In the Wind: pipe organ placement

Five manuals? Are you kidding?

Most organs around the world have two manual keyboards and a pedalboard. Three manual organs are common, as are “four-deckers,” especially in big cities, but organs with five manuals are rare. What on earth do you do with five manuals? You only have two hands, and while clever organists can play two keyboards at once by “thumbing down” a melody, the cleverest could not possibly manage more than four at once. Can you even reach the top keyboard?

During my career of servicing organs, I always noticed that the top keyboard of a four-manual console shows considerably less wear than the others. In fact, when restoring an organ console, it is possible to swap the well-worn Great keyboard with the less-used Solo. Is it laziness or just more comfortable and convenient to couple the fourth-manual Solo division to a lower keyboard? A console with five keyboards is certainly connected to a very large organ, so it is always a bewildering thing with hundreds of drawknobs, tilting tablets, pistons, indicator lights, and gadgets not found on more usual consoles.

I am thinking about five-manual organs because in the last two weeks I have visited three of them: the Austin in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine; the Kilgen at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York; and the Aeolian-Skinner at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in New York. The three instruments are radically different, each with a distinctive personality, and each was demonstrated by a brilliant “house” organist with a particular point of view.

Vacationland

My wife Wendy and I divide our time between homes in New York City and coastal Maine. New York is a bustling, booming metropolis alive with culture and variety, busily regaining its life after the horrors of Covid, and in Maine we are in a verdant rural area alive with the beauty of the ocean and the continual motion of wind and tide.

The population of New York City is 8.5 million people, 1.63 million of whom live in the twenty-three square miles of Manhattan, which is 71,125 people per square mile. The State of Maine has 1.34 million residents, 300,000 fewer than Manhattan. Maine covers 35,385 square miles, so the population density is about thirty-eight people per square mile. When we were in New York for the first time after our Covid exile, I commented to Wendy, “We’ve seen more people in the last three blocks than in the last fifteen months.”

Portland is the largest city in Maine with about 66,500 residents—there are probably blocks in Manhattan with more people—but it is a beautiful city with a symphony orchestra, several fine choral societies, an art museum, opera, and ballet, and one of America’s two active municipal organists. James Kennerley presides over the 104-rank Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium, a gift to the city by Portland native and publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis. Curtis gained his middle initials from Hermann Kotzschmar, a brilliant organist and conductor who was the center of the musical life of Portland at the turn of the twentieth century, and the great and good friend of Curtis’s father. He memorialized Kotzschmar with the gift of the organ, dedicating his gift to the city as the Kotzschmar Organ. Today, a nonprofit group called the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) maintains and promotes the organ.

On June 14, 2021, the FOKO board held its annual meeting in person, the first non-Zoom meeting since “before.” We met in the large rehearsal hall of Merrill Auditorium, so there was plenty of space to comply with the city’s requirements of masks and social distancing. (Should we call that MSD for simplicity?) It was a joy to see friends and colleagues, to choose elbow and fist bumps over handshakes, and to discuss the business of the organization. After the meeting, municipal organist James Kennerley treated us to a half-hour recital on the great organ. We sat in folding chairs on the auditorium stage, up close and personal with the vast and mighty instrument as James demonstrated how he has learned to adapt the music of Bach to its resources. He is widely known as a prolific performer of early music, and he noted that his teachers would have questioned his registration when he played a brief chorale prelude on the Harp alone.

The Kotzschmar Organ has six manual divisions (Great, Swell, Orchestral, Solo, Antiphonal, and Echo) and originally had a four-manual console in the well-known Austin style with stop tablets and the “ka-chunk” combination action. The five-manual console was built in 2000, allowing more complete control over the organ. Why do you need five manuals? Obviously, you don’t. But imagine that you would like to have two manual registrations on both the main organ and in the Echo and Antiphonal divisions, which are located above the ceiling at the rear of the auditorium, along with a colorful solo combination for comment. Boom. Five manuals. The organ is loaded with colorful voices and includes a full theatre-style toy counter.

One of FOKO’s annual traditions is the presentation of a silent movie with organ accompaniment on Halloween, making use of the organ’s second personality as a theatre organ. Last year’s Covid Halloween film was The Hunchback of Notre Dame presented at the drive-in movie theater in Saco, Maine.

Merrill Auditorium seats about 1,900 people in a classic concert-hall layout with two balconies. I do not know the exact dimensions of the hall, but I will guess that no seat is more than 150 feet from the organ, and many are within 100 feet. It is a powerful organ—most of the instrument is on ten inches of wind pressure—and the big 32′ voices really shake the place. It is unusual to hear such a large organ in such an intimate space.

James’s appointment as municipal organist immediately followed the comprehensive renovation of the organ completed by Foley-Baker, Inc., in 2014. The organ is like new, sparkling both inside and out, up to any demands of the most creative organist. Visit www.foko.org where you will find concert schedules, stoplist, history, and a description of the renovation project.

James had some comments about the fifth manual:

In Portland, the top manual gets more use than most similarly sized consoles. Because it controls, by default, the Antiphonal and Echo divisions, there is a logical spacial separation of manual and pipe location (the main case vs. 100 feet up in the ceiling!). Additionally, because it is truly conceived as an orchestral instrument—every manual division has something important to offer to the ensemble sound—I find that I’ll often have the four “main” divisions coupled together. Having that fifth manual available saves having to worry about Unisons Off, etc. Reminded of the North German tradition of extensive improvised choral fantasias, I find the fifth manual gets most use when improvising.

He went on to say that when he was an assistant organist at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, they reserved the fifth manual “almost exclusively” for the West End trumpets, not the sort of thing you would want to forget having coupled down to another manual, especially given the console placement where the organist would be the last to hear!

Fifth Avenue

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, located at Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, is among the largest ecclesiastical buildings in the United States and is the second largest in New York. It is an important tourist mecca visited by more than five million people each year. During my visit in the waning days of Covid restrictions, there were hundreds of people milling about both during and between Masses. The organ was originally built by Geo. Kilgen & Son and now has 116 stops and 142 ranks, located in a huge gallery at the west end, under the rose window.

The interior of the church is 332 feet long and 174 feet wide at the transepts. (The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side is 601 feet long inside!) I did not have a tape measure with me, but with my long career of removing organs from big churches, I will hazard a guess that the balcony is more than thirty feet off the floor of the nave and the organ is twenty feet above the console. The sound of the huge organ is monumental in scale with the room. At Merrill Auditorium, the closest seats are within fifty feet of the organ, and they face the main body of the instrument directly at eye level. At Saint Patrick’s, the closest seats are probably fifty feet away, directly below the organ, and the sound of the organ soars above them.

My host was Michael Hey, associate organist and director of music for the cathedral. We spent an hour and a half listening to and discussing the organ before a noon Mass. One of his demonstration pieces became the prelude for the Mass, and while tourists swirled in the back half of the church and down the side aisles, priests and cantor in the chancel led the celebration for a large congregation. It was surreal to be so far from the altar, the priests, and the congregation. I could hear the cantor singing, standing at a microphone two hundred feet away, but I could barely hear the congregation singing.

Throughout my career, people have responded to learning what I do for a living with their travel stories. “When we were in London, we walked into Saint Paul’s . . . .” “When we were in Paris, we walked into Notre Dame . . . and someone was playing the organ. It was incredible. I’ll never forget that sound . . . .” Michael knows that he’s the guy playing the organ when those millions of tourists walk into the church. He thinks of the person from Argentina or Brazil who always dreamed of visiting Saint Patrick’s. He is inspired by the sense that his playing brings that visit to life and those visitors will take the experience home with them.

