In the Wind: On the Hook

Preservation by relocation

News of churches closing crosses my desk ever more frequently and shows up as rants on social media forums at the same pace. I read comments claiming that a closing is “criminal” or “unconscionable” as if reasonable and caring people did not spend years discussing how to manage an albatross of a building with the tithes of fewer and fewer congregants. In the early 1990s, I renovated a large three-manual organ at the First Baptist Church of Arlington, Massachusetts, and continued to maintain it until a couple years ago. There were 150 pledging families at the time of the organ project. By the time I retired from maintaining organs, there were fewer than fifty families struggling to maintain the huge stone building with a 1,000-seat sanctuary and monogrammed china service for 1,200.

As we completed that project, I got to know Eleanor Metcalf, an elderly church member who played the organ, practiced at the church, and substituted occasionally for the regular organist. She had grown up in the Baptist church in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where she studied with the organist as a teenager and loved to sit in a particular pew where she had a view of the organ’s pedalboard. She was a lifelong fan of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532, which she said she could never play herself, but was thrilled to watch her teacher whip through those opening scales on the pedals. When she and her husband celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they engaged me to play a recital for their family and guests on the Watertown organ. Of course they sat in her favorite pew, and of course I played Bach’s D Major. A few years after that, the Watertown church closed, as the congregation had dwindled past sustainability. The building was subdivided into condominiums, and the organ, which was not of great distinction, was discarded.

Last week I received a call from a member of the Belmont-Watertown United Methodist Church, a congregation created ten years ago by the merging of the Belmont and Watertown churches, saying they were interested in selling one of their organs. (Belmont, Watertown, and Arlington, Massachusetts, are neighboring towns, about five miles west of Boston.) I had maintained the organ in the Belmont church for years, and as it too lacked distinction, I was glad to hear that they wished to sell the exceptional organ in the Watertown church.

As it happened, I was planning to drive between our homes in western Massachusetts and coastal Maine the next day so it would not be far out of my way to make a quick visit to Watertown. Wendy sealed the deal by reminding me that there is a spectacular Middle Eastern grocery store in Watertown. The congregant, Laurel, told me the story of their decision process that led to the merging of the congregations ten years ago. The Watertown church has a long history of outreach that led to dozens of weekly meetings of self-help and social organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the like. The merged congregations had been worshiping in the Belmont church, renting the Watertown sanctuary to a Korean congregation, and continuing the outreach programs in the Watertown building.

They have recently decided to sell the property in Belmont and the large stone parish house that adjoins the Watertown church building, which will be converted to condominiums, and redevelop the church to accommodate the merged Methodist congregation and all the outreach activities. The church building includes a large sanctuary, an adjoining fellowship hall, and a large basement with classrooms and open space. The chancel, which contains the organ in side chambers, will be separated from the nave to create an additional large meeting room, which explains the idea of selling the organ in the interest of its preservation.

. . . and what an organ

While the organs in the Belmont Methodist and Watertown Baptist churches were unremarkable, the Watertown Methodist church has a spectacular instrument, Skinner Organ Company Opus 459 (1924), with four manuals and thirty-four ranks. Skinner produced many organs of this scale based on a scheme of expression and flexibility. This organ has four enclosed divisions (Swell, Great, Solo, Echo), three sets of Celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Flauto Dolce), three 8′ Open Diapasons, nine reeds, a two-stop Echo division (Chimney Flute and Vox Humana with Chimes), and a Harp/Celesta. It is full of lavish extras like celestes that start at low C and sixteen-stage expression motors. A creative organist can do anything with an instrument like this. As I write in mid-June, the organ will appear on the website of the Organ Clearing House in the next few days. I wonder if it will still be available as you read this in early August.¹

Laurel told me how the congregation loves that organ and respects its heritage, and though they are heartbroken at the thought of losing it, they know they would never be able to fund the necessary renovation. When I visited the other day, the organ had not been used for six years. When I started the blower, there were dozens of ciphers and only a few notes on a few stops that played. From that perspective, the organ seems like a wreck, but when I climbed around inside the two chambers I marveled at the “like new” condition. Scrolls on reed pipes were neat and tight, everything was standing straight, and there was none of the tuner’s detritus we often see laying on perch boards or in corners. I imagine that in the ninety-eight years since the organ was built, no inept service technician ever entered the organ chambers. I understand and respect the decisions made by the board of trustees of the merged congregation, and I am confident that another congregation will acquire and restore the marvelous organ for another century of inspiring use.

Another transplant

In the June issue of this magazine, I wrote about visiting the Organ Clearing House installation of an organ by Gabriel Kney at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.² That organ became available when the church that commissioned it in 1980 decided to divest itself of real estate and use the proceeds of the sale to create a fund forming the core of a church devoted entirely to public service. Once again, the decision was the result of years of reflection and discussion as they realized that it did not make sense for the ever-smaller congregation to try to sustain a complex physical plant. The people of that church were thoughtful, creative, and eager to continue serving the community as effectively as their resources would allow, and they are pleased to know that their organ is now being used daily in the chapel of a flourishing seminary.

From Passaic to Ingelheim

Around the year 2000, the First Presbyterian Church in Passaic, New Jersey, was experiencing decline in membership and was saddled with a large complex building it could no longer afford to maintain or operate, and it entered into an agreement with a neighboring growing congregation to swap buildings. I do not remember the details of the deal, but I know that the result was that each congregation wound up in a building of appropriate size. The swap was completed with the understanding that the Presbyterian church’s Skinner organ (Opus 823, 1930) remained their property, and that the organ could be removed when it was sold.³ In 2008 we organized the sale of the organ to the Evangelische Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany.

The organist of the Saalkirche, Carsten Lenz, was enamored by Skinner organs and had long dreamed of importing one to Germany. He first visited me at the Organ Clearing House exhibition booth during the 2002 convention of the American Guild of Organists in Philadelphia. Later, we met in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Skinner organs. It took several years for his church to raise the funds and negotiate the sale, but in 2008 we dismantled the instrument and shipped it to Klais Orgelbau, who renovated the organ and installed it in Ingelheim.

