In the Wind: travels in Italy

Follow the money.

In the spring of 2023 Wendy and I went to Tuscany, my first time in Italy where we visited Florence and Bologna. We also spent several nights in a villa borrowed from a friend in a small town called Camaiore. Marco runs a wine shop in lower Manhattan and is a classic “foodie.” He gave us a list of the markets where we should mention his name, and we had a blast buying the best Italian ingredients and cooking in his beautiful kitchen. The funny thing was that the drain in the five-foot-wide copper sink was not at the lowest point, so we had to keep pushing the water uphill.

Bologna is a gustatory capital with an extensive district devoted to specialty food shops, and we spent an afternoon with a foodie tour guide. We visited a small “laboratory” where a half-dozen women were making pasta for one of the shops. What magic to watch that ancient craft, and what a delight to sample their products from paper cups while they worked. We had meals in wonderful intimate restaurants and fell in love with the ubiquitous local Sangiovese grapes.

Our visit to Florence was revelatory. I took a half-dozen art history courses in college and have long been aware of the vast collections of art housed in Florence, but I was not prepared for the depth and majesty of the place. I was also not prepared for the vast throngs of tourists pulsing through the narrow streets. Florence is frightfully crowded, but in spite of the bad behaviors of some tourists, it is worth the struggle. Florence is all laid out on streets that were established in the fifteenth century and before, and you never saw such a cute little garbage truck.

We managed a magical moment in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Art Works of the Cathedral) by arriving just when it opened while the masses were still sleeping off their Aperol spritzes and were privileged to stand alone for long minutes in the gallery of Michelangelo’s La Pietà, carved from a huge block of Carrara marble and completed in 1555 just before the artist’s eightieth birthday. Once again, a private tour guide helped enlighten us and gained us access for some shorter lines, especially to see Michelangelo’s David.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici founded the Medici bank in 1397, starting a powerful dynasty that became Italy’s wealthiest family. The bank’s early prosperity was based on the busy silk and textile trade in the region and expanded into many other industries, giving the Medici family seats of power that lasted nearly three centuries through the high Renaissance. Many of the official and ceremonial buildings in Florence were funded by the Medicis, who were also patrons of Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo. They funded the basilicas of Saint Peter in Rome and Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which houses a bewildering collection of art. The Medicis’ fingers are everywhere in Tuscany. Wealthy patrons have always been important supporters of the arts, providing funding for iconic buildings, musical compositions, public sculptures, and performance venues.

Running a railroad

Wendy and I moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three years ago and have been feasting on the wide range of cultural institutions in our area. It is an hour drive to Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), which occupies a vast old mill building in North Adams, Massachusetts. The Clark Art Institute, also an hour away in Williamstown, Massachusetts, houses a huge collection of fine art by the old masters and contemporary artists. The Norman Rockwell Museum is ten minutes from us. We sometimes walk there using a back way because the grounds are so beautiful and Farley the Goldendoodle loves to run in the surrounding fields. Jacob’s Pillow is a busy dance venue where we attended a performance by the Royal Ballet last week.

The crown jewel of the area is Tanglewood, ten minutes from home, the 500-acre summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) was the conductor of the BSO when Tanglewood was founded. Today it hosts a wide variety of artists including James Taylor (who gave his fiftieth consecutive July Fourth concert there this year), the Boston Pops, and a galaxy of classical stars. In the past week we have heard the brilliant Chinese pianist Yuja Wang play twice, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the BSO in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, the 5,100-seat venue with roof and no walls, and a solo recital in Ozawa Hall featuring eight preludes by Shostakovich, the Barber Piano Sonata, and Four Ballades by Chopin.

Each weekend the orchestra is playing at Tanglewood, the BSO publishes a program book of around seventy-five pages, which includes the programs for four concerts, biographies of the performers, and program notes for all the music. There are brief histories of both the orchestra and Tanglewood, health and safety protocols, and there are six pages listing the donors and patrons who have contributed amounts ranging from $5,000 to “Ten Million and Above.” In this weekend’s book, there are eight names in “Ten Million and Above,” five in “Seven and One Half Million,” sixteen in “Five Million,” thirty-nine in “Two and One Half Million,” and a hundred-twenty-six in “One Million.” The categories imply ranges, those named in the one million group gave between one and two-and-a-half million, but assuming that each gift was at the base amount of the group, those gifts totaled $421,000,000.

