In the Wind: One-stop shopping

Make me an instrument.

I have been involved in the world of building musical instruments since I was about twelve years old as the organist of my home church, where my father was rector, was the harpsichord and clavichord builder Carl Fudge. On occasion, he brought one of his instruments to the church for a special performance, and at that tender age I was fascinated by the concept of playing an instrument you had built yourself. I have thought about that continually in the past fifty-plus years, so my feelings and perceptions have become more sophisticated, but I know I was in awe of Carl’s skill as both instrument maker and musician. Visiting his workshop, I was further enthralled, I started taking organ lessons, and my life’s path was set.

Longtime readers of this column will recognize that one of my favorite subjects is writing about one’s relationship with one’s instrument. In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet wrote:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.

Lovely, isn’t it? What a poetic description of a musical relationship. But his next sentence throws most of the rest of us under the bus.

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. . . . To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.¹

In that light, I imagine Steinhardt would equate organists with truck drivers, sliding onto the bench, flipping a switch to turn on a ten-horsepower motor, and playing the instrument by remote control, twenty, fifty, or a hundred feet away.

I hope he likes it.

Nearly thirty-five years ago, my siblings, mother, and I commissioned a local artist to paint a picture of the red barn behind our parents’ house on Cape Cod in honor of dad’s retirement. We sent her photos of the barn, and she visited there several times in secret. The painting was to be unveiled at “the party” in front of family and friends, and there was an air of excitement, but when the cloth was removed there was silence. It did not look like our barn. The proportions were akilter, and the shadow of a nearby tree fell across the grass and the barn’s wall in a way no shadow could exist under the sun. It was a stunning moment, a much better story now than an experience then.

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I have just reread John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker (Harper Collins, 2007), which follows the commissioning and construction of a new violin for Eugene Drucker, violinist of the Emerson String Quartet. (Drucker and Philip Setzer have equal billing, swapping “first chair” duties back and forth.) Drucker had commissioned the legendary luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz of Brooklyn, New York, to build an instrument to complement the Stradivari instrument that he uses in most performances, but which has a temperamental “personality,” especially when the quartet’s travels take them from one climate extreme to another in a short period. The Strad is slow to recover.

Marchese provides plenty of background information including biographical data about Guarneri, Stradivari, and the other Cremonese luthiers. He spent countless hours with both Drucker and Zygmuntowicz, interviewing them and observing them in the workshop, teaching studio, and concert stage. As Sam chose the wood for Gene’s violin, Marchese related stories about the harvesting and aging of wood; luthiers have collections of pieces of maple and spruce that have aged fifty years since they were harvested and milled. The stability of such aged wood is essential to the luthier. We learn of Sam’s apprenticeship and education as a luthier, how he was privileged to take detailed measurements of a dismantled Strad, and how he created a detailed map of the various pieces of the fiddle, measured to the thousandth of an inch. We hear him speaking with and addressing his colleague luthiers at conferences and restaurant tables. Throughout the book, I could hear the undercurrent: “I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it, I hope he likes it.”

Spoiler alert: Sam finished the violin in time to present it at Gene’s fiftieth birthday party amid excitement and congratulations. Gene plays the instrument for his friends, uses it in concert, and practices on it. He swaps back and forth between the new instrument and his trusty Strad. He wants to love it, but just cannot get there. Ultimately Sam acknowledges that he failed to captivate Gene with the new instrument. I recommend this book to anyone who owns and cares for a musical instrument, and to anyone who builds those instruments.

A bargain at twice the price

Nowhere in Marchese’s book is the actual price of a Zygmuntowicz violin stated, but a quick internet search at least implied to me that it is around $100,000. That is about the price of a new Steinway “B,” the seven-foot piano so prevalent in teaching studios and smaller recital halls. A Steinway “B” weighs nearly 800 pounds—the instrument costs $125 per pound or about $9 an ounce. A Zygmuntowicz violin weighs about fourteen ounces, about $7,143 per ounce. By comparison, think of the $15,000,000 Strad at $1,071,429 per ounce.

As a pipe organ builder, I marvel at the idea that a fourteen-ounce violin might be worth $15,000,000. You can build a mighty pipe organ for that amount; in fact few organs have ever cost that much. And does that mighty organ weigh 100,000 pounds? It is a bargain at $150 a pound or $9.38 an ounce. Why would anyone want to buy a violin when they could have a pipe organ?

Let’s buy a pipe organ.

When an orchestral musician purchases an instrument, whether new or “experienced,” it is a personal transaction. The musician is choosing and paying privately. At Eugene Drucker’s level, the price can be a family sacrifice. That money might have gone toward a vacation home or a boat, but the serious musician cannot function without an instrument of high enough quality to inspire his creativity.

The purchase of a pipe organ is typically a community event. When an organ shows signs of failing or when people within an institution advocate for a new instrument, a committee is usually formed to study the situation. Many of these committees engage consultants to inform and advise their work. Organ companies are solicited for proposals, a budget is established, a decision is made, and the hard work begins: raising the money.

The iconic four-manual, seventy-five-rank Flentrop organ in Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, Washington, was purchased for $165,000 in 1965. In today’s economy, that is about enough money for the copper 32′ Prestant that dominates the façade. The same organ today would cost something like $2,000,000. A three-manual organ with forty stops is likely to cost $1,000,000. That is a lot of money for a congregation to raise, and regardless of the price per pound, it is a lot of money for a small community of people to pay for a musical instrument.

I like to compare that process with a tennis club deciding to build a swimming pool. A few members come up with the idea on a hot afternoon, the elected leadership gets involved, and contractors offer estimates. Perhaps the membership would be assessed to raise some of the money; perhaps members would be solicited to make donations; perhaps there would be a mortgage to be offset by increased membership dues. Whether it is a tennis club building a swimming pool or a church commissioning a pipe organ, there would likely be a parliamentary process of proposing, discussing, and voting, except in those institutions with authoritarian leadership.

I have long believed that the easy part of the process is building the organ. With decisions made and money raised, an organ builder receives some of that money and gets to work doing what he knows how to do.

I hope they like it.

My comment about building an organ being the easy part notwithstanding, it is a complex task. Where do you start? What is it going to sound like? A point of departure is the determination of scaling of the organ pipes and the wind pressure. The length of organ pipes is pretty much given by the physics of musical tone. To produce low CC, the lowest note of the keyboard, on a unison stop, the speaking length of the pipe from mouth to tuning point is eight feet. The question is, what should the diameter of the pipe be? Are you hoping to achieve a brilliant “baroquey” sound with narrow scales, a lush romantic sound with wide scales, or something in between? Higher wind pressure translates easily into more powerful tone, though there are plenty of examples of low-pressure organs with bold voices.

You can study examples of organs in comparable buildings, measuring the scales and other dimensions of the pipes, and maybe altering the numbers for slightly smaller or broader scales. Some organ builders are brilliant at imagining the tone of a particular scale within a building and designing the rest of the voices to be compatible with the first. For a more certain study, it is increasingly common for an organ builder to bring a portable organ with wind supply and a collection of sample pipes of different dimensions allowing him to compare different scales and wind pressures. It is an expensive process involving travel, lodging, and shipping the equipment and supplies, but if the organ has a million-dollar price tag, it is a modest investment. There is no substitute for producing actual tones in the actual acoustical environment.

Think of the myriad individual projects that make up a completed organ. Artisans are building windchests, reservoirs, keyboards, consoles, wind conductors, mechanical or electric actions, casework, ladders, walkboards—the list can seem endless. And what about ornate decorations like pinnacles, pipe shades, and putti?

