In the Wind: Humble π, Archimedes' Mental Model and Fritz Noack

The life of π

If you have maintained bird feeders, you know what squirrels can do. They are powerful, lithe acrobats, and they can outsmart almost any attempt to deter them. I recognize several individual male gray squirrels in our yard that are strong and agile enough to leap three or four feet from the ground on to the cone-shaped baffles. They shinny up the steel poles, over the tops of the feeders, hang upside down, and gorge themselves.

Some days I think it is okay to feed the squirrels as well as the birds, letting them take turns, but one day last week as I watched them dominate, it occurred to me that I could make a new baffle of different design, a two- or three-foot disc of plywood with flashing around the edge. If they jumped on it, it would surely flip and dump them off. I took a quick measurement and set off to the lumber yard for a sheet of half-inch exterior plywood and some flashing. How much flashing? It comes in ten-, twenty-, and thirty-foot rolls. I told the kid behind the sales desk (he’s younger than my kids) that I planned either a twenty-four- or thirty-inch circle. Let’s see. Twenty-four inches is two feet. Two times π is about six-and-a-quarter feet. Thirty inches times π is a little less than eight feet. Easy. Ten feet will do it.

The kid asked, “What’s π?” I told him it is a number discovered by a Greek mathematician named Archimedes who lived around 250 B.C. that defines all the properties of a circle. Π = roughly 3.14. Multiply π by the diameter of a circle and you get the circumference (c = πd), or multiply π by the radius squared to calculate the area of the circle (a = πr²). I added that Archimedes came up with other really useful ideas like the continuous inclined plane (the thread of a screw), and the properties of levers. “So a carpenter can use math,” he observed. I told him he could also use π to figure out the difference between a twelve- and sixteen-inch pizza. 3.14 x 12 = 37.68 square inches. 3.14 x 16 = 50.24 square inches. (I used the calculator in my iPhone.) Adding four inches to the diameter makes the pizza a lot bigger. If a bite of pizza is two square inches, the bigger pie has twenty-five more bites.

I took the ten-foot roll of flashing, drove into Building 3 to pick up the plywood, and went home to cut my circle. I decided on thirty inches and tied a Sharpie and an awl to a piece of string fifteen inches apart to make a rough compass. I marked and cut the circle, used little screws to attach the flashing to the sombrero-like gizmo, and mounted it on the pole under the bird feeder. It took the squirrels less than two days to get to the feeder.

Simple Simon met a π-man . . .

Carpenters work automatically with increments of sixteen inches, the standard distance between studs, joists, and rafters. To make things easy, most metal tape measures have clear markings every sixteen inches. A good carpenter knows sixteen inches perfectly. A baker makes a twenty- or thirty-pound batch of bread dough and cuts it into one-pound pieces. Maybe he checks each one with a scale, but he develops a knack for the heft of a pound. Our butcher does the same. I ask for a pound of ground beef, he grabs at the bowl, and puts 15.77 ounces on the scale. “You’ve done this before.” Experienced organ tuners develop a similar knack for the length of a pipe relative to the pitch. You hear the pitch and reach for the pipe of the correct length.

I worked in an organ shop that used twenty millimeters as the standard thickness for milling lumber for organ cases. We bought 4/4 (one-inch thick) rough-sawn wood from a lumber yard. Planing it flat and then to thickness, we could reliably get twenty millimeters from it. I had twenty-millimeter wood in my hands so much that I could tell if a stick was nineteen or twenty-one millimeters. Likewise, we set the “key-dip” on a keyboard, the distance of travel for the natural keys. It is usually something like ten or twelve millimeters. If you have spent three or four days leveling keyboards and adjusting key-dip, you can tell a millimeter difference in a heartbeat.