Mark Volpe, the BSO’s longtime president and chief executive officer, retired in 2021 after twenty-three years in that position. During his tenure, the BSO’s annual budget increased from $49,000,000 to $107,000,000, and the orchestra’s endowment tripled to $456,000,000.

The current roster of the BSO is published on pages 12–13 of the program book for July 12–14. It includes ninety-four musicians, fifty-three of whom occupy named chairs “endowed in perpetuity.” John Ferrillo has been principal oboe of the BSO since 2001. Before that, he was principal of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In 2015 he was paid $286,621; nine years later it must be significantly more.¹ How much money must be set aside to endow Ferrillo’s chair in perpetuity? Enough that the proceeds of the principal will produce over $300,000 which is likely over $6,000,000. Perhaps not all the endowed chairs support salaries as high as Ferrillo’s, but it is fair to guess that they would add up to $245,000,000, and there are another forty musicians in seats that are not endowed. That is what it takes to run that railroad. Toby Oft, the principal trombone, sits in the J. P. and Mary Barger Chair, endowed in perpetuity. Their son Jeff was my pal from fifth to twelfth grades in Winchester, Massachusetts. Like his father, Jeff played the trombone.

In March of 2017 we heard the BSO play Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Carnegie Hall in New York, the composer’s response to the Siege of Leningrad, the 857-day blockade by the Nazis during which nearly a million people died of starvation. That extraordinary piece opens with a plaintive melody on the oboe accompanied by sparse percussion, and the entire first movement is a great crescendo based on that theme. John Ferrillo was the oboe soloist who recreated the misery and anxiety of the besieged city. He is a terrific oboe player. I wrote about that concert in the May 2017 issue of The Diapason under the title, “Music in a terrible time.”

Wendy and I heard Mark Volpe give a lecture at the Lenox (Massachusetts) Library last April during which he reminisced about the highs and lows of his time with the orchestra, like the winding down and end of James Levine’s career as music director and the search that brought Andris Nelsons to Boston. He mentioned in passing that, unlike any other major American orchestra, the BSO owns 107 buildings. If you spend any time at Tanglewood, you will realize that some of them are lawn mower sheds (there is a mighty amount of mown grass there), emergency weather shelters (violent summer thunderstorms come out of nowhere in the Berkshires), restrooms, and concession stands. But that 107 also includes Symphony Hall in Boston, the Shed and Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, and the new Linde Center at Tanglewood, among other distinguished buildings. In contrast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a tenant in Disney Hall, and the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera are both tenants at Lincoln Center.

The administrative staff of the BSO takes up two pages of the program book, and development is the largest department with thirty-six directors and associates listed, implying that there is a larger staff supporting the directors. Are there a hundred or more people in the development department toiling away at the business of raising the money for their own salaries and those of the rest of the staff, the orchestra members, and the people running the lawn mowers? They should be the most popular people on campus.

Besides the massive fundraising efforts, the BSO sees significant ticket revenue at Tanglewood. Lawn seats are $22, which buys you space to spread a picnic blanket or set up chairs, and you can see the action on the stage on huge video screens. Seats in the shed range from about $25 to over $100 close up, and we have been to a few signature concerts where the tickets cost close to $200. Remember that the Shed seats 5,100 people, so a good house is bringing in several hundred thousand dollars, or just enough for a year of John Ferillo’s salary.

Before a concert, the Tanglewood lawn is a splendid spectacle. The lawn around the Shed is huge, and thousands of people are likely to be enjoying their picnics. It is amazing how lush and green the lawn is between concerts. There is an elegant marble monument in memory of a revered head groundskeeper, an indication of the importance of that position. Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland have statues on the grounds, but a monument to a groundskeeper is pretty good. Someone has to marshal all those lawn mowers, and more complicated, how do you keep grass growing if 4,000 people have picnics on the lawn three times a week? There are rules about bug spray printed in the program books.

