In the Wind: Mechanical Failure

The beat goes on.

At Oberlin College, January is a month of independent study between the fall and spring semesters known as winter term. During the fall, students propose projects to their principal teachers for approval. Projects can be off campus, and sometimes they are vacations disguised as serious research. I do not remember much about some of my winter term projects, but winter term of 1977, my junior year, was special.

My organ teacher, Haskell Thomson, designed a project for me and about eight of my peers, inviting the legendary eurhythmics professor Inda Howland out of retirement to lead us in a month of rhythmic adventures. Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) invented eurhythmics, a discipline that draws on the natural rhythms of the human body to enhance the rhythmic content of musical performances. Legend has it that Dalcroze was struggling with a piano student whose playing was distorted by chaotic rhythm. Following a lesson, looking out his office window, Dalcroze happened to see his student striding confidently across the campus. Of course he had rhythm, the human body is intrinsically rhythmic. Dalcroze developed that realization into the eponymous course of study, and Inda Howland (1907–1984) was one of his disciples. She had completed her studies with Dalcroze at L’Institute Jaques-Dalcroze in 1934, the year she started teaching at Oberlin.

Ms. Howland was seventy years old and barefoot, wore long flowing Indian saris, and carried an exotic drum made in Bali. She was never without something that could share a beat. Our group of eight or ten performance majors was a pretty cocky band, and I remember haughty smirks passing about as we first met with Professor Howland, sitting in a circle on a classroom floor bouncing balls back and forth while counting aloud. Maybe next we’ll color by numbers, have milk and cookies, spread out the mats, and take a nap. But it did not take long for the depth of her mission to become clear. We listened to recordings, sang to each other, bounced those balls, and skipped around in circles, all the while applying the motion of our bodies to the rhythmic content of the music.

One session was held in an organ practice room so we could play for each other. I was working on Bach’s Toccata in F Major at the time, and I was a whiz with those snazzy pedal solos. Up and down the pedalboard I went, swiveling on that imaginary ball bearing, emphasizing the high notes with Bach’s unexpected accidentals (and probably providing a few unexpected accidentals of my own). When I was finished, my peers made the obligatory supportive comments, then Inda Howland made a simple formative comment. “Your feet make more noise on the pedalboard than the organ pipes.” She used the word “clattering.” I was approaching the pedal keys from inches above, my feet slapping the pedals, producing uneven rhythms. “Try the first pedal solo again with your feet on the keys.” Yikes. Many readers have likely had similar experiences, where a teacher asks you to try something for the first time in front of a group. She was right. I had been practicing and studying the organ for close to eight years by then, and no teacher had ever mentioned this. Okay, maybe no naps.

When I was leading church choirs, I held annual choir retreats. The last choir I worked with was at a Congregational church in Massachusetts, and the camp was Craigville, a delightful beachfront community on Cape Cod. Those late summer retreats were filled with rehearsals on new repertoire, introducing the choir to the plans for the year, open discussions with the clergy about the choir’s role in the parish, and social moments at meals and beach time. In addition, I invited eurhythmics instructors to join us to lead daily sessions, and it was a treat to witness an imaginative eurhythmics instructor warming up the choir before a rehearsal.

During that winter term project, we had three morning classes a week for four weeks, maybe twenty-four hours altogether spent with the witty, enthusiastic, sagacious Inda Howland. I’m grateful to Haskell Thomson for creating that experience for us. It had a profound impact on my understanding of music, my own musicianship, and the many singers who participated in those choir retreats with me.

Take care of your machines.

You get in your car, buckle up, start the engine, and put the transmission in Reverse to back out of a parking space. You check the mirrors, look over your shoulder, and start the car moving. You make the turn, drop the gearshift to Drive, the transmission gives a little thud, and the car changes direction without pause.

Or, you get in your car, buckle up, start the engine, and put the transmission in Reverse to back out of a parking space. You check the mirrors, look over your shoulder, and start the car moving. You make the turn, come to a stop, and while stopped, move the gearshift slowly through Neutral to Drive before moving forward. No thud. The brakes are designed and intended to stop the car. The transmission is intended to transmit (get it, transmission) the motion of the engine to the motion of the wheels, setting them turning in the direction you wish to go. If you habitually use the transmission to stop the car and change direction, you are mistreating the transmission. That little thud is the car saying “ouch.”

One of my sons has a bit of a racehorse in him. That is to our advantage when he is skippering our sailboat during a race and causes our broad-beamed, slightly chubby catboat to leave an entire fleet of sleek sloops in our wake. (There is nothing quite like swimming off your boat at anchor while waiting for the rest of the fleet to cross the finish line.) But he was well into his twenties when he realized how much his style of driving was costing him. Tires had to be replaced too soon, brake pads wore out quickly, and an entire car “bit the dust” sooner than expected, sooner than he wished, sooner than he could afford. He still rides a big motorcycle like the desert wind, but he now drives his car like an adult and comments on how long a set of tires will last.

You are having a fight at home and slam a door to make a point. (I have read about such things.) The screws in the hinges, the screws that hold the knobset in place, the mechanism of the knob and latch, and the nails holding the door frame together all take an extra strain and work a little loose, and a picture falls off the wall and its glass breaks.

You thunder down the stairs, the stair treads pull a little harder on the nails, and the stairs are a little squeakier the next time. You slam the door of a cupboard, a dishwasher, a washing machine, and each machine suffers a little under the extra force. 

While I know perfectly well that an inanimate object like a door or a stair tread, or a machine like a dishwasher or the transmission in your car, do not have feelings, using them with extra force necessarily hastens their failure. My lifetime of operating, building, and repairing machines, especially pipe organs, combined with Inda Howland’s comments about my clattering on the pedal keys has made me aware of the noise that results from operating just about anything with excessive force.

That trick of putting the car in Neutral when you stop before changing direction does not take any real time. It is a matter of gentle timing, like the simple push of a piston as you move into a developing section of a piece of music. The seasoned organist gives the piston a gentle tap at the precise moment, an infinitesimal movement. The Swell reeds kick in with the box closed, and the drama steps up a notch. But I remember standing next to the console of a big city organ at the start of a service call, listening to the organist report that he could not change pistons, watching the energetic thumb jabbing at the little ivory set button as if striking a punching bag. Of course, the spring was broken, and the button was jammed.

