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In the Wind: The Life of π

John Bishop
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA

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.

Related Content

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

John Bishop
Fritz Noack

Humble π

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”

Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.

But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr2 (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.

Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.

Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.

Achimedes’ mental model

Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:

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 last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr3. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr2h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.

My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.

I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.

Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.

If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.

Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.1 The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.

An American renaissance

As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.

There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.

A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.

In a nutshell

The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.

In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.

Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.

I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.

He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.

I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

In the Wind: casting of metal pipes

Casting a metal pipe

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.

In the Wind: Take good care

John Bishop
Gabler organ

One size fits all.

As a plus-sized organ guy whose shoulders are four or five inches wider than an airplane seat, I always sit in an aisle seat so I do not have to crunch up against my neighbor. Instead, I am regularly clobbered by the flight attendant’s cart and the sloppiest of my fellow passengers as they negotiate the trek to the restroom. Years ago, on a flight to who knows where, I was seated next to a young woman who was sitting with her legs curled under her on her seat. I marveled at her flexibility, and when we stood to deplane, I realized she was under five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds or less. We had paid the same price for our seats, and she was sitting perfectly comfortably while I was squeezed into my seat like toothpaste in a tube. Hats, mittens, or leggings might be sold as one-size-fits-all, but I know that really means they will be loose on small people and tight on large people.

So it goes with education. Modern public schools are governed by the demands of standardized testing as if every child in America needs an identical education. My son Chris teaches English as a second language in an urban public high school where his students are first- or second-generation immigrants who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese at home, as it is typical that their parents do not speak English. These kids cannot be expected to thrive if they are being held to the same standards as their classmates who grew up speaking nothing but English. It is a heinous form of discrimination.

My other son Mike did not finish high school but worked in a succession of bicycle shops as a teenager and graduated to specialized piping, building the complex networks of tubing in university research labs. When he told me he had learned to do internal welding on eighth-inch stainless steel tubing, I knew he was going to be okay. He has now had a fifteen-year career with an architectural fabrication firm where he builds high-end signage with complex electrical systems, like the miles of LED displays that encircle the guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. He built and installed all the road signs for Terminal B of Logan Airport in Boston (“Central Parking, Next Left”), interior signs for Madison Square Garden including the jumbotron, and the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. You might think that Mike is disadvantaged because he did not have algebra or calculus in high school, but he uses more complex mathematics at his workstation every day than many of us do in a lifetime.

I had an industrial arts class in middle school where I learned to use a stationary shear, a metal brake, rollers, and rivets making a half-pipe-shaped, sheet-metal firewood caddy with decorative black iron legs and hoop handle. That gold-painted beauty stood next to the fireplace in my parents’ home until they moved into assisted living forty years later. I had algebra in high school, but I sure spent a lot of days in my career as an organ builder developing the metal-working skills I learned when I was thirteen.

In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), Matthew Crawford wrote about the dwindling of public school industrial arts education as schools focused more on standardized testing and achieving 100% college admissions. The second paragraph of his book’s introduction begins, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” He goes on to describe how modern engineering focuses on “hiding the works” by designing machines so that you cannot tell how they are put together or how they work. Open the hood of a new car, and you can hardly tell there is an engine in there, and to keep our precious hands clean, some newer Mercedes models do not have dipsticks, as if it is not the owner’s responsibility to pay attention to whether there is oil in the engine.

In 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act that provided funding for manual training in public schools, both as part of general education and as designated vocational schools. Crawford cites that starting around 1980, 80% of public high school shop programs began to disappear.1 Throughout the book, he makes the case that while some people flourish practicing law or managing businesses, many people are cut out to work with their hands, gaining the satisfaction of making or repairing something, what he calls “primary work.” He points out that surgery is a meeting of intellectual and manual disciplines. Standardized testing implies that a kid who is destined to be a plumber needs the same foundation as one who will be a musician or a corporate executive. Who can tell the future of a ten-year-old? You can’t. You provide all children with an education that includes academics, the arts and humanities, the industrial world, and sports, and hope that each child will be captivated by something—liberal arts for teenagers.

Simply reading the table of contents of Crawford’s book gives an overview of his point of view regarding the manual arts: “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts;” “The Separation of Thinking from Doing;” “To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff;” “The Education of a Gearhead;” “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional;” “The Contradictions of the Cubicle;” “Thinking as Doing;” “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement.” As an organ builder, I have spent much of my life negotiating and contemplating the differences between blue- and white-collar work, and I recommend this book as a good read with lively writing and philosophical musings from the life of a literary motorcycle mechanic.

Early in my career, living and working in Oberlin, Ohio, one of our friends taught diesel mechanics at the vocational high school. What could be more valuable to a rural farming community than a new generation of diesel mechanics? Let’s face it, we need plumbers and auto mechanics more than we need organ builders. Those kids at Voke-Tech were onto something.

Jack of all trades

David Margonelli was a woodworker whose shop was in Edgecomb, Maine, a few miles downriver from our house. His first woodworking project was a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox, a small shallow draft boat that could be sailed, rowed, poled, or sculled. He was interested in Shaker furniture early on, and over the years developed pieces that combined the Shaker tradition with elegant curves such as a chest of drawers with bowed front or a bow-legged dining table. He had an elaborate vacuum table set up in his shop, like that found in many organ building workshops used for gluing windchest tables to grids, that allowed him to use the pressure of the atmosphere to create his curved elements.

We have one of his tables in our apartment in New York. It is made of cherry with the signature bowed legs and a neat sliding mechanism to allow the addition of two leafs for larger dinners. It has been the host of countless wonderful dinners, and its graceful shape is a beautiful addition to our home. David was a gnarly old guy, very sure of himself, and proud of his designs and craftsmanship, and I loved visiting his shop as much as I love sharing meals at his table.

Camden, Maine, a coastal town an hour or so east from us, is home to a little shop that sells handmade leather goods where I bought a bag made of supple black leather that I use as a second briefcase. It is just the size of an iPad or letter-sized paper folded in half and has three zipper compartments with enough space for a phone/iPad charger, hand sanitizer, pens, a Moleskine notebook, and a bottle of water. It has a long, adjustable leather strap so I can carry it around my neck, and I take it to local meetings and on short trips when I know I am not going to need my MacBook. I never met the artisan who made it, but I appreciate the accurate cutting of the material, the careful hand stitching, and the thoughtful usefulness of the design.

