In the Wind: Getting on the road again after Covid

Industrial hygiene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water works.

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

Thar she blows . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five manuals? Are you kidding?

Most organs around the world have two manual keyboards and a pedalboard. Three manual organs are common, as are “four-deckers,” especially in big cities, but organs with five manuals are rare. What on earth do you do with five manuals? You only have two hands, and while clever organists can play two keyboards at once by “thumbing down” a melody, the cleverest could not possibly manage more than four at once. Can you even reach the top keyboard?

During my career of servicing organs, I always noticed that the top keyboard of a four-manual console shows considerably less wear than the others. In fact, when restoring an organ console, it is possible to swap the well-worn Great keyboard with the less-used Solo. Is it laziness or just more comfortable and convenient to couple the fourth-manual Solo division to a lower keyboard? A console with five keyboards is certainly connected to a very large organ, so it is always a bewildering thing with hundreds of drawknobs, tilting tablets, pistons, indicator lights, and gadgets not found on more usual consoles.

I am thinking about five-manual organs because in the last two weeks I have visited three of them: the Austin in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine; the Kilgen at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York; and the Aeolian-Skinner at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in New York. The three instruments are radically different, each with a distinctive personality, and each was demonstrated by a brilliant “house” organist with a particular point of view.

Vacationland

My wife Wendy and I divide our time between homes in New York City and coastal Maine. New York is a bustling, booming metropolis alive with culture and variety, busily regaining its life after the horrors of Covid, and in Maine we are in a verdant rural area alive with the beauty of the ocean and the continual motion of wind and tide.

The population of New York City is 8.5 million people, 1.63 million of whom live in the twenty-three square miles of Manhattan, which is 71,125 people per square mile. The State of Maine has 1.34 million residents, 300,000 fewer than Manhattan. Maine covers 35,385 square miles, so the population density is about thirty-eight people per square mile. When we were in New York for the first time after our Covid exile, I commented to Wendy, “We’ve seen more people in the last three blocks than in the last fifteen months.”

Portland is the largest city in Maine with about 66,500 residents—there are probably blocks in Manhattan with more people—but it is a beautiful city with a symphony orchestra, several fine choral societies, an art museum, opera, and ballet, and one of America’s two active municipal organists. James Kennerley presides over the 104-rank Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium, a gift to the city by Portland native and publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis. Curtis gained his middle initials from Hermann Kotzschmar, a brilliant organist and conductor who was the center of the musical life of Portland at the turn of the twentieth century, and the great and good friend of Curtis’s father. He memorialized Kotzschmar with the gift of the organ, dedicating his gift to the city as the Kotzschmar Organ. Today, a nonprofit group called the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) maintains and promotes the organ.

On June 14, 2021, the FOKO board held its annual meeting in person, the first non-Zoom meeting since “before.” We met in the large rehearsal hall of Merrill Auditorium, so there was plenty of space to comply with the city’s requirements of masks and social distancing. (Should we call that MSD for simplicity?) It was a joy to see friends and colleagues, to choose elbow and fist bumps over handshakes, and to discuss the business of the organization. After the meeting, municipal organist James Kennerley treated us to a half-hour recital on the great organ. We sat in folding chairs on the auditorium stage, up close and personal with the vast and mighty instrument as James demonstrated how he has learned to adapt the music of Bach to its resources. He is widely known as a prolific performer of early music, and he noted that his teachers would have questioned his registration when he played a brief chorale prelude on the Harp alone.

The Kotzschmar Organ has six manual divisions (Great, Swell, Orchestral, Solo, Antiphonal, and Echo) and originally had a four-manual console in the well-known Austin style with stop tablets and the “ka-chunk” combination action. The five-manual console was built in 2000, allowing more complete control over the organ. Why do you need five manuals? Obviously, you don’t. But imagine that you would like to have two manual registrations on both the main organ and in the Echo and Antiphonal divisions, which are located above the ceiling at the rear of the auditorium, along with a colorful solo combination for comment. Boom. Five manuals. The organ is loaded with colorful voices and includes a full theatre-style toy counter.

One of FOKO’s annual traditions is the presentation of a silent movie with organ accompaniment on Halloween, making use of the organ’s second personality as a theatre organ. Last year’s Covid Halloween film was The Hunchback of Notre Dame presented at the drive-in movie theater in Saco, Maine.

Merrill Auditorium seats about 1,900 people in a classic concert-hall layout with two balconies. I do not know the exact dimensions of the hall, but I will guess that no seat is more than 150 feet from the organ, and many are within 100 feet. It is a powerful organ—most of the instrument is on ten inches of wind pressure—and the big 32′ voices really shake the place. It is unusual to hear such a large organ in such an intimate space.

James’s appointment as municipal organist immediately followed the comprehensive renovation of the organ completed by Foley-Baker, Inc., in 2014. The organ is like new, sparkling both inside and out, up to any demands of the most creative organist. Visit www.foko.org where you will find concert schedules, stoplist, history, and a description of the renovation project.