This was another example of the “smallish” four-manual organs by the Skinner Organ Company with thirty-nine ranks and thirty-six stops including four 8′ Open Diapasons, four celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Echo Viole, Dulciana), eleven reeds, three expression boxes, and a Harp/Celesta. Sorry, no two-stop Echo. Like the Watertown organ, this scheme developed by Mr. Skinner defines an exceptionally versatile and expressive instrument. I was excited to visit the organ in Ingelheim in 2019 and pleased that while Klais had made some modifications to the instrument, the Skinner organ was otherwise intact and recognizable in its new home. Carsten gave me an energetic demonstration and tour and told me that German organists have responded to it enthusiastically.

Worthy of preservation

I have mentioned two organs that I deemed unworthy of preservation. Both were useful, serviceable instruments that enhanced worship and brought pleasure to listeners. Remember Eleanor Metcalf worshiping in Watertown as a teenager in the 1930s in the thrall of that organ. You might think there must be some place for it. But the fact is, there are hundreds of organs available at any given time, and it is a good year when we place more than twenty. If I can offer a masterpiece like the Skinner in Watertown, it is hard to justify encouraging a church to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ordinary or even mediocre instrument. View it through a wider lens. There is a finite amount of money spent on pipe organs in the United States each year. Isn’t it our responsibility to see that most of it is spent on excellence?

There is an exception to this idea. The church that owns and loves a reliable, useful organ, one that might not merit the cost of preservation through relocation, should be encouraged to keep it in good condition, even if it needs an expensive renovation like releathering. I am not thinking of a wreck of a pipe organ that has been “improved” by unqualified technicians. Eleanor’s church in Watertown maintained their organ well until they realized that the entire campus was beyond their means.

Former glories

I mentioned 1,200 sets of monogrammed china to provoke the image of a parish hall set up for a huge dinner, backed up by a professional kitchen that could produce that volume of food, tuna casserole being the 1950s equivalent of loaves and fishes. There are photos of just such an event hanging in the parish hall of that church, the men wearing identical skinny ties and white shirts under their jackets and the women with updos. In the age of TV dinners and cars with tailfins, suburban Protestant churches around Boston were packed on Sundays, home to softball and bowling leagues, and the huge buildings they left to their descendants have become impossibly expensive to maintain.

Over twenty years with the Organ Clearing House, I have spent hundreds of hours in church buildings that have been closed. I have heard about how much a church meant to lifelong parishioners. They have shown me photos of their children’s baptisms and weddings and parents’ funerals, and now they are reduced to clearing decades of churchy stuff out of a building. What do you do with 500 pew Bibles, fifty choir robes, a hundred bottles of Elmer’s glue, or a library of choral music? In at least one church, the last-standing loyal parishioners were members of the “Disbursement Committee.” Without exception, these people are heartened to know that their organ will have new life, metaphorically carrying the life’s breath of their church to worship somewhere else. While it is always sad to see a church building breathing its last, it is a privilege to be able to preserve a good organ.

Some years ago, I visited a church building in New Jersey that had been purchased by a new congregation. It was a large, elegant structure in a prominent downtown location with hardwood paneling on the front of the wrap-around balcony and a big Austin organ down front. The original congregation had abandoned the building without any planning. It was during the last service that the people were informed that it was the last service. They simply closed the doors and put the building up for sale. The bulletins were in a dusty heap at the ushers’ station, the water glasses were on the pulpit, the altar flowers were long rotted, and that Sunday’s anthem was heaped on the choir room piano. It was the only church I have visited that was closed without years of careful, thoughtful planning. There must have been some angry people after church that day. I wonder if there was a coffee hour.

It is more usual for a closure to happen after years of deliberation. If two congregations are merging, which building is retained? There are likely to be conflicting sentimentalities competing with practicality. One building might be better suited for redevelopment for another purpose. It can be tricky to build condominium residences in a Gothic building. What do you do with thirty-foot stained-glass windows? In some cases, one building is chosen, but the better organ from the other building is moved. Each individual case is a sad story. Each involves personal and community loss. But this trend is undeniable, inevitable, and in most cases, unavoidable. It is not useful to rattle along on social media about criminal negligence, irresponsibility, or thoughtlessness. It just is.

I am impressed by the story I have learned about the churches in Belmont and Watertown. I think they are being creative with their heritage and their resources. I am sorry that the wonderful Skinner organ will have to leave town, but I know it is worthy of proper restoration, and I expect it will be easy to find it a new home.

Good old Mr. Skinner

When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, we were all in the thrall of modern tracker organs built on classical models. I did not understand or appreciate Mr. Skinner’s ideals; in fact I admit I was disdainful of them. Of course, the trumpet and mixture should be on the Great. What sense does it make to bury them in the Swell? Wait. I get it. More of the “meat” of the organ is under expression. Couple the Swell to the Great and start the verse with the box closed. It is a great effect to put the wind at the back of the processing choir by opening the box slowly.

The Ernest M. Skinner Company built its first four-manual organ for Grace Church in New York City (now home of a smashing organ by Taylor & Boody) in 1902. The organ in Watertown, built in 1924, is the 103rd four-manual Skinner, most of which are modest in size with fewer than forty ranks. This scheme was a wonderful subset of Skinner’s prolific career with imaginative use of a relatively small number of voices combined with seemingly lavish excesses of construction.

I have listed some of the attributes of Opus 459. G. Donald Harrison joined the Skinner Organ Company in 1927, three years after the Watertown organ was installed. In 1936, the newly formed Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company installed the iconic organ at Church of the Advent in Boston (Opus 940),4 long recognized as a near perfect example of the American Classic organ with three fully developed principal choruses, a Positiv division, and several mutations. Under its two names, the company produced 481 organs between Watertown and Church of the Advent, a little over forty a year.

Ernest Skinner grew bitter in his old age as the style of organ he developed fell out of favor. Walter Holtkamp, Sr., rebuilt the Skinner organ at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While that project was underway, Holtkamp saw the elderly Ernest Skinner standing forlorn and alone at a function of the American Guild of Organists. He thought to himself, there is one of our greatest organ builders and no one wants to talk with him. He walked up to Skinner and introduced himself as Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland. Skinner, who was hard of hearing, snapped back, “Cleveland? One of my finest organs is in the art museum there, and some damn fool is trying to change it.”

