In the Wind: Follow the money

Music in the mountains

Last January, Wendy and I moved out of our apartment in Greenwich Village and into a house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Stockbridge is a town with two thousand residents in the Berkshire Mountains about five miles from the New York border. It is a gentle little town, and we live within a ten-minute walk of the cluster of shops and restaurants that form downtown, with the historic Red Lion Inn as its anchor. It is a dramatic change from the energetic bustle of Manhattan. Stockbridge was home to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, and to Norman Rockwell, the illustrator who produced hundreds of paintings to be used as covers for The Saturday Evening Post. French’s home and studio, Chesterwood, is now a museum and sculpture garden, and the Norman Rockwell Museum includes his studio, which was relocated to the site. Rockwell’s grave is about three hundred feet from our back door, in the cemetery behind the house along with many other quiet neighbors including the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The area is rich with summertime cultural institutions like the Shakespeare Festival, the Berkshire Theater Festival, and the dance theater Jacob’s Pillow. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is the area’s artistic centerpiece, located about fifteen minutes from our house in Lenox, Massachusetts. It is also home to the Tanglewood Music Festival founded by BSO conductor Serge Koussevitsky in 1940 as the Berkshire Music Festival, a rich educational program with a list of alumni that includes Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Zubin Mehta.

Mrs. Gorham Brooks (neé Tappan) and her aunt Mary Aspinwall Tappan donated the 210-acre Tappan estate to Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936, and an all-Beethoven concert by the BSO under Koussevitsky on August 5, 1937, was the beginning of the then-called Berkshire Symphonic Festival. The first concerts were held in a tent, and the 5,700-seat “Shed” was inaugurated on August 4, 1938. The Shed is an amphitheater-shaped structure with an enclosed stage and open walls. The rear of the building is a vast arc that opens onto a large lawn—lawn tickets are available to concertgoers who wish to sit outside—and there is a rich tradition of picnicking during concerts. We have seen some pretty elaborate rigs where families pull folding chairs and tables, coolers and baskets in wagons, and set up commissaries with fancy wines. A “Rules” page on the orchestra’s website states that patrons are free to bring any alcoholic beverages.

The BSO acquired the adjacent Highwood Estate in 1986, and an architect’s master plan combined the two properties, making possible the construction of the 1,200-seat Seiji Ozawa Hall, which was opened on July 7, 1994. Ozawa Hall has real walls and side balconies, but the rear wall is a huge door, like that on an airplane hangar, that opens to another picnic lawn.

Summer weather in the Berkshires is notorious for sudden and unexpected violent thunderstorms and microbursts, and severe weather shelters are scattered about the campus in proximity to the two big picnic lawns. Throngs of music-loving picnickers dashing toward those shelters makes quite a spectacle, leaving thousands of glasses of wine to get diluted.

The riches of summer

Regular readers may remember that we have lived in Newcastle, Maine, for more than twenty years, while in the meantime we have lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, Charlestown, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), and Greenwich Village. Maine is also home to our sailboat Kingfisher, which we use for day sails, overnight sails, and at least one cruise each summer lasting something like a week. When we settled in Stockbridge and tickets for Tanglewood went on sale in February, we agreed that we would buy tickets only for weekends that would be rainy in Maine. Our first Tanglewood weekend has just passed, and it was sunny and breezy in Maine.

We heard three concerts, one in Ozawa Hall and two in the Shed. The great pianist Emmanuel Ax has created a series of three programs called “Pathways from Prague,” largely featuring the music of Leoš Janácek and his mentor, Antonin Dvorák. The program opened with Janácek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, a cycle of twenty-two songs for tenor, three female soloists, and piano. Emmanuel Ax was joined by tenor Paul Appleby and members of the Lorelei Ensemble to tell the tale of a “white” farmer who was seduced by a “black” Gypsy who bore him a child, a story including the triple whammy of taboos—interracial sex, extra-marital sex, and illegitimate births. Absorbing such a complex tale would have been easier if translations had been provided. There was a translation broadcast on a small monitor on the stage, but it was invisible to our balcony seats, and I am sure it was invisible to anyone more than ten rows from the stage. The evening was redeemed by a thrilling and dynamic performance of Dvorák’s String Quartet No. 13 by the Dover Quartet. Their rich tones were amplified by the lively acoustics of the hall, sending us home with our heads buzzing.

The two concerts we heard with the Boston Symphony Orchestra included some disappointments. Andris Nelsons and the orchestra covered soprano Nicole Cabell in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was a little muddled and lacked the energy one would expect. The last time I heard The Rite of Spring performed live was organist Stephen Tharp’s memorable recital at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston to close the 2014 national convention of the American Guild of Organists. Tharp’s transcription of Stravinsky’s controversial masterpiece was a lesson to all present about the power and range of the pipe organ. The church’s 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner organ is a gold mine of tone color, and it seemed as though every pipe had something to say that night. In my memory, the energy of that single artist exceeded the collective energy of the mighty BSO.

Andris Nelsons’s reading of Gershwin’s An American in Paris was square, lacking the swagger and swing that is so much a part of Gershwin’s music. Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, was programmed to end the first half of the concert on Friday night, but pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet had to withdraw due to a death in his family, and the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang was his replacement, bringing with her Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a piece that she will be playing in Europe and New York later in the summer.

I have been watching Yuja Wang on YouTube videos for years, but this was the first time I had heard her play live. I will not mention technique. She flies up and down the keyboard like a conjurer. Her brilliant passages in octaves are more than just fireworks, they have shape and nuance along with the dazzle. She plays softer passages with exquisite tenderness, and she summons a vast range of tone from her instrument. Saturday night’s concert included Duke Ellington’s New World A-Comin’ for piano and orchestra. I do not know if the same piano was used for both concerts, but there was a dramatically different range and volume of sound between Ms. Wang and Saturday’s pianist. Ms. Wang has a slight stature, but her touch on the keys of the piano is backed up by swimmer’s shoulders, and she produces a tremendous sound. As has become increasingly usual, the audience demanded and was treated to an encore, a snippet from Vladimir Horowitz’s Carmen Variations, using the full range of the piano keyboard at a rate of something like a hundred notes per second. How she thumbed out those inner melodies in the midst of all that is a mystery to me.

As a further example of the depth of her abilities, Ms. Wang is scheduled to play all four Rachmaninoff piano concerti and his variations on a theme of Paganini with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 28, 2023, at Carnegie Hall in New York. Google it, there’s still time to buy tickets.

But wait, there’s more.

Wendy has just joined the board of directors of the Salt Bay Chamberfest, an annual festival of chamber music presented in our neighboring Maine town of Damariscotta. Each year they offer six or seven concerts with a wide variety of artists and music. Cellist Wilhelmina Smith is the artistic director; her wide connections in the music world help bring extraordinary musicians to our little village. One memorable moment several years ago was when Alan Gilbert, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, played viola in a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in a rustic barn.

After three evenings at Tanglewood, we packed Farley the Goldendoodle in the car and drove home to Maine for the opening fundraising concert of the Chamberfest. Violinist Sean Lee, a former student of Itzhak Perlman at the Juilliard School of Music, played ten of Paganini’s 24 Caprices. Like the Liszt concerto and Horowitz Carmen played by Yuja Wang, Paganini’s caprices are the fiendishly difficult and complex creations of a renowned virtuoso. Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) completed the 24 Caprices at the age of twenty-seven. They are relatively youthful works, but they explore the depths of the instrument and are widely credited with expanding the range of expression on the violin.

Mr. Lee is young with a compelling gift for speaking with his audience about the music he is playing, and he led us through the well-selected caprices with a sort of travelog about what each piece was intended to display. Passages in parallel octaves and parallel sixths seemed especially daring for the layout of the instrument’s four strings, and I was impressed by the accuracy of his tuning. He ended with the twenty-fourth caprice, a set of variations on that famous “theme by Paganini” that has inspired subsequent sets of variations by Johannes Brahms, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Witold Lutosławski, among others.

