In the Wind: reviewing years of organ maintenance

On the road again

In the 1980 movie, Honeysuckle Rose, Willie Nelson played Buck Bonham, a country music singer looking for national fame. His life as a traveling music star is a strain on his marriage to Viv, played by Dyan Cannon; one thing leads to another, and not everyone winds up happy. The best thing that came out of that movie is the song, “On the Road Again,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Song and an American Music Award for Favorite Country Single.

In the 1980s I was working in an organ shop where some of us preferred classical music and some preferred rock and roll. In the days before earpods when music was played through speakers we had to compromise—ours was often country music. It was fun to make up words to go with the rhyming schemes, and some of the country songs of those days were simply hilarious. Bobby Bare’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life,” Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and Dolly Parton’s “Better Keep Your Hands Off My Potential New Boyfriend” (really) gave us lots of material.

“On the Road Again” seems full of hope, opening with a major sixth (“My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. . .”), with lyrics about the pleasure of “making music with my friends.” There is a sort of choo-choo-train-like rhythm underneath, and some lithe, right-in-tune harmonica playing. “Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway, We’re the best of friends, insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way is on the road again.”

My daily office routine includes lots of correspondence with people wishing to buy and sell pipe organs, and I keep a list of places that might be productive to visit, sort of like pins on a map. Several times a year, when those pins meld into a circle that I might drive in a week or so, I set off in my Suburban. I make a point of visiting any organ workshops that might be along the route, and I am often able to include errands for us or for colleague companies, like delivering a blower here, a rank of pipes there, or picking up a pedalboard—it helps pay for the gas. When I leave home, sappy as it may be, I think of the indefatigable Willie Nelson and dial up that song, fixing myself up with an earworm that will easily last a week.

§

Last December, Willie cheered me on as I headed for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. My first day out, I met with people at a church who are considering purchasing an organ and had dinner with my son in central Massachusetts. The following morning, I drove to New Holland, Pennsylvania, to visit New Holland Church Furniture, a company that builds miles of pews, thousands of chairs, hundreds of altars, and dozens of organ cases. The Organ Clearing House has helped with the installation of several large new organs with cases built by New Holland, and they have since engaged us to install a few other large pieces such as a cathedral reredos. I was given a lengthy tour of the facility and marveled at the production volume and values.

I was especially impressed by an extensive layout of curved pews in the shop for the floor and balconies of a large church under construction. It is one thing to build straight pews; all organ builders have equipment in their workshops for cutting wood straight. It is much more challenging to work with curves, especially because you would not necessarily use the same curved layouts in several different churches. The forms and patterns for gluing those long, curved boards are custom made for each location. And in this building, the balconies had layouts much different from the main floor, further complicating the job. Massive custom-built sanding machines finish those twenty-foot-long curves with the grain, as any good woodworker would.

Computer-driven machines were cutting out chair backs, pew ends, Gothic arches, and Stations of the Cross at dizzying rates. A procession of ten-foot-long pew seats, hanging from iron hooks like sides of beef, rode conveyors through a huge spray booth. Carts of chair frames rolled from gluing stations to assembly rooms. Engineers and designers stared at computer screens, moving pixilated lines around to create perfect drawings. Those drawings were fed into the machines that cut the wood. Semi-trailers were backed up to loading docks, ready to haul the finished products to their destinations. Seventy-five or eighty workers were toiling in the factory, combining artistry with automation, creating elegant furnishings for church buildings across the country.

New Holland is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I was sharing the roads with Amish families in black carriages drawn by single horses and large flatbed trailers drawn by teams of three horses, all with reflective triangles on the back. Driving around them in a big comfortable car with the heat on gently and music playing, I reflected on the contrasting lifestyles. I saw those buggies parked in the driveways of prosperous-looking farmsteads where oxen were waiting patiently to be harnessed to plows and reapers. It is quite a feat to make a living as a farmer in these times without burning diesel fuel.

Pennsylvania and Ohio

I went from New Holland to Wooster, Ohio, home of Wooster College, where I helped maintain the large Holtkamp in the chapel and smaller practice organs when I was working with John Leek in the 1970s. I drove by those buildings nearly fifty years after I first worked in them, reliving John’s often humorous, sometimes stern teaching. I remembered standing on a ladder behind the Great windchest as a fledgling tuner, confronted for the first time by a Sesquialtera II, Mixture IV, and Scharff III, struggling to decipher the relationships between all those tiny pipes.

I drove past the First Presbyterian Church where in 1980 Leek and I attended the dedicatory recital of Karl Wilhelm’s Opus 76 played by my organ teacher, Haskell Thomson. Jack Russell, professor of organ at Wooster College and a former student of Haskell’s, was organist at that church. Jack is still a friend, now located in the Boston area. Opus 76 is a grand three-manual affair with thirty-six stops, free standing pedal towers, and beautiful carved pipe shades. What I remember most about that recital was a cipher that stopped Mr. Thomson in mid-sweep (his students will get an inward chuckle from that), bringing him to the balcony rail to ask for assistance, an organbuilder’s nightmare.

While in Wooster, I visited the newly formed Greenleaf Organ Company founded by Samantha Koch and her husband Daniel Hancock. They are working on the renovation of a 1916 Hook & Hastings organ purchased through the Organ Clearing House by a church in Kansas. The organ had been in storage for years in Newcastle, Maine, where I live, and it was fun to see “my baby” getting a new lease of life. The folks at Greenleaf are smart and skillful, and I look forward to seeing lots of great projects come from that shop.

I drove from Wooster to Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to school forty-five years ago. My timing was bad as I arrived a few days after the holiday break started, so there were not many people around. I had breakfast with Randy Wagner, longtime executive at Organ Supply Industries (OSI) in Erie, Pennsylvania. OSI has been for decades the largest company supplying to the organbuilding trade in the United States.

