In the Wind: Remembering Brian E. Jones and other thoughts

John Bishop

Teachers

Elizabeth Swist was my first piano teacher. I was six years old. She lived with her mother, and their house smelled like boiled cabbages. It was about a mile walk—I know that for sure because I have driven the route watching my odometer a couple times. My lessons included the Hanon piano method and little novelty pieces that I played as loud and fast as I could; spinning wheels were a common theme in the music. My mother likes to tell how I came home from my first lesson, ran to our piano, played middle C and shouted, “I knew it. Middle C on Miss Swist’s (say it three times fast) piano is higher than ours.” Mother says she complained to the tuner, “I just paid $25,” but the tuner said I was right. It was an old second-hand upright, and he had not been able to bring it up to pitch. She tells that story every chance she gets; some of it might be true.

Miss Swist got married and moved into a house a little closer to ours that did not smell like cabbages. Mrs. Holderied, née Swist, helped me out of the beginner’s novelties into real music like Bach minuets and Clementi sonatas.

We moved from Westwood, Massachusetts, to nearby Winchester when I was ten, and I took up lessons with Edith Bolster, an elderly woman who lived in an apartment with two pianos. I do not remember meeting her partner, but I got an occasional glimpse of her lurking about. Ms. Bolster introduced me to Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the expressive qualities of the piano, and she encouraged me to play in recitals arranged by the various local piano teachers.

I was twelve when I had my first organ lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown at Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (later Episcopal Divinity School, now defunct) outside Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was the professor of homiletics there. The organ was built by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., in 1956, with three manuals including one of the earliest Rückpositiv divisions in the United States. I often rode my bike the eight miles over busy commuting roads through Somerville and Cambridge to get to my lessons. Dr. Cassels-Brown had been associate organist at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City during Alec Wyton’s tenure there. He seemed worldly to me and shared insights into the structure of music beyond stringing series of notes together.

I was a middle-schooler when Dr. Cassels-Brown showed me the Fibonacci series, how that sequence of numbers fit into the natural world and governed some of the flowing beauty of music. He also taught me to compare the characteristics of music of a given era between different nationalities—for example, eighteenth-century France and Germany—and how the different styles of composition reflected different types of organ building. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and I guess he was a thoughtful, conservative player. Sometimes, he asked me to sit with him during special services, turning pages and witnessing what went into structuring a worship service from an organ console.

After a couple years, Dr. Cassels-Brown recommended I shift to studying with John Skelton, organist of the First Congregational Church in Winchester, just a couple blocks from where we lived. The church had a brand-new, three-manual Fisk organ, and I was fortunate to have generous practice privileges there. Mr. Skelton had studied with Yuko Hayashi at the New England Conservatory and with Anton Heiller in Vienna, and was well connected with the exciting organ scene in Boston in the early 1970s. There were several young “boutique” organ companies in the area rejuvenating the concept of the mechanical-action pipe organ, and John made sure I got to hear recitals and attend workshop open houses, drawing me into that crowd as a young teenager. I remember an after-concert dinner at the Wursthaus (a long-gone favorite haunt of organists in Harvard Square) after an organ recital, at which someone pointed out that there were nine organists present who played for churches that had Fisk organs.

John Skelton understood and nourished my fascination with pipe organ tone, discussing the functions and construction of the various stops and allowing me to register the pieces I was learning. I loved listening to the organ’s voices as I chose them.

The harpsichord builder Carl Fudge was organist of my home church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where my father was rector. He led the junior choir, which was where I was first exposed to church music, and as my voice changed, I moved to the senior choir. Carl was supportive of my early studies and took me to organ recitals. I am especially grateful that I heard E. Power Biggs play on the Flentrop organ at the “Museum Formerly Known as Busch-Reisinger.” What a thrill it was to hear him play Charles Ives’s Variations on “America” as an encore following a recital of Baroque music.

Organbuilder George Bozeman was another mentor during my teenage years. His wife Pat sang in the choir at Epiphany, and together they took me around the circuit to concerts, workshops (George worked for the Noack Organ Company at the time), and social events. I worked in George’s new shop, Bozeman-Gibson & Company, during the summers of 1975 and 1976, after my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, my first real experiences as a newbie organbuilder.

Burton Cowgill was the music director at Winchester High School where I was put to work accompanying everything and everybody. I bet a lot of readers grew up as workhorse accompanists. As chorus director, Mr. Cowgill led us through a huge amount of sacred music, something that would likely get him in trouble today. The greatest hits of Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Gabrieli, among others, helped further my interest in that rich repertory. I accompanied rehearsals of the Madrigal Singers and hundreds of hours with productions of musicals (Oklahoma and Little Mary Sunshine). Mr. Cowgill encouraged me out from behind the piano, out of my comfort zone, to sing solos in a cappella pieces (“Fare thee well, my dear, I must be gone, and leave thee for a while. . . .”).

Twenty years later, I was privileged to lead the music for Mr. Cowgill’s memorial service at the church where he had been director of music. The church’s choir was augmented by a couple dozen of his former students, including several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we offered some of the classics he had taught us (“I got a robe up in-a the Kingdom, ain’a that Good News”).

Leaving the nest

I started at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1974 with Haskell Thomson as my organ teacher. I had been a big fish in the little pond that was Winchester, Massachusetts, and quickly learned that I was not going to be such a big guy in Lake Oberlin. Mr. Thomson was a very tall man, impressive in the confines of the teaching studio. He did a lumbering dance, swinging his arms with the arc of the musical phrase, chanting, “and then to here, and then to there, and turn around and go to here.” He wanted the music to sweep purposefully to points of arrival, and he loved the motion of music. I especially remember learning Bach’s Fugue in E-flat, BWV 522ii (“Saint Anne”), for my senior recital, making those soaring passages of sixteenth notes in measure 100 fly with the encouragement of Mr. Thomson’s swooping about the studio.

Oberlin’s semester system leaves the month of January open for independent study, still known as “winter term projects.” Mr. Thomson organized a beauty for a group of us, a month of intensive eurythmics with the Dalcroze disciple, Inda Howland. She was elderly, and she had retired from regular teaching at Oberlin but came back for this special month. She wore long, colorful scarves and beads and carried a little drum so there was always a beat. We bounced and tossed balls and pranced about at her direction, and that month’s workshop gave me more insight into the motion and direction of music than any other period in my education. Twenty years later, I engaged a eurythmics instructor to work with the choir I was leading at our season-opening retreat on Cape Cod.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I started working with John Leek, the school’s organ and harpsichord technician. In addition to his work at the school, John had a growing business maintaining organs in the area, and I went off with him three days a week for the rest of my Oberlin career. This did not please Mr. Thomson, because it cut deeply into my practice and study time on campus, but John was teaching me to tune and how the actions worked in a wide variety of organs. I knew I wanted to spend a large part of my life working as an organbuilder, and this was my start.

I have written often about working with John and about John as a teacher. He was an old-world craftsman who had apprenticed in the Netherlands in a cabinet shop as a child and with an organbuilder as a teenager and married the daughter of the shop foreman. He had come to the United States in the 1960s to work for Walter Holtkamp and saw the job posting for Oberlin’s organ technician when working on campus for Holtkamp. We had tons of fun and countless adventures together, and by the time I left his shop, I had a foundation as a woodworker, a mechanical troubleshooter, and a tuner. I had participated in building three or four new harpsichords, two new mechanical-action pipe organs, and I knew how to releather regulators, pitman windchests, and countless other specialized pneumatic actions.

You’re in the big time now.

In the spring of my freshman year, I was hired as director of music at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, a large, multi-racial congregation at East Seventy-Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue with a four-manual Austin organ and a volunteer choir with a couple paid singers. I had several simple church jobs while I was in middle school and high school, but this was a big church in a big city, and the job came with some responsibilities beyond plodding through choir rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Roger Shoup was the pastor at Calvary, a big bear of a man who had been associate pastor there through the integration of the formerly all-white congregation. Roger was a devoted and prolific pipe smoker, and his vast collection of carefully seasoned pipes was on display in his office. When a well-meaning cleaning staff carried them all to the kitchen for washing in soap and water, Roger managed to keep his cool. (Keep away from my iron skillets.)

Roger was a great champion of my early ambition, making sure that there was money available to hire musicians (typically my pals from Oberlin) for special performances and for expanding the number of regular paid singers, again drawing from my classmates. He had the treasurer teach me how to create and manage a budget, counseled me on how to get along with the variety of personalities in that big rollicking diverse place, and let me know when my naiveté got in the way of my creativity. I count Roger among my most important teachers. He helped me grow up.

