In the Wind: Music in the Mountains

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.

One stop shopping

The age of the internet has brought us a new world of shopping. Tap an icon on your phone, type a few letters in a search window, click “buy now,” and Bob’s your uncle. If you are buying something easily recognizable or definable, you are not likely to be disappointed, and if you are disappointed, most online retailers are good at managing returns or substitutions. I am concerned about the environmental cost of all that shipping, delivery, and packing materials. I am dumbfounded by how much bubble-wrap and how many air pillows I take out of oversized boxes to find the little thing I ordered. On the other hand, I am embarrassed to remember how many times I have left a workshop or jobsite to drive to a hardware store because I needed ten of a certain size of screw.

It is no surprise that UPS and FedEx are the two largest trucking companies in the United States, and I am willing to bet that Amazon will pass one of them now that they are building their own fleet of trucks. They cater to our Amazon and eBay habits, rushing essentials to us a day or two after we place an order. In Maine, we have a half-mile driveway, as do many of the houses on our rural road, so Phil, our UPS driver, has to drive a mile on our private road to deliver to our house. He typically arrives around 6:00 p.m., and it takes him two hours to finish his route after he leaves us.

There are two kinds of birds . . .

. . . those you can eat, and those you cannot. I maintain the website for the Organ Clearing House, updating it every couple weeks as organs come and go, and I receive all the inquiries generated by the “Contact” page. There are two kinds of inquiries, those from people who know about pipe organs and those who do not. They ask when it could be delivered; some have asked if next-day delivery is available. As it happens, no. It is not like ordering shirts from L. L. Bean where you check a box for a monogram and another to state that it is a gift. Maybe I should add boxes on our website so you can check boxes to choose Kirnberger, Werckmeister, or equal temperaments.

I correspond with dozens (hundreds?) of people each year who are wondering how to acquire a pipe organ. Only a fraction get traction, and I can often tell from the first email or phone call if it is not going to lead anywhere. When I receive an inquiry from an organist and we correspond several times without anyone else being mentioned, I ask if we could have a conference call with some other people from the church. That winnows out those who are dreaming and have not mentioned the idea to anyone else.

I think the inquiry from someone who admits to not knowing much but sincerely wants to acquire an organ is a special responsibility. I try to respect their intention while at the same time describing the process clearly. In those instances, the first issue is almost always cost. During a preliminary conversation, I cannot be specific about the potential cost of an organ for a given church, but I can say that a modest-sized organ for a local church costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Often enough, that is the end of a conversation, but if we get past that barrier, we can start to get creative.

Sometimes, initial inquiries refer to specific organs on our website, listing three or four instruments that have nothing in common. Once again, this is not like ordering shirts. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what would constitute an ideal organ for a given church. We need to consider architecture and engineering. The organ should complement, even improve the interior of the church, and the building must safely sustain the weight of the organ. We need to consider the musical traditions and preferences of the parish. Is strong hymn singing the main goal? Complicated and sophisticated choral accompaniment? Recital literature? How might the placement of the organ enhance the church’s worship? What should the organ include to make it as useful as possible?

For many congregations, these are questions that are best answered with the help of an organ consultant, independent of the urge to promote a particular builder or type of organ. The most important role of the consultant is to educate a church’s organ committee or task force so they know what to ask when finally talking with potential organ builders.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Most of the conversations that lead to the purchase of an organ involve my making a site visit, which is the only way for me to get an accurate sense of a building and its community. I charge a fee plus travel expenses—a church’s willingness to bear some expense clarifies their intent. During those visits, I have my eyes open for where an organ might be placed. The location of the existing or previous organ might not be the best place in a room for an organ. I think of this as harvesting space. Where could we place a blower and wind supply? Where should the console be placed so the organist can see the choir, the clergy at the altar, and the bride waiting at the back of the church? Where should the organ be placed so its sound projects well, so it is safe from roof failures, so it looks its best? How can we ensure that the organ will be surrounded and supplied by temperate air to promote stable tuning? Answers to all these questions inform me and the people of the church as to what would bring the best result.

Tracker or electric?

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1952, and the New Testament was further revised in 1972. My father, rector of my home church, was introducing the new revision when a parishioner famously declared, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” I supposed she did not realize that Jesus could hardly have been aware of a book published in 1611.

Many organists have strong opinions about what type of organ they prefer or prefer not to play. “If a tracker organ was good enough for Bach, it’s good enough for me.” Before about 1900, there was no choice. Every organ had mechanical action, and every organ was hand pumped. There are countless examples of ancient organs that were placed in the ubiquitous rear gallery, high up on the central axis of the room. I suppose many of them were built without anyone wondering where the organ would go.