Like Sam Zygmuntowicz choosing the wood for a new violin, the organbuilder is on a constant search for good materials. I remember my mentor John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, in the 1970s purchasing a rare log of boxwood seven or eight feet long and eight inches in diameter for making the sharp keys of his organs and harpsichords, and gorgeous European beechwood for harpsichord bridges and nuts (the slim rail ahead of the tuning pins that lifts the strings off the pinblock). He ordered them through his friends at Flentrop Orgelbouw in Zaandam, the Netherlands, who shipped them to Cleveland in the sea-going container that delivered the brilliant Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland. Each time we set out to make a set of keyboards, we lopped a piece off that boxwood and milled it into those familiar tapered shapes.

John Boody of Taylor & Boody organbuilders in Staunton, Virginia, specializes in harvesting trees and sawing lumber for their instruments. His appreciation of the beauty of wood allows the artisans there to choose ideal boards for special places. Gorgeous woodgrain patterns on organ benches, around keytables, and casework is a hallmark of their instruments, and John’s care with quarter-sawing and drying the lumber produces especially stable material. In 2009, Wendy and I visited John and Janet Boody as part of a trip to Washington, DC, and Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, Monticello. We stayed in an apartment above John’s sawmill and saw the stacks of dried oak boards that would become the case of the new organ at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City.

George Bozeman, another of my mentors, held the concept that wind is the fuel we burn to make organ tone. Any pipe organ has a complex system to produce wind pressure (the blower), transport it to reservoirs and windchests (wind ducts), and regulate it to an exact and steady pressure (reservoirs, also known as regulators). “Bellows” is a term universally used to describe reservoirs/regulators, but I understand a bellows produces wind pressure, as found in the hand-pumped organs of earlier years, or the bellows next to your fireplace. A reservoir stores pressurized air, and a regulator regulates the pressure with internal valves that allow air to flow to the windchests only when the organ is being played and wind is being consumed. Both reservoir and regulator refer correctly to those components of a modern organ wind system, as the pressure is created by an electric blower. Steady, reliable pipe speech relies on steady, reliable wind pressure.

There are two basic types of structure for pipe organs. Some instruments have interior “skeletons” of wood or steel that support windchests, reservoirs, expression boxes, and the ladders and walkboards necessary to reach them all. Others are supported by their free-standing cases. The upright styles of the lower case support the impost, the heavy frame that includes the bases of round or pointed towers. In the case of the Flentrop in Cleveland I mentioned earlier, the impost was by far the heaviest single part of the organ, and the core of its structure. The upper-case panels and styles fit into mortices in the impost and in turn supported the majestic tower crowns. The Pedaal and Hoofdwerk windchests sat on the impost.

In either type of construction, the musical stability of the instrument is a direct factor of its structural stability, especially with mechanical key action, as any motion in the structure affects the adjustment of the action. Organ pipes must be supported to stand perfectly vertically, especially when the pipe metal is soft, as gravity will grab any leaning pipe and try to pull it to the ground. Reed pipes need special support because they are skinniest and weakest at the bottom of the resonator where it intersects with the pipe’s boot. Any organ builder or technician can tell stories about larger reed pipes collapsing on themselves, sometimes breaking free of their supports and crashing down on neighboring pipes.

The proof is in the pudding.

With beautiful wood chosen, accurate actions built and adjusted, wind system regulated and free of leaks, it is time for the pipes. It is a magical moment when an organ produces its first musical tones in its new home. Sometimes we let people in the church know when we expect to sound the first notes. We have already had the excitement of turning on the blower for the first time, experiencing the organ coming to life. People gather, a rank of pipes is placed in their holes, and an out-of-tune hymn is played. After thousands of hours in the workshop, days or weeks of heavy lifting, and precise fitting, the heart of the enterprise comes clear.

What about Eugene Drucker’s reaction to his new instrument? Will the new organ be all everyone hoped for? The local organist will have the strongest reaction, the choir and other musicians who will use the instrument follow suit. The people in the pews will have their opinions. In 1982, John Leek and I installed a new organ we had built at Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The previous organ was a nondescript “asparagus patch” of exposed pipes with little stature; our instrument had a tall case of oak and walnut with classic pointed towers and moldings and shiny façade pipes. We delivered the organ on a Sunday afternoon, and by the following Sunday the case was standing, giving the impression of being complete. John and I sat in the pews as the congregation filed in, found their seats, and craned their necks to see the new organ in the rear balcony. In the quiet of the moment, a young girl cried out, “I liked the old one better.”

Notes

1. Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.

Down front or up in the back?

My home church is the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was called as rector in 1966 when I was ten years old. The song, “Winchester Cathedral,” written by Geoff Stevens and recorded by The New Vaudeville Band, was released in August of 1966, and Dad received several copies of the recording as gag gifts from friends (Oh voh-dee oh doh). I had three years of piano lessons before we moved to Winchester, but singing in the choir there was my first experience participating in the music of the church. The harpsichord maker Carl Fudge was the organist, and as I have written frequently, he had a lot to do with my early career choices.

The organ at Epiphany, the first I played, was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company (Opus 128), a very early and seriously rundown example of Mr. Skinner’s work. The church is brick, of Gothic influence, and mythically shares proportions with “the” Winchester Cathedral. There is a classic Gothic chancel up several steps from the nave, and the choir was situated in fixed carved oak pews on either side. The Skinner console was on the Epistle side nearest the communion rail, right by the little alleyway through which the congregation returned to their seats in the nave after leaving the rail. I started organ lessons when I was twelve, and my first experience playing in church was when Mr. Fudge allowed me to slip onto the bench and noodle a bit while he received communion.

The church had an ancient forced-hot-air heating system with large registers in the floor. If you were a clever choir member or acolyte, you would finagle standing on one, and your cassock would inflate like a dirigible. There must have been a history of choir members fainting because the choir pews were equipped with smelling salts. These fifty-five-year-old childhood memories bring a burst of nostalgia. I am thinking of Eleanor Banks, the burly alto in the senior choir, who wielded a hairbrush like a nunchuck as the robed junior choir filed out of the choir room. In hindsight, it was good none of us had lice—she would have spread them through the whole choir.

I left Epiphany at thirteen to begin my career as an organist, filling in at the First Baptist Church (with a three-manual Estey), then as organist at Saint Eulalia’s Catholic Church (Conn Artist—you cannot make this stuff up), and then in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts (three-manual 1860 E. & G. G. Hook, a stupendous organ). While I was building my resumé before leaving town for Oberlin in the fall of 1974, the people of the Parish of the Epiphany were grappling with the condition of the wheezing Skinner organ. In that Boston suburb, we were in the heart and heyday of the tracker revival, and Mr. Fudge with his early music background was advocating a new tracker organ to be placed in a not-yet-built rear gallery.

Meanwhile, down the street . . .

The First Congregational Church in Winchester has a commanding location on a hillside above the town center and an immense steeple that leaves no doubt that the Congregationalists got the concept of “location, location, location.” Their much-rebuilt 1925 Hook & Hastings organ was replaced in 1969 by
C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 50, a three-manual, mechanical-action organ with twenty-seven stops. Mr. Fisk wanted to place the organ in the rear balcony, but the church insisted on a chancel installation. His solution was to build a very wide, very shallow organ on the chancel wall. In fact, the organ breaks out of the wall and looms into the chancel airspace. The keydesk is on the floor under the organ facing the opposite wall, and the mechanical action goes under the organist and up the wall to the organ. Large doors open into the hallway behind to expose the action. Originally, there was a setter-board combination action behind that door that has since been replaced with a hundred-level solid-state system.