Notes

1. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/22899.

2. organclearinghouse.com/sold#/3085-gabriel-kney-dallas-tx.

3. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/23629.

4. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/7407.

Spice is the variety of life.

Wendy and I love to cook. We send recipes from newspapers back and forth and thumb through cookbooks planning what the next fun will be. We have picked up the vernacular of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean dishes. We grill and smoke meat and vegetables outside at our place in Maine (running a smoker in a New York City apartment is frowned upon), and we even have a lamb-sized charcoal rotisserie that has produced several memorable holiday events.

Some years ago, my brother and his wife gave us an assortment of spice mixes from a local boutique, and I have been ordering stuff from them ever since. Something as simple as their Tellicherry peppercorns are a revelation. The name does not refer to a place of origin, but rather to the larger size of the peppercorns. Open the jar, take a whiff, and you know you are into something special. We have Caribbean seasoning with dried orange peel, chili peppers, and ginger that adds a dimension to grilled chicken. We have a Moroccan spice rub that is heavenly on grilled pork tenderloin with pilaf on the side, and a Merguez mix often found in lamb sausages that is marvelous on a butterflied leg of lamb.

We have an artisanal butcher near us in Maine (I often send him photos of my outdoor triumphs), three or four organic farms, and as we are on the Maine coast, there are lobster, oysters, clams, scallops, and all sorts of fish. We keep a small garden with basil, oregano, sage, and chives. I consulted for a private school in Thailand in 2010, where I learned a few magic hints about how to achieve authentic flavors, and my pad thai is a family favorite. Our daughter and son-in-law live in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, home of a wonderful middle eastern Halal market, and as our son-in-law is Greek, we have discovered rich sources of Greek ingredients in Astoria, Queens.

As the day ends, an hour and a half in the kitchen is a time for reflection, creativity, special little tastes, and marvelous aromas. Add to that the smell of woodsmoke and a cocktail, and all is right with the world.

Variety is the spice of life.

Consider the clarinet. While clarinetists know the differences from one instrument to another, to the untrained eye one clarinet looks pretty much like the next. The same applies to violins, flutes, trumpets, and pianos. But compare a monumental organ with hundreds of ranks of pipes to a three-stop continuo organ, and even a skilled organist might shake his head. It is hard to imagine that the two can be the same instrument. I have had rich experiences with dozens, even hundreds of organs of all shapes and sizes. Let me tell you about some of the organs I have known.

Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 (1951)

The organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (also known as the Mother Church), in Boston, Massachusetts, is a mighty instrument with 241 ranks, 166 stops (that’s right, lots of compound stops), more than forty ranks of reeds, ten sets of celestes, and forty-two independent ranks in the Pedal division alone. I was organ curator there for around fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, and managing its care was the challenge of a lifetime. While many organs of this scale had more modest beginnings and were gradually increased in size, #1203 was built as one opus number all at once, and its original design is breathtaking. It is three stories tall and three “departments” wide, with the thirty-eight-rank Swell division (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 5-1⁄3′ Quinte Trompette) at the center. The Solo division that includes the Cor des Anges on twenty-five inches of wind speaks through a round grille high in the room to the left of the organ. While I was sitting next to a colleague listening to Catharine Crozier’s recital at an American Guild of Organists convention, my friend leaned over and whispered to me, “This organ is a gold mine at mezzo piano.” And it is loaded with real gold, too. There is an acre of gold leaf on the magnificent display of façade pipes.

I was thrilled to play “First Night” concerts there several years in a row with a brass quintet from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and audiences of more than 3,000. Thinking that I would be the big man at the helm of that huge organ, I learned a lesson about the power of the bass line from Chester Schmidt, tubist for the BSO, whose rhythmic drive meant I had a tiger by the tail.

Bedient Pipe Organ Company Opus 42 (1994)

After he retired from a long ministry in Winchester, Massachusetts, my father was interim rector of Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is a lovely little church right on the fabled beach, with a rectory next door, a swell place to spend time. The organ is about as far as you can get from the Mother Church, tracker action with three stops, 8′ Gedackt, 4′ Rohrflute, and 2′ Praestant. Oh, and there is a pedalboard with a coupler. It is barely six feet tall, and sitting on the bench, you can wrap your arms around the case. While Dad was serving there, I played an evensong recital for the congregation, a program of sweet little pieces by Handel, Bach, Krebs, and the Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto. I’m a big guy, and I felt as if I was riding a tricycle.

An elderly couple, members of the church and one of the first couples to “come out” in Provincetown, gathered the money to pay for the organ by collecting returnable cans and bottles. They rooted through restaurant dumpsters, combed the beaches, collected empties from their friends, and they raised more than $25,000—a nickle at a time. It is a parish tradition to have a potluck dinner on the Fourth of July ahead of the fireworks display over the water. Tom tried a piece of cake and went back for a second piece. Thinking no one was looking, he swooped back and walked off with the entire cake. Someone whispered to the woman who had brought the cake, and she replied, “I’m glad he liked it.”

I maintained that organ for about twenty years, visiting once a year whether it needed it or not. The drive to Provincetown covers all points of the compass. After crossing the bridge from the mainland, you drive east to Orleans, north to Truro, west into Provincetown, and south to the church. It is about 115 miles from Boston, a long way to go for three stops.

Roy Carlson (ca. 1968)

I was director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, for almost twenty years where the Carlson organ had three manuals and thirty-six ranks. Every stop was useful, and several of them were beautiful; otherwise the organ was unremarkable. There were two open 16′ flues, Principal and Spitzflute, that spoke promptly and well, and two expressive divisions. I played this organ more than any other instrument I have known. The chapel was air-conditioned, so we worshipped there in the summer. We used the main sanctuary for forty Sundays each year, so I guess I played more than 750 services. Twenty weddings a year made the total nearly 1,500, plus recitals and more. I was comfortable at the organ, played all sorts of repertoire, and led the choir through all the usual masterworks.