I had a brief conversation with Mr. Lee after his performance (there was a very nice wine-and-cheese reception). He spoke of Bach and Paganini as the two towering figures in the development of violin playing—with Paganini’s influence the instrument was changed forever.

What is a virtuoso?

In my experience, virtuoso is a word that is often used casually, diminishing the gravity of the expression. We are members of a social club near our home in the Berkshires where recently we heard a guest artist play a piano recital after dinner. His performance was fine but not special. When he was finished, a friend turned to us and said gravely, “That is why they invented the word virtuoso.” As they say on the street, for me, not so much.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines virtuoso as “a person highly skilled in music or another artistic pursuit.” Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers “one who excels in the technique of art, especially: a highly skilled musical performer.” Fair enough, but it seems to me that there is more to it than that. As a lifelong listener of music, I believe there is a magic line that a performance can cross above which the awareness of any sort of technical demands vanishes. The performer’s physical being disappears from the flow of musical thought between the brain and the instrument. No matter how daunting the score, no matter how intense the demands, the listener is never aware that the performer thinks he or she is doing anything difficult. The music flows effortlessly off the fingertips, the embouchure, the lips. That is a different plane from “highly skilled.”

Standing ovations have become more and more common, almost obligatory, as if the audience is eager to know that they have witnessed greatness. Some brave soul in the first few rows stands, and gradually people heave themselves to their feet. When Yuja Wang sounded the final thundering chords of the Liszt concerto, the crowd sprang to its feet in unison with a roar of appreciation. Everyone present knew that they had witnessed something wonderful, something seemingly beyond human ability. Ms. Wang leaps around the piano keyboard as effortlessly as the butterflies outside my office window.

The other pianist we heard last weekend was highly skilled, and his performance of Duke Ellington’s music was compelling, but he had to plan each difficult leap, stepping back to assess the issue and calculate the trajectory. It was well rehearsed, but it was not second nature.

Stephen Tharp’s memorable concert in 2014 was a display of multiple levels of virtuosity. His transcription of The Rite of Spring was itself a virtuoso performance. Stravinsky produced a wildly complex score for a very large orchestra. There were eight French horns, three saxophones, and two tubas on stage with the orchestra on Saturday night. Distilling all that to two hands and two feet was a brilliant accomplishment. Even though he had created the score, memorizing the thing was other-worldly, and performing it with power, drive, and sensitivity left the audience breathless. And remember, Yuja Wang was playing for a crowd of music lovers, only some of whom were musicians. Tharp was playing for a huge building full of organists. With a wink, I quip that introduced a special level of difficulty.

Beyond being “highly skilled” and beyond crossing that line about physical limitations, I believe a virtuoso raises the bar for those who follow. Vladimir Horowitz changed the world of the piano (and how could he play sitting so low with his shoulders and nose so close to the keys?). Niccolò Paganini stretched the limits of his instrument, paving the way for the great romantic composers. (Mendelssohn wrote his famous violin concerto four years after Paganini’s death.) How can a fourteen-ounce cigar box with four strings produce such a range of sound? Cecilia Bartoli sings those fiendishly difficult Handel and Vivaldi arias as if she was singing “Happy Birthday,” and Martha Argerich playing Scarlatti is beyond comprehension.

Remove the machine.

It is the challenge of the performer to diminish or eliminate the physical act of making music so there is nothing between the brain and the instrument, and it is the instrument maker and technician’s challenge to remove the mechanics of the instrument from the equation. There was a mighty skillful piano technician behind Yuja Wang’s performance the other night. Both the pieces she played are full of cascades of notes. I marvel at the skill of a great pianist when the percussive being of the piano disappears and the flow of notes sounds like a waterfall. That would not be possible without meticulous action regulation and tuning.

The oboist, bassoonist, and clarinetist spend countless hours making and adjusting reeds, cutting slivers of cane to produce the purest tone. Those who play wind instruments are continuously eliminating moisture from inside their instrument, using swabs, gravity, and spit valves. We have all heard that blurp when a watery bubble makes its way through a French horn.

The pipe organ is the most mechanical of all musical instruments. Practically, it is impossible to eliminate all non-musical sounds from the instrument. We put padded muffler covers over pneumatic actions, balanced bearings for expression shutters, and precise bushings on keyboards and pedalboards. We strive to make wind connections airtight so the music is not interrupted by the hissing of leaking air, but there will always be a click, a squeak, or a groan to be tackled tomorrow. Heaven help us if there should be a cipher. Keep at it, friends.

§

As Wendy and I discussed the experiences of the weekend, I wondered if I was being too fussy, letting the snobbery born of a little knowledge cloud the overall experience. Guilty as charged, I suppose. When we were driving toward the Berkshires last week, we were listening to a performance of a Beethoven piano concerto, and I was thinking it was sub-par. At one of those climactic moments when the pianist roars up the keyboard in parallel tenths to break into a triumphant double trill, the two hands were trilling at different speeds, and I turned off the radio. We had a wonderful weekend, hearing lots of terrific performances along with a few duds, and two true thrills—the Dover String Quartet gave us a real treat. Tanglewood is a gorgeous mountain setting. The weather was perfect, sunny with a lovely breeze (should have been sailing in Maine?). The Shed was not filled, but given the huge seating capacity, there were well over three thousand people in seats, and another thousand or more picnicking on the lawn. Who’s a lucky guy?

The Organ Clearing House goes to the movies.

In July 2010 Sony Pictures released Salt, a film directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Angelina Jolie and Liev 
Schreiber. Ms. Jolie’s character is Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent accused of being a Soviet spy. Salt sets out to prove her innocence, and lots of people get hurt. One of the pivotal moments is the funeral of the American vice president held at Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York City. The church’s organist and choirmaster at the time, William Trafka, and the Saint Bartholomew’s Choir would perform a bit of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor as the vice president’s dear friend, President Matveyev of the Soviet Union, ascended the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. Salt would enter the church’s crypt from an adjacent subway tunnel, sabotage the organ’s wind and electrical systems creating a roaring disturbance, then detonate explosives that would deliver the pulpit, president and all, to the crypt where she would shoot him. Just another day in the life of a church.

Leslie Rollins, the film’s set decorator, read an article in The New York Times about the restoration by Quimby Pipe Organs of the organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and the Quimby people recommended the Organ Clearing House to decorate the set of the basement mechanical room for the St. Bart’s organ. Leslie invited me to the film’s offices in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood where he led me into the world of make-believe-turned-believable, which is the motion picture industry. The office walls were festooned with concept drawings of the dozens of sets that would be built, and he led me through the story so I could understand the role of the set we would create.

I described the behind-the-scenes functions of a large pipe organ including the blower and adjacent static reservoir and an array of electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching equipment. Since this would be an active operating set, I arranged to take Leslie and a couple people from Special Effects (SFX) to visit a nearby church to see that kind of equipment in operation. As is usual when the blower was turned on, the static reservoir expanded about six inches. They were disappointed—it wasn’t dramatic enough. I told them that while I did not want to build anything that would not be credible to another organ builder, I agreed that we could fashion a mock-up regulator with a more dramatic range of motion.

We provided a large blower from our stock and a huge array of organ electrical equipment borrowed from the yet-to-be-restored W. W. Kimball Co. organ at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey (in return for a nice contribution to the restoration of that organ), and I built a hilarious double-rise reservoir using two-by-fours for top, bottom, and middle frames and ten-inch-wide ribs cut from plywood. I made the usual canvas hinges all around but only put leather on the three sides that would be exposed to the camera. Rather than the measly six-inch rise of a normal organ reservoir, this thing opened close to thirty inches.