I met Randy in the 1970s when I was working for John Leek, and Leek and I traveled back and forth from OSI to deliver and pick up parts for our projects. Our relationship continued through my days with Angerstein & Associates, the Bishop Organ Company, and the Organ Clearing House. It is one of my longest collegial friendships. Randy retired to Oberlin where he cut his teeth working with Homer Blanchard in the 1950s. He shares with Barbara Owen the distinction of being one of two surviving participants in the founding meeting of the Organ Historical Society, held in the choir room at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1956.1

From Oberlin, I drove to Hartville, Ohio, for a quick visit with Charles Kegg of Kegg Pipe Organ Builders. Charles’s shop has a luxurious amount of space for his staff, with a snazzy collection of machines and equipment. His interest in automated musical instruments means that there are collections of paper rolls for player devices and a very rare machine that punches those paper rolls. Charles and I are collaborating on a project in New York City, and it was a nice opportunity to compare notes and questions.

And back to Pennsylvania

Organ Supply Industries in Erie, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest pipe organ companies in the United States and serves as a supplier to most of the independent organ companies around the country. My pal Bryan Timm, OSI vice president, gave me the “family rate” tour followed by a nice lunch. Their vast factory building is a wonderland where everything is on a huge scale, where forklifts stack organ parts sky high, and where the multiplicity of organ stuff boggles the mind. Eight pedalboards are lined up, in the early stages of their construction. A couple dozen keyboards are making their way through production. Thousands of the little dividers between coupler tablets roll off saws into boxes—the blanks that they are cut from look like houses and hotels from “Monopoly.” It takes hundreds of clamps to glue up things like the huge wood organ pipes from 16′ and 32′ open wood diapasons, and those clamps are stacked on carts, ready for the next project. Organ pipes of all sizes are under construction, and the countless forms and jigs needed to make pipes in an infinity of shapes and sizes are neatly organized in racks and shelves. Ranks of wooden pipes whip through their production department and wind up in crates labeled for shipment to organ companies all over the country. Huge woodworking machines seem to be everywhere, all connected with the metal ducts of the dust collection system that gathers tons of sawdust and plane shavings into hoppers, powered by immense vacuum motors.

OSI is something of a nerve-central for the American pipe organ industry. The bustle of activity through the various departments reassures us that pipe organs are being built across the country, and that talented and dedicated people are pouring their hearts into them.

I left Erie to visit an interesting vintage mechanical-action organ in a recently closed church in Canaseraga, a village of about 500 people in rural central New York, about sixty-five miles south of Rochester. Garret House (1810–1900) was the most prominent organbuilder in Buffalo, New York, of his time. He built a nine-rank, one-manual organ for Trinity Episcopal Church in Canaseraga, and my circle of pins included a snowy drive on long lonely country roads to meet with a small group of parishioners of the now-closed church. They were a cheerful band of lifelong residents, families who have been friends and neighbors for generations, and they are hoping we can find a new home for the lovely organ. Since I joined the Organ Clearing House, I have met with many such groups, sorry to have lost their church and eager for the organ to carry life’s breath to another congregation. Having gathered specifications, dimensions, and photographs, I was put in touch with the officer of the diocese who manages property. I hope we can offer the organ soon. Keep your eye on our website.

Saying goodbye

One of the sure effects of celebrating people I have known for forty or fifty years is the passing of treasured colleagues, mentors, and friends. Thomas H. Anderson was all of these. He was born in 1937 in Belfast, Ireland, and started as an apprentice in an organ pipe making shop when he was fourteen. He emigrated to the United States at age nineteen to take a job with the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. That was 1956, when Aeolian-Skinner built nearly twenty organs, including the beauty at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York (see footnote). Not long after that (not sure when), he started his own firm, the Thomas H. Anderson Organ Pipe Company. He purchased a home in Easton, Massachusetts, not far from Dorchester and Randolph, Massachusetts, where the Aeolian-Skinner facilities were located. His property included a handsome barn attached to the house that he converted to a workshop, and a long, low “chicken coop” where he stored large pipes and materials.

I first met Tommy around 1984 when I went to work for Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, less than ten miles from Tommy’s shop. What a convenience to have a pipe maker so close by; we frequently drove up and down Bay Road between the two shops. Daniel Angerstein closed his shop when he was appointed tonal director at M. P. Möller, and I started the Bishop Organ Company by assuming Dan’s maintenance business. At the same time, I assumed the care of the large Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, and I quickly had a list of rebuilding and restoration projects, most of which required Tommy’s help.

Tommy and his wife Susan grew up on the same street in Belfast. Once he was established in the United States, he went back to Belfast to marry her and bring her to join him in Easton. I imagine there were many letters between them in the interim, planning a life together in a new country. What a courageous decision it was for Susan to join Tommy here. They raised four children, six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all supported by Tommy, also known as Granda, hammering away in that workshop.

There are few craftsmen whose intuitive grasp of π can outstrip an organ pipe maker. When I was working in a shop every day, I could easily eye the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters, or between an inch and an inch-and-a-sixteenth. Tommy could hold a pipe in his hand and sense the width of the rectangle to cut to form an identical tube. Circles are the province of the pipe maker. It’s uncanny.

Susan passed away on December 31, 1996. Tommy passed away on December 30, 2023. His funeral service was held in Easton, just a mile from his house, on January 6, 2024. I was there with nine other organbuilders to meet his family and share stories of our work with him. One of his daughters remembered the chore of loading crates of newly made organ pipes into their van and delivering them to the Consolidated Freightways Terminal in nearby Canton, Massachusetts.

We were a group of old-timers, most of us had known Tommy for decades, and each of us know many organbuilders out there on the grapevine. None of us could remember hearing anything but lovely words about Tommy. He was kind, humorous, caring, diligent, and skillful—a valued and admired colleague. He made organ pipes. Tens of thousands of organ pipes. His work will sing on in dozens of churches around the country. He was a valued friend. He was a gentleman.