There is a swell little elevator from the narthex to the organ loft, a nice discovery on a very hot day, and a spiral stone stairway from the loft to the organ chambers and ultimately to the south tower. Most of the organ is located behind the magnificent organ façade, and we climbed ladders to the highest level where one can stand just under the great rose window and look down the length of the nave. Two full-length 32′ stops (Diapason and Contra Bombarde) lie on their sides in the north triforium, and when you walk past those two immense stops you reach the Nave Organ, located in two chambers near the great crossing. Are you paying attention? I’ve just left the organ loft, walked eighty feet to the Nave Organ, and another twenty-five to get to the place in the triforium where nave and transept meet, and there’s a commanding view of the great crossing, nave, and north transept.

The scale of the building and the organ encourages one to play to the acoustics. Michael’s hands are off the keys as much as on; he lifts his hands to separate notes, allowing the vast acoustics to connect them. It is light years from the practice room and from most usual church organs. There is nothing usual about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and its organ.

The fifth manual is home to the nineteen-stop Nave Organ that includes a principal chorus, a Gamba with Celeste, a couple flutes, a Vox Humana, Oboe, a big chorus of reeds and the Triforium Trumpet on eighteen inches of wind. Stand back. Michael is a tall, lanky guy, and when I asked him how often he plays on the fifth manual, he put his hands right on it and said it is really about how well your shirt fits. If the shirt is a little tight at the shoulders or the lunch a little too much, it is not as easy to get up there. But since the Nave Organ is so separate from the gallery organ, it makes sense to use the top keyboard to play the organs against each other. It was obvious as he played that the top manual is well within reach.

Michael’s affinity with the organ, the giddy climb high into the organ, and the thrill of hearing the mighty instrument project its tones through the lofty space was a great prelude to a lovely Thai lunch a few blocks away, a fitting end to a wonderful visit. You can find the stoplist and read about this remarkable organ at nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/StPatrickCath.html.

“Have you seen the well-to-do?”

Up and down Park Avenue . . . .¹ Saint Bartholomew’s Church (affectionately known as St. Bart’s), another of New York’s greatest, is four blocks from Saint Patrick’s at Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. Designed by Bertram Goodhue in a Byzantine-Romanesque style, it is markedly different in form and decoration from the many Gothic-inspired buildings throughout the city. With 225 ranks, the five-manual organ is the largest instrument in the city. Unlike the organs at Merrill Auditorium and Saint Patrick’s that are still in their original form with judicious additions, the St. Bart’s organ reflects an evolution, containing important elements from previous organs by Odell, Hutchings, and the Skinner Organ Company (Ernest Skinner), all summarized and crowned by what is the last project completed by the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company before it closed in 1972.

The most unusual feature of this landmark organ is the eighteen-stop Celestial division that plays from the fifth manual, built by the Skinner Organ Company in 1930 and installed above the dome, sixty-six feet above the floor of the nave. It originally included a large principal chorus, solo and soft flutes, strings and celestes, Vox Humana, a big assortment of reeds including Harmonic Trumpet, Tuba, and Corno di Bassetto, so the division includes both soft ethereal voices and powerful reeds, topped off with a seven-rank Harmonic Mixture. Half of the space above the ornamental dome is occupied by the organ, the other half of the outer dome is covered with hard plaster forming a huge resonating chamber, so the sound is blended as a heavenly chorus, providing huge climaxes to the effect of the combined chancel and gallery organs.

Paolo Bordignon, organist and choirmaster at St. Bart’s, is a devoted student of the organ he plays. As we walked around the church together, Paolo pointed out the spectacular carvings of the gallery organ case, all produced by master carver Frank Walter. You can follow a link to Mr. Walter’s work at stbarts.org/music/the-organs/. The interior of the building is wide and open as there are no columns. The impression of great height is enhanced by that dome, a huge interior space above the vaulted ceilings.

While Saint Patrick’s has the rolling acoustics you would expect in such a big room, in spite of its great size the acoustics at St. Bart’s are surprisingly intimate with “just enough” reverberation, allowing the brilliant classic choruses of the chancel organ to speak clearly throughout the room. Paolo demonstrated what he considers to be the genius of this organ, the rich Romantic voices from earlier instruments that include harmonic flutes, luscious strings, and wide-mouth diapasons combined with the brilliant neo-classical choruses of the 1972 Aeolian-Skinner. While some such instruments can only be described as hodge-podge (we sometimes say “Bitsa,” as in bitsa this and bitsa that), the St. Bart’s organ, enhanced by the marvelous building, is a cohesive, convincing whole.

Paolo gave me a detailed demonstration of the value of having so many stops by playing the same five or ten measures of various pieces over and over, using a different registration each time. Comparing and combining four or five sets of celestes, for example, showed what a kaleidoscope of sound a large organ can be. The luxury of choosing between harmonic flutes or between seven or eight lyrical colorful solo reed voices is the experience of playing on such a large instrument.

I did not need to ask Paolo about using the fifth manual. He repeated several times how important the Celestial division is to the whole of the organ, and as he played for me, he was up and down on all five keyboards. He is not especially tall, and he was wearing a jacket. Must have been a pretty good fit. Nothing to it.

When is enough enough?

It is just a couple months since I wrote about my visit to the world’s only seven-manual organ at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The design of that organ stretches the imagination ever further with its eighty-five- and seventy-three-note keyboards. The six-manual console at the Wanamaker Store (now Macy’s) in Philadelphia is a world wonder, especially when Grand Court Organist Peter Conte is playing. Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner built five organs with five-manual consoles (St. Bart’s, Riverside Church, Curtis Institute, Mormon Tabernacle, and Cleveland Public Auditorium). The Kotzschmar Organ and St. Bart’s are joined by the Hazel Wright Organ in Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral), the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, and Calvary Church, Charlotte, North Carolina, as among the five-manual organs in the United States. With Saint Patrick’s, that makes eleven of them, and by the way, there are two identical five-manual consoles at Saint Patrick’s, one in the rear gallery where Michael received me, the other in the chancel. This list is off the top of my head. I am not claiming it as definitive. Let me know how many I am missing. Five manuals is a lot, but my little tour proved that for a skilled and inquisitive organist and a very large organ, it’s nothing like too many.

Notes

1. Irving Berlin, “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”

Youthful fantasies

Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, Massachusetts, was founded as a mission in September 1953, and services were first held in the Deerfield Elementary School at the end of Deerfield Avenue. A new church building was dedicated next to the school in March 1955, and my father was appointed the first full-time rector in October 1956. I was seven months old. We lived in a rented house nearby while the rectory was built adjacent to the church. I know from personal memory and family lore that we were ensconced in the new rectory before I was two years old. My earliest memories of those days included the bulldozers that were grading the lawn and building the driveway. My wife and sons would quickly agree that must have been the genesis of my fascination with heavy equipment, admittedly alive and well today as my sixty-eighth 
birthday approaches.

The Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts established Saint John’s as a parish in 1959, and that year the church acquired C. B. Fisk Opus 31 (then the Andover Organ Company), a one-manual, six-stop, mechanical-action organ mounted on a platform with a detached, reversed console. I learned later (!) that the organ was planned as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual instrument that could be completed if the new parish succeeded. At three years old, I did not yet know about detached consoles, but my child’s eyes remember where it was placed in the simple new A-frame building, itself designed to accept future enhancement.

Ten years after its founding, the parish mounted a campaign to build a parish hall and complete the church interior with formal decorations and furniture. Two towers and a rear gallery were added. A full-height stained-glass wall was installed behind the altar, a chancel with steps and altar rail was added, and hardwood pews were installed replacing the metal folding chairs.

Having spent a lifetime moving pipe organs, I am amused by the memory of my first organ relocation—that tiny Fisk organ hanging from a crane, pipes and all, being lifted from the front of the original sanctuary to its permanent home in the new rear gallery before the roof was closed. If I saw that happening today, I would run toward the crane operator, arms waving like a semaphore, shouting “Stop!,” but there it was, an organ hanging from a hook on a sunny day. I was seven. That same year, when my parents were not at home, I thought it would be fun to climb the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower under construction. It was a lovely view from the top, showing my parents’ car turning on to Deerfield Avenue, heading home. I got back down before they reached the driveway, but the guilt on my face was enough to spill the story.

