In the Wind: from Nelson Barden to Dobson Pipe Organ Builders

Humble π

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

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

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

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

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

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

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

Achimedes’ mental model

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

When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

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

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

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

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

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

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

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

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

An American renaissance

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

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

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

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

In a nutshell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

Lost arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Connectivity

It does not seem that long ago that packing a briefcase for a business trip meant gathering file folders and notebooks. Today, all my files are digital, and my briefcase is full of chargers for iPhone and iPad and the power cord for my laptop. I admit to carrying an HDMI cord with adapters so I can plug into the television in a hotel room and watch movies or other good stuff using laptop, iPad, or phone, and I carry an extension cord to be sure I can set up camp comfortably. I add to all that a Bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music and NPR programs with rich sound. There are a lot of wires in my wireless life.

My desk at home similarly includes wires that make the essential connections of my life, and I had to add one more yesterday. The printer in a drawer under my desk, happily connected to Wi-Fi, suddenly went hermit on me and refused to perform. I ascertained that the Wi-Fi connection had failed and spent most of an hour mucking around with passwords, straightened paper clips, and reset buttons . . . to no avail. If this had happened at our home in Maine, I would have jumped into the car (it was snowing) and driven forty-five minutes to Staples to buy a cord. Luckily, I was in New York, where Staples is immediately across the street from us. The only door I have to pass is an ATM. Even though it was snowing, I did not bother with a jacket and ran across to get the cord. I fished it through the hole I had made for the printer’s power cord, and I was back in business.

I suppose I will want to renew the Wi-Fi connection sooner or later, but as I only paid $125 for the printer, I may just buy another one rather than spending more time trouble-shooting. Wendy’s printer is working fine, as is all of our other wireless gear, so I feel safe assuming that the printer is the culprit. It is not all that long ago that I put paper directly into a typewriter, and there was no question about the need for connectivity.

§

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers were racing against each other to perfect the harnessing and application of electricity for everyday life. J. P. Morgan’s mansion at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street in New York City was illuminated by Thomas Edison in 1882. There was a fire that spoiled Mr. Morgan’s expensively appointed study that necessitated replacing a lot of wiring, but he was very proud to be on the forefront of that revolution and invited hundreds of people to parties at his home, encouraging them to marvel at the new equipment.

Three years earlier, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings had completed a 101-rank masterpiece of an organ for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not done the research, but I feel safe guessing that it was the largest organ in the United States at that time. (https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=7254) Just look at that Great Chorus! Though the organ now has electric action opening the pallets, it was built without electricity, with mechanical key and stop action and a human-powered wind system.

Within ten years of the completion of the organ at Holy Cross, organbuilders were experimenting with electric power in pipe organs. Builders like George Hutchings and Ernest M. Skinner were developing the electro-pneumatic actions with which we are familiar today. In 1906, Mr. Skinner completed his massive instrument (Opus 150) for the newly unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With four manuals and eighty-four ranks, it was among the first really large fully electro-pneumatic organs in the world, completed just twenty-four years after the Holy Cross organ. (http://aeolianskinner.organhistoricalsociety.net/Specs/Op00150.html) And by the way, it had electric blowers.

That was quite a revolution. It took barely a generation to move from tracker action, proven to be reliable for over five hundred years, to electro-pneumatic action—that new-fangled, up-and-coming creation that provided organists with combination actions, comfortable ergonomic consoles (decades before the invention of the word ergonomic), myriad gadgets to aid registrations, and, perhaps most important, unlimited wind supplies. Many organists were skeptical of the new actions, thinking that because they were not direct they could not be musical.

In spite of the skepticism, electro-pneumatic organs sold like fried dough at the state fair. Before the end of 1915, the Ernest M. Skinner Company produced more than 140 organs (more than ten per year), forty-six of which had four manuals. (Who would like to go on a tour of forty-six pre-World War I four-manual Skinner organs? Raise your hand!) The negative side of this is the number of wonderful nineteenth-century tracker organs that were discarded in the name of progress, but it is hard to judge whether the preservation of those instruments would have been advantageous over the miracles of the innovation of electro-pneumatic action.

And a generation later, what went around came around when the new interest in tracker-action organs surged, and scores of distinguished electro-pneumatic organs were discarded in favor of new organs with low wind pressure and lots of stops of high pitch.