Notes

1. Pierre Cochereau, organist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to open the 1956 American Guild of Organists national convention with a recital on the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. During the months preceding that convention, G. Donald Harrison was racing to complete the organ. It was fiercely hot, and there was a taxi strike going on, so after a long workday on June 14, Harrison had to walk several long blocks to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner with his wife Helen, he sat down to watch Victor Borge on television and died of a heart attack. It is interesting to note that John Scott, future organist at Saint Thomas Church, was born on June 18, 1956, just four days after Harrison’s death.

I remember when . . .

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

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

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

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

The body of Christ

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

Less is more.

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

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

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

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

Retirement project

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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.

Photo: The organ that inspired back surgery, 1886 George S. Hutchings Opus 156, Korean Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts (formerly Pilgrim Congregational Church) (photo credit: John Bishop)

Rites of passage

Almost twenty years ago, I gave up the joy of serving churches as organist and director of music. I served two churches, one in Cleveland and one in suburban Boston, for over twenty-five years, concurrent with my work as an organbuilder. I was offered the opportunity to join the Organ Clearing House as director during founder Alan Laufman’s final illness. Alan passed away in November of 2000, and as I started my new job with its heavy travel schedule, I realized that I would not be able to sustain my work as a church musician. I had great experiences with semi-professional choirs in both churches and loved my role as a worship leader, especially before the retirement of the creative and supportive senior pastor in the last church. (He was followed by a fool who made it a little easier to give up the work.) It was a huge adjustment to my professional and artistic being, but it was nice to have weekends free for the first time in my life, especially as Wendy and I had just acquired our house in Maine.

I was first involved maintaining pipe organs when I started working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio (see this column in the February 2020 issue, pages 12–13) in 1976. Since I moved to the Boston area in 1984, I have maintained scores of organs with as many as 120 clients at one time. Since we moved to New York City five years ago, since I started a consultation business, and since the Organ Clearing House has grown ever busier, I realized last fall that I was unable to meet the needs of those clients and their organs in a timely, reliable fashion, and decided to retire from organ maintenance while continuing with the other work and while starting new ventures.

After forty-five Christmas tuning rushes, after countless arrivals at churches to find that the heat wasn’t on, after hundreds of panicky emergency calls from organists, and after one serious injury caused by a rickety antique ladder collapsing under my (admittedly excessive) weight, I look forward to a calendar free of day-at-a-time toolbox lugging, free of messy organ consoles, and free of unscheduled vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, chattering tourists, and unannounced funerals interrupting my work.

Funny, even without all those appointments, my calendar is still filled, but it is filled with new ventures, and with the effects of Anno Domini taking their toll on my physical being, I am excited about this change. I met last fall with a couple local colleagues, asking about their willingness and ability to take on new clients, and I have just finished the last round of correspondence recommending them to the last round of my clients. I still have a lot of church keys to return, but otherwise I am officially finished. I do not want to lose my last skills (after twenty years, getting on an organ bench is not like getting back on a bicycle), so I have retained just one client here in New York. It is a synagogue that operates on a different cycle than the Christian churches, it is a large, interesting organ that is easy to get around in, there is an elevator from street level to the balcony, and it is just a couple blocks from where I get my hair cut. The organist is a good friend, and I know I will enjoy going there several times each year. It is the perfect retirement service client.

I started maintaining organs in the Boston area when I joined the shop of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and when he closed his shop to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I started my own business and assumed most of his service clients. I served five of those churches for thirty-six years, and in each of those, I outlasted multiple pastors, organists, custodians, secretaries, and music committee chairs.

I have written about specific experiences on the tuning road periodically in this column, so I do not need to tell you about the wedding that was delayed because there was a card table against the intake of the blower. I do not have to tell you about the time I was fired for sending a bill for almost $1,000 for a service call that took fifteen minutes. (It took six hours of driving and three hours on a ferryboat to make the round trip on Good Friday!) I do not have to tell you about the furious organist who called in the middle of a recording session saying the whole organ was out of tune, insisting that I drive two hours right away to find that high F-sharp of the Pedal Clarion was off speech. (A resourceful organist might have isolated the problem and turned off the stop.) And I do not have to tell you about the night that Madame Duruflé gave me a big hug and kiss in the midst of a post-convention recital scrum, thanking me for helping make her Boston recital a success.

But as I reflect on that long career of caring for organs, I thought I would share a few observations from the desk of an itinerant organ worker.

Upside down and backwards

The health of the church universal has diminished substantially in the last thirty-five years. As director of the Organ Clearing House, I see that more dramatically than many. Tomorrow I am visiting a huge stone Gothic building in Manhattan that was a Roman Catholic church. It once housed thousands of worshipers at a time, surrounding them in artistic glory. It is empty now. There are puddles of water on the nave floor and chains on the front doors. The immense and opulent four-manual organ is mute. We are waiting for permits to be approved so the organ can be removed.

But diminutions are visible even in churches that are functioning and relatively healthy. Earlier in my career, most churches had at least one full-time person in the office in addition to clergy. The ubiquitous parish secretary was typically the one who really knew what was going on in the place. Today, many have been replaced by answering machines, out-sourced accounting firms, and messaging through a website. It is increasingly difficult to get personally in touch with someone to ensure that the heat will be turned on before a tuning, and the pleasant banter with church staff over a cup of scorched coffee is a thing of the past.

Each church also had a sexton or custodian who cared for the building and did routine maintenance on machinery like oiling motors and changing filters. Today it is common for churches to hire cleaning services that come weekly, while volunteer members of the property committee look after the mechanical things. In my opinion, that approach is backwards, even oxymoronic. Any church building of any size has mechanical equipment like furnaces, boilers, pumps, blowers, and elevators that are much more complex and sophisticated than anything found in a usual home. It makes more sense to me to hire a stationary engineer to visit the building four times a year to service machinery and invite volunteer church members to clean the place.

Make your house fair as you are able.