Early in 2013, I was tuning a venerable Hutchings organ in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a 127-year-old ladder collapsed under me. I had a classic view of a receding ceiling and landed flat on my back on the miraculously flat and uncluttered floor of the organ. (If I had landed on a windline, I would have never walked again.) Following surgery and rehab, and our first season with our new sailboat (we called it the Sciatica Cruise), I contacted those clients whose organs were particularly treacherous and suggested (required) that we would install new ladders, handholds, and railings to reduce the risk of accidents. There is a little metal fabricating shop in our neighboring village of Damariscotta, Maine, where two guys cut and weld iron to make things like gear for commercial fishing boats amidst a gallery of tool calendars. I took them drawings for a collection of railings and ladders, and it is a lot safer to work in those organs now.

All these skills and the specialized tools involved are part of the art of organ building. Add to them sophisticated electrical systems, mechanical and structural engineering, architecture, and the musical realm of voicing and tuning, and you approach the complete organ builder.

It takes a village.

Having spent countless hours and days on job sites, bringing organs in and out of churches and maintaining those in place, I reflect frequently on the wide range of trades and vocations. An organ builder must be conversant with musicians, clergy, and the lay or professional leaders who operate churches and equally at home with custodians, electricians, HVAC workers, and the plumbers who install overhead sprinkler systems. We deal with building and fire inspectors, insurance adjusters, and lumber vendors. And working with the Organ Clearing House, almost every job involves scaffolding and trucking. It is funny to deal with a big-city pastor and a scaffold delivery driver from Queens, New York, in the same morning, especially when it turns out that the pastor is the tough customer while the driver is a sweetheart who just wants to get things right.

In 2004, we dismantled a huge M. P. Möller organ in a chamber above the 125-foot-high ceiling of a 19,000-seat convention center. As it was in the union city of Philadelphia, we started the project with a meeting that would define who would be allowed to do what work. Representatives of the unions for riggers, laborers, and carpenters were present along with administrators of the University of Pennsylvania, which owned the site. I described how delicate organ parts can be in spite of their industrial appearance, and the guy from the riggers’ union assured me that their men had vast experience. “We’ve been rigging in Philadelphia for 100 years, we’re the guys who moved the Liberty Bell.” I quipped, “Are you the ones who cracked it?” He did not think it was funny, but there were audible snickers around the table. The laborers insisted they should be in the organ chamber with us, moving the crates around. In the end, I won the point that we “owned” the organ chamber, that no one but us could handle organ parts until they were packed, but as soon as a crate or organ part got to the riggers’ rope we could not touch it again. We found out that “touch” really meant touch. Later in the job, one of our guys was on the floor guiding the laborers about how to place and stack crates, and he pushed a loaded dolly a few feet. A whistle blew, the work stopped, and I had to go to an emergency meeting with the unions to smooth things over.

Mike, one of the riggers, showed up one morning looking pretty rough. His pal told us that he had been in a bar the night before that had a boxing ring set up where patrons could wrestle with a bear, and the bear had won. Hughie (six foot, eight inches tall) stands out in my memory. The union was requiring him to attend anger management classes because he had beat up a highway toll collector as he passed through the booth. (Who gets that angry in that short a time?) We got along famously, and I will never forget the goodbye hug he gave me when the job was finished. The music theory classes I had at Oberlin had nothing to do with preparing me for Hughie’s hug, but I am sure that my knowledge of theory and harmony has informed my tuning.

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We are all aware of the decline of “electives” in public schools like home economics, industrial arts, and the arts in general. The focus on college acceptance and standardized tests seems to hinder a thorough education. It is a common sentiment now that public schools could and should offer courses in life skills like family budgeting, tax preparation, investing, and auto maintenance, things that all of us need to know and learn on our own later if our parents do not teach us.

I repeat the quote from Matthew Crawford’s book, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” When I visit an art museum, I marvel at the manual skills of painters, sculptors, potters, and jewelers from centuries and millennia past. If you have never held tools in your hands, never tried to carve a piece of wood, or never put brush and paint to canvas, you will have less understanding of the magic that is around you. Visit the ancient sites in Greece or Rome, and imagine the knowledge, skill, and singular sense of purpose necessary to build the Colosseum, a 10,000-seat amphitheater, or craft an ornately decorated pottery urn.

When I was an apprentice in John Leek’s shop in Oberlin, Ohio, he taught me how to plane a rough board by hand before letting me loose on the thickness planer. That was a great lesson about sharpening and handling tools and understanding the flow of grain in a piece of wood so my plane would not tear chips out of the surface if I worked against the grain. That experience enhanced my appreciation of the historic organs I have visited and worked on in the United States and Europe. That iconic fifty-foot-tall organ case in Haarlem is made of lumber that was planed and cut without electric tools and machines. I get blisters on my hands just thinking about it. Since the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, we have seen video footage of the wooden superstructure of that building, made by artisans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Felling trees, milling them into huge beams, transporting them from the forest to the city, and hoisting them hundreds of feet in the air with only the power of humans and oxen to haul wagons and turn winches is practically beyond belief.

Wendy and I are in New York City this week, and because of some complicated twists of schedule, a friend is staying in our house in Maine taking care of Farley, the Goldendoodle. She called at five o’clock Saturday evening saying there was no running water in the house. I walked her through resetting the pump at the wellhead without results, so I called Darren, the plumber. Meanwhile, I told her that she had three flushes (there are three toilets), after which she could use the outhouse. Darren was at the house in fifteen minutes, cleaned the filter at the pressure tanks (of course, the filter), and Cassie had water again. Take good care of your plumber, pay his bills promptly, and he will take good care of you.

 

Notes

1. Michael B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), p. 11.

In the Wind. . .

John Bishop
Organ pipe trays

Shipping and handling included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

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

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

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

In the Wind . . .

John Bishop
Organ interior

How does it work?

It happened again. I sat at this desk for days mud wrestling with an unruly topic for this column. Twice I had more than a thousand tortured words on the screen, went upstairs for a break, and came back to Ctrl-Shift-A-Delete. But Anthony Tommasini, music critic for The New York Times, came to my rescue with his article under the headline, “Why Do Pianists Know So Little About Pianos?,” published November 12, 2020. This article was born as the outbreak of COVID-19 got rolling in New York City last March and his piano needed tuning, but his apartment building was locked down and workers from outside were not allowed in except for emergencies. “An out-of-tune piano hardly seemed an emergency.”

He quotes the brilliant Jeremy Denk as not knowing “the first thing about piano technology.” Denk, whose playing I admire deeply and who like me is an alumnus of Oberlin College, had the same issue as Tommasini when his building locked down, but convinced the superintendent of his apartment building that because playing the piano is his profession, his tuner should be accepted as an essential worker. It worked.

Tommasini singles out Mitsuko Uchida as one prominent pianist who is an intimate student of piano technology. He quotes her as saying, “you get stuck when the weight is different key to key, the piano has been sloppily prepared, and the dampers have not been adjusted—or the spring in the pedal.” She went on, finding trouble when “the pin underneath the key [guide pin] is dirty, or the other pin in the middle of the mechanism [balance pin] is dirty, rubbing, or slurping.” I love the word slurping in this context.