John Skelton was organist of the First Congregational Church back in the day, and he was my organ teacher through my high school career. The church was a five-minute walk from home, and I had generous practice privileges, spending most weekday afternoons in the thrall of the music and the instrument, learning to wrap my fingers and feet around the notes. Mr. Skelton was a gentle and generous teacher who encouraged and nurtured my passion. I loved working with him, and I loved playing on that organ. In summer of 2021, my son Chris and his wife Alex bought a house near where the Skeltons live, and while I was helping Chris with some repairs and modifications before they moved in, I had a swell evening with John and Carolyn.

A new Fisk organ was installed at the Parish of the Epiphany in 1974, just as I was leaving for Oberlin. It started with twelve stops on two manuals, and seven “prepared for” voices were added in 1983. The parish made the difficult decision to move the music making out of the chancel. The new balcony cost more than the $35,000 organ (imagine, a Fisk organ for $35,000), and while some parishioners were unhappy with the change, the relatively small organ was given a commanding position in the relatively large sanctuary. Of course, people familiar with Fisk organs know that “Charlie” was not known for having trouble filling churches with sound.

I did not play as much on Opus 65 as on Opus 50, but I did play a few recitals, perhaps a dozen services, and my sister’s wedding there. I have not been in that building since my father’s memorial service eight years ago, but I will always love the place and value its role in my earliest experiences with the music of the church. I will also always cherish the privilege of playing such brilliant, responsive organs when I was a pup.

Those two organs make a terrific comparison, built five years apart by the same firm in churches a half mile apart, and placed so radically differently in their buildings. They are both vibrant presences. The chancel placement in the Congregational church is surprisingly successful, partly because the chancel is very wide, so the organ’s sound directly reaches a large percentage of the area of the nave, because the acoustics are lively, and because the organ chamber is barely three feet deep.

The people at Fisk have dubbed these organs “Winchester Old” and “Winchester New,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the hymntunes for “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” and “On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry,” respectively.

As much space as you need?

I am fond of telling clients that there are two rules about placing a pipe organ in a church today. Rule #1: There is never enough money. Rule #2: There is never enough space. I have been in scores of older church buildings in which space was no issue. Think of a Catholic church built in 1880 seating 1,200 people. The ceiling is a barrel vault eighty feet up, so even if the balcony rail is twenty-five above the nave floor, there is still fifty-five feet of ceiling height. It is not unusual to find a nineteenth-century organ that is thirty-five or forty feet tall with a footprint of twenty by thirty feet with room left for a fifty-voice choir. Think of the grand organ formerly in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, now in storage. It is a rare modern building that will accommodate anything like that. It may be that the only chance of relocating such an organ would be to build a new organ from the pipes down and save the original voicing.

Even Gothic-style cathedrals pose serious challenges for organbuilders. The builders of the ancient cathedrals never imagined that people would be finding spaces for a hundred-plus ranks of organ pipes with all the associated mechanicals. The vaulted ceiling in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City is 112 feet off the floor, but the two 32′ stops are lying down in the triforium, the Contra Bombarde along Fiftieth Street and the (Double Open Wood) Diapason along Fifty-First Street. At Durham Cathedral, there are, count them, two big Open Wood Diapasons, both standing on the floor in the aisles beside the chancel, the sixteen-footer on the south aisle, and the thirty-two-footer on the north. At York Minster, the 32′ metal Diapason also stands on the floor of the aisle by the chancel, painted to imitate the stone fabric of the wall.

It is often problematic to place pipe organs in newer church buildings. The great interior height in many older church buildings is the result of the desire for proper proportions and the lofty superstructure that supports that high ceiling. Modern construction materials and techniques allow low ceilings to span great distances, and the economics of construction say that as a building gets taller, its cost increases exponentially. Are you paying $500,000 for each additional foot of height? Many modern churches are built without any planned accommodation for an organ, and plenty of architects do not know how much space and what sort of environment an organ needs.

The most extreme experience I have had with this was when a church in Virginia asked me to advise them about placing a pipe organ in their new building. I traveled there to find that although they had asked the architect to provide space for an organ, there was no place in the building to put it. The architect was present at this meeting, and he showed me a photo of an organ façade on the wall of a church and pointed to a space on an outside wall. He blanched when I told him that such an organ would be eight- or ten-feet deep behind the façade. It was an awkward moment. Disappointed, the church bought a digital instrument.

I view the task of evaluating a church building for the placement of an organ as harvesting space. Where in the building might an organ go? Can a classroom be converted to an organ chamber? Can additional height be captured by breaking through a ceiling into attic space? Will the organ be liturgically useful and acoustically successful if we put it there? In newer church buildings, we frequently find a sacristy behind the wall behind the altar. We could harvest the sacristy, open into the attic above, open the wall behind the altar, and make a perfect place for an organ—but I sure have run into opposition when I suggest taking the sacristy.

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The people of Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Shoreline, Washington, were willing to rethink and redesign the front of their church to accommodate a new organ. I visited there in 2016 to consult with them and found an amateur installation of a relocated organ with two “flower boxes” perched on the front wall and an enclosed swell stuffed in an attic behind the wall. There was a waist-high wall separating the choir from the altar and two false walls projecting from the front, enclosing the choir in a pseudo-chancel. Jonathan Ortloff’s design for the new organ created a proper chamber front and center. All the artificial barricades were removed, leaving a wide-open, flexible space for clergy, lay leaders, and musicians.

Susanna Valleau is music director at Saint Dunstan’s, a position she has held since before the inception of the organ project. She reports that Ortloff’s design was quickly accepted by the church’s rector and wardens and embraced by the congregation. The new flexibility of the sanctuary has allowed growth in the worship life of the parish as well as opening possibilities for community outreach, especially a variety of concerts.

The chambered organ

In the beginning of the twentieth century, it became popular to place organs in remote chambers, spaces separate from the rooms in which they would be heard. This can be partly attributed to economy—you save a lot of money when you do not have to build a case. It also means that you do not have an organ cluttering up the floor of the sanctuary (if you choose to look at it that way). This would never have been possible as a wide-spread practice without electricity. Electric keyboard actions made it possible to have great distances between keyboards and windchests, and organists had to learn to play by remote control.

Electricity was also crucial in enabling organs to break the bonds of their chambers, thanks to the luxury of virtually limitless wind supplied by electric blowers. Remember, Widor wrote all ten of his organ symphonies for the hand-pumped organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France. Organ builders developed techniques of voicing with higher wind pressures, producing ever-more-powerful sounds. While the wind pressure of a large organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in the 1860s might have been two-and-a-half inches or three inches, it is common to find five inches of pressure on the Great and eight inches on the Swell of a Skinner organ dating from the 1920s, not to mention solo reeds on fifteen inches or twenty-five inches. Air is the fuel we burn to create organ sound. When Mr. Skinner put his Swell celestes and Flauto Dolces on eight inches of pressure, he coaxed them out of the chamber and into the room, stepping on the gas by running more air through the pipes.

Today we can compare the experiences of playing and hearing organs in chambers and in free-standing cases. In fact, there are several American churches where you can hear both in the same room. The First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, has a three-manual organ by Rudolf von Beckerath (1972) in the rear gallery and a four-manual W. W. Kimball (1931) in chancel chambers. What a wealth of organ tone to experience under one roof.