Tanglewood was founded with the gift of a 210-acre estate from the Tappan family in 1936. The Tappan Manor House is preserved on the grounds and houses a museum and administrative offices. The first concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky was held under a tent on August 5, 1937. Eliel Saarinen designed an open-air concert venue, but the $100,000 budget was inadequate, and Saarinen wrote that the proposed budget would be enough for “just a shed, which any builder could accomplish without the aid of an architect.” The trustees of the orchestra enlisted engineer Joseph Franz of Stockbridge, and the shed was dedicated on August 4, 1938.

I marvel at the vision involved in founding such an institution. It took just a couple years to get it off the ground, and within a few years it was flourishing. Koussevitzky founded the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940, which quickly became one of the premier centers for advanced musical training. My trusty program book includes this statement:

Prominent TMC alumni include Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Stephanie Blythe, Karina Canellakis, Anthony Cheung, Phyllis Curtin, Christoph von Dohnányi, Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Gilbert Kalish, Oliver Knussen, Wynton Marsalis, Ludovic Morlot, Seiji Ozawa, Leontyne Price, Sanford Sylvan, Michael Tilson Thomas, Davóne Tine, Dawn Upshaw, and Shirley Verrett, as well as some 40 current members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

And to build an organ?

All of us in the organ building trade are familiar with the task and techniques of raising money as it routinely costs hundreds of thousands of dollars if not several million to build or renovate a pipe organ. Over the years I have come to realize that a community of people banding together to raise a million dollars for a musical instrument is a radical act. It takes vision and commitment, smart guidance, and lots of study. It takes planning, wisdom, and let’s face it, good politics. Organ projects are not successful if they are not supported by a common bond or agreement, a political base. I tell the organ committees that I work with that the hard part of an organ project is creating that foundation and raising the money. The easy part is when you give the money to an organbuilder asking them to do what they know best.

Sometimes an organ is funded by a single gift and a big plaque gets screwed to the organ case. This is especially true at universities and colleges. Sometimes there are several lead gifts, perhaps in six figures, followed by dozens of more modest gifts. I love seeing donor lists that include the few-dollars-at-a-time gifts from Sunday School classes. That is when you know the organ project has wide support in the congregation.

Yuja

I mentioned in passing that Wendy and I heard Yuja Wang play a solo recital at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. It was such a special evening that it merits some more comment. As I wrote earlier, the program included music of Shostakovich, Barber, and Chopin. While the preludes of Shostakovich are short, they are complex, meaty, and sophisticated. The Barber sonata is a towering, monumental work, and the demanding four Chopin ballades formed a varied, beefy second half of the program. Last winter, Yuja showed the world her immense stamina by playing all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Variations on a Theme of Paganini in one program that lasted over four hours. The other night her published program was nearly two hours long (including intermission), and as the audience howled in approval, she played six encores including transcriptions of several symphonic movements and the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the braying donkey. One of the encores, which I did not recognize, was interrupted by a ringing cell phone, and she abruptly left the stage—but she came back to play three more. I think she really loves playing the piano.

Yuja Wang was born in 1987; she is thirty-seven years old. When she was fifteen, she entered the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Gary Graffman, and that year she won the concerto competition at the Aspen Music Festival. Before she was twenty, she was an international star.

She has dazzling stage presence with a brisk walk to and from the piano, a lightning-fast deep bow from the hips that sets her hair flying, a quick transition from standing to sitting, demanding the audience’s attention with the set of her hands over the keys, and a commanding start for each piece, whether it is a bombastic tour-de-force or a gentle breath. There are hundreds of videos of her playing on YouTube, and you sure can see her flinging a lot of notes around. One of her famous encores is a fantasy on themes from Carmen, and you just cannot believe how many notes are being played, but the sonority of her softest notes, the results of just touching the keys, are a deep part of her magical musical genius.

