In the Wind: at the movies

“Just can’t wait to get on the road again.”¹

For over fourteen months during the extraordinary time of Covid, Wendy and I stayed at our house in Maine, leaving our apartment in virus-rich New York City vacant. Until late in 2020, Lincoln County where we live in Maine was counting fewer than twenty new cases each week, and we figured we would stay there until vaccinated. Like so many people around the country, we altered our working lives using Zoom and FaceTime instead of meeting in person. We set up our offices as “Zoom Rooms,” sometimes wearing “go to office” tops over jeans or shorts.

I received my first vaccination shot on my sixty-fifth birthday in mid-March. Once I was on the schedule, I started planning a trip, and I hit the road sixteen days after my second shot. I visited three organ building workshops, a half-dozen organs that were coming on the market, a couple iconic organs (one can never see enough of them), and a church where my colleagues are helping install an important new organ. I drove south on a western route through Virginia and Tennessee to Birmingham, across to Atlanta, and north on an eastern route home through North Carolina and Virginia to meet Wendy for a few days on the Jersey Shore. It was my re-immersion in the craft I have been working in for more than forty-five years, and I came home refreshed and newly inspired.

Variety is the spice of life.

Pipe organs come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. We have organs that are large and small, electric and mechanical, freestanding in cases and enclosed in chambers. We have organs based on ancient European concepts and models, and organs that are purely American, and my trip spanned the far reaches of the organ world. I visited the workshops of Noack Organ Co. (Georgetown, Massachusetts), Taylor & Boody Organ Builders (Staunton, Virginia), and Richards, Fowkes & Co. (Ooltewah, Tennessee), each of which works with a small staff of dedicated artisans building hand-crafted organs in free-standing hardwood cases. Noack is currently working on an organ with sixty stops, and I was lucky to see it being loaded on a truck at the workshop followed by the beginning of its installation at the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Paul in Birmingham, Alabama. Taylor & Boody’s current project is a thirty-eight-stop job for Wheaton College in Illinois, and Richards, Fowkes & Co. is working on a thirty-one-stop organ for Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan.² Besides a tour and rich conversations in their workshop, Bruce Fowkes and Ralph Richards took me to see the spectacular four-manual organ by John Brombaugh at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee. I am heartened that during this uncertain time, these three outstanding firms are all building substantial instruments at the same time. You can see details about each organ on the builders’ websites.

These three builders are known for building tiny organs as well as instruments with sixty or more stops. Continuo or practice organs with three or four stops are the hummingbirds of pipe organs, and modest instruments with fewer than twenty stops are little gems with gorgeous, intimate voices and carefully balanced choruses, but the big bird of my trip was the behemoth all-American organ in Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, an organ with single divisions that include more than thirty stops. (See the cover feature of the November 2020 issue of The Diapason.)

In the May 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about the efforts of curator Nathan Bryson and his staff of assistants and volunteers to protect the organ during the recent demolition by implosion of the adjacent Trump Hotel and Casino, so the organ was fresh on my mind when I started planning my trip, and I invited myself for a visit. Nathan was the consummate host for my day in the largest organ in the world.

The organs at Boardwalk Hall and the Wanamaker Store (now Macy’s) have each been considered the largest in the world. Now that I have visited both with their curators as my guides, I will take the plunge and explain how an organ earns such a title. At the moment, the Boardwalk Hall Organ is about 53% playable, so the Wanamaker Organ can safely claim to be the largest fully playable organ in the world. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee that oversees the organ in Boardwalk Hall has ambitious plans to bring the organ to fully functional condition. Stay tuned. I will report it when it happens.

The Wanamaker Organ has 464 ranks while Boardwalk Hall has a mere 449, a difference of fifteen ranks, the size of a modest organ, so it wins in the category of most ranks. The Wanamaker organ has 75 independent pedal ranks with 32 pipes (29 notes fewer than manual ranks), while many of the ranks in the Boardwalk Hall Organ have up to 85 notes, accounting for extensive unification and making use of the extended lower three keyboards which have 85, 85, and 75 notes, giving the organ a total of 33,112 pipes compared to the impressive 28,750 pipes in the Wanamaker Organ. That’s a difference of 4,362 pipes, or the equivalent of a seventy-rank organ!

An 85-note rank of pipes allows a continuous scale from low CC of 8′ to high c′′′′′′ of 2′, or as in the case of several ranks in Atlantic City, from low CCCC of 32′ to high c′′′′ of 8′. Unbelievably, there is a 64′ Dulzian Diaphone with 85 notes that goes all the way to the top of 16′. Scrolling down the endless stoplist, I count one 64′ rank (85 notes), eight 32′ ranks, and sixty 16′ ranks. A count like that makes a big organ. You can count for yourself. There are comprehensive lists of ranks, stops, console layout, and pistons and controls at www.boardwalkorgans.org. It would be difficult to calculate accurately, but it is my gut feeling that the Boardwalk Hall Organ weighs a lot more than the Wanamaker Organ.

Vulgar or beautiful?

I have had a number of encounters with the Wanamaker Organ over the past twenty years, both in intimate, personal, and comprehensive visits, and in swashbuckling public performances. This was my fourth visit to Boardwalk Hall, but the first time I heard the organ.³ I was aware of both organs when I was growing up, long before either had any meaningful restoration, but as I was in the thrall of the “Tracker Organ Revival,” dutifully learning early fingerings at Oberlin, I was not creative or open-minded enough to make space for them in my musical comprehension. I assumed that they existed to take part in the biggest-loudest-fastest competitions that lurk throughout our society. How could something with more than four hundred ranks be anything more than the pipe organ equivalent of a freight train? Artistic content? Musical sensitivity? Phooey. I was wrong.

I was fortunate to have experience renovating larger electro-pneumatic organs early in my career, and when I became curator of the organs at Trinity Church Copley Square and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, I was immersed in the grandeur of super-sized organs. The Aeolian-Skinner organ at The Mother Church is huge (237 ranks and 13,500 pipes), but less than half the size of those in Boardwalk Hall or the Wanamaker Store. While the organ at Trinity Church (actually two instruments, Chancel and Gallery, playable from one console) was smaller in number of ranks, it was an important part of my understanding of large organs because of the weekly recital series there. Each Friday, I heard a different organist play the instrument. Some were bewildered, bamboozled, even defeated by its complexity, but those organists who could make it sing taught me how a large and varied organ with divisions in four separate locations could combine to produce expressive sweeps, from thundering fortissimos to shimmering echoes that melted away into the frescoed walls.

If a finely crafted organ with mechanical action brings the intimacy of chamber music to the fingers of the organist, the large romantic organ allows the musician to paint majestic landscapes. And the mega-monumental symphonic organ allows expression ranges unheard of otherwise. What do you do with an eighty-rank string division? Paint pictures.

In the arena

When I first arrived at Boardwalk Hall, Nathan “fired up” the organ using files made by Peter Richard Conte, the Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Organ, along with several other creative players, and stored in the playback system. Peter is unusual among organists because of his affinity for these exceptional organs. While most of us are used to registering a chorale prelude with a cornet for the solo line and a few soft flutes and a Subbass for accompaniment, Peter is a sonic wizard with thousands of stop tabs and hundreds of other controls that allow him to command the dozens of divisions scattered about in the vast room. Sometimes he throws on a big row of stop tablets as if he was playing a glissando on the keyboard, but more usually, he programs pistons with intricate combinations using stops by the hundreds.

Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long and 310 feet wide with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that peaks at 137 feet. Its seating capacity is over 15,000, and it is regularly used for rodeos with bull-riding competitions (they truck in enough dirt to simulate a prairie), indoor auto racing, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, and even college football. It was the site of the first indoor helicopter flight, and it is home to the Miss America Pageant. It was surreal to stand alone on the empty floor of the semi-lit hall listening to the organ do its thing with the help of Peter’s bytes. The two main organ chambers are separated in space by the hundred-foot-wide stage. The chamber lights were on, and great swaths of expression shutters were in full view, swishing and fluttering like sensuous thirty-foot eyelashes. This was not “All Swells to Swell.” The many sets of shutters were moving in contrary motion, each responding to the rises and falls of individual voices in the complex arrangements. Waves of sound ebbed and flowed like the surf on the sandy beach on the other side of the iconic boardwalk, cascades of notes morphed into fanfares, melodies were “soloed out” as if by a platoon of trombones or by four dozen violinists playing pianissimo in unison. This is the very essence of the symphonic organ, its dazzling array of controls allowing the single musician to emulate the actual symphony orchestra.

Sweeping a beach

The Aeolian-Skinner at The Mother Church taught me what is involved in caring for a large organ. “Touching up the reeds” can take all day—there are forty-one of them. But that organ lives in a building with perfect climate control. When you have more than 450 ranks in a building that is also home to rodeos and auto racing, you have a hefty tuning responsibility. Curator Nathan Bryson manages a team of professionals and volunteers who are methodically moving through the organ rebuilding blowers, releathering windchests, refurbishing organ pipes, while maintaining the organ for daily recitals and many special events.