Saint John’s organist’s name was Donald McFeely. He had the parish on the cusp of the tracker revolution, buying an organ from Charles Fisk and the Andover Organ Company before the founding of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in 1961. The Andover Organ Company completed the twenty-three-rank instrument in 1991, including the original six-stop organ as the Rückpositiv as planned by Charlie Fisk.

I remember several of the families of Saint John’s as friends of my parents, and as I write I realize what a heady time that was for them. It must have been thrilling to start with meetings to incorporate a mission, transforming it to a parish, and taking on two building programs in ten years. Through their commitment, effort, and money, they created a church that continues to thrive over seventy years later. My father was a young priest in his second appointment, and it must have been mind-boggling and life-altering for him to be at the helm of that rocket ship. Dad has been gone almost ten years, so I will never get to chat about that with him, but the notion adds to my admiration. By the way, I attended the Deerfield School, next door to our house, from first through third grades.

§

Since my first organ was a quasi-experimental dip into the early years of the Organ Reform Movement, it is ironic that the second organ in my life was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company at a time when Robert Hope-Jones (who grew into the genius behind theatre organs built by Wurlitzer) was working with Skinner. Dad was called as rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966, when I was ten years old. I was instantly pressed into the Junior Choir led by harpsichord builder Carl Fudge, the parish’s organist and choirmaster. As I think about it, the further irony is that Mr. Fudge as an early practitioner in the esoteric world of harpsichord building in the 1960s was saddled with an aging, wheezing, cadaver of an organ in such poor condition that my friends and I as ten-year-old choristers where well aware of its precarious state.

There was the Sunday when I heard my first cipher in the middle of a service. Mr. Fudge left the bench, crossed the chancel, reverenced the altar, returned with a ladder, reverenced the altar again, set the ladder against the impost, climbed up and pulled a pipe. He repeated the process to return the ladder, reverencing the altar twice more, wearing a black cassock through the entire sequence. I expect that his pious performance as the service progressed was calculated to draw attention to the organ’s failings, and it was only five or six years later that my father was involved in purchasing another organ from Charles Fisk, Opus 65, which was completed in 1973.

When I was twelve, I had my first organ lessons on the gleaming ten-year-old, three-manual Holtkamp organ in Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (ETS) in Harvard Square, later the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), now defunct. Though it has electro-pneumatic action, that organ was in the vanguard of experimental design with low wind pressures, classical choruses, and a Rückpositiv division (on a pitman chest) along the gallery rail. But my first experiences playing the organ during worship were on that home Skinner when Mr. Fudge allowed me to “noodle” a bit while he left the bench to receive communion, and later to play an occasional prelude or postlude.

It was not long before I went out on my own, taking a six-week gig playing on a three-manual Estey (long gone) at the Baptist church in Winchester, and then after Vatican II at St. Eulalia Catholic Church in Winchester on a Conn Artist. (You can’t make these things up.) My last high-school church organist position was at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played a three-manual, thirty-three-stop E. & G. G. Hook organ built in 1860, a very grand organ with real large-organ stops like 16′ Double Open Wood and 16′ Trombone with wood resonators.

Nostalgia

I am wallowing in childhood memories today because Wendy and I recently moved from Greenwich Village to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where my grandfather had been rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, just at the time when my family moved from Westwood to Winchester and I started to take organ lessons. It has been both fun and eerie to merge into life in Stockbridge, walking past the rectory on Main Street where my grandparents lived, counting the windows, and remembering the rooms that were so familiar when I was a teenager.

Saint Paul’s first building was a wood Gothic structure designed by Richard Upjohn and consecrated in 1844. The present stone building was designed by Charles McKim and consecrated in 1884. The organ was Hilborne Roosevelt’s Opus 127, also built in 1884, but it was drastically altered in the early-1960s, a project that included the addition of mixtures and mutations, the replacement of the original principal stops with ranks of tapered pipes, the addition of a pedal division and a couple unified reeds including a Krummhorn with electric action. I wonder if Hilborne Roosevelt ever heard a Krummhorn? Today I call it a scandalous treatment of a lovely venerable instrument, but when I was twelve and thirteen years old and allowed to practice on the organ, loud and shrill as it was, I thought it was the bees’ knees. I do not remember if I ever played a service there, but I know I played a recital or two—I’m sure my grandparents were very proud.

When I was a kid, we had family holidays in Stockbridge. Thanksgiving dinner in the rectory was a great treat, and my grandparents nurtured my nascent love of music by treating me to weekends at Tanglewood, just a few miles away. Those were my first solo trips away from home—my parents put me on buses and trains in Boston and grandparents picked me up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, quite an adventure for a thirteen-year-old.

Since I retired as a church organist when I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, we have not attended church regularly, but when we first moved to Stockbridge, we were quick to show up at Saint Paul’s. We went to the early service at 8:00 a.m. and were part of a congregation of five or six people. It was fun to meet a woman whose wedding had been performed by my grandfather and who had wonderful memories of him, but it was a pretty quiet affair. Shortly after, we learned that the rector had just received a call to move elsewhere, and after our first visit we went dormant.

A new rector was installed at Saint Paul’s eight weeks ago, and Wendy and I went to church there last Sunday, attending the 10:00 a.m. service along with more than forty others. It was great to hear the organ being played, though it is in terrible condition, and we were pleased with the good vibes, the singing of the hymns, and the fact that there were some people present who were younger than us. Maybe we will go back this time.

Altered states

I imagine we are all familiar with organs that have been altered, receiving new identities for better or for worse. Some are great successes. There are many organs built by the Skinner Organ Company and later modified by Aeolian-Skinner under G. Donald Harrison’s direction. Ernest Skinner hated that, but Harrison was able in many cases to retain the gravitas of the original organ while adding well-balanced choruses and mutations.

I had a long relationship with a 1906 Hutchings-Votey organ rebuilt by Kinzey-Angerstein in 1973 at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Holliston, Massachusetts. I joined the reorganized workshop of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and the organ at Saint Mary’s was one of the first I tuned after taking that job. The occasion was a recital by Daniel Roth, then titulaire of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, celebrating the appointment of Saint Mary’s longtime organist, Leo Abbott, as director of music for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston and the end of his tenure at Saint Mary’s. The organ retained its original 8′ and 4′ principals, wood flutes, manual reeds, and pedal stops. Daniel Angerstein had added upperwork to the Great and Swell creating two fine choruses and a smashing 16′ Pedal Trombone. It is a grand organ with lots of pizzazz, and the new tonal scheme added wonderfully to the original foundation of the organ.

The Holliston organ was so successful because the new stops were scaled and voiced to complete choruses based on the original foundations. The added pipes were purposefully constructed to exacting specifications based on the scales of the original stops, so all voices blend as if the entire instrument had been built at once. Too often, organ technicians of lesser skill add voices to an organ based on the notion of an ideal stoplist without considering the scales, construction, or even wind pressures of the new pipes.

Earlier this year I visited an organ in Texas that has small-scale Baroque choruses added in the 1960s to a nineteenth-century organ with broad scales and heavy fundamental tone. The differences in harmonic structure between old and newer pipes is striking. The tonal effect is jarring, confusing, and difficult to sing with. The firm that added the high-pitched stops must not have made any effort to create a blend between old and new. The stoplist looks fine, but the organ sounds terrible.

