In the Wind: Under control

Connectivity

It does not seem that long ago that packing a briefcase for a business trip meant gathering file folders and notebooks. Today, all my files are digital, and my briefcase is full of chargers for iPhone and iPad and the power cord for my laptop. I admit to carrying an HDMI cord with adapters so I can plug into the television in a hotel room and watch movies or other good stuff using laptop, iPad, or phone, and I carry an extension cord to be sure I can set up camp comfortably. I add to all that a Bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music and NPR programs with rich sound. There are a lot of wires in my wireless life.

My desk at home similarly includes wires that make the essential connections of my life, and I had to add one more yesterday. The printer in a drawer under my desk, happily connected to Wi-Fi, suddenly went hermit on me and refused to perform. I ascertained that the Wi-Fi connection had failed and spent most of an hour mucking around with passwords, straightened paper clips, and reset buttons . . . to no avail. If this had happened at our home in Maine, I would have jumped into the car (it was snowing) and driven forty-five minutes to Staples to buy a cord. Luckily, I was in New York, where Staples is immediately across the street from us. The only door I have to pass is an ATM. Even though it was snowing, I did not bother with a jacket and ran across to get the cord. I fished it through the hole I had made for the printer’s power cord, and I was back in business.

I suppose I will want to renew the Wi-Fi connection sooner or later, but as I only paid $125 for the printer, I may just buy another one rather than spending more time trouble-shooting. Wendy’s printer is working fine, as is all of our other wireless gear, so I feel safe assuming that the printer is the culprit. It is not all that long ago that I put paper directly into a typewriter, and there was no question about the need for connectivity.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers were racing against each other to perfect the harnessing and application of electricity for everyday life. J. P. Morgan’s mansion at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street in New York City was illuminated by Thomas Edison in 1882. There was a fire that spoiled Mr. Morgan’s expensively appointed study that necessitated replacing a lot of wiring, but he was very proud to be on the forefront of that revolution and invited hundreds of people to parties at his home, encouraging them to marvel at the new equipment.

Three years earlier, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings had completed a 101-rank masterpiece of an organ for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not done the research, but I feel safe guessing that it was the largest organ in the United States at that time. (https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=7254) Just look at that Great Chorus! Though the organ now has electric action opening the pallets, it was built without electricity, with mechanical key and stop action and a human-powered wind system.

Within ten years of the completion of the organ at Holy Cross, organbuilders were experimenting with electric power in pipe organs. Builders like George Hutchings and Ernest M. Skinner were developing the electro-pneumatic actions with which we are familiar today. In 1906, Mr. Skinner completed his massive instrument (Opus 150) for the newly unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With four manuals and eighty-four ranks, it was among the first really large fully electro-pneumatic organs in the world, completed just twenty-four years after the Holy Cross organ. (http://aeolianskinner.organhistoricalsociety.net/Specs/Op00150.html) And by the way, it had electric blowers.

That was quite a revolution. It took barely a generation to move from tracker action, proven to be reliable for over five hundred years, to electro-pneumatic action—that new-fangled, up-and-coming creation that provided organists with combination actions, comfortable ergonomic consoles (decades before the invention of the word ergonomic), myriad gadgets to aid registrations, and, perhaps most important, unlimited wind supplies. Many organists were skeptical of the new actions, thinking that because they were not direct they could not be musical.

In spite of the skepticism, electro-pneumatic organs sold like fried dough at the state fair. Before the end of 1915, the Ernest M. Skinner Company produced more than 140 organs (more than ten per year), forty-six of which had four manuals. (Who would like to go on a tour of forty-six pre-World War I four-manual Skinner organs? Raise your hand!) The negative side of this is the number of wonderful nineteenth-century tracker organs that were discarded in the name of progress, but it is hard to judge whether the preservation of those instruments would have been advantageous over the miracles of the innovation of electro-pneumatic action.

And a generation later, what went around came around when the new interest in tracker-action organs surged, and scores of distinguished electro-pneumatic organs were discarded in favor of new organs with low wind pressure and lots of stops of high pitch.

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Early electro-pneumatic organs relied on elaborate electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching systems for their operation. Keyboard contacts operated matrix relays to control keyboard and stop actions. Consoles were packed full of coupling and combination machines, inspired along with the development of the vast multiplication of switching systems that supported the spread of the telephone. The wiring diagram of a Skinner organ is remarkably similar to the old telephone switchboards where operators inserted quarter-inch plugs into sockets to connect calls.

Along with “traditional” organs for churches and concert halls, the advance of electric actions fostered the theatre organ, a vehicle that allowed a musician to rollick through the countryside along with the antics and passions of the actors on the screen. The invention of double-touch keyboards expanded the scope of organ switching, as did the ubiquitous “toy counters” that duplicated the sounds of cow bells, train whistles, sleigh bells, thunder and lightning, car horns, and dozens of other sound effects that might have a use during a movie. Those novelty sounds were not synthesized, but produced by the actual instrument being manipulated, struck, shaken, or stirred by an electro-pneumatic device. Push the button marked “Castanets,” and a half-dozen sets of castanets sound across the Sea of Galilee. Ole!

The original switching system of a big electro-pneumatic organ is a thing to behold—electric relays in rows of sixty-one, seventy-three, or eighty-five (depending on the number of octaves in a rank, a windchest, or a keyboard). Each relay has a contact for each function a given key can perform. In a big four-manual organ with sub, unison, and super couplers every which way, multiple windchests for each division, and unified stops around the edges, one note of the Great keyboard might have as many as twenty contacts in various forms. Sometimes you see that many contacts physically mounted on each key, with miniscule spacing, and tiny dots of solder holding the connections fast. Spill a cup of coffee into that keyboard, and your organ technician will spend scores of billable hours cleaning up after you.

One organ I worked on for years was in fact two. The organ(s) at Trinity Church in Boston included a three-manual instrument in the chancel and a four-manual job in the rear gallery. Of course, both had pedal divisions. The console functioned as a remote-control device, its keyboards, stopknobs, pistons, and expression pedals operated a complex relay in a basement room directly below. The outputs for seven keyboards and two pedalboards (491), 175 stop knobs, 45 coupler tabs, 7 pistons, and 4 expression pedals (48 for shutters, 60 for crescendo) were in the cable going to the basement, a total of 826 conductors. But wait, there’s more. Since the combination action was also in the basement, the conductors from the combination action that operated the drawknobs and couplers were in the same conduit, bringing signals up from the basement. Drawknobs and couplers totaled 220, and each needed three wires (on coil, off coil, and sense contact)—660. All together, the console cable comprised 1,486 conductors.