The Boardwalk Hall Organ was built by Midmer-Losh of Merrick, Long Island, New York, during the Great Depression at a cost of over $500,000 and was completed in December of 1932. It is housed in eight chambers: Left Stage, Right Stage, Left Forward, Right Forward, Left Center, Right Center, Left Ceiling, and Right Ceiling. You can see the layout in a photo accompanying this column in the May 2021 issue. Getting a handle on which stops and which divisions are located in which chamber is the first challenge of learning one’s way around the vast instrument. The two Stage Chambers comprise what I perceived to be the main organ. They are huge and jammed with some of the largest organ stops in the world. There are stops on wind pressure of 100 inches on a water column, an absolute hurricane of air.

When the organ blowers are turned on and the instrument fills with wind, windchests expand visibly, as if the doctor told you to “take a deep breath.” The fifteen-foot-long walls of the pressurized room that houses the organ’s main electro-pneumatic switching equipment move so dramatically that I squinted, wondering why the thing does not burst. During renovation, several of the windchests on 100-inch pressure were replaced using more robust engineering, informed by the difficulty of building a wooden vessel to contain such high pressure.

Tuning those gargantuan ranks is a three-person job, one at the console, one in the middle of the hall where it is possible to hear pitches and beats, and the third (with industrial hearing protection and audio headphones) manipulating the pipes. You could try using a starting pistol to signal “next,” but you wouldn’t be able to hear it.

Beyond the endless work of restoring, renovating, tuning, and maintaining this organ, perhaps the most difficult and important work has been reintroducing the city and state governments to the ongoing stewardship of the instrument. A vast auditorium with such an unmusical array of uses seems an unlikely home for a pipe organ, and the people who have been working with and on the organ have been effective ambassadors, sharing the unique qualities of the largest organ in the world. If you would like to help, visit that website and look for the “Donate Now” button.

Look to the future.

After fourteen months at home, it was a joy to be back on the road. My thanks to Didier Grassin of the Noack Organ Company, Ralph Richards, Bruce Fowkes, John Boody, and Nathan Bryson for sharing their work and philosophies with me, and above all, for sharing the joy and pleasure of “knocking around about pipe organs.” Three cheers for all the wonderful work underway on organs both old and new. If this is a taste of the new normal, I am ready to ride.

Notes

^1. Willie Nelson.

^2. By coincidence, one of Wendy’s cousins is on the organ committee at Saint Andrew’s.

^3. In 2010, the Organ Clearing House built the “Blower Room” set for the Saint Bartholomew funeral scene in the spy-thriller movie, Salt, starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Philip Noyce. All the sets including the barge, the presidential bunker, and the CIA offices were constructed in retired Grumman aircraft hangars in Bethpage, New Jersey, where the Lunar Excursion Module was built. Our set included a couple big Spencer blowers that we had in stock and a huge electro-pneumatic switching machine borrowed from the “other” organ at Boardwalk Hall (a four-manual Kimball in the adjacent theater). I transported the machine in both directions in rental trucks. The set decorator thought the rig was complicated enough that I should be present for filming. I stood around while Ms. Jolie jumped through walls dozens of times, until I heard over the PA system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.” The leading lady greeted me with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I described that she should shoot the regulating chain to make the bellows go haywire and cause the mass cipher that would disrupt the funeral. (We provided the hardware, and special effects provided the action.) She said, “I can’t shoot that.” I replied, “I’ve seen you shoot.” I watched the single take on Mr. Noyce’s monitor and had the honor of shouting “Action!” at his signal, my twelve seconds in Hollywood, another chapter from the life of an itinerant organ guy. Curious? You can stream it on Netflix. And the nice thing about building a movie set? They don’t require a warranty.

Photo caption: Seven keyboards and 1,235 stop tablets, as big as they get. Midmer-Losh organ, Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Manuals I and II have 85 notes, Manual III has 75 notes, and manuals IV, V, VI, and VII have the usual 61.) (photo credit: John Bishop)

Robert McCormick has been organist and choirmaster of Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia, since 2016. Previously he held similar positions at Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C., and at Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City. He is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series (Matthew Glandorf) may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 (Mary Beth Bennett) in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13; and Part 3 (Jason Roberts) in the July 2023 issue, pages 16–17.

Introduction

We continue our series focusing on American organist-improvisers with a name familiar to many—Dorothy Papadakos. I first met Dorothy more than two decades ago, when I was director of music at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Times Square, New York City, and she was cathedral organist of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The first time I ever heard Dorothy play live was at the seating of the Right Reverend Mark Sisk as Fifteenth Bishop of New York in 2001. Dorothy began the first hymn on the celebrated State Trumpet, and off we went. “We’re about to have church,” I thought, and we certainly did. It was a marvelous and memorable liturgy, hardly least due to Dorothy’s glorious playing.

Dorothy surely must be one of the most multifaceted and versatile persons in our profession: she is not only an organist, but also a jazz musician, musical theater composer, and author. She also may well be one of the warmest and most joyful among us. In addition to interviewing Dorothy via email, I have just had the privilege of seeing her for the first time in over a decade over lunch in Philadelphia, alongside her delightful husband, Tracy McCullen, and marvelous fellow organist Peter Richard Conte. After an extraordinary shared meal, two hours later, I walked back to my church refreshed and full of Dorothy’s infectious happiness.

Writing this article, seeing Dorothy in person, and pondering her inspiring responses reminded me yet again of music’s power to stir, heal, and renew. Dorothy is a wonderful example of a life devoted to making the world a better place through the art of music. How many people has she inspired through her musical gifts? (Countless numbers, of course.) Case in point: I have been prompted again to seek to rediscover and recapture a sense of childlike joy and awe in music making. Like many of us, especially being an absolute perfectionist, I spend much of my time focused on the minutiae of music making. Without question, for any of us to practice our art at the highest levels, we must do this. Yet it is so easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of music making as a result, for our perspectives to become skewed.

In a church context, the goal of music is to glorify God and to inspire the people who hear it. How many times have I finished a service unable to think of anything other than whether or not I played a difficult passage cleanly enough, or why did I take such-and-such a turn in an improvisation when another would have been better, or whether the choir tuned as well as they could in a particular motet, only to have a congregant share heartfelt appreciation for the beauty of the music offered? (The answer, of course, is virtually all the time!)

Improvisation is perhaps the most personal way to make music. With that in mind, let us now hear directly from Dorothy Papadakos herself.

Discussion

When, how, and why did you start playing by ear and inventing your own music? Did it coincide with your early music training?

If it had not been for a fourth-grade crush, music and I may have never met! I was nine years old in Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, “going steady” with a boy taking piano lessons. Our mothers decided it would be cute if we played duets together, so they started me with his piano teacher, Loren McNabb, a hefty Scottish jazzman with a white goatee who moonlighted playing Reno’s nightclub circuit. To my surprise, I took to the piano instantly. I love math and science, and this was ultimate math and science to me. I enjoyed experiencing how my brain and fingers learned more and more technical pieces. And I loved the feel in my little hands of playing scales, amazed at what my fingers could do, especially when I stopped thinking about them and let them do their thing skiing up and down the keyboard like natural athletes!

After each half-hour lesson I begged Mr. McNabb to play me “his music:” Ellington, Gershwin, Porter, Broadway. Two years in, at age eleven, I went on strike! I refused to practice “that boring classical music” and insisted he teach me “his music:” jazz! I wanted to read lead sheets and chord changes. They were the gateway to a mysterious world, to musical freedom. Mr. McNabb complained to my mom about her problem child; she told him to teach me whatever I wanted if it kept me practicing! (Go, Mom!) I took to jazz like a bird to the air. In just a few years I could read any lead sheet and was playing jazz gigs for local events by age fifteen.

Enter the men who changed my early life and music forever: Liberace and blind British jazz pianist George Shearing. I got to meet Liberace several times backstage at John Ascuaga’s Nugget when he performed in Reno, because my mom knew him from her Hollywood days. I assiduously copied Liberace’s recordings note-for-note to learn his style and to get inside his stunning technique. (How did he do it with all those rings on?) Then the George Shearing Quartet came to town and blew this kid “outta da water!” His album Light, Airy, and Swinging changed my ears and tonal imagination. I knew then and there all I wanted to do was to improvise and compose “cool jazz.”

Tell us more about how you employed improvisation in childhood.

Those first jazz gigs at around age fifteen were for fashion shows in Reno and some Reno High School theater work. Then a turning point came: Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno (now Trinity Cathedral) asked me to join their folk ensemble since I’d been taking guitar lessons and sang in their youth choir. The next thing I knew, I was lead vocalist and guitarist of the ten-piece band playing the 9:00 a.m. service! This was the era of Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and 1970s folk and pop. It was musical heaven for me, until my dear Mr. McNabb died suddenly. I was 16, devastated, lost, a ship without a rudder. My mother tried everything to find me a new teacher. Of course, no one could measure up. She even took me to the University of Nevada-Reno’s head piano professor for whom I improvised on Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. Mom and I were so proud of my audition; I nailed every note and nuance! But this piano professor just shook his head, clicking his tongue saying, “It’s too bad she doesn’t play classical.” Mom, furious, grabbed me by my arm saying, “Come on, Dorothy Jean! We’re getting out of here!”