∏ is special. It is approximately 3.14, more accurately 3.14159265359 . . . . There is apparently no limit to the number of digits—as of now, it has been calculated to 31.4 trillion digits and counting. I have no concept of how those digits are calculated, so I accept 3.14. That is a lot fussier than sixteen-inch studs, and it is a great example of a concept that is all around us that we do not necessarily think about. When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out?” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

The simple circle equations, a = πr² and c = πd, are pretty familiar. I will take it a step further. The volume of a cylinder is πr² (the area of the circle) times the height (v = πr²h). The volume of a cone is v = πr²h/3. The volume of a cone is one-third the volume of a cylinder of the same dimensions. The volume of a sphere is v = 4/3πr³. I suppose you can guess I was pleased with myself for the little math lesson I gave the kid in the lumber yard. But what do bird feeders have to do with pipe organs?

The organ pipe maker is the π-man. People who make organ pipes live and breathe π. To make an organ pipe, you cut out three pieces of metal, a pie-shape (no relation to π) for the foot, a rectangle for the resonator, and a little circle for the languid (the horizontal piece at the joint between the foot and the resonator). The width of the rectangle and the length of the curved top of the cone both equal the circumference of the pipe. The circumference of the languid equals the width of the rectangle.

I wish that every organist could witness the making of organ pipes, the soul of our instrument. The metal is blended in a melting pot (just the right amount of lead, tin, eye of newt, and toe of frog) and cast into sheets on a long table. A few seconds after the sheet is cast, there is a magic moment when the liquid metal becomes solid. You can see it happen. The metal is planed to exact thickness, and some organ builders hammer softer metals (those with higher lead content) to make the metal denser.

Thick and strong metal sheets are cast for larger pipes. Low C of an 8′ Diapason is typically about ten feet long, including the foot and sometimes some extra length for tuning. (The speaking length of any organ pipe is measured from the lower lip of the mouth to the tuning point.) The highest note of that Diapason is a couple inches long from mouth to tuner, but take a look at some little mixture pipes, or the top octave of 1-1⁄3′ or 1-3⁄5′ ranks. The speaking length is a half inch or quarter inch and the diameter is a quarter inch or less. I will play with π a little to estimate that the rectangle of metal is 78/100 by 25/100 (1⁄4) of an inch, smaller than a chiclet. That’s a fussy little piece of metal to cut, much different from the carpenters’ sixteen-inch centers. The pipe maker forms that chiclet into a cylinder around a steel mandril, then solders the seams. Careful not to burn your fingers.

The pipe maker cuts sixty-one pieces of pie (toes), sixty-one rectangles (resonators), and sixty-one circles (languids), one of each for every note on the keyboard. Each is a different size. While the length of the pipes halve at every octave, the diameters of the pipes halve every seventeen notes or so. It is that halving that keeps scales (diameters) of the treble pipes large enough to speak, and it is that halving at seventeen that forms the beautiful parabola of the tops of the pipes as they sit on a windchest. When all those pieces are laid out in order on a table, they show the image of a rank of pipes. As I can tell the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters in my fingers, so the pipe maker can pick up one of those rectangles and know what the diameter of the pipe will be.

I wonder how Archimedes came across π. What induced him to think so intently about a circle? Did the formula appear to him in a dream? Did he use trial and error? How did he check himself? Did he draw a grid on a circle and count the squares?

Radical radii

I spent a couple weeks in Germany in September of 2019. I wrote about organs I visited on that trip in the December 2019 issue of The Diapason, pages 14–15. I spent about a week in Überlingen, on the shore of the Bodensee, visiting my friend and colleague Stefan Stürzer, director of the respected organ building firm Glatter-Götz in nearby Pfullendorf, perhaps best known in the United States as builders, with Manuel Rosales, of the iconic “Disney Organ.” I sat one afternoon with Heinz Kremnitzer, the designer and engineer for the company, who told me about the process of designing and making the huge, curved pipes that have given the organ the sobriquet, “A Large Order of Fries.” Frank Gehry, architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall and creator of the organ’s visual design, called for the curves.