The dozens of sets were built in a complex of unused aviation hangars in Bethpage, Long Island, previously owned by Grumman Aerospace Corporation, the site where the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) that landed astronauts on the moon was built. The crypt had ribbed arched ceilings, much fancier than the actual basement at Saint Bartholomew’s, made of two-by-four frames and Styrofoam painted to simulate stone masonry.¹

In April 2009 my colleague Amory Atkins and I gathered the blower and wind-system components along with metal windlines and regulating valves. I drove a truck to Atlantic City to collect the switching machines, and we met in Bethpage to assemble the fabrication. Once the big pieces were in place, we were joined by SFX who added the equipment that would animate the scene. Evelyn Salt would jump off a moving subway train, vault through an opening into the crypt, shoot the chain for the regulating valve causing the reservoir to rise dramatically, and shoot the switch stack causing a noisy explosion (way more sparks and smoke than a usual 12-volt DC organ system could produce). The organ above would roar into a mass cipher, the congregation would panic, Salt would scatter explosives under the foundation of the pulpit, and Bob’s your uncle. The set decorating team included a young hippie woman who floated a cart of art supplies about the place followed by a big floppy golden retriever. It was her job to make things look old. I gave her photos of a “real” organ blower room with the usual accumulation of dirt, dust, spider webs, and debris, and she worked her magic to make it look authentic.

I showed Leslie the completed set and described what Ms. Jolie would have to do to put all that in motion. Bewildered, he asked me to come back in a couple weeks for the filming of the scene so I could explain it in person. When I arrived, I learned that they were running behind and did not know exactly when I would be needed. Could I stay around and be ready at a moment’s notice? For two days I watched the various actors take and retake their scenes, building the movie a few seconds at a time. Phillip Noyce moved from set to set with an entourage of aides with clipboards and flunkies who carried his chair and computer monitors around. I watched Angelina Jolie vault through that opening into the crypt dozens of times—she was doing her own stunts. Then came an urgent message over the public address system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.”

Angelina Jolie came into my little sanctum with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I explained the set-up, “You shoot this chain;” “I can’t shoot that;” “I’ve seen you shoot.” Mr. Noyce invited me to sit with him to watch the take onto his monitor. “When I point at you, you yell ‘action’!” (My big moment.) Leap, shoot, whoosh, shoot, flash, blam, roar. Noyce hollered, “Fantastic, cause and effect in one shoot.” And that was it. Angie jumped out that tunnel at least thirty times, but she shot my chain in one try.²

With the shoot complete, we broke down the set and returned all the gear. I was on the job for about three weeks. I saw the setup outdoors that would catapult a car off a highway bridge. I witnessed actors who were playing small roles asking Angie for autographs. I saw Angie and Brad Pitt coming and going from her trailer. I learned that 150 carpenters were employed for that one film. And when I saw the completed film, I was struck by how much effort went into building and decorating that set for a scene that lasted just a few seconds. If you watch the movie, do not take your eyes off the screen once you see Salt on a subway, or you will miss it. I was disappointed to learn that you had to be a $100,000 vendor to make the credits. I mentioned that I could have charged that, but it was too late.³

It is easy to stream Salt. I watched it a couple nights ago on Netflix. I saw the completed sets for the barge, the tunnel, the CIA stairway, the office where Salt made a bazooka from an office chair, the hotel room, the Bolt bus, and the North Korean prison.

I happened to ride past Saint Bartholomew’s in a taxi during the filming of the big explosion scene. There were dozens of fire trucks, police cruisers, and ambulances hovering about, and a crowd of extras big enough to create a church-filling congregation of mourners. I am sure the Fire Department of New York was a $100,000 vendor. They must have made the credits.

Let’s take it live.

My friend Angie got dozens of tries to make the perfect leap from the subway tunnel to the crypt of the church. Actors in live theater get one. They may have twenty or thirty performances, more if they are in a well-funded big-city show, but each night they get one chance for each moment of magic.

The other night, Wendy and I saw a production of Cabaret at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The venerable show has a cast of twenty-one, ten of whom are in the chorus known as the Kit Kat Ensemble—the Kit Kat Club is the main set for the show. The story is set in the jumbled unraveling of the cultural life of Berlin in the years leading up to Nazi domination and the start of World War II, where the Kit Kat Club is a refuge for a large part of the population we know today as LGBTQIA2S+, in a time when such self-identification was not understood or accepted by those outside the acronym. The atmosphere in the Kit Kat Club was of forced hilarity, longing, and sexual confusion.

The superb ten-piece orchestra was sitting on a tiered bandstand on stage, just as you would expect a band to be played in a dance club—think of Ricky Riccardo’s band on I Love Lucy—and the energetic dancing swirled around them. Sometimes a lead character would leap into the band to hide, lights out, as the scene was changed. Sometimes a member of the band was soloed-out, spotlight and all. And during the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” at the end of the first act, the lead keyboard player, who was also the conductor, scooped up a gleaming white accordion and led the ensemble to the front of the stage singing her heart out.

Cliff Bradshaw, the traveling, struggling American novelist, hopes to build a life with Sally, the club’s marquee singer. Herr Schulz, the neighboring fruit vendor, dreams of marrying Fräulein Schneider, the spinster landlady who rents rooms to the various women of the ensemble and tries to turn a blind eye to the parade of sailors coming and going in her house. Then Cliff realizes that he has been used as a courier for the Nazis. Herr Schulz is revealed as a Jew and Fräulein Schneider realizes that she cannot risk her scant living and safety by marrying him. Some characters deny the situation, some try to exploit it, and some are propelled by the frenzy of alcohol, drugs, and sexual freedom to the exclusion of everything else. The emcee is the heart of the show, inciting and weaving the intrigue, hinting at the macabre, reveling in the confusion, and has the longest list of dance steps, acrobatics, complex songs and monologues, costume changes, and sinister gestures of all the characters.

We were attending one of the last performances of the three-week run. As we arrived at the theater, we read that the curtain would be delayed. Sometime around the scheduled curtain time, it was announced that the actor playing the emcee was unable to appear, and the understudy was hard at work with the cast doing a last-minute blocking rehearsal on stage. A half hour later we entered the theater. “Willkommen,” the bawdy opening number, blasted onto the stage, and for two-and-a-half hours we watched, yelled, and whistled in awe as the understudy and heretofore chorus member James Rose (she/they), tall and slender with past-shoulder-length hair, brought the emcee to life in their first and last-minute crack at the role.

I am sure that Wendy and I have seen understudies taking on a role before, perhaps sometimes at the last minute, but not a role as complex as this. I doubt that this performance will go fuzzy in my memory but will join the file in my memory titled “Unforgettable.” The emcee is central to most of the songs and dances, and Rose’s interpretation included endless sinister, sensual, sensuous motions of their extra-long, extra-flexible fingers. I have no idea how much rehearsal time she had with that role, but she certainly spent a lot of time thinking and preparing for it. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that last-minute rehearsal while we were waiting outside for the house to open; it must have been a very dramatic hour.

Art of the moment

In last month’s issue of The Diapason, I wrote about our recent trip to Athens, Florence, and Bologna during which we visited as many museums as our stamina would allow—more, in fact. We reveled in the timeless works by Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Ghiberti, as art lovers have for 500 or 600 years. If we are still able, we could go back and see them again in twenty years. You lean in to look at brush strokes, chisel marks, dappled sunlight, and facial expressions. Favorite souvenirs from the trip are the two-inch pieces of Carrara marble that I picked up from the roadway when we visited the quarry that was the source of stone for the sculptures of Michelangelo along with many other artists. What makes those stones magical are the hundreds of tiny, shiny facets that sparkle when I turn them under my desk lamp, the quality that breathes life into those monumental statues.