James had some comments about the fifth manual:

In Portland, the top manual gets more use than most similarly sized consoles. Because it controls, by default, the Antiphonal and Echo divisions, there is a logical spacial separation of manual and pipe location (the main case vs. 100 feet up in the ceiling!). Additionally, because it is truly conceived as an orchestral instrument—every manual division has something important to offer to the ensemble sound—I find that I’ll often have the four “main” divisions coupled together. Having that fifth manual available saves having to worry about Unisons Off, etc. Reminded of the North German tradition of extensive improvised choral fantasias, I find the fifth manual gets most use when improvising.

He went on to say that when he was an assistant organist at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, they reserved the fifth manual “almost exclusively” for the West End trumpets, not the sort of thing you would want to forget having coupled down to another manual, especially given the console placement where the organist would be the last to hear!

Fifth Avenue

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, located at Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, is among the largest ecclesiastical buildings in the United States and is the second largest in New York. It is an important tourist mecca visited by more than five million people each year. During my visit in the waning days of Covid restrictions, there were hundreds of people milling about both during and between Masses. The organ was originally built by Geo. Kilgen & Son and now has 116 stops and 142 ranks, located in a huge gallery at the west end, under the rose window.

The interior of the church is 332 feet long and 174 feet wide at the transepts. (The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side is 601 feet long inside!) I did not have a tape measure with me, but with my long career of removing organs from big churches, I will hazard a guess that the balcony is more than thirty feet off the floor of the nave and the organ is twenty feet above the console. The sound of the huge organ is monumental in scale with the room. At Merrill Auditorium, the closest seats are within fifty feet of the organ, and they face the main body of the instrument directly at eye level. At Saint Patrick’s, the closest seats are probably fifty feet away, directly below the organ, and the sound of the organ soars above them.

My host was Michael Hey, associate organist and director of music for the cathedral. We spent an hour and a half listening to and discussing the organ before a noon Mass. One of his demonstration pieces became the prelude for the Mass, and while tourists swirled in the back half of the church and down the side aisles, priests and cantor in the chancel led the celebration for a large congregation. It was surreal to be so far from the altar, the priests, and the congregation. I could hear the cantor singing, standing at a microphone two hundred feet away, but I could barely hear the congregation singing.

Throughout my career, people have responded to learning what I do for a living with their travel stories. “When we were in London, we walked into Saint Paul’s . . . .” “When we were in Paris, we walked into Notre Dame . . . and someone was playing the organ. It was incredible. I’ll never forget that sound . . . .” Michael knows that he’s the guy playing the organ when those millions of tourists walk into the church. He thinks of the person from Argentina or Brazil who always dreamed of visiting Saint Patrick’s. He is inspired by the sense that his playing brings that visit to life and those visitors will take the experience home with them.

There is a swell little elevator from the narthex to the organ loft, a nice discovery on a very hot day, and a spiral stone stairway from the loft to the organ chambers and ultimately to the south tower. Most of the organ is located behind the magnificent organ façade, and we climbed ladders to the highest level where one can stand just under the great rose window and look down the length of the nave. Two full-length 32′ stops (Diapason and Contra Bombarde) lie on their sides in the north triforium, and when you walk past those two immense stops you reach the Nave Organ, located in two chambers near the great crossing. Are you paying attention? I’ve just left the organ loft, walked eighty feet to the Nave Organ, and another twenty-five to get to the place in the triforium where nave and transept meet, and there’s a commanding view of the great crossing, nave, and north transept.

The scale of the building and the organ encourages one to play to the acoustics. Michael’s hands are off the keys as much as on; he lifts his hands to separate notes, allowing the vast acoustics to connect them. It is light years from the practice room and from most usual church organs. There is nothing usual about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and its organ.

The fifth manual is home to the nineteen-stop Nave Organ that includes a principal chorus, a Gamba with Celeste, a couple flutes, a Vox Humana, Oboe, a big chorus of reeds and the Triforium Trumpet on eighteen inches of wind. Stand back. Michael is a tall, lanky guy, and when I asked him how often he plays on the fifth manual, he put his hands right on it and said it is really about how well your shirt fits. If the shirt is a little tight at the shoulders or the lunch a little too much, it is not as easy to get up there. But since the Nave Organ is so separate from the gallery organ, it makes sense to use the top keyboard to play the organs against each other. It was obvious as he played that the top manual is well within reach.

Michael’s affinity with the organ, the giddy climb high into the organ, and the thrill of hearing the mighty instrument project its tones through the lofty space was a great prelude to a lovely Thai lunch a few blocks away, a fitting end to a wonderful visit. You can find the stoplist and read about this remarkable organ at nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/StPatrickCath.html.

“Have you seen the well-to-do?”