When the revival of classic organbuilding was getting traction in the early 1960s, many of the new organs were focused on high-pitched voices as were the “Baroque-izations” of older organs. It is ironic because the great classical instruments of Europe on which our revival was based are typically not shrill instruments. Their stoplists show fully developed choruses crowned with multiple mixtures, but their foundation stops are rich and full with thrilling harmonic development to support all that upperwork. When twentieth-century organbuilders began building new mechanical-action organs with low wind pressure and open-toe voicing, the challenge they faced, whether they knew it or not, was to figure out to deliver lots of air, not pressure but volume, to the largest pipes in the organ, and to voice those pipes so they could really sing.

§

It is fun to think about the first organs I knew, how my youthful impressions compared to my current thinking after playing, working on, and listening to hundreds of organs. As a thirteen-year-old, I was enthralled by the idea that I could play music on those keyboards and fill a church building with sound. I have been around organs with serious intent for about fifty-six years, and the evolution of my understanding of organ tone is still in process. I have learned slowly how scale (diameter) and wind pressure affect what an organ pipe can do. I have learned how the shape of a pipe’s resonator (the long part) affects the harmonic structure of its tone, so it stands to reason that two stops that emphasize the same harmonics will blend well together—that is a simple glimpse of the complex structure of a Cornet, especially when a reed stop is added to it. (Think d’Aquin noëls.)

I sat in a pew at Saint Paul’s last Sunday, delighted that the organ was being played, but critical of its collection of unrelated stops, however much I enjoyed playing it fifty-six years ago. (Oof!) The church has had some hard times over all those years, but it is fun to think that we might breathe some new life into it. Wendy and I live a fifteen-minute walk from Saint Paul’s. Maybe I could help?

There have been many organs in my life that were altered from their original state and transformed into something different. Some are marvelous successes, some are unmitigated disasters, and some (perhaps most) are the transformation of a fine instrument into one that is mediocre and uninteresting. A well-intentioned local organ technician may have terrific skills, but may not have the knowledge, wisdom, and experience to “out-Skinner Skinner.” If the organ you play most regularly does not have a trumpet, you probably could add one, but it should be as close as possible to the trumpet the original builder would have included if the organ was to be one stop larger. The added stop must be heard as part of the original organ and not as irrelevant braying. It is not the stoplist that makes an organ, it is the tonal structure.

I was at dinner recently with two beloved and admired colleagues who are collaborating on an important new organ. I asked them what they hoped to achieve with that organ. One replied, “I want to make an organ that sounds beautiful so lots of people will be happy to hear it.”

Climate change

The earth’s climate is one of today’s most prevalent hot-button issues. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and forests are burning. We are experiencing floods where it is usually dry, and droughts where it is usually wet. Heat waves across Europe have devastated crops, threatening food supplies and economies. On July 27, 2022, The Washington Post published a story under the headline, “France’s mustard shortage fuels drama and panic in grocery stores.” L’horreur. Pakistan is underwater. The natural habitats of polar bears and other Arctic creatures are being threatened. Here in Maine, fishermen report that the lobster catch is changing because lobsters are migrating north in search of colder water; lobster populations are diminishing here while they are increasing in Nova Scotia. Scientists warn of the dangers of climate change while doubters deny them.

Worldometers.info reports that the current population of earth is 7.97 billion people. Google tells me that in 1956, the year I was born, there were 2.8 billion people. That is an increase of 6.9 billion or more than two-and-a-half times. I guess zero population growth isn’t a real thing.

Take it indoors.

Our son-in-law is an architect who is focusing on “green” buildings. He is part of a large movement among architects who are researching this field, developing new construction techniques, experimenting with new materials, and working toward houses and commercial buildings that reduce energy consumption while increasing interior comfort. I have had many long conversations with him about my experiences with climate conditions inside the buildings where I have worked on organs.

Stabilizing the temperature and humidity is an essential part of planning and caring for pipe organs. It is a fact that the pitch of any organ pipe is affected and controlled by temperature. We have all been taught to leave the swell shutters open. And why is that? If the shutters are closed when the organ is not being used, an imbalance of temperature will result. If the Swell division is located in the back of the organ against a north-facing wall, the temperature in the swell box will drop, and the Swell will go flat relative to the Great division. If none of the pipes have been handled, when the shutters have been left open long enough for the internal temperature to return to normal, so will the pitch, but it might take days, and that one Sunday the organ would sound terrible.

By the way, the rule about leaving the shutters open typically applies only to organs with mechanical expression actions. The expression motors in most electro-pneumatic-action organs are arranged so the shutters stay open when the blower is turned off, specifically to maintain stable temperatures. One exception to that rule is the large Welte-Tripp organ built in 1929 for the Church of the Covenant, Boston, Massachusetts. The Swell, Choir, Solo, and Echo divisions are all enclosed, and the shutters close when the organ is turned off. I maintained that organ in the 1980s and 1990s and always directed the church to leave the organ blower on overnight before a tuning so the temperatures could stabilize. The blower was a terrific unit with an 880-volt DC motor installed with the organ in 1929. Austin Organs, Inc., renovated the organ in 2001 with significant support from Joseph Rotella and Spencer Organ Company, and Joseph and his people have maintained it since. I asked Joseph if they altered the original setup so the shutters would open when the blower was turned off. He replied:

. . . the shades were not changed when the organ was restored. Typically, we schedule a tuning for the afternoon with a second organ close by in the morning. Thus, we stop in, turn on the organ, make sure the shades are open, and then come back to tune in a couple of hours. Now that the church has radiant floor heating, they leave it the same temperature all the time in the winter, and so the variation is not all that bad. The Solo, however, is pretty bad all the time even after the organ has been on for a while. . . .

I have demonstrated the sensitivity of organ pipes to temperature to church officials by using a simple test. I stand inside the organ with two pipes playing and hold my finger against one of them. It takes just a few seconds for the pipe I am touching to heat up and go sharp. People easily recognize the acoustic beats, starting slowly and growing increasingly faster. The reverse demonstration is much slower—when I remove my finger from the pipe, the slowing of the beats takes much longer. The point is to prove that the effect of temperature on organ pipes is almost instantaneous. (I am a professional. Do not try this at home.)

We heat the church for the people.

Thirty years ago, I maintained a large three-manual tracker organ located high in a rear gallery in a nave with a very high ceiling, arranged so the three divisions were stacked one on top of the next. The Swell was near the floor, the Positiv above, and the Great was at the top of the thirty-foot-tall case. The ceiling was fifteen feet above all that. The difference in elevation of the divisions combined with the immense height of the building meant that the heat needed to be on for a long time for the room to warm up from the top down. There was often a twenty-degree difference in the temperature of the Great and Swell divisions. Once after arriving at the church for a seasonal tuning, I went to the office to report that I would not be able to tune because the heat had not been turned up the night before as I had requested. The pastor overheard me, stormed out of his office, and proclaimed, “We heat the church for the people, not the organ.” I suppose it would have been too much for him to grasp the concept that we tune the organ for the people as we work to make the organ sound as good as possible in preparation for public worship.

I have had the opposite experience, being greeted by the custodian as we arrived to tune the organ, “I’ve got it good and warm in there for you this time.” Their usual weekday setting was fifty-five degrees and Sunday worship setting was sixty-eight. We encountered ninety-five degree heat, which was a bigger discrepancy than if he left the heat off at a cost of who knows how much fuel oil.

When I was curator of the monumental Aeolian-Skinner organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston (230 ranks), there was a failure of the heating controls. Dr. Thomas Richner, a.k.a. Uncle T., called me late one evening to say, “Peepee (he called everyone Peepee), there’s something wrong here.” I went in the next morning to find that the tuning had shattered. It is quite a job in an organ that size to set “A” of the 4′ to a tuning fork and start over—it has over a hundred ranks of mixtures.

Touch up the reeds.