How many organists, playing in sight of their audience, have drawn a stop knob with histrionic flair, only to have the knob come off in their hand, or better yet, soar across the chancel in a parabolic arc?

Do you play an organ with mechanical stop action? The next time you register a piece, notice whether the mechanism is making any noise. Some organists tug on drawknobs with enough force to cause a bang with each motion. Many slider windchests have steel pins driven into the chest tables that correspond with slots in the sliders to limit their travel. Yank that knob with a bang a few hundred times, and the pin will pull out and the slider will move too far, likely resulting in partially closed note holes so pipes are underwinded. You cannot use that stop anymore, and it is an expensive repair because you have to remove ranks of pipes, rackboards, and toeboards to fix it. If you can hear a thud, clunk, or God help us, a bang when you pull stops, you are not doing it right.

Twinkle toes

Most organists have a special pair of organ shoes, usually light dance shoes with clearly defined heels and thin soles. The idea is that they help with accuracy on the pedalboard, but they have an important effect on the maintenance of the organ. Every organist should have a dedicated pair of organ shoes that are never worn outside. Where I live, it is likely to snow four months of the year. An organist who practices regularly on an instrument I maintained never changed his shoes. He came off the city streets and went straight to the organ. The pedal keys and the frame of the pedalboard and floor around the console were sullied and stained with salt, water, and city muck. The pedalboard springs and the screws were all rusty, and the pedal contacts were unreliable as they were clogged with the same muck. Of course, there were multiple dead notes on the pedalboard. This same organist broke two pedal keys by standing on them.

A wood pedal key is roughly the size of a hefty broomstick. If you are heavy and if you stomp on them, you will snap them in a heartbeat. I have heard organists justify standing on the pedals, saying they are not that heavy (I am), that [Casavant — Skinner — Austin, etc.] pedalboards can take it. I think Casavant wins the prize for building the sturdiest pedalboards, but the keys are still just sticks of wood at most one by one-and-a-half inches with a maple cap glued and screwed on. Some are far spindlier. Never stand on the pedal keys. It is a musical instrument, not a diving platform. Remember my moment with Inda. If the pedalboard stays quiet, the musicianship increases.

Tickling the ivories

We are used to seeing theatrical gestures at the keyboard from musicians such as Yuja Wang or Lang Lang, a great pounce on the keyboard with arms sailing overhead. But remember, the tone of the piano is sensitive to the touch on the keys. While I know that some of that is for stage effect, it is fair enough that a pianist might invent a grand gesture that would deliver more weight to the keys. While I know all about the theories of sensitive touch with mechanical key action, on both tracker and electric-action organs, the force with which you hit the keys has no impact on the amount of sound. It is nothing more than extra wear-and-tear on a tiny sensitive mechanism.

Do you rely on excessive pounding to play fast repeated chords? Three popular pieces come quickly to mind, the left hand of Widor’s Toccata, Mulet’s Tu es Petrus, and the echoing episodes in the third movement of the Vivaldi/Bach Concerto in A Minor. If you have to beat the keyboards to make those rhythms happen, you are not doing it right. The keys on organ keyboards travel something like ten or twelve millimeters. With your finger resting on the surface of the key, it takes but a nanosecond to accomplish that trip. The sound of the organ does not know the difference between a pounded key or a stroked key, but your organ technician does.

I wonder if Inda Howland would be pleased with my extension of her teaching to how I handle my car, but I would love her to know how important her teaching and observing was to me. An organbuilder is part artist, part mechanic. I have always appreciated the operation of good machines. I am still a sucker for a construction site. The operator of a payloader can lift five tons of gravel with the flick of a wrist. Let the machine do the work. An early lesson for a woodworker is let the tool do the work. For a musician, let the instrument do the work. It’s your job to conjure up beautiful sounds. It’s the instrument’s purpose to allow that. Be gentle and love the thing.

It’s personal.

There are many celebrated relationships between musicians and their instruments. In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, longtime first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, wrote of his affinity for his instrument, the sensual relationship between the musician and the instrument. He wrote of resting the violin under his chin, between his brain and his beating heart, wrapping his fingers around its neck. Those who play woodwind instruments take it a step further by placing the instrument in their mouths. To play a pipe organ, one sits at keyboards at least several feet from the source of the sound, and in many cases dozens, even hundreds of feet. Yet we think of Franck at Ste. Clothilde, Widor and Dupré at St. Sulpice, and Vierne at Notre Dame as classic pairings, like matching wine to a meal. During my many visits to the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, I have felt that Peter Conte’s affinity with the monster organ he calls “Baby” is on a par with those French masters.

Last fall, in the days of yore when I got on airplanes to fly places, I spent a week in Germany visiting an organ workshop as well as a couple special iconic historic organs. A highlight of that trip was the hours I spent in the Klosterkirche in Fürstenfeld (near Munich) with organist Christoph Hauser, experiencing the dazzling organ completed in 1736 by Johann Georg Fux. Christoph’s imaginative improvisations during the Mass, his brilliant playing, and the excitement with which he shared the organ with me all spoke of his love of the instrument. When playing such an ancient organ, one does not flail. The instrument defines the touch on the keys, and the player meets the organ on its terms. The smart musician leaves a session with such an instrument having been taught, and Christoph spoke eloquently of how his playing was informed by that organ. Inda Howland would have surely enjoyed that visit.

Photo: Christoph Hauser plays the Fux organ. (photo credit: John Bishop)

“It went zip when it moved and pop when it stopped. . . .”

In 1962 American songwriter and folksinger Tom Paxton wrote and recorded “The Marvelous Toy,” a nonsensical song with the catchy refrain that continued, “And ‘whirr’ when it stood still. I never knew just what it was, and I guess I never will.” As I was working out this essay in my mind’s ear, the song popped into my head, and I quickly found a raft of YouTube video performances including Tom Paxton himself singing with his grandson Sean Silvia, and the ubiquitous cover recording by Peter, Paul, and Mary released in 1969. The more you know about a machine, the easier it is to care for.