The first question was whether such an organ pipe would speak, so Glatter-Götz built low DDDD of the 32′ Violon as a prototype. The curves were marked on the huge boards that would be the sides of the pipes and cut using a hand-held circular saw. Big deal. We all have “Skilsaws” in our shops. But remember, that pipe was almost twenty-eight feet long, the length of an average living room. To assemble the pipe, the flat board that would be the back of the pipe was placed on sawhorses spaced far enough apart that the board sagged to approximate the correct curve. Glue was applied, the pipe assembled, and as anyone who has heard the Disney organ knows, the pipe spoke. Stefan told me that they borrowed dozens of extra clamps from neighboring organ companies to accomplish that complex job.

Each curve is a segment of a circle with a huge radius. Twenty-seven pipes of the 32′ Violon and ten pipes of the 32′ Basson are curved. Four different radii were used: 51.545 meters, 32.102 meters, 20.586 meters, and 13.027 meters. How much is 51.454 meters in feet? 169.11 feet. Double the radius to picture a 338.22-foot circle. That is more than the length of a football field, including both end zones. The length of the segments of those circles would be the speaking length of each pipe. With today’s sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD), that would be simple enough to draw. But turning that digital arc into a pencil line on a board is quite a process.

But wait, there is more. Remember there are ten curved reed pipes, the longest of which is over thirty-one feet and remember that reed pipes are tapered. How do you curve a tapered pipe? Easy, there are two different radii for each pipe.

Heinz spent weeks in the Los Angeles offices of Gehry Partners, LLP, designing the complicated supports for the curved pipes. The supports would have universal joints on each end to achieve the multiplicity of angles, and each pipe would have two supports to achieve rigidity. Heinz drew the supports into the CAD drawings, weaving each between the complex shapes and layout of the pipes. Take a look at a photo of the organ and imagine the task. Heinz’s last word on those big, curved pipes, “It was a challenge I really enjoyed.” Great thanks to Stefan Stürzer and Heinz Kremnitzer of Glatter-Götz for giving me permission to publish this fascinating information. I am not going to ask how Gehry arrived at a radius of 51.545 meters as the perfect curve.

A penny for your thoughts?

Our system of telling time has been derived from the movements of celestial bodies. The earth rotates in twenty-four hours. The moon orbits the earth in twenty-seven days. The earth orbits the sun in 365 days. There are anomalies in the way those cycles have been divided. Our months have different numbers of days, and there is a corrective “leap day” every four years allowing us to catch up. The exact measurement of time is a complex science, one that I do not have to worry about because my iPhone is the most accurate clock I have ever had. When I cross into a different time zone (which I will do “full-vax” in two weeks for the first time in almost fifteen months), Steve Jobs gives me a nudge with the exact local time.

Mechanical clocks are marvelous machines, and it takes meticulous attention to achieve really accurate timekeeping. Ian Westworth, the clock mechanic for the Houses of Parliament in Great Britain, is leading a team in the restoration of the Great Clock built in 1859 and installed in the Elizabeth Tower of the Palace of Westminster. While many people think “Big Ben” is the name of the clock, in fact, “Big Ben” is the name of the largest of the five bells, the solemn boom that tolls the hour.

On Tuesday, April 13, 2021, The New York Times published a story by Susanne Fowler under the headline, “What Does It Take to Hear Big Ben Again? 500 Workers and a Hiding Place.” The hiding place is the secret and secure location of the workshop where the clock is being restored. Many of the 500 workers are involved in the restoration of the tower and the four twenty-three-foot glass faces of the clock. An amazing 1,296 pieces of mouth-blown pot opal glass have been made, and the fourteen- and nine-foot hands of the clock are being restored to their original condition.

Mr. Westworth explained how they regulate the speed of the clock to keep accurate time. When the clock is operational, its speed varies by plus or minus two seconds in twenty-four hours. The weight of the pendulum controls the speed of the clock. They have calculated that adding or subtracting the weight of a penny (3.56 grams) changes the speed of the five-ton clock by two-fifths of a second over twenty-four hours. The clock is wound each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The clock mechanics keep careful track of the time of striking and adjust the speed at each winding by adding or subtracting a penny or two. That might be the only way you can actually buy time.