Bet I just set you a’whistling, “Love, the Guest, is on the way.” My Facebook page is dotted with photos of organ consoles labeled, “. . . my office today . . . .”
True enough. An organ console is a workstation, comparable to an office cubicle or computer station. But it is also part of a musical instrument, located in a sacred and public space, and I do not think it is appropriate to keep it looking like a dirty bathroom. As a parishioner, I do not like seeing piles of books on the organ console. I know you want to keep paper clips, post-its, Kleenex, and lozenges handy, but I have always been a little offended by nail clippers, hairbrushes, paper cups, used Kleenex, and the like. I think they signal disrespect. Maybe you could use a neat little box, or a pencil case like you had in grade school. If your fingernails need to be clipped, do it at home. I do not want to hear that snipping sound from my pew. “Our Father (snip), who art in heaven (snip) . . . .”

Good console hygiene helps the reliability of the organ. Paperclips falling between keys, sticky stains from spilled soda or sugary coffee, or crumbs from that quick bagel or donut will cause sticky keys, ciphers, and dead notes. The most noticeable physical feature of the elderly female organist at one church was her waist-length gray hair. It was dramatic and lovely, until we had to fix dead notes in the pedal keyboards caused by great hairballs mixed up in the pedal contacts. Disgusting. She kept a hairbrush at the console, and I suppose she passed the time during sermons preening. I know from experience that I would rather pull recently deceased bats out of reed pipes. If you as the staff member who uses the organ do not show your respect for the value of the instrument, you are less likely to find support from funding committees when it becomes necessary to spend a lot of money on it.

During service calls and consultation visits, I make a point of observing how well a building is kept. Are trash cans emptied, kitchens clean, and floors swept and mopped? Is the choir library strewn about the choir room? Is the organ chamber and blower room full of extraneous stuff? Is the basement a repository for thirty-year-old rummage sale signs and moldy pageant costumes? All these things reflect the attitude of a parish toward its valuable real estate.

You are the steward.

You may be a famous recitalist with advanced degrees from a conservatory of music and organist of a big city church with a huge organ, or you may be a converted pianist who plays a simple instrument in a small rural church, but you are both stewards of that instrument. It is likely that no one else in the building knows as much as you do about the organ, and it is your responsibility to see that it is well cared for. You do not have to be a very sophisticated musician to notice when a note is dead, when the shutters do not work, or when the tremolo will not turn off. When the furnace stops working, a specialist is called. When the organ stops working, a specialist should be called. If you do not know anyone who services organs, ask your local chapter of the American Guild of Organists, ask your diocesan or denominational headquarters. They would be able and willing to offer guidance.

Get to know your technician. A responsible organ technician can tell a lot about how an organ is used by snooping around a little, seeing what volumes of music are on the console or in the choir room, or reading a discarded Sunday bulletin. But I always preferred to have a personal relationship with each organist. If you are confused or concerned about something, call your tuner. It is part of a technician’s job to help the musician know their instrument better, to know why and how temperature affects the pitch of the organ, to know simple facts about how to take care of it. Besides, service call chats are a great way to take the pulse of a congregation.

A responsible organ technician will keep the organist aware of larger maintenance issues that are looming. It is likely that a fifty-year-old organ with electro-pneumatic action will need to be releathered pretty soon. If the technician takes the time to show the organist what a pouch or pneumatic looks like, and how a failure of leather will affect its operation, the church in turn will be less surprised to learn that the organ will soon need hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. Even the largest and wealthiest churches need to plan ahead.

May the force be with you.

Another regular feature of my Facebook page is a meme, often featuring the dowager Lady Grantham, sneering at congregants who report that the organ is too loud. In the nearly twenty years since I “left the bench” and had opportunities to hear other organists at work, I have observed that many of them do play too loud too often. An organ that is equipped with howitzers for the glory of Easter should be played with good taste and sensitivity on Pentecost 23. I propose a courtesy tax. For each time you use the en chamade, you give up coffee for a week. It is tiring to stand through five verses of a hymn with mixtures on throughout, and it borders on offensive to have powerful reeds featured in each selection. You as the organist are used to all that power. Those in the pews are not.

The glory of the pipe organ is apparent in its quietest voices as much as in its powerful choruses. And the whole point of the instrument with its myriad voices is the palette of tone colors. As you go from one verse to another, mix it up a little. Play one verse on principals alone. Play another with the melody on an Oboe or Clarinet. Read the text of the hymn. Does it imply anything about the registration of the organ? Or do you plow through “. . . oh
still small voice of calm . . .” like a runaway train with whistles blowing?

As you are the steward of the condition of the organ, you are also the steward of its favor with the congregation. I love a powerful organ as much as the next person. I have played two hundred-rank organs in huge buildings with the high-octane brass players from a major symphony orchestra. It is thrilling. But I have also set a church full of people to weeping, including myself, as the organ shimmered gently in candlelight with an occasional punctuating note from the chimes. Make beautiful music. Do not wield a weapon.

Nothing is forever.

When I was having my first organ lessons fifty years ago, there was a vital and active community of pipe organ professionals in the Boston area. Companies like Fisk, Noack, Andover, Bozeman, and Roche were digging into the exciting world of classically inspired tracker-action organs. My mentors took me to workshop open house parties and recitals on a regular basis. Many of the concerts were followed by convivial dinners at local restaurants, and I was in the thrall of it all. The New England Conservatory of Music was a centerpiece of that activity, and it did not occur to anyone that the heady environment might be temporary.

There are still many prosperous church music programs in the Boston area, but the organ department at NEC is gone, so fewer young and brilliant organists are coming to town, and many of the churches where I serviced organs for well-known creative musicians have given up on their organs. The church that I served for so long as director of music still employs an organist, but they formally decided to stop maintaining the organ. I was stunned when I called to schedule a tuning, and the pastor got on the line to inform me.

If you share catty comments on social media when a member of the congregation suggests that the organ is too loud, if you think your parish owes you the finest organ, you are not serving the parish or the world of the pipe organ very well. This is not about you. It is about your role adding beauty, depth, and meaning to the worship of a community of faith.