The performing arts are different. A piano sonata, an aria, a symphony, a Broadway show, or a hymn happens in real time. If the artist misses a piston or flubs a note, or a couple dancers run into each other, the moment vanishes but stays in memory. Cooperative music-making is one of the high points of the human condition. A symphony orchestra is a spectacular achievement, a choir is equally special, especially considering that it is just human voices. An opera or the musical we saw the other night is multi-dimensional, including singing, dancing, instrumental music, and live drama, and that production is a real romp—there is something happening onstage every second.

This notice was included as an insert in the playbill for Cabaret:

Barrington Stage wants to remind you that this is live theater; and for some of us, it can be church. Just like in church, you are welcome to come as you are—to hoot and holler or to sit quietly in reverence. Worship and engage however you feel most comfortable. Laugh audibly and have natural emotional and sometimes vocalized responses if you feel it. Just remember that while it’s okay to engage, we should aim to neither distract nor thwart the performance.

I know I hooted a few times, and probably hollered, too.

§

On November 14, 1943, the twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein stood in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and his career took off like a rocket. James Rose’s performance the other night was other-worldly, and more breathtaking as she was a last-minute fill in. I wonder what was going through their mind during that curtain-delaying rehearsal. During the ovation at the end of the performance, fellow cast members were expressing their admiration, offering quiet, affectionate congratulations, and deferring to Rose for extra solo bows. It was a thrilling performance of a chilling character. The arts matter.

Nota bene

While I took hundreds of photos while working on Salt that show the various sets under construction, we were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that barred us from publishing photographs taken on the set, and expressly forbidden from photographing the actors. Even though it was almost fifteen years ago, and though I would love to share some photos here, I will stick to the agreement I signed.

Notes

1. A different set for the film used another neat “faux-trick.” Late in the film, there is a scene where the American president is hustled down an elevator to a secure emergency facility deep underneath the White House. The tunnel between the elevator and the facility was ribbed, the ribs were made of swimming-pool noodles covered with thick spray paint.

2. Burt Dalton, foreman of SFX crew, won an Oscar for his work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the year before. I was impressed by his status on the set. When he walked by, people whispered in awe and respect.

3. Follow this link to see listing of cast and crew for Salt: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm. There are over 180 cast members from Angelina Jolie as Salt to Zoë D’Amato, mourner. Scroll past the cast to see the crew, which included twenty-three makeup technicians and hundreds of others in the art department, sound department, special effects, visual effects, stunts, costumes, editorial, location, etc. It takes hundreds of people to make a movie like this.

Adventures and transitions

In the last six weeks, Wendy and I have attended three singular events involving three very different pipe organs. One was small and in poor condition, another was a grand instrument in an iconic church, and the third was so large as to be off the charts. Most instruments have little variations in size—a violin is a violin, a trumpet is a trumpet—but pipe organs span huge ranges of size as well as styles and even purposes. These events provided a fun overview of extremes.

We traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on April 5 to hear the brilliant young organist Anna Lapwood play a recital on the massive Midmer-Losh organ in Boardwalk Hall. No other organ in the world has ten 32′ ranks, and those are just ten of 447 ranks; the organ has 33,111 pipes. You can find the stoplist and list of ranks at boardwalkorgans.org. (See also the cover feature of the November 2020 issue.) There is an impressive restoration effort underway there, a daunting task being faced by a professional staff and a troupe of volunteers under the direction and curatorship of Nathan Bryson.

According to its website, the interior of Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long, 310 feet wide, and 137 feet high. Remember that a football field is 300 feet long, and you might imagine the scale of the place. Among the activities in the hall beside organ recitals are car races, tractor pulls, and rock concerts, and it is the only space in the world that has hosted an indoor helicopter flight. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was nominated to be a candidate for president of the United States during the Democratic National Convention in Boardwalk Hall.

The stage of Boardwalk Hall is 148 feet wide, and the main organ chambers flank the proscenium arch. The size of the organ and the number of expressive divisions were obvious to the audience as the organ chamber lights remained on throughout the concert. All the individual sections of the instrument were evident, and hundreds of huge shutters opened and closed suddenly and majestically.

Anna Lapwood is twenty-eight years old and has risen to international fame through her fantastic abilities, popular appeal, and masterful use of social media. Enter her name in search fields for Google, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, and one will find days of fun listening. She was recently appointed an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for her service to music. According to her official website, Anna “holds the position of director of music for Pembroke College (Cambridge), associate artist with Royal Albert Hall, and artist in association with the BBC Singers. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ award from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist.”

Knowing that this would be a popular event among organists and organbuilders, I bought our tickets for Anna’s concert at Boardwalk Hall immediately after they went on sale in early February, and Wendy and I enjoyed our seats at a table on the main floor. Since Boardwalk Hall’s seating capacity is over 10,000 we were not worried about missing the concert. While the main floor was nearly full, the audience of around 1,200 people had plenty of space to move around. We cruised the floor, drinks in hand, greeting old and new friends, and chatting with my admired colleagues who serve on the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, responsible for this, the most massive of organ projects.

Ms. Lapwood’s entry to the concert stage was one only possible at Boardwalk Hall. We heard the blast of a car horn, and a 1938 regency blue Chevrolet Master Sport Sedan entered the hall from the left wing. With horn blowing, British flag waving, headlights blazing, and the audience cheering, the uniformed chauffeur, owner Chuck Gibson, walked around to open the passenger door. Ms. Lapwood stepped out onto the vast floor clad in sparkles and gold shoes, mounted the stage energetically, and we were off. The program featured her transcriptions of Hans Zimmer’s music from Interstellar, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and my favorite, Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain.

I have attended dozens of organ concerts offered by serious, even stuffy artists, including many of those I have stuffily played myself. Organ music can be very serious, confusing, arcane, and difficult for lay people to understand and appreciate. Anna Lapwood’s arresting stage presence and honest enthusiasm for the instrument and the music she played filled the cavernous space with excitement. It was a thrilling evening, and that is one room that can truly support 32′ organ tone.

Goodbye, good friend

In November 2023 friend and colleague Brian Jones passed away. (See “Nunc dimittis,” January 2024 issue, page 6.) Brian had been organist and choir director at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston from 1984 until 2004 where he built a widely admired choir program, making brilliant use of the church’s resources and central location to attract wonderful singers to the program, both professional and amateur. Brian along with associate organist Ross Wood and the choir produced eight recordings including the wildly successful Carols for Choirs, which helped transform Trinity’s Christmas carol service into a must-go experience for Boston audiences, so popular that after several years they started offering it twice on a December Sunday. One year Wendy and I took her mother for drinks in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel before crossing Saint James Place to enter the church early enough to find seats. I was honored to serve as organ curator at Trinity during Brian’s tenure, and I wrote about some of the experiences we shared in the February 2024 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9).

Brian’s memorial service was held at Trinity on April 27, 2024. We had dinner with friends the evening before and spent the night at a fine hotel on Copley Square. As we approached the church on Saturday morning, we were greeted by Lydia, Brian’s beloved 1933 cobalt blue Chrysler Coupe, complete with rumble seat and oversized headlamps, parked in the same spot next to the church where I parked every Friday morning for my pre-recital tuning all those years ago. Lydia was a common sight among Brian’s friends, her “ooo-gah” klaxon horn heralding her imminent arrival. She once made an appearance at our house in Maine, that crazy horn blaring through the woods as she came down our long driveway. Seeing that car invoked memories of the immense pleasure Brian got from driving her around, his ebullient, toothy smile as he enjoyed the daylights out of corny, often racy jokes, and his joy of sitting around a table with friends and family.