The introduction of electric actions and electric blowers at the beginning of the twentieth century introduced a new world of possibility for organ placement. The keyboards no longer needed to be physically attached to the body of the organ; a console could even be placed hundreds of feet from the instrument. It became common in England and the United States to place an organ on either side of a church’s chancel, with the choir divided between the two sides, and the console placed on one side. With electric playing actions that plan became very common, and as I wrote in the March issue of this journal, when my home parish was facing the end of time for its 1905 “chancel plan” Skinner, they chose to install a mechanical-action organ by C. B. Fisk, Inc., in a new rear gallery. That is a room of Gothic style and proportions, so the classic placement in a rear gallery was very effective.

That church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, has two classic locations that are ideal for organ placement. Perhaps the next organ there will be another chancel plan job. After all, the Fisk will be fifty years old next year. But it is more usual for a modern American church to have only one proper spot for an organ if there is space for a pipe organ at all.

Many church buildings cannot accommodate a mechanical-action pipe organ, no matter how much the organist might want one, but in those that could have either type, there is plenty of room for discussion. Well-built modern tracker-action organs are not clunky and awkward to play, and even very large organs with mechanical action allow ease of control and expression. They can have electric stop actions with complex combination actions, and some modern builders produce dual-registration systems with both mechanical and electric stop actions.

Electric and electro-pneumatic organs allow lots of versatility of registration and freedom of placement. You can have special effects like antiphonal or echo divisions, and you can “borrow” stops from one place to another using unit actions. Thousands of small unit organs with three or four ranks of pipes spread across multiple keyboards at many pitches have been built, and they are useful in many situations, but in larger electric-action organs, there are useful borrows, also called duplexes, made famous by Ernest Skinner and other innovative twentieth-century builders that do not compromise the integrity of the organ’s choruses. One of Mr. Skinner’s classic borrows is found in a Swell division with an 8′ Trumpet and maybe 4′ Clarion along with 8′ Oboe. The Oboe is extended to 16′ pitch and made to be playable independently in the Pedal at 16′ and 4′ pitches. That one rank forms the quiet solo voice on the Swell, the 16′ member of the Swell reed chorus, a gentle 16′ reed for the Pedal, especially useful as it is under expression, and a 4′ Pedal solo reed, ideal as the cantus firmus in a Baroque chorale prelude, with tremulant. That is a lot of bang for the buck. If there was space and budget for an independent 16′ reed, Mr. Skinner often included a Waldhorn 16′ that was duplexed to the Pedal.

Who’s going to build it?

Addressing all those issues and answering all those questions informs the organ committee as to which organbuilders should be asked for proposals. If the building could accommodate both tracker or electric-action organs, you would do well to have proposals for each. This is when your consultant can be most useful, guiding you through a list of possible companies considering their strengths and weaknesses.

Last summer, we replaced the roof and painted our house in Maine. Contractors visited to give us estimates, taking a few measurements, and scribbling on a pad taken from the dashboard of the pickup truck. There was no charge to us, and almost no cost to the contractor to provide those estimates.

It does not work like that when estimating the cost of a new organ or organ renovation. The builder will spend at least a day studying the building, several days if it is a large building and a potentially complex organ. Besides the time spent on the road, there are travel and lodging expenses. All that is followed by many days back at the workshop calculating, sketching, drawing, and writing. It is common for an organbuilder to invest $10,000 or more to develop a serious proposal for a large organ. Who should bear that expense? When soliciting proposals, some churches offer to reimburse travel expenses. Some organbuilders respond to invitations by asking for a fee.

How many proposals do you need? If an organ committee is well educated and can choose builders who are well suited for the project at hand, three should be enough. If the church feels the need to compare more than three proposals, they should be prepared to pay fully for all of them to avoid spending people’s time unnecessarily. As an organbuilder and organ contractor, I relish the opportunity to work with a thoughtful and well-prepared committee, even if I do not get the job, and I appreciate their respect for my time and effort.

Go Yuja.

A few months ago, I wrote about a concert Wendy and I attended at Tanglewood, when the scheduled piano soloist was replaced by the brilliant young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang playing a piano concerto by Liszt. I have been following Ms. Wang on social media for years; she has a formidable presence on Facebook where she (or someone working with her) posts videos of her performances, photos of her terrific (some say outlandish) performance costumes, and photos of her at leisure, always glamorous, always smiling.

On Saturday, January 28, Ms. Wang stunned the music world with her marathon performance of all four of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Carnegie Hall. But wait, there’s more. She also played Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Five of the most monumental and difficult of all compositions written for piano and orchestra were presented in a single four-and-a-half-hour concert. 