My colleague Amory and I were on the highway together—I was at the wheel, and Amory was half asleep in a highway-induced reverie when we passed a large truck whose trailer was a huge complex dedicated machine. Amory wondered half to himself, “What kind of machine are you?” I have always been fascinated by machines, what they do, how they work, and how to care for them.

I had a learning moment as a teenager mowing the lawn when the grass chute clogged. I stopped the engine, turned the mower over, cleared the clog, set it right side up, started it up, and continued mowing—for about thirty feet, when the three-and-a-half horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine stopped with a bang. While the mower was upside down, the motor oil ran out, and the engine ran about twelve seconds before it welded itself solid. It was like the proverbial customer in the auto parts store asking for a longer dipstick: “Mine doesn’t reach the oil anymore.” The other day, as Wendy and I were leaving our house in Maine to be gone for more than three weeks, I checked the oil in the backup generator and topped it off.

You are going to leave a parking space. You start your car’s engine, check the mirrors and back-up screen, put the transmission in reverse, and start the car moving backwards, steering so you wind up parallel with the curb. While you are still moving backward, you drop it into drive, the car gives a thud, and you start moving forward. At least that is what you do if you have no idea how the transmission (whether manual or automatic), universal joints, differential, crankshaft, and piston rods work. By changing the direction of your travel while the car is in motion, you have put excessive torque on all those critical parts and diminished the working life of your car’s drivetrain unnecessarily.

Try this: put the car in reverse, back out of the spot turning parallel to the curb, come to a complete stop as you move the gear shift to neutral, then shift into drive and start moving forward. No thud, no thump, no excessive torque, and you go merrily on your way.

Speaking of motor oil, I believe it is smart to let the engine run for thirty or forty seconds before you put the car in gear. When the engine is not running, all the oil is sitting in the oil pan at the bottom of the engine. When you start it, the oil pump pumps the oil to the top of the engine where the critical cams are opening and closing the intake and exhaust valves of the cylinders. If you put a load on the engine by moving the car before the oil is distributed throughout, you are adding unnecessary wear. Take a nice breath before you start rolling, and your camshaft will thank you. Have you ever noticed a light clattering sound just after starting the engine on a cold morning that goes away after a few seconds? That is the camshaft moving those valves, waiting for the oil to find its way to the top of the engine. I drive about 35,000 miles a year, and I have run six cars past 175,000 miles, three of those past 250,000.

After my parents retired to their home on Cape Cod, my tween-ish sons discovered that when you turned the faucets of the first-floor bathroom sink on, then off abruptly, you would get a loud clatter from the pipes within the walls. (I guess the plumber ran out of pipe clamps.) I told them how the rattling could lead to leaking joints hidden in the walls, but my mechanical wisdom fell on deaf ears. My older son Michael is as interested in all things mechanical as I am, and he grew into a career as a fabricator with superior welding skills and a vast knowledge of fasteners and connectors. He once described a project that required interior welding in eighth-inch stainless steel tubing. He reminisced about the banging of his grandparents’ plumbing, “We really were jerks, weren’t we?”

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Like millions of American children starting in 1969, my sons grew up watching Sesame Street, which included feature segments about how things are made. I remember a montage of scenes from a Crayola factory showing how crayons are made, but the real standout was filmed at the Teddie Peanut Butter factory in Everett, Massachusetts, and featured the 1920s-flapper-style song by Joe Raposo, It Takes a Lot of Little Nuts to Make a Jar of Peanut Butter. The video flips from one machine to another as peanuts are roasted, ground, “a little salt, a little sugar makes the goo taste really good and keeps it pumping through the pipeline like a peanut-butter-pumper should.”

How do they shell those billions of nuts for peanut butter, or those big jars of shelled pecans, walnuts, or heaven help us, Brazil nuts. It is a small triumph to free a Brazil nut or pecan with a standard-issue nutcracker without chipping or breaking it. Jasper Sanfilippo (1931–2020) worked in his father’s nut business from the age of nine until 1963 when his father passed away. Jasper had a degree in mechanical engineering, and he developed high-volume machines for shelling all varieties of nuts. His company acquired the Fisher nut brand in 1995, which quickly became the best-selling brand of shelled nuts in the United States. You can still see his name on the back of any Fisher nut package.

His nut fortune allowed him to pursue his passion for machines, especially automatic musical instruments along with steam engines and locomotives, gramophones, carousels, slot machines, and penny arcades. His grand house in Barrington Hills, Illinois, Place de la Musique, is still operated as a museum that is used for charitable events and, predictably, conventions of various organizations devoted to the pipe organ. There is an immense Wurlitzer theatre organ at the heart of the collection. I was particularly fascinated by the machines that played four violins simultaneously. The violins are mounted upside down and arranged like a compass—north, east, south, west—and a circular bow surrounds and plays all four instruments at once. There are dainty metal padded fingers to damp the strings along the necks, little mechanical marvels adjusted by fractions of millimeters for correct tuning of every note.

Console etiquette

If you are an organist for a church or university, you are likely to be responsible for the care of the organ, a complex and sophisticated machine that is subject to mechanical failures and sensitive to climate changes. If you know a little about how it works, you can protect it from unnecessary wear and tear, just like sparing the drivetrain in your car by not changing direction abruptly.

Years ago, I maintained a simple little organ in Lexington, Massachusetts, that was notorious for dead notes in the pedalboard. The organist was an elderly woman with luxurious long, thick gray hair who kept a hairbrush at the console, and part of our routine was to pull out the pedalboard and sweep up the great clumps of hair that were interfering with the contacts. We called it the hairball organ.

Do not wear street shoes when you are playing the organ. Gritty bits of sand and debris will wreck the hard finish on the pedal keys and gather as abrasives on contacts, felt bushings, springs, and guides. You might be tracking water, snow, or heaven help us, salt. If you have ever left salt in a silver salt cellar, you know how salt corrodes silver. If your pedalboard is less than thirty years old or has been rebuilt in that time frame, your pedal contacts are likely made of silver. Salt from your street shoes means dead notes.