There was a large, dedicated choir room under the chancel. It was a luxurious space, but a little musty as it was a basement room, so I bought a couple dehumidifiers to take care of the piano, the music library, and the people, but they did not seem to work. I had asked the custodian to maintain them, and it took a few weeks before I realized that he was filling the tanks.

For the 275th anniversary of the parish, our pastor, Mark Strickland, went for the gold and invited William Sloane Coffin to speak at the celebratory banquet. He accepted. The choir and I prepared a review of hymns that might have been sung in different eras of the church’s history. When we got to “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” the Reverend Coffin shouted, “I haven’t heard that one in years,” ran over to the choir, and joined in, every verse memorized long ago.

Flentrop Orgelbouw (1977)

Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, is a lovely Gothic building on Euclid Avenue, just east of downtown. I was a student at Oberlin and working for John Leek when the Flentrop organ was delivered there. John was a first-generation Hollander and friends with the people at Flentrop, and we were hired to help with the installation. The organ arrived from Rotterdam to the Port of Cleveland on the container ship Calliope, and we carried the bulk of the organ up the stone steps into the cathedral. I was used to the three-manual Flentrop at Oberlin that was dedicated in November of my freshman year, and was deep into historic performance practices, so I noticed with interest when I carried a box of expression shutters into the cathedral.

A small organ loft with a spiral staircase had been prepared, and we set up scaffolding towers on each side so we could hoist the heavy parts. I was on top of the growing tower with Jan Radenführer, the church’s sexton, when it looked as though we were going to run into the slope of the ceiling. Jan gave a shove and moved the tower from the top, an experience that informed me that, while I was not afraid of heights, I sure was afraid of falling. In those days I was the young strong guy. I wore a leather holster as if I was carrying a flag in a parade and walked slowly up a ladder with each shiny façade pipe hanging from my belt, while others above me balanced and guided them. Leaving the cathedral at the end of the day, we turned back to look at the organ, and the façade was basking in blue and red light from the afternoon sun shining through the stained-glass windows.

Daniel Hathaway was organist of the cathedral, a friend from my teenage days, and together we played four or five duo-recitals, four hands on the Flentrop and with the smaller Flentrop that had been installed a couple years earlier. Beethoven and Rossini sounded great in Werckmeister. Michael Jupin, who had been associate rector to my father in Winchester, was dean of the cathedral. My first wedding was held at Trinity with Mike, my father, two of my uncles, and my godfather as vested priests. That was the first big organ installation I participated in, and it was a formative experience to work and socialize with the talented people from the Netherlands.

Johann Georg Fux (1736)

In September of 2019, I spent a long week in Germany visiting a colleague organbuilder, and I made a few side trips to see and hear iconic organs. The organ by Johann Fux in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck is a knockout. The church is one of those Rococo masterpieces with side altars with spiraling columns, murals, and statues everywhere—an army of carved angels. The organ is in the second balcony, high enough that it looks small. One reaches the organ by climbing and climbing and climbing an ancient stairway at the front of the church and walking down the length of the building about fifteen feet higher than the floor of the organ—you approach the organ from above. That’s when you realize that while it has fewer than thirty stops, those are 32′ pipes in the façade. It is enormous. It is humbling to think of that beautiful casework, huge pipes, gorgeous keyboards, and complex mechanism being built with eighteenth-century technology and hoisted to that lofty place.

Christoph Hauser is organist of the Kloster. I attended a Sunday Mass and was delighted by his tuneful, humorous, even sassy improvisations. His affinity for the organ was obvious and infectious. I was to meet Christoph after Mass and assumed he would appear at the back of the room. Quite a bit of time passed before I spotted him, looking every bit the organist, standing down front. We climbed the ladder behind the organ and opened case panels, getting a good look at the beautifully made components. He showed me the newly restored bellows, and he played for me. The organ is lusty and colorful. There are gentle flute and string voices, the big choruses with tierces are ebullient and boisterous, and the reeds are authoritarian.

That an organ more than 280 years old could have such relevance to our modern ears is testament to the timelessness of a great instrument. I was in the building for barely three hours including the Mass, but that intimate time with the organ will always be with me. I am grateful to Christoph for his generosity in sharing it with me.

E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 (1860)

Woburn, Massachusetts, adjoins Winchester where I grew up. It was home to three organs by E. & G. G. Hook: Opus 646 (1872) in Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, Opus 553 (1870) in the First Unitarian Church, and Opus 283 in the First Congregational Church. Two are still there, but the Unitarian church closed in 1990, and Opus 553, beautifully restored, is now in the Heilig Kreuz-Passion Church in Berlin, Germany, where it is known as “Die Berliner Hook.” Organ builder George Bozeman was organist at the Congregational church when I was in high school, and he asked me to join him as assistant organist so I could cover for him when his work took him out of town.

Opus 283 is a large, three-manual organ with trumpets on the Swell and Great, lots of lovely color, a big Double Open Wood Diapason, and a walloping Possaune [sic] with wooden resonators. The case has elements of Moorish design with round towers with minarets, and the organ has a commanding position high in the front of the room. I played there with and for George for about two years and have been back to visit the organ many times since. This organ has a famous twin, Opus 288 (1860) in Saint John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine, making a spectacular pair of pre-Civil War instruments.

The Congregational Church was about two-and-a-half miles from our house, and I often walked the distance. One afternoon I arrived at the church and realized I had forgotten my key. No problem, one of the big windows was unlocked, so I opened it and climbed through. The thing is, the police station was next door. I told the friendly officer that I was the organist and had forgotten my key, and he believed me.

As my senior year of high school was ending and commencement was approaching, I agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary chorus in a school near my house. I attended a couple rehearsals, and all was well. Friends suggested we go to the beach after church. Sure, sounds like fun. When I got home from the beach, I learned there had been a slew of telephone calls. I had missed the concert. To deepen the embarrassment, it was the organist of my home church where Dad was rector, whose daughter was in the chorus, who answered the call from the stage if anyone in the house could accompany the concert.

Oh remember not the sins and offenses of my youth, but according to Thy mercy, think Thou on me, O Lord.

Photo credit: John Bishop

Why sell an organ?