The chapel at Duke University has a four-manual, hundred-rank Aeolian located in chancel chambers and a four-manual, hundred-rank Flentrop in a high gallery on the rear wall. There is also a small Brombaugh organ tuned in meantone in a side chapel. The Organ Historical Society held a national convention in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2001 during which we heard the ultimate comparison of organs with recitals on each of those organs in the same day—Mark Brombaugh played the Flentrop, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played the Aeolian. The range of music played was profound, from Frescobaldi to Wagner and Liszt, and conventioneers got a real earful that day.

Prepare the way.

When an institution is planning a room that will include a pipe organ, it is wise to engage an organ expert in the design process. It is a rare architect who would have a deep grasp of the space needed for an organ. In fact, without real practical knowledge, planning the size of an organ is likely to be arbitrary. How many stops must it have? Would it have fewer more powerful stops, or would the tonal variety that comes from a larger number of stops serve the needs of the institution best? These questions apply both to churches and universities. If it should be forty stops, should it be electric or mechanical action? And how do you arrive at forty stops? Where should the organ be placed for best acoustical advantage and logistical usefulness? You do not want to place a mechanical-action organ with an attached keydesk alone in a gallery with choir seating on the floor under it or at the other end of the room. The independent organ consultant can help answer all these questions without the conflict of angling for the contract to build the organ.

What will be the electrical requirements? How much might the organ weigh? How are the building’s walls constructed to maximize their effective resonance? In a recent job where an organ was removed for renovation and returned to its original location, the flimsy drywall behind the organ was reinforced with new heavy material, and the effect on the organ’s sound was dramatic.

Because the pipe organ is a monumental instrument, it relies on the integrity of its building for the projection of its sound. The building must provide the organ a safe and solid home. Flimsy construction absorbs sound. Rigid construction projects it. The organ should not be placed under valleys in the roof that would be prone to leak. Witness that the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Notre-Dame de Paris miraculously survived the catastrophic fire in 2019; the peaked roof above the organ between the two towers protected the instrument during that horrible event.

In many churches, it is obvious where the organ should go. In others, not so much. When you are going to the trouble and expense of acquiring an organ, set the stage well and get it right.

Out and about

After Christmas 2019 I retired from maintaining pipe organs. With some forty-five years of racing about twice a year to get to every client during “tuning season,” I was looking forward to sitting back, watching my friends and colleagues as they blasted about doing Easter and spring tunings, but as it turned out, no one was doing any tuning that spring. In March of 2020 the world as we knew it shut down, churches closed their doors, and organ tuners across the country stayed home.

My tuning and service career started when I was a student at Oberlin during the 1970s, as I was fortunate to work three days a week for John Leek. If you are a regular reader, you have read about John before. He was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who apprenticed in various workshops in the Netherlands starting when he was a child. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whose reputation as an innovating organbuilder was widely known. While working on Holtkamp organs on the campus of Oberlin College, Leek saw that the school was advertising for a full-time organ curator. “That’s the job for me.”

He was still employed by Oberlin when I started working with him, but as he had developed a lively organ service trade outside of his work at the school, he soon left Oberlin and founded his eponymous company. I loved traveling around the area with him servicing organs from the start, going in and out of church and school buildings, working on a variety of instruments. Each client had distinct personalities, both personal and institutional. It was easy to tell if a place was well run or struggling, ambitious or complacent, progressive or conservative. There were people we looked forward to seeing and people we knew would be difficult. There were organs that were fun to work on, and a few that we dreaded. Some buildings were immaculately maintained, always neat and clean, and others were dirty, smelly, and cluttered.

I left John’s shop in 1984 with my wife and two toddlers to return to Boston where I grew up, joining the workshop of Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and taking a position as music director at a lovely Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. In my first weeks with Angerstein, Dan and I went on service calls together so he could introduce me to the more complex and important instruments, and I was soon exploring my home territory with helpers from the workshop, learning the tricks and foibles of each instrument and client.

Dan closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller for what turned out to be Möller’s waning days—that venerable firm closed in 1993—and I took on Angerstein’s service clients as I formed the Bishop Organ Company. Over the years I think I serviced more than 300 different organs, some for short periods, some for well over thirty years, and I know there was a stretch in the 1990s when I had close to 100 clients at once. I had a group of wonderful helpers, three of whom I taught to tune and who were my pleasant travel companions as we rolled around New England.

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We worked on a wide range of organs, from the mighty 240-stop Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston where we tuned once a week, to a three-stop positive organ by Bedient Pipe Organ. That Bedient organ is in Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is more than seventy-five miles from the Sagamore Bridge connecting Cape Cod to the mainland. It was seventy-five miles from the workshop to the bridge, so we would schedule another service call on the Cape to make the trip worthwhile. After all that driving, tuning that tiny organ was something of a lark. Once as we started that long drive home, my helper Mark was half asleep in the passenger seat, looking dreamily out the window. As we passed a car, I overheard him whimper softly to himself, “They have ice cream.” I took the hint, and we stopped at the next opportunity.

After his retirement, my father was interim rector at Saint Mary, and I played a short evensong recital on the organ. It was like riding a tricycle. The organ had been a gift from an elderly gay couple who had lived in Provincetown for decades who collected $30,000 worth of recyclable bottles and cans by rooting through the dumpsters behind restaurants and bars—600,000 bottles and cans.

I once got fired by a client after a long day of travel. When I was working with Angerstein, we did a renovation and expansion project on a small Hook & Hastings tracker organ on Martha’s Vineyard, a quaint but exclusive touristy island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Later, when I was working on my own, the organ ciphered on Good Friday, and I received a call from the organist informing me that Easter was the day-after-tomorrow. His panicky and self-centered demeanor was well remembered from the time of the renovation project. I was finished with my hundred-or-so tunings, and the program of Easter music at my church was ready to go, so on Holy Saturday I made the two-hour drive from home in North Reading, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole where you catch the ferry to the Vineyard. It takes most of an hour to get your car in line for the ferry, and it is a forty-five-minute trip across the water.

I got to the church around noon, opened the windchest bung board, found a pallet caught between two guide pins, pushed the pins apart with my fingers, closed the bung, checked the tuning of the Oboe, and drove back to the ferry terminal. The invoice I sent the next week reflected four hours of driving, four hours dealing with the ferry, the cost of mileage and ferry tickets, and my minimum hour-and-a-half service call. The organist was furious. “You were in the church for fifteen minutes and you’re charging me a thousand dollars? You’re never coming back here.” I would not have expected “I’m so grateful you could get here in time for Easter” from that guy.

I had another panicky call from an organist on a Saturday morning. A wedding was starting in an hour, and the organ would not play. When he turned on the switch, lights glowed, and he heard the blower, but no sound. The church was a half hour from home. By the time I arrived, there were limousines parked in front of the church, a bagpipe howling in front, and people pouring into the church. I raced up the stairs to the organ loft, verified that the organ was running, and the electric stop action was working. I went to the basement and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake. Easy fix. Here comes the bride.

John Leek and I worked for a Polish Catholic Church on the west side of Cleveland. At the end of each tuning day, we presented ourselves at the rectory where the pastor would ask what we like to drink, duck back inside, and return with bottles of booze and cash to pay for the tuning. It seemed like kind of a loose way to run a ship.