Organists have asked me many times whether it is okay to stand on a pedalboard. Don’t. There are some obvious variables. An antique pedalboard is likely to be more delicate than a modern one. Some builders are known for producing especially sturdy pedalboards. In my experience Casavant gets the prize. Theirs are frightfully heavy and very robust. I am a heavy guy, and I am certain I could stand safely on a Casavant pedalboard. But my weight or yours standing directly on the pedal keys is far more downward force that we generate by simply playing, so we would be crushing the felt down-stops (ultimately increasing the travel of the pedal keys) and pushing the contacts or tracker action past their normal “on” position (ultimately spoiling their adjustment). And should you fall through, you will cause terrible damage requiring expensive repair.

I once commented to an organist about the big coffee cup sitting on the stopjamb while he practiced: “If that ever fell into the keyboards . . . .” I got a huffy reply, but a few days later it was a contrite phone call. The cup was full, and the coffee was sugary. The organ was in a big, busy church, and we did not want to miss a Sunday, so I took the keyboards to my workshop one at a time, took them all apart, cleaned everything, and replaced several octaves of guide-pin bushings. That was the end of the coffee cup habit.

Our furry friends

My mentor John Leek was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who was friends with a gaggle of guys who worked for Flentrop. When I was working with John in the 1970s and 1980s, we did a lot of work for Flentrop, especially installing new organs. Hans Steketee, then president of Flentrop, came to John’s place for dinner and a shop visit, and John and I showed him a half-dozen reservoirs that we were releathering, telling him that we did a lot of that kind of work. “What do you do, put mice in the organs?” he asked. Have you known an organist who might leave half a donut on a napkin on the console keytable? Rodents like donuts. Please do not bring food to the console.

When I was a teenager, I practiced in a church in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, on an organ built by William H. Clark in the Swedenborgian Church. There was a terrible bang from inside the organ late at night that had me jumping out of my proverbial skin. The minister had set a Havahart trap inside the organ and caught his raccoon. I wonder how many nights that raccoon was lurking inside the organ while I rattled away at the keys. The tracker action for the Pedal Bourdon went across the floor. I imagine that would have been like the Caribbean dancers who jump between pairs of poles rhythmically moving back and forth while being held close to the ground. I hope my teenage playing was rhythmic enough.

Keep your eyes open for signs of rodents in your organ. A particular favorite lair for little mousies is in between the keyboards of your organ’s console. Searching for a rattling sound in the keyboards, I have found messy trails and stashes of acorns on the keyboard behind the nameboard, another chance to imagine a manic dance for a little critter as the organist practices a wicked toccata. (Once when returning to our house in Maine after a while away, we found a stash of acorns in a pillowcase on our bed, a cozy but temporary home for a furry family.) Keyboard mice add to their comforts by harvesting the felt from capped pipes and keyboard bushings to make little multi-colored nests.

During a service call in Osterville, Massachusetts, a pipe was not speaking because there was an acorn inside it. There were well-marked trails through the organ, across windchests and across the tops of capped pipes (many of which were stripped of their black felt), and a mouse had dropped his acorn into the pipe. He was not complacent about his loss, going down to the rackboard and gnawing at the mouth of the pipe trying to free his nut, without success.

Aeolus, keeper of the winds

One of the most important tasks in caring for a pipe organ is lubricating the blower and keeping the blower room clean. In many churches, the blower is a heavy, dark monster lurking in a murky or dusty basement lair that is likely to be full of spider webs and the assorted creatures that maintain and frequent them.

It is best to keep the blower room clean, and you may be inspired to bring in a shop-vac, but I recommend a protocol for cleaning a blower room that ensures the blower will not blast loosened dust into the delicate mechanisms of the organ. You should leave this to your organ technician:

• Turn off the power to the blower to ensure it cannot be started during the process. There is typically a heavy cutout switch on the wall next to the blower.

• Seal the air intake of the blower with plastic and tape.

• Clean all the surfaces of the room with a vacuum cleaner. Use a bucket and mop on the floor. Use a cleaning agent with damp rags on the blower and ducts. (I like Simple Green.)

• Let the room sit idle for at least twenty-four hours to allow dust to settle.

• Clean the room again.

• Let the room sit idle for at least another twenty-four hours.

• Remove the plastic and tape from the blower air intake, being sure that no free dust enters the blower.

You can now start the blower, being sure that no dust is blown into the organ.

And most important:

Be sure that the organ is properly insured. The church’s insurance policies may be overseen by a parish administrator or a volunteer member of the property committee. Investigate whether the organ is clearly named in the policy. Many churches have a fine arts policy that covers musical instruments, stained glass windows, communion silver, and any other artwork that may be present. It is usual for an insurance carrier to require an assessment from a neutral pipe organ expert, someone other than your usual organ technician. The assessment and coverage should specifically be for the organ’s replacement value. In the case of a total loss, the organ could be replaced. In the case of partial loss due to fire, flood, vandalism, or even rodents, the insurance adjuster will negotiate with organbuilders and advisers to determine an appropriate settlement based on the replacement value.

The officers, organists, and members of many churches are blissfully unaware of the status of insurance coverage, leaving their organs at risk. It is the responsibility of organists and organ technicians to raise this issue.

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When I was a kid, the television had rabbit-ear antennae, often festooned with tinfoil, and when the reception was poor (it was always poor), we would slap the side of the machine as if that would knock those delicate vacuum tubes into submission. I have watched organists jab hard at intermittent piston buttons and stop controls, thinking that would get them to work, when in fact that was the cause of the fault. All our machines are the product of human ingenuity as applied to the laws of physics. There is no such thing as a machine that works better when treated roughly. Be gentle with your machines, and they will serve you well.

Doo-dads

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I lived in a four-bedroom house in the rolling farmland outside Oberlin, Ohio. I had just graduated from Oberlin, was working for the local organbuilder John Leek, and was director of music for a big Presbyterian Church in Cleveland. The house was part of an eighty-acre farm, and like most similar properties in the area, the fields were rented by a farmer who worked a total of about 1,500 acres in the neighborhood. It was typical to rotate corn and soybeans year by year, because their effect on the soil is complementary. Around the house, there were three or four outbuildings including a large barn that I remember as being in better condition than the house. The house had a natural gas well, pretty unusual for many people, but common there in those days. After all, now we know it as fracking country.