§

Early electro-pneumatic organs relied on elaborate electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching systems for their operation. Keyboard contacts operated matrix relays to control keyboard and stop actions. Consoles were packed full of coupling and combination machines, inspired along with the development of the vast multiplication of switching systems that supported the spread of the telephone. The wiring diagram of a Skinner organ is remarkably similar to the old telephone switchboards where operators inserted quarter-inch plugs into sockets to connect calls.

Along with “traditional” organs for churches and concert halls, the advance of electric actions fostered the theatre organ, a vehicle that allowed a musician to rollick through the countryside along with the antics and passions of the actors on the screen. The invention of double-touch keyboards expanded the scope of organ switching, as did the ubiquitous “toy counters” that duplicated the sounds of cow bells, train whistles, sleigh bells, thunder and lightning, car horns, and dozens of other sound effects that might have a use during a movie. Those novelty sounds were not synthesized, but produced by the actual instrument being manipulated, struck, shaken, or stirred by an electro-pneumatic device. Push the button marked “Castanets,” and a half-dozen sets of castanets sound across the Sea of Galilee. Ole!

The original switching system of a big electro-pneumatic organ is a thing to behold—electric relays in rows of sixty-one, seventy-three, or eighty-five (depending on the number of octaves in a rank, a windchest, or a keyboard). Each relay has a contact for each function a given key can perform. In a big four-manual organ with sub, unison, and super couplers every which way, multiple windchests for each division, and unified stops around the edges, one note of the Great keyboard might have as many as twenty contacts in various forms. Sometimes you see that many contacts physically mounted on each key, with miniscule spacing, and tiny dots of solder holding the connections fast. Spill a cup of coffee into that keyboard, and your organ technician will spend scores of billable hours cleaning up after you.

One organ I worked on for years was in fact two. The organ(s) at Trinity Church in Boston included a three-manual instrument in the chancel and a four-manual job in the rear gallery. Of course, both had pedal divisions. The console functioned as a remote-control device, its keyboards, stopknobs, pistons, and expression pedals operated a complex relay in a basement room directly below. The outputs for seven keyboards and two pedalboards (491), 175 stop knobs, 45 coupler tabs, 7 pistons, and 4 expression pedals (48 for shutters, 60 for crescendo) were in the cable going to the basement, a total of 826 conductors. But wait, there’s more. Since the combination action was also in the basement, the conductors from the combination action that operated the drawknobs and couplers were in the same conduit, bringing signals up from the basement. Drawknobs and couplers totaled 220, and each needed three wires (on coil, off coil, and sense contact)—660. All together, the console cable comprised 1,486 conductors.

When my company was engaged to install the new solid-state switching and combinations in that organ, we wired all the equipment to the existing relays in the basement and chambers, bought an orphaned console for temporary use and equipped it with new stop jambs with knob layout identical to the original, and set everything up with plug-in connectors. After the evening service one Sunday, we cut the console cable, dragged the original console out of the way, placed the temporary console, and started plugging things in. With just a little smoke escaping, we had the organ up and running in time for the Friday noon recital. One glitch turned up. One of my employees consistently reversed the violet/blue pair of conductors in our new color-coded cable so throughout the complex organ, #41 and #42 (soprano E and F) were mixed up!

When something goes wrong like a dead note or a cipher, physical electric contacts are fairly easy to trouble-shoot. Once you have acclimated yourself to the correct location, you are likely to be able to see the problem. It might be a bit of schmutz keeping contacts from moving or touching, it might be a contact wire bent by a passing mouse. Organ relays are often located in dirty basements where spiders catch prey, stonewalls weep with moisture, and careless custodians toss detritus into mysterious dark rooms. Many is the time I have seen the like of signs from a 1963 rummage sale heaped on top of delicate switching equipment.

Oxidation is another enemy of organ contacts that are typically made of phosphorous bronze wire that reacts with oxygen to form a non-conductive coating, inhibiting the operation of the contacts. Also, in a simple circuit that includes a power supply (organ rectifier), switch (keyboard contact), and appliance (chest magnet), a “fly-back” spark jumps across the space between contacts as a note is released. Each spark burns away a teeny bit of metal until after millions of repetitions the contact breaks causing a dead note. You can see this sparking clearly when you sit with a switch-stack with the lights off while the organ is being played.

You can retro fit a switching system by installing diodes in each circuit (which means rows of sixty-one) that arrest the sparks. You can replace phosphorous bronze with silver wire that does not oxidize, but you still have to keep the whole thing clean and protected from physical harm.