Tuning the reeds is a common approach to a quick service call. There are two main reasons why the reeds need tuning more often than ranks of flue pipes. Reed pipes have moving parts. The tone is produced by a vibrating brass tongue that is held in place by a wedge that is often made of wood. A stiff and springy bronze tuning wire holds pressure against the tongue, setting its vibrating length exactly to produce the correct pitch. The organ tuner taps the tuning wire up and down, changing the length of the tongue, which alters the pitch. Changes in humidity can cause the wedges to work loose so the tongue slips. The funnel-shaped resonators of reed pipes, especially trumpets and oboes, easily trap insects whose parts wind up caught in the tongue, muting the pipe. These tentative aspects of the speech of reed pipes means they need more attention than flue pipes.

The other reason is that the pitch of reed pipes is not affected dramatically by changes of temperature the way flue pipes are. If the reeds are tuned at Sunday morning temperature and the building cools down when thermostats are lowered, the pitch of the flues drops and the reeds stay the same, giving the impression that the reeds are out of tune. When the heat is turned up, the flues return to their tuned pitch. I have spent my career in the northeast where buildings are heated in the winter and where few buildings have air conditioning. (Today more and more churches are installing air conditioning.)

Christmas and Easter are both winter holidays here, so it makes more sense to have two tunings each year, one when the heat comes on in the fall, the other when it goes off in the spring, rather than focusing on the holidays. That usually means that the pitch of the reeds is changed considerably twice a year, and the tuner must judge whether to use the tuning wires that may loosen the tongues and affect the regulation or to tune on the scrolls at the top of the resonators that will eventually fatigue and break off after years of up in the spring and down in the fall.

Regulating is the process and art of adjusting “louds and softs” in a rank of pipes to achieve an even and flowing scale. Changing the length of a reed’s resonator changes the pitch, so the technique is to open or close the scroll and return the pipe to the correct pitch using the wire. Opening the scroll sharpens pitch, so you flatten on the wire, which increases the tongue’s curve and makes the pipe speak louder. Closing the scroll flattens the pitch, so you tap down on the wire, which decreases the curve and makes the pipe speak softer. This means that the tuner needs to add the question of regulation to the judgment about tuning on the wires or the scrolls. Changing the wires will alter the volume of the pipe. I believe the best approach that preserves the condition of the scrolls and maintains the regulation is to tune on the wires and check regulation after tuning each rank. It is more time consuming, but it is better for the organ. Having said that, one really needs to make this decision based on the organ and the characteristics of the individual stops.

Christmas in June

Brian Jones and the choir of Trinity Church, Boston, made the famous and brilliantly selling recording Candlelight Carols in June of 1990 when I was curator of the double organ there, Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co. Opus 573-A in the chancel and Skinner Organ Company Opus 573 in the gallery. Ross Wood was the organist. The weather was unseasonably warm, and it was downright hot high in the organ. I remember lying on my back in a pew in the wee hours of the morning, listening to the glorious Christmas music. It was surreal. However, the seventy-year-old reeds in the gallery organ, especially in the Solo at the top of the instrument, did not want to tune high enough, and I did not want to open the scrolls of those beautiful pipes for that one occasion. I do not remember specifics, but I do remember that some planned registrations had to be altered to preserve the long-term condition of the pipes, not the first choice of the director and the organist.

I have written before about the lovely Casavant organ, Opus 3140 (1972), at the First Church (formerly First and Second Church) in Boston, which has a contemporary Werkprinzip case with polished tin façade pipes in Great, Rückpositiv, and Pedal. The 1972 sanctuary designed by Paul Rudolph has a window at the top of the roof that runs the length of the roofline. At certain times of the year, the sun shines through the window and progresses across the wide façade at just the time of Sunday worship. I maintained that organ for more than thirty-five years and grew accustomed to how the heated façade pipes went sharp against the internal pipes as the sunlight passed by. It was my job to make a succession of organists aware that when the sun is shining on the façade, they should avoid using the reeds and the couplers. The good news would be that before the end of the service, all would return to normal.

The conviction of convection

For about twenty years, I served as music director for a church in suburban Boston that had a nice three-manual electro-pneumatic-action organ by a local builder installed in chambers on either side of the chancel of the Colonial-style sanctuary. The Swell and Choir chambers were against the south wall of the building, while the Great and Pedal were against the north wall. Sun exposure to the south created disparate temperatures, especially in the winter when the Great side would drop below fifty degrees. Early on, I simply repitched the Great, which had no reeds, twice a year, but I soon found an easier solution. The entry access to both chambers were trap doors in the chamber floors. Leaving the trap doors open allowed the cooler air to fall into stairwells on either side of the chancel, drawing the heated air from the chancel through the grill cloth to warm the chambers.

Many organ technicians install fans or circulating systems with ducts to create artificial convection. In the case of a tall and stacked mechanical-action organ, ceiling fans are a simple and effective way to stir the air so temperatures are constant from bottom to top. You just have to be careful that the fans turn slowly so as not to create a tremolo effect. Remember when you were a kid, amused by how your voice was altered when you spoke into a fan?

Humidity

I have said a lot about temperature, and I will at least mention the effect of changes of humidity on pipe organ pitch. There are a few obvious high points. Years of hot-air heating dries an organ, shrinking wood pipes so stoppers can fall, spoiling tuning and even pipe speech. Windchest toeholes change size, altering the amount of air that can enter the toeholes of organ pipes. Rising humidity can constrict rackboard holes and lift pipes off their toeholes and can constrict the motion of sliders, which can lead to half-open holes and underwinding or stops going completely dead. I mentioned loose wedges in reed pipes earlier.

Science

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, is director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is a vocal advocate for science information and education. He is famously quoted as saying, “The cool thing about science is that it’s true whether you believe in it or not.” These comments and stories about the adventures of an organ tuner are based on simple physical facts. When air warms it gets less dense as the molecules spread out, and sound waves travel more quickly so pitch rises. It is a rare organ that does not have foibles and inconsistencies that can alter the instrument’s pitch, and it is usually possible to figure out an exact cause. Finding a logical and inexpensive solution can be elusive—my organ chamber trap doors were as simple as it gets, and it cost nothing to correct the problem.

Karla Fowkes, wife of my friend and colleague, the organbuilder Bruce Fowkes, posted an amusing thought on Facebook. Over cocktails, Bruce was carrying on about temperature, organ tuning, and low humidity causing case panels to buzz, and Karla thought she heard him say “roomidity.” She posted:

Bruce and I are on the patio talking as dusk creeps in and the moon rises. He is talking about organ temps and humidity levels, but I hear “Roomidity” and immediately know this is a great word. All our organbuilder and organist friends cannot help but agree. Roomidity. It’s a thing.

You’re right, Karla. It’s a thing.

One stop shopping

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

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

There are two kinds of birds . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Now we’re getting somewhere.

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

Tracker or electric?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s going to build it?

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

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

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

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

Go Yuja.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Breathtaking

My father was, among many other things, an ardent and slightly kooky baseball fan. He grew up in Cincinnati watching the Reds at Crosley Field and started a lifelong relationship with the Boston Red Sox when he was in seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was eleven years old in 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream, when the Red Sox won the American league pennant behind the bat and fielding of Carl Yastrzemski. I think it was that summer that Dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time.

I will never forget my glimpse of all that beautiful green grass as we entered the stands from the scrum in the tunnels beneath. After watching dozens of games on black-and-white television it was breathtaking, and as I write that word, I imagine that I can feel the gasp. It took my breath away. A couple days ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about Iranian women being allowed to watch a live soccer match for the first time in forty years. (Google “Iranian women soccer,” and you will find a slew of stories.) One woman interviewed brought a tear to my eye when she mentioned “all that green grass.” I knew just what she was feeling, except that I have always taken my access to major league sports for granted.

I had the same sort of feeling the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live in Symphony Hall. I had never heard anything like those double basses. My breath was taken away again when I stepped into a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night in real time. It looks great on a coffee mug or a t-shirt, but that is not the same.