I have named eleven of my teachers, and I have skipped over dozens who had important roles in my education. Those eleven were all one-on-one teachers or mentors. Each had different methods of teaching and different ways of being. Some were quiet and encouraging, some were demanding, purposefully driving me to be better. They each gave me part of who I am as a musician, craftsman, consultant, and entrepreneur, and I am grateful to them all.

The art of the question

Charles Fisk (1925–1983) was one of the pioneering organbuilders active in the Boston area when I was a teenager, and there was so much excitement about the resurgence of tracker organs. In the early days of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the company worked in a long, low building that had been a rope walk for the fishing industry. The people who worked with Charlie in the 1970s and 1980s knew him as a Socratic teacher, the eponymous style of teaching by asking questions. He gave design problems to small groups of his employees and guided them to solutions with questions. Robert Cornell, who worked in the rope walk in those days, told me that Charlie would look at a solution and say, “That’s good. Is there another way to do it?” Over the years, I have talked with several people who worked closely with Charlie who remember fondly his unique and gentle approach to teaching. Encouraging his people to participate in design and problem solving was his way of ensuring that his company would outlast him. Bob Cornell supposed that was because Charlie knew his would not be a long life. He died of cancer in 1983.

On the bridge

I am thinking so much about teachers and teaching because recently a friend and I were privileged to witness a bit of Socratic teaching. This being our first summer without a sailboat, Wendy and I had promised each other we would look for a special experience on the water, and in early September, along with our old sailing friends Bill and Marlene, we went on a cruise in Alaska’s Inside Passage. We were on a small ship, about 250-feet long with only fifty cabins, operated in affiliation with National Geographic. There were fewer than 100 passengers and about seventy crew members including nine naturalists who guided hikes and Zodiac (small inflatable motorboats) excursions and gave evening talks about the geography, flora, and fauna of the area.

The captain had an “open bridge” policy, allowing passengers to visit the bridge without appointment unless there was complicated maneuvering going on. Bill and I spent a lot of time there, chatting with the captain and the chief mate, a young woman who had graduated from California Maritime Academy, a brilliant ship handler and authority figure, and on the last afternoon, approaching cocktail hour, Bill and I were on the bridge as the captain was teaching a young third mate how to drop anchor. “What are we doing?,” asked the captain. “Dropping anchor,” answered the mate. “What do we need?” “A place to drop the anchor.” The captain led the mate through establishing an anchor field on the chart plotter (the electronic chart on the sweeping dashboard), identifying an area a half-mile in diameter with a relatively flat, muddy bottom (it’s hard to anchor in rocks), far enough ahead that the ship could be slowed enough in time. We were traveling at 7-1⁄2 knots,¹ and the anchor field was five miles away.

The captain asked, “What should you do?” “Slow down.” “Right. Be sure you maintain just enough speed to steer when you’re ready to drop.” The mate eased back on the two three-inch throttle levers, and the engine RPM dropped from 1,100 to 890. Captain: “You have an anchor field, and you’re slowing down. What do you need now?” Mate: “Anchor watch” (the crew members whose job it is to operate the windlass that manages the heavy anchor chain). Captain: “Where are they?” Mate: “Off duty.” Captain raises an eyebrow. Mate says, “I’ll call the anchor watch.” Keys microphone, “Anchor watch to your bow station.”

The mate adjusted the throttle every few minutes, and the ship continued to slow to a little over one knot. As the ship’s image crept into the red circle on the chart that marked the anchor field, it slipped a little to starboard (to the right). Captain: “What do you see?” Mate: “We’re drifting to starboard.” Captain: “How do you respond?” Mate: “We’re in the middle of the anchor field, dropping anchor.” Captain does thumbs up with both hands.

Bill and I were surprised that the captain allowed us to stay on the bridge. I am sure he knew that we would be interested to watch the process, but I do not know if the mate had been prepared to receive his lesson with an audience. He sure was concentrating hard—it took more than a half hour for him to slow the ship enough to drop the anchor. The captain quipped that it was like watching paint dry.

Watching this, I tried to picture Charlie Fisk leaning on a drafting table, asking questions of his eager students. I thought of organ lessons when a question inspired a realization. And I imagined that third mate as a captain, twenty years hence, teaching his third mate how to drop an anchor in Sitka Bay, Alaska. As we traveled home the next day, Bill and I agreed that we had witnessed something special, a high point of our exotic trip. For some of us, how we get there is as interesting and thought provoking as being there.

Notes

1. A knot is a measure of speed, one nautical mile per hour. (It is not correct to say “knots per hour.”) A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, which equals 1,852 meters or about 6,000 feet.

John Bishop

“All the news that’s fit to print”

In 1897, Adolph Ochs, owner of The New York Times, created the slogan that still appears on the masthead of the newspaper. As I write, we are steaming toward the mid-December deadline for submissions for the February issue of The Diapason, nearing the end of the wildest of all news years. It has been a year during which it was important to print a lot of news that was barely fit to print, and I have had my nose, by way of touchscreen, in the NYT pretty much every morning. Along with the daily horrors of the Covid epidemic and political turmoil, I have been grateful to the NYT for keeping the true wonders of the world in our minds. On November 6, 2020, the NYT published an article by Patricia Morrisroe under the headline, “The Woman Who Built Beethoven’s Pianos.” Nannette Streicher was a hands-on craftswoman, an engineer, and a musician who helped transform the piano from its original delicate form as virtuoso techniques were developed, and her prominence in a male-dominated trade in a male-dominated society is a striking story. You can find the article at nytimes.com/2020/11/06/arts/music/beethoven-piano.html. 

Innovators: the chicken . . .

Pipe organ builders have always been innovators. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll and Ernest Skinner are two examples of builders whose mechanical and tonal innovations were so dramatic and wide-reaching that they inspired generations of musicians. Without Cavaillé-Coll, we would not have the music of Franck, Vierne, Widor, and Dupré, and countless of their contemporaries. Without Skinner, Lynnwood Farnam would have been limited to a few mechanical composition pedals, and his ingenious development of symphonic playing and orchestral transcriptions might never have happened.

. . . or the egg?

The piano was invented around 1720, and in its early years it was a gentle instrument, comparable in power to the harpsichord from which it evolved. Part of Mozart’s genius was to define the soul of the piano barely fifty years after its invention, exploiting the instrument’s fluid and expressive qualities. And fifty years after the invention of the piano, Beethoven was born. His progressive, even aggressive approach to the piano ushered in a new tradition of virtuosity, and the piano would never be the same. While organbuilders provided challenges and inspiration to musicians, it was composers and pianists who made demands of the instrument, challenging the builders to keep up.

Nannette Streicher (1769–1833) was the exact contemporary of Beethoven (1770–1827). Her father, Johann Andreas Stein, was a piano maker in Augsburg, Germany, and she took to the piano as a young girl. “At the age of eight, Nannette played in front of Mozart, who criticized her posture and grimacing, but admitted she had ‘genius.’ Two years later, she had mastered many of her father’s piano-building techniques, earning a reputation as a mechanical wunderkind.”¹

In an age when it was unusual for a woman to succeed professionally, Nannette Streicher was one of the most important figures in the development of piano making. After her father’s death in 1792, when she was twenty-three years old, she moved the company to Vienna where the musical action was. Her new husband Andreas assumed the role of managing the correspondence and finances of the business, and Nannette took her younger brother Matthäus as a partner, changing the name of the firm to Geschwister (siblings) Stein.² Nannette and her brother had a falling out and formed separate firms. While Matthäus claimed the family name for his nascent business, Nannette cleverly named her company Streicher neé Stein. Comparatively little was heard of Matthäus Stein after that.

Nannette had met Beethoven in Augsburg, and after she arrived in Vienna, they began a collegial relationship when Beethoven used her pianos for his concerts. After one concert, Beethoven commented to Andreas that the piano “was too good for him, because he wanted the freedom to ‘create his own tone.’ In a follow-up letter, he complained that the piano was still the least developed of all the instruments and that it sounded too much like a harp. Taking an obvious swipe at the composer, Andreas Streicher wrote an essay describing an unnamed pianist as a brutal murderer at the keyboard, ‘bent on revenge.’”² Ouch.

