In the Wind: Preservation by relocation

On the Hook

When I was a teenager, I had an unofficial job as assistant organist at the First Congregational Church of Woburn, Massachusetts. My mentor and friend George Bozeman was the organist there, and he brought me on to help when he was home and to take over the helm when he was away installing an organ. The organ is E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 from 1860 with three manuals, thirty-one stops, and thirty-four ranks.¹ It was one of about five organs I had played by then. I knew it was mighty special and especially mighty, but fifty years later I know a lot more about how lucky I was to play such an instrument.

Opus 283 is one of the last surviving of a distinctive breed, the three-manual pre-Civil War American pipe organ. There were two such Hooks in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, one of which (Opus 253, 1859) was destroyed by fire with the First Baptist Church in 2005.² “Mine” was one of three grand Hook organs in Woburn. E. & G. G. Hook Opus 553 (1870) was in the First Unitarian Church and is now in the Heilig Kreuz Kirche in Berlin, Germany, and commonly called Die Berliner Hook;³  and E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 646 (1872) is in Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.⁴ In my first days as director of the Organ Clearing House, I was privileged to speak at a conference about the preservation and relocation of historic organs at the Heilig Kreuz Kirche in Berlin representing the work of the Organ Clearing House. As owner of the Bishop Organ Company, I maintained the organ at Saint Charles for thirty years. That one has two manuals and twenty-three ranks and sits high in the rear gallery of the lofty church with some of the best acoustics one will find in an American parish church. It is a bold, brilliant organ with amazing lungs. I releathered the huge double-rise reservoir in place twenty years ago.

I also maintained E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 635 (1872) in the First Baptist Church of Wakefield, Massachusetts.⁵ That was the home church of old friend and colleague John Boody of Taylor & Boody Organ builders—his grandfather had been pastor there. John and I shared a special bond because of that organ, which was sadly destroyed by fire on October 23, 2018.

I grew up in the Boston area, the home of the Hook brothers, and I have serviced, played, restored, and relocated many of their instruments. Admitting this personal bias and remembering that the grand organ in the First Congregational Church of Woburn was one of the first organs I knew, I have long felt that E. & G. G. Hook and its continuation as E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings to be among the very best organ builders in history. I once had the good fortune to hear Dame Gilliam Weir play a recital on the iconic Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris and Peter Sykes in recital at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, otherwise known as the Jesuit Urban Center,⁶ within the same week. I was struck by the comparison of those two grand instruments. The Cavaillé-Coll had the edge with the power and romance of its reeds, but to my ears, the Hook & Hastings took the lead with its variety of principal and flute tone and clarity and beauty of individual voices. The Immaculate Conception organ was originally built in 1863 (and later expanded by Hook & Hastings in 1902), just three years after the Saint-Sulpice organ, and the two beauties have a lot in common.

Long dismantled and languishing in storage, the organ from the Jesuit Urban Center holds a special place in my heart, as my predecessor Alan Laufman’s memorial service was held there in the spring of 2001. There was a huge congregation of “organ people” present, and the congregational singing supported by that heroic organ was beyond belief.

Brothers and partners

Elias Hook (1805–1881) and George Greenleaf Hook (1807–1880) were sons of a cabinet maker in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1822 Elias apprenticed with the Boston organ builder William H. Goodrich, and it is supposed that George followed him. George built a one-manual organ in 1827, and the two brothers built an organ together in 1829 for the Unitarian Church of Danvers, Massachusetts. In the company’s first eighteen years, they built one hundred organs; Opus 100 was finished in 1856. The next hundred organs were built in seven years, and numbers 400 through 500 were built in just three years, between 1866 and 1869.

Frank Hastings (1836–1916) joined the company as a draftsman in 1855 and worked in every department of the factory building windchests, pipes, bellows, cabinets, and mechanical actions—all the thousands of components that make up a pipe organ. In 1870, when George was 63 and Elias was 65 years old, they made Frank Hastings a partner in the firm and changed the name to E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings. After 1881 when both brothers had died, Frank purchased their shares and moved the company from its longtime home in what is now Roxbury, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, to then farmland, now the suburb of Weston, ten miles west of the city.

The 1880s were a time of increasing labor unrest in the United States. There was a series of violent railroad strikes, and an anarchist exploded a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket in 1886, the same year that the American Federation of Labor was formed. In 1892 there was a highly publicized, exceedingly violent strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Mill near Pittsburgh, and there was a violent and costly strike at the Pullman Rail Car factory in Chicago in 1894 that spread to other localities. Aware of these events, Frank Hastings wanted to maintain a harmonious work environment.

Hastings purchased half of his family’s homestead in Weston in 1884. In 1886 he bought the remaining forty-five acres and an adjoining 150-acre farm, and the new factory was opened in 1889. In 1893 the company was reorganized and renamed the Hook & Hastings Company. Frank created a “community of labor,” building homes that he made available to workers with low-interest loans, a community hall, a theater, and a company school. By the end of 1893 the company had completed its Opus 1590.

We know little about Frank Hastings’s first wife. His son Francis Warren Hastings was an officer in the company, but because of failing health he moved to Bermuda in 1895, where he died of consumption in 1903 at the age of 41. After Warren died, Arthur Leslie Coburn (brother of Anna Coburn, the company schoolmistress) became president of the company. Frank Hastings married Anna Coburn in 1899 when he was 62 and she was 46 years old.

Frank Hastings died in 1916 at the age of 80. Arthur Coburn continued as president of the company, and long-time Hastings associates Norman Jacobsen and Alfred Pratt were the other officers. The legendary quality of Hook & Hastings organs continued, but the pace was diminishing. The company produced eighteen organs in 1916 and fifteen in 1917.

Then came the years of the Great Depression, Hollywood introduced “talkies,” and the radio and phonograph were becoming popular. Municipal music programs were dramatically diminished during the Depression. Perhaps more importantly, in those years Ernest Skinner was ensconced in Dorchester, Massachusetts, building organs by the hundred for an increasingly loyal patronage. All these factors contributed to the weakening and ultimate failure of the Hook & Hastings Company.

The company continued for several years after Coburn’s death in 1931, until Anna Hastings felt that the quality of the company’s products was declining sufficiently to close its doors in 1935. Remembering that her husband had always put quality before price, she felt that when organ builders started talking about price first, it was time to stop. A contract was signed with the Mystic Building Wrecking Company of Chelsea, the buildings were demolished, the lumber was salvaged, and the company was dissolved in April of 1937. The final tally was 2,614 organs in 110 years—a remarkable record of longevity, quality, and artistic achievement. Elias and George Hook built the company, and Frank Hastings carried their artistic vision into the twentieth century while creating a model for employee relations in a time of vicious labor disputes.

These details about the history of this great organ company come from the enormous and exhaustive book, Farm Town to Suburb: The History and Architecture of Weston, Massachusetts, by Pamela W. Fox, published by Peter E. Randall, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Pages 196 through 217 include the historical details accompanied by numerous photographs. Pam gave a lecture on this subject at the 2000 convention of the Organ Historical Society in Boston. Later, I developed a lecture on the subject, and Pam welcomed me into her home and shared photos and historical details not included in the book. I admire and commend Pam for her exceptional work and am grateful for her generosity.

I have also relied on The Hook Opus List, compiled by William T. Van Pelt and published by the Organ Historical Society in 1991. The book’s preface written by my predecessor at the Organ Clearing House, Alan Laufman, is a concise history of the Hook companies.