In his review published on January 29, Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times wrote, “She didn’t seem to have broken a sweat—neither on her face nor in her music-making, which had been calmly dazzling all the way through the final flourish of the Third Concerto at the program’s end.” “Calmly dazzling.” How many of us would like to be described that way? You can read the entire review at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/arts/music/yuja-wang-rachmaninoff-ca…;

Woolfe continued, “To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmalz. Her touch can certainly be firm, but not a single note was harsh or overly heavy; her prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five pieces of chocolate cake in a row.”

After all that, her encore was “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, a simple, tender melody that floated from her huge piano like the smell of a flower garden on a gentle breeze. The last paragraph of Woolfe’s review is a lovely comment on the juxtaposition of unimaginable virtuosity and stunning concert attire. Go read it for yourself.

I do not know the name of the technician who prepared that piano for this incredible concert. Although Zachary Woolfe promises that Ms. Wang does not bang on the keys, she sure gives them a workout. The speed of repeated notes, the breathtaking passages in octaves, and the clarity of the instrument in tender moments would not be possible without a brilliant technician. And after four-and-a-half hours of the most vigorous playing, the tuning of the piano was still “concert fresh” for the sweet little Gluck encore. We know the stories about how Franz Liszt had a spare piano ready for the second half of the concert because he beat the daylights out of the first one. How he would have loved to play on Ms. Wang’s Steinway.¹

I comment frequently to friends and colleagues and in writing about how fortunate we are to have so many brilliant virtuosos playing the organ. Like Ms. Wang and her Rachmaninoff, those organists blaze through the most difficult works of Reger and Demessieux without breaking a sweat. It is exciting to have the intricacies and majesty of those seemingly unattainable works revealed to ordinary listeners. Let’s keep building organs for them to play.

Notes

1. In the February 2021 issue of The Diapason, I wrote about Nanette Streicher,  “who built Beethoven’s pianos.” She inherited a piano factory from her father at the time when artists like Beethoven were venturing out of private salons and into concert halls seating 800 or 1,000. Realizing that pianos of that time were not adequate for developing virtuoso playing or for projecting in larger halls, Streicher increased the scaling of strings in her pianos that made necessary heavier cases and stronger interior bracing and frames. Her innovations led to today’s powerful instruments.

Changing seasons

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

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

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

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

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

Stars in your eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newfangled

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

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

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

Notes

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

Adventures and transitions

In the last six weeks, Wendy and I have attended three singular events involving three very different pipe organs. One was small and in poor condition, another was a grand instrument in an iconic church, and the third was so large as to be off the charts. Most instruments have little variations in size—a violin is a violin, a trumpet is a trumpet—but pipe organs span huge ranges of size as well as styles and even purposes. These events provided a fun overview of extremes.

We traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on April 5 to hear the brilliant young organist Anna Lapwood play a recital on the massive Midmer-Losh organ in Boardwalk Hall. No other organ in the world has ten 32′ ranks, and those are just ten of 447 ranks; the organ has 33,111 pipes. You can find the stoplist and list of ranks at boardwalkorgans.org. (See also the cover feature of the November 2020 issue.) There is an impressive restoration effort underway there, a daunting task being faced by a professional staff and a troupe of volunteers under the direction and curatorship of Nathan Bryson.

According to its website, the interior of Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long, 310 feet wide, and 137 feet high. Remember that a football field is 300 feet long, and you might imagine the scale of the place. Among the activities in the hall beside organ recitals are car races, tractor pulls, and rock concerts, and it is the only space in the world that has hosted an indoor helicopter flight. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was nominated to be a candidate for president of the United States during the Democratic National Convention in Boardwalk Hall.

The stage of Boardwalk Hall is 148 feet wide, and the main organ chambers flank the proscenium arch. The size of the organ and the number of expressive divisions were obvious to the audience as the organ chamber lights remained on throughout the concert. All the individual sections of the instrument were evident, and hundreds of huge shutters opened and closed suddenly and majestically.

Anna Lapwood is twenty-eight years old and has risen to international fame through her fantastic abilities, popular appeal, and masterful use of social media. Enter her name in search fields for Google, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, and one will find days of fun listening. She was recently appointed an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for her service to music. According to her official website, Anna “holds the position of director of music for Pembroke College (Cambridge), associate artist with Royal Albert Hall, and artist in association with the BBC Singers. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ award from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist.”