That next Sunday in church my ears heard the organ as if for the first time (a three-manual 1967 Allen). That’s when I approached Mr. James Poulton, Trinity’s wonderful 11:00 a.m. organist and choirmaster, who agreed to give me organ lessons. As with the piano, I’d never given the organ a moment’s thought, but I was so lost without Mr. McNabb, I thought, “Why not organ? It’s a stack of synthesizers!” (Yes, that’s how my sixteen-year-old brain saw the organ.) I now know that if it weren’t for death and grief, the organ and I may have never met—and fallen in love. My scientific mind went crazy for the stops, pistons, 32′ pitches, pedals, the whole tonal palette. I felt like a one-woman orchestra!

I noticed, too, I could “noodle” around on the organ, but no one else I knew noodled (in public), so I assumed this was simply not done. My first organ piece with Mr. Poulton was the famous (attributed to) Bach Toccata in D Minor, every sixteenth note’s fingerings and meticulous counting penciled in. To this day, I still use that really worn-out original score at my Phantom of the Opera (1929) silent film performances (my show opener to set the mood) to remember where I come from. And, of course, I now play the Toccata like the improvisation it’s meant to be!

As a child, did you understand the music theory behind what you were doing, or did that understanding catch up later?

Yes, oh yes, I was very fortunate that both Mr. McNabb and my next mentor, Don Rae, the great jazz pianist/arranger for the legendary Las Vegas comedy team Gaylord and Holiday, insisted I master jazz harmony, voicings, and scales, and listen to classical composers to learn how they put harmonies together. They instilled in me the fierce mental discipline that I rely on today. Once I discovered major and minor ninths, thirteenths, and Burt Bacharach, I was hooked. But when I discovered how just one harmonic shift, or one simple, sexy jazz chord could change the key and slip my improv into a brand-new musical world, it ignited the composer in me.

At age eleven, I learned the circle of fifths and how to read complex charts. It was fun, hard work yet easy to memorize, and it laid the groundwork for reading figured bass when I started playing Baroque continuo. I spent thousands of hours at my stepfather’s Steinway grand piano and couldn’t wait to get home from school to play through a new fake book or disco tunes Don Rae brought me. Don’s big improvisation game changer was teaching me the Blues. In losing Mr. McNabb, I understood gut-wrenching loss and grief, but I didn’t know how to get there musically, how to turn anguish into beauty. Don had me prepare a new improvisation weekly by memory in all twenty-four keys, major and minor, over twenty weeks, on anything I wanted. I remember that first time I played one of my improvs for him, it was about four minutes long. Nervous as I was, I let myself go in it. When I finished, he was silent. I turned and saw him, his jaw open. I remember it so well. That’s when he knew I had a gift; me, I wasn’t so sure. I thought I was a copycat, just imitating Duke Ellington and George Shearing. I still didn’t feel original or unique because I worked so hard to emulate others.

I must add here a pivotal moment almost every successful person I’ve met has experienced. It happened at the end of my freshman year at the University of Nevada, Reno. Remember the piano professor my mother stormed out on? They assigned him to teach me organ! Oh no! He was no organist, and I knew this would be bad. At our last lesson he dismissed me in no uncertain terms: “Missy, I suggest you give this up. You don’t have what it takes to make it in music.” In that instant I thought of Liberace, George Shearing, Mr. McNabb, Don Rae, Duke Ellington, my improvs. (I also thought of words that are unprintable here!) He was wrong, and I knew it. But what was I to do, having been told, “Don’t come back”? Well, the gods were listening!

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to become a professional organist and church musician?

Yes! Enter Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, New York City, and Robert K. Kennedy, organist and master of the choirs at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, Long Island. One springtime Sunday morning in Reno before church I serendipitously caught the TV broadcast of the 9:00 a.m. contemporary service at Saint Bartholomew’s with guitars, drums, organ, handbells, a big choir, and congregation singing amazing jazz church music!

I froze, mesmerized in total disbelief. Oh, the joy in their music! I knew I was meant to be there. I packed up and drove across the country to live with my dad in Saint James, Long Island, and started commuting on Sunday mornings to St. Bart’s as a choir member and guitarist in the 9:00 a.m. band. At the same time, I began organ lessons as a sophomore at SUNY Stony Brook traveling to Garden City to work with the brilliant, warm, and wonderful Kennedy, who gave me the “You get serious or else!” talk. He whipped me into shape like a real organ teacher. The Bach-Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor always makes me think of Robert. I credit him with helping me decide to become a professional organist and believing I could do it if I gave everything to my craft. So I did­—everything. I dove into repertoire and completely forgot about jazz and improv. I told myself they were no longer of any use. At this point I still had no idea anyone improvised on the organ, even though Robert was teaching at the same time his astonishing protégé Peter Richard Conte, my dear friend and improvisation colleague!

Beyond Robert Kennedy, who were your principal teachers and influences in organ and organ improvisation? How did you learn from them?

At Saint Bartholomew’s I met the great conductor and organist Dr. Dennis Keene, who was at the time St. Bart’s assistant organist, while finishing his doctoral degree at Juilliard. Dennis would become pivotal in my organ education.

St. Bart’s by now had hired me as their Christian education secretary, and one night working late I heard Dennis practicing two pieces on St. Bart’s glorious Aeolian-Skinner organ: Messiaen’s Le Banquet Céleste and Duruflé’s Scherzo. I stopped my work. I quietly snuck out to a partially opened chancel door and listened and watched him play in that sparkling, golden Byzantine mosaic space.

Le Banquet Céleste brought tears to my eyes. What on earth was this exquisitely inexpressible music? And this playful scherzo! Who on earth wrote this jewel of pure spontaneous magic? Both were jazz but not jazz; earthly yet other-worldly. Duruflé and Messiaen became my repertoire gurus. Soon Dennis was teaching me French Romantic and contemporary repertoire on the organ in St. Bart’s side chapel. (Organist Jack Ossewaarde prohibited anyone but Dennis and him from touching the great organ, especially newbies like me!) When Dennis became organist and choirmaster downtown at the Church of the Ascension, our work continued, and he trained me up for Juilliard and Eastman auditions. Those years studying with Dennis and the thousands of painstaking hours of blood, sweat, and tears formed my technique into what it is today. I have Dennis to thank for not letting me get away with anything less than excellence. And he gave me a front row seat as organ-page-turner at some of the finest choral and orchestral concerts in the world presented by his Ascension Music. I have lifelong gratitude for all he gave me, especially the privilege of hosting Madame Duruflé in my cathedral apartment (because Je parle français) for a week at Saint John the Divine— wow—il n’y a rien à dire! (There are no words!) She and I remained dear friends for many years after and shared unforgettable visits in France. Now there was une grande improvisatrice! And with such petite hands!

May I digress and share with you the thrill of a lifetime? On a visit to Marie-Madeleine’s lovely stone house in Cavaillon in Provence where she was on holiday with her dear sister Elianne, we were having tea in her living room when I commented on the lovely old brown upright piano against the far wall, a candle mounted on each end, fine lace lying across the top. She told me, “That’s where Maurice composed his Messe Cum Jubilo.” I started to cry as I so love that gorgeous work. I can still feel that hot Provence August afternoon with her and smell the fragrance of her giant rosemary bushes infusing that cool stone living room.

While studying with Dennis, I won the New York City AGO organ competition, and to my joy and astonishment got into Juilliard for fall 1983 to pursue my dream of studying Messiaen’s works with Messiaen’s protégé, the sublime artist Dr. Jon Gillock. What a world Jon brought me into; what an extraordinary friendship we built. Messiaen’s harmonies, registrations, birdsongs, and Hindu rhythms blew my mind. Through all this, improvisation took a back seat until three things happened at once: first, Dennis gave me Marcel Dupré’s two improvisation books; second, I began studying improvisation at Juilliard with my dear friend and colleague, the legendary improviser “Uncle” Gerre Hancock at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (that’s an article all its own!); and third, I heard Paul Halley’s iconic improvisation album Nightwatch on the great organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where he was organist and choirmaster.

If there was a seminal person, moment, place, and organ in my improvisation career, this was it: Paul Halley at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the mind-blowing Aeolian-Skinner Opus 150-A, “Miss Scarlett,” housed in the cathedral’s astounding eight-second acoustic (now nine seconds since the 2001 post-fire restoration!). Paul Halley’s organ improvs exploded my mind, ears, and musical imagination. In his playing I heard jazz improvisation like nothing I’d ever heard; he used the organ in ways I never imagined possible, especially the strings. I memorized Paul’s album, tried to replicate his sophisticated progressions, his sonic palette, his tricks with acoustics. I worked my butt off learning this extraordinary new thing: jazz-infused improvisation on a pipe organ, wonder of wonders! My four improvisers (two hands, two feet) found their home. This is when I made the commitment to find my voice and forge my own style.

My “second childhood,” as I call my twenty-three years at Saint John the Divine, began prior to my Juilliard studies, as a Barnard College junior in 1980. One autumn Friday I was unexpectedly called in as a last-minute sub to play for the cathedral’s weekend sleepover-in-the-crypt youth program, Nightwatch. It went so well that I was invited back on many Friday nights when Paul Halley was on tour with the Paul Winter Consort. Nightwatch and I would continue together for the next nine years, and it became my weekly “improv lab” to try out new ideas! Can I even begin to describe what it was like to be in that vast, dark cathedral on those marvelous cold winter Friday and Saturday nights, improvising in the dark and speaking to thousands of kids visiting from across the country about the great organ, showing off its cool sounds and taking them on a grand sonic ride they still to this day write to me about?