When my company was engaged to install the new solid-state switching and combinations in that organ, we wired all the equipment to the existing relays in the basement and chambers, bought an orphaned console for temporary use and equipped it with new stop jambs with knob layout identical to the original, and set everything up with plug-in connectors. After the evening service one Sunday, we cut the console cable, dragged the original console out of the way, placed the temporary console, and started plugging things in. With just a little smoke escaping, we had the organ up and running in time for the Friday noon recital. One glitch turned up. One of my employees consistently reversed the violet/blue pair of conductors in our new color-coded cable so throughout the complex organ, #41 and #42 (soprano E and F) were mixed up!

When something goes wrong like a dead note or a cipher, physical electric contacts are fairly easy to trouble-shoot. Once you have acclimated yourself to the correct location, you are likely to be able to see the problem. It might be a bit of schmutz keeping contacts from moving or touching, it might be a contact wire bent by a passing mouse. Organ relays are often located in dirty basements where spiders catch prey, stonewalls weep with moisture, and careless custodians toss detritus into mysterious dark rooms. Many is the time I have seen the like of signs from a 1963 rummage sale heaped on top of delicate switching equipment.

Oxidation is another enemy of organ contacts that are typically made of phosphorous bronze wire that reacts with oxygen to form a non-conductive coating, inhibiting the operation of the contacts. Also, in a simple circuit that includes a power supply (organ rectifier), switch (keyboard contact), and appliance (chest magnet), a “fly-back” spark jumps across the space between contacts as a note is released. Each spark burns away a teeny bit of metal until after millions of repetitions the contact breaks causing a dead note. You can see this sparking clearly when you sit with a switch-stack with the lights off while the organ is being played.

You can retro fit a switching system by installing diodes in each circuit (which means rows of sixty-one) that arrest the sparks. You can replace phosphorous bronze with silver wire that does not oxidize, but you still have to keep the whole thing clean and protected from physical harm.

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Just as the telephone companies have converted to solid-state switching, so has the pipe organ industry. Solid-state equipment is no longer new; in fact, it has been around as long as electro-pneumatic organs were before the revival of tracker organs. But perhaps some of you don’t actually know what “solid-state” means. A solid-state device controls electricity without any physical motion. Circuits are built using semi-conductors. What is a semi-conductor? A device that conducts electricity under certain circumstances or in particular ways, less fully than a standard conductor. A piece of wire is a conductor. Electricity travels freely over a piece of wire in any direction.

A great example of a semi-conductor is the diode I mentioned earlier that contains “fly-back” sparks when a circuit is broken. The diode can do this because it conducts electricity in only one direction. It has a wire on each end to connect to a circuit, and power can flow from the switch through the diode to the magnet (if you have installed it facing the right way!). When the contact is released, the power cannot come back through the diode from the magnet to the switch. Semi-conductor.

Some semi-conductors are in fact switches (transistors) with three legs. Apply power to one leg, and power flows through the other two. Integrated circuits are simply little gadgets that contain many transistors. Resistors are gadgets that reduce the flow of power by resisting it. The advance of electronics has been enabled by the reduction of size of these components. I have transistors in my toolbox that are replacements for common organ controls that are each the size of my pinkie fingernail. Huge! I have no idea how many circuits there are in my iPhone, but it must be millions.

I first worked with solid-state organ actions in the late 1970s. One job was in a rickety Anglican church on East 55th Street in Cleveland where we were installing one of the earliest Peterson combination actions in an old Holtkamp organ. The church had a dirt crawl space instead of a basement, and as the apprentice, it was my job to crawl on my belly with the rats (yup, lots of them), trailing cables from chamber to console. We followed the directions meticulously, made all the connections carefully, crossed our fingers, and turned it on. Some smoke came out. It took us a couple hours to sort out the problem, and we had to wait a few days for replacement parts, but the second time it worked perfectly. I do not believe we were very sure of what we had done, but we sure were pleased.

In around 1987, I became curator of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1202, 1951) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. With over 230 ranks and 13,000 pipes, the instrument had heaps of electro-pneumatic-mechanical relays. As I came onboard, wire contacts had started to break at a rapid rate, and as the switches were mounted vertically, when a contact broke, it would fall and lodge across its neighbors causing cluster ciphers. Ronald Paul of Salt Lake City, Utah, had been contracted to install a new solid-state switching system, and I was on hand to help him with many details. I was assuming the care of the organ from Jason McKown who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner at the Skinner Organ Company and cared for the Mother Church organ since it was installed. Jason was in his eighties and still climbed the hundreds of rungs and steps involved in reaching the far reaches of that massive organ.

Jason looked over all the shiny gear, bristling with rows of pins and filled with those fiberglass cards covered with mysterious bugs, shook his head, and said, “this is for you young fellows.”

Swing wide the gates.

Over the past fifty years, most of us have gotten used to solid-state pipe organ actions. In that time, we have seen the medium of connections go from regular old organ cable to “Cat5” to optical fiber. I know that some of the firms that supply this equipment are experimenting with wireless connections. I suppose I may be asked to install such a system someday, but while I am committed to solid-state switching and all its benefits, I am skeptical about wireless.

Forty years ago, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had a small and ancient electronic organ in the chapel. I was happy enough that I almost never had to play it, but there was one Thanksgiving Day when the pastor chose to lead an early morning worship service in the chapel. Halfway through that service, human voices blared out of the organ, decidedly irreverent human voices. The organ was picking up citizens band radio transmissions from Euclid Avenue in front of the church. I dove for the power cord. “Roger that, good buddy. Over and out!”

We have wireless remote controls for televisions, receivers, radios, even electric fans, and it is often necessary to punch a button repeatedly to get the desired function to work. And there was that printer yesterday, choosing idly to skip the bounds of our Wi-Fi router and booster, requiring the introduction of a new wire.

When I think of a wireless connection between the console and chambers of a large pipe organ, I imagine sweeping onto the bench, robes a-flutter, turning on the organ, pushing a piston, and garage doors throughout the neighborhood randomly opening and closing. Swing wide the gates, I’m coming home.