Up and down Park Avenue . . . .¹ Saint Bartholomew’s Church (affectionately known as St. Bart’s), another of New York’s greatest, is four blocks from Saint Patrick’s at Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. Designed by Bertram Goodhue in a Byzantine-Romanesque style, it is markedly different in form and decoration from the many Gothic-inspired buildings throughout the city. With 225 ranks, the five-manual organ is the largest instrument in the city. Unlike the organs at Merrill Auditorium and Saint Patrick’s that are still in their original form with judicious additions, the St. Bart’s organ reflects an evolution, containing important elements from previous organs by Odell, Hutchings, and the Skinner Organ Company (Ernest Skinner), all summarized and crowned by what is the last project completed by the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company before it closed in 1972.

The most unusual feature of this landmark organ is the eighteen-stop Celestial division that plays from the fifth manual, built by the Skinner Organ Company in 1930 and installed above the dome, sixty-six feet above the floor of the nave. It originally included a large principal chorus, solo and soft flutes, strings and celestes, Vox Humana, a big assortment of reeds including Harmonic Trumpet, Tuba, and Corno di Bassetto, so the division includes both soft ethereal voices and powerful reeds, topped off with a seven-rank Harmonic Mixture. Half of the space above the ornamental dome is occupied by the organ, the other half of the outer dome is covered with hard plaster forming a huge resonating chamber, so the sound is blended as a heavenly chorus, providing huge climaxes to the effect of the combined chancel and gallery organs.

Paolo Bordignon, organist and choirmaster at St. Bart’s, is a devoted student of the organ he plays. As we walked around the church together, Paolo pointed out the spectacular carvings of the gallery organ case, all produced by master carver Frank Walter. You can follow a link to Mr. Walter’s work at stbarts.org/music/the-organs/. The interior of the building is wide and open as there are no columns. The impression of great height is enhanced by that dome, a huge interior space above the vaulted ceilings.

While Saint Patrick’s has the rolling acoustics you would expect in such a big room, in spite of its great size the acoustics at St. Bart’s are surprisingly intimate with “just enough” reverberation, allowing the brilliant classic choruses of the chancel organ to speak clearly throughout the room. Paolo demonstrated what he considers to be the genius of this organ, the rich Romantic voices from earlier instruments that include harmonic flutes, luscious strings, and wide-mouth diapasons combined with the brilliant neo-classical choruses of the 1972 Aeolian-Skinner. While some such instruments can only be described as hodge-podge (we sometimes say “Bitsa,” as in bitsa this and bitsa that), the St. Bart’s organ, enhanced by the marvelous building, is a cohesive, convincing whole.

Paolo gave me a detailed demonstration of the value of having so many stops by playing the same five or ten measures of various pieces over and over, using a different registration each time. Comparing and combining four or five sets of celestes, for example, showed what a kaleidoscope of sound a large organ can be. The luxury of choosing between harmonic flutes or between seven or eight lyrical colorful solo reed voices is the experience of playing on such a large instrument.

I did not need to ask Paolo about using the fifth manual. He repeated several times how important the Celestial division is to the whole of the organ, and as he played for me, he was up and down on all five keyboards. He is not especially tall, and he was wearing a jacket. Must have been a pretty good fit. Nothing to it.

When is enough enough?

It is just a couple months since I wrote about my visit to the world’s only seven-manual organ at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The design of that organ stretches the imagination ever further with its eighty-five- and seventy-three-note keyboards. The six-manual console at the Wanamaker Store (now Macy’s) in Philadelphia is a world wonder, especially when Grand Court Organist Peter Conte is playing. Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner built five organs with five-manual consoles (St. Bart’s, Riverside Church, Curtis Institute, Mormon Tabernacle, and Cleveland Public Auditorium). The Kotzschmar Organ and St. Bart’s are joined by the Hazel Wright Organ in Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral), the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, and Calvary Church, Charlotte, North Carolina, as among the five-manual organs in the United States. With Saint Patrick’s, that makes eleven of them, and by the way, there are two identical five-manual consoles at Saint Patrick’s, one in the rear gallery where Michael received me, the other in the chancel. This list is off the top of my head. I am not claiming it as definitive. Let me know how many I am missing. Five manuals is a lot, but my little tour proved that for a skilled and inquisitive organist and a very large organ, it’s nothing like too many.

Notes

1. Irving Berlin, “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”

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.

Lost arts

The stone carvings in an ancient cathedral, the sparkles of light on Rembrandt’s tunic, the deep colors of a Tiffany lampshade, the intricacies of a Renaissance tapestry. These are all experiences available to us as we travel to ancient sites and visit museums. They are living testaments to the skills of artists and artisans, expressing their visions, observations, and thoughts in physical media. Did Rembrandt mix his paints from gathered materials as observed in artworks already old when he viewed them? Did he know that his paints would retain their colors and stay on the canvas for 350 years? Visit a modern artists’ supply store, and you will find rack upon rack of tubes of pre-mixed paints from different manufacturers. Do they expect that their products will last on canvas until the year 2352? Do the artists who buy and work with those paints trust that a glimmer of light on the nose of a subject will beguile viewers three centuries from now?