Boston has long been a center for pipe organ building starting before 1810 with William Goodrich and Thomas Appleton and continuing with E. & G. G. Hook (later E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, and later still Hook & Hastings), George Stevens, George Hutchings, Ernest Skinner, Aeolian-Skinner, Andover, Fisk, Noack, and many others. I have calculated that in over two hundred years, Boston organ builders collectively produced around 9,000 instruments. Compare that to the single firm of M. P. Möller, Inc., which built roughly 13,500 organs in around 120 years. Many of those were simple stock models like the ubiquitous Artiste, which in some years were pushed out the door at the rate of more than one a day.

Starting in the early 1960s, several new companies were formed to help usher in the “tracker revival,” most notably Fisk and Noack. Among those lesser known today was Robert Roche, whose workshop was in Taunton, Massachusetts. Bob was of Portuguese heritage, well informed, and a very fast talker—it was hard to get a word in edgewise. Along with his activities building, rebuilding, and restoring organs, he ran a small-scale organ supply company, providing parts, tools, and supplies for pipe organ builders. In the late 1980s when I was starting the Bishop Organ Company, I drove to Taunton to pick up a load of something or other, and during the expected yak-fest, Bob gave me his best advice for a nascent independent organbuilder, “Never build an organ for a wealthy church. You’ll create your magnum opus, and they’ll swap it out in twenty years.” I remember thinking if I ever had a chance to build an instrument for a wealthy church, I would go ahead and take my chances, and as far as I know, Bob never had that opportunity.

Church of the Redeemer (Episcopal) in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, my mother’s home parish, is nestled in an affluent neighborhood a couple miles west of Boston. The original organ by Kimball, Smallman, & Frazee was installed in 1915 when the building was completed. Möller Opus 9475 was installed there in 1961, followed by Noack Opus 111 in 1989. Schoenstein Opus 172 replaced the Noack in 2018, the third organ I have known personally in the same church, and the third organ there in less than thirty years. My first organ teacher, Alastair Cassels-Brown, was organist at Redeemer in the 1980s, and I maintained the Möller for him. My college pal Gregg Romatowski was organist there when the Noack was acquired. Sadly, Gregg died of AIDS shortly thereafter.

My dear friend Michael Murray, who shared organist duties at my wedding to Wendy with his husband Stuart Forster, had a productive tenure at Redeemer during which the Schoenstein organ was commissioned, twelve years after Schoenstein Opus 149 was installed at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Stuart was organist. The Organ Clearing House removed the Noack and returned it to the Noack shop in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where it was renovated and enhanced for Saint Paul’s Chapel on lower Broadway in New York City, part of the fabled congregation of Trinity Church, Wall Street. We installed the organ at Saint Paul’s, and later helped install the Schoenstein at Redeemer.

Our wedding was at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine, home of Hutchings Opus 182 (1888) and the first church building designed by the brilliant ecclesiastical architect Henry Vaughan. Vaughan wanted the ceiling painted with frescoes, but funds were not available, so he did it himself, lying on his back on scaffolding. (Henry Vaughan also designed Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill.) Stephen White, a former student of my father who taught homiletics at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was rector of Saint Andrew’s at the time of our wedding. He and dad celebrated the wedding together. Stephen was the former rector at Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill.

Did you get all of that? It is hard to imagine that I could have so many connections with one church except to add that I accompanied a local choral society in a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor on the Noack organ at Redeemer a few days after September 11, 2001.

Of course, there have been hundreds of other churches in my life. Even as adults, my kids still joke that when driving, I navigate by steeples. 

What were they thinking?

From my seat in the Organ Clearing House, the concept of changing organs is always on my mind. Several times a week, I hear from a church wishing to buy or sell an instrument, and I am usually corresponding about ten organs at any given time. It has been especially intense in the last few weeks as we placed an instrument built by Mander Organ Builders in 1991 for Christ Episcopal Church, Pittsford, New York, on the market. It has two manuals and twenty-five stops and an especially beautiful case with brilliant proportions, rich carvings, and polished tin façade pipes with gilded mouths. The organ glows in the dark.

When I published the organ’s availability on our website and posted a link on Facebook, several serious potential purchasers responded quickly, as did the all-knowing community of organ watchers who lurk there. “What church would sell an organ like that?” “A praise band must be next.” 

The Mander organ replaced a Wicks built in 1947 that had been “improved” several times by technicians whose intent exceeded their abilities. The new organ, standing prominently on the church’s long axis, brought brilliance and clarity of tone to the room for the first time. The Mander was fifteen years old when the rector encouraged the enhancement of the music program. The music director’s position was expanded to full-time with a mandate to expand the choir program, bringing a new level of excellence and depth to the music of worship. The growing choir, which had been seated in the rear of the church with the Mander, returned to seats in the chancel. Organist David Baskeyfield brought in a Hauptwerk instrument to accompany the choir and lead music from the chancel, and an organ committee is working on plans for the acquisition of a new pipe organ to be placed around and behind the chancel, especially designed for sophisticated choral accompaniment.

All this reflects the church’s thoughtful and constructive commitment to excellence in music, not irresponsibility for the Mander organ. As I write this, I am corresponding with several potential purchasers where the organ would be placed in superior acoustics and appreciated for its many strengths. It is a thrill to watch a church’s music program grow quickly enough to outgrow a brilliant thirty-year-old organ. I commend the church for bringing two fine organs into existence, and I am grateful for the lively chat online about this superb instrument.

Better get it out of there. . . .

In 2002, I was asked to sell an organ built by Hellmuth Wolff in 1976 with two manuals and seventeen stops. Hellmuth was upset that the church was rejecting his organ and asked me to convince them to keep it, but the church’s new organist was eager to have a large four-manual digital instrument and had no interest in retaining the Wolff organ. When I learned that the organist’s domestic partner was the senior warden of the church, I was pretty sure we were not going to stop it, and when that organist suggested that some of the pipes from the Wolff might be retained to enhance the digital instrument, I told Hellmuth that we had better get that organ out of there before something bad happened to it.

The organ was purchased by Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church in Durham, North Carolina, which already owned a one-manual organ by John Brombaugh. In 2003 we moved the Brombaugh to the front of the church and installed the Wolff organ in the balcony. The church brought Hellmuth to Durham for the dedication of the organ, a happy moment for him after so much frustration and disappointment.