Tommasini reminds us that orchestral players know more about their instruments than most pianists, and that unlike pianists, orchestral players own their instruments and can carry them with them between performances. Vladimir Horowitz traveled with his own piano, but then, Horowitz was Horowitz. You tell him “No.” Unusual among modern pianists, Mitsuko Uchida travels with her own piano. When Tommasini asked her if the institutions where she plays cover that cost, she said “usually not.” But she went on, “I have no excess otherwise. I don’t need country houses, expensive jewelry, expensive cars, special collections of whatever.” I suppose her usual fees cover that cost and still provide her with lunch money.

Tommasini concluded the column: Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano, and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward, it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved.

Press the key and the pipe blows.

The pipe organ is the most complex of all musical instruments. It is such a sophisticated machine that other musicians, including some world-renowned orchestral conductors, consider it to be unmusical. While a violinist or clarinetist can accent a note by applying a touch more energy, what a single organ pipe can do is all it can do. The organist can accent a note by tweaking the rhythm—a nano-second of delay can translate into an accent—or by operating a machine. A twitch of the ankle on the Swell pedal does it, so does coupling a registration to another keyboard with a soft stop so a note or two can be accented by darting to the other keyboard. The creative organist has a bag of tricks that bypass the mechanics and allow the behemoth to sing.

I have been building, restoring, repairing, servicing, selling, and relocating pipe organs for over forty-five years, and I know that many organists have little idea of how an organ works, so I thought I would offer a short primer. If you already know some or most of this, maybe you can share it with people in your church to help them understand the complexity. In that case, it might help people, especially those on the organ committee, understand why it is so expensive to build, repair, and maintain an organ.

Pipes and registrations

A single organ pipe produces a tone when pressurized air is blown into its toehole. The construction of the pipe is such that the puff of air, which lasts as long as the key is held, is converted to a flat “sheet” that passes across the opening that is the mouth of the pipe. The tone is generated when the sheet is split by the upper lip of the mouth. This is how tone is produced by a recorder, an orchestral flute, or a police whistle. Organ pipes that work this way are called “flue pipes,” and there are no moving parts involved in tone production. Reed pipes (trumpets, oboes, clarinets, tubas, etc.) have a brass tongue that vibrates when air enters the toehole: that vibration is the source of the tone.

Since each pipe can produce only one pitch, you need a set of pipes. We call them ranks of pipes, with one pipe for each note on the keyboard to make a single organ voice. Additional stops are made with additional ranks. There are sixty-one notes on a standard organ keyboard. If the organ has ten stops, there are 610 pipes. Pedal stops usually have thirty-two pipes.

The Arabic numbers on stop knobs or tablets refer to the pitch at which a stop speaks. 8′ indicates unison pitch because the pipe for the lowest note of the keyboard must be eight feet long. 4′ indicates a stop that speaks an octave higher, 2′ is two octaves higher, 16′ is an octave lower. Some stops, such as mixtures, have more than one rank. The number of ranks is usually indicated with a Roman numeral on the stop knob or tablet. A four-rank mixture has four pipes for each note. The organist combines stops of different pitches and different tone colors to form a registration, the term we use to describe a group of stops chosen for a particular piece of music or verse of a hymn.

The length of an organ pipe determines its pitch. On a usual 8′ stop like an Open Diapason, the pipe for low CC is eight feet long, the pipe for tenor c° is four feet, for middle c′ is two feet, and the highest c′′′′ is about three inches. Every organ pipe is equipped with a way to make tiny changes in length. Tuning an organ involves making those tiny adjustments to hundreds or thousands of pipes.

Many organs have combination actions that allow an organist to preset a certain registration and recall it when wanted by pressing a little button between the keyboards (piston) or a larger button near the pedalboard to be operated by the feet (toestud).

Wind

When playing a piece of music on an organ, the little puff of air through each organ pipe to create sound is multiplied by the number of notes and the number of stops being used. Play the Doxology, thirty-two four-note chords, on one stop and there will be 128 puffs of air blowing into pipes. Add a single pedal stop to double the bass line and you will play 160 pipes. Play it on ten manual stops and two pedal stops, 1,384. A hundred manual stops (big organ) and ten pedal stops, 6,420, just to play the Doxology, a veritable gale.

Where does all that wind come from? Somewhere in the building there is an electric rotary blower. In smaller organs, the blower might be right inside the organ, in larger organs the blower is typically found in a soundproof room in the basement. The blower is running as long as the organ is turned on, so there needs to be a system to deal with the extra air when the organ is not being played, and to manage the different flow of air for small or large registrations. The wind output of the blower is connected to a unit that most of us refer to as a bellows. “Bellows” actually defines a device that produces a flow of air—think of a fireplace bellows. Before we had electric blowers, it was accurate to refer to the device as a bellows. When connected to a blower that produces the flow of air, the device has two functions, each of which implies a name. It stores pressurized air, so it can accurately be called a reservoir, and it regulates the flow and pressure of the air, so it can accurately be called a regulator. We use both terms interchangeably.

Between the reservoir/regulator and the blower output, there is a regulating valve. Sometimes it is a “curtain valve” with fabric on a roller that operates something like a window shade, and sometimes it is a wooden cone that seats on a big donut of felt and leather to form an air-tight seal. In either case, the valve is connected to the moving top of the reservoir/regulator. When the blower is running and the organ is not being played, the valve is closed so no air enters the reservoir. When the organist starts to play, air leaves the reservoir to blow the pipes, the top of the reservoir dips in response, the valve is pulled open a little, and air flows into the reservoir, replenishing all that is being used to make music by blowing pipes.

Weights or springs on the top of the reservoir regulate the pressure. The organ’s wind pressure is measured using a manometer. Picture a glass tube in the shape of a “U,” twelve inches tall with the legs of the “U” an inch apart. Fill it halfway with water, and the level of the water will be equal in both legs. With a rubber tube, apply the pressure of the organ’s wind, and the level of the water will go down on one side of the “U” and up on the other. Measure the difference and voilà, you have the wind pressure of the organ in inches or millimeters. It is common for the wind pressure to be three inches or so in a modest tracker-action organ. In a larger electro-pneumatic organ, the pressure on the Great might be four inches, six inches on the Swell, five inches in the Choir, with a big Trumpet or Tuba on twelve inches. The State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on 100 inches. I used to carry a glass tube full of water into an organ, a risky maneuver. Now I have a digital manometer.