We play and listen to centuries-old organs, experiencing the same lively sounds that musicians and congregations heard over 600 years ago. We marvel at the monumental organ cases, knowing that they were built without the aid of electric milling machines. Perhaps some of us have tried to saw a board from a log by hand. I have. I can tell you it is hard work; it is tricky to produce a board that is anything like straight; and it takes a long time. We read that eighteenth-century organs took eight or ten years to build. Even so, Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) produced ninety-five new organs, forty-eight of which survive. Multiply that by the number of boards sawn by hand—case panels, toeboards, rackboards, keyboards, stop action traces, and hundreds of thousands of trackers. That many organs is a significant life’s work for a modern organ builder. And remember, delivering a pipe organ in those days involved oxcarts and rutted dirt (or mud) roads. Or did Mr. Schnitger set up a workshop in each church, casting metal and soldering pipes on site? That would simplify the logistics.

Something like 2,500 “Hook” organs were built between 1827 and 1927 by E. & G. G. Hook, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, and Hook & Hastings. Organs were shipped from the workshops in Boston to churches below the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War, to California, and throughout the Midwest. By then, steam ferries and railroads were available to make shipments easier—the tracks ran right into the workshop. During the same period, builders like Henry Erben, George Hutchings, George Stevens, and George Jardine, among many others, combined to build thousands of organs across the United States. With the introduction of electricity to pipe organ keyboard and stop actions, Skinner, Möller, Austin, Schantz, Kimball, and others combined to build as many as 2,500 new pipe organs a year in American churches during the 1920s.

Here’s to the crabgrass, here’s to the mortgage . . . .

So sang Allen Sherman in his 1963 smash hit recording, My Son the Nut, the same album that included “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. . . .” The song was about the migration from cities to suburbs in the 1950s: “walk the dog and cut the grass, take the kids to dancing class, Jim’s little league got beat again.”1 During the 1950s and 1960s, suburban churches blossomed. The populations of towns surrounding Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and countless other cities exploded. Twenty years ago, I served a church as music director in a suburb of Boston that never had more than 2,000 residents until the circumnavigating commuter highway Route 128 (now I-95) was built around 1960. Within ten years, there were 15,000 residents, and the little country Congregational church built an impressive new sanctuary with an extensive parish house and a three-manual organ.

Many if not most of those powerful suburban congregations commissioned new pipe organs. Where I grew up, the ubiquitous New England town square had two or three competing churches. One town near home had two three-manual Hook organs built in 1860 and 1870. Another had three Aeolian-Skinners. And by the time I graduated from high school, my hometown had two organs by Charles Fisk, one of which has its fiftieth anniversary this year.

A new wave

Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, hundreds of American churches committed to commissioning new organs built by “boutique” builders of tracker organs, many of which replaced impressive and valuable electro-pneumatic-action organs. Of course, many of those organs had in turn replaced impressive and important nineteenth-century organs. The Andover Organ Company, then led by Charles Fisk, was among the first of the new wave of organ companies. Charles Fisk spun off to start what became C. B. Fisk, Inc., along with the founding of, in no particular order, eponymous organ companies such as Noack, Roche, Brombaugh, Bozeman-Gibson, Bedient, Taylor & Boody, Dobson, Visser-Rowland, and Jaeckel. Casavant started building tracker organs and firms like Wilhelm, Wolff, and Létourneau spun off from there in the following years.

As some of the “older” new firms began “aging out,” a new wave of impressive companies came along such as Juget-Sinclair, Richards, Fowkes & Co., and Paul Fritts, and companies like Nichols & Simpson and the revitalized Schoenstein & Co. started building new electro-pneumatic-action organs of high quality inspired both by the electric-action masterpieces of the early twentieth century and by, I believe, the increasingly high standards of the boutique organ movement. Toward the end of the twentieth century, American organbuilding was a vital, if small industry producing beautiful instruments of all descriptions at a rapid rate.

American organbuilders gathered in Washington, DC, in September 1973 to discuss formation of a new professional organization that would take the name American Institute of Organbuilders. This purpose statement was published in the program book for that gathering:

• to be the first such convention in recent times in North America and to be a model for future conventions of this type to be held regularly;

• to promote the exchange of principles and ideas among established organbuilders to aid in the improvement of the instrument while lowering its costs and ensuring the security of our future;

• to educate ourselves in potential new technologies and construction procedures, some of which are being employed by other industries and arts but perhaps not yet fully realized and exploited by organbuilders;

• to provide the many suppliers of organ parts and materials, many of which are new to our field, with the opportunity to display and demonstrate their developments and ideas where many builders may jointly view and discuss these products;

• to study some general business problems of concern to the organ industry, and to propose courses of action that might be taken by organbuilders, both individually and collectively, to alleviate these concerns;

• to enable social exchanges between organbuilders and their families; to provide families of organbuilders with the opportunity to share in the appreciation of the greater glories of the profession through mutual enjoyment of a convention environment and its program of entertainment designed for all.