The other night, we were fortunate to have seats on the stage behind her, and her path to and from the stage door was just a couple feet from us. It is clear to see the love she has for music, for the art of performing, for her audience. Such a roar from that audience. There were several people near us shouting her name at the top of their voices each time she entered the stage and each time the music stopped. They made her smile. I thanked her as she walked past between encores, and she smiled at me. What a night.

Notes

1. Ferrillo’s 2015 salary was published in the Boston Globe on July 16, 2018, in a story about salary equity in the orchestra, as principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe filed a lawsuit claiming that she held a comparable position in the orchestra but was being paid 25% less. Ferrillo wrote in support of Rowe’s claim, stating that she held a position equal in prominence and responsibility to his and that she was an artist of equal ability. They sit next to each other on stage.

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.”

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.

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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.

One size fits all.

As a plus-sized organ guy whose shoulders are four or five inches wider than an airplane seat, I always sit in an aisle seat so I do not have to crunch up against my neighbor. Instead, I am regularly clobbered by the flight attendant’s cart and the sloppiest of my fellow passengers as they negotiate the trek to the restroom. Years ago, on a flight to who knows where, I was seated next to a young woman who was sitting with her legs curled under her on her seat. I marveled at her flexibility, and when we stood to deplane, I realized she was under five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds or less. We had paid the same price for our seats, and she was sitting perfectly comfortably while I was squeezed into my seat like toothpaste in a tube. Hats, mittens, or leggings might be sold as one-size-fits-all, but I know that really means they will be loose on small people and tight on large people.

So it goes with education. Modern public schools are governed by the demands of standardized testing as if every child in America needs an identical education. My son Chris teaches English as a second language in an urban public high school where his students are first- or second-generation immigrants who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese at home, as it is typical that their parents do not speak English. These kids cannot be expected to thrive if they are being held to the same standards as their classmates who grew up speaking nothing but English. It is a heinous form of discrimination.

My other son Mike did not finish high school but worked in a succession of bicycle shops as a teenager and graduated to specialized piping, building the complex networks of tubing in university research labs. When he told me he had learned to do internal welding on eighth-inch stainless steel tubing, I knew he was going to be okay. He has now had a fifteen-year career with an architectural fabrication firm where he builds high-end signage with complex electrical systems, like the miles of LED displays that encircle the guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. He built and installed all the road signs for Terminal B of Logan Airport in Boston (“Central Parking, Next Left”), interior signs for Madison Square Garden including the jumbotron, and the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. You might think that Mike is disadvantaged because he did not have algebra or calculus in high school, but he uses more complex mathematics at his workstation every day than many of us do in a lifetime.

I had an industrial arts class in middle school where I learned to use a stationary shear, a metal brake, rollers, and rivets making a half-pipe-shaped, sheet-metal firewood caddy with decorative black iron legs and hoop handle. That gold-painted beauty stood next to the fireplace in my parents’ home until they moved into assisted living forty years later. I had algebra in high school, but I sure spent a lot of days in my career as an organ builder developing the metal-working skills I learned when I was thirteen.

In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), Matthew Crawford wrote about the dwindling of public school industrial arts education as schools focused more on standardized testing and achieving 100% college admissions. The second paragraph of his book’s introduction begins, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” He goes on to describe how modern engineering focuses on “hiding the works” by designing machines so that you cannot tell how they are put together or how they work. Open the hood of a new car, and you can hardly tell there is an engine in there, and to keep our precious hands clean, some newer Mercedes models do not have dipsticks, as if it is not the owner’s responsibility to pay attention to whether there is oil in the engine.

In 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act that provided funding for manual training in public schools, both as part of general education and as designated vocational schools. Crawford cites that starting around 1980, 80% of public high school shop programs began to disappear.¹ Throughout the book, he makes the case that while some people flourish practicing law or managing businesses, many people are cut out to work with their hands, gaining the satisfaction of making or repairing something, what he calls “primary work.” He points out that surgery is a meeting of intellectual and manual disciplines. Standardized testing implies that a kid who is destined to be a plumber needs the same foundation as one who will be a musician or a corporate executive. Who can tell the future of a ten-year-old? You can’t. You provide all children with an education that includes academics, the arts and humanities, the industrial world, and sports, and hope that each child will be captivated by something—liberal arts for teenagers.