A couple weeks ago I spent a week in Germany visiting an organbuilder’s workshop to discuss a future project. An American colleague was also visiting to give first lessons in voicing organ pipes to a bright young apprentice. And while I was there, I visited three historic organs. Two were iconic eighteenth-century masterpieces, gleaming away in their natural habitat. The third was a beauty built in Boston in 1930 for a church in Passaic, New Jersey. What are you doing in Germany?

A glass of wine, Herr Gabler?

The Basilica of Saint Martin is perched on a hill in eponymous Weingarten, the principal town in a region known for growing grapes and producing wine. I had my first glimpse of its towers as I turned a corner passing Burger King. It is a town of about 24,000 people with a long and complicated history of changes of government and processions of Lord Mayors and Abbots. The exterior of the huge building is simple enough, and it is surrounded by the dormitory-like buildings of what was one of the largest monasteries in Germany.

I first saw photos of the organ built by Joseph Gabler when I was a kid, most likely after that first baseball game because my organ lessons started when I was twelve. Visually, it is at the top of the list of all-time greats, on a par with and wildly different from the Müller organ at Haarlem, you know, the red one with the lions. Enormous organ cases decorated with faux-marble swirl around six huge round windows, everything festooned with putti, moldings, carvings, and virile statues to Rococo extremes. I entered the Basilica of Saint Martin from the west end, under the organ, so my first view of the place was down the three-hundred-foot nave, across a fantasyland of decoration. The arched ceiling, nearly a hundred feet up, is adorned with murals in which painted drapery crosses borders to become real drapery.

When I turned around to look at the organ for the first time, I had two quick impressions. In spite of the 32′ façade pipes, it is up so high that it does not look very big, and its magnificent gaudiness cannot possibly be captured in a photograph. There is so much going on visually that I could not take my eyes off it. It is when you climb the many stairs (I forgot to count) to the organ loft that you find out how big it is. You can hardly see the top of the organ. The biggest façade pipe is 32′ DDDD (the two largest are inside the cases). The loft must be fifty feet across, and you could imagine that there are three or four independent organs up there until you realize that the console is up six steps on a platform that allows tracker action to run every which way, and the floor boards between the base of the console platform and the two cases on the gallery rail have iron rings so they can be lifted to access the mechanics.

I visited Weingarten with the three colleagues from the workshop. Stephan Debeur, organist at the abbey, had only limited time coinciding with my visit, so he invited us to join him at the organ while he played for Mass on Friday evening. The steps to and from the organ console were especially squeaky, making me nervous about distracting the worship, but Stephan assured us that he regularly had visitors while playing, and because of the size of the place, it was not an issue. In the lapses between playing, he led us around, opening access doors so we could see interior pipes and action. He kept his ears on the action downstairs and darted back to the console at appropriate moments. I was amused as he played the role of cantor, braying without amplification down the length of the immense church while accompanying himself on that spectacular organ.

He made a point of demonstrating the Vox Humana, an iconic stop in an iconic organ, a stop of such beauty that a legend grew around it. Joseph Gabler experimented with countless combinations of metal and wood, striving to build the pipes that would perfectly imitate the human voice and failing frequently to his disappointment. The legend has him approaching Satan to exchange his soul for the perfect piece of metal, and that idyllic voice was born. Stephan played “Ich ruf’ zu dir” from J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40), alternating the solo voice up and down by octaves in subsequent lines. Gorgeous.

The organ has many singular features. Every façade pipe is a speaking pipe, even the teeny ones lofted above the high center window. Gabler had planned to have an entire division in that location but settled for running long tubes to conduct wind to those pipes from a windchest far below. There is a stop called La Force (The Power), which plays forty-nine pipes simultaneously on low C of the pedalboard. I was sorry not to hear it, as it is apparently not conducive for use in a simple evening Mass. I guess I will have to go back.

There is a voice in one of the Positiv cases with twenty pipes of solid ivory. Take a look at your lathe, remove the motor, and pump the thing with a foot lever, and try to make an ivory organ pipe without chipping it. And while you are at it, note that the massive drawknobs and their square shanks are also solid ivory. There is elaborate marquetry everywhere you look, on banisters, newels, and console panels. There is hardly a square inch that lacks added ornamentation.

Every time I hear an instrument built in another age, I am struck by the timelessness of the sound of a pipe organ. The organ at Weingarten predates American Guild of Organists console standards by more than 150 years, and it is an awkward sit at first whack. But Stephan ably demonstrated that a modern organist can easily play a modern Mass, changing stops like a conjurer, sending beautifully balanced voices across the immense space. Perched on that six-step platform, he has a spectacular view to the altar, surrounded by mammoth organ cases. It is thought to be the first pipe organ built with a detached console.

When Gabler completed the organ in 1750, the delighted monks presented him with a bonus—enough wine to fill the largest pipe. Assuming that 32′ DDDD has a diameter of twenty inches and dusting off my π, that is about 22,600 cubic inches, which is almost ninety-eight gallons. A standard pour for a glass of wine is five ounces. Herr Gabler could entertain a lot of friends with 2,500 five-ounce glasses.¹

Follow the Fox to Munich.

When I asked my friend Stephen Tharp which organs stand out in the neighborhood I was visiting, he all but blurted out Fürstenfeld. The organ in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck was completed by Johann Georg Fux in 1736. The church, though smaller than that in Weingarten, is still immense, and sports the same degree of fantastic opulent decoration. There are side altars with spiraling columns in every bay, angels with sunbursts, carvings, and murals everywhere. Once again, the organ is placed so high in the church that it looks small at first. But though it has fewer than thirty stops, it has a 32′ façade. The tallest pipes are mounted on the impost that is well out of reach from the floor. I guess the organ is over forty-five feet tall.

With Stephen’s help, I met the organist Christoph Hauser after Mass on Sunday morning, so I attended Mass to hear the organ well from the floor. It was dazzling. Christoph’s playing was colorful, thoughtful, rhythmic, and inspirational. It was all improvised excepting the hymns and congregational responses, and that ancient organ filled the room with the liveliest tones, both delicate and charming, and full ablaze.

After Mass, I returned the hymnal to the rack and wandered about keeping my eyes on the rear of the room, assuming that Christoph would appear there. A few moments later, I noticed a dapper gent at the front of the room, looking exactly like an organist (you bet I was profiling). Turns out that the stairs start in a sacristy next to the chancel. And such stairs. Once again, I forgot to count, but this organ is in a second balcony, and there were plenty of them. We passed the antique mechanism of the tower clock, the size of a small car with counterweights as big as oil drums hanging from cables high above. The stairs changed from stone to wood, the stairwell grew narrower, and my tuner’s knees along with all they support was barely a match for the thirty-something spry organist I was chasing. We arrived into a gallery that spanned the length of the room, passing through narrow arches at each bay, until we reached the organ. The organ loft is about ten steps down from the gallery allowing a grand view of the side of the organ case, but it was not until I got down those stairs to stand on the same floor as the organ that I could appreciate its size. The 32′ façade pipes are topped by ornate crowns laden with putti, carvings, and more sunbursts, and are mounted on an impost that is well out of reach.

If Weingarten has the oldest detached console, does Fürstenfeld have the tallest two-manual organ?

Speaking of AGO standards, the Fux organ has “short and broken” bass octaves. Both keyboards and the pedalboard are missing the lowest C#, D#, F#, and G#. What looks like E is actually C. What looks like passing from F# to G is actually D to G. Christoph agreed that it took some adjustment, and now that he is used to it, he has to think twice when moving to more usual keyboards. After lots of digging, he determined that Bach’s Dorian Toccata is the only large piece by Bach with a big pedal part that he can play on the organ. I invite and encourage you to type “Hauser Fux Dorian Toccata” into your YouTube search bar. Hang on to your hats: it is a thrilling ride.