Beethoven’s comments must not have been lost on Nannette. She was not only a brilliant craftswoman, but a creative innovator as well. She added an octave and a half to the keyboard range of her father’s pianos, which illustrates her prowess with the scaling and tension of strings and the other minutia of piano engineering. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, pianists were taking their performances out of salons and performing in concert halls that sat hundreds of people. Her father had invented what became known as the “Viennese Action,” in which the hammer head pointed towards, rather than away from the player, allowing the advance of an escapement action (a sort of slingshot device that allows the hammer to fling toward the string). Nannette refined the action, changed the dimensions and thickness of the soundboards, and increased the heft of the instruments’ frame and case, working assiduously to create instruments that were up to the demands of advancing keyboard technique and the size of concert venues. Now when Beethoven wanted to summon up a roar, the piano could deliver it.

Meanwhile, another performer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849), introduced lightning-fast passages of octaves in both hands. Mere mortal keyboard players marvel at the spectacle and sonorities of modern artists playing on a modern piano as they thunder in octaves to the climax of a concerto by Saint-Saens or Rachmaninoff. As an instrument builder, I can imagine the bewilderment of an early eighteenth-century piano-maker witnessing someone doing that for the first time, the force of the entire body poured into the piano. “Whoa, whoa, you’re going to bust it!”

Nannette Streicher was the pioneer in transforming Mozart’s silvery and light-touched piano toward the versatile powerhouse we know today, capable of taking just about anything a human body can exert, the sonic equal to modern decibel-rich symphony orchestras. Pianists of the early nineteenth century were demanding more of their instruments, often to the point of damaging them as they played. This recalls the legend about Franz Liszt (1811–1886), the demon musician of the following generation, who beat his pianos so hard that he kept a second piano backstage for the second half of the concert. In 1812, Streicher built a 300-seat concert hall adjacent to her workshop, a long jump from the intimate salons that Mozart knew, and as the capacity of concert halls expanded toward a thousand seats in the ensuing years, she tweaked and strengthened the designs of her pianos, producing over fifty instruments a year and earning the reputation among some of the most admired musicians as the best piano maker of her time.

Innovation by replication

During the twentieth century, composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen were inventing new musical languages at a rapid rate. As the century progressed, many musicians delved deeply into the study of early music and how the progression of musical styles related to the development of the instruments.

Wanda Landowska (1879–1959) was one of the first twentieth-century musicians to advocate the performance of early music. She recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1933, playing a harpsichord built by the French piano maker Pleyel, an instrument similar to that displayed by Pleyel at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Pleyel harpsichords were built with steel frames and sturdy cases more like a modern piano than a harpsichord, but Landowska’s energetic playing enthralled musicians and led to the modern active industry of harpsichord making.

Alfred Deller was the first modern countertenor and a champion of early vocal music, especially that of Purcell. As a boy, he sang in a church choir in his hometown of Margate, England, and musically defied puberty by simply continuing to sing in the treble range after his voice changed. He formed the Deller Consort in 1948, gathering singers and instrumentalists to perform music from as early as the thirteenth century. His distinctive vocal tone was a revelation, and his interest in early music inspired generations of musicians.

Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt founded Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953. This was an ensemble of musicians playing on period instruments backed by extensive research into the methods of performing in earlier centuries.

E. Power Biggs played a weekly radio program from the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall) between 1942 and 1948, performing on an experimental “classic” organ built by Aeolian-Skinner. He brought the now iconic Flentrop organ to the same hall in 1958 and by 1961 was flooding the market with multiple volumes of Bach Organ Favorites recorded there, still regarded as the best-selling series of solo classical albums in recording history. His recording The Golden Age of the Organ celebrating the organs built by Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was released in 1963 and was followed by another multiple-volume series of historic organs of various European countries.

As musicians dug into the study of early music, a parallel study of period instruments was essential. Organbuilders like Charles Fisk, Fritz Noack, and John Brombaugh started building organs according to ancient ideals and principles. They traveled Europe to study and measure the important organs and applied their new knowledge to the instruments they were building. Harpsichord makers like Eric Herz, William Dowd, and Frank Hubbard brought the modern revival of the harpsichord from the battle-ready Pleyels to respectful copies of the lively and delicate instruments played by Renaissance and Baroque musicians.

Philip Belt was the first to commit to building replicas of early fortepianos. He apprenticed building harpsichords with William Dowd and Frank Hubbard while feeding his fascination with early pianos in a basement workshop. He started a pianoforte workshop on a farmstead in Center Conway, New Hampshire, and purchased a hearse for transporting pianos. His instruments were first used in concert at Harvard University in the mid 1960s, and in 1969 Belt loaned his copy of an instrument by Dulcken for use in a concert at Cornell University played by Malcolm Bilson, who immediately ordered one for himself and became an energetic champion of Belt’s work and the revival of the fortepiano. In 1987, John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists recorded a complete cycle of Mozart’s piano concertos with Malcolm Bilson, Robert Levin, and Melvyn Tan dividing the keyboard duties on a piano built by Philip Belt. Christopher Clarke (British, living in France), William Jurgenson (American, living in Germany), and Rod Regier of Maine are among those following Philip Belt by building replicas of early pianos today.

Generations of women

Nannette Streicher became a sort of personal caretaker for Beethoven, managing the details of his household and enabling his later great compositions. The organization she brought to his personal life and the ever more powerful pianos she built enabled the composition of his blockbuster Hammerklavier Sonata in 1818 and the Diabelli Variations, written between 1819 and 1823, a bewildering hour-long set of thirty-three variations. Nannette Streicher died in 1833, and the firm “continued to thrive under her son, Johann Baptiste, and then her grandson, Emil, who built pianos for Brahms. When Emil retired in 1896, the company closed.”³

§

After reading Morrisroe’s article, I wrote to my friend Laurence Libin, retired curator of musical instruments for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I knew that the Met’s collection included at least one piano built by Nannette Streicher, and I thought I would get some goodies from him. And so I did, in the form of an introduction to Anne Acker, the harpsichord and piano maker featured toward the end of the article as having completed a replica of an 1816 Streicher six-and-a-half-octave grand piano started by Margaret Hood, which was pictured in the article. (See Anne Acker’s article, “The 2014 Ivory Trade and Movement Restrictions: New regulations and their effects,” The Diapason, September 2014, pages 28–30.)

Margaret Hood (1937–2008) grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was an accomplished painter and prodigious equestrian. She became interested in instrument building in the early 1960s, building harpsichords from kits, first for herself, and then to be sold to others. Her interest expanded to fortepianos as she studied historic instruments in museums in Europe and the United States, and she founded her company to build fortepianos in Platteville, Wisconsin, in 1976. Within ten years she was renowned for building copies of instruments built by Nannette Streicher in 1803 and 1816. Margaret Hood was also a prolific researcher, and at the time of her death was working with the more than sixty letters written by Beethoven to Streicher regarding the details of running his household.

Anne Acker studied the piano from the age of four, and by the time she was a teenager playing the music of Scarlatti and Bach, she felt frustrated by the instrument and had the sense that something was missing. While in high school, she was learning Bach’s Italian Concerto and happened to pick up a recording of the piece played by Igor Kipnis on a harpsichord. As she put it in our lengthy phone interview, “That was my first ‘a-ha,’ someday I will have a harpsichord.”

When her children were little, she joined a group of amateur musicians that gathered monthly to play for each other. One of the guys had a Zuckermann harpsichord, and at one of the meetings, Anne played the Italian Concerto on it. When she finished, he said, “Take it home, Anne.” “Oh Jack, don’t be silly.” She ran into Jack at a bookstore a month later, and he asked when she would come to get the harpsichord. The second time she ran into him, she relented. It needed some work, so she made some phone calls, got her hands on some materials, and did the work. Anne spoke of her father with gratitude and admiration, saying that he had instilled in her a love and understanding of tools and things mechanical, and that she had been able to draw on his lessons to make the little harpsichord sing better.

Trevor Stephenson, a student of Malcolm Bilson, came to town to play a recital on his copy of a Stein piano built by Tom Ciul. Anne fell in love with the instrument, and through him met Margaret Hood a few months thereafter. Later she and Stephenson debuted one of Hood’s Streicher copies at a Schubertiade at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, playing Schubert’s F-Minor Fantasie. Under Hood’s influence, Anne became fascinated by the work of Nannette Streicher, and she continued her career, building, restoring, and repairing harpsichords and antique pianos. When Margaret Hood passed away, she had been working on a copy of an 1816 Stein piano. Anne approached Hood’s husband and acquired the unfinished instrument. As she wrote on her website, “After all, it is a design by a woman, Nannette Streicher, daughter of the famous piano Viennese maker Andreas Stein, the replica was begun by a woman, so, as I told Margaret’s husband after her too early passing, a woman needs to finish it.”