Gustatory tuning

When scheduling a slate of tunings, I kept two criteria in mind, geographic proximity and what would be for lunch. Some organs would command a full day a few times a year. On other days we might visit two, three, or even four organs. Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard for ten years, a neighborhood of Boston across the harbor from the city where our neighbor was the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. The Episcopal church in Charlestown was a service client with a neat little two-manual tracker organ. The organist there was a pal who was happy to hold notes, so that church was often an easy fourth stop of the day, getting me home in time for cocktails.

We had pairs of churches close to each other, each pair associated with a nice place for lunch, and I scheduled things so we had a variety of lunches. You would not want to have Mexican food two days in a row. We had a nice range of cuisines including Vietnamese (Harvard Square), Chinese (Boston University), Mexican (Worcester and Quincy, Massachusetts), Thai (Back Bay, Boston), Italian (Newton, Massachusetts), fried seafood and clam chowder (Cape Cod)—you get the idea.

Several of the organists of churches where we tuned often joined us for lunch, allowing fun conversations about what was going on in each church. I paid attention to what music was out in the choir rooms, what music was piled around the organ console, and what notices were posted on bulletin boards, so I had a comprehensive working knowledge of dozens of church music programs, all of which informed my work at the church where I was music director (as well as organ tuner).

Watch your step.

If you are paying attention, maintaining a lot of instruments is an education in organ building. It is a delight to work on a well-designed, well-engineered, well-built, and well-voiced organ. How easy it is to move around inside an organ and how easy it is to reach things that will always need attention is an important reflection on the quality of an instrument. No church wants to hear that an ordinarily simple repair would involve a week of dismantling other parts of the organ to gain access to the offender.

I maintain an organ in a large, central building in New York, built by a widely known and respected builder, that includes a common brand of solid-state controls for switching and combination actions. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the “brain” of the system was installed inside the console in a way that the interchangeable circuit boards could not be removed, making normal maintenance impossible without removing the entire unit from the console and stressing the immense jumble of ribbon cables that connect it to the organ. That Medusa-like tangle made my blood run cold.

We like to see neat wiring on junction boards in an organ, every wire in its proper place, soldered evenly, tied and dressed so it will be easy to troubleshoot in the future. Sometimes we are confronted by tangled messes of wires that show no order or logic. The weight of cables is hanging directly from delicate contacts, odd wires are laced about, and there is no logic from one row of pins to another. You just know by taking a glance that the mess will be unreliable, and it is difficult, sometimes hopeless to dig down to find the wire in question.

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Organs enclosed in free-standing cases are often among the best built, but they can be difficult to service because one must reach everything from walkboards outside the back of the case. If there are seven or eight stops on the Great, that tin façade seems a mile away, and the treble pipes of the Principal down at rackboard level are often out of reach, especially if they are cone-tuned so you cannot use a long tuning iron. Staying with the Great as example, you might find three or even four reeds at the back of the windchest (16′ Trompette, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Vox Humana, 4′ Clarion), and two or three compound stops buried behind them (Mixture VI, Scharff IV, Sesquialter II). It is a stretch to reach over those hulking reeds to get to those tiny mixture trebles. As you get used to such an organ over the years, you realize which big reed pipes you can remove to gain the angles needed.

The lowest notes of the 8′ Gedeckt are probably tubed off the main chest and mounted on the case wall, but they are far away, and they can be especially tough to handle because if the pipe is sharp you must reach the pipe with two hands, one to hold the pipe and the other to move the cap higher on the pipe. Sometimes I asked a helper to hang on to my belt to keep me from falling into the pipes.

Ernest Skinner cared a lot about the serviceability of his organs. Stable ladders, ample walkboards between windchests, and sturdy tuning benches above the pipes make tuning comfortable and safe for both the tuner and the instrument. There are no surprises like treacherous spongy boards underfoot as you pass through the organ. We hope for this quality in any organ, but some are spooky. You must figure out what can bear your weight. A good rule for when you are walking somewhere in an organ where you have not walked before is do not put all your weight on anything without trying it gently first.

Over the years

Over years I learned the priorities and interests of the many organists I worked for. For one, I would always double check all the expression boxes, shutters, motors, and mechanisms, knowing that he used them constantly and considered them an important part of his playing. For another, it might be the trebles of the flutes, making sure that solo stops like orchestral reeds or harmonic flutes were in tune with each other, especially if there were antiphonal pairs of similar stops.

I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each organ, which reeds would need attention, the trebles of stopped wood flutes, keyboard contacts, and recalcitrant tremulants. I also learned which firms build organs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and, most important, beautiful. In my conversations with many organists, I learned what features of an organ made it most useful to the working musician, and how effectively it led the church’s music, especially congregational singing.

It is fun to reflect on how much easier that work is in the age of the mobile phone. Thirty years ago, while on the road doing service calls, I had to find pay phones to let people know if I was running late and to maintain my schedule. I had a memorized list of gas stations that had phone booths that were likely to be available. If I had to call a vendor with questions about the systems of an organ, I would ask in the church office if I could use the phone and sit facing away from the secretary so I could not see her angry glare when I had tied up the church’s only phone line for too long. Today you have your phone with you all the time (and it has a flashlight). If you are explaining something to a technician at Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Organ Supply Industries, or one of our other valued suppliers, you can snap a photo and send it instantly. What could be easier?

In several churches where I tuned for decades, I outlived generations of staff members and could be relied on to find a stepladder, to know where the controls for HVAC equipment were located, and how to program the electronic tower chimes. (I like to call them Bongatrons.) It is fun to think back on tens of thousands of miles driven, thousands of satisfying repairs—it is fun when you solve a knotty problem and get an organ back on its feet—endless conversations with musicians, clergy, and staff members. I had running jokes and teases with people I saw twice a year.

What an adventure, what a privilege, and what an education. Thanks for the great ride.

Shipping and handling included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

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

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

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students’ Listening II

Why should anyone ever listen to music?

That is, of course, a ridiculous question. It is obvious from history that listening to music is fundamentally human: a desire or even a need, and maybe a definitional part of human experience. Yet, I think it is important to continually remind ourselves that recordings, in addition to live performances, help us to strive to become better musicians. Musicians are often subject to self-doubt. (There is a cartoon that I see once in a while that shows a pie chart of the mind of a musician. The section labeled “crippling self-doubt” covers about 90% of the space.) That self-doubt comes from several questions, not the least of which is: “is this all worthwhile?” Yet, listening to great music provides us with an affirmative answer. The sort of self-doubt regarding the quality of one’s own playing can be exacerbated by listening—something that I will try to grapple with below.

One concrete reason for listening to music is to gain familiarity with diverse repertoire. This was the point of that “listening test” I encountered in college that I referenced last month. What repertoire? There are expanding circles ranging from music from a specific time period written specifically for our instrument to the entirety of written music. It is potentially frustrating and, for me, quite liberating to realize that it is impossible to know all of the music that is out there. Frustrating because of the inevitability of missing things that are wonderful. Liberating because, if we cannot experience everything, then we do not have to aspire to have experienced everything. We can hope to experience a substantial and meaningful subset of what there is.

How should any given student navigate the world of listening for learning about repertoire? Listening to music that you already know and like is a wonderful thing to do, but that’s not really part of this process. Going out in circles is always a good idea: if you love and listen to Brahms symphonies, try his chamber music; try symphonies by someone who influenced Brahms or whom he influenced. Then try their chamber music, piano music, and so on. If you like Schütz, listen to Gabrieli. If you like Beethoven, listen to Albrechtsberger. There need not be anything obscure, complicated, or subtle about constructing these circles. Fruitful connections can be found by perusing Wikipedia articles or CD booklets.