§

Just as the telephone companies have converted to solid-state switching, so has the pipe organ industry. Solid-state equipment is no longer new; in fact, it has been around as long as electro-pneumatic organs were before the revival of tracker organs. But perhaps some of you don’t actually know what “solid-state” means. A solid-state device controls electricity without any physical motion. Circuits are built using semi-conductors. What is a semi-conductor? A device that conducts electricity under certain circumstances or in particular ways, less fully than a standard conductor. A piece of wire is a conductor. Electricity travels freely over a piece of wire in any direction.

A great example of a semi-conductor is the diode I mentioned earlier that contains “fly-back” sparks when a circuit is broken. The diode can do this because it conducts electricity in only one direction. It has a wire on each end to connect to a circuit, and power can flow from the switch through the diode to the magnet (if you have installed it facing the right way!). When the contact is released, the power cannot come back through the diode from the magnet to the switch. Semi-conductor.

Some semi-conductors are in fact switches (transistors) with three legs. Apply power to one leg, and power flows through the other two. Integrated circuits are simply little gadgets that contain many transistors. Resistors are gadgets that reduce the flow of power by resisting it. The advance of electronics has been enabled by the reduction of size of these components. I have transistors in my toolbox that are replacements for common organ controls that are each the size of my pinkie fingernail. Huge! I have no idea how many circuits there are in my iPhone, but it must be millions.

I first worked with solid-state organ actions in the late 1970s. One job was in a rickety Anglican church on East 55th Street in Cleveland where we were installing one of the earliest Peterson combination actions in an old Holtkamp organ. The church had a dirt crawl space instead of a basement, and as the apprentice, it was my job to crawl on my belly with the rats (yup, lots of them), trailing cables from chamber to console. We followed the directions meticulously, made all the connections carefully, crossed our fingers, and turned it on. Some smoke came out. It took us a couple hours to sort out the problem, and we had to wait a few days for replacement parts, but the second time it worked perfectly. I do not believe we were very sure of what we had done, but we sure were pleased.

In around 1987, I became curator of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1202, 1951) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. With over 230 ranks and 13,000 pipes, the instrument had heaps of electro-pneumatic-mechanical relays. As I came onboard, wire contacts had started to break at a rapid rate, and as the switches were mounted vertically, when a contact broke, it would fall and lodge across its neighbors causing cluster ciphers. Ronald Paul of Salt Lake City, Utah, had been contracted to install a new solid-state switching system, and I was on hand to help him with many details. I was assuming the care of the organ from Jason McKown who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner at the Skinner Organ Company and cared for the Mother Church organ since it was installed. Jason was in his eighties and still climbed the hundreds of rungs and steps involved in reaching the far reaches of that massive organ.

Jason looked over all the shiny gear, bristling with rows of pins and filled with those fiberglass cards covered with mysterious bugs, shook his head, and said, “this is for you young fellows.”

Swing wide the gates.

Over the past fifty years, most of us have gotten used to solid-state pipe organ actions. In that time, we have seen the medium of connections go from regular old organ cable to “Cat5” to optical fiber. I know that some of the firms that supply this equipment are experimenting with wireless connections. I suppose I may be asked to install such a system someday, but while I am committed to solid-state switching and all its benefits, I am skeptical about wireless.

Forty years ago, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had a small and ancient electronic organ in the chapel. I was happy enough that I almost never had to play it, but there was one Thanksgiving Day when the pastor chose to lead an early morning worship service in the chapel. Halfway through that service, human voices blared out of the organ, decidedly irreverent human voices. The organ was picking up citizens band radio transmissions from Euclid Avenue in front of the church. I dove for the power cord. “Roger that, good buddy. Over and out!”

We have wireless remote controls for televisions, receivers, radios, even electric fans, and it is often necessary to punch a button repeatedly to get the desired function to work. And there was that printer yesterday, choosing idly to skip the bounds of our Wi-Fi router and booster, requiring the introduction of a new wire.

When I think of a wireless connection between the console and chambers of a large pipe organ, I imagine sweeping onto the bench, robes a-flutter, turning on the organ, pushing a piston, and garage doors throughout the neighborhood randomly opening and closing. Swing wide the gates, I’m coming home.

“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)

Control freaks

A little over a year ago, I bought a slightly used 2017 Chevrolet Suburban. It replaced a 2008 Suburban that I drove 250,000 miles. I prefer buying cars that have 10,000 or 15,000 miles on them because I think the first owner absorbs the loss of the “new car value,” and I get to buy a fancier car for less money. The first Suburban was black. Wendy thought Tony Soprano while I thought Barack Obama. My colleague Amory said “Special Agent Bishop” when I arrived at his house to pick him up. But the funnier thing was that while sitting in an on-street parking spot in New York City in the big black car, people would open the back door and get in, thinking I was the limo they had ordered. That happened several times, and each time brought a good shared laugh.