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

Lost arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving the nest

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

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

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

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

You’re in the big time now.

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

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

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

The art of the question

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

On the bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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.

Giants among favorites

I am often asked if I have a favorite organ, a single instrument that stands out among the multitude as the best, the most expressive, the most impressive, among the hundreds I have visited, played on, or worked on. I am never able to answer clearly by citing a single instrument. There are organs that have been important in my life, but great life experiences do not necessarily focus on superb organs. I am very proud of some of the projects I have done on simple organs that I was able to expand and improve so the congregations that own them were thrilled with the result.

I have heard some of our finest musicians play thrilling programs on magnificent instruments and come away from those experiences with gratitude for a life surrounded by great musicians and great organs. I have been moved by beautiful playing on exquisite smaller instruments and amazed by the relationships of beautiful organs with the acoustics and architecture of their buildings.

I have fond memories of the organs I knew when I was a teenager first learning to play, some of which I still see regularly, and memories of rich evenings with beloved colleagues—sitting with an organ, listening to its tones, experimenting with its mechanics, marveling at its design, historical importance, heritage—and then retiring to a restaurant for a great meal. I have visited many organs nearing completion in colleagues’ workshops and then heard them as finished instruments in their “forever homes.” And as director of the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that what seemed like a forever home for an organ can vanish, leaving the organ homeless. I am especially proud of some of those when we were able to find new homes for them and see them restored for a second century of use.

There are dozens, hundreds of organs I can think of that I love and respect as great technical, musical, artistic achievements, but there is not one that I can point to as the best or as my favorite. I will cite a few standouts.

Warner Concert Hall

I was an eighteen-year-old incoming freshman at Oberlin in November 1974, my third month as a grown-up organ major, when the grand Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. I was fortunate to have grown up in Boston where I heard many wonderful new mechanical-action organs, but the Flentrop dazzled me. Painted red and blue and wearing gold negligee, it looks fantastic in the mostly whitish room. I did the hard work of practice, lessons, studio classes, and required performances including my senior recital on that organ. After a long absence I had a chance to visit it again last summer, and as you read this, I will have attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that organ over the weekend of November 15, reuniting with dozens of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Basilica of Saint Martin

I visited Stefan Stürzer at Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Pfullendorf, Germany, in September of 2019. Manuel Rosales was there working on the earliest stages of the monumental organ they are building together for Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. Stefan, Manuel, Glatter-Götz’s then-new employee Felix Müller, and I had a chance to visit the Josef Gabler organ (completed in 1750) in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Weingarten, Germany. The only time we could schedule our visit was during a Mass on a Friday afternoon, but since the organ gallery is very high in the rear of the building, we were able to walk around chatting. In between leading hymns, psalms, and incidental music, the organist opened panels to show us inner workings, and he made a point of demonstrating some of the unique sounds of that remarkable organ, especially the haunting Vox Humana in the Brüstungspositiv (Rückpositiv).

There is a fascinating legend regarding that Vox Humana that had Gabler struggling to recreate the human voice exactly, and one attempt after many others fell short. The devil offered a deal: consign your soul to the devil, meet in a prescribed lonely place in the forest, and you will receive the secret for the perfect human voice, which turned out to be a piece of metal to be used to build the rank. It is not clear how Gabler got out of that pickle, but the organ was successful enough that the abbot presented him with enough wine to fill the organ’s largest pipe. (If the pipe was twenty-four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long, that would be around seven-hundred-fifty gallons.) The name of the city and abbey gives away the source of such a plentiful supply. I remember that as a remarkable encounter with a spectacular organ in the company of admired colleagues, pretty heady stuff. That night, Felix took the photo of me that shows every month at the top of the right-hand page of this column.

Saint-Sulpice

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential organs in the world. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré filled that organ bench for a hundred years as they taught generations of students. Imagine hearing Widor’s “Toccata” from the Fifth Symphony in that church for the first time. “Oh Maître, I hope you’ll play it again.” I attended a recital there played by Gillian Weir and could do nothing but weep. Putting my fingers on the keys played by Widor and Dupré for thousands of Masses and countless hours of practice was both humbling and thrilling.