In a small organ, the blower typically feeds a single reservoir that regulates the flow and pressure and distributes the wind to the various windchests through wind conductors (pipes), sometimes called wind trunks. In larger organs, it is common to find a regulator in the basement with the blower, and big pipes that carry wind up to the organ where it distributes into various reservoirs, sometimes one for each keyboard or division. Very large organs have two, three, four, or more windchests for each keyboard division, each with its own reservoir. A large bass Pedal stop might have one reservoir for the lowest twelve notes and another for the rest of the stop. And speaking of big pedal stops, the toehole of the lowest note of something like a 16′ Double Open Wood Diapason can be over six inches in diameter. When that valve opens, a hurricane comes out.

Windchests

The organ’s pipes are mounted on windchests arranged in rows on two axes. All the pipes of one rank or stop are arranged in rows “the long way,” and each note of the keyboard is arranged in rows “the short way.” The keyboard action operates the notes of the windchests, and the stop action determines which sets of pipes are being used. Pull on one stop and play one note, and one pipe plays. Pull on five stops and play a four-note chord, and twenty pipes play. In a tracker-action organ or an electric-action organ with slider chests, the keyboard operates a row of large valves that fill a “note channel” when a note is played and a valve opens. The stops are selected by sliders connected to the stopknobs, which have holes identical to the layout of the holes the pipes are sitting in. When the stop is off, the holes do not line up. When the stop is on, they do, and the air can pass from the note channel into those pipes sitting above open sliders.

It is common in electro-pneumatic organs for there to be an individual valve under every pipe. There is an electric contact under every note on the keyboard, a simple switch that is “on” when the note is played. The current goes to the “primary action” (keyboard action) of the windchest. The stops are selected through various devices that engage or disengage the valves under each set of pipes. When a note is played with no stops drawn, the primary action operates, but no pipe valves open. The stopknobs or tablets have electric contacts similar to those in the keyboards. When a stop is turned on and a note is played, a valve opens, and a pipe speaks.

We refer to “releathering” an organ. We know that the total pipe count in an organ is calculated by the number of stops and number of notes. An organ of average size might have 1,800, 2,500, 3,000 pipes. Larger organs have 8,000 or 10,000 pipes, even over 25,000. The valves under the pipes are made of leather, as are the motors (often called pouches) that operate the valves. Releathering an organ involves dismantling it to remove all the internal actions, scraping off all the old leather, cutting new leather pieces, and gluing the motors and valves in place with exacting accuracy. The material is expensive, but it is the hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled labor that add up quickest.

It’s all about air.

We think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument, but that is not really accurate. A piano’s tone is generated by striking a string that is under tension and causing it to vibrate. That is a percussion instrument. The tone of the pipe organ is generated by air, either being split by the upper lip of the organ pipe or causing a reed tongue to vibrate. The organ is a wind instrument. When we play, we are operating machinery that supplies and regulates air, and that controls the valves that allow air to blow into the pipes. When I am playing, I like to think of all those valves flapping open and closed by the thousand. I like to think of those thousands of pipes at the ready and speaking forth when I call on them like a vast choir of Johnny-One-Notes. I like to think of a thousand pounds of wood shutters moving silently when I touch the Swell pedal. I believe my knowledge of how the organ works informs my playing.

A piano is more intimate than a pipe organ, though technically it is also played by remote control as a mechanical system connects the keys to the tone generation. I am not surprised, but I am curious why more pianists do not make a study of what happens inside the instrument when they strike a key. I believe it would inform their playing. A clarinetist certainly knows how his tone is generated, especially when his reed cuts his tongue.

I have always loved being inside an organ when the blower is turned on. You hear a distant stirring, then watch as the reservoirs fill, listen as the pressure builds to its full, and the organ transforms from a bewildering heap of arcane mechanical gear to a living, breathing entity. I have spent thousands of days inside hundreds of organs, and the thrill is still there. 

That’s about 1,800 words on how an organ works. My learned colleagues will no doubt think of a thousand things I left out. I was once engaged to write “Pipe Organs for Dummies” for a group of attorneys studying a complex insurance claim. It was over twenty-five pages and 15,000 words and was still just a brief overview. Reading this, you might not have caught up with Mitsuko Uchida, but you’re miles ahead of Jeremy Denk.

A postscript

In my column in the November 2020 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9), I mentioned in passing that G. Donald Harrison, the legendary president and tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner, died of a heart attack in 1956 while watching the comedian-pianist Victor Borge on television. The other day, I received a phone message from James Colias, Borge’s longtime personal assistant and manager, wondering where I got the information. I have referred to that story several times and remembered generally that it was reported in Craig Whitney’s marvelous book, All the Stops, published in 2003 by Perseus Book Group. Before returning Colias’s call, I spoke with Craig, who referred me to page 119, and there it was.

I returned Mr. Colias’s call and had a fun conversation. He told me that he had shared my story with Borge’s five children (now in their seventies). He also shared that when Victor Borge was born, his father was sixty-two-years-old, so when he was a young boy, he had lots of elderly relatives. His sense of humor was precocious, and when a family member was ailing, he was sent to cheer them up. Later in life, Borge said that they either got better or died laughing. I guess G. Donald Harrison died laughing.

Photo: Tracker keyboard action under a four-manual console, 1750 Gabler organ, Weingarten, Germany. (photo credit: John Bishop)

Designing an historic reed

Michael McNeil

Michael McNeil has designed, constructed, voiced, and researched pipe organs since 1973. He was also a research engineer in magnetic recording with 27 awarded patents. He has authored four books, among them The Sound of Pipe Organs, which explores the scaling and voicing of organ pipes, the effects of wind system dynamics on musicality, and the relationship of temperaments to tonal design.

Laukhuff tenor C reed pipe

Editor’s note: The Diapason offers a feature at our digital edition—two sound clips. Any subscriber can access this by logging into our website (thediapason.com), click on Magazine, then this issue, View Digital Edition, scroll to this page, and click on each <soundclip> in the text.

This article was written after the author received reed pipes built to specifications in this article by Aug. Laukhuff GmbH. A victim of the economic retraction during the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, Aug. Laukhuff GmbH closed its doors in June of 2021. Established in 1823, it served the needs of organbuilders worldwide. Its unimaginable loss is catastrophic to the profession, not only in the unique products it provided, but also in the centuries-old expertise of its managers and employees. Making an historic reed with the necessary detail will be a challenge.

The sound of an historic reed chorus may strike us like an emotional thunderclap and leave us with the wish that we might make such reeds today. I had one such experience with the sound of the reed chorus from the 1754 Joseph Riepp organ at Dole. Those reeds were a later addition in 1787 by the French builder François Callinet. You can get a sense of the drama of these reeds from a performance by the late Michel Chapuis <soundclip1>.1 The great Romantic organbuilder Cavaillé-Coll often preserved Callinet reeds in the organs he rebuilt.