When I lived in rural Ohio, a neighbor who was a soybean and corn farmer commented that a particular seed for corn was advertised as especially productive on good ground. “I can grow anything on good ground. What I need is something that grows well on my fields.”

Where it all begins

When I was growing up, my family had a summer home on Cape Cod where we grew enamored by a brilliant potter about five miles away. Scargo Hill Pottery was founded by Harry Holl, and over fifty years later his daughters still make the characteristic shaped dishes, mugs, and vases we grew to love. Harry worked with white porcelain that he accented with dark spots made by mixing the black sand from a specific nearby beach into his clay. He accented them with vibrant glazes. Our household and those of my siblings are rich with Harry Holl pieces; it is lovely to eat daily meals off such beautiful art and to have such ornaments on our walls and shelves.

From its beginning Scargo Hill Pottery has had a wonderful, almost spiritual side. There is a row of potter’s wheels in a sunlit spot with a translucent fiberglass roof and no walls, where you can stand and watch the artists create their products. I still think it is magical to watch a turned shape emerge from a lump of clay and become a useful vessel. From my earliest teenage years I have been in love with places where beautiful things were made. On many a summer evening, we piled into the car after supper to visit Harry and his troupe. The lovely outings were capped by a stop at Sea Breeze soft-serve ice cream conveniently located along the route.

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The 150-acre summer estate of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is a couple miles from where we live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. French is perhaps best known for two iconic public sculptures, The Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts, near “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” and the monumental statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He bought the property in 1896 and immediately commissioned the construction of a studio that became his principal workspace for the rest of his life. At that time there was train service from New York to Stockbridge; the Stockbridge station, long out of use, still stands just a couple miles from Chesterwood.

The studio is situated close to the house and has large glass windows providing plenty of natural light inside that feature broad views of Monument Mountain and the rest of the southern Berkshires. The principal work room is twenty-nine feet by thirty feet with twenty-six-foot-high walls allowing enough space for monumental equestrian statues. Since most of French’s work was to be installed outdoors, the design of the building included a working platform on railroad tracks with large doors that allowed him to move a massive work in progress outside so he could view it in natural light. He was so eager to work in the beautiful new space that he moved in two weeks before it was complete. The building included a reception room where he could receive potential clients and where his family had afternoon tea when the weather would not permit using the house’s grand south-facing porch.

The Minute Man was completed in 1875 for the centennial of the start of the Revolutionary War, before French acquired Chesterwood, but the Lincoln Memorial was completed in 1920. French designed Lincoln’s statue at Chesterwood, and a six-foot model is on display there. The full-scale statue was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers whose studio was on 142nd Street in the Bronx, New York. A four-foot bronze statue of a winged angel by Daniel Chester French, The Spirit of Life, stands in a portico at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge.

A visit to Chesterwood is an inspiration. It is thrilling to think of the wealthy and powerful people who traveled there to commission public art, and wonderful to imagine the brilliant and prolific artist toiling in the lovely studio in that bucolic setting, surrounded by family and friends.

§

Another iconic artist’s studio is within walking distance of our house in Stockbridge. Norman Rockwell had been living in Vermont when his wife began treatment at a prominent psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, and Rockwell moved his family there in 1953. His first studio in this town was behind a large plate-glass window in the central storefront of Stockbridge’s Main Street, directly above the Back Room Rest, familiarly known as Alice’s Restaurant of Arlo Guthrie fame. He later built a free-standing studio with plenty of natural light on South Street. When the present building of the Norman Rockwell Museum was opened in 1993, the studio was moved to the new site where museum visitors can go inside to see Rockwell’s easels, paints, brushes, props, and tools.

Many hundreds of Norman Rockwell’s large-scale paintings were featured on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post and are inscribed in the artistic minds of millions of people around the world. I have been moved many times by sitting on the bench and playing the keys upon which the giants of organ music sat and played—Widor, Dupré, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and so many others. It is equally moving to see the stool on which Rockwell sat while painting his beloved three-dimensional self-portrait, his iconic Rosie the Riveter, and The Runaway.

Our place in Stockbridge backs up to the cemetery where every morning I walk Farley the Goldendoodle through the cemetery, past Norman Rockwell’s grave to the adjoining Naumkeag estate, a great place for him (Farley) to be off leash for his morning constitutional. Norman is there with two of his wives, his gravestone festooned with tubes of paint, paintbrushes, and little trinkets left in tribute to his marvelous career and influence on our cultural life. Our granddaughter has been swept up by Norman-mania, being sure to visit him each time she visits us.

That Ingenious Business

In 1990 the Pennsylvania German Society published a book by our late colleague, friend, and organ builder, Raymond Brunner about the Pennsylvania German organbuilders Philip Bachman and David Tannenberg, among many others. These were some of the first organbuilders active in the United States, and a few authentic examples of their eighteenth-century American-built organs are still extant. As the organ was the most complex device built by humans at that time, the phrase “that ingenious business” evolved around that local industry. Now we are surrounded by technological marvels—no eighteenth-century organbuilder could have imagined mobile phones, flat-screen televisions, or nuclear submarines, but the pipe organ remains one of our fascinating achievements.

Among my many pleasures of working with the Organ Clearing House is visiting the workshops where pipe organs are built. We have working relationships with many of the country’s fine organbuilders as we help them with their projects, providing truck transportation, rigging and hoisting, assembly and disassembly. I have been in dozens of organ shops both here and abroad, and I always marvel at the creativity and dedication of the people in them. My first shop visits were open houses at Fisk and Noack in the 1970s when I was in high school. Organbuilder George Bozeman was an early mentor. I sang with his wife, Pat, in the choir at my home parish, and they were generous, taking me to those magical places to see organs nearing completion and ready to be dismantled and shipped. My high school organ teacher John Skelton also shared those wonders with me.