Hellmuth Wolff was born in 1937 in Switzerland, apprenticed with Metzler, and then worked for Rieger and Fisk. He moved to Canada in 1963 to work as a designer in the new mechanical-action department at Casavant alongside Karl Wilhelm. In 1964, he and Karl installed a forty-six-rank Casavant, Opus 2791, at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The Organ Clearing House subsequently sold that organ to Saint Theresa Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was relocated by Messrs. Czeluzniak et Dugal in 2005. Juget-Sinclair Opus 4 with two manuals and forty-five ranks was installed at Saint Andrew’s in 2006. Organ Clearing House president Amory Atkins and his wife Virginia Childs were married at Saint Andrew’s in 1991. Hellmuth and Karl both established successful independent firms in Québec. Hellmuth passed away in 2013.

Miles and piles . . .

Nativity Catholic Church in Timonium, Maryland, was home to a twelve-rank Schlicker organ built in 1986. We sold the organ to All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Kapa’a, Hawaii, in 2015. The reason the organ was offered for sale was obvious the instant I entered the building, as predicted by one of the errant Mander commentators. There was an elaborate rock-and-roll setup adjacent to the organ console, with miles and piles of wire coiled and snaking about, woven between microphone stands, mixers, drums, and stools. We found handfuls of guitar picks and used nine-volt batteries instead of the usual pencils under the pedalboard. We sent the organ to Rosales Organ Builders in Los Angeles. They renovated and expanded the organ and installed it at All Saints’ in 2020. Adam Pajan played the dedicatory recitals. Shane Morris Wise is the organist at All Saints’.

If the shoe fits . . .

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, California, was home to a forty-four-rank Schlicker organ with three manuals built in 1963. In 2008, the organ was ready for renovation, and the people of Saint Mark’s chose to offer it for sale so they could acquire a more “Anglican” instrument. First Lutheran Church of Montclair, New Jersey, purchased the organ in 2010. It was renovated and relocated by the Organ Clearing House, and installation was completed in 2015. Pastor Will Moser of First Lutheran Church, now retired, is also an organist. He had grown up in the thrall of Schlicker organs, considering them to be the quintessential Lutheran instrument.

Saint Mark’s Church in Glendale acquired Skinner Organ Company Opus 774, built in 1930 with three manuals and thirty ranks. It was restored and installed by Foley-Baker, Inc., in 2009. With two expressive divisions, three pairs of celestes, and three colorful orchestral reeds, that organ is ideally suited for the Anglican liturgy and the accompaniment of Anglican choral music and chants. Two radically different organs were exchanged to provide their congregations with instruments especially well suited for their individual musical traditions.

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I have written about organs being sold because styles and opinions change, or because an active church outgrows an instrument, but of course the most common reason for the sale of pipe organs is the closing or merging of churches. When a congregation dwindles and its resources are stretched too thin for feasible operation and starts planning for the sale of their building, they should also begin planning for the future of their organ. Conversely, real estate developers often contact me about selling an organ in a building they have purchased when there is a month or less before they start demolition.

When selling a pipe organ, a year is like a lightning strike. When a church is considering acquiring an organ, there is typically a long committee process. A group travels to audition an available organ and organbuilders inspect it and provide proposals for renovation and relocation, which are presented to the congregation. Organ committees, music committees, finance committees, and parish councils or vestries discuss the proposals. Sometimes fundraising does not start until that entire process is complete. The organ that was offered for sale a month before demolition has long been reduced to rubble.

A church that is considering closing should start working on the sale of an organ as soon as feasible. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than watching an organ go down. When there is time to work with, an organ can command a higher price—its cash value plummets as time runs out. This also applies to the church that has commissioned a new instrument and faces a deadline for the removal of an organ. The worst case in that situation is for a church to have to pay to scrap an organ that has run out time. If your church has decided to replace its organ, get the old one on the market right away, even before the new contract is signed.

Another option to remember when selling a church building is the possibility of retaining ownership of an organ in a sales agreement. If the building sells before the organ, the buyer might agree to allow for the removal of the organ six months, a year, or more after the building changes hands. We once removed a large organ from a church building that had been sold over a year earlier. The original congregation still owned the organ, and the new one was contractually obligated to allow for its removal, but they were not pleased with the impending disruption, and there were some contentious issues to work out. When we offered the use of our scaffolding for the installation of planned new lighting, all the squabbling ended.

The cash value of a vintage pipe organ is determined largely by circumstances and by the market. Any church considering the acquisition of a vintage instrument will be facing significant expense for renovating and relocating the instrument. When a seller insists that the asking price should be comparable to new, I simply remind them that the cost of a new organ includes transportation and installation and assumes that the organ is in mint condition. You have to subtract the cost of relocation, installation, and any necessary renovation to determine a reasonable asking price.

There is a finite amount of money spent on pipe organ projects in the United States every year, and I have adopted the attitude that I need to do all I can to be sure that those precious resources are spent on wonderful instruments. If a church owns a simple organ in poor condition and wants to keep using it, I am ready to encourage them to spend money on repairs, but if there is no hope of a project resulting in a credibly useful organ, I do not see the point. There is such a thing as an organ without any artistic merit. I try to encourage churches looking to purchase an organ to consider those of highest quality first. I am not comfortable advocating a mediocre organ when excellent instruments are available at similar cost. That guides my decisions regarding accepting new listings. There are always many times more organs available than we will ever be able to place, so let us concentrate on the best.

It is immensely satisfying to place a fine organ in a new home once its time has run out somewhere else. New organs are typically planned carefully for the spaces they will inhabit, but it is remarkable how often an instrument adapts beautifully to a new home with minimal changes. We’ll never be able to save them all, but it’s fun to try.

Down front or up in the back?

My home church is the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was called as rector in 1966 when I was ten years old. The song, “Winchester Cathedral,” written by Geoff Stevens and recorded by The New Vaudeville Band, was released in August of 1966, and Dad received several copies of the recording as gag gifts from friends (Oh voh-dee oh doh). I had three years of piano lessons before we moved to Winchester, but singing in the choir there was my first experience participating in the music of the church. The harpsichord maker Carl Fudge was the organist, and as I have written frequently, he had a lot to do with my early career choices.