How does it work?

It happened again. I sat at this desk for days mud wrestling with an unruly topic for this column. Twice I had more than a thousand tortured words on the screen, went upstairs for a break, and came back to Ctrl-Shift-A-Delete. But Anthony Tommasini, music critic for The New York Times, came to my rescue with his article under the headline, “Why Do Pianists Know So Little About Pianos?,” published November 12, 2020. This article was born as the outbreak of COVID-19 got rolling in New York City last March and his piano needed tuning, but his apartment building was locked down and workers from outside were not allowed in except for emergencies. “An out-of-tune piano hardly seemed an emergency.”

He quotes the brilliant Jeremy Denk as not knowing “the first thing about piano technology.” Denk, whose playing I admire deeply and who like me is an alumnus of Oberlin College, had the same issue as Tommasini when his building locked down, but convinced the superintendent of his apartment building that because playing the piano is his profession, his tuner should be accepted as an essential worker. It worked.

Tommasini singles out Mitsuko Uchida as one prominent pianist who is an intimate student of piano technology. He quotes her as saying, “you get stuck when the weight is different key to key, the piano has been sloppily prepared, and the dampers have not been adjusted—or the spring in the pedal.” She went on, finding trouble when “the pin underneath the key [guide pin] is dirty, or the other pin in the middle of the mechanism [balance pin] is dirty, rubbing, or slurping.” I love the word slurping in this context.

Tommasini reminds us that orchestral players know more about their instruments than most pianists, and that unlike pianists, orchestral players own their instruments and can carry them with them between performances. Vladimir Horowitz traveled with his own piano, but then, Horowitz was Horowitz. You tell him “No.” Unusual among modern pianists, Mitsuko Uchida travels with her own piano. When Tommasini asked her if the institutions where she plays cover that cost, she said “usually not.” But she went on, “I have no excess otherwise. I don’t need country houses, expensive jewelry, expensive cars, special collections of whatever.” I suppose her usual fees cover that cost and still provide her with lunch money.

Tommasini concluded the column: Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano, and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward, it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved.

Press the key and the pipe blows.

The pipe organ is the most complex of all musical instruments. It is such a sophisticated machine that other musicians, including some world-renowned orchestral conductors, consider it to be unmusical. While a violinist or clarinetist can accent a note by applying a touch more energy, what a single organ pipe can do is all it can do. The organist can accent a note by tweaking the rhythm—a nano-second of delay can translate into an accent—or by operating a machine. A twitch of the ankle on the Swell pedal does it, so does coupling a registration to another keyboard with a soft stop so a note or two can be accented by darting to the other keyboard. The creative organist has a bag of tricks that bypass the mechanics and allow the behemoth to sing.

I have been building, restoring, repairing, servicing, selling, and relocating pipe organs for over forty-five years, and I know that many organists have little idea of how an organ works, so I thought I would offer a short primer. If you already know some or most of this, maybe you can share it with people in your church to help them understand the complexity. In that case, it might help people, especially those on the organ committee, understand why it is so expensive to build, repair, and maintain an organ.

Pipes and registrations

A single organ pipe produces a tone when pressurized air is blown into its toehole. The construction of the pipe is such that the puff of air, which lasts as long as the key is held, is converted to a flat “sheet” that passes across the opening that is the mouth of the pipe. The tone is generated when the sheet is split by the upper lip of the mouth. This is how tone is produced by a recorder, an orchestral flute, or a police whistle. Organ pipes that work this way are called “flue pipes,” and there are no moving parts involved in tone production. Reed pipes (trumpets, oboes, clarinets, tubas, etc.) have a brass tongue that vibrates when air enters the toehole: that vibration is the source of the tone.

Since each pipe can produce only one pitch, you need a set of pipes. We call them ranks of pipes, with one pipe for each note on the keyboard to make a single organ voice. Additional stops are made with additional ranks. There are sixty-one notes on a standard organ keyboard. If the organ has ten stops, there are 610 pipes. Pedal stops usually have thirty-two pipes.

The Arabic numbers on stop knobs or tablets refer to the pitch at which a stop speaks. 8′ indicates unison pitch because the pipe for the lowest note of the keyboard must be eight feet long. 4′ indicates a stop that speaks an octave higher, 2′ is two octaves higher, 16′ is an octave lower. Some stops, such as mixtures, have more than one rank. The number of ranks is usually indicated with a Roman numeral on the stop knob or tablet. A four-rank mixture has four pipes for each note. The organist combines stops of different pitches and different tone colors to form a registration, the term we use to describe a group of stops chosen for a particular piece of music or verse of a hymn.

The length of an organ pipe determines its pitch. On a usual 8′ stop like an Open Diapason, the pipe for low CC is eight feet long, the pipe for tenor c° is four feet, for middle c′ is two feet, and the highest c′′′′ is about three inches. Every organ pipe is equipped with a way to make tiny changes in length. Tuning an organ involves making those tiny adjustments to hundreds or thousands of pipes.

Many organs have combination actions that allow an organist to preset a certain registration and recall it when wanted by pressing a little button between the keyboards (piston) or a larger button near the pedalboard to be operated by the feet (toestud).

Wind

When playing a piece of music on an organ, the little puff of air through each organ pipe to create sound is multiplied by the number of notes and the number of stops being used. Play the Doxology, thirty-two four-note chords, on one stop and there will be 128 puffs of air blowing into pipes. Add a single pedal stop to double the bass line and you will play 160 pipes. Play it on ten manual stops and two pedal stops, 1,384. A hundred manual stops (big organ) and ten pedal stops, 6,420, just to play the Doxology, a veritable gale.

Where does all that wind come from? Somewhere in the building there is an electric rotary blower. In smaller organs, the blower might be right inside the organ, in larger organs the blower is typically found in a soundproof room in the basement. The blower is running as long as the organ is turned on, so there needs to be a system to deal with the extra air when the organ is not being played, and to manage the different flow of air for small or large registrations. The wind output of the blower is connected to a unit that most of us refer to as a bellows. “Bellows” actually defines a device that produces a flow of air—think of a fireplace bellows. Before we had electric blowers, it was accurate to refer to the device as a bellows. When connected to a blower that produces the flow of air, the device has two functions, each of which implies a name. It stores pressurized air, so it can accurately be called a reservoir, and it regulates the flow and pressure of the air, so it can accurately be called a regulator. We use both terms interchangeably.