While at Juilliard in 1983, I found my courage to write Paul Halley asking if he’d consider taking me on as an improv student, knowing he didn’t teach because of his heavy touring and cathedral schedule. But, oh my goodness, he asked me to come in and play for him! He’d heard about my subbing at Nightwatch, and I’ll always remember that audition: afternoon light in the great organ loft, me seated on the bench, terrified in awe to be in Paul’s presence as he opened the hymnal to a Gregorian chant, one I would soon come to cherish, Conditor alme siderum.

I don’t remember what I improvised; I do remember thinking I made a total hash of it! I finished, waited in silence, then turned. Paul was relaxed, leaning back, arms stretched wide along the organ loft railing. With that great smile of his, he nodded saying, “Yes, I’ll work with you.” I thought I would die. My spontaneous squeal of joy echoed through the cathedral! What a privilege to become Paul’s improvisation protégé. And what a challenge: I never worked so hard in my life, never felt such a drive to excel, to prove myself and to achieve my dream of becoming a great improviser. And in all those years of study, Paul never charged me for a lesson.

In January 1984 Paul asked me to substitute for him in my first ever Paul Winter Consort gig at the Princeton University Chapel on their colossal organ. Thus began my nearly forty-year friendship and life-changing work with my dear friend and musical guru Paul Winter. Here was an entire band of world-class improvisers who welcomed me with open arms. And who knew one could improvise with humpback whales, timber wolves, or canyon wrens? Again my sonic world exploded! In 1986 Paul Halley named me cathedral organ scholar and trained me up on how to devise choral accompaniments and hymns in the English Cathedral style. In 1987 he and the dean appointed me cathedral assistant organist and then in 1990, when Paul left the cathedral, I was appointed cathedral organist. I remember once asking Paul why he hired me, and I’ve never forgotten his answer: “Because you’re great with kids (the Cathedral Choristers), you’re an accomplished woman organist (an endangered species in 1980s New York), and you read Samba charts (unheard of for an organist!).” Wow. There it was: all my years of improvisation and jazz landed me the coolest job on planet Earth.

A funny side note to this: at Juilliard my dear teacher Dr. Jon Gillock fully supported my improvisation work with Paul Halley. Jon deeply revered the great French organ improvisers and wanted me to give my improv and repertoire studies equal effort like the French do. But Juilliard found out and threatened to expel me for studying with a teacher outside the school, even though I had Dr. Gillock’s blessing. So, I assured the powers-that-be that I would stop—and of course, I didn’t! Never in a million years could I have imagined when I graduated from Juilliard with my master’s degree in organ at age twenty-five that in four short years I would be appointed the first woman cathedral organist at Saint John the Divine, because of my improv chops!

How does improvising in concert settings differ to you from liturgical settings?

There is quite a difference for me, like two alternate sonic worlds with very separate harmonic languages, techniques, themes, timings, feeling, purpose, audience, energetic intent, all of it. In accompanying silent films, my job (as I learned in reading my hero Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography) is to provide the emotional subtext of every scene: to improvise music that provides the emotional counterpoint to the action to enhance, not compete with, its drama, comedy, and conflict, and also to prepare the audience for what’s coming in the next scene. The music is the narrator. It must be subtle yet blunt, amorphous yet cued, often with specific timed “hits” (like a crash or surprise), and it is very much about surrendering to the three-way micro-millisecond relationship between oneself, the audience, and the actors. It’s a powerful and very real energetic triangle, and when you give yourself over to it, that’s when the magic happens, when the audience gets lost in the film and forgets you’re there.

In liturgical settings it’s all about surrender, again, but this time it’s surrender to what is ineffable, wonder-filled, and sacred inside each person in a holy gathering. Here we are, friends and strangers gathered in worship in a once-in-a-lifetime gathering that’ll never be repeated in all of time, with all our burdens, sorrows, challenges, and joys. I’ve found that yearning is at the core of everyone’s worship—our deep yearning for divine intervention, divine comfort, for the sublime, for answers, transformation, the soul aching to be heard and held. Organ music can express and even meet this yearning like nothing else. Whether it helps people cry and release, or is a cradle of peace, or uplifts them in an ecstatic experience of the divine, it is a sacred honor and opportunity we organists are entrusted with.

The very first thing I do in any performance is “take the temperature” of the room. Even thirty feet up and three hundred feet away hidden in a cathedral organ loft, you can feel a congregation’s mood. It’s hard to describe, but it’s palpable. It’s a vibration that imbues the space. I use this as the starting point of my prelude improv, the launch of any Sunday morning’s spiritual journey in which we organists are the first soul to express our yearning. Gradually the congregation joins us in hymn singing, joins the clergy in prayer, and together we go on the journey.

My musical goal in any liturgy is to shift the mood from what it was at the start to something entirely new and different by the end. My liturgical harmonic language is completely different and more contemporary than my silent film language. Silent films tend to dictate what harmonies and progressions work so you don’t “take the audience out of the film.” In a liturgy, I find there’s room for broader expression and risk-taking, especially in a big acoustic on a big instrument with lots of toys onboard. My liturgical improvs are infused with jazz and French Romantic harmonic worlds and massive rhythm. I’m talking massive; rhythm is everything! It’s the heartbeat of any improvisation, loud or soft, fast or slow.

Paul Halley taught me this. It’s what thrills and soars and tingles and creates awe. You could vamp on plain old C major with a killer rhythmic pattern, a few textural shifts, a 32′ Bombarde, and it’ll make your congregation stomp and cheer! I aim for one thing in my liturgical improvs: to continually lift up, even in somber Lenten modal mysterious improvs. I constantly let myself let go—this keeps the journey lifting and wondering (versus wandering!) for whomever I’m playing. If I’m surprised, they’ll be surprised; if I’m moved, they’ll be moved. I tell my students that improv is sheer blind trust; it’s surrender to divine channeling. It’s losing one’s conscious thought, so time stands still and you can’t remember what you played. And that’s when they really go on the ride with you. That’s when you come out of it thinking, “Wow, what just happened?” That’s when your congregation knows you gave yourself to them. I never, ever forget this maxim: “You can’t fool an audience.” They just somehow know if you’re holding back or are bored, scared, unprepared, not into it, or not giving your all—they know when there’s no lift off!

Do you consider yourself to have your own distinct musical language? Is there anything distinctly “American” about your improvising?

My musical passion is world music. I love combining ethnic sounds, especially Greek, Brazilian, Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Asian. I love stretching where the organ can go, seeing what part of the world it can travel to through a culture’s musical voice. That’s what I loved at Saint John the Divine in those golden years under the visionary leadership of our global-minded dean, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton. One minute I’d be playing Tibetan music for the Dalai Lama, then Eritrean hymns at a Coptic funeral, then Sakura for a Japanese tea ceremony, then “Hava Nagila” at a Jewish-Christian wedding, then New York, New York on the State Trumpet celebrating a Yankees-Mets Subway Series! If you see our magnificent country as the great melting pot of immigrants, then yes, my improvs and compositions are highly “American” in that I embrace all our ethnic styles. In terms of my own style, I don’t know how to describe it. I just know it as me and that it’s ever evolving. I’m often told by people, “Oh, Dorothy, I just knew when I walked in it was you playing—I’d know that sound anywhere!” I always wonder to myself, which sound(s) gave me away?

Tell us more about your jazz background and how it informs your improvising at the organ.

In addition to what I described above, I’d add two things: the legendary jazz pianist Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny Group, with whom I had the tremendous privilege of studying jazz composition, told me, “Dorothy, if I ever hear you cadenced with plain old V–I, I’ll call the jazz police!” And Lyle also said, “The greatest musicians on the planet are jazz players. They can improvise in any style because they get inside the style, they don’t just copy it.” I’ve bided by Lyle’s words throughout my career.

Do you ever imitate specific composers or historical styles?

Oh yes, of course! We all stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before us, and we borrow from our contemporaries, too. No musicians, especially improvisers, are creative islands unto themselves. Day and night we unconsciously take in shards of music, hooks, and tunes we’re not aware of. They lodge and cook in our musical psyche, then days later pop out in a gig or writing session, and we’re like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” I borrow rhythmic hooks from Bartók, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Ravel; toccata patterns from Cochereau, Vierne, and Dupré; and every day I listen on BBC Radio 1 to the hottest pop, chill, dance, and cutting-edge tracks. I relax to Indian ragas and cook to electronic soundscape artists like Aurah. It all informs my improvs, my music theater scores, my organ and choral works. In fact, I’m listening to Aurah while writing this: it’s “I Decree Peace” on their Etherea Borealis album. Check it out!

How does improvisation differ from composing to you? Do you prefer one or the other?

To me improvisation is spontaneous composition, and composition is repeated improvisation until you find something you want to save and write down. They are equal in fertility and joy to me. I’d say the great gift that improvisation brings to a composer is to know if you don’t like something you wrote, you can improvise a hundred other ideas to replace it with! Composer-improvisers trust the unlimited flowing fountain of ideas inside of them. It’s unfailing, and the perfect idea is always just an improv away. Improvisation is ultimately just about trusting the unknown yet to be revealed in you. Each of us is a creative giant we have this lifetime to get to know, so from me to you I say, “Go for it, and rock da house!”

