “Tu es petra” title in different ink, along with a host of other changes. This points to the ideological meaning given the work at the time of publication. The Latin inscription is a quote from the Vulgate Bible that asserts that Christ established the papacy. The Greek text of Saint Matthew’s Gospel has been the subject of debate among Christians since the Western Schism. The Catholic Church’s official interpretation of the Vulgate states that the Church is founded not on a geological rock but by Christ who appointed Peter as the first pope and established the Petrine ministry as God’s eternal presence in the world. Orthodox and Protestant churches interpret the Greek differently. The full text of Matthew 16:18–19 reads: “Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam,” “And I tell you, because you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Mulet made three edits to the Biblical text.

The first edit is the change from “Petrus,” a masculine, proper noun meaning the name Peter, to “petra,” a feminine noun meaning a geological rock. Given the uniform association between Mulet’s Catholic audience with the papacy, this revision is startling. Several seminary professors of Church history found no precedent in the Catholic world for this alteration. One of them felt that the substitution was so bizarre that perhaps Mulet was writing from memory and misquoted the Vulgate!

The dominant theory to explain this change is that the “rock” is Montmartre Hill, and that “hell” is an allegory for the passage of time and erosion by the elements. This widely accepted theory does not come directly from Mulet nor anecdotally from Raugel. The Greek word “Petrus” appears sixteen times in the New Testament. If Mulet only wanted to speak of geological rocks, he could have selected any of these since the “Tu es petra” text has such a strong association with the papacy. Another theory says that “petra” refers to the smaller, Medieval church of Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre, an institution consecrated over 700 years before the basilica. Regardless, both interpretations struggle to compete with the dominant Catholic exegesis.

Significant, too, is the omission of the phrase “et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam,” the portion of the text interpreted as the source of papal authority. This omission suggests that Mulet is not arguing for the legitimacy of the Petrine office but the invincibility of “petra.” The third edit is the change of the word “eam” (“him”) to “te” (“you”) to match the feminine gender of “petra.” This change is significant because of the distance between the two agreeing words in the Latin text. A mere misquotation would not be so precise. Despite the difference in languages, Mulet may have linked the French “Montmartre” with the Latin “petra” because both are of feminine gender. Without a doubt, “petra” means “rock.” Mulet just changed the Biblical text to suit his purpose, a tactic that he frequently employed in various other pieces. Knowing that his Catholic audience would immediately associate this passage with the papacy, Mulet may have intended another double meaning of the word “petra.”

To fully understand Mulet’s use of the title and its relationship to the basilica, one needs to examine the status of the papacy by 1920. The French Revolution of 1789 effectively ended the notion of government as a divinely ordained hierarchy. This idea quickly swept across the globe. In Italy, minor revolutions in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s gave rise to the movement to unite the Italian peninsula: the Risorgimento. Because the centrally located Papal States divided Italy in half, the Italian nationalists viewed them as an obstacle to unification. The nationalists conquered them one by one, and by 1861 only Rome remained directly under papal rule. The pope’s army was weak and had never been able to defend any of its states without the military assistance of historically Catholic countries. Most of these allies withdrew their aid when the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) decreed papal infallibility. Only the French remained, and the onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 recalled all these troops from Rome. The pope pleaded for international assistance, but still enraged at the definition of papal infallibility, the leadership of Europe’s traditionally Catholic countries refused. King Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878) of Italy attempted diplomatic resolutions to the problem of Rome, but Pope Pius IX would cede nothing to the Italians.

Rome, undefended, was invaded by the Italian army under the command of Raffaele Cadorna (1815–1897) in the early morning hours of September 20, 1870. It fell soon afterward. The populace of Rome was itself divided on whether Rome should be independent of the papacy. “The Catholic religion represented the hand of medieval superstition and inequality, faith in the supernatural rather than in reason.”³¹ By 1873, cries of “death to the Pope” rang in the streets, which led to the excommunication of King Victor Emmanuel II for his Law of Suppression of Religious Corporations. Unwavering, the pope insisted that his spiritual autonomy depended upon his territorial sovereignty. There was no room in Rome for two sovereigns. Pope Pius IX declared himself “Prisoner of the Vatican” and refused to leave its buildings rather than to accept the sovereignty of the King of Italy. He and his successors would remain “prisoners” until Pope Pius XI bartered the Lateran Treaty with Benito Mussolini in 1929, creating the Vatican City State.

When Rome fell, France gazed at the events in Italy with tears in its eyes. France, the Pope’s surest defender, abandoned him in his hour of greatest need. The papal nuncio to France remarked that as “. . . the French army’s catastrophe on the Rhine began, . . . the conviction is spreading and deepening that the French government’s sins toward the Holy See have provoked God’s wrath on France.”³² The French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was God’s punishment inflicted on the nation for abandoning the pope. France needed to atone for its sins against God when it allowed Papal Rome to fall.