Brian’s memorial service was a reunion of dozens of colleagues, some I had not seen in years. People came from great distances to be with him in spirit one last time in that great church where it had been Brian’s childhood ambition to serve as organist. The building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and decorated by John La Farge, is a symphony of crotch-matched marble, painted stenciling, rich dark woodworking, and a magnificent pair of organs, Skinner Organ Company Opus 573, revised, and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-C. A small herd of organists took turns at the great four-manual console, and Colin Lynch, Trinity’s director of music, led a large and enthusiastic alumnae choir.

The choir sang a collection of anthems including two great swashbucklers that I first heard sung by the Trinity Choir under Brian’s directions, pieces that he loved and that I taught the parish choir I was leading at the time. “Kyrie,” from Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, expresses the height of the French Romantic symphonic literature for organ as inspired by the stupendous expressive organs built in many of France’s great churches by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, including the doozy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where Vierne was organist from 1900 until his death at the organ console with his foot on low E at the end of his 1,750th recital at the church. The organ accompaniment is worthy of Vierne’s six great symphonies for organ, and the choir sings dramatic expressive passages culminating with a soaring soprano line in the closing statement of “Kyrie eleison.” The choir was rehearsing that piece as we entered the church, and I burst into tears. “I can name that tune in one note.”

Brian Jones loved sublime pieces like the Vierne and the carols of John Rutter, and he had a soft spot for syrupy, nostalgic music. A beautiful reading of Adolph Adam’s O Holy Night was included in the recording Carols for Choirs, and Stephen Adams’s The Holy City was a perennial favorite. Colin Lynch and the alumnae choir gave us The Holy City with its dramatic sweeps and swoops, rolling triplets in the accompaniment bass line, and the treacly text that combine to make the piece a sentimental favorite:

And then me thought my dream was changed, the streets no longer rang, hushed were the glad Hosannas the little children sang, the sun grew dark with mystery, the morn was cold and chill as the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Hark, how the Angels sing Hosanna in the Highest, Hosanna to the King!

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Listening to that marvelous barnburner of an anthem, I remembered a moment during my time caring for the Trinity organs. I was sitting at the console, maybe planning the next hour of tuning, when a foreign tourist came up to the velvet rope, got my attention, and asked, “Can you play zee Holy City?” I gave him a chorus of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” and went down the steps to shake his hand.

Anyone who has attended a convention of the Organ Historical Society has witnessed the best of hymn singing as it is a tradition of the society that the audience/congregation sings a hymn at each recital. That Saturday morning at Trinity Church, Mr. Richardson’s massive roof was raised as the throng of organists and singers poured their emotional hearts into singing some of the great hymns of the faith led by that gorgeous heroic organ, all of them except me, because I cannot sing while weeping.

Brian’s grown children, Eliza and Nat, gave loving moving eulogies, speaking for Brian’s widower Mike and the entire family. Brian had a distinctive, often stentorian voice and a repertory of standard phrases always delivered in the same singsong fashion. Nat Jones’s imitations of his father were so authentic as to bring Brian into the room with us, both hilarious and unnerving. It was a grand morning remembering a grand man.

Why we do this

All that wonderful music in that beautiful place was a reminder of the magic that is the instrument we love so much. In a lofty setting like Trinity, the organ is a monumental presence. Years ago, when I still worked at Trinity, I was at a meeting on Cape Cod discussing the possibility of bringing an organ to a summer chapel there, when a retired Episcopal bishop hearing that I worked at Trinity referred to the organ there as a “weapon.” I am not sure that was the right word, but I think I know what he meant. That organ is a great example of an instrument perfectly suited to its room, with a range of expression from barely audible mystery to thundering triumph, all under the hands and feet of a single musician. The nerdy organbuilder in me sits in a pew picturing the thousands of pouches and valves flapping away inside the windchests, pouring air into thousands of pipes, lifting our spirits. It is mystical, magical, and majestic all at once. That’s why we do this.

Inaugurating a new ministry

Since we moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a couple years ago, Wendy and I have been attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street across from the Red Lion Inn. I have a previous personal connection with the parish as my grandfather, the Reverend Dr. George Douglas Krumbhaar, was rector there from 1960 to 1974, from when I was four years old until I graduated from high school. I have fond memories of holiday family visits to the rectory, and solo summer weekend trips when my grandparents treated me to concerts at Tanglewood. I practiced and played a couple recitals on the Roosevelt organ as rebuilt with neo-Baroque accent in the early 1960s, and walking around town as an adult fills me with memories from over fifty years ago.

Saint Paul’s is a beautiful building, designed by Charles McKim and richly decorated with appointments by John La Farge and Stockbridge resident Daniel Chester French.¹ Its stately location with adjoining rectory on the northeast corner of the main intersection gives it a local prominence, and its doors are perpetually open, welcoming the many tourists who visit for skiing in the winter and the countless artistic outlets during the summer.

On May 8 we were thrilled to join a throng of clergy, members, and guests attending the installation of the Reverend Samuel T. Vaught as the twentieth rector of Saint Paul’s. Father Sam is young, a newly minted priest, and this is his first appointment as rector of a parish. It was an involved and poignant service full of symbolism and hopefulness. Especially meaningful was the prayer of the new rector, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, yet you have called your servant to stand in your house and serve at your altar. To you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit.” He proved his youthfulness by delivering the prayer kneeling on the bare stone floor and when finished, standing smoothly with nary a grunt, creak, or stumble. Father Sam is ambitious, hoping to stay long enough to make a difference, and as one of the many silver-haired people in the congregation, I hope that his youthful enthusiasm will attract younger families to join the fun.

Saint Paul’s has the thoroughly picked over old bones of Hilborne Roosevelt Opus 127, built in 1884, the same year that the building was completed and dedicated. The replacement of principal stops with tapered pipes along with the addition of an especially narrow-scaled mixture, Scharff, Sesquialtera, and Krummhorn on electric windchests have obliterated much of the organ’s original character. I am pretty sure that Mr. Roosevelt never heard a Krummhorn. Besides the poorly conceived and executed alterations, the organ is in horrible condition. I have not mounted the steps to the organ loft buried in the base of the tower since my return to Saint Paul’s, but from sitting in the pews, I can list on my fingers which Bourdon pipes have cracks or fallen stoppers and which are dead, which manual notes are prone to ciphering, and which notes of specified stops are out of tune by more than two whole tones. Yikes. There is no choir, and there are two organists casually employed who take turns at the keydesk. Although there is not much of a music program, it is still nice to hear a pipe organ.

In addition to his priestly presence, Father Sam is an organist and pianist. I enjoyed a coffee date with him a few weeks ago during which he expressed the ambition that the church should have an appointed parish musician who could start a program involving solo and choir singing. Knowing that for at least the current moment there would be no money available for significant organ repairs or replacement, I offered to inspect the instrument and suggest what might be repaired with a little bit of local elbow grease, and I am pretty sure I could improve the tuning supposedly applied during Holy Week. While money was paid, it does not sound to my ears that much good happened.

In an age when many parishes flounder, it is fun to think of the possibility of reinvigorating this venerable parish that I have been associated with for more than sixty years. As a twelve-year-old, I thought the organ was great. As a sixty-eight-year-old, not so much. Here’s hoping and anticipating that the arrival of an energetic young priest will bring new life to the place. I think the town is ready 
for it.

Notes

1. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is best known for his monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Chesterwood, is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

One stop shopping

The age of the internet has brought us a new world of shopping. Tap an icon on your phone, type a few letters in a search window, click “buy now,” and Bob’s your uncle. If you are buying something easily recognizable or definable, you are not likely to be disappointed, and if you are disappointed, most online retailers are good at managing returns or substitutions. I am concerned about the environmental cost of all that shipping, delivery, and packing materials. I am dumbfounded by how much bubble-wrap and how many air pillows I take out of oversized boxes to find the little thing I ordered. On the other hand, I am embarrassed to remember how many times I have left a workshop or jobsite to drive to a hardware store because I needed ten of a certain size of screw.