Between the reservoir/regulator and the blower output, there is a regulating valve. Sometimes it is a “curtain valve” with fabric on a roller that operates something like a window shade, and sometimes it is a wooden cone that seats on a big donut of felt and leather to form an air-tight seal. In either case, the valve is connected to the moving top of the reservoir/regulator. When the blower is running and the organ is not being played, the valve is closed so no air enters the reservoir. When the organist starts to play, air leaves the reservoir to blow the pipes, the top of the reservoir dips in response, the valve is pulled open a little, and air flows into the reservoir, replenishing all that is being used to make music by blowing pipes.

Weights or springs on the top of the reservoir regulate the pressure. The organ’s wind pressure is measured using a manometer. Picture a glass tube in the shape of a “U,” twelve inches tall with the legs of the “U” an inch apart. Fill it halfway with water, and the level of the water will be equal in both legs. With a rubber tube, apply the pressure of the organ’s wind, and the level of the water will go down on one side of the “U” and up on the other. Measure the difference and voilà, you have the wind pressure of the organ in inches or millimeters. It is common for the wind pressure to be three inches or so in a modest tracker-action organ. In a larger electro-pneumatic organ, the pressure on the Great might be four inches, six inches on the Swell, five inches in the Choir, with a big Trumpet or Tuba on twelve inches. The State Trumpet at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City is on 100 inches. I used to carry a glass tube full of water into an organ, a risky maneuver. Now I have a digital manometer.

In a small organ, the blower typically feeds a single reservoir that regulates the flow and pressure and distributes the wind to the various windchests through wind conductors (pipes), sometimes called wind trunks. In larger organs, it is common to find a regulator in the basement with the blower, and big pipes that carry wind up to the organ where it distributes into various reservoirs, sometimes one for each keyboard or division. Very large organs have two, three, four, or more windchests for each keyboard division, each with its own reservoir. A large bass Pedal stop might have one reservoir for the lowest twelve notes and another for the rest of the stop. And speaking of big pedal stops, the toehole of the lowest note of something like a 16′ Double Open Wood Diapason can be over six inches in diameter. When that valve opens, a hurricane comes out.

Windchests

The organ’s pipes are mounted on windchests arranged in rows on two axes. All the pipes of one rank or stop are arranged in rows “the long way,” and each note of the keyboard is arranged in rows “the short way.” The keyboard action operates the notes of the windchests, and the stop action determines which sets of pipes are being used. Pull on one stop and play one note, and one pipe plays. Pull on five stops and play a four-note chord, and twenty pipes play. In a tracker-action organ or an electric-action organ with slider chests, the keyboard operates a row of large valves that fill a “note channel” when a note is played and a valve opens. The stops are selected by sliders connected to the stopknobs, which have holes identical to the layout of the holes the pipes are sitting in. When the stop is off, the holes do not line up. When the stop is on, they do, and the air can pass from the note channel into those pipes sitting above open sliders.

It is common in electro-pneumatic organs for there to be an individual valve under every pipe. There is an electric contact under every note on the keyboard, a simple switch that is “on” when the note is played. The current goes to the “primary action” (keyboard action) of the windchest. The stops are selected through various devices that engage or disengage the valves under each set of pipes. When a note is played with no stops drawn, the primary action operates, but no pipe valves open. The stopknobs or tablets have electric contacts similar to those in the keyboards. When a stop is turned on and a note is played, a valve opens, and a pipe speaks.

We refer to “releathering” an organ. We know that the total pipe count in an organ is calculated by the number of stops and number of notes. An organ of average size might have 1,800, 2,500, 3,000 pipes. Larger organs have 8,000 or 10,000 pipes, even over 25,000. The valves under the pipes are made of leather, as are the motors (often called pouches) that operate the valves. Releathering an organ involves dismantling it to remove all the internal actions, scraping off all the old leather, cutting new leather pieces, and gluing the motors and valves in place with exacting accuracy. The material is expensive, but it is the hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled labor that add up quickest.

It’s all about air.

We think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument, but that is not really accurate. A piano’s tone is generated by striking a string that is under tension and causing it to vibrate. That is a percussion instrument. The tone of the pipe organ is generated by air, either being split by the upper lip of the organ pipe or causing a reed tongue to vibrate. The organ is a wind instrument. When we play, we are operating machinery that supplies and regulates air, and that controls the valves that allow air to blow into the pipes. When I am playing, I like to think of all those valves flapping open and closed by the thousand. I like to think of those thousands of pipes at the ready and speaking forth when I call on them like a vast choir of Johnny-One-Notes. I like to think of a thousand pounds of wood shutters moving silently when I touch the Swell pedal. I believe my knowledge of how the organ works informs my playing.

A piano is more intimate than a pipe organ, though technically it is also played by remote control as a mechanical system connects the keys to the tone generation. I am not surprised, but I am curious why more pianists do not make a study of what happens inside the instrument when they strike a key. I believe it would inform their playing. A clarinetist certainly knows how his tone is generated, especially when his reed cuts his tongue.

I have always loved being inside an organ when the blower is turned on. You hear a distant stirring, then watch as the reservoirs fill, listen as the pressure builds to its full, and the organ transforms from a bewildering heap of arcane mechanical gear to a living, breathing entity. I have spent thousands of days inside hundreds of organs, and the thrill is still there. 

That’s about 1,800 words on how an organ works. My learned colleagues will no doubt think of a thousand things I left out. I was once engaged to write “Pipe Organs for Dummies” for a group of attorneys studying a complex insurance claim. It was over twenty-five pages and 15,000 words and was still just a brief overview. Reading this, you might not have caught up with Mitsuko Uchida, but you’re miles ahead of Jeremy Denk.

A postscript

In my column in the November 2020 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9), I mentioned in passing that G. Donald Harrison, the legendary president and tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner, died of a heart attack in 1956 while watching the comedian-pianist Victor Borge on television. The other day, I received a phone message from James Colias, Borge’s longtime personal assistant and manager, wondering where I got the information. I have referred to that story several times and remembered generally that it was reported in Craig Whitney’s marvelous book, All the Stops, published in 2003 by Perseus Book Group. Before returning Colias’s call, I spoke with Craig, who referred me to page 119, and there it was.