Reflection

I hope readers are as fascinated and stirred by Dorothy’s words as I am. She reminds us, if I may use a tired cliché, not to neglect the trees (as Dorothy clearly has done her homework, thoroughly learning music theory and technique, inside and out), but truly to see and appreciate the whole forest. I’m not sure about each of you, but that’s a reminder I needed at this moment. May each of us heed Dorothy’s advice to “go for it.” ν

Dorothy Papadakos’s website: dorothypapadakos.com

Experience Dorothy’s artistry at our website: thediapason.com/videos/dorothy-papadakos-plays-phantom-opera

Photo caption: The amphitheater at Epidaurus (photo credit: Carole Raddato, used through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

A break in the action

Last night, my wife Wendy and I watched the American Masters documentary, “Where Now Is,” about Michael Tilson Thomas, widely known as MTT, who recently retired as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. His tenure in San Francisco spanned nearly twenty-five years during which the orchestra grew in stature and popularity. I admire how a brilliant conductor can build an orchestra over time, nurturing the musicianship of the individual players and the strength of the ensemble. I consider the symphony orchestra to be one of the greatest achievements of human culture. It amazes me that all those musicians, each an accomplished soloist with the requisite ego, can come together on a hundred-foot stage and perform with such precision of ensemble.

MTT had a dramatic conducting debut at a very young age. On October 22, 1969, William Steinberg was conducting a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, opening the program with Brahms’s Second Symphony during which he fell ill. At the end of the piece, Steinberg left the stage, found MTT, assistant conductor of the BSO, said something like, “Put on a suit. You’re going to conduct,” and was taken to Roosevelt Hospital. 

The following morning, Harold Schoenberg of The New York Times reported, “Young Mr. Thomas, 24 years old, had his golden opportunity and made the most of it. He conducted Robert Starer’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel with an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” (Leonard Bernstein had a similar sudden debut. He was twenty-five when he filled in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.)

MTT’s precocious brilliance kick-started his storied career as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic before going to San Francisco. Perhaps his crowning achievement is the creation of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida. Founded in 1987, the New World Symphony is an orchestral academy whose mission statement is “to prepare highly gifted graduates of distinguished music programs for leadership roles in ensembles and orchestras around the world.” 

I was especially moved to watch MTT in private coaching sessions with the young musicians of the New World Symphony, as well as his rehearsal techniques with the full orchestra. Wendy and I commented to each other that he was always smiling. Of course, the editor of the film may have had some control over that, moments of ill temper left on the cutting room floor, but I don’t think so.

Frank Gehry was the principal architect for the spectacular New World Center, home of the New World Symphony, opened in Miami Beach in 2011. Hilariously, it was noted that Gehry was MTT’s babysitter when both were growing up in Los Angeles. 

Watching that film was bittersweet. It has been more than a year since we sat in a concert hall to hear an orchestra perform. The last live performance Wendy and I saw together was a disappointing new opera, four days before she left the city for our exile in Maine. (I followed her four days later.) MTT’s enthusiasm and that of the many colleagues we saw in orchestras and in separate interviews was infectious and a poignant reminder of all that we have lost in the last year. As I remember our life in the city, I think of the many thrilling plays, musicals, and concerts we have seen. I think of the stagehands, ushers, electricians, carpenters, costume designers, and actors whose livelihood vanished overnight. A quick look at my calendar shows that I had dinner with a colleague in a posh restaurant in lower Manhattan on Thursday, March 12, 2020, the same day that forty-two Broadway theaters, countless off-Broadway venues, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and many other cultural venues closed. It first seemed that those places would reopen in a few weeks, but that was not to be.

Weathering the storm

In the December 2015 issue of The Diapason, I wrote of our first visit with our grandson Samuel, four days after his birth. In that essay, I wondered what life would bring him, I looked forward to being able to share cultural experiences with him and his older brother Benjamin, and I wondered what their educations would be like. I remembered the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who taught music in the public schools when I was a kid, making twice-a-week visits to each classroom, braying simple songs. She drew staves on the blackboard with that cool five-gang chalk holder and taught us musical notation. “Every good boy deserves fudge,” but come to think of it, I do not remember what the girls got. I don’t think that is going to happen for them in public school.

As I thought about that precious young life, I could not have imagined that he’d spend his fifth birthday on lockdown, or that Chris would take leave from his job as a high school teacher, develop a curriculum for approval by the school principal, and home-school his sons so they would not have to spend all of Covid-tide glued to screens. I could not have imagined that they would have to be isolated from their friends, many of whom they can see from the windows of their condominium apartment or learn to wear masks whenever they leave their home.

I wonder what it will be like for them when the coast is clear and they can re-socialize. Will they experience growing pains as they reconnect with their pals? Will it be hard for them to return to classroom learning? We all wonder together what the “new normal” will be, even as we look forward to returning to a former life.

Rusty

On February 3, 2021, Gregory Wallace and Pete Muntean reported on CNN that airline pilots who had been idled by reduced air travel during the pandemic are finding that they are rusty when they return to the air and making errors managing their aircraft. Early in their article they wrote, “‘This was my first flight in nearly three months,’ one pilot wrote in a June report explaining why he or she neglected to turn on the critical anti-icing system. ‘I placed too much confidence in assuming it would all come back to me as second nature.’” A few paragraphs down, there was a bold heading, “Boy, was I wrong!”

Watching MTT lead rehearsals had me wondering what it will take to rebuild musical ensembles when the spread of the virus is contained. A symphony orchestra becomes great because its members play together all the time. They are in rehearsal and concerts five or six days a week, and they learn the musical intuitions as well as the quirks and habits of their fellow musicians. A violinist might think to herself, “He’s going to flub that note at the page-turn,” and compensate subconsciously. A second clarinet is inspired by the principal to stretch that phrase just a touch. How much rejuvenation will it take to rebuild the intimate ensemble, that greatest of collegial achievements? Musicians often refer to a sloppy performance as a “train wreck.” I hope “plane crash” does not become part of that lexicon.

Will a rusty theater electrician fail to tighten a bolt allowing a light to fall during a play?¹ Will actors and dancers step on each other’s toes? Will they have crises of confidence? Performance is a tricky thing that blends pedagogy, intuition, memory, expression, and confidence. Remember Harold Schoenberg writing that MTT conducted with “an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” I love that his confidence was not misplaced. Any performer knows exactly what that means and so do astute listeners, as in, “He had no business being that sure of himself.” I know I have played concerts during which my confidence was misplaced.

§

Human creativity reached a zenith in the last centuries before the birth of Christ. The marvelous architecture of ancient Rome and Greece, the literature of Sophocles and Euripides, and the mathematical understanding of Archimedes and Euclid all bear witness to the genius of that age. And don’t forget my hero Pythagoras (570 BC–495 BC) who discovered the musical overtone series, defined musical intervals, and developed systems of tuning.

The Sacred Triangle of Greece comprises the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) in Athens, and the Temple of Athena Aphaia on the island of Aegina. The three sites were built within a few years of each other around 500 BC and form a perfect isosceles triangle, a hundred miles on each side. How did they plot that triangle when one leg crosses mountains and the other two cross bodies of water? Celestial navigation was first practiced by the Phoenecians around 2000 BC, and in the second century BC, Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer, developed the concept of longitude, assuming a spherical earth and dividing it into 360 degrees.

Several years ago, visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, Greece, her father-in-law Christos, an architect, took us to visit the Sanctuary of Asklepios, the god of medicine, at Epidaurus, about ninety miles from Athens. We have probably visited a dozen Greek amphitheaters, but the one at Epidaurus, built in the fourth century BC and seating 14,000, takes the cake. The immense structure is a section of a perfect sphere that produces whispering acoustics in a vast space and has remained perfectly level for over two thousand years. How did they do that without a laser-level? How did they know the ground would be that stable for millennia? How did they plot that perfect sphere?

Christos told how he worked for a large architectural firm that held retreats at that site, when the head of the firm posed the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the library at Alexandria?” That library was a depository of human knowledge recorded in hundreds of thousands of scrolls, estimated to be the equivalent of 100,000 books. Its destruction was part of the decline of intellectual activity that led to the Dark Ages, which ran roughly from 700 AD until the thirteenth century. It was a time of ignorance and war, and as populations increased faster than medical care developed, the era was rife with disease and pandemics such as the Black Death.

Humankind broke out of the Dark Ages into a time of explosive creativity. In the world of music, we remember the remarkable pipe organ in Sion, Switzerland (approximately 1390), Guillame DuFay (1397–1474), Johannes Ockeghem (died 1497), and Josquin des Prez (died 1521). Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had a lot to say in the arts and sciences, Titian (1490–1576) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) brought the visual arts to dizzying heights. 

§

Our year of pandemic is a hiccup compared to the Dark Ages, but just as the Renaissance bloomed out of despair, I think we are going to see an explosion of creativity when orchestras can return to the stage and rehearsal room, when theaters can open and host dramatic expression, when museums can welcome in crowds hungry to learn, and when we can gather with friends before or after a concert to revel in the thrill of creativity and the thrall of our lasting companionship.