I like to have big, comfortable cars because I drive a lot (between 1985 and 2018, I drove six cars a total of nearly 1,250,000 miles, which is an average of about 38,000 miles a year), and because I carry big loads of tools, organ components, and, um, boat stuff. I can put an eight-foot rowing dinghy in the back of the Suburban and close the door. The new Suburban gets about forty percent more miles to the gallon. But the biggest difference is the electronics.

Sitting at a stoplight facing uphill, I move my foot from the brake to the accelerator to start moving, and a sign on the dashboard lights up, “Hillside brake assist active.” I am told that I am Driver #1 for the auto-set feature for seats and mirrors (and steering wheel and pedals). I am told when my phone connects to Bluetooth or when Wendy’s phone is not present in the car. I am told when the rain sensor is operating the wipers. I am told when my tire pressure is low. I am told when I am following a car too closely. And to the amusement of friends and family, and a little excitement for me, the driver’s seat buzzes when I get close to things like Jersey Barriers, trees, or other cars. It sounds like the gabbling of eider ducks when they are rafting together in big groups at sea.

The feature I like best is Apple CarPlay. When my phone is plugged into the charger, my Apple icons show up on the dashboard touchscreen giving me easy and safe access to Apple Maps, Google Maps, hands-free messaging, and phoning. I can activate Siri with a button on the steering wheel and place a call or record a reminder, so I have no excuse for forgetting things. One of the icons is my Audible account so I can listen to my library of ebooks as I drive.

I expect there is a downside to all these gadgets. Any organbuilder knows that there is a whopper of a wiring harness snaking through the car and a CPU somewhere deep in the bowels of the vehicle, and I imagine that the most expensive repairs I will face down the road will be correcting cranky electronics.

One thing leads to another.

I am thinking about electronic controls because I was amused recently by a post on Facebook by Damin Spritzer¹ who wrote, “Does anyone else have anxiety dreams about Sequencers? *Laughs weakly and makes more coffee.*” There ensued a flurry of responses, some thoughtful and provocative, some ridiculous, and some downright stupid. This conversation brought to my mind several themes I have developed over the years about the advances of pipe organ control systems and various colleagues’ reactions to the relevance, convenience, and pitfalls of new generations of this equipment.

In the late 1980s, I took over the care of the heroic Aeolian-Skinner organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston, Massachusetts. With 237 ranks and well over 13,000 pipes, this was quite a responsibility. Jason McKown, then in his eighties, who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner in the 1920s, was retiring after decades of service, and before I arrived, the church had contracted with another organ company to install a solid-state switching and combination system. Jason’s comment was simple, “This is for you young guys.” I was present to help with that installation, and, of course, was responsible for maintaining it. That was before the days of effective lightning protection, and whenever there was a thunderstorm, we had to reprogram the Crescendo memory. I had a helper who memorized that huge list of stops, and I could trust her to drop by and punch it in.

Marie-Madeleine Duruflé played a recital at Boston’s Trinity Church for the 1990 convention of the American Guild of Organists. A few days before she was to arrive to prepare for her performance, the solid-state combination system in the organ stopped working and the organ went dead. The company that built the system sent a technician with a bale of spare cards, and we worked through two nights to get the organ running again, just in time for Madame Duruflé to work her magic.

The Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University is one of the great monuments of twentieth-century organbuilding. With more than a 165 voices and over 12,500 pipes, it is high on the magic list of the largest Skinner organs, and Nick Thompson-Allen and Joe Dzeda have been its curators for over fifty years. Nick’s father, Aubrey Thompson-Allen, started caring for the organ in 1952. That huge organ is played regularly by dozens of different people, and one might expect that a combination system with multiple levels would have been installed promptly there. But at first, Joe and Nick resisted that change, correctly insisting that the original equipment built by Ernest Skinner’s people must be preserved as a pristine example of that historic art and technology.