This is fairly obvious, and we all probably do it normally as we seek out things to listen to. But still, you should encourage your students to follow the process consciously, maybe in ways that are partly teacher-guided, perhaps with a written outline to keep track. But another idea is to seek out new things to listen to not by affinity but by opposition. If you love Brahms, listen to Wagner or Liszt. If you love Debussy, listen to a selection of music by Les Six, who consciously rejected his influence. If you love Bach, seek out the music of Marchand, who was apparently intimidated by Bach and fled from a possible competition with him. Or, if you have not already done so, listen to Handel, whose life, career, temperament, and music were so different from those of Bach.

Keeping a distance

Another way to find things to listen to is to search for music that is completely different from your norm. Whatever you have just been listening to and enjoying, move as far away as possible. If you have been listening to the Telemann Paris Quartets, find some late nineteenth-century Russian choral music. If you have been listening to a Bruckner symphony, find a clavichord performance of early seventeenth-century dances. This is a controlled randomness and guarantees avoiding ruts.

If a friend, teacher, critic, or scholar says that particular music is not worth getting to know (boring, pedestrian, unpleasant, lacking in importance), then try it out! This suggestion is not based on the notion that that friend or critic is someone of bad judgment or likely to be wrong. It is just a way of shaking things up. People of equal discernment and experience end up reacting differently to artistic experience as often as they end up reacting similarly, and that is just as true when they agree that they are people of similar tastes.

Some of my most important, rewarding, and long-term fruitful listening as a youngster came from LPs that an older musician had discarded as being of little or no interest. And the musician in question was someone from whom I learned a lot and whose taste and judgment I admired. We should never base our exploration on the assumption that any two people see things the same way.

When we talk about listening to music to broaden or deepen our familiarity with repertoire, we are mostly talking about listening to recordings. We expect to be able to find recordings of just about anything, whereas the concert offerings in any one locale can only cover a tiny amount of music, even over several concert seasons. The changes in the ways in which we encounter recordings that have taken place in the last several years are interesting to consider, especially as they influence the experience of students.

The revolution in the listening experience

In my experience, I would say that for at least five years now, 85% of the time that a student has come to a lesson and told me that they have listened to a piece, that listening has taken place on YouTube. A lot of listening is now done without any money changing hands. That opens music up to more listeners, though the effect on creators of performances is more problematic. I remember spending several days while I was in college agonizing over whether to spend, I believe, $4.99 on Ralph Kirkpatrick’s LP of four Bach harpsichord toccatas. I vividly recall going back to the Princeton University Store several times to look it over. (I did buy it.) Now anyone can find many performances of those pieces on YouTube.

When a student comes to a lesson and tells me that they have been looking into a particular piece by listening to a YouTube performance, I always ask who was playing. And never once in that situation has anyone been able to say who the performer was. Of course, that information is usually there to be found. And furthermore, all of the students in question have been extremely smart and clever people who pay attention to the world around them and care about artistic matters. It is just that expectations have changed; the ethos of how we listen has changed. YouTube is seen, for purposes like this, as a sort of neutral encyclopedia of music. It isn’t any more obvious that you would check on who was playing than it would be to dig into the question of who wrote a given encyclopedia or Wikipedia article.

Is this good, bad, neither, or both? I am not sure. I have an extreme interest in performers. Probably too extreme, in that it can get in the way; if I do not know who is playing, I have trouble feeling comfortable listening. But that is a foible of mine. If listening is being done only or mostly to learn something about what music is out there, then the identity or background of the player is perhaps best thought of as only one piece of information about what is going on, not necessarily more important than information about instruments, acoustics, recording technology, edition used, and so on. If a piece seems less interesting or compelling than you had hoped that it would be, it is often worth looking for a different performance before shelving your interest in that piece.

This modern paradigm has the effect of taking away some of the feelings of authority that we have traditionally bestowed on those performers who were invited to make recordings. Part of the dynamic of record listening over the twentieth century was that we assumed, by and large, that the recording artists were the most talented players and thoughtful interpreters. No matter how inspiring it can be to listen to great recordings, it can also be limiting. This limiting tendency has its feel-good side: getting accustomed to a certain undeniably effective performance approach and experiencing the satisfaction of absorbing and then perhaps recreating it. I would argue that the limiting nature of this outweighs the good feeling that it engenders. But even worse, there is the outwardly discouraging side: feeling intimidated by the reputed greatness of the recording artists, not just by liking their performances better than you anticipate liking your own, but being daunted by their celebrity and publicly heralded greatness. It is possible that the more democratic performance model that has taken hold now will have the psychological effect of freeing students to include themselves more easily in the universe of those whose performances are valid.

Listening to interpretation

In former days, a student might ask, “how can I hope to play as well as Marcel Dupré, Helmut Walcha, Fernando Germani, Marie-Claire Alain, etc.” Now we can say “you don’t even know who that player was. It could just as easily have been you. You can do that just as well!” This is an over-simplification, but not an unrealistic or inapt one, based on what I have seen.

This brings us to another major aspect of listening: to learn interpretation. As anyone will know who has read this column over the years, I am a strong believer in encouraging everyone to feel free to play as they want. This includes students, to such an extent that I want even beginners to make their own interpretive decisions. That is a big subject, and this is not the place to go into it fully. The role of listening to recordings in shaping interpretation or in learning how to think about the art of shaping interpretation is essentially two-fold. On the one hand, anyone’s playing can be a direct source of ideas about playing. There is nothing wrong with listening to someone else play and thinking about what that player did, the choices that he or she made, the effects that those choices seemed to have, etc. If a student is doing this as a conscious choice then it can be used in the ways that the student wants, with whatever guidance from the teacher seems useful. The teacher might do well to remind the student that anything heard in someone else’s performance is just one person’s choice.

But there is only so much that we can do by taking hold of this sort of listening consciously. To a greater or lesser extent from one person to another, but to a significant extent for almost everyone, performances heard repeatedly exert a subconscious influence, sometimes a very strong one. If we have heard a passage or a piece exactly the same way over and over again, our minds can define the piece as being what we heard as much as we define it by the notes on the page. This is true not only as defined by performance gestures—tempo, articulation, timing, etc., but also about registration or the often-irreproducible effects of acoustics. I recall an earnest conversation that I once had with an organist a bit older and more experienced than I was about what the registration “should” be for the middle section of a certain piece. I was arguing that the nature of the music called for something clear and light; he was equally sure that it needed a more “quinty”-rich sound. It turned out that each of us had had as our favorite recorded performance of that piece one that led us to these diverging conclusions. The point is not that we each liked the sound we were used to, but that we had absorbed it so deeply that we were prepared to argue that it was part of the definition of the piece.

As another example, I love the piano music of Schubert. However, I have lately realized that I so deeply absorbed Alfred Brendel’s approach to that music growing up that I have a hard time listening to anyone else playing it. For years I have sought out records or occasional live performances of Schubert by pianists whom I admire greatly. But I always react as if something is just not quite right—an interpretive/rhetorical analogue to pervasive wrong notes or bad tuning. I consider this a loss for me, and it may fade or otherwise change someday. It is not a big deal; rather, it is part of the give and take of life. But if I were trying to play that music, I would have the following bad choice: either I would play in a way that was a copy of someone else, or I would not like the way I played.