While Facebook is full of flaws and has certainly made it easy for people to stir up trouble, I have loved witnessing the “creativity in exile” of many friends and colleagues. People have been sharing their Covid-tide projects, learning new literature, writing new music, finding ways to create ensembles online, all to keep the arts alive. I have seen performances of Bach cantatas on Zoom that project the intimacy of musical relationships and love of the music. If those great pieces can be brought alive remotely, I cannot wait to hear how musicians interact when they can gather in person again.

I have been thinking especially about church choirs. In my days as a church musician, choir night was a highlight of the week. Thinking of my own workload and availability of volunteer time, I appreciated the ability of people to carve out that time. Many of the members of choirs I led had young children, so their participation depended on the willingness of a spouse to be at home making supper, supervising homework, and making sure the kids got cleaned up and to bed on time. And each Thursday evening, as many as a dozen choir members came to our house for BYOB after rehearsal, singing around the piano, ordering pizza, building a loving social group as part of their volunteer service to their church.

Those deep and lasting friendships had everything to do with the quality of their music making. Chatting about the music over drinks after a rehearsal is a big part of ensemble building, as are shared visions, shared life experiences, shared opinions, and shared jokes. A choir that can laugh together sings better together. I remember an evening when we were working on a particularly difficult passage in William Byrd’s five-part (with two tenors) setting of Ave, Maria, when in frustration, one of the tenors burst out with “Oy vey, Maria,” and the choir fell into the kind of unstoppable laughter that makes your eyes water and your belly hurt. It took a few more readings of the piece before we could pass that measure without cracking up, but the performance was the richer for it.

Tens of thousands of devoted choir members are missing all that these days. I encourage those of you who lead choirs to be nurturing your groups, maintaining those social and musical relationships in any way possible, and helping the volunteers to look forward to returning to the marvelous work of making music for the church. Won’t it be great to see the vested choir waiting at the back of the church as you start that processional hymn with a room full of people?

It’s not a train.

There’s a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are spreading across the globe, and they are proving to be effective. While most large cultural institutions are still closed or operating with significantly reduced schedules and capacities, there is a sense that we may be over the hump. I know I am eager to get back on the road and resume my former pattern of visiting the organs that I am dealing with. As I correspond with so many of you, I am longing for the time when I can call and say, “I’ll be in town next week, can we meet?” And I am looking forward to witnessing the celebrations as orchestras get back to work and our beloved church choirs can be free to have their fun. Be sure you’re ready, and when the time comes, give it all you’ve got.

Notes

1. I was once sitting in a concert hall with my first wife, waiting for a friend’s voice recital to start, when a heavy stage light crashed in front of the piano, right where the singer would have stood. The falling light was enough to cancel the concert. This was when my children were young, and we got home far earlier than expected to find the babysitter on the couch making out with her boyfriend. “Hi, this is Jimmie.”

Follow the money.

In the spring of 2023 Wendy and I went to Tuscany, my first time in Italy where we visited Florence and Bologna. We also spent several nights in a villa borrowed from a friend in a small town called Camaiore. Marco runs a wine shop in lower Manhattan and is a classic “foodie.” He gave us a list of the markets where we should mention his name, and we had a blast buying the best Italian ingredients and cooking in his beautiful kitchen. The funny thing was that the drain in the five-foot-wide copper sink was not at the lowest point, so we had to keep pushing the water uphill.

Bologna is a gustatory capital with an extensive district devoted to specialty food shops, and we spent an afternoon with a foodie tour guide. We visited a small “laboratory” where a half-dozen women were making pasta for one of the shops. What magic to watch that ancient craft, and what a delight to sample their products from paper cups while they worked. We had meals in wonderful intimate restaurants and fell in love with the ubiquitous local Sangiovese grapes.

Our visit to Florence was revelatory. I took a half-dozen art history courses in college and have long been aware of the vast collections of art housed in Florence, but I was not prepared for the depth and majesty of the place. I was also not prepared for the vast throngs of tourists pulsing through the narrow streets. Florence is frightfully crowded, but in spite of the bad behaviors of some tourists, it is worth the struggle. Florence is all laid out on streets that were established in the fifteenth century and before, and you never saw such a cute little garbage truck.

We managed a magical moment in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Art Works of the Cathedral) by arriving just when it opened while the masses were still sleeping off their Aperol spritzes and were privileged to stand alone for long minutes in the gallery of Michelangelo’s La Pietà, carved from a huge block of Carrara marble and completed in 1555 just before the artist’s eightieth birthday. Once again, a private tour guide helped enlighten us and gained us access for some shorter lines, especially to see Michelangelo’s David.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici founded the Medici bank in 1397, starting a powerful dynasty that became Italy’s wealthiest family. The bank’s early prosperity was based on the busy silk and textile trade in the region and expanded into many other industries, giving the Medici family seats of power that lasted nearly three centuries through the high Renaissance. Many of the official and ceremonial buildings in Florence were funded by the Medicis, who were also patrons of Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo. They funded the basilicas of Saint Peter in Rome and Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which houses a bewildering collection of art. The Medicis’ fingers are everywhere in Tuscany. Wealthy patrons have always been important supporters of the arts, providing funding for iconic buildings, musical compositions, public sculptures, and performance venues.

Running a railroad

Wendy and I moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three years ago and have been feasting on the wide range of cultural institutions in our area. It is an hour drive to Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), which occupies a vast old mill building in North Adams, Massachusetts. The Clark Art Institute, also an hour away in Williamstown, Massachusetts, houses a huge collection of fine art by the old masters and contemporary artists. The Norman Rockwell Museum is ten minutes from us. We sometimes walk there using a back way because the grounds are so beautiful and Farley the Goldendoodle loves to run in the surrounding fields. Jacob’s Pillow is a busy dance venue where we attended a performance by the Royal Ballet last week.

The crown jewel of the area is Tanglewood, ten minutes from home, the 500-acre summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) was the conductor of the BSO when Tanglewood was founded. Today it hosts a wide variety of artists including James Taylor (who gave his fiftieth consecutive July Fourth concert there this year), the Boston Pops, and a galaxy of classical stars. In the past week we have heard the brilliant Chinese pianist Yuja Wang play twice, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the BSO in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, the 5,100-seat venue with roof and no walls, and a solo recital in Ozawa Hall featuring eight preludes by Shostakovich, the Barber Piano Sonata, and Four Ballades by Chopin.

Each weekend the orchestra is playing at Tanglewood, the BSO publishes a program book of around seventy-five pages, which includes the programs for four concerts, biographies of the performers, and program notes for all the music. There are brief histories of both the orchestra and Tanglewood, health and safety protocols, and there are six pages listing the donors and patrons who have contributed amounts ranging from $5,000 to “Ten Million and Above.” In this weekend’s book, there are eight names in “Ten Million and Above,” five in “Seven and One Half Million,” sixteen in “Five Million,” thirty-nine in “Two and One Half Million,” and a hundred-twenty-six in “One Million.” The categories imply ranges, those named in the one million group gave between one and two-and-a-half million, but assuming that each gift was at the base amount of the group, those gifts totaled $421,000,000.

Mark Volpe, the BSO’s longtime president and chief executive officer, retired in 2021 after twenty-three years in that position. During his tenure, the BSO’s annual budget increased from $49,000,000 to $107,000,000, and the orchestra’s endowment tripled to $456,000,000.

The current roster of the BSO is published on pages 12–13 of the program book for July 12–14. It includes ninety-four musicians, fifty-three of whom occupy named chairs “endowed in perpetuity.” John Ferrillo has been principal oboe of the BSO since 2001. Before that, he was principal of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In 2015 he was paid $286,621; nine years later it must be significantly more.¹ How much money must be set aside to endow Ferrillo’s chair in perpetuity? Enough that the proceeds of the principal will produce over $300,000 which is likely over $6,000,000. Perhaps not all the endowed chairs support salaries as high as Ferrillo’s, but it is fair to guess that they would add up to $245,000,000, and there are another forty musicians in seats that are not endowed. That is what it takes to run that railroad. Toby Oft, the principal trombone, sits in the J. P. and Mary Barger Chair, endowed in perpetuity. Their son Jeff was my pal from fifth to twelfth grades in Winchester, Massachusetts. Like his father, Jeff played the trombone.

In March of 2017 we heard the BSO play Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Carnegie Hall in New York, the composer’s response to the Siege of Leningrad, the 857-day blockade by the Nazis during which nearly a million people died of starvation. That extraordinary piece opens with a plaintive melody on the oboe accompanied by sparse percussion, and the entire first movement is a great crescendo based on that theme. John Ferrillo was the oboe soloist who recreated the misery and anxiety of the besieged city. He is a terrific oboe player. I wrote about that concert in the May 2017 issue of The Diapason under the title, “Music in a terrible time.”

Wendy and I heard Mark Volpe give a lecture at the Lenox (Massachusetts) Library last April during which he reminisced about the highs and lows of his time with the orchestra, like the winding down and end of James Levine’s career as music director and the search that brought Andris Nelsons to Boston. He mentioned in passing that, unlike any other major American orchestra, the BSO owns 107 buildings. If you spend any time at Tanglewood, you will realize that some of them are lawn mower sheds (there is a mighty amount of mown grass there), emergency weather shelters (violent summer thunderstorms come out of nowhere in the Berkshires), restrooms, and concession stands. But that 107 also includes Symphony Hall in Boston, the Shed and Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, and the new Linde Center at Tanglewood, among other distinguished buildings. In contrast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a tenant in Disney Hall, and the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera are both tenants at Lincoln Center.