A relocation tale

In 1995, I had a call from the chair of the organ committee at Follen Community Church (Unitarian Universalist Association) in Lexington, Massachusetts, about the church’s organ that had been assembled by a well-meaning parishioner using “parts-n-pieces” from various sources. The resulting hodge-podge was unmusical and unreliable, and the committee was considering options for its repair or replacement. I inspected the organ, and we began a conversation about how the situation could be improved without offending the faithful congregant who had “created” the organ. The process was accelerated when the 48-volt electrical system in the console shorted out and the congregation witnessed smoke emerging from within.

At the same time, the congregation of the First Unitarian Church of Stoneham, Massachusetts, disbanded, and the building was sold to a children’s day care center. A group of volunteers led by organ historian and consultant Barbara Owen dismantled the two-manual Hook organ (Opus 466, 1868)⁷ and placed it in storage. Barbara, working as an agent for the Unitarian Universalist Association of Boston, advertised the availability of the organ in a UUA newsletter, “Free to a good home.” The chair of the Follen Church committee saw the notice and called me wondering if this might be an option for them. A quick study showed that Follen would be an ideal home for the organ, the church received ownership, and the Bishop Organ Company was engaged to restore and install it.

Volunteers from the church helped with the heavy work of refinishing the case and setting up the organ. They came to my workshop to clean small components and wind new tracker ends while I restored the windchests and releathered the double-rise reservoir and its two feeder bellows. The organ was first played in its new home on Easter Sunday of 1996.

I spent about six months up close and personal with Opus 466, handling every part myself. I dismantled the windchests and decided that the original chest tables could be retained if I routed out a few cracks and filled them with shims. I put new leather on the pallets, cleaned the pipes, reconditioned the actions, and replaced the bushings in the keyboards. Milling a couple pipes from the salvaged 16′ Subbass of another Hook organ into a mile of tracker stock, I noticed that the “virgin” nineteenth-century pine lumber was white, not the rich deep brown we are used to seeing inside historic organs. Could it be that when the organ was new, its interior was bleached-blond-white wood?

I felt as though I got to know the people who built the organ in 1868. When they were working on that organ, Ulysses S. Grant was elected president of the United States. Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama were admitted back into the Union following the Civil War.
E. & G. G. Hook built thirty-six organs that year. I marveled at the precision of the woodworker’s measure markings and the elegant penmanship of their labeling—how did they get their pencils that sharp? I saw the marks of hand tools and milling machines on the thousands of parts. I wondered what a worker in that factory would bring for lunch and how many hours they worked each day. They must have taken pride in their work, or it would not have been so good. Each of the multitude of parts was crafted with exquisite care.

Stephen P. Kinsley was the head voicer in the Hook workshop. In each organ he voiced, he left his mark on the first pipe of the Open Diapason that sat on the Great windchest, a half-step up from the smallest façade pipe. It is a shield drawn in ink, inscribed “Wind, S.P.K. 25⁄8, 1868.”⁸ When I first picked up a pipe of this organ and blew in it, I was surprised by how much sound was produced with so little effort. Remember that in those days, all organs were hand pumped. Efficiency of tone production was essential to their success.

Mr. Kinsley is the only person I know by name who worked on that organ. Frank Hastings had been working for the Hook brothers for thirteen years and was thirty-two years old. In 1868, Frank was still working his way through all the departments of the company. As thirty-six organs were built there that year by over two-hundred craftsmen, he may or may not have put his hands on any piece of the instrument. Perhaps he admired it when it was complete on the shop floor ready for shipment.

Follow the money.

When Hook Opus 553 was sold by the Unitarian Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, to the church in Berlin, Charley Smith, a longtime church member, became steward of the proceeds of the sale. Since Woburn, Stoneham (the original home of Opus 466), and Lexington (home of the Follen Church, the new home of Opus 466) are all adjoining towns,⁹ Charley knew that the Stoneham Organ was being preserved by relocation. Since both organs were built within two years of each other, he recognized that they were sisters, and the Woburn organ fund was donated to the Follen Church to be dedicated to the care and use of the newly installed organ. Members of the former Woburn church were present at the dedication of Opus 466 in Lexington, closing the circle that started when their church was closed and their organ was sold overseas.

§

George and Elias Hook sure started something. George was an organist with a musical ear and led the company’s artistic development. Elias was a genius manager who established the strong financial base of the company and enabled the correspondence necessary for contracting, designing, building, and installing as many as fifty-five organs in a single year. Remembering the state of communication and transportation in the second half of the nineteenth century, that alone was a great accomplishment. The factory equipment was powered by a large stationary steam engine, and materials were delivered and finished organs were shipped on horse-drawn rail cars at night, using tracks that carried trollies by day.

E. & G. G. Hook, E & G. G. Hook & Hastings, the Hook & Hastings Company, and Hook-Hastings combine to form a great heritage of artistic development and musical excellence. I was fortunate to practice and perform on one of their masterpieces when I was a pup. Those beautiful tones informed my naïve ears, and I am thrilled anew whenever I encounter one of their organs.

Notes

1. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6083.

2. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/5994.

3. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/49571.

4. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6962.

5. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6950.

6. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/5670.

7. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/8579.

8. 2-5⁄8′′ was the original wind pressure. When we received the organ from storage there was a note saying the pressure had been measured as 3-1⁄8′′. When commissioning the wind system, we set the pressure according to Mr. Kinsley, and original voicing sang clear.

9. My hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts, adjoins Woburn, Stoneham, and Lexington.

On the road again

In April 2021, after a year of Covid isolation and after I received my second dose of the vaccine, I went on a “bust out” road trip driving south from our home in New York City as far as Atlanta, visiting three colleagues’ organ shops, the installation of an organ where the Organ Clearing House crew was working, and a few iconic instruments. It was my reintroduction to the excitement of being out and about, seeing friends and colleagues, and getting my nose back in the business after being sequestered at our place in Maine during the worst of the pandemic. I wrote about that trip under the title “On the road again” in the July 2021 issue of The Diapason (pages 10–11). It was fun to recreate and chronicle some of my experiences on the road, and here I am to do it again.

Last week I drove as far west as Chicago from our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two things inspired this trip. The Organ Clearing House was installing a relocated organ by Gabriel Kney (Opus 93 from Dallas, Texas) at the Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana, and I was promoting an exceptional organ built by M. P. Möller (Opus 5881 from Chicago, Illinois) that had been donated by organ historian and architect William H. Barnes and his brother and mother in honor of his father, Charles Osborne Barnes, who had been a longtime member and trustee of the church.

I was on the road for seven nights, stayed in five different hotels, and drove just over twenty-five-hundred miles. I love that kind of driving. My first experiences with long-distance driving were as a student at Oberlin when I drove back and forth between school and home in the Boston area, growing familiar with Interstate 90. During the summer of 1978, just after my graduation from Oberlin, my mentor John Leek and I drove to Oakland, California, to deliver a harpsichord we built. That trip was a great lesson about our country because while it is a one-day drive from Boston to Oberlin, it is a five or six-day drive from Oberlin to San Francisco. Just as I thought I was going west when I went away to school, a school friend who grew up in northern Wisconsin thought he was going south.

Kegg Organ Company

I left home on Saturday morning, spent that night outside Cleveland, met my friend Charles Kegg for breakfast on Sunday morning in Hartville, Ohio, and visited his workshop, which is in a 16,500-square-foot building, beautifully equipped for the specialized work of building pipe organs. The immense rooms are carefully planned and nicely maintained. There is a fleet of orderly stationary machines and workstations. Various components and structures of a large organ under construction occupied big areas of the abundant floor space. The company had just upgraded the HVAC system to include air filtering, heating, and air conditioning, replacing the noisy old hanging gas heaters of yesteryear.