Knowing that this would be a popular event among organists and organbuilders, I bought our tickets for Anna’s concert at Boardwalk Hall immediately after they went on sale in early February, and Wendy and I enjoyed our seats at a table on the main floor. Since Boardwalk Hall’s seating capacity is over 10,000 we were not worried about missing the concert. While the main floor was nearly full, the audience of around 1,200 people had plenty of space to move around. We cruised the floor, drinks in hand, greeting old and new friends, and chatting with my admired colleagues who serve on the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, responsible for this, the most massive of organ projects.

Ms. Lapwood’s entry to the concert stage was one only possible at Boardwalk Hall. We heard the blast of a car horn, and a 1938 regency blue Chevrolet Master Sport Sedan entered the hall from the left wing. With horn blowing, British flag waving, headlights blazing, and the audience cheering, the uniformed chauffeur, owner Chuck Gibson, walked around to open the passenger door. Ms. Lapwood stepped out onto the vast floor clad in sparkles and gold shoes, mounted the stage energetically, and we were off. The program featured her transcriptions of Hans Zimmer’s music from Interstellar, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and my favorite, Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain.

I have attended dozens of organ concerts offered by serious, even stuffy artists, including many of those I have stuffily played myself. Organ music can be very serious, confusing, arcane, and difficult for lay people to understand and appreciate. Anna Lapwood’s arresting stage presence and honest enthusiasm for the instrument and the music she played filled the cavernous space with excitement. It was a thrilling evening, and that is one room that can truly support 32′ organ tone.

Goodbye, good friend

In November 2023 friend and colleague Brian Jones passed away. (See “Nunc dimittis,” January 2024 issue, page 6.) Brian had been organist and choir director at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston from 1984 until 2004 where he built a widely admired choir program, making brilliant use of the church’s resources and central location to attract wonderful singers to the program, both professional and amateur. Brian along with associate organist Ross Wood and the choir produced eight recordings including the wildly successful Carols for Choirs, which helped transform Trinity’s Christmas carol service into a must-go experience for Boston audiences, so popular that after several years they started offering it twice on a December Sunday. One year Wendy and I took her mother for drinks in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel before crossing Saint James Place to enter the church early enough to find seats. I was honored to serve as organ curator at Trinity during Brian’s tenure, and I wrote about some of the experiences we shared in the February 2024 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9).

Brian’s memorial service was held at Trinity on April 27, 2024. We had dinner with friends the evening before and spent the night at a fine hotel on Copley Square. As we approached the church on Saturday morning, we were greeted by Lydia, Brian’s beloved 1933 cobalt blue Chrysler Coupe, complete with rumble seat and oversized headlamps, parked in the same spot next to the church where I parked every Friday morning for my pre-recital tuning all those years ago. Lydia was a common sight among Brian’s friends, her “ooo-gah” klaxon horn heralding her imminent arrival. She once made an appearance at our house in Maine, that crazy horn blaring through the woods as she came down our long driveway. Seeing that car invoked memories of the immense pleasure Brian got from driving her around, his ebullient, toothy smile as he enjoyed the daylights out of corny, often racy jokes, and his joy of sitting around a table with friends and family.

Brian’s memorial service was a reunion of dozens of colleagues, some I had not seen in years. People came from great distances to be with him in spirit one last time in that great church where it had been Brian’s childhood ambition to serve as organist. The building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and decorated by John La Farge, is a symphony of crotch-matched marble, painted stenciling, rich dark woodworking, and a magnificent pair of organs, Skinner Organ Company Opus 573, revised, and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-C. A small herd of organists took turns at the great four-manual console, and Colin Lynch, Trinity’s director of music, led a large and enthusiastic alumnae choir.

The choir sang a collection of anthems including two great swashbucklers that I first heard sung by the Trinity Choir under Brian’s directions, pieces that he loved and that I taught the parish choir I was leading at the time. “Kyrie,” from Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, expresses the height of the French Romantic symphonic literature for organ as inspired by the stupendous expressive organs built in many of France’s great churches by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, including the doozy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where Vierne was organist from 1900 until his death at the organ console with his foot on low E at the end of his 1,750th recital at the church. The organ accompaniment is worthy of Vierne’s six great symphonies for organ, and the choir sings dramatic expressive passages culminating with a soaring soprano line in the closing statement of “Kyrie eleison.” The choir was rehearsing that piece as we entered the church, and I burst into tears. “I can name that tune in one note.”