The administrative staff of the BSO takes up two pages of the program book, and development is the largest department with thirty-six directors and associates listed, implying that there is a larger staff supporting the directors. Are there a hundred or more people in the development department toiling away at the business of raising the money for their own salaries and those of the rest of the staff, the orchestra members, and the people running the lawn mowers? They should be the most popular people on campus.

Besides the massive fundraising efforts, the BSO sees significant ticket revenue at Tanglewood. Lawn seats are $22, which buys you space to spread a picnic blanket or set up chairs, and you can see the action on the stage on huge video screens. Seats in the shed range from about $25 to over $100 close up, and we have been to a few signature concerts where the tickets cost close to $200. Remember that the Shed seats 5,100 people, so a good house is bringing in several hundred thousand dollars, or just enough for a year of John Ferillo’s salary.

Before a concert, the Tanglewood lawn is a splendid spectacle. The lawn around the Shed is huge, and thousands of people are likely to be enjoying their picnics. It is amazing how lush and green the lawn is between concerts. There is an elegant marble monument in memory of a revered head groundskeeper, an indication of the importance of that position. Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland have statues on the grounds, but a monument to a groundskeeper is pretty good. Someone has to marshal all those lawn mowers, and more complicated, how do you keep grass growing if 4,000 people have picnics on the lawn three times a week? There are rules about bug spray printed in the program books.

Tanglewood was founded with the gift of a 210-acre estate from the Tappan family in 1936. The Tappan Manor House is preserved on the grounds and houses a museum and administrative offices. The first concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky was held under a tent on August 5, 1937. Eliel Saarinen designed an open-air concert venue, but the $100,000 budget was inadequate, and Saarinen wrote that the proposed budget would be enough for “just a shed, which any builder could accomplish without the aid of an architect.” The trustees of the orchestra enlisted engineer Joseph Franz of Stockbridge, and the shed was dedicated on August 4, 1938.

I marvel at the vision involved in founding such an institution. It took just a couple years to get it off the ground, and within a few years it was flourishing. Koussevitzky founded the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940, which quickly became one of the premier centers for advanced musical training. My trusty program book includes this statement:

Prominent TMC alumni include Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Stephanie Blythe, Karina Canellakis, Anthony Cheung, Phyllis Curtin, Christoph von Dohnányi, Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Gilbert Kalish, Oliver Knussen, Wynton Marsalis, Ludovic Morlot, Seiji Ozawa, Leontyne Price, Sanford Sylvan, Michael Tilson Thomas, Davóne Tine, Dawn Upshaw, and Shirley Verrett, as well as some 40 current members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

And to build an organ?

All of us in the organ building trade are familiar with the task and techniques of raising money as it routinely costs hundreds of thousands of dollars if not several million to build or renovate a pipe organ. Over the years I have come to realize that a community of people banding together to raise a million dollars for a musical instrument is a radical act. It takes vision and commitment, smart guidance, and lots of study. It takes planning, wisdom, and let’s face it, good politics. Organ projects are not successful if they are not supported by a common bond or agreement, a political base. I tell the organ committees that I work with that the hard part of an organ project is creating that foundation and raising the money. The easy part is when you give the money to an organbuilder asking them to do what they know best.

Sometimes an organ is funded by a single gift and a big plaque gets screwed to the organ case. This is especially true at universities and colleges. Sometimes there are several lead gifts, perhaps in six figures, followed by dozens of more modest gifts. I love seeing donor lists that include the few-dollars-at-a-time gifts from Sunday School classes. That is when you know the organ project has wide support in the congregation.

Yuja

I mentioned in passing that Wendy and I heard Yuja Wang play a solo recital at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. It was such a special evening that it merits some more comment. As I wrote earlier, the program included music of Shostakovich, Barber, and Chopin. While the preludes of Shostakovich are short, they are complex, meaty, and sophisticated. The Barber sonata is a towering, monumental work, and the demanding four Chopin ballades formed a varied, beefy second half of the program. Last winter, Yuja showed the world her immense stamina by playing all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Variations on a Theme of Paganini in one program that lasted over four hours. The other night her published program was nearly two hours long (including intermission), and as the audience howled in approval, she played six encores including transcriptions of several symphonic movements and the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the braying donkey. One of the encores, which I did not recognize, was interrupted by a ringing cell phone, and she abruptly left the stage—but she came back to play three more. I think she really loves playing the piano.

Yuja Wang was born in 1987; she is thirty-seven years old. When she was fifteen, she entered the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Gary Graffman, and that year she won the concerto competition at the Aspen Music Festival. Before she was twenty, she was an international star.

She has dazzling stage presence with a brisk walk to and from the piano, a lightning-fast deep bow from the hips that sets her hair flying, a quick transition from standing to sitting, demanding the audience’s attention with the set of her hands over the keys, and a commanding start for each piece, whether it is a bombastic tour-de-force or a gentle breath. There are hundreds of videos of her playing on YouTube, and you sure can see her flinging a lot of notes around. One of her famous encores is a fantasy on themes from Carmen, and you just cannot believe how many notes are being played, but the sonority of her softest notes, the results of just touching the keys, are a deep part of her magical musical genius.

The other night, we were fortunate to have seats on the stage behind her, and her path to and from the stage door was just a couple feet from us. It is clear to see the love she has for music, for the art of performing, for her audience. Such a roar from that audience. There were several people near us shouting her name at the top of their voices each time she entered the stage and each time the music stopped. They made her smile. I thanked her as she walked past between encores, and she smiled at me. What a night.

Notes

1. Ferrillo’s 2015 salary was published in the Boston Globe on July 16, 2018, in a story about salary equity in the orchestra, as principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe filed a lawsuit claiming that she held a comparable position in the orchestra but was being paid 25% less. Ferrillo wrote in support of Rowe’s claim, stating that she held a position equal in prominence and responsibility to his and that she was an artist of equal ability. They sit next to each other on stage.

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.

Why art?

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is a magnificent and monumental painting. Almost nine feet tall and more than six feet wide, it is a compelling work in which I see a shy and slightly frightened Mary holding a burly infant who sports a Gotti-esque pout. (Whadaya gonna doo?) Saint Sixtus, the patron saint of the church for whom the painting was commissioned, is shown in the thrall of the mother and child, and Saint Barbara, whose presence was also specified by the commission, looks down at two putti resting their chins, arms, and elbows on the bottom frame of the painting.

Because of its huge scale and rich colors (it’s my guess that in real life, Mary never had such opulent garments), it is a real eye catcher, but those two little imps are the stars of the show. A legend says that they were the children of Raphael’s model, and he painted them just as they looked six hours into the tenth day of watching their mother stand still for the master. Their expressions convey both disinterest and cunning, and they are clearly not impressed by the exalted infant. As grandfather of two boys about the ages of the putti, I have seen those expressions before, and know that they signal time for a diversion. “Hey, boys, let’s go outside.”

Raphael’s putti have been plucked from the painting and reproduced and marketed as if they were nacho chips or soda pop, appearing on post cards, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and tote bags. They are adorable, but something of the original poignancy is lost.

When the pope commissioned the painting, did Raphael take it on as a job, happy to have the income and simply accepting that he was better at painting than others, so it was natural that it would be his job? Or did he take it on as a spiritual challenge, setting out to do something so good that mere mortals would never be able to fully understand?

You can order a 16′′ x 24′′ framed print of Sistine Madonna from Amazon for $29.99, and a 9.5′′ x 7.9′′ mouse pad picturing the putti for $9.99.

Musicians know that the music of Bach or Mozart is the work of genius. When you study the music mathematically and theoretically, you get a sense of what the composer had in mind. But for all its majesty and intricacy, I heard “Brandenburg Five” playing at Starbucks the other day when I ordered coffee. If the barista had been a struggling young musician, perhaps she would have worked the steam nozzle in time with the music. A little puff of steam on “one and three” would have been cute. But no. Bach’s ingenious creation was coexisting with her off-beat steam punk, competing with the grinder reducing my beans for espresso and the gabbling of the women wearing headsets working the drive-thru window.

Michelangelo’s David in a snow globe; Rodin’s Thinker as a paperweight; Rondo ala Turca in an elevator; history’s artistic milestones reduced to the commonplace. Wendy and I are lucky to live in New York City, where great museums are sprinkled across the map, and we can experience many of the greatest artworks at the other end of a short subway ride. Van Gogh’s Starry Night looks fine on a t-shirt, but when you see it in person in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it takes your breath away. Monet produced around 250 “Water Lilies” paintings, all showing scenes of the beautiful gardens at his home in Giverny. Just like Starry Night, they look nice on t-shirts, but if you have only seen them in that format, you might not realize that they get as big as 13 by 41 feet. That is a huge amount of paint for someone who was suffering from cataracts.