It is no surprise that UPS and FedEx are the two largest trucking companies in the United States, and I am willing to bet that Amazon will pass one of them now that they are building their own fleet of trucks. They cater to our Amazon and eBay habits, rushing essentials to us a day or two after we place an order. In Maine, we have a half-mile driveway, as do many of the houses on our rural road, so Phil, our UPS driver, has to drive a mile on our private road to deliver to our house. He typically arrives around 6:00 p.m., and it takes him two hours to finish his route after he leaves us.

There are two kinds of birds . . .

. . . those you can eat, and those you cannot. I maintain the website for the Organ Clearing House, updating it every couple weeks as organs come and go, and I receive all the inquiries generated by the “Contact” page. There are two kinds of inquiries, those from people who know about pipe organs and those who do not. They ask when it could be delivered; some have asked if next-day delivery is available. As it happens, no. It is not like ordering shirts from L. L. Bean where you check a box for a monogram and another to state that it is a gift. Maybe I should add boxes on our website so you can check boxes to choose Kirnberger, Werckmeister, or equal temperaments.

I correspond with dozens (hundreds?) of people each year who are wondering how to acquire a pipe organ. Only a fraction get traction, and I can often tell from the first email or phone call if it is not going to lead anywhere. When I receive an inquiry from an organist and we correspond several times without anyone else being mentioned, I ask if we could have a conference call with some other people from the church. That winnows out those who are dreaming and have not mentioned the idea to anyone else.

I think the inquiry from someone who admits to not knowing much but sincerely wants to acquire an organ is a special responsibility. I try to respect their intention while at the same time describing the process clearly. In those instances, the first issue is almost always cost. During a preliminary conversation, I cannot be specific about the potential cost of an organ for a given church, but I can say that a modest-sized organ for a local church costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Often enough, that is the end of a conversation, but if we get past that barrier, we can start to get creative.

Sometimes, initial inquiries refer to specific organs on our website, listing three or four instruments that have nothing in common. Once again, this is not like ordering shirts. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what would constitute an ideal organ for a given church. We need to consider architecture and engineering. The organ should complement, even improve the interior of the church, and the building must safely sustain the weight of the organ. We need to consider the musical traditions and preferences of the parish. Is strong hymn singing the main goal? Complicated and sophisticated choral accompaniment? Recital literature? How might the placement of the organ enhance the church’s worship? What should the organ include to make it as useful as possible?

For many congregations, these are questions that are best answered with the help of an organ consultant, independent of the urge to promote a particular builder or type of organ. The most important role of the consultant is to educate a church’s organ committee or task force so they know what to ask when finally talking with potential organ builders.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Most of the conversations that lead to the purchase of an organ involve my making a site visit, which is the only way for me to get an accurate sense of a building and its community. I charge a fee plus travel expenses—a church’s willingness to bear some expense clarifies their intent. During those visits, I have my eyes open for where an organ might be placed. The location of the existing or previous organ might not be the best place in a room for an organ. I think of this as harvesting space. Where could we place a blower and wind supply? Where should the console be placed so the organist can see the choir, the clergy at the altar, and the bride waiting at the back of the church? Where should the organ be placed so its sound projects well, so it is safe from roof failures, so it looks its best? How can we ensure that the organ will be surrounded and supplied by temperate air to promote stable tuning? Answers to all these questions inform me and the people of the church as to what would bring the best result.

Tracker or electric?

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1952, and the New Testament was further revised in 1972. My father, rector of my home church, was introducing the new revision when a parishioner famously declared, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” I supposed she did not realize that Jesus could hardly have been aware of a book published in 1611.

Many organists have strong opinions about what type of organ they prefer or prefer not to play. “If a tracker organ was good enough for Bach, it’s good enough for me.” Before about 1900, there was no choice. Every organ had mechanical action, and every organ was hand pumped. There are countless examples of ancient organs that were placed in the ubiquitous rear gallery, high up on the central axis of the room. I suppose many of them were built without anyone wondering where the organ would go.

The introduction of electric actions and electric blowers at the beginning of the twentieth century introduced a new world of possibility for organ placement. The keyboards no longer needed to be physically attached to the body of the organ; a console could even be placed hundreds of feet from the instrument. It became common in England and the United States to place an organ on either side of a church’s chancel, with the choir divided between the two sides, and the console placed on one side. With electric playing actions that plan became very common, and as I wrote in the March issue of this journal, when my home parish was facing the end of time for its 1905 “chancel plan” Skinner, they chose to install a mechanical-action organ by C. B. Fisk, Inc., in a new rear gallery. That is a room of Gothic style and proportions, so the classic placement in a rear gallery was very effective.

That church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, has two classic locations that are ideal for organ placement. Perhaps the next organ there will be another chancel plan job. After all, the Fisk will be fifty years old next year. But it is more usual for a modern American church to have only one proper spot for an organ if there is space for a pipe organ at all.

Many church buildings cannot accommodate a mechanical-action pipe organ, no matter how much the organist might want one, but in those that could have either type, there is plenty of room for discussion. Well-built modern tracker-action organs are not clunky and awkward to play, and even very large organs with mechanical action allow ease of control and expression. They can have electric stop actions with complex combination actions, and some modern builders produce dual-registration systems with both mechanical and electric stop actions.

Electric and electro-pneumatic organs allow lots of versatility of registration and freedom of placement. You can have special effects like antiphonal or echo divisions, and you can “borrow” stops from one place to another using unit actions. Thousands of small unit organs with three or four ranks of pipes spread across multiple keyboards at many pitches have been built, and they are useful in many situations, but in larger electric-action organs, there are useful borrows, also called duplexes, made famous by Ernest Skinner and other innovative twentieth-century builders that do not compromise the integrity of the organ’s choruses. One of Mr. Skinner’s classic borrows is found in a Swell division with an 8′ Trumpet and maybe 4′ Clarion along with 8′ Oboe. The Oboe is extended to 16′ pitch and made to be playable independently in the Pedal at 16′ and 4′ pitches. That one rank forms the quiet solo voice on the Swell, the 16′ member of the Swell reed chorus, a gentle 16′ reed for the Pedal, especially useful as it is under expression, and a 4′ Pedal solo reed, ideal as the cantus firmus in a Baroque chorale prelude, with tremulant. That is a lot of bang for the buck. If there was space and budget for an independent 16′ reed, Mr. Skinner often included a Waldhorn 16′ that was duplexed to the Pedal.

Who’s going to build it?

Addressing all those issues and answering all those questions informs the organ committee as to which organbuilders should be asked for proposals. If the building could accommodate both tracker or electric-action organs, you would do well to have proposals for each. This is when your consultant can be most useful, guiding you through a list of possible companies considering their strengths and weaknesses.

Last summer, we replaced the roof and painted our house in Maine. Contractors visited to give us estimates, taking a few measurements, and scribbling on a pad taken from the dashboard of the pickup truck. There was no charge to us, and almost no cost to the contractor to provide those estimates.

It does not work like that when estimating the cost of a new organ or organ renovation. The builder will spend at least a day studying the building, several days if it is a large building and a potentially complex organ. Besides the time spent on the road, there are travel and lodging expenses. All that is followed by many days back at the workshop calculating, sketching, drawing, and writing. It is common for an organbuilder to invest $10,000 or more to develop a serious proposal for a large organ. Who should bear that expense? When soliciting proposals, some churches offer to reimburse travel expenses. Some organbuilders respond to invitations by asking for a fee.

How many proposals do you need? If an organ committee is well educated and can choose builders who are well suited for the project at hand, three should be enough. If the church feels the need to compare more than three proposals, they should be prepared to pay fully for all of them to avoid spending people’s time unnecessarily. As an organbuilder and organ contractor, I relish the opportunity to work with a thoughtful and well-prepared committee, even if I do not get the job, and I appreciate their respect for my time and effort.