Brian Jones loved sublime pieces like the Vierne and the carols of John Rutter, and he had a soft spot for syrupy, nostalgic music. A beautiful reading of Adolph Adam’s O Holy Night was included in the recording Carols for Choirs, and Stephen Adams’s The Holy City was a perennial favorite. Colin Lynch and the alumnae choir gave us The Holy City with its dramatic sweeps and swoops, rolling triplets in the accompaniment bass line, and the treacly text that combine to make the piece a sentimental favorite:

And then me thought my dream was changed, the streets no longer rang, hushed were the glad Hosannas the little children sang, the sun grew dark with mystery, the morn was cold and chill as the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Hark, how the Angels sing Hosanna in the Highest, Hosanna to the King!

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Listening to that marvelous barnburner of an anthem, I remembered a moment during my time caring for the Trinity organs. I was sitting at the console, maybe planning the next hour of tuning, when a foreign tourist came up to the velvet rope, got my attention, and asked, “Can you play zee Holy City?” I gave him a chorus of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” and went down the steps to shake his hand.

Anyone who has attended a convention of the Organ Historical Society has witnessed the best of hymn singing as it is a tradition of the society that the audience/congregation sings a hymn at each recital. That Saturday morning at Trinity Church, Mr. Richardson’s massive roof was raised as the throng of organists and singers poured their emotional hearts into singing some of the great hymns of the faith led by that gorgeous heroic organ, all of them except me, because I cannot sing while weeping.

Brian’s grown children, Eliza and Nat, gave loving moving eulogies, speaking for Brian’s widower Mike and the entire family. Brian had a distinctive, often stentorian voice and a repertory of standard phrases always delivered in the same singsong fashion. Nat Jones’s imitations of his father were so authentic as to bring Brian into the room with us, both hilarious and unnerving. It was a grand morning remembering a grand man.

Why we do this

All that wonderful music in that beautiful place was a reminder of the magic that is the instrument we love so much. In a lofty setting like Trinity, the organ is a monumental presence. Years ago, when I still worked at Trinity, I was at a meeting on Cape Cod discussing the possibility of bringing an organ to a summer chapel there, when a retired Episcopal bishop hearing that I worked at Trinity referred to the organ there as a “weapon.” I am not sure that was the right word, but I think I know what he meant. That organ is a great example of an instrument perfectly suited to its room, with a range of expression from barely audible mystery to thundering triumph, all under the hands and feet of a single musician. The nerdy organbuilder in me sits in a pew picturing the thousands of pouches and valves flapping away inside the windchests, pouring air into thousands of pipes, lifting our spirits. It is mystical, magical, and majestic all at once. That’s why we do this.

Inaugurating a new ministry

Since we moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a couple years ago, Wendy and I have been attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street across from the Red Lion Inn. I have a previous personal connection with the parish as my grandfather, the Reverend Dr. George Douglas Krumbhaar, was rector there from 1960 to 1974, from when I was four years old until I graduated from high school. I have fond memories of holiday family visits to the rectory, and solo summer weekend trips when my grandparents treated me to concerts at Tanglewood. I practiced and played a couple recitals on the Roosevelt organ as rebuilt with neo-Baroque accent in the early 1960s, and walking around town as an adult fills me with memories from over fifty years ago.

Saint Paul’s is a beautiful building, designed by Charles McKim and richly decorated with appointments by John La Farge and Stockbridge resident Daniel Chester French.¹ Its stately location with adjoining rectory on the northeast corner of the main intersection gives it a local prominence, and its doors are perpetually open, welcoming the many tourists who visit for skiing in the winter and the countless artistic outlets during the summer.

On May 8 we were thrilled to join a throng of clergy, members, and guests attending the installation of the Reverend Samuel T. Vaught as the twentieth rector of Saint Paul’s. Father Sam is young, a newly minted priest, and this is his first appointment as rector of a parish. It was an involved and poignant service full of symbolism and hopefulness. Especially meaningful was the prayer of the new rector, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, yet you have called your servant to stand in your house and serve at your altar. To you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit.” He proved his youthfulness by delivering the prayer kneeling on the bare stone floor and when finished, standing smoothly with nary a grunt, creak, or stumble. Father Sam is ambitious, hoping to stay long enough to make a difference, and as one of the many silver-haired people in the congregation, I hope that his youthful enthusiasm will attract younger families to join the fun.

Saint Paul’s has the thoroughly picked over old bones of Hilborne Roosevelt Opus 127, built in 1884, the same year that the building was completed and dedicated. The replacement of principal stops with tapered pipes along with the addition of an especially narrow-scaled mixture, Scharff, Sesquialtera, and Krummhorn on electric windchests have obliterated much of the organ’s original character. I am pretty sure that Mr. Roosevelt never heard a Krummhorn. Besides the poorly conceived and executed alterations, the organ is in horrible condition. I have not mounted the steps to the organ loft buried in the base of the tower since my return to Saint Paul’s, but from sitting in the pews, I can list on my fingers which Bourdon pipes have cracks or fallen stoppers and which are dead, which manual notes are prone to ciphering, and which notes of specified stops are out of tune by more than two whole tones. Yikes. There is no choir, and there are two organists casually employed who take turns at the keydesk. Although there is not much of a music program, it is still nice to hear a pipe organ.