I returned Mr. Colias’s call and had a fun conversation. He told me that he had shared my story with Borge’s five children (now in their seventies). He also shared that when Victor Borge was born, his father was sixty-two-years-old, so when he was a young boy, he had lots of elderly relatives. His sense of humor was precocious, and when a family member was ailing, he was sent to cheer them up. Later in life, Borge said that they either got better or died laughing. I guess G. Donald Harrison died laughing.

Photo: Tracker keyboard action under a four-manual console, 1750 Gabler organ, Weingarten, Germany. (photo credit: John Bishop)

Mechanical failure

This morning while doing errands with Wendy, I noticed a lug nut on the tarmac next to our parked car. The inside thread was stripped bare, even shiny and smooth, and while the outside should have had six corners and six sides, only three corners and two of the sides were intact while the rest was rounded. I put it in my pocket and worried it with my fingers as we completed our errands and placed it on my desk when I got home. I have been glancing at it and handling it, wondering how it got so badly deformed. Was it cross-threaded onto the lug so aggressively that the thread was compromised? Did it fall off a car parked there? If so, how many other lug nuts were in such bad shape? How did the outside of the nut get rounded? Did other lug nuts on the same wheel suffer the same damage? It’s bad when a wheel falls off.

Take care of your machines.

For most of us, our cars are the most complex and sophisticated machines we own, and there are some simple maintenance procedures we follow to ensure smooth operation. The fact is that failure to take these steps can lead to serious damage and mortal danger. We change the oil every few thousand miles. When the engine is not running, the oil sits in a reservoir at the bottom of the engine known as the oil pan. When you start the engine, the oil pump brings oil to the top where it splashes about the camshaft and valves, and trickles down across myriad parts to be recirculated. If the oil gets dirty, it does not lubricate as well. If the oil runs dry, the engine parts heat to the point of welding themselves together. I once hit a rock with a lawnmower that cracked the oil drain plug inside the mower deck. The oil ran out, and the engine seized with a bang.

Did you ever notice how your car’s engine clatters for a few seconds when you start it on a cold morning? That is because the oil is extra thick and takes a moment to get to the top of the engine. Are you one of those drivers who starts the engine and immediately puts the car in gear? It would be better to wait until the oil gets to the top of the engine and the clattering stops before you put a load on the engine.

You are backing out of a parking space. You check your mirrors, shift into reverse, and start the car moving. When you shift into drive you hear a clunk from under the floor. Each of those clunks means a little extra wear on the transmission with its hundreds of precise interior fluid channels. I back out of the space, shift into neutral as I stop the car, then shift into drive before I start moving again. No clunk. It is an extra step, but I think it means my transmission will last longer. It is as easy to develop that habit as putting only one space after a period.

When my sons were young, they were delighted to find that they could cause the plumbing to make banging noises in the walls when they turned a bathroom faucet on and off at my parents’ house. My older son is now an expert fabricator with high-end welding skills, and we laughed together recently over that memory. They could have done serious damage to the house by breaking soldered plumbing joints inside the walls.

The same son was a wild driver early on. He loved going fast, he loved having smoke coming off his tires, and he pushed a series of cars to early ends, adding to the huge expense of many speeding tickets, cancelled insurance policies, and suspended licenses. When he finally broke those habits, he observed that it is lot less expensive to drive more conservatively.

Try it again without making noise.

The pipe organ is a musical wonder, and no other musical instrument has such complicated mechanical systems. Our habits at the keyboard and our attitudes toward our instruments can have a significant effect on their reliability. I do not need to mention the organist who habitually placed a sugary cup of coffee on top of the console stopjamb. I chided him about the ugly rings on the lovely, shellacked surface and warned about spills. The spill happened late on a Saturday night, and I was able to get the organ working a little before Sunday services, but removing the keyboards, replacing felt bushings, cleaning contacts, and regluing several of the sharp keys cost many thousands of dollars.

I do not need to mention the organist who played on a nineteenth-century mechanical-action organ and caused heavy bangs in the stop action because of the force he used on the drawknobs. The travel of those sliders is regulated and limited by little steel pins drilled and driven into the windchest tables. There are slots in the sliders that ensure the correct amount of motion, and the pins also fit into holes in the bottom of the toeboards, assuring that they are in the correct position. Slam, bang, thud hundreds of times every time he played, and the stops gradually grew softer and out of tune. Those guide pins were being driven out of their holes, and the sliders were traveling too far, going past the “full open” position, constricting the holes, and underwinding the pipes. That one was a $45,000 repair, removing all the pipes, lifting the toeboards and sliders, repairing the holes, redrilling the pins, then putting everything back together and tuning the pipes.

And I do not need to mention the organist who complained that the piston buttons were unreliable, demonstrating them to me with furious jabs from a powerful finger. Maybe, just maybe, the tiny contacts and springs that make those buttons work were prematurely worn by that vigorous action.

Just as I try to avoid that extra clunk when shifting my car from reverse to drive, you might listen to your console as you play. Does your technique cause extra noise at the keyboards? You might be causing excessive wear.

When I was a student at Oberlin, I had an important lesson about unnecessary noise. My organ teacher, Haskell Thomson, organized a winter term project for a group of us to be led by Inda Howland, the legendary teacher of eurhythmics and disciple of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze. For three days a week through the month of January, ten or fifteen of us bounced balls and performed other rhythmic exercises to the beat of the drum that always hung on a lanyard around Ms. Howland’s neck. Later in the month, we moved to practice rooms where we played for each other with her coaching and comments. I was working on Bach’s Toccata in F at the time, and I bravely powered through those familiar pedal solos with my pals huddled around the little organ. (If you think the acoustics in a practice room are dry, add twelve inquisitive pairs of ears to the mix.) When I finished, Ms. Howland referred to the noise of my feet on the pedalboard, “try it again without making noise.” That one comment had more impact on me than ten years of organ lessons, and I know my pedal technique improved from that moment on.

The most mechanical of musical instruments

A violin is nothing more than a curiously shaped box with a neck and four strings. The only things mechanical about it are the tuning pegs that use “friction fit” to maintain the exact tension to keep each string in tune. A trumpet has three valves that function like pistons, connecting tubes of various lengths as their positions are changed. A clarinet has eleven holes that are opened and closed by a system of levers operated by the player, and a piano key action has about ten moving parts for each note, mounted in neat rows.