I was especially interested to see one of Charles’s specialties and passions, the machine built by M. P. Möller to produce rolls for their automatic organs. It is a stately structure with an intricate mechanism that transfers musical notes into holes in the paper rolls. Möller rolls are big and heavy, a large-format version of the more familiar Aeolian rolls. Charles was working with the now-shuttered American Organ Institute at the University of Oklahoma to rejuvenate the machine and make new rolls to aid in the understanding of that brilliant technology developed early in the twentieth century. Along with his active interest in automatic musical instruments, Charles and his company are building beautiful new organs with electric-valve actions, versatile symphonic specifications, and exquisite consoles.

Saint Meinrad School of Theology

I left Hartville to drive across Ohio, through Cincinnati and past Louisville, Kentucky, to Saint Meinrad, Indiana, the town next to Santa Claus near the southern tip of the state. Saint Meinrad is a thriving Catholic seminary on a beautiful remote campus. There is a prominent archabbey with an organ by Goulding & Wood in the principal chapel, and the school operates industries that produce high-quality caskets and peanut butter.

In addition to the archabbey there is a chapel honoring Saint Thomas Aquinas, where the Organ Clearing House was installing an organ built in 1980 by Gabriel Kney (Opus 93) for the First Community Church of Dallas, Texas. Susan Ferré was the consultant for the design and construction of the project. Debra Dyko, the theological school’s organist, found the instrument listed on the OCH website and went to Dallas within a week to audition the organ. The sale was completed quickly, and less than a month later, the OCH crew was in Dallas dismantling the organ.

I arrived when the installation was well along. The case was up, windchests in place, action connected and functioning, and the wind system was complete. I was able to help connect the solid-state slider control and combination mechanisms including the installation of a new 24-volt DC power supply for the Heuss slider motors. I “retired” from working on-site with the crew at the end of 2019, and it was nice to have tools in my hands again for a few hours. This was a classic relocation project. The organ is well suited for the building visually and tonally. It is well built, so it went back together easily and will be a reliable instrument for decades of further use, and it was a great fit physically and visually—there were no alterations required. Fred Bahr of John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders accomplished tonal finishing of the organ in May.

. . . and speaking of Buzard . . .

I left Saint Meinrad on Tuesday morning to drive to Champaign, Illinois, to visit John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders. I had a nice lunch with John-Paul Buzard that included rich conversation about organbuilding philosophies, the history of his company, and conversations about past and future collaborations. The company, affectionately referred to as “Buzco” (as seen on the license plates of company vehicles), is in a former women’s residential hotel in downtown Champaign. It is a four-story building with rental apartments on the fourth floor (The Organ Loft Apartments) and three floors of offices, workshops, voicing studios, and erection space.

A large, four-manual organ for Saint George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is under construction, and I saw a big section of the framework and structure of the instrument in the erection space, windchests being assembled, wind system components being built, pipes in the voicing rooms, and the console partially assembled. The long corridors down the center of each floor serve as storage rooms and are wide enough to allow passage between stacks of organ components.

The Buzco service department has a separate workshop in a building across the street devoted to large-scale repairs of organs they maintain. There is a well-equipped woodworking shop, leathering station, stocks of wiring supplies, and lots of projects in progress on workbenches. Keeping renovation and repair work separate from the construction of new organs makes it easier to keep track of things.

I visited with the brilliant organist Katelyn Emerson at McKinley Presbyterian Church where she played for me on the 1994 Dobson Opus 63. We sat in a pew talking for an hour or two about the organ, its music, and her upcoming studies in Britain. Katelyn’s husband, David Brown, is a longtime member of the Buzard shop, a dear friend with whom I correspond regularly. I was delighted to sit between Dave and Katelyn at the rollicking dinner that evening hosted by John-Paul that included his wife and daughter along with several other members of the Buzco team.

Given by the master

William Harrison Barnes (1892–1980) was an authority on pipe organ construction and a consultant responsible for the design of some four hundred instruments. He grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1910. In 2008, the high school celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the three-manual pipe organ that Dr. Barnes donated to the school. His home church was Epworth United Methodist Church of Chicago where his father, Charles Osborne Barnes, was a longtime member and trustee. A plaque on the wall of the church dedicates the 1931
M. P. Möller organ (Opus 5881) to the loving memory of Charles Osborne Barnes, naming the donors as Mrs. Charles O. Barnes and her two sons, William H. Barnes and Harold O. Barnes.

When Pastor Max Kuecker of Epworth Church contacted me about organizing the sale of the organ and shared its history with me, I imagined a scenario in the offices of M. P. Möller when staff members looked at each other and agreed that with the Barnes family involved, this had better be an exceptional instrument, and I was curious to see it. The church had waited until after the proverbial last minute to address the future of the organ as our first contact was after the sale of the building with real estate closing just weeks away. Since our company would be working in Saint Meinrad, I combined the two interests and planned my trip.

The people at Möller did deliver an exceptional organ. There are twenty-two ranks in three manual divisions with one independent pedal rank, 16′/8′ Bourdon, enclosed with the Swell. The Choir division is located across a stairway from the main organ chamber and has shutters facing two rooms. One set of shutters speaks into the stairwell and through a grille that opens into the choir loft, the other opens into the adjacent Sunday School chapel, and the Choir organ is playable as a separate instrument from a two-manual console in the chapel. Each console has a cut-out switch to close and disable the shutters that are not to be in use. An eight-octave rank of flue pipes that starts at 16′ (1–24 stopped, 25–37 open, 38–56 open harmonic, 57–97 metal) sits on a unit chest allowing it to be used as a pedal stop and at different pitches on the keyboards while the ranks of the main pitman chest are distributed between the two keyboards.

There are four 8′ diapasons on the organ, two in the Great and one each in the Swell and Choir, and the Great 8′ Second Diapason is extended as a pedal stop with a marvelous octave of 16′ Diaphone pipes. There is plenty of power, and the Choir 8′ Dulciana and Swell 8′ Muted Viol disappear as whispers when the boxes are closed. You can learn more about this organ here: pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/9216.

When I posted Opus 5881 for sale on our website and promoted it on Facebook, I was not surprised to have immediate responses from congregations interested in acquiring it, and as I planned my trip, I invited the organists of those churches to meet with me while I was visiting the church. I shared the organ with representatives of two churches, one of which was quick to act, and while as I write the transaction is not officially completed, it sure looks as though we will be dismantling that organ in July. I’ll let you know when the deal is complete.

The corner of Oak and Walnut

I left Chicago on Friday morning for the six-hour drive to Orrville, Ohio, where the Schantz Organ Company has been on that street corner for 121 years. Organ architect Eric Gastier greeted me and showed me through the storied workshop where nearly twenty-five-hundred organs have been built, an average of about twenty organs a year. We were joined by Jeffery Dexter, vice president and tonal director, for conversations about the history and operation of the company.

The deep heritage of the company is evident everywhere in the huge shop building. Heavily worn wood floors tell the history of the countless footsteps and cartwheels required to build one organ, not to mention twenty-five hundred. Jigs and patterns for dozens of specialty components hang on the walls, and personal workstations are decorated with family photos and mementos and lifetime tools. There is specialty equipment everywhere like a power-vented workstation for soldering metal windlines, mechanized rollers with crank handles for turning tiny tuning slides, tapered and straight mandrills for shaping organ pipes, and ancient carts for the storage and transportation of hundreds of clamps. There is a huge belt sander, wide enough to accept the largest windchest, and an elegant walnut-wainscoted conference room with raised panels that only an organ shop could build. My tour took us through a seemingly endless maze of rooms, both large and small, each dedicated to a specific facet of the art of making pipe organs.