In addition to his priestly presence, Father Sam is an organist and pianist. I enjoyed a coffee date with him a few weeks ago during which he expressed the ambition that the church should have an appointed parish musician who could start a program involving solo and choir singing. Knowing that for at least the current moment there would be no money available for significant organ repairs or replacement, I offered to inspect the instrument and suggest what might be repaired with a little bit of local elbow grease, and I am pretty sure I could improve the tuning supposedly applied during Holy Week. While money was paid, it does not sound to my ears that much good happened.

In an age when many parishes flounder, it is fun to think of the possibility of reinvigorating this venerable parish that I have been associated with for more than sixty years. As a twelve-year-old, I thought the organ was great. As a sixty-eight-year-old, not so much. Here’s hoping and anticipating that the arrival of an energetic young priest will bring new life to the place. I think the town is ready 
for it.

Notes

1. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is best known for his monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Chesterwood, is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Ringing through the night

Wendy and I left our apartment in Greenwich Village in March of 2020, fleeing from the burgeoning epidemic to the relative safety of our home in Maine. Although the current second wave with choices of variants is ravaging the unvaccinated population there now, through the summer of 2020 Maine was one of the least affected states in the early stages of the epidemic with cases counted on your fingers compared to the tens of thousands each day in New York City. We ventured back into New York after sixteen months, gingerly returning to the life we have loved there. Finding our neighborhood transformed with outdoor dining consuming parking spaces and congesting sidewalks, we decided to leave the city. We had a ten-year run there, and we are the richer for it.

With our place in Maine as a comforting constant, we have moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, barely five miles from Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We are living four tenths of a mile from Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church (across from the Red Lion Inn), where my grandfather was rector during my pre-teen and teenage years and where I practiced endlessly on the Roosevelt organ, sadly “baroque-ified” so that much of the original grandeur is gone—but as a thirteen-year-old, I thought it was wonderful.

Our house is about 600 feet from the Children’s Chime Tower, a lovely structure on a picturesque village common, with eleven bells, the largest of which tolls every hour. We can hear it from our bedroom, so we give each other morning reports of which hours we heard. My tuner’s ear gets mired in identifying the overtones, an arcane version of counting sheep, and I have found myself thinking anew about the role of overtones in tonal music and the development of the pipe organ.

How do you make an organ stop?

In February 2017, I gave a lecture titled “Pythagoras, broccoli, and the development of pipe organ stop action” for the Presidents’ Day Conference of the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. I was inspired to lecture on this when a family member casually asked why the voices of the organ are called stops? Wouldn’t it make sense to call them “go’s?” After all, we pull out stops to make an organ go.

Pythagoras lived on the Greek island of Samos in the eastern Aegean Sea, barely a mile from Turkey. It is near the popular resort islands of Naxos and Mykonos and about 170 miles south of Lesbos, also close to the Turkish coast, which has been central to the continuing refugee crisis in the region. Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BC) was a mathematician who famously gave us the eponymous theory defining the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle (A² + B² = C²) and who discovered the series of overtones present in any musical note. Walking past a blacksmith shop, Pythagoras noticed that the workers produced different pitches as they hammered on their anvils and thought at first that it was the size of the hammer that affected the pitch. It did not take much experimentation to determine that it was the size of the anvil. Our tower bell is a good example. You get the same pitch if you hit the bell with a pencil or a hammer.

Organists know the overtone series by the pitches of our stops. Unison pitch is 8′. The first overtone is an octave higher (4′), the second is an octave and a fifth (2-2⁄3′), the third is two octaves higher (2′), the fourth is two octaves and a third (1-3⁄5′), the fifth is two octaves and a fifth (1-1⁄3′), then 1-1⁄7′, 1′, etc., ad infinitum. Organ stops rarely go higher than 1′, although we often find pitches like 1⁄2′, 1⁄3′, 1⁄4′ in the lower octaves of high-pitched compound stops like Cymbals and Scharffs.