However, along with Yale’s teachers, they understood that the change would be a big advantage for all involved, including the durability of the organ itself. Knowing that the cotton-covered wire used in Skinner organs would soon be no longer available, they proactively purchased a big supply. At their request, Richard Houghton devised a plan that added 256 levels of solid-state memory while retaining the original combination action and retaining the original electro-pneumatic actions to operate the drawknobs and tilting tablets as pistons were pushed and settings engaged. Houghton was sensitive to all aspects of the situation, and the 1928 console still functions as it did ninety-one years ago, while serving the procession of brilliant students and performers who use that organ for lessons, practice, and performance. The addition of the new equipment was accomplished with great skill in the spirit of Mr. Skinner under Joe and Nick’s supervision. Neat bundles of green and red cotton-covered wire wrapped in friction tape connect the hundreds of circuits of the console to the new unit, just as if it had been installed by Mr. Skinner’s workers in 1928. A side benefit was the elimination of countless hours spent resetting pistons as each organist took to the bench, hours lost for valuable practice, hours when the huge blower was running to support that mundane task.

Next

The sequencers to which Dr. Spritzer was referring are accessory functions of the more advanced solid-state combination systems that allow an organist to set sequences of pistons whose individual settings are advanced during performance by repeatedly pressing a piston or toe stud labeled “Next.” In addition, some systems allow the organist to program which pistons would be “Next,” so some make all the buttons have that function, while others choose buttons that are easy to reach and difficult to miss.

There is a steep learning curve in gaining proficiency with sequencers. It is easy enough to punch a wrong button or to fail to insert an intended step, so double-checking before performing is advised. And malfunctions happen, leaving a performer stranded with an unintended registration in the heat of battle. In thirty-six hours, Dr. Spritzer’s post attracted 135 “Likes” and 185 responses from organists who have had those magic moments. The brilliant performer Katelyn Emerson chimed in, “When the sequencer jumped no fewer than 16 generals on the third to last page of Liszt’s Ad nos, and I landed on nothing more than an 8′ Gamba, I had nightmares for weeks.” Reading that, I thought, “If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.”

Here are a few other replies to Dr. Spritzer’s post:

“No music was written for sequencers, so I don’t use them.”

“Didn’t have to dream it. I lived it.”

“When forward and back are unlabeled brass pedals one inch apart, only mayhem will ensue.”

“I just stick to mechanical action.”

“You know, I’m a sequencer phobic. I’ve had situations where I hit it and it zipped up five pistons.”

“Petrified of the things . . . . Yes, that’s why I never use them.”

Any colleague organbuilder who has or might consider installing a sequencer in an organ console should jump on Facebook (or get a friend to help you), find Dr. Spritzer’s post, and read this string of responses.

There are two basic ways that piston sequencers work. One is that you set all the pistons you need, and then set them in a chosen sequence. You can reuse individual settings as often as you would like, and there is no meaningful limit to the number of steps in a saved sequence. You can go back and edit your sequence, adding or deleting settings mid-way through. This is sometimes referred to as the “American” system.

The “European” system is a little different. It runs through General pistons in order, then scrolls up to the next level of memory and runs through them again. The scrolling continues through all the levels. This seems limiting, because it specifies exactly the order in which you must set pistons, and if you want to return to a setting, you have to program another piston the same way. In both styles, there is typically an LED readout on the console showing the current step in the sequence, and which piston it is, and if there isn’t, there should be.

If there are so many pitfalls, why bother? One of the great things about the state of the pipe organ today is that there are so many brilliant players who concertize around the world. If you perform on twenty or thirty different organs each year, especially those with big complicated consoles, you might take comfort in finding handy gadgets that are common to many of them. If you are adept and comfortable using sequencers, you do not have to go fishing around a big complex console looking for Swell 1, Great to Pedal, General 22, Positiv to Great 51⁄3′, Great 6, All 32′ Stops Off. You just keep hitting “Next.” Some consoles are equipped with “Next” buttons up high, so your page-turner can press it. (If you need that kind of help, maybe you should try the autoharp.)

Some teachers discourage the use of sequencers. Stephen Schnurr, editorial director and publisher of The Diapason, wrote that he “forbids” his students to use them in public performances at Valparaiso University where he teaches. He confirmed my guess, that he is encouraging them to “stand on their own two feet” and learn to play the organ seriously “the old-fashioned way.” That reminds me of my apprenticeship in Jan Leek’s workshop in Oberlin, Ohio, where he made sure I could cut a piece of wood straight and square by hand before teaching me the use of the super-accurate stationary machines. Further, Schnurr believes it is important that students do not rely on sequencers so heavily that they are bamboozled when faced with a console that does not have one. After all, I would guess that well over half of all organs do not have piston sequencers.