My first experience working in an organ shop was the summer of 1975, between my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, when I spent those months in the workshop of Bozeman-Gibson & Company. The shop was in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a building previously occupied by organbuilder Rostron Kershaw, and I spent my first day as a nascent organbuilder in the parking lot with sawhorses, façade pipes, Zip-Strip, hose, bucket, and rubber gloves. Oh, the glory of it. The parking lot was shared with a guy who transported chickens on a flatbed truck stacked high with wooden coops. I do not think he raised the chickens. I guess you would say he was trafficking in chickens, but the truck clattered in and out, and he was always happy to take the sawdust from the dust collection system to line his coops. Once when the bin was empty, he asked if we would plane some wood.

That summer, the company was working on the restoration of the wonderful 1848 George Stevens organ in the First Church of Belfast, Maine, and the installation of a new organ in the Federated Church of Castleton, Vermont. What an adventure it was for a nineteen-year-old enthusiast to spend the summer driving around New England, staying in motels, eating with a meal allowance ($1.50, $2.50, $3.50 for breakfast, lunch, dinner), and having my first hands-on experiences with organs. I returned the following summer and helped install the Bozeman-Gibson organ on Squirrel Island, an exclusive summer community off the Maine coast near Boothbay Harbor, six miles as the crow flies from our house in Newcastle.

Nearly fifty years later, I still marvel at the magic. I have a sense that it is improbable that we would be allowed, even encouraged to make something as otherworldly as a pipe organ. The variety of skills involved seems endless. An organbuilder is an architect, carpenter, woodworker, steel worker, electrician, leather worker, metallurgist, sculptor, acoustician, and musician. A comprehensive workshop houses familiar machinery like saws, drill presses, and planers, milling machines, and welders, and equipment you are not likely to see elsewhere like the cauldrons for melting soft metals, and especially the tables for casting the long sheets of metal used to make organ pipes.

François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles de Salelles (1709–1779, we know him familiarly as Dom Bédos) was a Benedictine monk and organbuilder who published a monumental treatise, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of Organbuilding) in 1778. Its volumes are packed with elegant engravings showing all facets of the trade including tools, workbenches, mechanical actions, wind systems, windchest layout, and clever exploded views of the interior of a complete organ. The cauldron and casting table are clearly illustrated, just like those found in modern workshops. I imagine that Dom Bédos built lovely big bellows to help tend the fires under his melting pot. Of course, today’s organbuilders do not have to stoke wood fires to melt their metal; a gas burner does the trick in a trice. Flipping through the pages of the good monk’s treatise shows how little has changed in the craft in nearly 250 years.

But how much has changed

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) is revered for the tremendous legacy of pipe organs his company produced for such churches as Notre-Dame and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, but along with over 500 instruments he was honored for the invention of the circular saw blade. How we take them for granted now. I still have the table saw I bought in 1987 when I started the Bishop Organ Company, and I have ten or fifteen circular blades for it, some of which have specialty uses. Most of them have carbide steel tips on the teeth that stay sharp through miles of cuts. Think of spending a day making thousands of wood trackers, maybe ten feet long with a cross section of 1.5 by 8 millimeters. You stand at that saw all day making cut after cut. It is monotonous, but you cannot let your mind wander because you really want precise cuts, and you want to keep your fingers. (I still have all mine after forty-nine years behind the saw.)

As repetitive and precise as that task is, besides the circular saw blade we have the added luxury of a shop-wide dust collection system. The good monk had none of that. He cut those trackers by hand. My mentor John Leek taught me to make long, straight saw cuts and to plane a board flat and parallel by hand before I was free to use the machines. It was a great learning experience. I hardly ever did that again, but that helped me imagine the time, effort, and concentration it would take to make an organ full of trackers by hand. Or think of making a keyboard by hand with sixty long straight cuts. When I worked for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, I built the four keyboards for the new console of a large organ in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I remember that the lowest few naturals of the bottom keyboard were a little wider than the others. I have not noticed anything like that in any of the historic organs I have visited. I recently had a fun exchange about that with the good people of the Red River Organ Company who maintain that organ now.

I had a root canal a couple months ago—not my first choice of how to spend a morning, but I had a good laugh with the endodontist when I told her that the smell of grinding my teeth reminded me of standing at a table saw cutting ivory or cow bone for keyboards. I was impressed by the array of teeny cutting tools she used with a compressed-air motor to drill so delicately into the roots of my teeth. She spoke softly to her assisting technician, “A 14, please,” “A 12, please.” Between gulps, I asked if those were bit sizes. Yes, but of course the numbers refer to length in millimeters, not diameter.

Drill sergeant

The art of organbuilding can be defined as the art of knowing where to put the holes. Each pipe in an organ needs at least two holes, a toehole to stand in and a rackboard hole that stands it up straight. In a slider chest, there are two more holes for each pipe, one in the windchest table and one in the slider. A ten-stop, sixty-one-note slider chest has 2,440 holes. Those in the windchest, sliders, and toeboards range from about ½ inch to 1¼ inches with some larger oval holes because the holes cannot be larger than the travel distance of the slider. The rackboard holes range from about ½ inch to 3 inches or more, with the largest pipes supported by felted “scallop” racks higher up on the pipe. Dom Bédos’s windchests did not have sixty-one note compasses, but he still had to drill thousands of holes just to hold up and blow the pipes. There are usually at least two holes in each key of a keyboard, one for a balance pin, and one for a guide pin. He built an organ with five manuals, each with fifty-six notes—that is 560 holes. He used a “bit-and-brace” drill with handmade bits. What skill, precision, and plain hard work 
was involved.

I have thousands of drill bits in my workshop—twist bits, multi-spur bits, Forstner bits (guided by the outside edge rather than a center pin), countersinks, and spade bits. To turn those bits, I have a little fleet of drill motors with rechargeable batteries and the drill press I bought with the table saw.