The last decades of the twentieth century were very productive for American organbuilding, and we must not forget the vast number of European organs imported to the United States. E. Power Biggs famously purchased an organ from Flentrop that was installed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall) at Harvard University in 1957. He made it instantly famous with his fabulously successful series of recordings, Bach: Great Organ Favorites. Many of my friends and colleagues, myself included, cite those recordings as influential to devoting a lifetime to organbuilding. That organ was followed by a flood of Flentrops crossing the Atlantic, a wave greatly advanced by Fenner Douglas, professor of organ at Oberlin in the 1960s and early 1970s, whose influence led to at least dozens of Flentrops installed in American churches and universities, notably those at Oberlin College and Duke University. Also in 1957, Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio, installed a four-manual, sixty-five-rank Beckerath organ, three years before the monumental five-manual Beckerath organ was installed at Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal.

As the twentieth century came to a close, a significant decline in church attendance was well underway. Churches continue to close at an increasing rate. And toward the end of the last century, there was a dip of interest in playing the organ. When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, there were over fifty organ majors in four bustling studios. Fifteen years later, there were fewer than ten. Several colleges and universities closed their organ departments, churches with traditionally active music programs began having trouble filling empty jobs, and for a while things were looking pretty grim for the American pipe organ.

I am carving time into rough blocks for my own convenience, but as the twenty-first century got underway, a fresh wave of brilliant young organists appeared. Stephen Tharp and Ken Cowan, now in their late forties and early fifties, led the pack forging virtuosic concert careers. They were followed in no particular order by Paul Jacobs, Isabelle Demers, Nathan Laube, Katelyn Emerson, and many others, raising the art of organ playing to unprecedented heights. Concurrently, especially following economic lows following 9/11 and the near collapse of the American economy in 2008, noticeably fewer churches embarked on expensive organ renovation or new organ projects. Many of us in the organbuilding trade wondered silently and increasingly out loud if we were heading toward the end of the pipe organ industry.

Convention

The American Institute of Organbuilders held its annual convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, October 8–12, 2022. More than 300 members gathered in a convention hotel there to be immersed in the work of the Historic Organ Restoration Committee that is more than halfway through the herculean task of restoring the legendary Boardwalk Hall organ with seven manuals and 449 ranks. Built by Midmer-Losh, Inc., between 1929 and 1932 (Opus 5550), the Boardwalk Hall organ is the largest in the world, not by ranks (The Wanamaker Organ has more), but with 33,112 pipes. Many of the ranks have eighty-five pipes or more. The committee is about eight years into the project and anticipates completion in 2030. I will bet we will have another convention there then. (See the cover feature for this organ in the November 2020 issue.)

A convention of the AIO typically includes a lot of time riding buses to see organs throughout an area. Because of the huge attraction at the center of this convention, we had just one day of bus travel to visit three marvelous organs in the Philadelphia area: C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 150 (2016) at Christ Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; Aeolian-Skinner Opus 948 (1936) at St. Mark’s Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; and the instrument by Kegg Pipe Organ Builders (2014) at Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. These are three very different and very distinguished organs, all beautifully demonstrated, and all terrific examples of the art of American organbuilding. At the convention hotel, perhaps the only large hotel in Atlantic City that does not boast a casino, we heard lectures about the history of the Boardwalk Hall organ, the economics of refurbishing rather than replacing damaged old organ pipes, and the art of structuring a contract to define an organ project, among others. Nathan Laube, the brilliant recitalist and teacher I mentioned earlier, lectured organbuilders about his ideal of the modern organ console—his conclusion, keep it simple.

In the past, I have written in detail about the organs we heard after attending a convention. This time, I want to celebrate the trade. I have related an off-the-cuff bird’s eye view of American organbuilding over the past century to put in context what I am observing now. In addition to our work aiding the sales of vintage pipe organs and dismantling those organs to be delivered to workshops for renovation, the Organ Clearing House is privileged to work with many of our admired companies, assisting with the shipping, hoisting, assembly, and installation of their new organs. This allows us intimate exposure to the methods and practices of a variety of firms and close associations with their largest organs.

While varying styles of worship and the proliferation of digital instruments has consumed much of the market for simple pipe organs, it is clear that we are in an age of monumental new instruments. Noack, Fritts, Fisk, Schoenstein, Richards, Fowkes, Létourneau, Buzard, and Parsons, among others, have built exceptional new organs in the last five years. All of them carry forth the 500-year tradition of organbuilding, many aided by Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers. These expensive but efficient machines use computer programs to interpret an organbuilder’s drawings to produce repetitive parts automatically, to drill windchest tables, to make toeboards, rackboards, skyracks, and countless other organ parts with precise perfection. Ten years ago, only a few shops had them, now some have two that grind along in the corner of a shop while the organbuilders are free to do the interpretive work that a machine cannot do.

A couple important firms have recently closed. After a century of work and producing more than 2,500 organs, the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence, Kansas, stopped most operations on December 1. While they remained profitable until the end, as the senior staff reached retirement age, other administrative staff chose not to step in to continue the business. The closure of August Laukhuff GmbH, a huge and important organ supply firm in Weikersheim, Germany, is having a profound effect on American companies. Many organbuilders have long relied on Laukhuff for organ blowers, electric parts like slider motors and pull-down magnets, keyboards, polished façade pipes, action chassis, and countless other widgets essential to the trade. Other firms are working to fill in the gaps, but this remains an important loss.