Patricia Morrisroe is not a musician—in fact, one of her recent books is a biography of Robert Maplethorpe—but she was inspired by the work of Nannette Streicher when doing research for her recently published novel, The Woman in the Moonlight (Little A, 2020), about the dramatic passion behind Beethoven’s composition of his iconic Moonlight Sonata. I guess I’ll read that next.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print, today.

 

Notes

1. Patricia Morrisroe, “The Woman Who Built Beethoven’s Pianos,” The New York Times, November 6, 2020.

2. Patricia Morrisroe, The New York Times.

3. Ibid. 

Photo caption: Nannette Streicher

John Bishop

Adventures and transitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye, good friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

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

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

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

Why we do this

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

Inaugurating a new ministry

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Lorraine S. Brugh and Richard Webster

Lorraine Brugh is senior research professor of music at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Richard Webster is interim director of music at Saint Paul’s Choir School and Church, Harvard Square, Boston, Massachusetts, and music director of Chicago’s Bach Week Festival.

The celebration

“These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s. Looking around, we students likely smirked, unable to imagine this motley crew being lifelong friends. Almost exactly fifty years later, on November 17, 2023, many of those former students along with colleagues, family, and church members gathered to celebrate Karel’s life of teaching, leading, and performing.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, named Karel Paukert artist-in-residence on August 2, 2023. He has served at Saint Paul’s since 1979, first as organist and choirmaster, and now continues as organist for their Sunday early service. Most days he is there, practicing and working on a memoir he is writing at the request of two colleagues in the Czech Republic.

Kevin Jones, director of music at Saint Paul’s since June 2022 and a former student of Karel’s, organized an evening of celebration and tribute. Attended by more than 200 people, the evening opened with a recital by five of Karel’s former students. The rector, the Reverend Jeanne Leinbach, welcomed everyone to the recital. Performers were former students of Karel’s from Northwestern University—James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Lorraine Brugh—and the Cleveland Institute of Music—Brian Wilson and Kevin Jones. The recital displayed evidence of the wide range of Karel’s teaching and influence with works of Jehan Alain, Paul Hindemith, César Franck, Nicolas de Grigny, Richard Webster, Petr Eben, and Maurice Duruflé.

A gala reception followed the recital. Wine flowed freely, complemented by delicious canapés and desserts. The Reverend Leinbach again greeted and thanked all who came from near and far to attend. Lorraine Brugh, James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Kevin Jones all gave tributes, as well as a bit of roasting to Karel. Karel then closed the evening by recalling his love for Saint Paul’s and the staff and parishioners who continue to be a source of great love and support for him, his family, many of whom were in attendance, as were his former students. It was a grand evening of sharing across many decades and places where Karel continues to inspire with his music and wit. All shared admiration for his humanity. Indeed, we students had remained friends for life.

An interview

On November 17, before the festivities, Lorraine Brugh and Richard Webster interviewed Karel, focusing on his early life in Czechoslovakia (thereafter the Czech Republic and now Czechia), his escape to the West, and passion for lifelong teaching 
and learning.

Lorraine Brugh: You have been a lifelong mentor to so many students, including the two of us. Would you talk about that role and then tell us who your mentors were?

Karel Paukert: This is very interesting, because I never thought of you two as teenagers. I don’t think I treated you that way. You were both seventeen when you came to Northwestern. I simply saw two young people, extremely gifted; it was oozing from you. I was as excited as I used to be as a child when I was cultivating herbs and flowers. As a kid I loved to grow plants. This was fantastic for me.

I was first teaching young students as a young person myself when my teachers J. B. Krajs in Prague and then Gabriel Verschraegen in Ghent asked me to work with certain students while they were absent. I like to deal with people, especially young people. You two were very eager, like sponges. It was just a pleasure from the very beginning.

Richard Webster: It’s significant that you mention your love of people because many teachers don’t have that love as you do.

I really feel strongly about the role love plays in our lives. It surpasses language, racial, and geographical barriers. Also, good will. I felt it in abundance as soon as I left my oppressed native country and began my life in the West. It instantly changed me, and I became more trusting and harmonious within myself.

During my second week in Iceland, I was entrusted with the role of an oboe teacher in the music school. In my own mind I had no business being a teacher of oboe, but as a member of the Radio Orchestra and being one of the very few oboe players on the island, I fulfilled my task. My student Kjartan became the oboist of the Iceland Philharmonic a few years later.

I think that my positive instincts in that field are in my DNA, as most of my forefathers on one side of my family were teachers in the Sudetenland (frontiers drawn after the First World War in 1918–1919 and in 1938 appropriated by Adolf Hitler). Consequently, I have the need to share good things with other people.

LB: Which side of your family was that?

My father’s family. My grandfather just happened to come to my hometown Skuteč as the new postmaster. He married there. The object of his admiration was my grandmother Hedvika. He ate in a restaurant for ten years watching this young woman, the daughter of the owner, before he asked her to marry him. He had a dignity about him and thought we teenagers were rude for welcoming girls without shirts on, even though it was a hot summer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and he considered us loose, with no manners. He gave us an example of a time he was mortified when his teacher in elementary school took his class to the river and requested them to take their shirts off before swimming. His shyness did not allow him to do it. He was tearing up, sharing this episode with us. I would definitely say I got my love of teaching from his side.

LB: Can you talk about some of your mentors outside of your family?

There was a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jiri Sahula, who, though poor as a church mouse, had a great assortment of musical instruments. When I was about ten years old and was his acolyte for morning Mass in the local Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, he lent me books to read. They were way over my head, but I just perused them to please him and then brought them back. For a change he started to talk about the beauty and nobility of the church organ. That was before it began to mesmerize me. In the same context he talked about a composer, František Musil, a priest, who composed a beautiful sonata.

Many years later, when I played the sonata, I was often in tears, recalling Monsignor’s poverty and humility. You could see him from afar. He walked by our house to the next village, probably to visit ailing folks. Walking through the neighborhood, he would carry a huge leather bag, and village folks often offered him goods. “Just baked, Monsignor.” People loved him and took pleasure in feeding him.

Monsignor Sahula was well known as a published historian, rather conservative, but enlightened. It was moving to see him play a variety of instruments, including a musical saw, a zither, and a one-key flute. When I came home for a visit from the conservatory in Prague, he wanted us to make music together—violin and piano. I was pleased to oblige. Often it was painful because he did not practice and his intonation was painful. In the winter, around Christmas, his huge room with a high ceiling was atrociously cold. It was touching to see him tear up playing or talking about music. (I learned from him and others how much music moves people.) I loved those times with the Monsignor, nevertheless.

RW: Would you tell us about your teachers?

My organ teacher at the Prague Conservatory, Jan Bedřich Krajs, was the nephew of the composer and organ virtuoso, Bedřich Antonín Wiedermann. He was like a father to me, in part because he had the same kind of view on present-day government policy and was opposed to the Communists, as my father was.

Our discussions in the organ studio were without boundaries. At a certain point, perhaps in my second year, a recording line was installed, so that we could record our playing. That was a pretext, and what we did not think of was that they also could tape our conversations. We didn’t realize that when we talked politics, even students among ourselves, someone could record us, and they did. It was brought to the attention of the conservatory authorities, and they threatened to close the department if professor Krajs did not dismiss me.

I seemed to have been the chief culprit. My standing was magnified by an anonymous letter from my hometown Skuteč about my class origin: petit bourgeois. This indicated that I was not worthy to be part of the cadre, the working class in the new Socialist state, but should first prove myself in a factory.

Fortunately, the man who installed the telephone was our instructor of acoustics and the son of Comrade Prchal, a leader of the Revolutionary Movement of the Trade Unions (ROH). He was a friend of my teacher, who, among other maintenance tasks, oiled our organ motors. He asked Professor Krajs with urgency to dismiss me, to prevent the closing of the department of organ. On ideological grounds, Krajs said he was not going to do that. What followed was a search of the apartment of the Krajs family. Professor Krajs was a friend of Jan Masaryk, the son of the first president of the Czech Republic, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. He “died” in Czernin Palace [in Prague] in 1948, by suicide or was possibly thrown out of a window. To this day it isn’t certain how he died.

My father listened to Jan Masaryk and other Czech dissidents on regular shortwave radio transmissions from London on the BBC (London Calls) and from New York (Voice of America) during the War. Broadcasts were in the Czech language, received on our Telefunken radio. This was considered to be illegal activity and could be punishable by prison or even death, as the required orange tag on the dial indicated.