Mr. Skinner goes to Ingelheim.

In 2008, the Organ Clearing House sold Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 823 (1930) to the Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany. The church’s organist Carsten Lenz had long intended to import a Skinner organ to Germany, and this exciting transaction happened after four years of conversations, lots of touring around the eastern United States, and a frightening heap of paperwork. The organ was shipped to Klais Orgelbau in Bonn where it was releathered, renovated, and reconfigured under the supervision and with the advice of Skinner experts Sean O’Donnell and Nelson Barden.

The church in Passaic, New Jersey, where the organ was originally installed, had been purchased by a new congregation, and the decorated façade pipes were to stay in place, so Klais produced a new case of contemporary design including new pipes to replace the original speaking façade pipes from 16′ and 8′ Diapasons. The organ was originally placed in deep chambers in a large room with plaster walls, carpeting, and lovely pew cushions. The new setting has the organ placed in a new shallow case in a high balcony on the center axis of a brick and stone room. The thoughtful installation included placing the large wood pedal pipes in front of the exposed Great division to control the egress of tone. Even with that precaution, it was still necessary to hang heavy sheets of felt in front of the Great to balance the tone in the lively acoustics.

I was delighted to see the shellac, ink lettering, distinctive racking styles, and beefy expression shutters we know so well from long experience with Skinner organs. I was delighted to hear the distinctive tones of Mr. Skinner’s specialty voices so far from home. And I was delighted to hear Carsten describe how German audiences have responded to the unique sounds of the Skinner organ.

We have heard criticism about exporting American organs, expressing the feeling that they should stay at home. I have two thoughts to share. Skinner #823, like many of the instruments we have shipped overseas, was on the market for five years before the church in Ingelheim purchased it. Better to be sent overseas than never to be heard again. And for the last seventy years, American organists and organbuilders have been influenced by European traditions. Reciprocity is a good thing. Germany has a five-hundred-year history of building pipe organs, but no one in Germany has ever built a Skinner organ. There is nothing else like it. Seems we can teach them a thing or two, especially, according to Carsten, when American organists come to play!

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It is impossible to fully describe the experience of visiting a single fine pipe organ, writing a paragraph about each individual voice or chorus, describing the feel of different keyboards, the intricacies of design, the quirks, the chirps, and the foibles. In the mid-eighteenth century when the Weingarten and Fürstenfeldbruck organs were built, there was no other machine made by humans quite as complicated as a pipe organ. With more than seven-thousand pipes, the Weingarten organ is large by modern standards, and its console placement is visionary.

Returning to AGO standards, or what we are used to in organs, the twenty-nine-stop Fürstenfeld organ has only one reed, 16′ Trompas² in the Pedal (prominently displayed in Christoph Hauser’s recording of the Dorian Toccata). How can you play an organ with no manual reeds? Shut up and sing, that’s how. And by the way, most of the mixtures include tierces, and full organ sure sounds as though there are manual reeds.

I shared my thrill and thrall on Facebook after each of these visits and received a comment about Weingarten that stood out. “I’ve always thought that organ was a little soft in the church. I’m sure Gabler did his best.” Oof. Herr Gabler’s worst is far better than the best of most organbuilders, even after 2,500 glasses of wine.

Notes

1. You can see the specification of the Gabler organ at Weingartern here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_the_Basilica_of_St._Martin_(Wein….

2. Yes, it really is 16′ Trompas. You can see the specifications of the Fux organ at Fürstenfeldbruck here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgeln_der_Klosterkirche_Fürstenfeld.

Designed for the space

When an organ builder accepts the challenge of creating a new instrument for a particular space, they incorporate all the features of the room: architecture, acoustics, ambient climate, and building surfaces like floors, walls, and ceilings. All are factors that influence the design of the organ. Many builders have a portable windchest equipped with blower, regulator, and sample pipes that they ship to the church, allowing them to hear and compare pipes of different scales at different wind pressures in the room where the organ will go. If the walls, ceilings, and floors are made of materials that absorb sound, the builder recommends changing them by replacing carpet with stone tiles, sealing soft ceilings with material that reflects sound, and doubling or tripling the thickness of sheetrock walls.

A formula is developed that includes the scope and content of the organ, the scales of various ranks of pipes at certain wind pressures, and the adaptation of the room that encloses it. It is both a scientific equation and an artistic composition. It is purposeful and intentional; there is no sense of “hit or miss.” Building a pipe organ is an expensive adventure, and it is important to get it right.

Perhaps I am describing an ideal. Often there are compromises because of budget limitations or conflicts with other groups within a parish about changing the look and feel of a sanctuary—a congregation that is accustomed to carpets and pew cushions may not part with them easily. In any case, it is customary for an organbuilder to spend a lot of time and effort creating the most effective equation considering the limitations.

If each instrument is carefully planned for a specific room, how can it be that we routinely relocate organs from one place to another? That has been central to my work as director of the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years. We accept as new listings those organs we judge to be good candidates for relocation, and we help guide the placement of an organ based on our sense of the same design equation used to plan a new instrument. Sometimes it is necessary to design and build a new case to get the architecture right. In other cases it helps to rescale some of the stops to increase the depth of the sound of the organ. Increasing the scale involves making the pipes larger in diameter relative to their length by adding new pipes for the lowest few notes, moving the pipes up the correct number of holes and cutting them shorter to make the correct pitch. Increasing scale along with raising wind pressure will make an organ more bold and powerful, ready to fill a larger space with sound.

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A couple years ago the Organ Clearing House organized the relocation of Gabriel Kney’s Opus 93 (two manuals, forty ranks), built in 1980 for First Community Church of Dallas, Texas. The organ was offered for sale because that church decided to divest itself of real estate to create an endowment it could administer to meet specific needs of the community, confining the organized worship to more simple surroundings. The organ’s original home was a contemporary room with a sharp-pitched roofline, something like an A-frame. It was moved to a richly decorated chapel at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.

The organ has classic lines and proportions. It is housed in a free-standing “honey” oak case with a narrow lower section that spreads wider midway up to accommodate a common three-tower design. The towers have flat roofs that neatly parallel the flat but coffered ceiling of the chapel. The honey color of the case complements that of the wooden chairs, while walls and ceiling are a similar but darker hue. Someone seeing the organ for the first time in the chapel at Saint Meinrad might think it was originally designed for that room.

The bright and powerful classic tones of the organ carry effectively through the large space, which with its contoured ceiling provides a rich acoustical surrounding. Mr. Kney’s equation for the creation of an instrument for the church in Dallas transposed easily to the different surroundings.

About twelve years ago, we relocated a 1916 Casavant organ, Opus 665, from the “downstairs church” at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine, to the nave of Church of the Resurrection on East Seventy-Fourth Street at Park Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four 16′ stops from previous organs in the church were incorporated and added to the specification. The Pedal Principal 16′ became the Great 16′ Violone; the Gemshorn 16′ extended the Postif Dulciane 8′ to play at 16′ on both manual and pedal; the Pedal Bourdon 16′ serves as an independent pedal stop with the remote Positif; and the Pedal 16′ Quintadena was cut shorter to create a 10-2⁄3′ Quinte, which effectively increased the scale of the stop by five notes. A fourth “new” 16′ stop was created with the extension of the Récit 8′ Hautbois with a new bass octave so the rank could speak at 16′ pitch on manual and pedal, making a total of four sixteens and a ten-and-two-thirds added to the already sonorous Double Open Wood, Subbass, and Trombone. Pretty good foundation for a forty-rank organ.

Originally, there were two Open Diapasons on the Grand Orgue. We left one in that division as the usual foundation of the main principal chorus, and the other, larger diapason became the base of a new Solo division, which includes a restored Skinner French Horn and new replicas of a Skinner Harmonic Flute and high-pressure Tuba.