The sheer complexity of reed construction is daunting, but we might begin to understand reeds by trying to recreate one we like. Although one of my dear colleagues rejoiced that I did not tackle the subject of reeds in my recent book on the sound of pipe organs, this article takes a deep dive into the subject. An exact copy would be prohibitively expensive, but we can capture the sound using the resources available to us from modern suppliers. For this example we used the resources of Aug. Laukhuff GmbH, Weikersheim, Germany, as they described their capabilities in great detail on their website. 

There are hurdles to clear before we can reproduce such a reed, and perhaps the greatest of these is sufficient documentation. The detailed data required to really understand a reed is extremely rare, and the greatest practitioner of data collection was Pierre Chéron. We owe him a great debt for the complete measurements of every pipe in the 1774 Isnard organ at St. Maximin.2

The data

Sufficiently complete measurements of the reeds at Dole are unknown to the author, but a wonderful book gives just enough data to get a feel for the scaling of the entire reed chorus of that organ.3, 9
Although we lack sufficient data for the Dole reeds, it is our great fortune that Chéron’s data for the 1st Trompette from the 1790 Callinet organ at Auxonne has been published in exquisite detail by Laurent Plet.4 The complete data from the Callinet reed at Auxonne and the limited data from Dole correlate very well. Chéron took the Auxonne reed data in 1990 prior to the restoration of the organ by Laurent Plet, and you will find a wealth of data and photos on Plet’s website for this organ.5 The complete table may be seen in Figure 25.

Chéron’s table has lettered data columns that are made clear by the drawing of a reed pipe in Figure 1 and the detail of a shallot in Figure 2. Chéron’s dimensions are in millimeters except thicknesses of the tongues, which are in hundredths of a millimeter. Here are descriptions of Chéron’s lettered columns:

Description of the Chéron data

Diameters

A is the name of the note (there is no bass C-sharp)

B is the inside top diameter of the resonator

C is the thickness of the resonator at the top

E is the inside bottom diameter of the resonator

F is the thickness of the resonator at the bottom

Lengths

G is the length of the shallot from the block, or “nut” 

H is the height of the block, or “nut”

K is the length of the resonator from the block to the top 

L is the total tuned length of the reed (there are no tuning slots)

Shallots

M is the outside diameter of the shallot

N is the outside depth of the shallot at the block

O is the outside depth of the shallot at the end

P is the inside diameter of the shallot

Q is the wall thickness of the shallot

R is width of the shallot face (the slot opening width is R-2Q)

S is the total shallot length, including the section inserted into the block

Tongues

T is the width of the tongue

U is the thickness of the tongue under the wedge

V is the thickness of the tongue under the tuning wire

W is the thickness of the tongue at the free end

X is the vibrating length of the tongue

Y is the extension of the tongue beyond the end of the shallot

Boots

AA is the diameter of the toe hole in the boot.

This seems like a lot of detail, but as you will see, Chéron recorded exactly what is needed to understand a reed.

Diameters 

Let’s start with the top diameters in the table in Figure 3, which control power. The amplitude of a standing wave in a resonator gets larger with larger resonator diameters, and Callinet’s diameters are very robust. In Figure 3, column 1 we see the raw values of the Callinet diameters. 

We will use an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the Callinet reed, and we will start by graphing the raw diameters. The beauty of the Excel spreadsheet is that a simple click of the mouse on the graph finds the equation of the line that best fits those diameters. That exponential equation is shown in the graph in Figure 4.
We can use that equation in Excel to calculate the smoothed data we see in Figure 3, column 2, which now fills in all of the missing gaps! Note that there are many missing pipes in the original data. The diameters in Figure 3, column 2 are placed into an Excel table, Figure 5, which will be the basis for the new design.

The diameter of the bottom tip of the resonator is usually not less than the inside diameter of the shallot, and it is often larger. Reiner Janke relates that Cavaillé-Coll used a ratio of approximately 8 for top to bottom diameters.6 The Callinet data shows ratios changing from 10.9 in the bass to 9.3 in the treble. These bottom diameters are narrower than Cavaillé-Coll would have specified (larger ratios yield smaller bottom resonator diameters), but as we will see, Callinet carefully designed the bottom inside resonator diameters to be about one millimeter wider than the inside diameters of his shallots, making a smooth transition from the bore of the shallot to the bore of the resonator. 

Using these Callinet ratios we let Excel calculate the inside bottom diameters of the resonators. Callinet tapers the thickness of his resonators in the bass, making them thicker at the bottom for added strength. These thicknesses are entered in the Excel file, and we have the specifications for the resonators. We also added a note to make the resonators of 75% polished tin, the highest tin alloy Laukhuff offered. Figure 5 shows the first steps in this table for the low octave. We will show the entire table when it is complete.

Lengths

Resonators will be longer with a lower temperature, lower pitch, higher wind pressure, and the flat-tuned intervals in an unequal temperament. For this exercise we will specify temperature at 20 degrees Celsius, wind pressure at 85 mm (the original Callinet pressure), pitch at A = 440 Hz, and Pietro Aaron’s 1⁄4-comma meantone temperament.15

Lengths obviously relate to the pitch, but they also strongly influence the timbre. Resonators voiced to the maximum lengths will have a strong “Bourdon” fundamental in the tone, and resonators voiced shorter will have less fundamental and stronger harmonic fire. The goal in the total tuned length is a resonator where the “flip” or “Bourdon” point preserves considerable fundamental in the tone while not sacrificing harmonic fire. The Bourdon point can be modified to some degree with the curve of the tongue and the diameter of the foot hole during voicing. An article by Reiner Janke has an excellent discussion of the Bourdon point.6, 10 Those interested in the math of the effect of temperature on pitch can refer to a very useful website (www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-pitchchange.htm). The calculator on this website indicates that pitch changes a full halftone from 32 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit. 

As we can see, resonator length is very important, and it is doubly so if we are designing resonators with no tuning slots—like most classical, “dead-length” French resonators. Tuning slots are often used to tune reeds to changing temperatures, and while this maintains the timbre of the reed, such tuning slots nearly always end up molested thus that the pipes become extremely uneven in voicing. The lack of tuning slots in French pipes has preserved the intent of their voicers; the reeds are tuned “on the wire.”

Although we have been talking about resonator lengths, the important length in a reed is its total tuned length, and this includes the length of the resonator, the block to which the resonator attaches, and the extension of the shallot below the block. This total length is what really determines the pitch and timbre of the pipe. Chéron gives us the total tuned length in column L of his data. The original pitch of the Callinet organ was A = 415 Hz, and Plet displays a table for these pipes with the estimated total tuned lengths they would have had at their original pitch.7 The current lengths of the pipes in the Chéron table reflect a pitch closer to A = 440 Hz, and as this pitch is the goal of our new reed, we will use those lengths with the understanding that there is uncertainty in Callinet’s intended pitch of the Bourdon point. 