Open the door of an organ case or organ chamber, and you face a complex heap of contraptions that somehow unify into a musical whole. There are bellows or reservoirs to store and regulate wind pressure, ducts to direct the wind throughout the organ, levers, switches, and wires connecting keyboards to valves, ladders and walkboards to allow technicians to clamber about inside. As it is the challenge to the musician to play the instrument with as little extra noise as possible, it is the job of the organ builder to make the machine disappear. The inherent mechanical nature of the instrument is minimized to allow the most direct communication between the musician’s brain and the listener’s ears.

Ernest Skinner, one of the most ingenious mechanical and tonal innovators in the history of organ building, invented the “whiffle-tree” expression engine. The origin of the whiffle-tree is the system of harnesses used to hitch a team of horses to a wagon that allows the force of the pull of each individual animal to be evenly added to the whole. Skinner made whiffle-tree motors with eight or sixteen stages depending on the size and glamour of the organ. They include large power pneumatics inside the machine connected to the marionette-like whiffle-tree that pulls on the shutter action, which are exhausted by a row of primary valves at the top of the machine. The motors are activated when you “close” the swell shoe, pulling the shutters closed. There is either a spring or a heavy counterweight with cable and pulleys to pull the shutters open when the motor is disengaged. To avoid the possibility of the shutters slamming closed, Skinner made the primary valve of the last stage smaller than the rest, constricting the exhaust, and slowing the motion of the shutters at the end of their travel.

While Mr. Skinner’s machine was effective at quieting the noise of closing shutters, I am reminded of a moment when operator error allowed expression shutters to make not only extra noise but visual distraction. A friend was accompanying a chorus on the organ in a music school recital hall and asked me to sit in on a rehearsal to listen for balance. She had chosen great registrations, so there was little to say there, but she was beating time with the Swell pedal, and since the shutters were fully visible as part of the organ’s façade, it was a huge distraction. We broke that habit.

Things that go bump in the night

In the 1980s and 1990s, I was curator of the mammoth Aeolian-Skinner organ at First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, also known as “The Mother Church.” Dr. Thomas Richner was the organist, a colorful, diminutive man with a wry sense of humor and marvelous control over that organ with its nearly 240 ranks. My phone rang around eleven one evening, “Pee-pee” (he called everyone Pee-pee), “something terrible has happened to the organ. I closed the Swell box and there was such a crash.” That Swell division has twenty-seven stops and forty ranks including a full-length 32′ Bombarde, and there are four big windchests with four huge banks of shutters coupled together. I went to the church the next morning to find that the cable of the counterweight for the Swell shutters had broken, and several hundred pounds of iron had crashed onto the cement floor. Practicing alone late at night in a dark church, the poor man must have jumped out of his skin.

In the 1960s, organ builders were experimenting with electric motors to control the stops of slider chests, and one of our supply houses marketed Slic Slider Motors, grapefruit-sized units with a crank arm on top that rotated 135-degrees or so from “on” to “off.” I suppose they were among the first units to work reliably in that application, and lots of organ builders used them. The travel was adjustable, and they worked quickly. But the noise was unmistakable, schliK-K-K! I remember as a pre-organ builder teenager sitting in a big church listening to an organ recital, wondering what all that noise was. After a particularly large and noisy registration change, the mentor who had brought me leaned over and explained it. That was before I knew Inda Howland, but I am sure she would not have approved.

In the early 1970s, Laukhuff, the prominent German organ supply firm that recently and unfortunately ceased operations, developed a double-acting solenoid slider motor. It was housed in a steel case, and there were steel “stops” with heavy rubber bumpers attached to the shiny central shaft to limit the travel of the sliders. I maintained several organs that featured those motors. They worked beautifully until the rubber bumpers crumbled and fell off after thirty or forty years. The motion of the powerful motors was now limited by steel-on-steel, and they made an impressive hammer-on-anvil sound as they operated. I made a supply of replacement bumpers to keep in each organ punched out of woven green hammer-rail felt with a slit cut to the center hole so they could be popped onto the shaft without dismantling the motor.

Going out with a bang

During the “organ wars” of the 1960s and 1970s, “tracker detractors” chortled, “if it clicks and clacks, it’s a tracker.” Fair enough—lots of tracker organs have action noise, especially older ones. But the thousands of “pffts” from an electro-pneumatic organ are also often audible from the pews. Modern tracker actions have Delrin and nylon bushings to replace the metal-on-wood systems found in older organs and carbon-fiber trackers that do not slap at each other like traditional wood trackers.

It is easy and relatively inexpensive to include muffler covers to quiet electro-pneumatic actions, but I have often been in organs where a previous technician left the covers off for convenience, allowing the action noise to be clearly audible. And tremolos: how many of us have heard them set up a Totentanz with reservoir weights jumping and thumping and valves huffing and puffing? Screw down those weights before they bust a gusset in a reservoir and build a box around that pufferbelly. It is not helping the music.

Along with space-age materials that allow us to build quieter actions, we have space-age lubricants to keep things running smoothly. A squirt or two and the squeak is gone, and the part moves effortlessly. But there was a spray lubricant used widely in the early 1970s that worked fine for a generation but turned gummy as it aged. Several prolific organ companies used it to lubricate the sliders of windchests, and stop actions failed as the stuff gummed up the works. I had several jobs that involved removing the pipes, taking up toeboards and sliders, cleaning off the old goo with solvents, and spraying on a new lubricant. I hope the stuff I used will last longer than the original. There is an old joke about it being easy to spot the organ builder as he walks through town because all the dogs follow him, attracted by the smell of mutton tallow he used to grease the skids.

Part of the magic of the pipe organ is its ability to move from a whisper to a roar and back again. Part of the challenge of effectively playing an effective instrument is to preserve the music itself as the only noise. I’m grateful to Inda Howland for her keen observation of the bombast of my twenty-year-old self. Let the music play.

Out and about

After Christmas 2019 I retired from maintaining pipe organs. With some forty-five years of racing about twice a year to get to every client during “tuning season,” I was looking forward to sitting back, watching my friends and colleagues as they blasted about doing Easter and spring tunings, but as it turned out, no one was doing any tuning that spring. In March of 2020 the world as we knew it shut down, churches closed their doors, and organ tuners across the country stayed home.