The organ at Epiphany, the first I played, was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company (Opus 128), a very early and seriously rundown example of Mr. Skinner’s work. The church is brick, of Gothic influence, and mythically shares proportions with “the” Winchester Cathedral. There is a classic Gothic chancel up several steps from the nave, and the choir was situated in fixed carved oak pews on either side. The Skinner console was on the Epistle side nearest the communion rail, right by the little alleyway through which the congregation returned to their seats in the nave after leaving the rail. I started organ lessons when I was twelve, and my first experience playing in church was when Mr. Fudge allowed me to slip onto the bench and noodle a bit while he received communion.

The church had an ancient forced-hot-air heating system with large registers in the floor. If you were a clever choir member or acolyte, you would finagle standing on one, and your cassock would inflate like a dirigible. There must have been a history of choir members fainting because the choir pews were equipped with smelling salts. These fifty-five-year-old childhood memories bring a burst of nostalgia. I am thinking of Eleanor Banks, the burly alto in the senior choir, who wielded a hairbrush like a nunchuck as the robed junior choir filed out of the choir room. In hindsight, it was good none of us had lice—she would have spread them through the whole choir.

I left Epiphany at thirteen to begin my career as an organist, filling in at the First Baptist Church (with a three-manual Estey), then as organist at Saint Eulalia’s Catholic Church (Conn Artist—you cannot make this stuff up), and then in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts (three-manual 1860 E. & G. G. Hook, a stupendous organ). While I was building my resumé before leaving town for Oberlin in the fall of 1974, the people of the Parish of the Epiphany were grappling with the condition of the wheezing Skinner organ. In that Boston suburb, we were in the heart and heyday of the tracker revival, and Mr. Fudge with his early music background was advocating a new tracker organ to be placed in a not-yet-built rear gallery.

Meanwhile, down the street . . .

The First Congregational Church in Winchester has a commanding location on a hillside above the town center and an immense steeple that leaves no doubt that the Congregationalists got the concept of “location, location, location.” Their much-rebuilt 1925 Hook & Hastings organ was replaced in 1969 by
C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 50, a three-manual, mechanical-action organ with twenty-seven stops. Mr. Fisk wanted to place the organ in the rear balcony, but the church insisted on a chancel installation. His solution was to build a very wide, very shallow organ on the chancel wall. In fact, the organ breaks out of the wall and looms into the chancel airspace. The keydesk is on the floor under the organ facing the opposite wall, and the mechanical action goes under the organist and up the wall to the organ. Large doors open into the hallway behind to expose the action. Originally, there was a setter-board combination action behind that door that has since been replaced with a hundred-level solid-state system.

John Skelton was organist of the First Congregational Church back in the day, and he was my organ teacher through my high school career. The church was a five-minute walk from home, and I had generous practice privileges, spending most weekday afternoons in the thrall of the music and the instrument, learning to wrap my fingers and feet around the notes. Mr. Skelton was a gentle and generous teacher who encouraged and nurtured my passion. I loved working with him, and I loved playing on that organ. In summer of 2021, my son Chris and his wife Alex bought a house near where the Skeltons live, and while I was helping Chris with some repairs and modifications before they moved in, I had a swell evening with John and Carolyn.

A new Fisk organ was installed at the Parish of the Epiphany in 1974, just as I was leaving for Oberlin. It started with twelve stops on two manuals, and seven “prepared for” voices were added in 1983. The parish made the difficult decision to move the music making out of the chancel. The new balcony cost more than the $35,000 organ (imagine, a Fisk organ for $35,000), and while some parishioners were unhappy with the change, the relatively small organ was given a commanding position in the relatively large sanctuary. Of course, people familiar with Fisk organs know that “Charlie” was not known for having trouble filling churches with sound.

I did not play as much on Opus 65 as on Opus 50, but I did play a few recitals, perhaps a dozen services, and my sister’s wedding there. I have not been in that building since my father’s memorial service eight years ago, but I will always love the place and value its role in my earliest experiences with the music of the church. I will also always cherish the privilege of playing such brilliant, responsive organs when I was a pup.

Those two organs make a terrific comparison, built five years apart by the same firm in churches a half mile apart, and placed so radically differently in their buildings. They are both vibrant presences. The chancel placement in the Congregational church is surprisingly successful, partly because the chancel is very wide, so the organ’s sound directly reaches a large percentage of the area of the nave, because the acoustics are lively, and because the organ chamber is barely three feet deep.

The people at Fisk have dubbed these organs “Winchester Old” and “Winchester New,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the hymntunes for “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” and “On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry,” respectively.

As much space as you need?

I am fond of telling clients that there are two rules about placing a pipe organ in a church today. Rule #1: There is never enough money. Rule #2: There is never enough space. I have been in scores of older church buildings in which space was no issue. Think of a Catholic church built in 1880 seating 1,200 people. The ceiling is a barrel vault eighty feet up, so even if the balcony rail is twenty-five above the nave floor, there is still fifty-five feet of ceiling height. It is not unusual to find a nineteenth-century organ that is thirty-five or forty feet tall with a footprint of twenty by thirty feet with room left for a fifty-voice choir. Think of the grand organ formerly in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, now in storage. It is a rare modern building that will accommodate anything like that. It may be that the only chance of relocating such an organ would be to build a new organ from the pipes down and save the original voicing.

Even Gothic-style cathedrals pose serious challenges for organbuilders. The builders of the ancient cathedrals never imagined that people would be finding spaces for a hundred-plus ranks of organ pipes with all the associated mechanicals. The vaulted ceiling in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City is 112 feet off the floor, but the two 32′ stops are lying down in the triforium, the Contra Bombarde along Fiftieth Street and the (Double Open Wood) Diapason along Fifty-First Street. At Durham Cathedral, there are, count them, two big Open Wood Diapasons, both standing on the floor in the aisles beside the chancel, the sixteen-footer on the south aisle, and the thirty-two-footer on the north. At York Minster, the 32′ metal Diapason also stands on the floor of the aisle by the chancel, painted to imitate the stone fabric of the wall.