These and other modifications transformed the organ from a downstairs small-town organ to an upstairs big-city organ. You can read about this instrument and follow links to see full specifications at resurrectionnyc.org/organ.html.

Monumental art

I am thinking about moving large objects that were made for specific places after reading an article by Hilarie M. Sheets published in The New York Times on October 13, 2023, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act.” Orpheus and Apollo is a metal sculpture 190-feet wide and forty-feet deep comprising 188 Muntz metal bars¹ suspended in a system of complex angles from 444 woven stainless-steel wires. The wires were fastened to eye bolts in the ceiling personally by the sculptor Richard Lippold (1915–2002) in the grand lobby of Philharmonic Hall in New York City’s Lincoln Center. The work was in place for the opening of the hall in 1962 (E. Power Biggs, Catharine Crozier, and Virgil Fox shared the dedication recital of the Aeolian-Skinner organ there that year), but fifty years later conservators grew concerned about the stability and safety of the massive complex work. The wires that suspended the heavy metal bars were fraying, and as a second reconstruction and renaming of the hall was being planned, Orpheus and Apollo was documented, dismantled, and placed in a storage facility in New Jersey. Just like seemingly countless pipe organs I have seen go into storage, there was little hope that the grand piece of art would ever see the light of day.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, lecturer at the Parsons School of Design and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the column “Skyline” in The New Yorker magazine, was serving as consultant to Lincoln Center for the selection of the architect of the transformation of Philharmonic Hall, then Avery Fisher Hall, into Geffen Hall, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport. As he followed the planning of those two major projects, he noticed similarities in the two monumental spaces and conceived the idea that Orpheus and Apollo might be installed at LaGuardia. “Lincoln Center had a sculpture in search of a space, and the airport had a space in search of a purpose,” Goldberger said of the atrium at LaGuardia. The article continues, “With the sculpture as the centerpiece of this new gathering spot with a mezzanine lounge, Goldberger feels it is ‘entirely consistent with what Lippold intended, which was to enliven an architectural space, to have people moving around it.’”

Peter Flamm, executive director of the Lincoln Center Development Project, said, “We believed LaGuardia to be the best solution that provided a manner to appropriately appreciate the piece.” Lincoln Center not only gave Orpheus and Apollo to the Port Authority but also funded the restoration and re-lacquering of the 188 metal bars. When conservator Marc Roussel dismantled the sculpture, a precise 3-D scan of the original installation was created—that was included in the gift to the Port Authority.

Frank Rapaccioli of the fine-arts mover Dun-Right Carriers was responsible for the installation at LaGuardia, converting the model into a format that mapped out the placement of the screw-eyes and the lengths of the new steel wires that determined the height of each end of the sculpture. The original layout had to be changed to accommodate the lower ceiling in the LaGuardia atrium, and conservator Roussel was charged by the Lippold Foundation to observe and approve those changes in the interest of preserving as much of the integrity of the original installation as possible.

The installation took thirty days. At the outset, there was a lot of trial and error as the installers and curators realized how easy it was to leave wires rubbing against others, and many pieces had to be cut down and moved even a few inches for clearance. As the work progressed they got the hang of it, and there were far fewer “back steps” in the second half of the project.

The article concludes, “While profoundly disappointed about the sculpture’s displacement, Anthony C. Wood, executive director of the Ittleson Foundation, which originally funded Orpheus and Apollo at Lincoln Center, is relieved that it was so well documented and hasn’t been consigned to storage, in pieces, for eternity. Putting it in a new and exciting home, where it will be seen by more people, is the silver lining,” Wood said. “But you don’t have to be an art expert to know that it’s going to be different. How could it not?”²

This story speaks of inspiration, cooperation, and flexibility. Paul Goldberger had the great idea, and officials and conservators at Lincoln Center and the Port Authority cooperated to make it happen. The fact that the iconic sculpture would not fit in the new space in its original form did not stop them. They reconfigured it to fit, retaining as much of the work’s integrity as possible. The overriding sentiment was that it is better to have the work renovated and installed in a busy public place than to have it languish in storage, never to be seen again.

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We at the Organ Clearing House have faced just this question with numerous pipe organs. Imagine a large three-manual, nineteenth-century organ built by E. & G. G. Hook or Henry Erben. It is installed in an immense balcony, stands thirty or forty feet tall, and has a footprint thirty feet wide by twelve feet deep. (I am thinking of a particular organ I visited last week.) What newer church can accommodate an instrument of that size? But when a potential purchaser who loves the sounds of organs from that era arrives representing a church that has adequate space for this organ but would wish to equip it with electric stop action and a solid-state combination action, I would be tempted to refuse on the grounds that the historic monument should be preserved without alteration. What do I achieve? Nothing. The interested party moves on, and the organ remains dormant.

Why not consider adapting that grand organ to suit the needs of a modern congregation? After all, there would be only a few churches that could house such a massive organ. A careful restoration of the windchests, reservoirs, keyboard and stop action, and pipes could be enhanced by adding electric solenoid stop action motors to the existing mechanical stop action. The only actual violation of the original organ would be drilling piston buttons into the keyslips between the keyboards, and the original keyslips could be retained in case someone later chose to reverse the project and remove the electric action.

The organ would be used and admired, and it would sound just as it did when it was new. It would leave the vast assortment of historic organs languishing in storage or in abandoned buildings.

When conservators restore a piece of furniture owned by Marie Antoinette, they place it behind velvet ropes, keeping visitors from touching it. When we restore or renovate a pipe organ, we intend it to be used. The purpose of preserving an organ is so people can hear the timeless sounds.

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There is a grand relief-plaster sculpture thirty feet wide called The Spirit of Transportation in a secondary waiting room in the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia. One passes it on leaving the main concourse and heading for the public restrooms or the Amtrak first class lounge. It was created by the Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter (1867–1915) who emigrated to the United States in 1889. The Spirit of Transportation was created for the opening of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and depicts the history of transportation from ox carts to fanciful imaginations of air and space craft. When the Thirtieth Street Station was built, its predecessor the Broad Street Station was demolished, but curators and designers had the foresight to preserve this and several other important sculptures. One might have preferred to have the work installed in a busy central place in the new station rather than in an out-of-the-way place, but at least it was preserved where it can be freely admired by the public.

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In the first weekend of November 2023, my colleague Amory Atkins and I attended dedication concerts of the rebuilt and reimagined 1977 Klais organ at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue (at the CitiCorp building) in Manhattan. I have written previously about the emergency removal of the organ a couple winters ago following a major water main break at the intersection of East Fifty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. The lower levels of the church were profoundly flooded, and while there was only about a half inch of water in the organ, there was great concern about mold developing and the need to remove the organ quickly for remediation in the entire room.

There had been questions about the viability of the instrument for many years. It has an iconic case designed by Massimo Vignelli, but the windchests and mechanical action were problematic, the wind system was inadequate, and the tonal structure was substandard. The organ was shipped to the workshop of C. B. 
Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it was reworked with a new wind system and tracker action, several lovely replacement voices, and a general revoicing. The resulting instrument is a joy to hear. The preservation of the case and visual design of the organ was an important move, retaining the original architectural content of the striking and unusual sanctuary.

This project was a great example of how thoughtful changes can extend the life and improve the usefulness of an artwork. It is exciting to celebrate that organ’s rebirth concurrently with the installation of the restored and re-invigorated Lippold sculpture, Orpheus and Apollo. Neither project was a strict historical restoration, and both brought new life to important works of art through open-minded appraisal and thoughtful craftsmanship. There are a lot of ways to interpret the concept of historical preservation.

Notes

1. Muntz metal is an alloy of 60% copper and 40% zinc that is stronger, harder, and more rigid than other forms of brass.

2. Hilarie M. Sheets, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act,” The New York Times, October 13, 2023.