Go Yuja.

A few months ago, I wrote about a concert Wendy and I attended at Tanglewood, when the scheduled piano soloist was replaced by the brilliant young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang playing a piano concerto by Liszt. I have been following Ms. Wang on social media for years; she has a formidable presence on Facebook where she (or someone working with her) posts videos of her performances, photos of her terrific (some say outlandish) performance costumes, and photos of her at leisure, always glamorous, always smiling.

On Saturday, January 28, Ms. Wang stunned the music world with her marathon performance of all four of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Carnegie Hall. But wait, there’s more. She also played Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Five of the most monumental and difficult of all compositions written for piano and orchestra were presented in a single four-and-a-half-hour concert. 

In his review published on January 29, Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times wrote, “She didn’t seem to have broken a sweat—neither on her face nor in her music-making, which had been calmly dazzling all the way through the final flourish of the Third Concerto at the program’s end.” “Calmly dazzling.” How many of us would like to be described that way? You can read the entire review at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/arts/music/yuja-wang-rachmaninoff-ca…;

Woolfe continued, “To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmalz. Her touch can certainly be firm, but not a single note was harsh or overly heavy; her prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five pieces of chocolate cake in a row.”

After all that, her encore was “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, a simple, tender melody that floated from her huge piano like the smell of a flower garden on a gentle breeze. The last paragraph of Woolfe’s review is a lovely comment on the juxtaposition of unimaginable virtuosity and stunning concert attire. Go read it for yourself.

I do not know the name of the technician who prepared that piano for this incredible concert. Although Zachary Woolfe promises that Ms. Wang does not bang on the keys, she sure gives them a workout. The speed of repeated notes, the breathtaking passages in octaves, and the clarity of the instrument in tender moments would not be possible without a brilliant technician. And after four-and-a-half hours of the most vigorous playing, the tuning of the piano was still “concert fresh” for the sweet little Gluck encore. We know the stories about how Franz Liszt had a spare piano ready for the second half of the concert because he beat the daylights out of the first one. How he would have loved to play on Ms. Wang’s Steinway.¹

I comment frequently to friends and colleagues and in writing about how fortunate we are to have so many brilliant virtuosos playing the organ. Like Ms. Wang and her Rachmaninoff, those organists blaze through the most difficult works of Reger and Demessieux without breaking a sweat. It is exciting to have the intricacies and majesty of those seemingly unattainable works revealed to ordinary listeners. Let’s keep building organs for them to play.

Notes

1. In the February 2021 issue of The Diapason, I wrote about Nanette Streicher,  “who built Beethoven’s pianos.” She inherited a piano factory from her father at the time when artists like Beethoven were venturing out of private salons and into concert halls seating 800 or 1,000. Realizing that pianos of that time were not adequate for developing virtuoso playing or for projecting in larger halls, Streicher increased the scaling of strings in her pianos that made necessary heavier cases and stronger interior bracing and frames. Her innovations led to today’s powerful instruments.

Covering all the basses

I remember the first time I went to Fenway Park in Boston with my father to see a Red Sox game. I had watched many games on television, but those of us “of a certain age” remember what televisions were like in 1965 with foil-wrapped rabbit-ear antennas, bulbous black-and-white picture tubes, and fuzzy pictures. When Dad and I came out of the tunnel into the sunshine at Fenway, the outfield grass was the greenest I had ever seen. I was dazzled.

The first time I heard a symphony orchestra live, those double basses took my breath away. I thought their rich sonorities, enhanced by the storied acoustics of Symphony Hall in Boston, were otherworldly, something that cannot be duplicated by a recording. I remember that magical first time whenever I hear those tones.

Robert Augustus Melcher (1910–1983) was a professor of music theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music from 1937 until 1976. He perennially taught the required two-semester freshman theory course Music Theory 101 and 102 along with a following sophomore course 201 and 202. I was a sophomore at Oberlin in the academic year of 1975–1976, his last year of teaching. Dr. Melcher’s teaching methods included fear and intimidation. He never hesitated to humiliate a student who answered incorrectly in class, and woe betide the one who was caught gazing vacantly across Tappan Square. He was particularly hard on singers, and he fawned over organ majors, calling us “theory prone” because of our understanding of basslines, which he called the driving force of music.

Dr. Melcher was right about basslines. As a Sunday morning organist and today as a sometimes congregant, I love how the basslines of hymns provide foundation, define harmonies, and inspire motion. As a frequent concert goer, I love how cellos, double basses, trombones, and tubas define the motion of Classical and Romantic symphonic music. As an organbuilder, I love the majesty of the wonderful bass sonorities driven by all that wind. It is fundamental.

§

I was curator of organs at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston in the 1980s and 1990s, where the principal instrument is Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 completed in 1952. It is a heroic organ with eight divisions, 240 ranks, and well over 13,000 pipes. It is something like eighty feet wide, forty feet tall, and twelve feet deep, beautifully organized and engineered because, unlike most organs of this size, it was built all at once under a single opus number. There is a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott enclosed in the Swell along with the rarity of a 5-1⁄3′ Quinte Trompette, four Pedal 32′ stops, and a Pedal division with over forty-five independent ranks.

The music in Christian Science worship services is described in the church’s manual, Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the church. There are three hymns, organ prelude and postlude of prescribed length, and devotional music provided by a solo singer accompanied by the organist. When the church leadership planned to join Boston’s fabulously popular New Year’s celebration, First Night, by offering a concert with organ and brass, the church’s organist, Thomas Richner, known to many of us as “Uncle T.,” asked if I would be the organist because he was not comfortable playing with ensembles.

What a thrill, what a great opportunity, the height of my performing career. There were 3,000 people in the audience and a brass quintet from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. With that huge organ under my hands, I’d be King of the Hill. We would play all the usual barnburners for brass and organ—Purcell, Clarke, Handel, Gigout; but there came Chester Schmitz, tuba player for the BSO, and I had a tiger by the tail. The power and energy of his bassline up close and personal was something I had never experienced. It reminded me of standing on the platform of a railroad station when an express train blasts through—the sense of force and power followed by a swirling cloud of dust and paper. I was once on a ferry from Rafina, Greece (an hour drive east of Athens), to the Island of Andros in a heavy gale. Standing on the open upper deck hanging on to the rail with my erstwhile hair and present clothing pushed straight back, I remembered Chester Schmitz’s bassline, as wide and powerful as the wind over the sea. The trumpets were terrific, horn and trombone all you would expect from principal players in a powerful, modern symphony orchestra; but Chester’s bassline ruled the day.

Who’s going to play the melody?

On March 23 of this year, Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition on National Public Radio, interviewed jazz bassist Christian McBride, who had just released a duet recording with his friend and colleague, bassist Edgar Myers. McBride shared that he and Myers had a mutual admiration society for many decades, and that coincidentally they were both at the festival known as Jazz Aspen some twenty years ago. When it was announced locally that they would play an unscheduled duet concert at the festival, a friend wondered, “But who’s gonna play the melody?” They played concerts and tours together over the years, and this is their first recording together. The title? But Who’s Gonna Play the Melody?

In the various cuts of the recording, they swap back and forth between bassline and melody, even accompanying each other on the piano. It was a creative look into the solo possibilities of an instrument typically associated with bass, made especially interesting by the equality of the two players and their shared inventive exploration. During the ten years Wendy and I lived in Greenwich Village, small jazz combos were a regular part of our entertainment life as we visited with friends in restaurants and bars, and I enjoyed listening to the ubiquitous bass player taking a turn as a soloist, wandering down the instrument’s fingerboard to find the highest treble range, plunking about up high while maintaining the rhythm, then returning “home” to the role of providing bass while accepting the patter of applause from listening patrons. McBride and Myers took that scene many steps further, obviously enjoying the unusual pairing of their instruments and outlooks.