Our neighbors Tony and Claire-Marie across the street had a similar property with a neat house, an enormous barn, and fields that were rented by a farmer. They were friends of the Leeks from church and lovely, considerate people. Tony ran an excavating business and used his barn to store and maintain his huge pieces of heavy equipment. Occasionally, Tony invited me to help him with a repair project. I do not think he really needed my help but knew that I would be interested, so I would spend a Saturday with him doing things like changing the wheel bearings on his Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer.

That machine was over twenty-five feet long, fifteen-feet wide, and weighed over 100,000 pounds. You don’t just jack it up, pull out a tire iron, loosen the lug nuts, and pull the wheel off. He had a homemade hydraulic jack made from parts taken from old construction equipment. The hydraulic pump came off an excavator and was driven by the power-take-off of a farm tractor. The lug nuts were three inches in diameter (his sets of socket and open-end wrenches went up to five inches), and he used a backhoe and a hoisting strap to lift the wheel off the machine. I was a young apprentice, the proud owner of a new set of Marples™ chisels (I still have them and use them regularly), and I had never seen such an ingenious caper. Because of my career in organbuilding, I have had a lifelong fascination with tools and, as Tony realized, I would always be interested in seeing something new to do with tools.

Watching Tony make that heavy work look easy by using the right tools influenced my work with organs. It was not long after that time that I was helping to install a large three-manual tracker organ in a high organ loft. We centered the floor frame properly, but when the case started getting tall, we could see that it was not going to center under the peak of the vaulted ceiling. We used hydraulics to move the entire organ with case, windchests, reservoirs, keyboards, and actions, budging it to the right about an inch-and-a-half. (Don’t tell anyone.)

When we were done with the wheel bearings, we started the D-9 (the starter motor is a forty-horsepower diesel motor), climbed on board, he backed it out of the barn, and let me drive it around in a circle in the big gravel apron. I had another experience running heavy equipment when the farmer who rented our fields was harvesting corn, and I got to run the combine for a couple rows. Glad I didn’t have to parallel park it.

A man and his tools

As more than forty years have passed since my heavy-equipment-operator days, I have downsized to a small private workshop which is the three-car garage attached to our house. I have a table saw, drill press, and band saw left from my big shop days, and shelves and drawers full of countless hand tools and odds-and-ends. I have a terrific woodworker’s workbench, the maple job with built in vises and bench dogs, and I have a sturdy well-lit, double-length workbench where I do most of my work. Wendy and I are thinking about enlarging the laundry room (sometimes called the mud room) that shares a wall with my shop, a wall covered with shelves. We were standing there tossing ideas around, and she commented that I might just get rid of all that stuff. Quickly and defensively, I pointed out the house jacks.

Why does an organbuilder need house jacks? When releathering a reservoir, you get to the step where the pairs of ribs are glued to the top frame and the whole assembly is glued to the body. You cut and glue on the eight leather or rubber cloth belts and let the glue set overnight. In the morning, you have to open the reservoir by lifting the top, as if it were filling with wind. All that freshly set glue and nice stiff material has to be convinced that this is a good idea, and the reservoir is on your workbench, so you are lifting it to chest level. That is a perfect use for a small house jack. I prop the jack up on blocks and pump the hydraulic handle. You can also use a house jack lying sideways to budge an organ an inch or two to the right.

But more to the point, remember when our daughter Meg wanted to convert the little shed out back to a pottery studio and we realized that one of the posts had rotted? Remember how her husband Yorgos and I jacked up the corner of the shed and sunk a new post into the ground? That’s why I need a house jack.

What is that next to the house jack? An ultrasonic cleaner, a little tub with a metal basket and a dial on the front. I use it to clean brass parts like reed tongues and shallots, cabinet hinges, escutcheons (look it up), and the fancy little brass doo-dads that organbuilders like to use for trim pieces, specialized controls, and the like. Parson’s Sudsy Ammonia™ is a great solvent. Fill up the little tub, fill the basket with your parts, and Bob’s your uncle. Oh, and anytime you have metal jewelry that needs cleaning . . . .

There is a big stainless-steel double boiler, the thing you ladle soup from in a cafeteria line. It’s on the shelf next to the glue pot. Hide glue comes in dry flakes or crystals. You mix it with water and heat it in the glue pot. You keep adding more water or more glue as you work to keep the consistency the way you want it. You can also put cloves of garlic in a cheesecloth bag and let it soak in the hot glue—it’s supposed to keep the glue from getting moldy, and it makes it smell a little better. When you are working with that glue, you need to have a hot, wet rag nearby to clean off excess. I can fill the double boiler and use the thermostat to keep the water just exactly as hot as I can stand putting my hands in, so I always have a good hot, wet rag. Oh, and when we have a cookout, I can clean it up and serve chowder from it.

There is a beat-up old steam iron. For the same reason I use hot water to clean up while gluing, applying heat is a big help when ungluing something. Crank up that old iron and heat up the rubber-cloth strips on an old reservoir, and voilà, off it comes, smelling like burned rubber. You can put heavy paper between the iron and the rubber to keep it from sticking, but it is hard to avoid gumming up the iron with melted rubber, so when it cools, I hold the iron on my belt sander to clean it off. This maximizes the awful smells you can extract from old rubber cloth. You should not take this iron into the house and use it on white linen. There is a household benefit, however. When it finally stops working, I will steal the iron from the bedroom closet and buy a new one for pressing clothes.

A popular meme says that you only need two tools, WD-40™ and Duck Tape™. If it’s supposed to move but doesn’t, use WD-40™. If it isn’t supposed to move but does, use Duct Tape™. As a professional organbuilder, I find that pretty sophomoric. But Wendy wanted to know why I need so many spray bottles. WD-40™ is great stuff, and it smells better than burned rubber. But it is oily, so you might want to use silicone for some applications. That is what I used on the sliding doors in the living room the other day. If you have WD-40™, why do you need Marvel Mystery Oil™? Simple. I love the pepperminty smell of it.