Before leaving the country, Masaryk left Professor Krajs his famous hat, books, letters, and other memorabilia. One day the secret police came to check his apartment, probably to look for objects that could compromise him so that they could take action against him. The Krajs family lived in Malá Strana, in a centuries-old house, below the Prague Castle in Thunovská Street. Upon hearing the doorbell, the professor peeked down from the upper floor and saw men in leather coats, a typical attire of the secret police. Before he opened the doors downstairs he took the things that might be compromising and threw them all into an oven, a ceramic stove that went up all the way to the ceiling in the large room, which housed a small two-manual organ. Unfortunately, later in the day when the professor was at the conservatory, Mrs. Krajs came back and lit a fire in the stove, not knowing what all the papers were about. She burned it all up. There were notes, letters, enough incriminating evidence that almost certainly would have resulted in incarceration.

The early 1950s were tough times after a few peaceful years following World War II. It was the “dictatorship of the working class on the way to Socialism and Communism.” In many ways it mirrored the German occupation and their beastly deeds.

RW: What year would this be?

It began after the February 1948 Revolution with the confiscation of properties of the rich and the nationalization of industry, and climaxed in the last years of Stalin. The years 1952 and 1953 were terrible, because any Soviet doctrine would be copied by the Czech Communists. It was the art and culture of social realism; everything had to be optimistic, with positive depictions of the Russians. Whatever it was, it had to be in agreement with the party line. This was the reign of Socialist realism. So we couldn’t play music that wasn’t relatable to the working classes, especially anything with religious titles. Music that named Jesus Christ or mentioned anything religious was prohibited, with a few exceptions. If a piece was called “Meditation” it might have passed the ideological control.

My colleague, Jan Hora, retired professor of the conservatory and the Academy of Musical Arts, often played in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. He said that there were never printed programs in the Soviet Union. The works would be announced from the stage so that any religious connotations would be erased.

Thanks to Jan I got to know Professor Verschraegen. Jan was my best friend from the conservatory years. He was a fine organist and was allowed to travel abroad. While still in school he won several competitions. In fact, Jan met Professor Verschraegen when he was taking part in the J. S. Bach competition in Ghent. He always brought back organ scores of contemporary composers published in the West. This was music that we never had access to in the “Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” I was able to borrow and copy some of them.

I also told you about Paul Hindemith and copying his Sonata I. When he came to Prague, I asked him if he would be so kind as to sign it. That much I could say in German. He was very upset—I might say furious. I must have been in a tearful disposition, as his kind wife, Frau Gertrud, had mercy on me, took me by my hand, and invited me to sit with her in the loge at Smetana Hall during the second half of his rehearsal with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. After I explained to her in broken German our situation, vis-à-vis new music from the West, she took me after the rehearsal to the green room. I could tell that she was explaining the predicament of music students to Hindemith. He obviously changed his mind, because he did sign the sonata (“With thanks to the copyist”!!). He also requested my address, and during one of the ensuing summer months I got a package from Schott in Vienna, addressed to my parents’ house in Skuteč, with all three of his sonatas.

Back to Professor Verschraegen. It happened that he was allowed to concertize in the Czech Republic. I was in military service between 1957 and 1959 in Pisek and Tabor. It was in 1958 that I met him. Mr. Palasek, who was the minister at the prayer house of the Czech Brethren, had for our circumstances a nice, small two-manual organ, and allowed me to practice there whenever I had permission to leave the barracks. He told me about an upcoming Verschraegen concert there and asked if I could assist him during his recital.

There was a youngish lady named Vera who was translating for him. The two seemed to have been affectionate with each other. She was a Jew and had spent several war years in the concentration camp. I could tell because she had a tattoo on her arm.

Later in Ghent, I realized that her story fascinated Verschraegen from the very beginning, and he was attracted to her. She asked me if I liked his playing; I said, yes, very much, and she asked if I would like to study with him. She talked to Gabriel about me, and the next time he came to Prague I played for him. He came there to premiere his Concerto for Organ and Strings with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in the Rudolfinum.

He loved Prague and stayed for several days. I tried to communicate with him in my elementary German. He spoke his native Flemish, French, and German. Afterwards, Vera convinced me that I had to improve my German to communicate with him. I listened to her and took private German lessons, making fairly rapid progress.

The Pragokoncert housed him in the Hotel Alcron, a hotel for guests from the West. One evening he invited me there for supper. As we spoke a waiter came to us and silently pointed above his head, toward the chandelier. That indicated to me that there was a recording device. Fortunately, I had not said very much. But I was so grateful, so grateful to the waiter for warning us.

The next day, through the help of Vera, I got to play for him. Later when I was in Belgium, he told me I was like some other Czech organists, who were so rhythmically undisciplined. (He had heard them in various competitions as a juror.) He said I had to buy a metronome and reached immediately for his wallet to give me money, but I did have some money. After two lessons with him I did what he asked me to do—to write in all the fingerings and pedaling in Bach’s Toccata in F (BWV 540i). Thereafter, I passed his requirement.

RW: Just like you, he was very generous to his students.

Thank you. Anyway, so then after two or three lessons, he said that he would like me to teach his son, Dirk. “You can play as you want, but I want you to teach him to use the metronome and note the fingerings.” Obviously, he wanted me to instill discipline in him.

After that I didn’t get many lessons from him. He would listen to me and make a few, always helpful comments. We discussed interpretations away from the organ as well. He was a deep thinker and liked to talk a lot about himself and life in general. I lived nearby, and he would often ring my doorbell in the evening and ask if I wanted to have coffee or a beer chat. We might also meet in the square at a brasserie in front of the cathedral where I was playing weekday Masses, Sunday morning Masses, and other important offices. Or we would talk and walk through the old town. He would talk politics, the world, and Vera in Prague, and I would comment here and there. He loved his city and was a proud “Vlamink” (Flemish citizen).

RW: Last year you received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague, and a week thereafter the Prize of the Ministry of Culture. What was it like for you to be there and to receive the award?

It was like a dream. My entire U.S. family and Czech relatives came to support me. When I legally left Prague in 1961 I had a suitcase containing some music scores and my oboe for a one-year engagement in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. By not returning for the obligatory summer military training and disregarding all the letters from the Czech authorities, the military court issued me a ten-year prison term. I did not think that even a short visit would ever be a possibility.

I never thought I would be going back. But things changed. The Velvet Revolution was a miracle. I told you about my mother. When I took a train to Skuteč to say goodbye before leaving for Iceland and told her I might not be coming back, she was standing in front of the armoire and was so startled she dropped a mirror on the floor. “You cannot do it.” I didn’t even say goodbye to my father because he was working in an ammunition factory and could only come home on the weekend. I didn’t know myself if I could get to the point where I could divorce myself from my past and never be back again.

Playing in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik, existing modestly, I had saved some money, made some more in Oslo with the recording of Czech organ music in the cathedral in Oslo for the Norwegian Radio. I kept my savings in my shoes, believing that with a little bit of luck I could survive two to three months.

In Oslo I put my suitcase into a railway depot before embarking by autostop to the west coast. I splurged on a pair of blue jeans (my first ones), a small backpack, and a navy t-shirt. Then in the harbor I was trying to find work. I did find it on a packet boat servicing Kristiansand and Bergen. I meditated about my future under the starlit sky when the boat moored at night in one of the magic fjords. The sailors would leave me on the boat alone, sleep somewhere on the shore, and would come back in the morning. I was to clean the kitchen and the deck. After I was finished I watched the stars and made my plans. My kingdom was the deck of the smallish boat.

On the way to Prague in 2022 I was again replaying in my mind the circumstances of my leaving in 1961. It took me many months in Reykjavik to tackle the parting step with my past. The final decision, the realization that I had to leave my past in order to at least touch my dreams, was made during my journey in 1962, hitchhiking from Bergen back to Oslo. After a nap in a haystack in the Telemark region of Norway, awakened by the scent of hay and hearing singing from a beautifully carved chalet (there must have been more than a dozen of them, scattered in the valley), I made the decision to stay in the West. I bought a ticket to Ghent, checked my suitcase, boarded the train, and was on my way to Belgium.

In Sweden there was no passport control from Norway. When we reached Denmark, however, there was a casual passport control at the border to Germany. The officer selected me and said I needed a valid visa. I told him I had one. He stated I needed a visa for each country since my passport was from a Communist country. He said I had transgressed Scandinavian rules. I explained what I was contemplating—to ask for asylum. He said he would let me go to Germany, and there I would need to ask for asylum.

The German border police got me off the train. The realization came to me too late that my suitcase, a “Mitgepäck,” was going to Ghent. Out of fear that I could be apprehended, I had left in it the letters from Verschraegen that could prove he had invited me to come to study with him, plus anything else that would reveal my intentions not to return home. This was August, and I didn’t get to Ghent until November. Meanwhile, I had to exist. The Germans said it would be possible to stay in Germany because I was a musician. But I would have to change my name and go to a camp for refugees, because I didn’t want to become a German citizen.