As Monet produced hundreds of gorgeous images in spite of failing eyesight, so Beethoven gave us some of the most sublime, defiant, innovative, and powerful masterworks of music as he was losing his hearing. We know enough about him to have a sense that he could be cranky. If your life is creating spectacular music, I will forgive you a fit or two if you are losing your hearing. A legend has Beethoven playing the piano for a group of socialites in a lavish drawing room, angered by their inattention and chatter, slamming the fall board, standing up to announce, “For such pigs I will not play,” and storming out of the room.

§

Dictionary definitions of art use phrases like, “. . . works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Art is pictures, sculptures, music, literature, and drama. Art can be fiction or non-fiction. A bowl of pears and grapes sitting on a table next to a candlestick may be a non-fiction subject, but the fact that every glistening drop of moisture, every vein in a leaf, and iridescent surface of the fruit is represented in paint applied by human hands is the art part. That still life is art because of its beauty more than its emotional power, while Starry Night is all about emotional power.

A painting that depicts a historical event, a battle, or an armistice for example, would be non-fiction. But what about a painting of a biblical scene? Asking whether The Last Supper is fiction feels like a great way to start an argument. I am guessing that most texts that have been set to music are fiction. Most operas and most art songs are fables, allegories, stories, or poetry. I am afraid to categorize sacred music that way. Like The Last Supper, it feels a little dangerous to ask if the Latin Mass is fiction.

But what about a trio sonata, a symphony, or a piano concerto? Can they be defined as fiction or non-fiction? There is something abstract about the concept of music, even tonal music that is controlled and defined by complex sets of rules. It is sound that is organized vertically in chords, all of which are ultimately derived from the overtones that are the structure of any musical note, and it is sound that is organized in time. How chords progress from one to another, how counterpoint allows multiple independent lines of music to intertwine, converting melody into harmony is somehow both logical and mystical. Could that oxymoron be the definition of why music is art?

Michelangelo rendered human flesh, including sensitive facial expressions, in marble. Rodin left us a fleet of sensual and sensuous images in bronze. Manipulating such dense materials with such sensitivity is the essence of art, images that transcend the inanimate quality of their materials.

Music as art is magical because it is fleeting. It happens at the present, and the present is infinite. Each nanosecond is another right now! The motion of a piece of music is like the bow wave of a boat, moving relentlessly through an infinite series of “right nows.” As we play or as we listen, we store up the memories of those infinite moments and assemble the progression of sound into our perception of the music. There is a wonderful photograph of Pablo Picasso tracing the outline of a bull with a flashlight, captured on a long exposure. That seems the closest link between pictorial art and music.

We have invented a recognizable written language to record music, so the creation of the composer can be saved for reproduction. Music is an art, but unless there is a performer who can realize it, is it anything more than notations? We consider a performer to be an artist, but unless the performer is improvising, inventing music on the spot, the art of music is the interpretation of someone else’s inspiration.

We talk about artistic temperament. The phrase is sometimes used to excuse someone’s bad behavior, but at its best, artistic temperament is a frame of mind for expressing beauty or powerful emotions. The splendid Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died at the age of fifty-five in November 2017, could express the full depth of human emotion with a twitch of his lips. Before he sang a single note, you knew you were in for something special. I strongly recommend treating yourself to twenty minutes on YouTube, entering his name in the search bar, and watching his every move. Musicianship and artistry do not get any better.

§

Last week, sitting in the hundred-fifty-year-old second-floor theater (complete with tin ceiling) in downtown Damariscotta, Maine, Wendy and I saw John Logan’s play, Red, as filmed in a live performance at London’s Wyndam Theater in the summer of 2018. It is a ninety-minute production with five scenes, performed without intermission, portraying a two-year period in the life of artist Mark Rothko. Rothko and his assistant, Ken, are the only two characters, and those two years exactly span Ken’s employment in Rothko’s studio. Ken’s entry to the stage a few moments into the play is the moment he is hired.

The play is set in 1958–1959 in Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery, an abandoned gymnasium. The title is derived from the commission Rothko is working on, a series of monumental murals for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City’s Seagram Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson. Rothko makes no secret of the fact that he views this commission as the opportunity of a lifetime. He is being paid $30,000 for it, which he feels is a huge amount of money. Ken is expected to be very impressed by that. Rothko is crushed to learn that Jackson Pollack is Ken’s favorite artist, and throughout the play, the action circles around Rothko’s enormous ego.

Rothko denigrates Pollack, saying that success is the worst thing that ever happened to him, and ridiculing him for owning an Oldsmobile convertible. Racing around Long Island in that car was the antithesis of art. Pollack died in a drunken crash in that car, and Rothko called it a “lazy suicide.” He continues, “believe me, when I commit suicide there won’t be any doubt about it.” (In fact, Rothko did commit suicide with a combination of barbiturates and razor blades. There was no doubt about it.) He goes on to criticize Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtentstein, and Robert Rauschenberg for selling out to commercialism.

The irony of all this, given the $30,000 commission, is not lost on Ken. Rothko is obsessed with the progress of the work and of his greatness, until late in the play, Ken explodes in pent up fury and frustration. “Not every painting has to be so . . . important all the time! Not every painting has to rip your guts out and expose your soul! Not everyone wants art that actually hurts! Sometimes you just want a . . . still life or landscape or soup can or comic book.” The fight continues until Ken bursts out with, “Just admit your hypocrisy: The High Priest of Modern Art is painting a wall in the Temple of Consumption. You rail against commercialism in art, but pal, you’re taking the money.”

The last scene opens with Rothko arriving at the studio the following morning. He tells Ken that he went there. Where? The Four Seasons. He is horrified by the experience, the naked consumerism, the spectacle of the city’s wealthiest people trying to impress each other by spending too much on dinner. He picks up the telephone, dials a number, and asks for Mr. Philip Johnson. “Philip, this is Rothko. Listen, I went to the restaurant last night and lemme tell you, anyone who eats that kind of food for that kind of money in that kind of joint will never look at a painting of mine.” Ken is pleased to have made his point so dramatically, but two lines later, Rothko fires him, and the play ends.

Rothko is the big loser in this story, and the eerie foreshadowing of his suicide is a poignant part of the play. Alfred Molina created the role of Rothko and repeated in the revival production we saw. Eddy Redmayne was the original Ken—in this production we saw Alfred Enoch playing Ken. Red won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2010, and Eddy Redmayne won a Tony that year for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.

Red was screened in theaters in the United States and the UK on November 7. I do not know if there are plans for it to be screened again. Perhaps it will be available through Netflix or Amazon? Keep your eyes open for it. It is a profound lesson for any artist.

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Who among history’s great artists had a Rothko-esque ego? Rembrandt? Picasso? Michelangelo? Turner? And who among composers? Mendelssohn? Vivaldi? Gounod? Bruhns? It is easier to name performing musicians. Kathleen Battle’s early career was crammed with magnificent performances and recordings, but twenty years later, she had developed a terrible reputation for her elevated ego and poor treatment of the people around her. After a performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1992, The Boston Globe reported that she left behind a “froth of ill will.” And in February 1994, Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, fired Battle from her leading role in La Fille du regiment, citing “unprofessional actions during rehearsal . . . conduct profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration between all the cast members.” Time magazine reported that the cast applauded when informed of her dismissal. She never returned to the opera stage.

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I know many organists who have been badly treated by clergy. For example, it is pretty common to hear tales of woe about priests who felt overshadowed summarily dismissing successful musicians. But I am troubled by haughty attitudes I often encounter among musicians. A stopknob engraved “Rector Ejector” may be a cute gag, but the thing can get out of hand. I see all sorts of complaints from church musicians on social media, dismissing people who think the organ is too loud, making snide remarks about clergy, and chiding the “ignorant” congregants as if they are not worthy of your music.

I was a regular church musician for about thirty years and gave up the bench twenty years ago when I joined the Organ Clearing House because the travel schedule was not compatible. That means I have a lot more chances than most organists to sit in the pews as a worshipper, and you know what? The organ is often too loud. As much as I love the sounds of a powerful organ, I find it tiring. Every verse of every hymn does not need to include Mixtures. It is refreshing for the congregant if the organist mixes it up a little, changing colors between verses, and saving the big guns for the right moment. If you are playing a gentle hymn, play it gently. When a hymn starts with a huge crash, it can be jarring for people who did not know it was coming. The organ is a musical instrument, a living, breathing thing that encourages people to sing if you do not frighten them.

Ken accused Mark Rothko of acting as though no one was good enough to view his paintings. According to Rothko, museums are mausoleums and art dealers are pimps. Rothko railed against the client who asked to commission a painting that would “go” with a certain couch, and he used the term “overmantle” to denigrate the client who wanted a painting simply to fill a space.

Music is a public art that requires both composer and performer to make it happen. And, of course, it requires listeners who are engaged and who participate in the act of music, especially when they are invited to sing and be part of the performance. A bumper sticker popular among people who race sailboats says, “Have you flogged your crew today?” One for organists could be, “Have you flogged your congregation today?”

Ultimately, Rothko realized that he could not control a commercial space with his paintings. Unfortunately, he was so tied up in his high opinion of himself that suicide was inevitable. He mentioned it himself in a Freudian slip.

Organists: what you do is special. It is an unusual art and a special gift. Invite the people of your church in. Share the majesty and the mystery of your instrument with them. Teach them to appreciate the art as you envelope them with beauty. Never forget that they paid for the instrument that it is your privilege to play. Show them that it was worth it.