My tuning and service career started when I was a student at Oberlin during the 1970s, as I was fortunate to work three days a week for John Leek. If you are a regular reader, you have read about John before. He was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who apprenticed in various workshops in the Netherlands starting when he was a child. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whose reputation as an innovating organbuilder was widely known. While working on Holtkamp organs on the campus of Oberlin College, Leek saw that the school was advertising for a full-time organ curator. “That’s the job for me.”

He was still employed by Oberlin when I started working with him, but as he had developed a lively organ service trade outside of his work at the school, he soon left Oberlin and founded his eponymous company. I loved traveling around the area with him servicing organs from the start, going in and out of church and school buildings, working on a variety of instruments. Each client had distinct personalities, both personal and institutional. It was easy to tell if a place was well run or struggling, ambitious or complacent, progressive or conservative. There were people we looked forward to seeing and people we knew would be difficult. There were organs that were fun to work on, and a few that we dreaded. Some buildings were immaculately maintained, always neat and clean, and others were dirty, smelly, and cluttered.

I left John’s shop in 1984 with my wife and two toddlers to return to Boston where I grew up, joining the workshop of Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and taking a position as music director at a lovely Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. In my first weeks with Angerstein, Dan and I went on service calls together so he could introduce me to the more complex and important instruments, and I was soon exploring my home territory with helpers from the workshop, learning the tricks and foibles of each instrument and client.

Dan closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller for what turned out to be Möller’s waning days—that venerable firm closed in 1993—and I took on Angerstein’s service clients as I formed the Bishop Organ Company. Over the years I think I serviced more than 300 different organs, some for short periods, some for well over thirty years, and I know there was a stretch in the 1990s when I had close to 100 clients at once. I had a group of wonderful helpers, three of whom I taught to tune and who were my pleasant travel companions as we rolled around New England.

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We worked on a wide range of organs, from the mighty 240-stop Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston where we tuned once a week, to a three-stop positive organ by Bedient Pipe Organ. That Bedient organ is in Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is more than seventy-five miles from the Sagamore Bridge connecting Cape Cod to the mainland. It was seventy-five miles from the workshop to the bridge, so we would schedule another service call on the Cape to make the trip worthwhile. After all that driving, tuning that tiny organ was something of a lark. Once as we started that long drive home, my helper Mark was half asleep in the passenger seat, looking dreamily out the window. As we passed a car, I overheard him whimper softly to himself, “They have ice cream.” I took the hint, and we stopped at the next opportunity.

After his retirement, my father was interim rector at Saint Mary, and I played a short evensong recital on the organ. It was like riding a tricycle. The organ had been a gift from an elderly gay couple who had lived in Provincetown for decades who collected $30,000 worth of recyclable bottles and cans by rooting through the dumpsters behind restaurants and bars—600,000 bottles and cans.

I once got fired by a client after a long day of travel. When I was working with Angerstein, we did a renovation and expansion project on a small Hook & Hastings tracker organ on Martha’s Vineyard, a quaint but exclusive touristy island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Later, when I was working on my own, the organ ciphered on Good Friday, and I received a call from the organist informing me that Easter was the day-after-tomorrow. His panicky and self-centered demeanor was well remembered from the time of the renovation project. I was finished with my hundred-or-so tunings, and the program of Easter music at my church was ready to go, so on Holy Saturday I made the two-hour drive from home in North Reading, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole where you catch the ferry to the Vineyard. It takes most of an hour to get your car in line for the ferry, and it is a forty-five-minute trip across the water.

I got to the church around noon, opened the windchest bung board, found a pallet caught between two guide pins, pushed the pins apart with my fingers, closed the bung, checked the tuning of the Oboe, and drove back to the ferry terminal. The invoice I sent the next week reflected four hours of driving, four hours dealing with the ferry, the cost of mileage and ferry tickets, and my minimum hour-and-a-half service call. The organist was furious. “You were in the church for fifteen minutes and you’re charging me a thousand dollars? You’re never coming back here.” I would not have expected “I’m so grateful you could get here in time for Easter” from that guy.

I had another panicky call from an organist on a Saturday morning. A wedding was starting in an hour, and the organ would not play. When he turned on the switch, lights glowed, and he heard the blower, but no sound. The church was a half hour from home. By the time I arrived, there were limousines parked in front of the church, a bagpipe howling in front, and people pouring into the church. I raced up the stairs to the organ loft, verified that the organ was running, and the electric stop action was working. I went to the basement and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake. Easy fix. Here comes the bride.

John Leek and I worked for a Polish Catholic Church on the west side of Cleveland. At the end of each tuning day, we presented ourselves at the rectory where the pastor would ask what we like to drink, duck back inside, and return with bottles of booze and cash to pay for the tuning. It seemed like kind of a loose way to run a ship.

Gustatory tuning

When scheduling a slate of tunings, I kept two criteria in mind, geographic proximity and what would be for lunch. Some organs would command a full day a few times a year. On other days we might visit two, three, or even four organs. Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard for ten years, a neighborhood of Boston across the harbor from the city where our neighbor was the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. The Episcopal church in Charlestown was a service client with a neat little two-manual tracker organ. The organist there was a pal who was happy to hold notes, so that church was often an easy fourth stop of the day, getting me home in time for cocktails.

We had pairs of churches close to each other, each pair associated with a nice place for lunch, and I scheduled things so we had a variety of lunches. You would not want to have Mexican food two days in a row. We had a nice range of cuisines including Vietnamese (Harvard Square), Chinese (Boston University), Mexican (Worcester and Quincy, Massachusetts), Thai (Back Bay, Boston), Italian (Newton, Massachusetts), fried seafood and clam chowder (Cape Cod)—you get the idea.

Several of the organists of churches where we tuned often joined us for lunch, allowing fun conversations about what was going on in each church. I paid attention to what music was out in the choir rooms, what music was piled around the organ console, and what notices were posted on bulletin boards, so I had a comprehensive working knowledge of dozens of church music programs, all of which informed my work at the church where I was music director (as well as organ tuner).

Watch your step.

If you are paying attention, maintaining a lot of instruments is an education in organ building. It is a delight to work on a well-designed, well-engineered, well-built, and well-voiced organ. How easy it is to move around inside an organ and how easy it is to reach things that will always need attention is an important reflection on the quality of an instrument. No church wants to hear that an ordinarily simple repair would involve a week of dismantling other parts of the organ to gain access to the offender.