With your own eyes

If you have not already, I hope you all get to visit an organ shop sometime. Most companies that build new organs love to host open house events when an organ is ready to be shipped. Those events typically include food and drink, displays about how certain tasks and processes are accomplished, and the added excitement of visitors from the church where the organ is going. If you are planning a trip to an area that is home to an organ company, get in touch through their website or give them a call to ask if you might visit. At least they will put you on a mailing list for the next open house. There is an old gag about sausages—you might love to eat them, but you do not want to watch them being made. Watching the artisans at work in an organ shop will inspire your love of the instrument and will inspire your musicianship. It’s nothing like sausages.

Let’s hoist a few.

On September 24, 2023, Alyson Krueger published an article in The New York Times under the headline, “My Running Club, My Everything,” telling of the culture of running clubs in New York City in which twenty-five or more people gather at a specified meeting place and run together for four or five miles. She described an outing of the Upper West Side Running Club that met at the American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at Eighty-First Street) where members ran a loop around Central Park and wound up at the Gin Mill on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-First Street, one block west of the museum. I chuckled as I read because the Gin Mill is a favorite after hours haunt of the Organ Clearing House crew. I wonder how many of you reading this have sat there with our guys?

The Gin Mill has a happy hour routine with discounted drinks, and if you are anything like a regular and the bartender knows you, it seems as if you are charged by the hour. Your glass gets magically and repeatedly refilled, and the closing check is a nice surprise. I have spent quite a few evenings there, but our boots-on-the-ground crew has spent dozens. In 2010 the crew spent most of the summer hoisting organ parts into the chambers at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, followed by hoisting pints and other concoctions at the Gin Mill. Numerous subsequent projects have allowed reunions with the friendly staff there—friendly to good natured partyers, but hard on bad apples.

Since so many of our projects involve hoisting organ components in and out of balconies, towers, and high chambers, I spend a lot of time talking with scaffolding vendors around the country. I have first-name relationships with reps in a dozen cities, as well as with our personal representatives from national scaffolding vendors. We own several electric hoists, including one with a 100-foot reach purchased for that job at Saint John the Divine that can hoist a 2,000-pound load 100 feet in two minutes with a soft start and stop. A multiple-week job like that means that someone has held a finger on the up or down button for dozens of hours. We like to ship our own hoist across the country because specialized rental equipment like that can be hard to find and in poor condition. In a usual setup, the hoist is hung from a trolley that rolls on an I-beam so a heavy load like a four-manual console or ten-stop windchest can be lifted clear of a balcony rail, trolleyed out over the nave floor, and safely lowered. Safely for the console, safely for our crew.

The bells, the bells

Wendy and I left our apartment in Greenwich Village on the heels of the pandemic and moved early last year to bucolic Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, about five miles from the New York border. Our house is three doors up Church Street from Main Street where stands the granite Children’s Chime Tower on the Village Green that is shared by the First Congregational Church. After we moved in, we were delighted to learn that we can hear the largest bell ringing the hour, every hour, from the house—no more wondering what time it is in the middle of the night.

The tower was built in 1879, the gift of David Dudley Field II, son of David Dudley Field, pastor of the Congregational Church, and his wife, Submit (really). David II was a prominent New York politician and attorney who represented William Magear “Boss” Tweed in his Tammany Hall embezzlement trial. (Tweed died in prison.) David II dedicated the tower to his grandchildren, stipulating that the chimes should be played every day from “apple blossom time to first frost.” His grave is in the Stockbridge Cemetery, just across Main Street from the Chime Tower. My grandfather was rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge when I was a kid, and I remember sitting on that green with my grandmother at picnic suppers listening to recitals on the chimes. The music was simple as there are only eleven bells, but since it was more than fifty years ago, I remember it as grand. That tradition continued until recently when the timber frame supporting the chimes was deemed unsafe due to an infestation of carpenter ants.

The big bell continued to ring every hour until a storm caused a power failure last spring, stopping the clock at 2:16. The clock was not reset after the storm, leaving us wondering about the time during the night. At the last town meeting, the citizens approved rebuilding the chimes with a new steel frame, refurbishing the chimes’ playing action, replacing the roof, and re-pointing the stone work.

I was returning to Stockbridge last week from our place in Maine and saw a large crane set up next to the tower. I went home, unloaded the car, walked back to the green with Farley the Goldendoodle to see what was going on, and I found three men from the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, preparing to hoist the bells back into the tower. They had removed them earlier in the week, placing them on a flat-bed trailer owned by the town so they could be driven to safety overnight at the public works yard a half-mile away. The new steel frame was in place, and they were hoisting the bells with their new striking mechanisms back into the tower.

In the twenty months since we moved to town, we had only heard the largest bell as it tolled the hours, but now, as the people from Verdin were putting things together and testing the new actions, I heard all the bells for the first time in more than fifty years. At least one of the technicians knew how to play a little so a few hymns and a couple children’s songs wafted up the street to our house. Before they left town, they set and started the clock, freeing it from 2:16 to cover all 720 minutes of the twelve-hour cycle. The morning after the first night of tolling the hour, I was walking Farley a few minutes before 7:00 and ran into our neighbor Marty with Brody the Labrador at the poop-bag kiosk across from the tower. When the bell tolled the hour and we were chatting about the return of the bells, Marty told me that Stewart across the street used to play the chimes and was looking forward to volunteering again when the rest of the work on the tower is complete and the chime goes back into service. I suppose I will, too.

Doing it the old-fashioned way

After Wendy and I visited Florence, Italy, in May 2023, I wrote about the hoisting equipment designed by Filippo Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of the cathedral there. He had won the design competition in 1418, and construction started in 1420 on what is still the largest unsupported dome in the world. Brunelleschi’s hoisting gear was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill on the floor of the cathedral, a rig that was a lot messier and required more maintenance than what we use on our job sites. He made use of blocks and tackle, the same as used to handle the rigging of sailing ships. It is fun to picture workers hauling hay into the church to feed the oxen, and I suppose there was a poop-bag kiosk there also.