We can enter the total lengths of the Callinet pipes into Excel and fit a curve. Figure 6 shows a table with the raw total tuned length data in column 1. Figure 7 graphs that data for the actual Callinet tuned lengths and shows a fitted curve with its exponential equation. The very high R2 value indicates a close fit to the data.16 With this equation we can fill in the missing gaps with the fitted data in Figure 6, column 2. 

We need to add one more wrinkle to the lengths—temperament. The intended 1⁄4-comma meantone temperament will give us an opportunity to show how to make length corrections (the original Callinet temperament with the missing bass C-sharp probably had major thirds of less purity than the Pietro Aaron meantone). We can approximate that correction by calculating an octave of frequencies for this temperament and finding the differences in the intervals as seen in Figure 8. For this type of meantone, pipes speaking C-sharp, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, and B will need to have resonators with lengths that are approximately 2⁄3 of the whole step in which they reside, not the typical half step of equal temperament. Figure 6, column 4 shows the total tuned meantone lengths of new pipes with adjusted lengths in blue font. The values in Figure 6, column 2 work well for equal temperament. 

We can now enter these total tuned length values into our Excel table in Figure 9. The estimated block height “H” values are placeholders that will be modified by the pipemaker to suit the Laukhuff blocks. The estimated shallot, from block, “G” values are likewise placeholders; the entered values are approximations based on the vibrating lengths of the tongues plus the necessary clearances of the tuning wires to the wedges. Once the values for “H” and “G” are known, the pipemaker will subtract them from the total tuned length “L” to give the estimated resonators “K,” i.e., K = L - (H + G). The values of the estimated resonator lengths in the table reflect that equation.  

It is important to note that the octave ratios of the lengths are 1.94, where the resonators are shorter than a pure doubling of length at the octave as they descend into the bass. This will be addressed in the comments on voicing.

Shallots

Shallots are usually made of brass, and they provide the surface and openings on which the tongues beat to make the sounds we hear. A variety of shallot and opening sizes and shapes gives us a vast range of power and timbres.17 Callinet shallots are parallel with parallel slot openings. It would be prohibitively expensive to make custom shallots for every pipe, so we will refer to Laukhuff’s selection of shallots to achieve a close approximation of Callinet’s ratios of resonator top diameters to shallot inside diameters. Figure 10 shows a portion of Laukhuff’s shallot selection for their Type II Clicquot shallots with rounded ends, which closely resemble the Callinet shallots in shape (all dimensions are in millimeters).

Callinet’s ratio of “12” for resonators to shallot inside diameters is a crucial part of his sound. Reiner Janke relates that Cavaillé-Coll’s ratio is approximately 11, and this means that Callinet’s shallots are slightly smaller and drive his wide resonators with slightly less energy.6 In the first three rows of our Excel table under the heading “Shallots” in Figure 11 we see the Laukhuff shallot number, the shallot inside diameter “P,” and ratio we are trying to achieve. The Excel file calculates the ratio for us. We cannot achieve exact ratios with the shallot sizes available to us, so we select shallots to get as close as we can to a ratio of 12, i.e., a range of about 11.5 to 12.5. We enter the Laukhuff wall thicknesses in the next row, and the table calculates the outside diameter “M” as simply the inside diameter plus two times the wall thickness. 

The slot opening width of the shallot, “CC” in Figure 12, is extremely important; wider slots yield more power and more harmonic fire. While Chéron did not measure this parameter directly, it is implied in his measurement of the face width “R” minus two times the wall thickness “Q,” a calculation that is accurate for shallots that are cut deeply and nearly fully open. The “face” is the surface of the shallot on which the tongue beats. Tables of reed data most often record the height of the cut of the shallot (Chéron’s data “N” and “O”), but this is a very indirect method of getting at the slot width, especially if the wall thickness is unknown. A more direct method is to simply specify that the shallots are cut until they yield the desired slot opening width, and these are the values you see in the next to last row of Figure 11, slot width “CC.” The last row is a calculation of the ratio of the slot width “CC” to the shallot inside diameter “P,” and while the Callinet data is somewhat noisy, it averages about 0.85, a very widely cut shallot. We adjust our slot widths to achieve that ratio. The pipemaker can now cut the shallots of a given Laukhuff number to the same height and slot widths.

Blocks

We specified Laukhuff’s French blocks for this reed. French boots extend well beyond the block, or the “nut” as it is often called, to support the resonator, a design that minimizes the collapse of the resonator above the block, a common problem in reeds. Bass resonators have a narrower taper, and to keep the boot from extending too far, a “ring” is inserted above the block on the resonators of those pipes. This ring is deleted when the resonator taper sufficiently widens. Figure 13 shows the two classical forms. We specified half-round teak wedges and tinned bronze tuning wires bent at the top at right angles for ease in tuning. The Callinet originals at Dole have wires bent in this manner.

Tongues

We specified Laukhuff’s tongues made of rolled, spring elastic brass. Laukhuff gave us the option of voiced or unvoiced reeds, and we specified voiced with French tongue curves. The art of reed voicing encompasses power, the Bourdon point and timbre, and the promptness of the speech. With a dead length resonator, the voicer adjusts the diameter of the toe opening in the boot to control the wind along with the stiffness and curve of the tongue.

Stiffness relates to wind pressure and the amount of curve that can be tolerated. With a large curve a thick tongue may speak slowly or not at all. If too thin, it will speak quickly but the sound will be weak in fundamental. A range of timbres can be coaxed from tongues with different curves. We will start by characterizing the Callinet tongues with their stiffness. The power of this method will be demonstrated, and it appears that to some degree Callinet thought in these terms as well.

The stiffness of a tongue, especially if it is a simple parallel tongue, may be understood with some very simple ideas. Stiffness is inversely proportional to length, meaning that a tongue of half the length will be twice as stiff. You can demonstrate this to yourself by taking a metal ruler, holding it down at the edge of a table, and letting a portion of the ruler extend beyond the edge of the table; pull up the ruler at the free end, let it go, and listen to the sound it makes. Now extend the ruler only half as far off the table and listen to the sound it makes—it will sound an octave higher with twice the stiffness. Tongues obviously come in different lengths, and the longer tongues beat at lower pitches. Tongues also come in different widths, and what is intuitively obvious is also correct—a tongue of half the width will have half the stiffness.