Simply reading the table of contents of Crawford’s book gives an overview of his point of view regarding the manual arts: “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts;” “The Separation of Thinking from Doing;” “To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff;” “The Education of a Gearhead;” “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional;” “The Contradictions of the Cubicle;” “Thinking as Doing;” “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement.” As an organ builder, I have spent much of my life negotiating and contemplating the differences between blue- and white-collar work, and I recommend this book as a good read with lively writing and philosophical musings from the life of a literary motorcycle mechanic.

Early in my career, living and working in Oberlin, Ohio, one of our friends taught diesel mechanics at the vocational high school. What could be more valuable to a rural farming community than a new generation of diesel mechanics? Let’s face it, we need plumbers and auto mechanics more than we need organ builders. Those kids at Voke-Tech were onto something.

Jack of all trades

David Margonelli was a woodworker whose shop was in Edgecomb, Maine, a few miles downriver from our house. His first woodworking project was a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox, a small shallow draft boat that could be sailed, rowed, poled, or sculled. He was interested in Shaker furniture early on, and over the years developed pieces that combined the Shaker tradition with elegant curves such as a chest of drawers with bowed front or a bow-legged dining table. He had an elaborate vacuum table set up in his shop, like that found in many organ building workshops used for gluing windchest tables to grids, that allowed him to use the pressure of the atmosphere to create his curved elements.

We have one of his tables in our apartment in New York. It is made of cherry with the signature bowed legs and a neat sliding mechanism to allow the addition of two leafs for larger dinners. It has been the host of countless wonderful dinners, and its graceful shape is a beautiful addition to our home. David was a gnarly old guy, very sure of himself, and proud of his designs and craftsmanship, and I loved visiting his shop as much as I love sharing meals at his table.

Camden, Maine, a coastal town an hour or so east from us, is home to a little shop that sells handmade leather goods where I bought a bag made of supple black leather that I use as a second briefcase. It is just the size of an iPad or letter-sized paper folded in half and has three zipper compartments with enough space for a phone/iPad charger, hand sanitizer, pens, a Moleskine notebook, and a bottle of water. It has a long, adjustable leather strap so I can carry it around my neck, and I take it to local meetings and on short trips when I know I am not going to need my MacBook. I never met the artisan who made it, but I appreciate the accurate cutting of the material, the careful hand stitching, and the thoughtful usefulness of the design.

Early in 2013, I was tuning a venerable Hutchings organ in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a 127-year-old ladder collapsed under me. I had a classic view of a receding ceiling and landed flat on my back on the miraculously flat and uncluttered floor of the organ. (If I had landed on a windline, I would have never walked again.) Following surgery and rehab, and our first season with our new sailboat (we called it the Sciatica Cruise), I contacted those clients whose organs were particularly treacherous and suggested (required) that we would install new ladders, handholds, and railings to reduce the risk of accidents. There is a little metal fabricating shop in our neighboring village of Damariscotta, Maine, where two guys cut and weld iron to make things like gear for commercial fishing boats amidst a gallery of tool calendars. I took them drawings for a collection of railings and ladders, and it is a lot safer to work in those organs now.

All these skills and the specialized tools involved are part of the art of organ building. Add to them sophisticated electrical systems, mechanical and structural engineering, architecture, and the musical realm of voicing and tuning, and you approach the complete organ builder.

It takes a village.

Having spent countless hours and days on job sites, bringing organs in and out of churches and maintaining those in place, I reflect frequently on the wide range of trades and vocations. An organ builder must be conversant with musicians, clergy, and the lay or professional leaders who operate churches and equally at home with custodians, electricians, HVAC workers, and the plumbers who install overhead sprinkler systems. We deal with building and fire inspectors, insurance adjusters, and lumber vendors. And working with the Organ Clearing House, almost every job involves scaffolding and trucking. It is funny to deal with a big-city pastor and a scaffold delivery driver from Queens, New York, in the same morning, especially when it turns out that the pastor is the tough customer while the driver is a sweetheart who just wants to get things right.