“To obtain the deliverance of the Sovereign Pontiff and the Salvation of France” is one of two fundamental goals of Legentil’s National Vow. The construction of Sacré-Coeur to fulfill the demands of Alacoque’s vision was a required act of reparation for the country’s sins against the papacy. To win back God’s favor, its construction was essential. Revolutions in France and Italy had ended the church’s immediate, practical, governing authority, resulting in the execution of bishops and clergy and the demolition of once-great monasteries and convents. The pope was walled up in the Vatican in the face of a secular government and a populace thirsty for his blood. The bishop of Poitiers, François Pie, noted that, “The Revolution of 1789 is the original sin of public life.”³³ Simply put: hell is the Revolution. The Savoyarde dedication booklet anticipates this explicitly, stating that its purpose is “to resist all the attacks of the demolishers and the shock of all the future revolutions” (italics added).³⁴ The precedent of this view and its likely dissemination among French Catholics suggests that Mulet’s message in this final movement of the cycle is a statement of faith in both the physical building and its ideology; and as such, “Tu es petra” is no mere circus showpiece, but the profound prayer of a fervent heart and a statement of hope and comfort to an oppressed Church.

Conclusion

While there is no doubt that Mulet’s Esquisses Byzantines is a colorful interpretation of the architecture of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris, one should not neglect its ideological program. A close reading of this text completes the understanding of the piece in a more philosophical way than the empiricists suggest. The ideology of the basilica is one of atonement—a call to France to repent for the sins of the Revolution and for failure to protect the pope from the Risorgimento. The fruit of this penance was the Allied victory in World War I. Mulet’s programmatic inscriptions seem to support this as does his otherwise unknown motivation for publishing the work at this time. Mulet never commented on the program of the Esquisses Byzantines, but this in no way dismisses this close reading.

The French victory in World War I confirmed for conservative Catholics that the final fulfillment of the prophecies of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had been successful. France had atoned for its sins. Alacoque was canonized on May 13, 1920, the final affirmation of the victory won through the Sacred Heart of Jesus for France and the world.

Notes

1. Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), page 17.

2. Ibid., page 5.

3. Raymond A. Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: an Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), page 27.

4. Ibid., page 40.

5. Ibid., page 83.

6. Ibid., page 90.

7. Ibid., page 149.

8. Alfred Van den Brule, Le Sacré-Coeur De Montmartre: Hubert Rohault De Fleury (Paris: Spes, 1930), page 134.

9. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2006), page 376.

10. Jacques Benoist, “Le Sacré-Coeur De Montmartre De 1870 a Nos Jours,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, volume 26, number 1 (1992), pages 355–356.

11. Felix Raugel, letter to Kenneth Saslaw, July 7, 1973. Correspondence: Saslaw archives, Donna Walters, Gautier, Mississippi, November 16, 2023.

12. Bulletin De l’Œuvre Du Vœu National, Archives Historiques De l’Archevêché De Paris (AHAP), 1895, page 924.

13. Benoist, page 608.

14. Donna Mary Walters, Steven Best, and Thomas Fielding, The Enigmatic Organist (manuscript), page 1.

15. Ibid., page 26.

16. Ibid., page 23.

17. Fulcher, op. cit., page 11.

18. “Les tendances et antireligieuses néfastes de l’orgue moderne,” Congres General de Musique Sacrée, Strasbourg, July 26–31, 1921, page 9.

19. Isabelle Mulet letter to Kenneth Saslaw, July 7, 1973. Correspondence in Saslaw archives, Donna Walters, Gautier, Mississippi, November 16, 2023.

20. Benoist, op. cit., page 586.

20. Benoist, op. cit., page 588.

21. Harvey, op. cit., page 381.

22. G. Mulet, “La Savoyarde: Cantique Populaire” (Grenoble, M. Fleurot, 1896).

23. Paul Handley, editor, “Sacre Coeur Is Consecrated,” Church Times, October 25, 2019, www.churchtimes.co.uk/.

24. Jean-Loup Truche, Concerning the Translations of the Words “Memoîre” and “Campagnes,” email to the author, January 12, 2020.

25. Quoted in R. F. O’Conner, “Cardinal Guibert.” American Catholic Quarterly Review, Volume XLII, Number 165 (January 1917), page 465.

26. Ibid., page 487.

27. Savoyarde.

28. Ibid., page 47.

29. Ibid., page 71.

30. David Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), page 111.

31. Ibid., page 39.

32. Kertzer, op. cit., p. 39.

33. Jonas, op. cit., page 147.

34. “Voeu national au Sacré Coeur: cérémonie du baptême de Françoise Marguerite du Sacré-Coeur [cloche dite la Savoyarde de]” (Paris: Imprimerie Devalois, 1895).

John Bishop

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.