There are very few workshops remaining in the world in which pipe organs have been built by the thousand. I have visited the shops of Austin, Reuter, and Casavant, but am hard-pressed to think of another North American shop with such a legacy. I think of the thousands of truckloads of organs that have rolled away from the loading dock and down the residential street to Main Street where you can drive across the railroad tracks and find a highway.

Whiling away the time

What do you do while you are driving twenty-five-hundred miles alone? My work with the Organ Clearing House has brought me close to the American trucking industry, as I wrote in the April 2022 issue of The Diapason (pages 10–11). Because we maintain DOT (Department of Transportation) and FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) numbers, to Wendy’s amusement I receive several trucking magazines. Glancing at them occasionally, I know that Walmart is America’s largest trucking company. My observation is that Amazon must be becoming a close second—their trucks are everywhere. Landstar, the company we use, has a solid presence on the country’s highways. Taking attendance is a mindless occupation as white lines stream past.

Highway warning signs can be amusing, like the one on I-90 in western New York that says, “Correctional facility ahead, don’t stop for hitchhikers,” or the huge tourist stop and museum in eastern Pennsylvania with a sign that reads, “Be prepared to see more than you expected.” For years I have loved listening to “books on tape” while driving, the concept updated now to Audible.com. As a devoted sailor, I listened to Joshua Slocum’s famous memoir, Sailing Around the World Alone, for the third time. I especially love the moment when he frightens away a pirate attack by scattering upholstery tacks on the deck of his oyster sloop, Spray. I wonder if the pirates got shoes after that.

A couple months ago, Wendy introduced me to a series of podcasts called Sticky Notes hosted by the conductor Joshua Weilerstein, artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Switzerland. In each of the dozens of hour-long episodes, Weilerstein analyzes a different piece of music using many recorded examples, delivered in a rapid vocal cadence. During this trip I listened to his thoughts on the Bach cello suites and Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. I didn’t agree with everything he said (the recording he used of Beethoven’s Eroica was too fast), but I found it engaging to argue with him while I was driving. As an enthusiastic young musician with an impressive career unfolding, Weilerstein has given much thought to the music he performs, and his insights are rewarding, informative, and reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s iconic Young People’s Concerts on television with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Download the Sticky Notes app, and you’ll see a big library of compelling lessons.

That Ingenious Business . . .

. . . is the title of an authoritative book about the Pennsylvania German organbuilders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, written by the late organbuilder Raymond J. Brunner and published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1990. It reflects a comment by a bystander, a contemporary of David Tannenberg, the greatest of that tribe of craftsmen. I am reminded of that phrase whenever I visit an organ shop. Each of the three shops I visited last week has a distinct personality, an aura that reflects the philosophy of its founder, whether living and active or gone for generations. Each building speaks of the passion behind this fascinating art, and each displays craftsmanship at its Old World finest combined with cutting-edge materials and equipment. My thanks to Charles Kegg, John-Paul Buzard, Eric Gastier, and Jeffrey Dexter for sharing their work with me. I am the richer for it, and I promise I won’t pick up any hitchhikers.

Why sell an organ?

Boston has long been a center for pipe organ building starting before 1810 with William Goodrich and Thomas Appleton and continuing with E. & G. G. Hook (later E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, and later still Hook & Hastings), George Stevens, George Hutchings, Ernest Skinner, Aeolian-Skinner, Andover, Fisk, Noack, and many others. I have calculated that in over two hundred years, Boston organ builders collectively produced around 9,000 instruments. Compare that to the single firm of M. P. Möller, Inc., which built roughly 13,500 organs in around 120 years. Many of those were simple stock models like the ubiquitous Artiste, which in some years were pushed out the door at the rate of more than one a day.

Starting in the early 1960s, several new companies were formed to help usher in the “tracker revival,” most notably Fisk and Noack. Among those lesser known today was Robert Roche, whose workshop was in Taunton, Massachusetts. Bob was of Portuguese heritage, well informed, and a very fast talker—it was hard to get a word in edgewise. Along with his activities building, rebuilding, and restoring organs, he ran a small-scale organ supply company, providing parts, tools, and supplies for pipe organ builders. In the late 1980s when I was starting the Bishop Organ Company, I drove to Taunton to pick up a load of something or other, and during the expected yak-fest, Bob gave me his best advice for a nascent independent organbuilder, “Never build an organ for a wealthy church. You’ll create your magnum opus, and they’ll swap it out in twenty years.” I remember thinking if I ever had a chance to build an instrument for a wealthy church, I would go ahead and take my chances, and as far as I know, Bob never had that opportunity.

Church of the Redeemer (Episcopal) in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, my mother’s home parish, is nestled in an affluent neighborhood a couple miles west of Boston. The original organ by Kimball, Smallman, & Frazee was installed in 1915 when the building was completed. Möller Opus 9475 was installed there in 1961, followed by Noack Opus 111 in 1989. Schoenstein Opus 172 replaced the Noack in 2018, the third organ I have known personally in the same church, and the third organ there in less than thirty years. My first organ teacher, Alastair Cassels-Brown, was organist at Redeemer in the 1980s, and I maintained the Möller for him. My college pal Gregg Romatowski was organist there when the Noack was acquired. Sadly, Gregg died of AIDS shortly thereafter.

My dear friend Michael Murray, who shared organist duties at my wedding to Wendy with his husband Stuart Forster, had a productive tenure at Redeemer during which the Schoenstein organ was commissioned, twelve years after Schoenstein Opus 149 was installed at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Stuart was organist. The Organ Clearing House removed the Noack and returned it to the Noack shop in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where it was renovated and enhanced for Saint Paul’s Chapel on lower Broadway in New York City, part of the fabled congregation of Trinity Church, Wall Street. We installed the organ at Saint Paul’s, and later helped install the Schoenstein at Redeemer.

Our wedding was at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine, home of Hutchings Opus 182 (1888) and the first church building designed by the brilliant ecclesiastical architect Henry Vaughan. Vaughan wanted the ceiling painted with frescoes, but funds were not available, so he did it himself, lying on his back on scaffolding. (Henry Vaughan also designed Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill.) Stephen White, a former student of my father who taught homiletics at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was rector of Saint Andrew’s at the time of our wedding. He and dad celebrated the wedding together. Stephen was the former rector at Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill.

Did you get all of that? It is hard to imagine that I could have so many connections with one church except to add that I accompanied a local choral society in a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor on the Noack organ at Redeemer a few days after September 11, 2001.

Of course, there have been hundreds of other churches in my life. Even as adults, my kids still joke that when driving, I navigate by steeples. 

What were they thinking?

From my seat in the Organ Clearing House, the concept of changing organs is always on my mind. Several times a week, I hear from a church wishing to buy or sell an instrument, and I am usually corresponding about ten organs at any given time. It has been especially intense in the last few weeks as we placed an instrument built by Mander Organ Builders in 1991 for Christ Episcopal Church, Pittsford, New York, on the market. It has two manuals and twenty-five stops and an especially beautiful case with brilliant proportions, rich carvings, and polished tin façade pipes with gilded mouths. The organ glows in the dark.

When I published the organ’s availability on our website and posted a link on Facebook, several serious potential purchasers responded quickly, as did the all-knowing community of organ watchers who lurk there. “What church would sell an organ like that?” “A praise band must be next.” 

The Mander organ replaced a Wicks built in 1947 that had been “improved” several times by technicians whose intent exceeded their abilities. The new organ, standing prominently on the church’s long axis, brought brilliance and clarity of tone to the room for the first time. The Mander was fifteen years old when the rector encouraged the enhancement of the music program. The music director’s position was expanded to full-time with a mandate to expand the choir program, bringing a new level of excellence and depth to the music of worship. The growing choir, which had been seated in the rear of the church with the Mander, returned to seats in the chancel. Organist David Baskeyfield brought in a Hauptwerk instrument to accompany the choir and lead music from the chancel, and an organ committee is working on plans for the acquisition of a new pipe organ to be placed around and behind the chancel, especially designed for sophisticated choral accompaniment.