Goof Off™ comes in spray bottles, aerosol cans, and squeeze bottles, different dispensers for different situations. It is a terrific solvent for Duck Tape™ residue, or any kind of adhesive. The last time I used it on a service call, I was removing old chewing gum from under the keyboards of a distinguished organ. C’mon, people. And that is what I used to remove that nasty tar from the fender of the car. Works on stubborn windshield bugs, too.

3M 77 Spray Adhesive™ is terrific for gluing felt and leather together to make valves or for covering pallets. Spray that stuff on both surfaces, and according to the instructions on the can, “make bond while adhesive is aggressively tacky.” The can bears the warning,

Extremely flammable. Vapors may cause flash fire. Vapors may cause eye, skin, nose, and throat irritation and may affect the central nervous system causing dizziness, headaches, and nausea. Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents may be harmful or fatal.

At least the valves do not come unglued. When Wendy finished that beautiful woven tapestry and wondered about fixing it to a piece of fabric for framing, that’s what I used. I feel fine.

My two favorite general cleaning agents are Murphy’s Oil Soap™ and Simple Green™. Both are biodegradable, and both are really effective. Both can be used full strength or diluted in water. Murphy’s is terrific for cleaning old woodwork, Simple Green™ cleans just about anything. I have two spray bottles for each, one diluted by 50%, the other full strength. You can also pour a bit in a bucket of water. And they both smell great. And there is some of each under the kitchen sink.

There must be thirty heavy plastic cases. Get rid of half of them?

• A set of dado blades I use to make the table saw cut wider. I used them to make that bookshelf.

• A propane torch that is good for light metal work. That is how I bent that piece of iron to hang the birdfeeder on the deck.

• A tap and die set that cuts threads on metal wire or rods (outies) or inside holes (innies) from one-eighth to one-half, in coarse and fine threads.

• A set of ratchet socket wrenches, both English and metric, with quarter-inch, three-eighths, and half-inch drives with extensions. The last time I used that, I was tightening all the hardware on your loom because you said it had gotten wobbly.

• Many sets of drill bits.

* One goes from one-eighth to half-inch, graduated by sixty-fourths.

* One has about a hundred bits graduated by the numbers and letters of the American Wire Gauge (AWG).

• Say you are using bronze wire that’s .064′′ as an axle in tracker keyboard action parts. You want the wire to be tight in the hole in the part that moves, and barely loose in the mounting hole. Use the .059′′ bit (#53) for the tight hole, and the .067′′ bit (#51) for the loose hole.

* One is metric from two to twenty millimeters, graduated by tenths.

* One is Forstner bits from a quarter to two inches, graduated by eighths, especially useful because they drill flat-bottomed holes, and since they are not guided by a central pin, you can drill overlapping holes.

* One is “airplane” bits from one-eighth to three-quarters, graduated in eighths, especially useful every few years because they are eighteen-inches long. I don’t need them very often, but when I do, nothing else will work.

* One is spade bits from three-eighth to two-inches, best for making very sloppy holes in soft materials, and for spraining your wrist. I do not use those very often.

* Okay, okay. I have two of the AWG sets, and two of the sixty-fourths sets. There are a few bits missing from each, and one of the drawers over there has replacements bits for every size.

• Digital calipers that read in fractions or thousandths of an inch, or hundredths of a millimeter. That is how I know that piece of bronze wire was .064′′.

• Another big set of socket wrenches that does not include metric sizes. That is the one we carry on the boat. I forgot to put it on board this summer.

• Caddies with assorted screw sizes that I bring to installation sites, so I never have just the size I am looking for.

• You get idea. The next time, I will write about why there are eight toolboxes full of tools. Sometimes they are all in the car at once.

That huge rolling steel cabinet with drawers that looks like it belongs in a gas station? In my previous shop, all my hand tools hung on purpose-made racks. There is not enough wall space for that here, so I bought this. In the drawers, from top to bottom:

• hinged tools like pliers and wire cutters. I used this big Channel Lock™ wrench last week to fix the drain for the outdoor shower;

• open-end wrenches;

• measuring tools like squares, scribes, miter gauges, calipers, micrometers, folding rulers, steel rulers;

• cutting tools like dovetail saws, Exact™ knives and blades, scissors, rotary knives and blades (for cutting leather and felt), small carving tools, razor blades, and the three beautiful leather knives that John Leek brought me from Holland in 1976;

• screwdrivers;

• that set of Marples™ chisels;

• pneumatic accessories like blow guns, detachable couplings, and assorted valves for inflating things. That is how I blew up the soccer ball. And remember when friends from New York were worried about their tire pressure? There is the gauge and valve;

• staple and pop rivet guns, staples and pop rivets;

• arch punches for cutting round pieces of leather and felt, or for cutting round holes in leather and felt. My set goes from one-eighth to three-inches;

• rotary bits for routers, cutting plugs, deburring holes;

• multi-spur bits—the big dangerous looking ones for drilling the holes in rackboards, dozens of them from a half-inch to three inches.

That cabinet serves me well and is big enough for the available space, but I admit to having tool-chest-envy when I walk through the big stores and see the jobs as big as a bus that have charging stations for power tools and mobile phones, refrigerators, and mirrors. What a great idea. You can tell which mechanic has a mirror in his toolbox because his hair is always combed.

It is easy enough to explain all these tools and supplies, especially when I can argue their domestic usefulness. How does anyone get by without an ultrasonic cleaner? But I also have boxes by the dozen with cryptic markings. “Schlicker Console Parts” is full of the little toggles that set stops on pistons, salvaged when I installed a solid-state combination action in a Schlicker console. Anyone needs some, I’ve got them. “Austin Coils” are the “electro” part of the Austin electro-pneumatic note motors. Anyone needs some, I’ve got them. “Skinner Toggle Springs,” “Misc. Peterson,” “Large Slide Tuners,” “Spare Ivories,” “Reed Organ Reeds,” anyone needs some, I’ve got them.

It’s not just an organ shop.

There is a cabinet full of flowerpots and gardening supplies and tools. There is a cabinet full of stockpots and lobster pots, overflow from the kitchen. There is a bag of life jackets, ready for winter storage. There are a half-dozen boxes full of spare parts for a sailboat, an outboard motor, a couple anchors, and lots of nautical line. You never know when you’re going to need a piece of line. Or an air horn. Or Schlicker combination parts. It would be aggressively tacky to think that I would get rid of them.