The real genius of Brunelleschi’s hoist was the crane at the top that could transfer stones weighing thousands of pounds laterally to every spot in the circumference of the dome. In the world of rigging, it is one thing to hoist a heavy load vertically; it is a very different challenge to move horizontally from under the hoisting point.

We marvel at ancient feats of lifting. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, is believed to be between four- and five-thousand years old. It includes some thirty stones, some as heavy as twenty-five tons. The stones came from a quarry sixteen miles away—simply bringing them to the site was effort enough. In most American states, the weight limits on tandem axles of commercial trucks are between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds. Rhode Island has the highest limit, 44,800 pounds, which is about the weight of one of the stones at Stonehenge. The Grove crane that was helping my friends from Verdin hoisting bells is a robust machine with a fifty-ton lifting capacity. The engineers and laborers at Stonehenge would have been pleased with help from Gary the crane operator.

We visit iconic churches in Europe built in centuries past and admire their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs. The monumental organ completed in 1738 by Christian Müller at the church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has 32′ pipes in the pedal tower. As modern organbuilders, we know how much work it is to handle things like that. Those eighteenth-century craftsmen worked very hard.

I was twenty-one years old when my mentor John Leek and I helped a crew from Flentrop in Zaandam, the Netherlands, install the three-manual organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. The organ has a beautiful twenty-five-foot mahogany case topped with a massive crown with heavy moldings that stands on a pedestal balcony something like fifteen feet above the floor. The balcony is shallower than the organ case so when you are up on top, you look straight down to the floor.

There is a polished 16′ Principal in the façade, and come to think of it, we installed that organ using technology and equipment similar to that used by Brunelleschi, lifting everything to the balcony and into the organ using a block-and-tackle with hemp rope. Looking back, it would have been a lot more pleasant had anyone thought of using nylon rigging rope like you find on a modern sailboat because that hairy, prickly hemp was hard on our hands. The heaviest piece of the organ was the impost frame with the huge moldings that form the bases of the case towers and the rigid structure that connects the lower and upper cases. I suppose it weighed around 1,500 pounds; so instead of oxen, there was me and a young guy from Flentrop pulling on the rope. We were much neater and easier to maintain than Brunelleschi’s oxen. My sixty-seven-year-old shoulders and back could no more do that kind of work now than fly me to the moon.

To lift the big shiny façade pipes up to the case, a co-worker picked up the top of the pipe and climbed a ladder from the nave floor to the balcony as others moved the toe end toward the ladder, bringing the pipe to vertical. I wore a leather harness around my waist as if I was carrying a flagpole in a parade, we placed the toe of the pipe in the cup, and I climbed the ladder, toe following top as the others above me balanced and guided it into place. Today I stand in a church gazing up at the organ, remembering doing that work, incredulous. I am not half the man I used to be.

I have been with the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years, watching my colleague Amory Atkins set up scaffolding and hoisting equipment on dozens, even hundreds of job sites. There is still plenty of hustle to the work, but the I-beams, trolley, and electric hoist all supported by steel scaffolding make for a much safer and less strenuous work site.

Making the impossible possible

When I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area in the 1980s, we had a releathering project in the large organ of one of Boston’s great churches. As usual, we started the job with a string of heavy days disconnecting organ components covered with decades of city grime and removing them from the organ for transportation to our workshop. After we had wrestled a particularly awkward and heavy part down the ladders and out of the building, one of my employees announced that now he thought he understood organbuilding. “It’s squeezing into tiny spaces to remove screws you can’t reach, to separate a part of the organ the size of a refrigerator that’s covered with mud and sharp pointy things and carrying it down a ladder next to a Tiffany window.”

He was right. A big manual windchest might weigh 800 or 1,000 pounds, more for a large console. If we are planning to dismantle or install a Skinner organ that has one of those wonderful electro-pneumatic harps, we might plan an entire day to handle that single specialty voice—they are big and heavy and include row after row of little prickly things that dig into your hands, arms, and shoulders. When I hear a harp in service playing, recital, or recording, my mind jumps instantly to the titanic struggles I have had moving them. They sound so ethereal in a lofty room, but they are pugnacious bulky brats to handle.

The thrilling rumbles of big 16′ and 32′ stops do not happen anywhere else in music, but again, my mind jumps to the herculean task of moving such things. The pipes, racks, and windchests of a 32′ Double Open Wood weigh many tons and will fill half of a semi-trailer. One of the marvels of the pipe organ is the idea that a single pipe might be approaching forty feet in length including pipe foot and tuning length, weigh close to a ton, and can produce only one musical tone at one pitch at one volume level. What a luxurious note.

When I meet people at social events, they are invariably surprised when they learn about my work. “A pipe organ builder. I didn’t know there were any of you left.” Another common comment is someone remembering the organ looming high in the back of the church and if they ever gave it any thought, they assumed that it was part of the building. Not so. Every organ in every building anywhere in the world was put there intentionally by craftsmen. They had to figure out how to mount and secure each heavy component. Think of the sprawling sixteenth-century organ case at the cathedral in Chartres. It gives the impression that it is somehow hanging from the stained-glass windows, but 500 years ago, those workers built scaffolding clear up to the clerestory windows and hoisted and lugged the heavy woodwork and huge pipes to their lofty spots.

Twenty years ago, we were delivering a three-manual organ to a church in suburban Richmond, Virginia. There was a big organ case with polished façade pipes, five large windchests, all the machinery and ductwork for the wind system, seventy or eighty eight-foot pipe trays full of nicely packed pipes, the console, and all the mysterious looking bits and pieces that make up a full-sized pipe organ. Parishioners volunteered on a Sunday afternoon to help unload the truck, and by day’s end the sanctuary was jam packed with carefully made, expensive looking stuff. I had worked with the church’s organ committee and governing board to create and negotiate the project and knew several of the people involved very well. After the dust had settled that evening, one of them came up to me and commented, “John, it wasn’t until this moment that I understood why organs cost so much money.”