All this reflects the church’s thoughtful and constructive commitment to excellence in music, not irresponsibility for the Mander organ. As I write this, I am corresponding with several potential purchasers where the organ would be placed in superior acoustics and appreciated for its many strengths. It is a thrill to watch a church’s music program grow quickly enough to outgrow a brilliant thirty-year-old organ. I commend the church for bringing two fine organs into existence, and I am grateful for the lively chat online about this superb instrument.

Better get it out of there. . . .

In 2002, I was asked to sell an organ built by Hellmuth Wolff in 1976 with two manuals and seventeen stops. Hellmuth was upset that the church was rejecting his organ and asked me to convince them to keep it, but the church’s new organist was eager to have a large four-manual digital instrument and had no interest in retaining the Wolff organ. When I learned that the organist’s domestic partner was the senior warden of the church, I was pretty sure we were not going to stop it, and when that organist suggested that some of the pipes from the Wolff might be retained to enhance the digital instrument, I told Hellmuth that we had better get that organ out of there before something bad happened to it.

The organ was purchased by Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church in Durham, North Carolina, which already owned a one-manual organ by John Brombaugh. In 2003 we moved the Brombaugh to the front of the church and installed the Wolff organ in the balcony. The church brought Hellmuth to Durham for the dedication of the organ, a happy moment for him after so much frustration and disappointment.

Hellmuth Wolff was born in 1937 in Switzerland, apprenticed with Metzler, and then worked for Rieger and Fisk. He moved to Canada in 1963 to work as a designer in the new mechanical-action department at Casavant alongside Karl Wilhelm. In 1964, he and Karl installed a forty-six-rank Casavant, Opus 2791, at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The Organ Clearing House subsequently sold that organ to Saint Theresa Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was relocated by Messrs. Czeluzniak et Dugal in 2005. Juget-Sinclair Opus 4 with two manuals and forty-five ranks was installed at Saint Andrew’s in 2006. Organ Clearing House president Amory Atkins and his wife Virginia Childs were married at Saint Andrew’s in 1991. Hellmuth and Karl both established successful independent firms in Québec. Hellmuth passed away in 2013.

Miles and piles . . .

Nativity Catholic Church in Timonium, Maryland, was home to a twelve-rank Schlicker organ built in 1986. We sold the organ to All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Kapa’a, Hawaii, in 2015. The reason the organ was offered for sale was obvious the instant I entered the building, as predicted by one of the errant Mander commentators. There was an elaborate rock-and-roll setup adjacent to the organ console, with miles and piles of wire coiled and snaking about, woven between microphone stands, mixers, drums, and stools. We found handfuls of guitar picks and used nine-volt batteries instead of the usual pencils under the pedalboard. We sent the organ to Rosales Organ Builders in Los Angeles. They renovated and expanded the organ and installed it at All Saints’ in 2020. Adam Pajan played the dedicatory recitals. Shane Morris Wise is the organist at All Saints’.

If the shoe fits . . .

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, California, was home to a forty-four-rank Schlicker organ with three manuals built in 1963. In 2008, the organ was ready for renovation, and the people of Saint Mark’s chose to offer it for sale so they could acquire a more “Anglican” instrument. First Lutheran Church of Montclair, New Jersey, purchased the organ in 2010. It was renovated and relocated by the Organ Clearing House, and installation was completed in 2015. Pastor Will Moser of First Lutheran Church, now retired, is also an organist. He had grown up in the thrall of Schlicker organs, considering them to be the quintessential Lutheran instrument.

Saint Mark’s Church in Glendale acquired Skinner Organ Company Opus 774, built in 1930 with three manuals and thirty ranks. It was restored and installed by Foley-Baker, Inc., in 2009. With two expressive divisions, three pairs of celestes, and three colorful orchestral reeds, that organ is ideally suited for the Anglican liturgy and the accompaniment of Anglican choral music and chants. Two radically different organs were exchanged to provide their congregations with instruments especially well suited for their individual musical traditions.

§

I have written about organs being sold because styles and opinions change, or because an active church outgrows an instrument, but of course the most common reason for the sale of pipe organs is the closing or merging of churches. When a congregation dwindles and its resources are stretched too thin for feasible operation and starts planning for the sale of their building, they should also begin planning for the future of their organ. Conversely, real estate developers often contact me about selling an organ in a building they have purchased when there is a month or less before they start demolition.

When selling a pipe organ, a year is like a lightning strike. When a church is considering acquiring an organ, there is typically a long committee process. A group travels to audition an available organ and organbuilders inspect it and provide proposals for renovation and relocation, which are presented to the congregation. Organ committees, music committees, finance committees, and parish councils or vestries discuss the proposals. Sometimes fundraising does not start until that entire process is complete. The organ that was offered for sale a month before demolition has long been reduced to rubble.

A church that is considering closing should start working on the sale of an organ as soon as feasible. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is better than watching an organ go down. When there is time to work with, an organ can command a higher price—its cash value plummets as time runs out. This also applies to the church that has commissioned a new instrument and faces a deadline for the removal of an organ. The worst case in that situation is for a church to have to pay to scrap an organ that has run out time. If your church has decided to replace its organ, get the old one on the market right away, even before the new contract is signed.

Another option to remember when selling a church building is the possibility of retaining ownership of an organ in a sales agreement. If the building sells before the organ, the buyer might agree to allow for the removal of the organ six months, a year, or more after the building changes hands. We once removed a large organ from a church building that had been sold over a year earlier. The original congregation still owned the organ, and the new one was contractually obligated to allow for its removal, but they were not pleased with the impending disruption, and there were some contentious issues to work out. When we offered the use of our scaffolding for the installation of planned new lighting, all the squabbling ended.

The cash value of a vintage pipe organ is determined largely by circumstances and by the market. Any church considering the acquisition of a vintage instrument will be facing significant expense for renovating and relocating the instrument. When a seller insists that the asking price should be comparable to new, I simply remind them that the cost of a new organ includes transportation and installation and assumes that the organ is in mint condition. You have to subtract the cost of relocation, installation, and any necessary renovation to determine a reasonable asking price.

There is a finite amount of money spent on pipe organ projects in the United States every year, and I have adopted the attitude that I need to do all I can to be sure that those precious resources are spent on wonderful instruments. If a church owns a simple organ in poor condition and wants to keep using it, I am ready to encourage them to spend money on repairs, but if there is no hope of a project resulting in a credibly useful organ, I do not see the point. There is such a thing as an organ without any artistic merit. I try to encourage churches looking to purchase an organ to consider those of highest quality first. I am not comfortable advocating a mediocre organ when excellent instruments are available at similar cost. That guides my decisions regarding accepting new listings. There are always many times more organs available than we will ever be able to place, so let us concentrate on the best.

It is immensely satisfying to place a fine organ in a new home once its time has run out somewhere else. New organs are typically planned carefully for the spaces they will inhabit, but it is remarkable how often an instrument adapts beautifully to a new home with minimal changes. We’ll never be able to save them all, but it’s fun to try.

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!

§

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.

I remember when . . .

Leading up to Christmas of 2019, I decided to stop maintaining organs so I could concentrate more on the administration of the Organ Clearing House, especially the management of organ sales. I met with several colleagues asking if they would be able to take on more maintenance customers, and I wrote to my clients recommending those technicians for the care of the organs I thought they would be best suited for.