Continuing the bass

The underpinning of most Baroque music is the basso continuo, the duo comprising a bass instrument, usually viola da gamba or cello and sometimes a bassoon, and a keyboard, usually harpsichord but sometimes an organ doubling the bassline and adding harmony above. Since the bassline needs two players, it takes three to play a solo sonata and four to play a trio. The harmonies for the keyboard are indicated by a system of squiggles, actually numbers, under the printed bassline, numbers that form chords by indicating the notes above the bass note. For example, if the bass note is C with a 3 and 5, you play a C-major chord. If it is C with a 4 and a 6, you play an F-major chord in second inversion. It is a magical system left over from the ancient tablatures that predated our modern music notation. It also reminds us of a chart for a jazz arrangement that gives a bassline and indicates chords. It is a license to improvise, and it is an admirable art.

One of my favorite moments in the literature of basso continuo is the end of the alto aria, “Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes” (He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty) from Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach. The singer is accompanied by two flutes and basso continuo, the flutes with a lovely E-major melody in parallel sixths and imitative passages. The alto finishes in measure thirty-six, and the flutes reprise the opening, which becomes the conclusion, but Bach’s gentle genius has them leave us abruptly in mid-resolution while the continuo plays the last chord alone, sending “the rich away empty,” a poignant rebuff.

The catalog of Bach’s cantatas is a dazzling list of masterpieces, some for solo singer with a small ensemble, and some swashbuckling monumental tours-de-force with large orchestra including brass and timpani, chorus, and multiple soloists. Some of music’s most famous passages are included—it is hard to imagine a world without “Jesu bleibet meine Freude” from Cantata 149. It would take some nerve to choose a favorite among the myriad, but I have nerve enough to name mine, Cantata 21, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis. It is a huge, eleven-movement piece with four choruses and solos and duets for soprano, tenor, and bass. After the mournful opening “Sinfonia,” the first movement is of special interest to organists as it is a fugue with the same subject as BWV 541, Prelude and Fugue in G Major, but in the cantata, the subject is in C minor, a striking comparison.

The continuo keyboard instrument is organ, and the bassoon doubles the continuo part for some movements and has an independent part in others. The ninth movement, “Erfreue dich Seele, erfreue dich Herze” (Rejoice my soul, rejoice my heart), is a snazzy aria for tenor and rollicking continuo, with fast bass scales and skipping-down-the-lane hemiolas that gives the continuo player an opportunity to create melody. What a privilege.

We know a great deal about Bach’s affinity with numbers and math. His music is loaded with mathematical relationships, and works like Cantata 21 are supremely organized. In the context of all that precision, the continuo part is an intimate invitation to improvise, a generous opportunity for creativity. The basso continuo is a colorful underpinning for the melodies, chords, and counterpoints that soar above. Basso continuo is the model for some more recent applications, like the bass and rhythm guitars in a classic rock band, the tuba-and-banjo duet of a sleepy Dixieland ballad, or any musical expression where a bassline with improvised chords accompanies a solo instrument or voice.

Supporting an orchestra

The ubiquitous 16′ Bourdon is found even on one-manual instruments with just a few voices, speaking an octave lower than unison pitch, doubling the bassline of hymns like the double basses of the orchestra. When an organ is large enough to include a 16′ Principal with open pipes, the pedal line takes on a new life, bringing both depth and clarity to the overall sound of the organ, and things really get profound when the bassline is emphasized by a 32′ stop. Because the Organ Clearing House specializes in the hoisting and rigging part of organbuilding, we are often called to handle the monster pipes of 32′ stops in which a single pipe can weigh a ton and produce a pitch at about sixteen cycles per second, which is below the range of human hearing.

Jason McKown (1906–1989) was my predecessor as curator of the organs at The Mother Church. He was an original Skinner man who had cared for the organ since its installation, who told stories about working next to Mr. Skinner on local installations when McKown was in his twenties, including Opus 692, built in 1928 for West Medford Congregational Church in West Medford, Massachusetts. He cared for that organ for fifty-nine years until I took it over in 1987.

The first organ installed in Boston Symphony Hall was built by George Hutchings in 1900, Opus 481, and included the king of organ stops, a 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason. Jason remembered seeing those noble pipes cut into pieces, piled on the sidewalk in front of Symphony Hall ready to be hauled away as scrap lumber in preparation for the installation of a new Aeolian-Skinner organ in 1947. Given that the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Symphony Hall had “only” a 32′ Violone and was never considered the equal of the mighty orchestra, that chopped up 32′ rank seemed a sad waste. When Foley-Baker, Inc., modified and enlarged the organ in 2004, they added a new 32′ Contra Bass and a huge wood Diapason with Haskell basses, a technology that inverts a tube into the pipe increasing its functional length with the side effect of providing more prompt speech.

I had a conversation with Mike Foley of Foley-Baker about the decision to use Haskell basses in which he noted that the conductor of a modern symphony orchestra is used to the instant speech of the double basses (and don’t forget Chester Schmitz’s cannon fire tuba notes) and is not willing to wait around for a lazy organ pipe to find itself and settle on a pitch. Wendy and I were present when the organ was played with the orchestra for the first time. James Levine was the conductor, Simon Preston was the organist, and it will not surprise you that they played Camille Saint-Saens’ Symphony III (the “Organ Symphony”). We had series tickets with seats just over stage right in the first balcony, the perfect seats for piano concertos, and the organ console was placed right under us.

In Symphony III, the organ enters in the adagio section of the first movement with a double-low A-flat followed by bass passages in D-flat major. When those magical deep notes came from the organ, we watched the woodwind players nudge and smile at each other; no other instrument can match those sonorities. Igor Stravinsky despised the organ, calling it the “monster that never breaths.” But how could the instrument produce such wind-driven tones without breathing?

Dad

We have just passed the tenth anniversary of my father’s death. Dad was an Episcopal priest who loved the music and liturgy of the church. He loved baseball, and he loved gardening. Evening primroses from his garden are in our yard in Maine. He had a special church voice that we heard only when he was celebrating the Eucharist. He really celebrated it, not in a here-we-go-again mumble, but in a full bold voice with a touch of singsong, distinctly different from any other of his tones of voice. He supported the music of the church and was involved in the commissioning of two new pipe organs.

I went with Dad to dozens of ball games at Fenway where we shared a streak of twenty-five consecutive opening day games. A large part of my adult relationship with Dad happened in section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14, seats that he held for over forty years. John Kiley was the creative and revered organist at Fenway, and we made a point of getting to the park early so we could hear “the preludes.” Kiley was also a church organist who slipped lots of hilarious little hints into his improvised reactions to unusual plays, like bursting into the “Hallelujah Chorus” when Carlton Fisk’s long fly ball bounced off the left field foul pole as a fair ball, home run, winning game five of the 1975 World Series.

As rector at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, Dad stood up for the Civil Rights movement and protested the Vietnam War in a town known as the place where “the politics meet the zip code, Zero-1890.” He educated the parish when the beloved organist Larry Berry was dying of AIDS and parents wanted to pull their children out of the choir, and when parishioner Yo-Yo Ma came to his office offering to play the cello as part of a Christmas Eve service, Dad said, “Larry plans the music here, we’ll have to speak with him.” He was the first in the Diocese of Massachusetts to hire an ordained woman as a full-time member of staff and was chair of the Standing Committee that nominated Barbara Harris as the first woman bishop in the Episcopal Church.

The day Dad died, I was working with my colleague Amory Atkins at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, the church where my parents were married. It was Amory’s birthday. There were twelve priests and four bishops in robes at Dad’s memorial service. I miss him.

Thar she blows.

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

Blower hygiene

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

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

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

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

Biggest in the fleet

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

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

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

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

Hurricanes

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

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

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

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

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