Saint James

When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, around 1980, we renovated a large Wicks organ in Saint James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, with three manuals and twenty-eight ranks. It was located in an ample and high loft at the rear of the church with a small two-division sanctuary organ burrowed into the reredos, an unremarkable organ except that it was in a huge, resonant church and was a product of the period when Vincent Willis III of the great eponymous British firm was working at Wicks influencing their tonal schemes.

There was a lot of unification in the organ, so there was a lot of wiring to do, much of which I did alone in a Zen state, sorting and soldering row after row of wires while listening to a gaggle of women with an occasional added man reciting the Rosary for an hour after the end of the 8:00 a.m. Mass. By the time the project was finished, that sequence of prayers was forever etched in my brain, and when I hear it today, I can smell the soldering iron.

I mention this organ because it opened my twenty-something, tracker-action, early music eyes and ears to a new understanding of Romantic music. One afternoon I was playing the ubiquitous Widor “Toccata” (he sure did play it again, and so has almost every organist since), reveling in the effect of the piece in that vast rolling acoustic. I was used to playing it on smallish tracker organs that made it sound like pelting marbles on a metal roof. So that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Maybe there is something to this music.

“The Busch”

E. Power Biggs lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was neighbor to great thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Julia Child. After working with G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner to create an “experimental organ” in Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (now known as Busch Hall), Biggs commissioned a three-manual, mechanical-action organ by Flentrop Orgelbouw of Zaandam, the Netherlands, which was installed in the gallery of the resonant hall in 1957. That instrument quickly became world-famous as Biggs recorded there his brilliant and influential series of LPs, E. Power Biggs: Bach Great Organ Favorites. I was deeply influenced by those recordings, and I have met countless other organists “of a certain age” whose life paths were set by those recordings. As a teenager I heard Biggs play several recitals there, memories that have stayed with me for over fifty years, and I have visited the organ several times since. It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Flentrop organ on American organ building at that time, as the renaissance that was the revival of the classic craft was gaining traction.

Trinity on Copley

I worked at Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 until Daniel Angerstein closed the workshop to become tonal director for M. P. Möller in Hagerstown, Maryland. Dan and I worked out that I would assume the many service clients that led to the founding of the Bishop Organ Company. Jason McKown was a legendary old organ technician in the Boston area who had worked directly and personally with Ernest Skinner and told endless stories about Mr. Skinner and many famous organists and organbuilders. He was over eighty years old and eager to retire as curator of the marvelous double organ at Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, where there is a four-manual instrument by the Skinner Organ Company in the rear gallery and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in a chancel chamber. Jason had been caring for the organ for over fifty years. The building is a heavy, dense, grand place with interior decoration by John La Farge, and the organs sound spectacular there. Brian Jones, the organist there and an old friend, introduced me to Jason, and I became curator of the organs.

Trinity Church has long been famous for noontime recitals every Friday, and I was there early every Friday morning for two hours of tuning. It was my habit to listen to Red Barber and Bob Edwards after the 7:30 a.m. headlines on National Public Radio in my car with a cup of coffee before going inside to tune.

Those Friday noon recitals meant I heard different organists play the organ every week. Some players were swallowed up by the complexity and sophistication of the big double organ with myriad controls and combinations. Others managed to tame the beast, and it sometimes seemed that the organ somehow knew when the person who slid onto the bench was going to give it a great ride. Over a period of about ten years, I heard more than 200 recitals there. Of course, there were many repeats, but hearing so many different approaches to a single organ was an important part of my learning.

A couple doozies

Once I was established at Trinity, Jason walked me the half mile up Huntington Avenue to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known familiarly as the Mother Church, home to Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, built in 1952. He had been caring for the organ since it was installed, and what an organ it is with over 150 stops and 237 ranks. Jason recommended me to the church as his successor, and I had a rollicking ten years learning the mysteries of taking care of a truly massive organ.