So the first antidote to getting one performance approach stuck in one’s head is to listen more or less equally to multiple performances. If you have heard each of five or six performances of a piece approximately the same number of times, then it is quite impossible that one of them can have established itself in your mind as the very definition of the piece. But this is also part of the give and take of life. If we listen to half a dozen performances of every piece that we might want to play, then we have that much less time to listen to other things. It is a question of managing what we want to do. I personally focus on pieces that I am actively working on or feel sure that I want to play some day. I solve the problem for those pieces by not listening to them at all. That is the opposite solution to listening to multiple performances. They both work for this purpose. For other music I sort of let the chips fall where they may.

Most of us spend much less time listening to live concerts in person than we do listening to recordings. Probably the major advantage of live performance is that when all is said and done, the sonorities, the effect of acoustics, and the spontaneity are simply different. A recording is not an “I couldn’t tell the difference” recreation of a concert or other live performance, and it is at least a common experience that concerts at their best are even better than recordings. This is kind of a cliché, and in this case it is only sometimes true. A given concert even by a great performer can happen to be uninspired, or something can go wrong: noise, tuning, acoustic. But there is a particular advantage to live concerts. If you hear a piece in concert and are intrigued or excited by it—a piece of the sort that you might want to play—then the chances are that you will not remember all specifics of the interpretation well enough or in enough detail to be overly influenced by them. They certainly cannot imprint themselves on your subconscious with the weight of authority that comes from repetition if that repetition has not happened.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and I will come back to it. For the next column, I will turn to J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Some of the features of this piece that make it particularly interesting inspire me to think and write while working on creating a performance of it, as there are some important things about the work that we do not know. For instance, we do not know the order of the movements, what instrument or instruments it was intended for, what title the composer meant for it to have, or, since it is incomplete, how it was meant to end. We do know that Bach worked on it for years, right up to his death, and that his heirs worked thereafter on getting it published. As to all of these things that we do not know, we can make highly educated guesses or assumptions—enough to make it interesting to discuss and to be getting on with for performance.

Music in the mountains

Last January, Wendy and I moved out of our apartment in Greenwich Village and into a house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Stockbridge is a town with two thousand residents in the Berkshire Mountains about five miles from the New York border. It is a gentle little town, and we live within a ten-minute walk of the cluster of shops and restaurants that form downtown, with the historic Red Lion Inn as its anchor. It is a dramatic change from the energetic bustle of Manhattan. Stockbridge was home to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, and to Norman Rockwell, the illustrator who produced hundreds of paintings to be used as covers for The Saturday Evening Post. French’s home and studio, Chesterwood, is now a museum and sculpture garden, and the Norman Rockwell Museum includes his studio, which was relocated to the site. Rockwell’s grave is about three hundred feet from our back door, in the cemetery behind the house along with many other quiet neighbors including the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The area is rich with summertime cultural institutions like the Shakespeare Festival, the Berkshire Theater Festival, and the dance theater Jacob’s Pillow. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is the area’s artistic centerpiece, located about fifteen minutes from our house in Lenox, Massachusetts. It is also home to the Tanglewood Music Festival founded by BSO conductor Serge Koussevitsky in 1940 as the Berkshire Music Festival, a rich educational program with a list of alumni that includes Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Zubin Mehta.

Mrs. Gorham Brooks (neé Tappan) and her aunt Mary Aspinwall Tappan donated the 210-acre Tappan estate to Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936, and an all-Beethoven concert by the BSO under Koussevitsky on August 5, 1937, was the beginning of the then-called Berkshire Symphonic Festival. The first concerts were held in a tent, and the 5,700-seat “Shed” was inaugurated on August 4, 1938. The Shed is an amphitheater-shaped structure with an enclosed stage and open walls. The rear of the building is a vast arc that opens onto a large lawn—lawn tickets are available to concertgoers who wish to sit outside—and there is a rich tradition of picnicking during concerts. We have seen some pretty elaborate rigs where families pull folding chairs and tables, coolers and baskets in wagons, and set up commissaries with fancy wines. A “Rules” page on the orchestra’s website states that patrons are free to bring any alcoholic beverages.

The BSO acquired the adjacent Highwood Estate in 1986, and an architect’s master plan combined the two properties, making possible the construction of the 1,200-seat Seiji Ozawa Hall, which was opened on July 7, 1994. Ozawa Hall has real walls and side balconies, but the rear wall is a huge door, like that on an airplane hangar, that opens to another picnic lawn.

Summer weather in the Berkshires is notorious for sudden and unexpected violent thunderstorms and microbursts, and severe weather shelters are scattered about the campus in proximity to the two big picnic lawns. Throngs of music-loving picnickers dashing toward those shelters makes quite a spectacle, leaving thousands of glasses of wine to get diluted.

The riches of summer

Regular readers may remember that we have lived in Newcastle, Maine, for more than twenty years, while in the meantime we have lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, Charlestown, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), and Greenwich Village. Maine is also home to our sailboat Kingfisher, which we use for day sails, overnight sails, and at least one cruise each summer lasting something like a week. When we settled in Stockbridge and tickets for Tanglewood went on sale in February, we agreed that we would buy tickets only for weekends that would be rainy in Maine. Our first Tanglewood weekend has just passed, and it was sunny and breezy in Maine.

We heard three concerts, one in Ozawa Hall and two in the Shed. The great pianist Emmanuel Ax has created a series of three programs called “Pathways from Prague,” largely featuring the music of Leoš Janácek and his mentor, Antonin Dvorák. The program opened with Janácek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, a cycle of twenty-two songs for tenor, three female soloists, and piano. Emmanuel Ax was joined by tenor Paul Appleby and members of the Lorelei Ensemble to tell the tale of a “white” farmer who was seduced by a “black” Gypsy who bore him a child, a story including the triple whammy of taboos—interracial sex, extra-marital sex, and illegitimate births. Absorbing such a complex tale would have been easier if translations had been provided. There was a translation broadcast on a small monitor on the stage, but it was invisible to our balcony seats, and I am sure it was invisible to anyone more than ten rows from the stage. The evening was redeemed by a thrilling and dynamic performance of Dvorák’s String Quartet No. 13 by the Dover Quartet. Their rich tones were amplified by the lively acoustics of the hall, sending us home with our heads buzzing.

The two concerts we heard with the Boston Symphony Orchestra included some disappointments. Andris Nelsons and the orchestra covered soprano Nicole Cabell in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was a little muddled and lacked the energy one would expect. The last time I heard The Rite of Spring performed live was organist Stephen Tharp’s memorable recital at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston to close the 2014 national convention of the American Guild of Organists. Tharp’s transcription of Stravinsky’s controversial masterpiece was a lesson to all present about the power and range of the pipe organ. The church’s 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner organ is a gold mine of tone color, and it seemed as though every pipe had something to say that night. In my memory, the energy of that single artist exceeded the collective energy of the mighty BSO.

Andris Nelsons’s reading of Gershwin’s An American in Paris was square, lacking the swagger and swing that is so much a part of Gershwin’s music. Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, was programmed to end the first half of the concert on Friday night, but pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet had to withdraw due to a death in his family, and the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang was his replacement, bringing with her Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a piece that she will be playing in Europe and New York later in the summer.

I have been watching Yuja Wang on YouTube videos for years, but this was the first time I had heard her play live. I will not mention technique. She flies up and down the keyboard like a conjurer. Her brilliant passages in octaves are more than just fireworks, they have shape and nuance along with the dazzle. She plays softer passages with exquisite tenderness, and she summons a vast range of tone from her instrument. Saturday night’s concert included Duke Ellington’s New World A-Comin’ for piano and orchestra. I do not know if the same piano was used for both concerts, but there was a dramatically different range and volume of sound between Ms. Wang and Saturday’s pianist. Ms. Wang has a slight stature, but her touch on the keys of the piano is backed up by swimmer’s shoulders, and she produces a tremendous sound. As has become increasingly usual, the audience demanded and was treated to an encore, a snippet from Vladimir Horowitz’s Carmen Variations, using the full range of the piano keyboard at a rate of something like a hundred notes per second. How she thumbed out those inner melodies in the midst of all that is a mystery to me.