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)

String too short to save

After my freshman year at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, I spent the summer working with Bozeman-Gibson & Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was 1975, and on my first day working in an organ shop, I was set up in the parking lot with sawhorses, a set of painted façade pipes, a can of Zip-Strip®, and a hose. If that wasn’t enough to send me running, I guess I was hooked. They were working on the restoration of an 1848 Stevens organ in Belfast, Maine, completing a new organ in Castleton, Vermont, and installing a rebuilt historic tracker (I do not remember the builder) in a Salvation Army chapel in Providence, Rhode Island. A lot of the summer was spent driving around New England between those organs, my first glimpse into the life of a vagabond organ guy.

During my sophomore year I started working part time for John Leek, the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. I spent the next summer working with Bozeman during which the company moved to their permanent workshop in Deerfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple hours of “barn building” each day after the organ building. I continued part time with Leek as long as I was a student and switched to full time after I graduated. Counting the summers and part-time work, I have been at it for forty-six years.

After Christmas of 2019 I retired from working on organs on site and in my workshop. No more weeks spent wiring organs, no more service calls, no more console rebuilds—my favorite workshop job. I hasten to add that I continue to run the Organ Clearing House, managing the sale of vintage organs, and keeping the crew busy. I am still working as a consultant and still writing monthly columns. They will have to snatch the MacBook® from my cold dead hands. I have not yet imagined a time when I would not be doing some type of work with pipe organs.

With the outbreak of Covid, Wendy and I left New York City for our place in Maine, bringing the families of two of our kids with us. My private workshop, the three-car garage, became a staging space for groceries for our expanded household as we quarantined everything we brought into the house. When winter turned to spring, we added a refrigerator beside the garage freezer. The workshop has always been at least part boatyard. I have a couple shelves of boat parts, the expensive stainless-steel screws we use around salt water, and there are several lengths of surplus line hanging on a wall. You never know when you are going to need some more line. It is also a gardening shed and kitchen overflow storage for the bigger pots and pans. Lobster pots, roasting pans, and canning jars live on the shelves above the fridge.

This sounds like a lot of clutter, but I still have not mentioned the cabinets, shelves, and industrial drawers full of organ parts and hardware I have accumulated over the years. One year I restored an Aeolian residence organ with its paper roll player. It was playable in the shop for a summer, and we had a string of dinner parties during which we would suggest a break before dessert and leave the table for an organ demonstration. Some of Wendy’s publishing friends and colleagues needed that to understand just what I do for a living. “It was always mysterious to me!” I have rebuilt four or five consoles here, refinishing cabinets, rebushing keyboards, and retrofitting solid-state controls and electric drawknobs.

I know I will keep most of the general hardware as long as we live here. It is handy to have hundreds of sizes of screws arranged in drawers to support home repair projects. This summer, I cut up several lengths of half-inch threaded rod and collected the necessary washers, nuts, and lock washers for a tool hanger I built in the shed. Mending plates, corner braces, and hinges will always come in handy. I have felt and punches to make pads for the bottoms of chair legs; I have lubricants and finishes for pretty much any purpose and big, well-lit workbenches. It is my own private hardware store. Funny, I still go to the hardware store most weeks.

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

Along with his organ work, John Leek built harpsichords, and as we made those keyboards and brass levers to control “choirs” of jacks, I learned about polishing. I have a bench grinder that spins abrasive wheels, wire wheels, and cloth polishing wheels. There is a drawer full of bars of polishing compound, a rake for dressing the cloth wheels, and the nasty wheel with an iron handle for dressing the abrasive wheels. I rejuvenated a rusty cast-iron skillet using the wire wheel. Handy.

There is a case of Parson’s sudsy ammonia on a high shelf. I think there are ten bottles left in it. It is a terrific solution for use in my ultrasonic cleaner. I have used it to clean reed shallots and tongues, little brass console parts like screws and switches. I will hang onto all this because there are lots of things around the house that need polishing, and Wendy’s engagement ring looks great after an ultrasonic swim in sudsy ammonia.

Totally tubular

I have worked on all sorts of pneumatic actions from different organ builders, many of which incorporate some type of rigid or flexible tubing. Seventy-year-old rubber tubing is likely to be crumbling apart. Quarter-inch (interior diameter) tubing is common to many different types of organs, so I have hundreds of feet of that in a coil, destined to be cut into six-inch pieces. There is about forty feet of three-quarter-inch (ID) heavy plastic tubing with nylon webbing embedded. It is made for high-pressure hot water in small gasoline engines, and it was great for use as pneumatic tubing in a big expression motor. I have coils of copper tubing and some straight lengths of aluminum and brass tubing. You never know when you are going to need some.

Parts is parts.

Sometime ago I got the idea that it would be clever to have a supply of the waxed boxes used for Asian carry-out food for storing specific organ parts. I used them for a while, decided they were ridiculous, and discarded most of the minimum order of 1,000 boxes, but some are still around. One is labeled “Schlicker console parts.” I installed a Peterson system in a Schlicker console. Having serviced many Schlicker organs over the years, I know that the little pressed metal toggles in the “ka-chunk” combination actions can wear and break or simply fall out, and here were two or three hundred of them going to waste. I used four or five for a service call repair, and I still have the rest of them. Pretty sure I am not going to need them again.

I have boxes of Austin magnets, Austin note motors, Kimber Allen keyboard contacts, pedalboard contacts, Heuss nuts, leather nuts, compass springs (for the pallets in slider windchests), pouch springs, fiber discs (for making pouches and valves), many sizes and styles of felt and paper punchings for regulating keyboards, and even coils of wire for stringing harpsichords.

For a short while I repaired and rebuilt harmoniums, and I have a heavy box full of the brass reeds. They must have been salvaged from derelict instruments. I do not remember where I got them, but I doubt I did the salvaging because I would have kept them separated and labeled by voices. I may have used ten of them, and the rest are here if anyone wants them. A soak in sudsy ammonia would help. Another box is full of keyboard ivories. I “harvested” them from old pianos and organ keyboards, and having a miscellany of ivories really is useful as you can pick through them to match color and size. While I used many of them for service call repairs and refurbishing old keyboards, I am probably finished with them now.