I was sent back to Denmark on the next train. The same officer, Mr. Poulsen, waited for me at the Padborg station and brought me to a small police station directly in the railway station. There he interviewed me and wrote a protocol. I was jailed overnight and taken with two men, obviously criminals, to Copenhagen by rail and boats. Today the bridges make that part of the voyage a delight.

They brought me to the officer for refugees. I deposited my Czech passport and the return airline ticket to Prague. His office would help me apply for a visa to Belgium. In the meantime, I was required to find housing and periodically report to his office. I was terrified that I would not have enough money to stay in the city while I waited for the visa.

I wrote a desperate letter to a friend in Iceland, Didda Gudrum Kristinsdottir. She was a pianist who studied with Bruno Seidlhofer in Vienna and was at that time the best pianist in Iceland. I gave her the address of the rented room where she could write to me.

Instead of receiving a letter, one day a Danish woman came to my door, introduced herself as Hanne Poulsen, a friend of Didda from Vienna, where she had studied broadcasting. She already knew that I needed help here and offered me the use of her apartment. “I am leaving my apartment and going on vacation. I will be with my mother for six weeks. I would like you to use it.” I just couldn’t accept it. She said she would come in the afternoon and would show me Copenhagen. She drove me all around the city in her beautiful Saab. We ended in Nyhavn with a glass of delicious Tuborg beer. During our sightseeing I decided to accept her kind offer. That helped me to survive in Copenhagen because I had no job. For many years thereafter, whenever I would be nearby, I would meet her for dinner.

I would go to the Belgian embassy to check on my visa almost every day, wearing sunglasses so that I would not be recognized. That feeling of being pursued stayed with me for a long time. It finally disappeared in 1964, when I arrived in the United States.

During my waiting time for the visa I was able to take advantage of the musical life in Copenhagen. Tickets were inexpensive. In Tivoli, the famous amusement park, I heard amazing concerts of all sorts, including Danish avant-garde composers, conductor Zubin Mehta with the Tivoli orchestra, even a piano recital by the seventy-five-year-old Arthur Rubinstein.

One day, in a cafeteria, I met a young man who looked at me quizzically and addressed me in English. By that time I could speak some English. He was a Fulbright student from the USA, Raymond Harris, studying with Finn Viderø. I knew the name of his teacher as he was well known as a prophet, specializing in the works of Buxtehude. Mr. Viderø didn’t mind if I came to his lessons. I learned a lot by observing him and listening to the beautiful Marcussen organ on which he taught. I summoned the courage to visit other organ lofts and was received cordially. Many of the organists were also composers. I could not believe the clarity of those instruments!

Then one day at the Belgian embassy, a kind consular officer, a distinguished older Jewish woman told me, “Do not despair. It will happen.” It wasn’t happening fast enough. I was writing desperate letters to Verschraegen, “Please, please, Herr Professor.” I got no answer. He needed to attest that he was inviting me to Belgium. We had made the agreement in 1961 that he would send me a Christmas card with his signature and an asterisk if the invitation was still valid. Shortly thereafter I received it and still have it. It’s a Christmas card, more than half a century old, with a landscape painting of an old Flemish master, and on the reverse, his signature and the asterisk.

After coming to Ghent I found out that Professor Verschraegen traveled during the summer with the whole family in Europe and was also giving concerts. His mail was collected by one of the sextons, Roger Van de Wielle, a musicologist and author, who was also one of the organists.

LB: Tonight you will be honored for another award, artist-in-residence at Saint Paul’s. Share some of your thoughts about this celebration.

The rector, in her generosity, and Kevin Jones, director of music here, made it possible for me to stay on. I treasure the office I have, because I can hopefully finish my memoirs. I also have a resting place here in the columbarium for Noriko [Fujii-Paukert, Karel’s wife] and myself. She agreed to be buried with me.

Look at this beautiful space. I’m often here until 8:00 p.m. working on details of the remembrances, making sure all the details are correct. Sometimes I come to pleasant, even stunning discoveries. Today, for example, I was reading about two musicians who concertized at the Cleveland Museum of Art in their early careers, Christine Brandes and Joshua Bell. Christine, a sought-after soprano in early music, shone in several of our concerts thirty years ago, and Joshua, now a world-class violinist, was scheduled for one of our summer concerts when he was thirteen or fourteen. He was the first winner of the Stulberg International Competition for string players under age twenty.

This competition was founded by the friends of Julius Stulberg, professor of violin in Kalamazoo [Western Michigan University], a year after his death. It was a stroke of luck, and it happened because of my skiing accident. I found out about Joshua from my orthopedist, Dr. Stulberg, whose father was a German immigrant and the famed violinist. The good doctor, who apparently frequented our concerts, raved about Joshua and put me in contact with his mother. I was fortunate in that regard; so many good things happened to me.

LB: How did the invitation to write your memoir come about?

It was the editor of Prague Radio, Eva Ocisková, who recorded a series of talks for her program Pameti (“Memories”). It was a successful program in many installments on Radio Vltava Prague. From that she must have gleaned some inspiration and asked me to consider writing the story of my life. Her husband, my close friend, renowned organist Jaroslav Tůma, supported it.

LB: They are planning a publication in Czech?

Yes, and there is support for the Czech edition from official circles. What happens further, with the English edition, I don’t know as yet.

LB: What accomplishments are you most proud of, or satisfied with, in your long professional arc?

Well, here in the church I am pleased with the acquisition of instruments. We acquired an Italian organ by Gerhard Hradetzky, the Italian harpsichord by Matthias Giewisch, and the positiv of Vladimir Slajch. Of course, we have the iconic Holtkamp organ.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) procurement was one of my chief preoccupations from the very beginning. I wanted to acquire instruments that would enable us to present a variety of musical styles. Those instruments included harpsichord copies for French, Italian, and German repertoire, an organ positiv, an original Broadwood fortepiano, a copy of Mozart’s Walter clavier, and a clavichord. We used them in the auditorium and in various galleries for concerts. This gave the musical arts also a visual artistic presentation. In both instances it required patience and perseverance to obtain the necessary funds from private individuals and foundations.

Unfortunately, the CMA instruments are now in storage and are not played. That situation pains me very much. Even more, the human capital we assembled through the many activities is no longer nourished by the CMA as it was for almost 100 years. You cannot measure such things with a yardstick, but you can see and feel the respect people paid to music over the years. I was not the first one. I simply continued in that trajectory of the first curators, following in the footsteps of my predecessor, Walter Blodgett.

There are many instrumentalists and composers who were studying here at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) and students at other institutions who, even now after many years have passed, acknowledge how much the CMA program enriched their professional lives through the concerts, listening to rehearsals, and meeting with the artists. We wanted it to be precisely that: a supplemental music laboratory for as many as possible. The young professionals who studied with Donald Erb at CIM got to meet William Bolcom, William Albright, Jacob Druckman, Messrs. Carter and Crumb, and dozens of others. Imagine the young organist to be a few steps away from such legends as Jean Langlais, Pierre Cochereau, Madame Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, or Yvonne Loriod. There is something sacred in meeting great artists.

It was the same with masterclasses. If we had harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt or Edith Picht-Axenfeld playing fortepiano, students would come from CIM, from Case Western, Cleveland State, or the Oberlin Conservatory, just to experience their artistry. It was the education tangent that I valued very much. What is heartwarming to me now are the occasional encounters with folks I meet in the street or a store, or musicians who participated in our endeavors, age-wise all over the spectrum, expressing gratitude for our musical mission.

LB: Was the new music direction your own, or had it been already established?

I was following Walter Blodgett. He was interested in new music. The CMA juried exhibitions of local artists. Walter complemented this with May festivals, mostly performances of new music. He had people like Karlheinz Stockhausen here before I came. I could not believe it.

So I felt very safe in pushing the envelope. Among others in programming music of different nations, I also wanted to promote Czech music. The general manager of CMA, Beverly Barksdale, previously assistant to George Szell, assured me that because Szell presented Czech music often [with the Cleveland Orchestra], programming Czech music would not be objectionable to Clevelanders. On the contrary, we would frequently combine resources from CMA, the choir from Saint Paul’s, as well as local instrumentalists, and present concerts in the CMA, the Bohemian National Hall, and elsewhere in the city. During the oppressive regime, ending with the Velvet Revolution (Prague, November and December 1989), local folks were unable to visit the homeland and enthusiastically supported our programs of Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček, and others.