In 2004, we dismantled a huge M. P. Möller organ in a chamber above the 125-foot-high ceiling of a 19,000-seat convention center. As it was in the union city of Philadelphia, we started the project with a meeting that would define who would be allowed to do what work. Representatives of the unions for riggers, laborers, and carpenters were present along with administrators of the University of Pennsylvania, which owned the site. I described how delicate organ parts can be in spite of their industrial appearance, and the guy from the riggers’ union assured me that their men had vast experience. “We’ve been rigging in Philadelphia for 100 years, we’re the guys who moved the Liberty Bell.” I quipped, “Are you the ones who cracked it?” He did not think it was funny, but there were audible snickers around the table. The laborers insisted they should be in the organ chamber with us, moving the crates around. In the end, I won the point that we “owned” the organ chamber, that no one but us could handle organ parts until they were packed, but as soon as a crate or organ part got to the riggers’ rope we could not touch it again. We found out that “touch” really meant touch. Later in the job, one of our guys was on the floor guiding the laborers about how to place and stack crates, and he pushed a loaded dolly a few feet. A whistle blew, the work stopped, and I had to go to an emergency meeting with the unions to smooth things over.

Mike, one of the riggers, showed up one morning looking pretty rough. His pal told us that he had been in a bar the night before that had a boxing ring set up where patrons could wrestle with a bear, and the bear had won. Hughie (six foot, eight inches tall) stands out in my memory. The union was requiring him to attend anger management classes because he had beat up a highway toll collector as he passed through the booth. (Who gets that angry in that short a time?) We got along famously, and I will never forget the goodbye hug he gave me when the job was finished. The music theory classes I had at Oberlin had nothing to do with preparing me for Hughie’s hug, but I am sure that my knowledge of theory and harmony has informed my tuning.

§

We are all aware of the decline of “electives” in public schools like home economics, industrial arts, and the arts in general. The focus on college acceptance and standardized tests seems to hinder a thorough education. It is a common sentiment now that public schools could and should offer courses in life skills like family budgeting, tax preparation, investing, and auto maintenance, things that all of us need to know and learn on our own later if our parents do not teach us.

I repeat the quote from Matthew Crawford’s book, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” When I visit an art museum, I marvel at the manual skills of painters, sculptors, potters, and jewelers from centuries and millennia past. If you have never held tools in your hands, never tried to carve a piece of wood, or never put brush and paint to canvas, you will have less understanding of the magic that is around you. Visit the ancient sites in Greece or Rome, and imagine the knowledge, skill, and singular sense of purpose necessary to build the Colosseum, a 10,000-seat amphitheater, or craft an ornately decorated pottery urn.

When I was an apprentice in John Leek’s shop in Oberlin, Ohio, he taught me how to plane a rough board by hand before letting me loose on the thickness planer. That was a great lesson about sharpening and handling tools and understanding the flow of grain in a piece of wood so my plane would not tear chips out of the surface if I worked against the grain. That experience enhanced my appreciation of the historic organs I have visited and worked on in the United States and Europe. That iconic fifty-foot-tall organ case in Haarlem is made of lumber that was planed and cut without electric tools and machines. I get blisters on my hands just thinking about it. Since the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, we have seen video footage of the wooden superstructure of that building, made by artisans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Felling trees, milling them into huge beams, transporting them from the forest to the city, and hoisting them hundreds of feet in the air with only the power of humans and oxen to haul wagons and turn winches is practically beyond belief.

Wendy and I are in New York City this week, and because of some complicated twists of schedule, a friend is staying in our house in Maine taking care of Farley, the Goldendoodle. She called at five o’clock Saturday evening saying there was no running water in the house. I walked her through resetting the pump at the wellhead without results, so I called Darren, the plumber. Meanwhile, I told her that she had three flushes (there are three toilets), after which she could use the outhouse. Darren was at the house in fifteen minutes, cleaned the filter at the pressure tanks (of course, the filter), and Cassie had water again. Take good care of your plumber, pay his bills promptly, and he will take good care of you.

Notes

1. Michael B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), p. 11.

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

Shipping and handling included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

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

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

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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