It is often problematic to place pipe organs in newer church buildings. The great interior height in many older church buildings is the result of the desire for proper proportions and the lofty superstructure that supports that high ceiling. Modern construction materials and techniques allow low ceilings to span great distances, and the economics of construction say that as a building gets taller, its cost increases exponentially. Are you paying $500,000 for each additional foot of height? Many modern churches are built without any planned accommodation for an organ, and plenty of architects do not know how much space and what sort of environment an organ needs.

The most extreme experience I have had with this was when a church in Virginia asked me to advise them about placing a pipe organ in their new building. I traveled there to find that although they had asked the architect to provide space for an organ, there was no place in the building to put it. The architect was present at this meeting, and he showed me a photo of an organ façade on the wall of a church and pointed to a space on an outside wall. He blanched when I told him that such an organ would be eight- or ten-feet deep behind the façade. It was an awkward moment. Disappointed, the church bought a digital instrument.

I view the task of evaluating a church building for the placement of an organ as harvesting space. Where in the building might an organ go? Can a classroom be converted to an organ chamber? Can additional height be captured by breaking through a ceiling into attic space? Will the organ be liturgically useful and acoustically successful if we put it there? In newer church buildings, we frequently find a sacristy behind the wall behind the altar. We could harvest the sacristy, open into the attic above, open the wall behind the altar, and make a perfect place for an organ—but I sure have run into opposition when I suggest taking the sacristy.

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The people of Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Shoreline, Washington, were willing to rethink and redesign the front of their church to accommodate a new organ. I visited there in 2016 to consult with them and found an amateur installation of a relocated organ with two “flower boxes” perched on the front wall and an enclosed swell stuffed in an attic behind the wall. There was a waist-high wall separating the choir from the altar and two false walls projecting from the front, enclosing the choir in a pseudo-chancel. Jonathan Ortloff’s design for the new organ created a proper chamber front and center. All the artificial barricades were removed, leaving a wide-open, flexible space for clergy, lay leaders, and musicians.

Susanna Valleau is music director at Saint Dunstan’s, a position she has held since before the inception of the organ project. She reports that Ortloff’s design was quickly accepted by the church’s rector and wardens and embraced by the congregation. The new flexibility of the sanctuary has allowed growth in the worship life of the parish as well as opening possibilities for community outreach, especially a variety of concerts.

The chambered organ

In the beginning of the twentieth century, it became popular to place organs in remote chambers, spaces separate from the rooms in which they would be heard. This can be partly attributed to economy—you save a lot of money when you do not have to build a case. It also means that you do not have an organ cluttering up the floor of the sanctuary (if you choose to look at it that way). This would never have been possible as a wide-spread practice without electricity. Electric keyboard actions made it possible to have great distances between keyboards and windchests, and organists had to learn to play by remote control.

Electricity was also crucial in enabling organs to break the bonds of their chambers, thanks to the luxury of virtually limitless wind supplied by electric blowers. Remember, Widor wrote all ten of his organ symphonies for the hand-pumped organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France. Organ builders developed techniques of voicing with higher wind pressures, producing ever-more-powerful sounds. While the wind pressure of a large organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in the 1860s might have been two-and-a-half inches or three inches, it is common to find five inches of pressure on the Great and eight inches on the Swell of a Skinner organ dating from the 1920s, not to mention solo reeds on fifteen inches or twenty-five inches. Air is the fuel we burn to create organ sound. When Mr. Skinner put his Swell celestes and Flauto Dolces on eight inches of pressure, he coaxed them out of the chamber and into the room, stepping on the gas by running more air through the pipes.

Today we can compare the experiences of playing and hearing organs in chambers and in free-standing cases. In fact, there are several American churches where you can hear both in the same room. The First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, has a three-manual organ by Rudolf von Beckerath (1972) in the rear gallery and a four-manual W. W. Kimball (1931) in chancel chambers. What a wealth of organ tone to experience under one roof.

The chapel at Duke University has a four-manual, hundred-rank Aeolian located in chancel chambers and a four-manual, hundred-rank Flentrop in a high gallery on the rear wall. There is also a small Brombaugh organ tuned in meantone in a side chapel. The Organ Historical Society held a national convention in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2001 during which we heard the ultimate comparison of organs with recitals on each of those organs in the same day—Mark Brombaugh played the Flentrop, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played the Aeolian. The range of music played was profound, from Frescobaldi to Wagner and Liszt, and conventioneers got a real earful that day.

Prepare the way.

When an institution is planning a room that will include a pipe organ, it is wise to engage an organ expert in the design process. It is a rare architect who would have a deep grasp of the space needed for an organ. In fact, without real practical knowledge, planning the size of an organ is likely to be arbitrary. How many stops must it have? Would it have fewer more powerful stops, or would the tonal variety that comes from a larger number of stops serve the needs of the institution best? These questions apply both to churches and universities. If it should be forty stops, should it be electric or mechanical action? And how do you arrive at forty stops? Where should the organ be placed for best acoustical advantage and logistical usefulness? You do not want to place a mechanical-action organ with an attached keydesk alone in a gallery with choir seating on the floor under it or at the other end of the room. The independent organ consultant can help answer all these questions without the conflict of angling for the contract to build the organ.

What will be the electrical requirements? How much might the organ weigh? How are the building’s walls constructed to maximize their effective resonance? In a recent job where an organ was removed for renovation and returned to its original location, the flimsy drywall behind the organ was reinforced with new heavy material, and the effect on the organ’s sound was dramatic.

Because the pipe organ is a monumental instrument, it relies on the integrity of its building for the projection of its sound. The building must provide the organ a safe and solid home. Flimsy construction absorbs sound. Rigid construction projects it. The organ should not be placed under valleys in the roof that would be prone to leak. Witness that the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Notre-Dame de Paris miraculously survived the catastrophic fire in 2019; the peaked roof above the organ between the two towers protected the instrument during that horrible event.

In many churches, it is obvious where the organ should go. In others, not so much. When you are going to the trouble and expense of acquiring an organ, set the stage well and get it right.

Changing seasons

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

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

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

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

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

Stars in your eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newfangled

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

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

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

Notes

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

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.