We start with the earliest forms of pipe organs such as the hydraulis, created by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century BC, which had a pressurized wind supply regulated by the weight of water, a row of primitive organ pipes, and a keyboard-like mechanism for the choosing of notes. That instrument and many of the following stages of evolution had a single set of unison pipes. As those organ builders began to understand their sophisticated musical tones and became aware of the overtones, it was natural to add a set of pipes that spoke at the first overtone, an octave higher, to brighten the tone. Then, perhaps, a second rank of unison pipes was added to beef things up, then another four-footer. Imagine the light bulb over the guy’s head when he thought of adding a rank at the second overtone, the world’s first Nazard.

This primitive organ came to include a dozen or more ranks and was known as a “Blockwerk.” There was no stop action, just a big powerful chorus of voices bellowing simultaneously, so the next innovation was to separate the windchest into two parts, with the original unison rank on one wind supply, and the rest of the multitude on the other whose wind could be shut off by a separate control. When I was writing my lecture, I conferred with several colleagues well versed in organs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and learned that the original name for that control was “doof,” an old Dutch word that meant either “dumb” (as in deaf and dumb) or stupid. One Dutch colleague told me that “doof” was the nickname her grandmother had for her grandfather, and her family assumed that she was intending both definitions. In modern English, the first pipe organ stop action was intended to turn things off. Stop.

That led to family discussions on the original question. We “pull out all the stops” to make a loud noise on an organ or to give a situation or task our best shot. “This year when spring cleaning we’re going to pull out all the stops.” We pull out a stopper to make liquid flow, like wine from a bottle, and conversely, we use a doorstop to keep a door open.

Use your ears.

The common registrations for French Classic organ music give us some of the clearest examples of exploiting the overtones of each stop. Think of the Cornet decomposé, literally a dismantled five-rank Cornet with flutes at 8′, 4′, 2-2⁄3′, 2′, and 1-3⁄5′. Each has its own rich overtone structure, but collectively, they mimic the harmonic structure of the reeds like Trompette or Cromorne. The Trompette ranks in French Classic organs had broad scales and powerful tones from the bass, through the tenor, and into the middle octave of the keyboard before they started to peter out toward the treble. The five-rank Cornet starts at middle C and is intended to beef up the treble of the reeds, and you can imagine where Clérambault got the “Basse et Dessus de Trompette” and Balbastre and d’Aquin the rollicking pairings of Cromornes and Cornets in their noël variations.

The Cornet decomposé allows the fascinating variety of combining two, three, or four of those pitches to achieve different sonorities, and those ranks can be added individually or in combinations to the Cromorne, Hautbois, or Trompette to spice things up, like adding a dash of cayenne to an otherwise stolid dish.

When I was an apprentice in Ohio in the mid 1970s, my mentor John Leek and I went to tune a large M. P. Möller organ for the first time. It was a neo-Baroque rebuild of an earlier Möller that had an impossible Positiv division with a chiffy Gedackt, a smarmy 4′ flute, and a terribly high-pitched Cymbal, the kind that at first glance looks like there are only six different sized pipes making up the sixty-one notes of three ranks. What do you use to tune that squealing thing? There was a yellowed index card lying on the tuning perch with a neat suggestion: tune the Krummhorn to the Great 4′ Octave, far away but still easy to hear, and tune the Cymbal to the Krummhorn, being sure that each note of the Krummhorn is still in tune. The infinitely high overtones of the Krummhorn pipes clearly matched the stratospheric pitches of the pencil-sized pipes.

I use that technique to this day when tuning higher-pitched mutations. The top octaves of the Tierce ring out clear as a bell against an Oboe or Trumpet because those partials are so strong in the reed pipes. Any tuner’s ears are trained to hear those overtones in single pipes. You can learn this by playing a note in an Oboe (the tenor octave is usually the clearest) and turning a 2-2⁄3′ stop on and off, or by playing a fifth above in a different stop. Reinforcing the second partial that way helps your ear pick up the partial in the reed pipe alone. I love that demonstration as an important lesson about how musical tones work.

Thicken the batter

When you combine stops that speak in intervals with one another, you build a sassy pile of dissonance. Imagine playing C with an 8′ stop whose second partial (overtone) is G, an octave and a half above. Add the 2-2⁄3′, which speaks a G, with a second partial of D. Add the 1-3⁄5′, whose second partial is B. With those three pitches playing, you are hearing a cluster of several C’s, G’s, D’s, E’s, and B’s all at once. When you add another layer of partials it becomes a twelve-tone cluster. This conglomeration helps explain why mutations can be so difficult to tune. Consider a mixture tuned in equal temperament and play C. The ranks of a usual mixture are speaking octaves and quints (C’s and G’s). The ranks of the mixture are tuned pure to each other, but the intervals on the keyboard are tempered so you are hearing both tempered and pure fifths when you play chords. This is true to some degree in any unequal temperament because it is impossible to temper every interval pure. It may seem as though I am describing unbearable dissonance, but in fact, it is a richness comparable to twenty violins playing in unison in a great orchestra. It is impossible for them all to play identical pitches, but they are close enough to each other that we hear it as three-dimensional richness.