As a further example of the depth of her abilities, Ms. Wang is scheduled to play all four Rachmaninoff piano concerti and his variations on a theme of Paganini with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 28, 2023, at Carnegie Hall in New York. Google it, there’s still time to buy tickets.

But wait, there’s more.

Wendy has just joined the board of directors of the Salt Bay Chamberfest, an annual festival of chamber music presented in our neighboring Maine town of Damariscotta. Each year they offer six or seven concerts with a wide variety of artists and music. Cellist Wilhelmina Smith is the artistic director; her wide connections in the music world help bring extraordinary musicians to our little village. One memorable moment several years ago was when Alan Gilbert, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, played viola in a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in a rustic barn.

After three evenings at Tanglewood, we packed Farley the Goldendoodle in the car and drove home to Maine for the opening fundraising concert of the Chamberfest. Violinist Sean Lee, a former student of Itzhak Perlman at the Juilliard School of Music, played ten of Paganini’s 24 Caprices. Like the Liszt concerto and Horowitz Carmen played by Yuja Wang, Paganini’s caprices are the fiendishly difficult and complex creations of a renowned virtuoso. Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) completed the 24 Caprices at the age of twenty-seven. They are relatively youthful works, but they explore the depths of the instrument and are widely credited with expanding the range of expression on the violin.

Mr. Lee is young with a compelling gift for speaking with his audience about the music he is playing, and he led us through the well-selected caprices with a sort of travelog about what each piece was intended to display. Passages in parallel octaves and parallel sixths seemed especially daring for the layout of the instrument’s four strings, and I was impressed by the accuracy of his tuning. He ended with the twenty-fourth caprice, a set of variations on that famous “theme by Paganini” that has inspired subsequent sets of variations by Johannes Brahms, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Witold Lutosławski, among others.

I had a brief conversation with Mr. Lee after his performance (there was a very nice wine-and-cheese reception). He spoke of Bach and Paganini as the two towering figures in the development of violin playing—with Paganini’s influence the instrument was changed forever.

What is a virtuoso?

In my experience, virtuoso is a word that is often used casually, diminishing the gravity of the expression. We are members of a social club near our home in the Berkshires where recently we heard a guest artist play a piano recital after dinner. His performance was fine but not special. When he was finished, a friend turned to us and said gravely, “That is why they invented the word virtuoso.” As they say on the street, for me, not so much.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines virtuoso as “a person highly skilled in music or another artistic pursuit.” Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers “one who excels in the technique of art, especially: a highly skilled musical performer.” Fair enough, but it seems to me that there is more to it than that. As a lifelong listener of music, I believe there is a magic line that a performance can cross above which the awareness of any sort of technical demands vanishes. The performer’s physical being disappears from the flow of musical thought between the brain and the instrument. No matter how daunting the score, no matter how intense the demands, the listener is never aware that the performer thinks he or she is doing anything difficult. The music flows effortlessly off the fingertips, the embouchure, the lips. That is a different plane from “highly skilled.”

Standing ovations have become more and more common, almost obligatory, as if the audience is eager to know that they have witnessed greatness. Some brave soul in the first few rows stands, and gradually people heave themselves to their feet. When Yuja Wang sounded the final thundering chords of the Liszt concerto, the crowd sprang to its feet in unison with a roar of appreciation. Everyone present knew that they had witnessed something wonderful, something seemingly beyond human ability. Ms. Wang leaps around the piano keyboard as effortlessly as the butterflies outside my office window.

The other pianist we heard last weekend was highly skilled, and his performance of Duke Ellington’s music was compelling, but he had to plan each difficult leap, stepping back to assess the issue and calculate the trajectory. It was well rehearsed, but it was not second nature.

Stephen Tharp’s memorable concert in 2014 was a display of multiple levels of virtuosity. His transcription of The Rite of Spring was itself a virtuoso performance. Stravinsky produced a wildly complex score for a very large orchestra. There were eight French horns, three saxophones, and two tubas on stage with the orchestra on Saturday night. Distilling all that to two hands and two feet was a brilliant accomplishment. Even though he had created the score, memorizing the thing was other-worldly, and performing it with power, drive, and sensitivity left the audience breathless. And remember, Yuja Wang was playing for a crowd of music lovers, only some of whom were musicians. Tharp was playing for a huge building full of organists. With a wink, I quip that introduced a special level of difficulty.

Beyond being “highly skilled” and beyond crossing that line about physical limitations, I believe a virtuoso raises the bar for those who follow. Vladimir Horowitz changed the world of the piano (and how could he play sitting so low with his shoulders and nose so close to the keys?). Niccolò Paganini stretched the limits of his instrument, paving the way for the great romantic composers. (Mendelssohn wrote his famous violin concerto four years after Paganini’s death.) How can a fourteen-ounce cigar box with four strings produce such a range of sound? Cecilia Bartoli sings those fiendishly difficult Handel and Vivaldi arias as if she was singing “Happy Birthday,” and Martha Argerich playing Scarlatti is beyond comprehension.

Remove the machine.

It is the challenge of the performer to diminish or eliminate the physical act of making music so there is nothing between the brain and the instrument, and it is the instrument maker and technician’s challenge to remove the mechanics of the instrument from the equation. There was a mighty skillful piano technician behind Yuja Wang’s performance the other night. Both the pieces she played are full of cascades of notes. I marvel at the skill of a great pianist when the percussive being of the piano disappears and the flow of notes sounds like a waterfall. That would not be possible without meticulous action regulation and tuning.

The oboist, bassoonist, and clarinetist spend countless hours making and adjusting reeds, cutting slivers of cane to produce the purest tone. Those who play wind instruments are continuously eliminating moisture from inside their instrument, using swabs, gravity, and spit valves. We have all heard that blurp when a watery bubble makes its way through a French horn.

The pipe organ is the most mechanical of all musical instruments. Practically, it is impossible to eliminate all non-musical sounds from the instrument. We put padded muffler covers over pneumatic actions, balanced bearings for expression shutters, and precise bushings on keyboards and pedalboards. We strive to make wind connections airtight so the music is not interrupted by the hissing of leaking air, but there will always be a click, a squeak, or a groan to be tackled tomorrow. Heaven help us if there should be a cipher. Keep at it, friends.

§

As Wendy and I discussed the experiences of the weekend, I wondered if I was being too fussy, letting the snobbery born of a little knowledge cloud the overall experience. Guilty as charged, I suppose. When we were driving toward the Berkshires last week, we were listening to a performance of a Beethoven piano concerto, and I was thinking it was sub-par. At one of those climactic moments when the pianist roars up the keyboard in parallel tenths to break into a triumphant double trill, the two hands were trilling at different speeds, and I turned off the radio. We had a wonderful weekend, hearing lots of terrific performances along with a few duds, and two true thrills—the Dover String Quartet gave us a real treat. Tanglewood is a gorgeous mountain setting. The weather was perfect, sunny with a lovely breeze (should have been sailing in Maine?). The Shed was not filled, but given the huge seating capacity, there were well over three thousand people in seats, and another thousand or more picnicking on the lawn. Who’s a lucky guy?