As the winter started winding down in early 2020, I was looking forward to missing the first holiday tuning season since I was a teenager, only to find that leading up to Easter of 2020, no one was tuning organs. Like pretty much everything else in our world, the whole business shut down as covid spread virulently around the world. 

No one has pronounced that the pandemic is over, and we are still hearing about spooky outbreaks, especially in big cities. But with a few reservations, life seems to have returned to something like normal. This past March, the organ tuners were out and about like never before, documenting each lapsed thermostat, each shallot-encased moth carcass, and each insistent vacuum cleaner on social media. I especially enjoy the posts of Richard Pelland, the prolific organ technician based in New Hampshire, who at my recommendation took on many of my former maintenance clients. His habit of posting videos of his assistant playing freshly tuned organs brings back memories of my mad dashes around the countryside, of the many lovely organs (and a few not so lovely), and of the satisfaction of completing a good tuning.

Would the average parishioner identify that great tuning as integral to the celebrations during Holy Week and Easter? Not likely. But they would go home after church with a tune in their head, and I always knew I was part of that. I believe that a well-tuned organ brings a smile or a raised eyebrow that sour notes cannot.

The body of Christ

Carolyn Manning of the Red River Organ Company in Norman, Oklahoma, posted a photo taken during an Easter tuning from high in the rear of the lofty sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of Corpus Christi, Texas. The longest resonators of the Trompette-en-Chamade were visible in Carolyn’s photo, as was the console I helped build around 1986. I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and we rebuilt and expanded the four-manual Reuter organ there. Dan Angerstein, a terrific voicer, was in the thrall of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and Lawrence, Kansas, became something close to Paris on Shoreline Boulevard in Corpus Christi, across the street from the Gulf of Mexico.

We did our best to reconstruct the classic shape of Cavaillé-Coll’s grand consoles. My shopmate, pal, and wicked wag Jack Carr built the cabinet, and I built the curved and terraced stop jambs and the four keyboards. I do not remember the exact dates, but I sure remember that the installation trip was in the heart of summer, a big deal for this life-long northerner. The church’s vacation bible school was going on while we were there, and I have a hilarious memory of the church’s organist, wearing a “coat of many colors,” having been put in charge of a live camel. This had not been his first choice, and he was not mincing words.

A local electrician was on the job with us, ostensibly helping identify the many cables running from the two organ chambers in the front of the church to the Antiphonal organ and the Trompette-en-Chamade. He was using live current to “ring out” the different cables. It turned out that there were speaker wires from the PA system in the same conduit that looked just like organ cables, and when he touched those with his hot wire, we heard such a sound. I am pretty sure that was the end of those speakers. The big reed had been given in memory of a young parishioner who was killed in Vietnam. The drawknob is engraved “Trompette Boyd.”

Our flight from Boston to Houston at the beginning of that installation was my first trip in first class. My coach seat had been double-booked with a guy who was refusing to move. I was rewarded for my ambivalence, and I took full advantage of the perks of first class even though it was a morning flight.

It was fun to see Carolyn’s post, reminding me of that job from so long ago. It’s nice to know that the organ is still being used and cared for.

§

I do not have a tally of how many organs I have maintained, but I know it is in the hundreds. My tuning career started in Oberlin, Ohio, when I was working for John Leek. John was the organ and harpsichord technician for Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music and had a healthy side business of maintaining instruments in that general area. I worked with John part time and summers while I was student and shifted to full time after I graduated. During my junior year, John left the school to concentrate on his business. Altogether, I worked with John for about seven years, during which time we built several new harpsichords and two organs together. We renovated and releathered a small fleet of organs and went on hundreds of service calls together. We took care of organs in big city churches and in tiny hamlets far out in farm country. We covered an area from Toledo and Cincinnati to the west, to Erie and Pittsburgh to the east.

The biggest trip I took with John was to deliver a harpsichord we built for a woman in Oakland, California—she had been a student at Oberlin and admired John’s instruments. It was the summer after I graduated, and John proposed the trip to me saying it would take two weeks. I would not get paid (I suppose he was not getting paid either), but we would stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants. We would gamble in Reno, see the Golden Gate Bridge, and swim in the Pacific Ocean. Of course I’d go.

We loaded his butterscotch-colored Dodge van and headed west. It is about 2,500 miles from Oberlin to Oakland, and we drove 500 or 600 miles each day. We marveled at the open spaces, hunkered down under bridges to sit out thunderstorms, and drove all day from Salt Lake City with the mountains of Nevada dead ahead that never seemed to get closer until we reached them. When we stopped for gas after crossing into Nevada, I put a dime in a slot machine, received a little cascade in return, and was all ready for Reno. We stayed overnight in Elko, Nevada, and ate dinner in a Basque restaurant recommended by Oberlin voice professor Howard Hatton. And we got creamed in Reno. My meager cash supply disappeared, and John played a few hands of blackjack—it was remarkable how often the dealer got twenty-one.

Arriving in Oakland, we carried the harpsichord into the house, and unpacked and set it up. John tuned it and fiddled with the voicing. We went outside for a cigarette and were admonished by the client’s physician husband about the dangers of smoking. The next evening, he brought home a cancerous lung in a jar for our viewing pleasure.¹ That jaunt with John was the first of many cross-country trips I have made carting about instruments.

One summer, John and his wife Maria wanted to add a large screened porch to their house, and he flung the resources of his company at the job. He made a nice drawing of a post-and-beam structure, and off we went. There would be a lofty pitched ceiling, stained and varnished plywood wainscoting, and a floor of wide pine planks. We cut mortises and tenons on the machines in the workshop and assembled the frame and shingled the roof. We made screened frames to fill the window openings, and we painted everything. Painting the floor, I had my back to John, but heard a big increase in his industry. I turned to find him rushing to paint me into a corner.

John Leek passed away in the fall of 2019, and I drove to Oberlin for his funeral. It was wonderful to see Maria and their children Paula, James, and Peter. A week later, Maria wrote me a note thanking me for coming, which inspired another flood of nostalgia—her handwriting had been on my paychecks for seven years.

§

Dan Angerstein had a large stable of service clients, and when he closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I assumed most of those accounts—that was the foundation of the Bishop Organ Company located in North Reading and then Wakefield, Massachusetts. When I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, I continued the care of most of those organs as the BOC morphed into the OCH. By the time I stopped doing service work in early 2020, there were still seven organs I had been caring for since 1984—thirty-five years. There were six instruments built in the late 1980s whose care I assumed when they were new. I was the only technician to work on them for the first thirty-plus years.

Shortly after I started the Bishop Organ Company, I became curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ (four manuals, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church) in Boston, and of the double Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church on Copley Square. Jason McKown had cared for the Mother Church organ since its installation in 1952 and had worked for Trinity for over fifty years. He was in his mid-eighties when I met him, and he introduced me to many of his clients as he was finally ready to retire. Jason’s tenure at the Mother Church was extended so he would overlap with me for six months to show me the ropes of caring for such a large organ. We tuned there every Wednesday, and Jason’s countless stories were an important part of my education.

As a young man, Jason had worked personally with Ernest Skinner installing his Opus 692 at the West Medford Congregational Church in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1928 and had maintained it ever since. I worked there until 2009 when the church closed and the building was sold.2 Between us, Jason and I maintained that organ for eighty-one years.

Less is more.

When I mention Skinner Organ Company Opus 692 (1928) in West Medford, Massachusetts, I remember the pristine interior of the instrument. It was still playing on its original leather and had never been altered. This reminds me of another Skinner organ less than ten miles away that I have written about recently, Opus 459 (1924), which was sold through the Organ Clearing House to Galilee Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Both organs had been regularly maintained and well used, and neither show the familiar wear-and-tear damage of stretched tuning scrolls, out-of-round pipes, cotton balls left in mixture pipes, or spare wires looping about.