The AIO has a relatively new tradition of having a special dinner for members under thirty years old. Since the conventions in 2020 and 2021 were postponed because of covid, this year’s dinner included all members under forty, and there were more than thirty in attendance. I was thrilled to realize that in a trade heavily populated by older people, more than ten percent of those attending this convention were under forty. I had wonderful conversations with many of them and was heartened by their excitement and commitment to continuing the art.

This year’s AIO Convention was particularly high-spirited with enthusiasm for our trade abounding. Nathan Bryson, convention chair and curator of the Boardwalk Hall organ, was an enthusiastic and welcoming host. His excitement for his job is evident in the attitudes of the members of the Historic Organs Restoration Committee, both staff and volunteers. My many conversations with our younger colleagues were highpoints of the week for me. I was happy to hear their enthusiasm about their work. Some newcomers to the trade expressed to me their amazement at the rich history of the organ and the complexities of building, restoring, and repairing them. A couple of the younger participants were in the process of starting new workshops, and their excitement was infectious. Many of the younger members are women, bringing lively diversity to our gathering.

Whenever I am with colleague organbuilders, I hear stories of how they got interested in the organ when they were kids, how the first years of learning piqued their interest enough to devote their lives to the trade. I love comparing notes about solving problems. I love hearing about new materials, methods, machinery, and tools that save time and money, and I love the comeradery of spending time with like-minded people.

Above all, I celebrate what seems to be a bright future for American organbuilding. Churches are investing in large expensive projects, and many of our colleague firms have years of contracted work spreading ahead of them. Perhaps most important, I believe that American organ playing is the best it has ever been. As long as there are brilliant, compelling musicians to play on the instruments we build, there will always be new organs to build. Keep working hard, my friends. ν

Notes

1. In fact, the couple singing that song winds up fleeing the suburbs to return to the city: “Back to the crush there, hurry let us rush there, back to the rat race, don’t forget your briefcase, back to the groove there, say, why don’t we move there, away from all this sweet simplicity.”

On the road again

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

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

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

Kegg Organ Company

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

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

Saint Meinrad School of Theology

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

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

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

. . . and speaking of Buzard . . .

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

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

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

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

Given by the master

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

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

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

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

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

The corner of Oak and Walnut

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

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

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

Whiling away the time

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

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

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

That Ingenious Business . . .

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

Shipping and handling included

Wendy and I live in a building with about two hundred households. We are mostly anonymous neighbors; just a few fellow residents are casual acquaintances. The people we chat with the most are the other dog owners, and we are more likely to know the dogs’ names than their owners’. Farley the goldendoodle is a cheerful and friendly guy so he attracts a lot of attention in the elevators and lobby.

Living in close proximity to that many people, we are constantly reminded of what a click-and-ship world we live in. Adjoining the building’s lobby is a large package room lined with shelves ten feet high where the doormen sort hundreds of parcels. Since Amazon started same day delivery in the city, as many as a half-dozen delivery trucks stop each day.

Twice a week, mountains of trash and recyclables are piled on the sidewalks including thousands of collapsed cardboard boxes tied with twine. Along with the boxes, we routinely throw away bales of bubble wrap, tons of Styrofoam peanuts, and miles of strips of air-cushion bladders. It can be a wicked nuisance dealing with a big carton of peanuts. It is especially annoying when they get charged with static electricity and I cannot get them off me. And for goodness sake, keep them away from the dog.

I am thinking about packaging today because I am just finishing an organ project in my little workshop in Maine, starting to take things apart and getting them ready for shipment. Yesterday, I went to a storage locker I rent nearby and loaded several empty pipe trays into my car. The standard size we make at the Organ Clearing House is eight-feet by two-feet by eight-inches deep. They are larger than those made by some other companies, and when they are full, they are heavy, but we think they are just right. Low EE of most 8′ stops fits in those eight-foot trays, so we also make some ten-footers to hold the biggest four pipes. We can get the biggest four of an 8′ Principal into one of those, or the biggest four of two 8′ strings.

My car is a Chevrolet Suburban, big enough to hold an eight-foot rowing dinghy with the doors closed. A guy at a local boatyard called it a Chevy “Subdivision.” When there is no boat inside, I can get four eight-foot trays in the car with the doors closed.