RW: What are your regrets?

As humans we all sin. Perhaps I sinned more than others. Feeling guilty helped me do good things and helped me, in part, to overcome my guilt. I should have loved more. I should have spent more time with my family. I should have been more understanding of some of my students. I should have worked harder from the beginning.

RW: What advice do you have to young musicians, particularly organists, composers, and church musicians who are at the beginnings of their careers?

I just really think that, in today’s market, it is necessary to be multi-faceted, to be capable of stepping into diverse situations, in order to earn enough for the basic necessities. I am speaking now as the father of a family. The brilliant ones and those who are hard working will most likely make it. [Young musicians] do not need any advice from us. They just need to find a mentor and continue to love music and know what and why they are doing it.

LB: Well, there aren’t even enough church jobs to go around anymore.

I think you have to follow your call, whatever it is. My teacher at the conservatory, Mr. Krajs, said, when he taught me privately,

Darling, you are ready to take the exams at the conservatory. Think it over. You have to be sure you love music enough. You know how the government treats the church, and it may not change in your lifetime. You may have to play for free in the church, if they are even open, and be employed in a radio station as a sound engineer. But you play oboe; you will be okay.

The satisfaction of being a musician is enormous, especially in religious realms. I was fortunate to have a dream position at the museum (CMA), not in terms of financial rewards but in being an unofficial musical missionary in the city. To that end was added another dimension, serving people in the church, first [at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church] in Evanston and now in Cleveland Heights. I was fortunate to work under great rectors—in Evanston, Tom Ray, and in Cleveland Heights, Chave McCracken, Nick White, Alan Gates, Jeanne Leinbach, and a host of wonderful musical colleagues. I learned from all of them, and I am still learning.

RW: It’s a calling.

Yes.

Postscript by Karel Paukert

I wish Frank Cunkle were still alive. Thanks to him I made it all the way to the U.S. In 1963 Gabriel Verschraegen asked me to take care of an American music journalist, Mr. Cunkle, who was planning to visit the Festival of Flanders to see diverse organs and attend as many recitals as possible. I agreed to be his guide, not realizing that this encounter would change my life forever.

Frank was the editor of The Diapason, based in Chicago. As I quickly found out, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. organ scene. He let me know right away that he disliked certain organists, but did like very much the playing of Catharine Crozier and also Robert Noehren. I proudly told him that I met both in Haarlem and that they recommended me to come to the U.S. Frank did not promise me anything but indicated that he would contact a few acquaintances in churches and schools for a possible recital or a class on Czech organ music. It all became reality when I landed in Chicago on December 19, 1964. I was welcomed by Frank, organ builder John F. Shawhan, and two doctoral students at Northwestern University, Benn Gibson and James Leland. They brought me to Frank’s house (he did not drive) in Oak Park.

The Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists invited me to play a recital for their midwinter conclave, undoubtedly, thanks to Frank’s recommendation. It was announced in the December 1964 issue of The Diapason.

In 1968 I returned to the Chicago area to teach at Northwestern University in Evanston and reconnected with Frank. Upon his retirement in 1970 he moved to our small house on Noyes Street and became a frequent babysitter of our children. He eventually fulfilled his plan to retire in Mexico. After he found the experience disappointing, he returned to the U.S. to live close to his sister in Chula Vista, California.

A child of the Great Depression, he was born in Arkansas and was accustomed to living frugally. In his younger years he earned his living in music as an organist, pianist, composer, and arranger. He possessed absolute pitch. His music education was broad. I am his grateful mentee, for imparting to me the skills of American life I would need for the rest of my life.

Special thanks to my friends, Lorraine and Richard, and also to Stephen Schnurr and The Diapason, for allowing me to share my memories.

 

Karel is currently receiving treatment at the University Hospital’s Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

John Bishop

Listen to the voices.

Alan Laufman, who founded the Organ Clearing House in 1961, was in his final illness during the summer of 2000 when he asked me to join the company to help its work continue when he was finished. During that summer and fall, I sat with him for countless hours as he passed on the company lore and history, warning me of potential pitfalls and hinting about tricks he had picked up over the years. Among many other things, he warned that I would be spending a lot of time typing stoplists. When the company was young, he was working with a manual typewriter, carbon paper, and Wite-Out. (Remember those little bottles with a brush in the cap?) He kept a typewritten list of available organs: builder, year, location, number of manuals, number of stops. If you sent him a letter with $3.45 in stamps, he would send you a copy of the list. Updating the list meant retyping it completely. There were dozens of organs.

Happily, many stoplists are now available online from the websites of organ companies, churches, and the brilliant, comprehensive Pipe Organ Database created under the auspices of the Organ Historical Society (pipeorgandatabase.org), and it is easy to publish a stoplist on our website by attaching a link to a file or web page. “Click here to download specifications.” Still, I sometimes need to type the stoplist while referring to a photograph of the stop jambs. It is easy enough for a modest organ, but once you get over fifty stops, it takes a lot of flicking back and forth between screens to get it all accurately.

I review a dozen or more stoplists every time I spend a day at my desk. They are open as tabs on web browsers. I refer to them when talking on the phone. I type them, edit them, file them, and publish them. And while there are almost infinite variations, there are also similarities that apply to many American organs. I am often speaking or corresponding with people who have purchased an old church building who are altogether unfamiliar with organs, telling them how to gather the information I need to assess the marketability of an instrument. I might be speaking with a real estate developer sitting on the organ bench, mobile phone camera at the ready. I ask how many keyboards? “Three.” “Are there banks of knobs on either side of the keyboards?” “Yes.” “Do you see a group of knobs marked ‘Great’ on the right side?” “Yes.” “From the bottom up, you might read 8′ Diapason, 8′ Dulciana, 8′ Melodia, 4′ Octave, and so on?” “Exactly right. How did you know?” I just knew. It goes on: 4′ Flute d’Amour, 2′ Fifteenth, Mixture IV, 8′ Trumpet.

Is there one pedal stop? It is either Bourdon or Subbass, some smart people label it using the German Subbaß. Are there two pedal stops? I will bet lunch that it is one of these two pairs, 16′ Bourdon and 8′ Violoncello or 16′ Open Wood Diapason and 16′ Bourdon. How many three-manual organs have a Choir division that reads 8′ Concert Flute, 8′ Dulciana, 8′ Unda Maris, 4′ Flute, 8′ Clarinet? A ten-stop Swell division would have 8′ Viola da Gamba, 8′ Viole Celeste, 8′ Stopped Diapason, 4′ Principal, 2′ Octavin, Plein Jeu III, 16′ Bassoon, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Hautbois, and 4′ Clarion, a list that is familiar to thousands of organists.

Of course I am oversimplifying. I notice that my imaginary organ has 8′ Dulciana on both Great and Choir, fair enough because those are both common places to find that stop. If the organ was a little larger, we might have a Geigen Diapason on the Choir, or we might change the Great Dulciana to an Erzähler. One organ I played a lot when I was young had an 8′ English Diapason on the Choir. If the organ was a little larger, there would be an 8′ Diapason on the Swell, a few more independent Pedal stops like 16′ Principal, 8′ Octave, 4′ Choralbass (or Choralbaß), and 16′ Trombone. As I throw more stops at my imaginary organ, I am still using names that are common to many, even most American organs. So I raise the question, if pipe organ stoplists are so predictable, what’s new under the sun?

Making a list

If you leaf through a stack of printed stoplists, you will notice a common form that connects them all. Stops are separated by division, they are listed from lowest to highest pitches, maybe there is a mixture or two after the usual flues, and the reeds are last. When there are several flue stops of the same pitch, they are listed in order, principal, string, flute. The biggest apparent variety is the number of stops and number of divisions. So why don’t all organs sound alike?

Just like regional accents in any language, there are countless ways an organ stop like Principal or Gedeckt can sound. When an organ is being planned, the person or people responsible for how it will sound make decisions about what materials to use to make pipes, what wind pressures should be to complement the acoustics of the room and placement of the instrument, what scales should be used (the ratio between length and diameter of a pipe), and how each stop should be balanced with all the others.