The only other century-old organs I have known in like-new condition are those in small remote churches that had never seen organ technicians. The organs might be full of spider webs and coal dust from obsolete heating systems, but the pipes and interior components could be straight from the factory. Ironically, organs that have never been maintained are the best candidates
for restoration.

I offer a challenge to all my colleague organ tuners and technicians. Leave each organ looking as though no one has been inside. Do not harm the organ in the interest of forcing it into tune. Do not leave little piles of your rubble. Do not leave obvious evidence of quick-and-dirty repairs. I know this is a tall order. I know that many churches are struggling financially and are unable to fund proper repairs. I am sure you will often have to take my admonition with a grain of salt, but I encourage you to respect the instruments you work on and the people who built them.

Those of you on social media, please keep sharing your experiences with the organs in your care. 

Retirement project

Retired organbuilder Gene Bedient has set about building a new two-manual tracker organ for his home and has documented the process intricately and intimately on Facebook. Starting with making open 8′ bass pipes from wood and progressing through building windchests, keyboards, actions, bench, and lately moving the completed base of the organ into the house with the help of neighbors, he has posted hundreds of photos with colorful descriptions of each step in the process. Every now and then, he posts a photo of the drawings so we have an idea of what the finished organ will look like. I recommend you follow Gene’s page and scroll through the last couple years of his documentation. This is a much more creative use of Facebook than photos of your cats or your savory breakfast.

Gene discusses the materials he is using, shows photos of complex gluing setups, and acknowledges the occasional need to “split the difference” to make something line up perfectly. His workshop is in the garage that adjoins the house, and while it is a tiny space and this is not the tiniest of residence organs, Gene’s photography provides a fascinating educational experience for anyone interested in how a pipe organ is built. I am eager to follow the continuation and culmination of this project.

As I write, I have been corresponding with Gene about his project, and he offers this statement about “Bedient Opus # Undecided”:

This home organ is for practice purposes and has only two stops—the lower manual, Principal 8, and the upper manual, Flute 4. Each manual couples to the Pedal. No manual to manual coupler. The lower manual is suspended action. The upper manual keyboard pivots in the center and pushes the top-of-grid pallets up to play, like the French Positif and Echo actions. It is the hope that two beautiful stops and two contrasting but light and responsive key actions will make the organ a pleasure to play.

Thank you, Gene, for sharing your exciting project so generously.

Notes

1. I stopped smoking two years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1981, when my first wife Pat was pregnant with our first child. Michael was born the following March into a smoke-free home.

2. I was in touch with the new owners of the building asking if they had plans for the organ. They replied that they did not plan to use it but did not want to remove anything original from the church building. I check in every now and again.

Walter Holtkamp and the American Classic

At the Organ Clearing House, we have been working on a Holtkamp organ these days, which has spurred me to remember the fleet of Holtkamps I have known and worked with. I spent my formative years working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, starting when I was a student and John was the school’s organ and harpsichord technician, and continuing after my graduation and after John left the school to form his own company. We built several harpsichords and one complete organ together, and we worked through countless service calls, releathering projects, major repairs, and organ relocations. John had apprenticed and started his career in Holland and immigrated to the United States to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr. (1895–1962). While working on Holtkamp organs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he learned that the school was looking for a full-time technician and felt that was the job for him.

John had an active organ maintenance business, and given the proximity to Cleveland, the home of the Holtkamp Organ Company, we worked on dozens of their instruments. Oberlin professor Garth Peacock was organist at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River, Ohio, a 1950s brick building known affectionately (or otherwise) as “The Blue Whale,” where after several unheated service calls for the three-manual Holtkamp, we arrived for a tuning to find the sexton chortling, “I’ve got it good and hot in there for you this time!” Jack Russell was the organ teacher at Wooster College, where the big Holtkamp in the chapel was housed in a cinderblock corral. And David Dunkel, who graduated from Oberlin a few years before me, was organist at Saint Philomena’s Church in East Cleveland where Holtkamp had built an organ with an exposed Rückpositiv in 1936, touted as one of the first Rückpositivs in the United States.

I have written often and recently about the three-manual Holtkamp (1956) in Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Divinity School, formerly the Episcopal Theological School (now defunct) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my father taught homiletics, and where I had my first organ lessons in 1968. Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, was organist of the seminary and a strong advocate of Holtkamp organs. Charles Fisk was an apprentice in the Holtkamp shop, E. Power Biggs was a neighbor of the seminary, and the innovative design of that organ must have attracted a lot of attention.

Recently, the Organ Clearing House was involved in the sale of the fifty-four rank Holtkamp at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, Ohio, my father’s home church, where Gerre Hancock began his illustrious career. My father had two LPs of Boar’s Head festivals at Christ Church as led by “Uncle Gerre,” which included some of the earliest great organ playing and improvisation I ever heard. (Dad also had a Musical Heritage Society recording of vespers at Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City with McNeil Robinson improvising on the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ.)

I pulled out my well-worn copy of Orpha Osche’s seminal book, The History of the Organ in the United States, to review her piece about Walter Holtkamp, and found some great insights into his work in his own words and those of his competitors. Walter Holtkamp believed in simple console design, so the ubiquitous Holtkamp console has a table on which the keyboards sit with a simple box above them to house the stop-rail and music rack. Anyone familiar with Holtkamp organs will recognize that little row of six coupler tablets in the center of the stop rail, the basic unison couplers for a three-manual organ. Holtkamp wrote,

There now seems to be a genuine desire on the part of serious musicians to reduce the number of console appliances and spend this money on the inside of the organ. This matter of simplifying consoles directly concerns the couplers. We have far too many couplers. If fewer couplers were used the present confusion in coupler arrangements would never have arisen.¹

Was he implying that musicians who use couplers are not serious? Of course, there are differing points of view. The style of playing developed and advocated by such geniuses as Lynwood Farnam depended heavily on super- and sub-coupling. But Farnam was no showcasing fool. The spectacular console he designed for the 1917 Casavant organ at Boston’s Emmanuel Church included such beauties as “Swell Octave Couplers to Cut Off Swell 2′ Stops.”

Look at the stoplist of most any Holtkamp organ, and you will see lots of fractions and Roman numerals—those voices that speak at intervals and have particularly high pitches. Tasteful use of those stops precludes the use of super couplers. Any organ tuner will tell you to avoid coupling mixtures up and down octaves and to couple mixtures between keyboards only with care. If the Positiv and Great are not in tune with each other, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by coupling the two together.

Thirty years ago, I knew a tuner who had worked for Aeolian-Skinner who regularly changed the pistons on organs he tuned, taking super-couplers, tremulants, and redundant mixtures out of the combinations, muttering to himself. And several Möller organs I have known had electro-pneumatic cutout switches that would not allow a Celeste and a Mixture to play together, or a Mixture and a super-coupler. Another trick was that a Mixture would not play unless you drew an 8′ Principal.

Upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber

Holtkamp believed that a listener/viewer should be able to discern the content of an organ by looking at it, and most of his organs left all of the unenclosed pipes out in the open. With just a little knowledge about the construction of organ pipes, one can construct a stoplist without seeing the console. And with only a few exceptions, Holtkamp organs had only one enclosed division. Holtkamp wrote, “The Swell is the only division under the influence of the shutters. The shutters are plainly visible, and the onlooker is not in doubt as to the function of the apparatus.”²

This visibility of interior components reflects the Bauhaus School of Architecture as practiced by Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, where “form follows function.” It reflects Holtkamp’s thought that an organ should be “honest.” The highly regarded Holtkamp organ in Crouse Hall at the University of Syracuse is a stunning example of this philosophy. What you see is what you get.

Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music houses a modest three-manual Holtkamp organ built in 1972, the work of Walter’s son, “Chick” Holtkamp. A colleague asked me to listen for balance at a rehearsal where she was playing the organ in a large piece for chorus and orchestra. My first suggestion was to stop beating time with the Swell pedal. The shutters were up there flapping “in front of God and everyone.”

The focus on exposed pipes was a factor of sound as well as appearance. Holtkamp was rebelling against the practice common in early and mid-twentieth-century organs of placing pipes in remote chambers. He wrote, “With the present conditions of organ placement, the organist is in the unfortunate position of the man who must woo his lady by correspondence.”³

In my long experience tuning organs, I know a significant disadvantage of organs with many exposed pipes—they are dirty. An organ case or chamber limits the number of airborne particles, protecting the pipes from accumulating excessive dust. I maintain a Delaware organ with many exposed pipes, located in a church on a busy street corner in Manhattan. There is so much dirt and debris in the pipes that Mixtures and other upperwork cannot be tuned.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

Walter Holtkamp and G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner were contemporaries, and both were interested in exploring the sounds of classic organs, together contributing to the development of what we now call the “American Classic” tradition. However, Harrison believed in the complex consoles that Holtkamp denounced and regularly installed organs in chambers, a practice that Holtkamp abhorred.

Harrison’s organs reflected his English heritage. The Swell division typically contained a Principal chorus and multiple reed stops, equipping the instruments for extraordinary expressive capabilities, especially valued for choral accompanying. The Swell divisions in Holtkamp organs were less important and less developed than the Great or Positiv divisions and usually included only small reeds such as Schalmei, Bassoon, or the fractional-length Dulzian.

Harrison’s organs used Ernest Skinner’s pitman windchests exclusively. Holtkamp’s extremist philosophy married him to slider chests, the traditional form developed in Europe in the earliest centuries of organ building. We are familiar with the mantra that the classic slider chest with key channels creates superior blend of choruses of voices because all the pipes of a single note from each stop in a division are arranged over a common key channel. In other words, middle C of every stop on the Great is above the middle C key channel. The stops that are speaking are those whose sliders are open, and the air from the open pallet is common to all those middle C pipes.

Walter Holtkamp cheated. While most of his organs have slider stop action, at least on the Great, those chests do not have key channels, but are large open vessels with internal key action similar to that of an Austin organ, with a single round valve under every pipe. That valve action is complex and tricky enough to adjust that it is hard to tell why Holtkamp used them, especially when he was sacrificing the advantages of key channels.

Walter Holtkamp, Sr., was a transitional figure in the history of the twentieth century American pipe organ. His company was founded by George Votteler in Cleveland in 1855. Hermann Holtkamp of Saint Marys, Ohio, joined Votteler in 1903, and the firm was later known as Votteler-Holtkamp-Sparling. Hermann’s son Walter took control of the company in 1931.

By following the evolution of stoplists year by year, it is easy to see how the organs of G. Donald Harrison and Walter Holtkamp developed on different paths. Into the 1950s, while Harrison was producing stately masterpieces such as found at Saint Mary the Virgin and Saint Thomas in New York, Holtkamp’s instruments were more edgy and experimental. Like Charles Fisk a decade later, Holtkamp had a large following of admirers, devotees, and advocates. His organs were installed in many prestigious schools of music, including Oberlin, University of California at Berkeley, Trinity College, Yale University, and General Theological Seminary in New York.

Another set of recordings in my father’s collection featured Princeton University organist Carl Weinrich playing Bach on the Holtkamp at General Theological Seminary, a statement from the 1950s version of progressive musicians. This was exactly concurrent with E. Power Biggs’s introduction of the Flentrop organ in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and his wildly popular series of recordings, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites.

Ironically, an example of Holtkamp’s popularity as a progressive organbuilder resulted in the commissioning of a Schantz organ. In the 1950s, Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, was planning for a new organ for the Bryan Recital Hall in the Moore Music Center. They hoped to have an organ by Holtkamp, but the state required that they solicit three bids and take the lowest. The result was a Schantz organ designed by Walter Holtkamp. You can read about that organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=19242.4.

In 1979, John Leek was engaged to move all the organs owned by Bowling Green State University into their new music building. I had graduated from Oberlin in 1978 and was working with John full time. To spruce up the Schantz organ with its thousands of exposed pipes, we took all the pipes over five feet tall to the workshop where we sprayed them with fresh coats of nickel-gray paint. We loaded the pipes into a U-Haul truck, packing them with appropriate care, and took our usual ten-in-the-morning coffee break. I started off to Bowling Green in the truck, leaving John to make a few phone calls. He would follow me ten minutes later.

As he told it, he drove around a corner on Route 20 heading toward Wakefield, Ohio, and saw a U-Haul truck off the road on its side. A pickup truck had run a stop sign and crossed the highway in front of me. The truck was lying on its left side, with a utility pole where the windshield had been. I was lying in the grass when I came to. It was raining. I still have no idea how I got up and out of the cab through the passenger side door. EMTs were working on me. I had a nasty wound on my scalp. This was six weeks before my wedding. I was put on a stretcher. The woman at my head tugged on the stretcher and said, “Jesus Christ, is he heavy.”

John Leek gave the tow-truck driver a fist-full of money and had him deliver the righted truck to the workshop, where he found that our packing was good enough that there was almost no damage to the organ pipes. Months later, happily married, but still badly bothered by my wound, I was doing a service call on a Möller organ in Sandusky, Ohio. I had removed the pedalboard and was fixing something “down there.” I stood up, cracked my head on the corner of the keyboard table, and a piece of windshield glass came out. I still have a lump there.

Some damn fool . . .

In 1922, Ernest Skinner built a landmark organ in the auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1933, Walter Holtkamp added a nine-rank Rückpositiv division to it. I imagine the addition must have stood out from the lush strains of the Skinner, but it was considered revolutionary. Sadly, by that time, Ernest Skinner’s philosophies had run out of fashion, and he was no longer sought after to speak at organists’ conventions. In a letter dated February 20, 1976, Robert Baker, the founding director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music wrote,

. . . at the Boston Convention in the 1930s, Mr. Skinner found himself standing alone and both hurt and bewildered in the lobby of the Copley Plaza. Walter Holtkamp, who told me this story, saw him standing there, and said to himself, ‘Now this is a perfect shame!! There stands one of the greatest figures in the art of organ-building, and all those sissies are afraid to go up to speak to him, for fear they might lose face amongst their peers!’ So Walter sauntered over, saying ‘Mr. Skinner, I am Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland, and I just want to thank you for all you have meant and done for the art of organ-building through your splendid career.’ Mr. Skinner, by that time a bit hard of hearing, and a bit slower on the uptake by then, got only one thing out of this, and that was the word ‘Cleveland.’ So he responded, ‘Cleveland! Say, you know, I have one of my best organs out there in the Art Museum, and some damn fool has come along and just ruined it.’ ⁵

Notes

1. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States, Indiana University Press, 1975, page 386.

2. Ochse, page 388.

3. Ochse, page 388.

4. For those who are not aware, most of the organs I mention in this column­—in fact most of the organs in the United States—are documented in the Pipe Organ Database of the Organ Historical Society. If you would like to know more, open https://pipeorgandatabase.org/Organs.SearchForm-Quick.php in your browser, and fill in the form.

5. Dorothy Holden, The Life and Work of Ernest Skinner, Organ Historical Society, 1987, page 179.