I took the pipes off the windchests and laid them out in order on a big work surface. I lined the bottom of each tray with a ¼-inch thick Styrofoam sheet (we buy it in 250-foot rolls, perforated every foot, three rolls come in a “tube”). I opened a carton of clean 24-inch x 36-inch newsprint, and started wrapping pipes. With experience, you get a sense of how many pipes should be in a package. I use several sheets of newsprint at a time to weave between six-foot pipes so they cannot bump against each other. Going up the scale, getting to around tenor F of an 8′ stop (a three-foot pipe), each pipe is wrapped individually. After middle C, two to a package, then three, then maybe as many as six or seven treble pipes. When I am putting several pipes in a package, I roll it each time so there is paper between each pipe, and I fold the ends over opposite sides to increase the padding. My favorite local butcher does the same thing with the marvelous sausages he makes. A piece of tape holds the package closed, and the bundles are lined up in the trays. If the pipes are not very heavy, I can put a couple layers in a tray separated with Styrofoam.

My personal shop is a three-car garage that adjoins our house, and this is a tiny organ. It started as an M. P. Möller Double Artiste, and we are adding a third three-rank division to make a total of nine unified ranks. The user interface is a large three-manual console, also by Möller but from a different organ, equipped with a fancy combination action. It is to be a practice organ for a school of music, providing students with a platform for working on the complex Romantic and symphonic registrations that are so popular these days. This will be a simple shipment, nowhere near a full truck. The only complication is that we will be driving it over the Rocky Mountains in mid-winter.

That load will include eleven trays, nine with pipes and two with odds and ends, bits and pieces (the stuff Alan Laufman called “chowder”), console, bench, three windchests, two “expressive” cases including shutters and shutter motors, three wind regulators with windlines, a blower, the biggest pipes of a nicely mitered 16′ Bourdon (too big for trays), and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam it takes to make an organ. I am guessing the load will weigh around 6,000 pounds including the trays and packing materials. We will also be carrying a new residence organ built by a colleague firm, as its new owner lives in the same western city. We are always happy to throw another organ on the back of the truck if there is space.

§

When we estimate the cost for dismantling and packing an organ, we consider the number of person-days and crew expenses like travel, meals, and lodging. We decide whether we will need to rent scaffolding and set up hoisting equipment, and we figure how much we will need in the way of packing materials. An important variable is the tray count, which varies as much by the style of an organ as it does by number of ranks. If we are packing an organ with mechanical action built in the 1970s with low wind pressure and small scales, we can figure on two or three ranks per tray. (A usual four-rank mixture easily fits in a single tray. You just have to be sure you label the packages so you do not mix up the ranks.) If we are packing a heavy Romantic organ like something built by Skinner, it is more like two or three trays per rank. A big fat Skinner 8′ French Horn can fill four trays!

Based on long experience, we run down the printed stoplist of an organ and note how many trays we will need for each stop, and I enter the totals for eight-foot and ten-foot trays into a spreadsheet that spits out the lumber list. A four-by-eight sheet of 7⁄16-inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) makes two tray bottoms, and it takes two ten-foot pine 1 x 8s to make the sides and ends. When we dismantled an eighty-rank Aeolian residence organ on Long Island (imagine that!), we figured we would need 160 eight-foot trays and 40 ten-footers, and I sent this list to City Lumber in Long Island City, New York:

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

120 8′ 1′′ x 2′′ strapping (10 bundles) for battens on tray tops

1,680 feet ¼′′ x 2′-wide Styrofoam (7 rolls)

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

The bill was $5,277.33, including delivery, and we gave the driver a $50 tip.

When we have finished dismantling an organ, the packed trays go on the truck first. A standard semi-trailer is 100-inches wide inside so we can stack four piles wide. If we make stacks of ten trays each, we can cap the stacks with sheets of plywood and put 16-foot metal bass pipes up top. The big metal pipes are wrapped individually in Styrofoam for protection. Interior height of the trailer is 110 inches. Four trays wide and ten high, that is forty trays for each eight feet of trailer. The trailer is 53-feet long—240 trays is a truck full. That is less than the tray count for the wonderful Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City.

When we are packing an organ that large, the trays are just the beginning. Think about the organ’s biggest pipes, like that 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason. The biggest pipe is more than 35-feet long, and about two-feet square. I guess that pipe weighs 1,500 pounds and by itself makes a big dent in an empty trailer. Three 32′ ranks (Diapason, Bourdon, and reed) and the windchests of that huge organ fill truck number two. Reservoirs, shutters, expression motors, tremulants, windlines, ladders, and walkboards fill truck number three. And number four brings the console, frames, expression box panels, blowers, and 8,000 pounds of chowder.

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Most of the trucks with box trailers that you see on the highway are carrying loads of goods that are all the same size, packed on pallets whose dimensions are calculated to exactly fill the trailer’s interior space. Paper towels, potato chips, mattresses, and tableware are packed in boxes whose dimensions exactly correspond with the pallets. A truck backs up to a loading dock, and a forklift runs in and out carrying pallets, two or three at a time. The trailer is nothing but a metal and fiberglass box. There are no hooks, cleats, or straps to fasten the load. There is no need, because the load assembles to the same dimensions of the trailer, and it takes fifteen minutes to pack.