Tongues also come in different thicknesses, but our intuition may fail us here—the stiffness will be the cube of the thickness. For example, if we double the thickness of a tongue, its stiffness will be 23, and that means it will be eight times stiffer (23 = 8). That makes thickness by far the most sensitive parameter.

In Figure 14 we see a portion of Laukhuff’s thicknesses for tongue brass. These dimensions, like Chéron’s, are in hundredths of a millimeter, e.g., brass with a thickness of “25” is 0.25 mm thick.

Figure 15 shows a table compiled from Chéron’s data on tongues. Chéron gives us not only tongue thickness in column 6 and width in column 5, he also gives us the vibrating length of the tongue from the tuning wire to its end in column 4, a parameter that is very rarely seen in reed documentation. With this data we can make a calculation of the stiffness of the tongues. These stiffness values involve relatively complex calculations that are illustrated in Figure 24. You do not need to understand them in detail if the math is daunting, and they are already worked into the Excel spreadsheet available from the author.9

The real point of using stiffness values is that we get a method to adapt the tongues to our shallots and to available tongue thicknesses. The value of this may not at first be obvious, but bear with me. We will take it step by step.

We first take the raw values for vibrating lengths in Figure 15, column 4, graph the values, fit an equation, and calculate the smoothed and missing data in column 2. Figure 16 shows the raw data and fitted equation; the fit with an R2 value of 0.99 is quite reasonable. 

The next step is to calculate the stiffness of Callinet’s tongues.13 We use the raw data in Figure 15, columns 4, 5, and 6 to calculate the Callinet tongue stiffnesses shown in column 7. We graph those stiffnesses in Figure 17, and fit it to an equation. This data is quite noisy with a low R2 value.16 The new equation yields the smoothed stiffness data for all of the tongues in Figure 15, column 8.

This has been a long slog through data and calculations, but we are now very close to reaping the rewards. In our Excel table for tongues in Figure 18 we have entered the smoothed Callinet vibrating length data in the row for vibrating length “X” and the smoothed Callinet stiffness data in the row for target Callinet stiffness. With this data we can now design our tongues.

We make trial entries in the rows for “width” and “thickness,” and the Excel spreadsheet calculates the resulting stiffness in the row “stiffness.” The last row, “width of tongue-slot/2,” tells us when the width we have entered is so narrow that the tongue will literally fall into the slot opening of the shallot, i.e., when the value in this row is zero or less. Ideally, we would like to have a generous overhang of the tongue on the slot opening of the shallot, and this would be something like a minimum of 2 mm on each side of the bass shallot openings and at least 1 mm on each side of the treble openings. It does not matter if the tongue is significantly wider than the face of the shallot (the slot opening width plus the two shallot walls), but it cannot be less than the slot opening itself. 

Now look at the table in Figure 18. The first data column is low C followed by C-sharp, etc. We enter the thickness for low C at 0.47 mm, then we adjust the tongue width until the relative stiffness matches the target Callinet stiffness. A few iterations gives us a tongue width of 14.3 mm and produces a 2.5 mm overhang of the tongue (last row, “width of tongue – slot/2”). If we had selected Laukhuff’s 0.50 mm tongue thickness, we would need to significantly narrow the tongue to achieve the target stiffness, and while it would not fall into the slot, it would be dangerously narrow. This is all there is to it. Just keep doing this for all 49 tongues!

Callinet apparently thought of tongue design in similar terms, although his noisy stiffness data indicates that he was not at all rigorous about this.16 In the table in Figure 19 we see the first two rows of Chéron’s data for the low C and low D pipes. The columns for tongue thickness, “V” and “W,” show that the tongue for D is thinner than the tongue for C. But note in the column for tongue width, “T,” that the 13.0 mm tongue for D is wider than the 12.5 mm tongue for C. Remember that thickness is our most sensitive parameter (it is a cube function of stiffness), while width is simply proportional to stiffness. The thinner tongue for D would lack the necessary stiffness if it were narrower than the tongue for C, and Callinet has compensated by treating tongue widths as an independent variable; he does not care if the tongue is wider than the face of the shallot, and the math for stiffness explains why we should not care, either.

To summarize, we have reproduced Callinet’s stiffness of the tongues with this method. We have achieved this while accommodating the shallots and tongue thicknesses that were available to us from Laukhuff. Figure 20 shows the tongue thicknesses we selected to make the tongues wide enough to extend over the shallot faces, and Figure 21 shows the final adjustments we made to the tongue widths to achieve continuous stiffness. With careful voicing we should be able to reproduce Callinet’s sound <soundclip2>.14

Boot toe hole diameters 

Toe hole diameters may be used to control the pressure in the boot, and there is evidence that Callinet made extensive use of this. In the bass and tenor octaves the toe holes are narrower than the shallot inside diameters (the maximum flow of wind is limited by the shallot diameter and its opening). These toe hole diameters, Figure 22, are much narrower than those found in Chéron’s data for a Trompette of similar scales and wind pressure in the Isnard organ at St. Maximin.8 I have entered the fitted data of Callinet’s toe hole diameters in the last data row of Figures 23a and 23b. Like the stiffness data, the toe hole diameters are quite noisy with an R2 value of 0.49, indicating that Callinet used the toe holes as a voicing variable. There is a poor R2 correlation of 0.20 between the tongue stiffnesses and the toe hole diameters, perhaps indicating that Callinet used this variable to accommodate different tongue curves, thicknesses, and widths.

We can now see our completed table in Figures 23a and 23b (the bass and treble are shown separately to make the table more readable). This table specifies our reproduction of the Callinet 1st Trompette at Auxonne, France! The Excel file shown in this article took considerable time to create, and it is available at no charge from the author.9 It can be used as a template for other reeds.

Voicing 

Power balances are greatly affected by scaling and voicing, and Callinet’s data are instructive. Total tuned lengths will be approximately a ratio of 2 for each descending octave if bass power is strong relative to the treble, and we find octave ratios averaging 1.99 for the three Trompettes in the Raisonnance and Grand Orgue of the Isnard organ at Saint Maximin. The Callinet octave ratios are significantly smaller at 1.94, indicating shorter tuned lengths with descending octaves and reduced power in the bass. Reduced wind pressure and reduced power will result in shorter resonators at the same Bourdon point, i.e., at the same timbre.10 This observation is reinforced by the significantly reduced toe hole diameters in the bass and tenor of Callinet’s reeds. The Bourdon point is also affected by the curve of the tongue—a larger curve makes the sound more powerful, the timbre brighter, and moves the Bourdon point to a longer resonator. Larger curves require more pressure and larger toe holes for prompt speech.