A palette of color

Looking at the rows of pipes inside an organ, you can see a variety of shapes and sizes and a variety of materials used to make them. We refer to the differing diameters of pipes of the same length as “scaling.” An 8′ pipe with a large diameter (diapason) produces a broad tone, while one of narrow scale (string) produces a keen tone. Broad scales and softer material like wood or metal with higher lead content emphasize the fundamental pitch. Harder metal (high tin content) emphasizes the development of higher partials and produces brighter tone. That is a simple description of the rich, earthy tone of a Skinner diapason as compared with the brightness of principal pipes in an organ by Rieger or Beckerath.

Various shapes of resonators like the “choo-choo-train” tops of English Horn pipes or the narrow brass tubes leading to cylindrical resonators of a Schalmei affect the harmonic development of tone and create different timbers. A Clarinet has a cylindrical resonator like a Cromorne. Adding a bell at the top of a Clarinet pipe enforces the fundamental, adding the richness to create a Corno di Bassetto. A “usual” Oboe has a double taper, a long, narrow taper that opens to more of a flare at the top. An Orchestral Oboe has a very thin scale and a gradual taper. A Tuba and a Trumpet are more or less the same in production of tone, but the Tuba has a larger scale and usually higher wind pressure. The placement of scrolls for tuning and regulating also affects the timbre of a pipe.

Similarly, some flue pipes have particular shapes that define the tone. A Rohrflöte is usually a capped metal pipe with a chimney soldered to a hole in the cap. I imagine that the hole in the cap frees the quint, as the presence of a stronger second partial creates the signature brightness of that flute. Ernest M. Skinner and others often made Rohrflötes (also called Chimney Flutes) of wood, drilling through the handle of the stopper to create the chimney. The tapered cap with a small opening at the top of a Koppelflöte pipe has a similar effect.

A tapered flue pipe like a Spitz Flute or Gemshorn, wide scale at the mouth and narrow scale at the top, is a hybrid. The wide scale allows a wide mouth that creates greater tone, but the narrow scale at the top points it toward a string. Many mid-century Aeolian-Skinner organs, especially in the Joseph Whiteford years, have gently tapered principal pipes. A colleague once joked while pointing out Whiteford’s house near the Charles River in Boston, “It’s the one with the tapered doorway.”

All these variations give us the rich palette of tone colors in our pipe organs, and it all relates to the manipulation of the overtone series. Pythagoras may not have foreseen the comparison of a Gedackt and a Chimney Flute, but he discovered and described the math that makes it possible.

So why the broccoli?

The title of my lecture was “Pythagoras, broccoli, and the development of pipe organ stop action.” A thirteenth-century Italian mathematician named Fibonacci discovered a series of numbers that is found throughout nature. The infinite Fibonacci series starts 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 5 = 8, etc. Each successive number is the sum of the preceding two. This series defines the spiral of a nautilus shell, the diminishing tiles of a pineapple or pinecone, and yes, the diminishing spirals of Romanesco broccoli. It also defines the diminishing intervals between musical overtones. Pythagoras had the numbers right 1,800 years before the Fibonacci series was identified.

Nunc dimittis

Friend and colleague Richard Houghten of Ann Arbor, Michigan, passed away on December 29, 2021. Dick was the American presence of Solid State Organ Systems (SSOS, formerly SSL), which has been producing excellent control systems for pipe organs for more than a generation. He had also served as the American representative for Laukhuff, helping dozens of us choose what products we needed and helping us with the complications of ordering products internationally.

He installed SSOS systems in dozens of America’s greatest organs and was available as mentor and guide, helping many of us find our way out of technical problems. I spoke with him, asking for advice about a complicated organ while he was recuperating from surgery coupled with complications, and though he was confined and suffering, he was eager to help, answering my questions and providing follow-up information.

His skills, wisdom, and thoughtful presence added much to the world of organ builders, and I am grateful to have known him as a colleague and a friend. He cared deeply about the organ classes at the neighboring University of Michigan, inviting them to his home and workshop and sharing his experiences with them. Above everything, Dick was a gentleman in every sense of the word. I miss him, and I will remember him always.

Made right here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potter at work

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

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

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

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

Will it float?

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

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

Back to its maker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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