We engage special commodity trucks, which come with lots of special equipment. There are highway bars that span the interior by clicking into vertical tracks on the trailer walls and support plywood floors, so we can build a second story that safely carries smaller components. There are ramps and hydraulic tailgates because we almost never have the luxury of a loading dock, and a standard complement of twenty-dozen quilted furniture pads. We specify that we will need six or eight hours to load the truck as they typically charge extra when it is more than two hours. The trays go into the truck fast and neat, and the rest of the organ is like a ten-ton game of Tetrus. Because no two parts of the organ are the same size, the pallet-and-forklift equation does not work at all. Each piece of the organ is wrapped with pads as it enters the truck. At the other end of the trip, it is a huge job just to fold all those heavy pads, and the drivers are always fussy about making neat piles.

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Most of the organs we move fit into “Bobtail” trucks, the standard single-body box trucks we can rent from Ryder or Penske. A usual two-manual organ fits in a single truck. Forty years ago, when I was first in the organ business, there was little in the way of regulation controlling the type of trucking we do. Today, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration makes us jump through regulatory hoops. If we are carrying an organ that we have owned and are selling to a client, there is no problem. But if we are carrying an organ that belongs to someone else, like a church or school, especially if we are crossing state lines, we have to be ready with our DOT and MC (Motor Carrier) numbers whenever we encounter a weigh station on the highway. That makes us an official trucking company, and I receive a lot of a gear-jamming junk mail that has nothing to do with organs.

In 2008, we were engaged to bring an organ to an important church in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and we would include a dozen pianos in the shipment for a couple churches and orphanages I had visited. I found a moving company in Maine that had a barn full of surplus pianos, rented a truck, loaded them up, and started down the Maine Turnpike. As required, I stopped in the weigh station where the state trooper asked me, “What are you carrying?” “Pianos,” I answered. “Where are you taking them?” My sense of the ridiculous took control, and I answered, “Madagascar!” He directed me into a parking area where three troopers spent a half hour trying to find something wrong with my paperwork, with the truck, with its required emergency flares and reflectors, anything they could think of.

We have worked with many drivers over the years, mostly owner/operators who contract with central dispatchers. Richard Mowen was a special favorite, a wiry little man with a huge Peterbilt tractor. He had replaced the Caterpillar diesel engine after two million miles, and he traveled with a little dog in the cab. Many commercial drivers only come and go from big warehouses with loading docks, while our work in churches around the country is anything but predictable. It may be a narrow cross street in Manhattan or a winding dirt road in a rural village. Richard could put that rig anywhere. It is much more difficult to back a semi-trailer when you have to go backwards to the right, because that is the blind side. It was fun watching him figure his angle, nudging the tailgate right where we wanted it.

Richard loved carrying pipe organs. He moved many organs for us, and we recommended him to a number of colleague companies. He considered organs to be a specialty, and he was a treasure. Sadly, he had a heart attack that took him off the road, but he is still around. We miss his great work and thank him for his terrific service to our industry. Richard left us with one of the best driving tips ever. “I can drive down that hill too slow as many times as I want. I can do it too fast only once.” We will remember that next month when we are driving down the far side of the Rockies.

Then there is the guy who was dispatched to drive an organ from New Haven, Connecticut, to Reno, Nevada. With the truck loaded, we were chatting and joking on the sidewalk by the church when the driver mentioned that it was a good thing we were not shipping the organ to Canada, because he had been busted for transporting firearms illegally and was not allowed to drive there anymore. I called the dispatcher and requested a different driver.

Through all the shipments over the years, there was one that involved significant damage to the organ. We packed and loaded an organ in New York City and sent it off to Los Angeles. The shipment was to be received by a crew from the European company that built it, and they would install it in the church there. The truck arrived as scheduled, and when they opened the doors, they found a mess of broken woodwork and organ parts. There was a language barrier between the organbuilders and the insurance adjuster who viewed the damage. When they told the adjuster that they might have packed things differently, he interpreted that they were saying we had been negligent. Knowing that was not true, I got the adjuster to agree to reconsider if I went to Los Angeles to present a case.

That shipment had an unusual stipulation. We were required to remove the organ from the building in New York before a certain date, and the delivery could not happen until after a certain date, which meant that the organ would be in the truck several days longer than the actual travel time, and we had arranged to pay a daily standstill fee. Naively, I imagined that the truck would sit still in a parking lot. It did not take very much digging to learn that the driver had taken advantage of the situation and made a detour to visit family in the mountains of Tennessee. The trucking company admitted that there had been “an incident” on the road, and the insurance claim was paid.

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It is fun to think of the romance of building a fine organ, with dedicated craftsmen working together in a comfortable shop, cutting and milling wood, working leather and metal, building the thousands of individual pieces that combine to create an organ. The next time you are playing or listening to an organ, especially a really big one, give a thought to the physical challenge of taking all those pieces and parts from one place to another. The shipping industry calls it logistics or material handling. I think it is a great glimpse into yet another reason that pipe organs are so special. What other musician can measure the size of the instrument by the truckload?

When a load is complete, paperwork signed, doors locked, and the driver climbs into his cab, we give a classic truckers’ greeting, “Shiny side up!”