On the high shelf near the tubing, there is a stack of boxes of various types of windchest magnets. Some have pipe valves that work either electrically or pneumatically, others are the standard “screw cap” chest magnets for pitman and offset chests. And for those times when you are changing wind pressure, there are boxes of magnet caps with one-quarter-inch and three-sixteenths-inch exhaust holes. None of these will have household use.

There are about twenty three-foot cardboard tubes in the rafters containing skins of leather and yards of felt, fabric, and cork. There is enough material to releather a ten-stop pitman chest and a half-dozen reservoirs. There is pouch leather, gusset leather, alum-tanned leather for reservoir belts, and several types and weights of pneumatic leather. I am not sure how much of it I will use, but as I recently gave Wendy a big piece of thin black felt for a sewing project, I will assume it is worth keeping. Since it is up high, it is not in anyone’s way.

Twenty or thirty years ago, industrial chemists developed spray cans of graphite lubricant, perfect for treating windchest tables, sliders, and toeboard bottoms so slider stop action would work smoothly. Before switching to that, I mixed flake graphite with denatured alcohol creating a paste that I scooped with latex-gloved hands and rubbed over all the surfaces. It was a messy process, but when the alcohol evaporated, a rich, even coat of graphite glistened on the wood. Heaven help you if you spilled any on the floor. I have most of a gallon can of graphite that I guess I do not need anymore. I also have half a case of that graphite spray. I can use it on snow shovels to keep snow from sticking to them.

Material handling

In industrial catalogues, material handling is the section that includes dollies, carts, pallet jacks, and all the tools and equipment used to move things around. You can buy a Drum Dolly, a two-wheeler designed specifically to handle 55-gallon drums or a refrigerator dolly—you can guess what that’s for. A refrigerator dolly is a two-wheeler with straps to hold the load in place, and rubber belts that move over wheels on the back so you can haul the fridge up stairs. I have used mine for hauling reservoirs upstairs to choir lofts. The upright freezer in the garage needs to be defrosted occasionally. That can be a nasty job, but it is pretty simple here, and we have been “eating it down” in preparation. Soon, I will move the last few things into the top of the Covid fridge, wheel the freezer through the overhead door, and stand it in the dooryard facing the sun with the door open. It takes a few hours, and there is no need to catch the water.

I have a come-along, a tool with a steel cable, hooks on both ends, and a long handle that pumps a ratchet. I bought it when we were installing an organ and realized it needed to be a few inches to the left. A half-dozen pumps of the handle was all it took to scootch the organ to its proper place. I have not used it on a job since, but we have a half-mile wooded driveway that trees fall on occasionally. I can often hitch a chain to loops on my car and drag a tree out of the way, but several times I have used the come-along tied to another tree to do the job when I cannot make the angle with the car. We also use it to pull the dock out of the water. I am keeping that.

The opposite of the come-along is a house jack that I have used often when releathering reservoirs. After the hinges are glued to the ribs, the pairs of ribs are glued to the body and top, and the belts are glued on all around, you have to open the thing fully before gluing on the gussets. You are stretching all the new material and glue, and it can be a heavy lift, especially on a large reservoir. I have done it with blocks and levers, but a hand-pumped hydraulic house jack is just the ticket. When our daughter wanted to convert a small shed into a pottery studio, our son-in-law and I jacked up the shed and repaired its structure. I will keep the jack.

Another tool I used when gluing reservoirs is the big double-boiler you see keeping soup warm in a cafeteria line. Having hot wet rags is essential when using hot glue, and I have a Sharpie mark on the front for the little volume knob, setting the temperature high enough to soften excess glue, but not so hot that I cannot put my hands in it. When I was gluing four or five reservoirs at once, the pot would be hot all day, and I would change the water every hour as it got dark with the glue. We like to give big parties, and a steaming pot of clam chowder would be just the thing for a chilly fall cookout, but I think this appliance has too many miles on it for use in food service. It is handy for soaking labels off jars.

My Rubbermaid® rolling table has ball-bearing casters and a load limit of 500 pounds. I know it can bear more than that. It is about the same height as my workbenches and the rear end of my Chevy Suburban, so I can wheel a windchest or reservoir from the back of the car to the workbench without lifting anything, and it is perfect for moving lumber between planer, table saw, and cut-off saw. I can also wheel groceries from the car to the Covid fridge, and I have even used it to wheel our eight-foot fiberglass dinghy to the car. Yes, you can put an eight-foot dinghy in a Suburban and close the door. I get fussy when other people in the family leave stuff on my rolling table because I like to keep it free for the next use. I’m keeping it.

One of our kids bought a couple big inflatable rubber swim toys. I especially like the Grandpa-sized pink inner tube with its five-foot dragon tail, lots of fun for swimming off the dock with our grandchildren, and it is convenient to have an air compressor with a big assortment of fittings. It saves fifteen minutes of huffing and puffing when you could be in the water. The fifty-foot air hose hangs on a steel column between garage bays, so it only takes a moment to set up to check the air of the tires on cars parked outside.

Perspective

There is almost no end to the list of tools, materials, supplies, and equipment in my garage workshop. I am still using most of the tools for projects around the house. This summer I built a neat set of drawers using quarter-sawn oak to match my library table desk. I am just starting a new “private drive” sign for the top of the road using birch lumber left over from a set of bookcases I made for Wendy’s office. I will use a pin-router to make the lettering. Wendy is a talented and productive weaver, and there is nothing like an organ builder as tech department for a house with two looms.

I hope this little tour is informative to organists who might not know much of what is behind the service technician who works on your organ or the organ company that built or rebuilt it. Mine is a light-duty shop, a delight for me to work in alone or with a colleague or two. It is especially nice in the summer with the overhead doors open. I keep thinking I will not do any more organ work there, but it is easy to imagine a time when our crew is working nearby and something needs to be releathered quickly. I might just bend the rule.

Thar she blows.

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

Blower hygiene

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

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

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

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

Biggest in the fleet

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

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

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

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

Hurricanes

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

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

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

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

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