Looking at the other side of the issue, a few months ago, the Organ Clearing House installed a practice organ at the University of Washington, specially intended to expose students to the latest gadgets. We expanded a Möller Double Artiste to include a third independent unified division and provided a three-manual drawknob console with a comprehensive solid-state combination action that includes a sequencer. The organ allows students to develop proficiency using a sequencer in the safety of a practice room. It also features two independent expression boxes.

The old-fashioned way

The Illinois organbuilder John-Paul Buzard drives “Bunnie,” his Model A Ford, across the picturesque countryside, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of fellow members of a club of Model A owners. It looks like a ton of fun and great camaraderie, especially as club members help each other through repairs. Nevertheless, I will bet he uses a vehicle that is more up to date in the context of daily life. I am not an expert, but I am guessing that the Model A would be taxed if pressed into the mileage-hungry travel routines of an active organ guy. The Michelin radial tires on my whiz-bang Suburban are much better suited for endless hours at, um, eighty miles-per-hour than the 4.75 x 19 tires on the Model A.

In 1875, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings built a spectacular organ with seventy stops and 101 ranks (Opus 801) for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. The company’s workshop was within walking distance, and Frank Hastings reveled in taking potential clients to see it. It was equipped with a pneumatic Barker lever to assist the extensive mechanical keyboard and coupler actions, ten registering composition pedals, and a fourteen-stop Pedal division, complete with four 16′ flues, a 12′ Quint, and a 32′ Contra Bourdon. Anyone familiar with the construction of such organs knows that represents about an acre of windchest tables.

Thirty-one years later, in 1906, the Ernest M. Skinner Company built a four-manual, eighty-four-rank organ (Opus 150) for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, New York. That organ had electro-pneumatic action throughout, pitman windchests, and an electro-pneumatic combination action with pistons and a crescendo pedal. That is a quantum leap in pipe organ technology in thirty-one years.

Look back to the iconic Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, France, built in 1860. This was likely the most advanced instrument of its time, and the myriad original mechanical and pneumatic registration machines are still in use. We can reproduce how Widor, Dupré, and countless other genius players managed that massive instrument (although the presence of an electric blower takes away some of the original charm—it must have been quite a chore to maintain a brigade of organ pumpers to get through performances of Widor’s organ symphonies). Louis-James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was the organist there when the instrument was new, but Cavaillé-Coll realized that he was not the equal of the instrument and championed Widor as the next titulaire. Widor exploited the vast tonal resources of that great organ transforming the art of organ playing, inspired and enabled by Cavaillé-Coll’s technological innovations.

Ernest Skinner, with his comprehensive combination-actions, helped enable innovative artists like Lynwood Farnam develop new styles of playing. Widor and Farnam were apparently not above using complex and newly developed controls to enhance their command of their instruments. Their organbuilders demanded it of them.

I first worked with solid-state combinations in the late 1970s. Those systems were primitive, and excepting the revolutionary availability of two levels of memory, they had pretty much the same capabilities as traditional electric and electro-pneumatic systems. As the systems got more complex, they were sensitive to flukes like lightning strikes, and their developers worked hard to improve them. Recently I commented to a colleague that we all know that Mr. Skinner’s systems could fail. A hole in a piece of leather could mean that the Harmonic Flute would not set on divisional pistons. He agreed but replied that a good organ technician with a properly stocked tool kit could open up the machine and fix the problem in an hour or so. Some organbuilders are now proficient with electronic repairs, while others of us rely on phone support from the factory and next-day shipment of replacement parts to correct problems.

§

I could repair almost anything in my first car. There were two carburetors, a mechanical throttle, a manual choke, and an ignition rotor. When you open the hood of my Suburban, you see some plastic cowls and some wires and assume there is a cast engine block down in there. To start the car, I step on the brake and push a button. The key must be present, but it stays in my pocket. If I leave the key in the car and shut the doors, the horn gives three quick toots, telling me that the car knows better than to lock the doors. But I suppose someday it will smirk, toot twice, and lock me out.

Next.

Notes

1. Dr. Damin Spritzer is assistant professor of organ at the American Organ Institute of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, artist in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. Matthew in Dallas, Texas, and an active international recitalist. You can read more about her at http://www.ou.edu/aoi/about/directory/spritzer-bio.

Giants among favorites

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

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

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

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

Warner Concert Hall

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

Basilica of Saint Martin

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

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

Saint-Sulpice

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

Saint James

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

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

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

“The Busch”

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

Trinity on Copley

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

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

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

A couple doozies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look it up.

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

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

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

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