Many of the world’s largest organs, say those with more than 200 ranks, were originally built as more modest instruments and evolved into their present glory under a string of opus numbers. One of the many remarkable things about Opus 1203 is that it was built all at once under one giant contract. Also remarkable is that it was built under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps, who was only thirty years old at the time. I know I thought I was quite something when I was thirty, but I am sure I could not have produced such a massive organ with such a sophisticated tonal scheme.

This amazing organ was at the center of my professional life for around ten years, and I had many important experiences and lessons there. I have written about it in these pages many times because pretty much any time I start writing about organs, it is there lurking—no, looming in the background.

I had a conversation the other day with Bryan Ashley, who has been the organist there since 2009. He revels in the organ’s majesty and subtlety and told me that it is the honor of his life to play it each week. The church has supported the organ with meticulous care since it was installed. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, has been working there since I left nearly thirty years ago, doing usual tuning and service calls as well as a comprehensive renovation under the direction of Phelps in the 1990s. The brilliant concert organist Stephen Tharp played a landmark recital on the Mother Church organ on June 28, 2014, the closing recital for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. He premiered his transcription of Igor Stravinsky’s world-changing Rite of Spring in a riveting performance that I thought changed the world of organ recitals forever. His fierce rhythmic drive and dynamic, fiery registrations had the huge audience spellbound. In testament to the quality and condition of that massive organ built in 1952, Stephen told me that he practiced energetically for dozens of hours in preparation for his recital and never had to call on the technicians to correct anything.

The Mother Church organ came to mind, as it does frequently, when I was in Salt Lake City this past August for the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, where the famous Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Mormon Tabernacle was featured in several programs. The Tabernacle organ (Opus 1075) was built in 1945, just seven years and 128 opus numbers earlier than the Mother Church organ. It originally had 187 ranks and has been gradually expanded to today’s 206 ranks by Schoenstein & Company. It was built under the directorship of G. Donald Harrison who considered it his masterpiece, and rightly so. A quick look at the encyclopedic stoplist shows its vast variety of tone colors and combinations.

There is a fundamental difference between these two extraordinary organs. While both can be considered “American Classic” instruments, the Mother Church organ has lower wind pressures. The Positiv division is on less than two inches of wind; it is amazing that the eleven-stop pitman windchest can function on such low pressure. Along with lower wind pressures, the organ has what could be considered Baroque choruses with German nomenclature. Along with the Great, Swell, and Choir you would expect to find the Hauptwerk and Positiv with distinctly lighter tone.

Both organs are rich with multiple pairs of “celesting” stops, mutations at every pitch imaginable, and many mixtures of varying character. It is important to note that both organs are scrupulously maintained in terrific condition, reflecting the dedication of those two institutions.

Look it up.

I have been rattling from one organ to another, and I imagine some readers would be interested to see the stoplists. You are in luck. The Organ Historical Society has a broad and valuable database of organs across the United States. Visit pipeorgandatabase.com, click on “Instruments” in the upper left corner, then click on “View/Search Instruments.” That will open a form with blanks to fill in: Location (Church, Institution, etc.), City, State, Builder, Opus Number, etc. You usually only need to fill in a few blanks before the organ you are looking for pops up.

The database is a fantastic resource with photos and information about thousands of organs. The website is open on my browser whenever I am sitting at my desk, and I routinely search for information about dozens of organs. A little hint: if an organ has been rebuilt, it is likely you will find it under that company rather than the original builder. For example, you will find the Mother Church organ under Foley-Baker, not Aeolian-Skinner. Three cheers to the OHS for conceiving and continuing with that valuable project, essential to those who work with and research organs, and fascinating to all of us who are just plain interested.

If you visit the database and do not see an organ you play regularly or just know and love, go back to the original menu, click “Instruments,” and then click “Submit New Instrument Entry.” Your submission will be reviewed, someone may ask you a question or two, and then you will have contributed to a unique and valuable resource.

Next time we meet, ask me what’s my favorite organ. I’m thinking about that all the time; you may get a sassy answer.