We begin to get a feel for Callinet’s power balances: a restrained power in the bass with still brilliant timbre and fundamental warmth—or put another way, a more ascending treble. A smoother, more sonorous treble can be accentuated with a Bourdon point that is closer to the tuned point in the treble, farther in the bass. For example, Reiner Janke relates that Cavaillé-Coll voiced normal-length reeds close to their Bourdon point just before they transitioned to harmonic-length reeds.11

We might also note that Callinet lets his tongues extend by a small and varying amount beyond the end of his shallots, a technique that subtly affects timbre in much the same manner as adding weights to the tongues. See Chéron’s data in column Y, Figure 25

Reed voicing is a complex subject with much subjective opinion. The goal in voicing this reed, and especially the curve of its tongues, is the scintillating French voicing of Callinet. I can think of no better source for understanding French reed voicing than the wonderful essay on this subject by Reiner Janke.6 I have translated this essay into English, and it is available by contacting him at [email protected]. He has a gift for finding the important variables in scaling and voicing; see the professional documentary in which he shows how to make and voice perfect copies of a Baroque Silbermann pipe and a Romantic Walcker pipe.12

Janke provides further guidance in the voicing of tongues.11 Tongue brass is made by rolling sheets to the desired thickness. The process of rolling produces work-hardened surfaces, and the direction of rolling produces a grain with more stiffness in the direction of rolling. Tongues will be less stiff if they are cut from sheets where the grain is parallel to the width of the tongue. Baroque voicers also commonly filed their tongues to different thicknesses, and this removed the work-hardened surfaces, making their tongues less stiff. A thinner tongue will yield a more rounded timbre, and a thicker and stiffer tongue will be brighter in timbre. Narrowing the tongue will make it louder (it will be less stiff and can be curved more). These are all issues to keep in mind during the voicing process, and they probably account for most of the variability we see in the Callinet stiffnesses in Figure 17 and the toe holes in Figure 22. For those who want to experiment with different tongue configurations, you will need an assortment of reed brass of different thicknesses and a guillotine to cut tongues.

Reflections

This analysis of a Callinet Trompette helps us understand Callinet’s intentions. For those wishing to replicate the entire Callinet chorus at Dole, the Excel model described in this article may be useful as a template to help us interpret the more limited data available to us for the Dole organ.3, 9 The author ordered and received a Trompette from Laukhuff based on these specifications as part of a new organ to demonstrate the range of wind dynamics, among other things. This new organ will be fully described in a future issue of this journal with sound clips—stay tuned.

There are many ways to design a reed, and the varieties of reeds and their sounds are virtually limitless. This essay on reed design should not be understood as the only way to tackle this complex subject, but taken rather as a contribution to its discussion. When we hear a sound that commands our attention like the Callinet reeds at Dole, this article reminds us that a great deal of time and effort is required before we can understand those sounds. Callinet reeds are worth our time.

Notes & References

1. Michel Chapuis. Michel Chapuis joue la suite gothique à Dole, a Youtube video by Frederic Munoz, January 25, 2018 <soundclip1>. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxWHMPS6Lp4.

2. Yves Cabourdin and Pierre Chéron. L’Orgue de Jean-Esprit et Joseph Isnard dans la Basilique de la Madeleine à Saint-Maximin. Nice: ARCAM, 1991, 208 pages, ISBN 2-906700-12-6. 

3. Pierre-Marie Gueritéy et al. L’orgue de Dole, Canevas Editeur, Frasne, France, 1995, 127 pages, ISBN 2-88382-058-9.

4. Laurent Plet. Restauration de l’orgue d’Auxonne, accessed January 11, 2019. lplet.org/orgues/auxonne/tuyaux/tgo_tr1c.htm.

5. Laurent Plet. Restauration de l’orgue d’Auxonne, accessed January 11, 2019. lplet.org/orgues/auxonne/auxonne.htm#sommaire.

6. Reiner Janke. See the article Grundzüge Zungenintonation, accessed January 3, 2019. www.orgel-info.de/. An English translation is also available. The Cavaillé-Coll ratios are general approximations and were reported to Janke by Pierre Chéron. 

7. Plet, Laurent. Restauration de l’orgue d’Auxonne, accessed January 11, 2019. lplet.org/orgues/auxonne/tuyaux/tgo_tr1.htm.

8. L’Orgue de Jean-Esprit et Joseph Isnard dans la Basilique de la Madeleine à Saint-Maximin, pages 139, 155, 156.

9. Michael McNeil. Designing an Historic Reed, Excel file, Mead, Colorado, 2019. Email the author for a free copy: [email protected]. This file also contains data on the Callinet reeds at Dole.

10. See also my discussion of the Bourdon or “flip” point in “1863 E. & G. G. Hook Opus 322, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Boston, Massachusetts, Part 3,” The Diapason, September 2017, pages 20–22.

11. Personal communications, January and March 2019.

12. Reiner Janke. Organ Voicing, Experiential Knowledge of Reiner Janke. www.youtube.com/watch?v=isEWba9rLRY&feature=youtu.be. This professionally produced video by the Universität Göttingen, April 26, 2018, is a revelation for those wishing to understand the voicing of flue pipes. The sound track is in English.

13. In Figure 24 we see the stiffness calculations of the tongues with proper physical units of Newtons of force and Newtons/meter of stiffness. While the force is admittedly applied uniformly over the surface of the tongue and not at the end as modeled in the equations, the resulting stiffness increases uniformly with pitch in the expected manner. See the website: www.tribology-abc.com/calculators/t14_9.htm.

14. Michel Chapuis. Beauvarlet à Dole avec Michel Chapuis, a Youtube video by Frederic Munoz, December 5, 2017
<soundclip2>. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_wPdGUfuD8&feature=youtu.be.

15. This temperament is described in detail in the author’s article, “Exploring the Sound of Keyboard Tunings,” The Diapason, April 2016, pages 20–21.

16. The term “R2” or “R-squared” describes how closely the data fits to the equation on the graph. If all of the data points fall on the line, the R² is equal to “1” and the fit is perfect. If the R2 is zero, the data is just a scatterplot looking much like a shotgun blast with no correlation at all to the line described by the equation. A click of the mouse in Excel will show the R2 for any graphed data fitted to an equation. The noisy fit of R2 = 0.56 for the Callinet tongue stiffnesses in Figure 17 may very likely indicate that Callinet used stiffness as a variable during voicing.

17. Personal communication of March 2019. Janke points out that the shallot functions as a resonator which strongly affects the timbre of the sound. Extremely wide shallots, typical of North German Baroque practice, produce an “oo” vowel with strong harmonics in the range of 200 Hz; less wide shallots will produce an “ah” vowel with strong harmonics in the range of 400 Hz; French Baroque shallots are narrower and produce an “ee” vowel with strong harmonics in the range
of 600 Hz.

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