The choice of materials is a good place to start. Hard metal like tin produces a bright tone; soft metal like lead produces a darker tone; and lead and tin are mixed in alloys through the spectrum. It is rare to find pipes made of pure tin because that metal is too hard to work with when doing the meticulous finicky work of voicing. Adding ten or twenty percent lead softens the metal enough to allow the voicer to manipulate the metal more easily, but the tone still benefits from the hardness. It is also rare, even a mistake, to make pipes of pure lead because the metal is so soft and heavy that the pipes cannot support their own weight. As the revival of classic organ building got rolling in the last third of the twentieth century, some organ pipes were made with such high lead content that the pipes collapsed after only a few years. Builders realized that when duplicating the high lead content found in antique pipes, they failed to consider that modern metallurgy produces purer materials while ancient lead was full of impurities. Throw a handful of impurity into the melting pot, and the lead gets stronger. It is the opposite of skimming the floating stuff off the top of your chicken stock pot.

The same applies to making wood pipes. Softwoods like spruce or fir produce darker tones, while hardwoods like oak or maple produce brighter sounds. It is common to find neat little 2′ Principals made of oak in portable continuo organs that produce crystal clear tones, and in the Taylor & Boody organ at Grace Church in New York City, the beautiful Choir 8′ Principal Dolce that forms the façade just behind the organ bench is made of white oak.

Wind pressure is a critical choice because it determines what style of voicing is possible. Bright, transparent choruses in Classic-style organs require low pressures, while the broad, rich, and even powerful voices in a Romantic or symphonic organ are produced by high pressures. The symphonic style of pipe organs was made possible in the early-twentieth century by the introduction of the electric blower, allowing voicers to use great volumes of air at high pressures without worrying about the aches and pains of the people pumping the bellows. The fact that all the organ symphonies of Widor were written for a huge organ that was hand-pumped speaks volumes about the skill and resourcefulness of the organbuilder.

Like the choice of materials, scaling is an essential part of planning an organ. Middle C of an 8′ Principal could be 1-3⁄4 inches or 2-1⁄4 inches in diameter, depending on the tonal character desired. Varying the scale of wood pipes is a matter of changing the dimensions of the cross section. Low CCC of a 16′ Double Open Wood might be twice the width and depth of the same note in a wood 16′ Violone. The Double Open will produce a hefty, broad bass tone, while the Violone with keener tone will provide more clear definition of pitch with crisp speech.

Color my world.

Thirty years ago, when we chose a paint color, the person in the store looked up a formula and used a machine with a lot of tubes of basic colors to put the correct number of ounces of each color into the can of base paint, one tint at a time. The same action is done now with computerized machines that produce the accurate little squirts of color. Those color-blending machines in your neighborhood hardware store are just like choosing registrations for a piece of organ music. Draw a little blue (8′ Diapason) and red (8′ French Horn) and you get a lovely purple.

Some organists register their music in a formulaic way. “I always use flutes 8′, 4′, and 2′ in this passage” or strictly use registrations printed in a score. That approach misses the opportunity to create your own tone color. Consider Bach’s Fugue in E-flat Major, the “Saint Anne,” BWV 552ii. Start the elegant main subject on principals 8′ and 4′. Perfect. You might say that is the way I have always done it, but one organ I often played has a beautiful 8′ Oboe that I combined with the 8′ Principal to create a gorgeous sound that allowed the counterpoint to be heard clearly and gave harmonic richness to the soaring passages. I sometimes added the 4′ Octave midway before changing to something sparkling for the sprightly 6/8 section.

If you are preparing to play a particular piece on a particular organ for the first time, take a few minutes to play the first few measures on fifteen different combinations. If you were cooking, you would add some olive oil (rich and earthy), oregano (aromatic), garlic (bitter and spicy), butter (smooth and creamy), and diced tomato (flavorful and moist), and you get a wonderful sauce.

Start with an 8′ Trumpet (rich and earthy), add a 4′ Octave (a touch of brilliance), add the 2-2⁄3′ Quint (harmonic blend), and you have the start of a French Grand Jeu. Why is that such a satisfying sound? The pipes of the Trumpet have rich overtones at the first, second, third, and fourth overtones (4′, 2-2⁄3′, 2′, 1-3⁄5′). In our three-stop combination, the Quint is emphasizing the second overtone. Beautiful. Go ahead and add the 2′ and 1-3⁄5′ to complete the Cornet. Play around with those overtones. Draw the 8′ Oboe and 2-2⁄3′ Quint for a nice solo combination. If the 1-3⁄5′ is not too loud, it will sit delicately on top of the Oboe and Quint. If it is loud and spicy, it might be too much. Maybe emphasize 8′ pitch by adding a stopped flute, or better yet, a chimneyed flute because it also emphasizes the second overtone. Use your ears and listen.

Staying with the French tradition of overtones, start with an 8′ Gedeckt or Stopped Diapason, add 4′, 2-2⁄3′, 2′, and 1-3⁄5′. That is the classic Cornet. But do not leave it at that just because the score says so. Try all the possible combinations of those five stops, with and without the tremolo. There are lots of possibilities, and one of them is just right, or if it is not such a great organ, one of them is better than the others.

Here is some more ear training. Hold a single note on an Oboe or Cromorne and flick the 2-2⁄3′ on and off a few times. You can train your ears to hear the second overtone (Quint) in the solo voice of the reed. This trick works best in the tenor octave where the overtones are heard most clearly. Once you can easily identify that harmonic, try the same trick with 1-3⁄5′ until you are certain you can hear the fifth overtone in the solo reed voice. Now you can use your ears discriminately to choose the most luscious registration.

Mind your Zs and Qs.

A friend who is a brilliant organist associated primarily with a large symphonic organ once told me he had no use for organ stops with Zs or Qs in their names. Quintadena, Sesquialtera, Terz (Terzian), Zimbel, Prinzipal, and Dulzian are all stops you would find in a modern low-pressure organ, perhaps with open-toe voicing and high tin content—not your favorite sounds if the rolling, robust, even mysterious sounds of a symphonic organ are your thing. On the other hand, that somewhat snobby comment from my friend would be the reverse for many organists who love the brilliant instruments of Visser-Rowland, Holtkamp, or Zimmer where there are lots of Zs and Qs. There is something for everyone.

How good can it sound?

Another important reason to use your ears when you are registering music at the organ is the condition of the tuning and pipe speech of your chosen organ. If Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv are not in tune with each other, do not couple them together, or you will get a nasty zinging of high-pitched pipes like a swarm of bees. If the Trumpet is flat against the rest of the organ because it is hot in the church, do not use it. Your listeners would rather hear a reduced registration than the fingernails-on-the-blackboard sensation that comes from bad tuning, and most of them would never know that you would have preferred to use the Trumpet just then if it sounded a little better.

For over thirty years I maintained an organ in Boston that had large tin pipes in the façades of Pedal, Great, and Rückpositiv cases. There was a long, thin window at the peak of the ceiling that ran the length of the building, and at a certain time of the year, sunlight beaming through that window would parade across the organ’s façade at 10:00 in the morning, just the time to be finishing your prelude and starting the opening hymn. Over the years there was a procession of organists, and I showed them all how to pay attention to that sunlight because for a brief time, the Principal pipes would be heated up by the sun and go sharp from the rest of the organ. Is it too fussy to pay attention to tuning to that kind of detail? I guess it depends on your ears, but the pitch of organ pipes changes with temperature. You can add that to your knowledge base. Science is a real thing.

If you are choosing a solo combination for the cantus firmus of a chorale prelude and your precious Oboe has a squawker on the second note of the melody, do not use it. There is sure to be another combination that sounds good enough, and your listeners will never know you did not get your first choice. A lot of wedding marches will be spoiled when the fourth F-sharp of the Trumpet is a lulu. Take it up a half step, or if transposition is not your strongest suit, you can go down a half step by imagining the key signature of D-flat and using the same notes. As you choose stops to combine, play chromatic scales up and down the keyboard on every stop you plan to use and listen for uneven voicing. Maybe a few notes are too soft or too loud. Maybe a few pipes are slow to speak, have too much unpleasant chiff, sound raspy, or cause some woodwork to vibrate and buzz. Choose a different stop or combination of stops. The point is to make the organ sound as good as it can. It is all about listening.

As you listen and experiment like this, write down issues you found that caused you to change your mind about what stop to use. That list becomes a guide for your service technician. If the console log book says that the third D-sharp of Swell Flute d’Amour is too soft, it will get corrected during the next service call. Conscientious organ technicians are pleased to find that list, because they know they can make the organ sound better for you.

A few months ago, during a nice restaurant dinner with a colleague who was voicing an important new organ, I asked what he hoped to achieve with the completed instrument. “I want to build something beautiful that will enrich the people who hear it.” It is your duty as organist to use each organ you play to its best advantage.

John Bishop

One stop shopping

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

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

There are two kinds of birds . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Now we’re getting somewhere.

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

Tracker or electric?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s going to build it?

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

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

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

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

Go Yuja.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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