I maintain an organ in a large, central building in New York, built by a widely known and respected builder, that includes a common brand of solid-state controls for switching and combination actions. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the “brain” of the system was installed inside the console in a way that the interchangeable circuit boards could not be removed, making normal maintenance impossible without removing the entire unit from the console and stressing the immense jumble of ribbon cables that connect it to the organ. That Medusa-like tangle made my blood run cold.

We like to see neat wiring on junction boards in an organ, every wire in its proper place, soldered evenly, tied and dressed so it will be easy to troubleshoot in the future. Sometimes we are confronted by tangled messes of wires that show no order or logic. The weight of cables is hanging directly from delicate contacts, odd wires are laced about, and there is no logic from one row of pins to another. You just know by taking a glance that the mess will be unreliable, and it is difficult, sometimes hopeless to dig down to find the wire in question.

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Organs enclosed in free-standing cases are often among the best built, but they can be difficult to service because one must reach everything from walkboards outside the back of the case. If there are seven or eight stops on the Great, that tin façade seems a mile away, and the treble pipes of the Principal down at rackboard level are often out of reach, especially if they are cone-tuned so you cannot use a long tuning iron. Staying with the Great as example, you might find three or even four reeds at the back of the windchest (16′ Trompette, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Vox Humana, 4′ Clarion), and two or three compound stops buried behind them (Mixture VI, Scharff IV, Sesquialter II). It is a stretch to reach over those hulking reeds to get to those tiny mixture trebles. As you get used to such an organ over the years, you realize which big reed pipes you can remove to gain the angles needed.

The lowest notes of the 8′ Gedeckt are probably tubed off the main chest and mounted on the case wall, but they are far away, and they can be especially tough to handle because if the pipe is sharp you must reach the pipe with two hands, one to hold the pipe and the other to move the cap higher on the pipe. Sometimes I asked a helper to hang on to my belt to keep me from falling into the pipes.

Ernest Skinner cared a lot about the serviceability of his organs. Stable ladders, ample walkboards between windchests, and sturdy tuning benches above the pipes make tuning comfortable and safe for both the tuner and the instrument. There are no surprises like treacherous spongy boards underfoot as you pass through the organ. We hope for this quality in any organ, but some are spooky. You must figure out what can bear your weight. A good rule for when you are walking somewhere in an organ where you have not walked before is do not put all your weight on anything without trying it gently first.

Over the years

Over years I learned the priorities and interests of the many organists I worked for. For one, I would always double check all the expression boxes, shutters, motors, and mechanisms, knowing that he used them constantly and considered them an important part of his playing. For another, it might be the trebles of the flutes, making sure that solo stops like orchestral reeds or harmonic flutes were in tune with each other, especially if there were antiphonal pairs of similar stops.

I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each organ, which reeds would need attention, the trebles of stopped wood flutes, keyboard contacts, and recalcitrant tremulants. I also learned which firms build organs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and, most important, beautiful. In my conversations with many organists, I learned what features of an organ made it most useful to the working musician, and how effectively it led the church’s music, especially congregational singing.

It is fun to reflect on how much easier that work is in the age of the mobile phone. Thirty years ago, while on the road doing service calls, I had to find pay phones to let people know if I was running late and to maintain my schedule. I had a memorized list of gas stations that had phone booths that were likely to be available. If I had to call a vendor with questions about the systems of an organ, I would ask in the church office if I could use the phone and sit facing away from the secretary so I could not see her angry glare when I had tied up the church’s only phone line for too long. Today you have your phone with you all the time (and it has a flashlight). If you are explaining something to a technician at Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Organ Supply Industries, or one of our other valued suppliers, you can snap a photo and send it instantly. What could be easier?

In several churches where I tuned for decades, I outlived generations of staff members and could be relied on to find a stepladder, to know where the controls for HVAC equipment were located, and how to program the electronic tower chimes. (I like to call them Bongatrons.) It is fun to think back on tens of thousands of miles driven, thousands of satisfying repairs—it is fun when you solve a knotty problem and get an organ back on its feet—endless conversations with musicians, clergy, and staff members. I had running jokes and teases with people I saw twice a year.

What an adventure, what a privilege, and what an education. Thanks for the great ride.

Passing eras

My mother’s grandmother died in Boston in 1959 when I was three years old. I have a dim memory of her and of sitting in the kitchen of her apartment in Boston’s Back Bay at the time of her death, where I was served Cheerios with blue milk, food coloring added by her maid. Granny Reynolds was born in 1867 and remembered her grandmother who was born in 1779. As I grew up, my grandfather made a point of reminding my parents and me of that to keep the milky memory alive. Now, in my early sixties in 2020, I can claim to remember a family member who remembers a family member born during the Revolutionary War. Mozart was twenty-three years old.

Jason McKown (1906–1989) was an old Skinner man. I met him in 1987 when I was engaged to care for the Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston (a few blocks from Granny Reynolds’s apartment), where Jason had been organ curator for fifty years. He was eighty-one years old and spry as a cat, easily negotiating the tall ladders and narrow walkboards, but he was eager to retire so he introduced me to another of his clients, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, home to the monumental Aeolian-Skinner organ with over two-hundred-forty ranks.

Jason had been caring for that organ since it was installed in 1952, and in order to ensure a smooth transition after I was appointed, the church retained Jason for six months to help me learn the ropes. And some ropes they were. Forty-one ranks of reeds (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 51⁄3′ Quinte Trompette in the Swell), over a hundred ranks of mixtures (including some harmonic doozies with 7ths and 9ths), and nearly fifty independent ranks in the Pedal. It is a model of engineering, three stories tall and three chambers wide behind an acre of gold-leafed façade pipes. Jason patiently shared his approach to the instrument, its strengths and weaknesses, and the history of repairs and adjustments. We were together at the organ all day every Wednesday for those six months, with Jason leading me around as he offered his hints and insights. After more than sixty years as a tuner, he was an accomplished keyholder.

Shortly before I started at The Mother Church, Ronald Poll of Salt Lake City had been contracted to install a solid-state switching and combination action supplied by Solid State Logic. Ron was the brother of Robert Poll, curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Mormon Tabernacle, and had just completed a similar project there. As Ron started installing the hardware at the various switching stations throughout the organ, I was still maintaining the extensive electro-pneumatic electrical system for its last few months of operation, and I quickly became familiar with one of the weaknesses Jason had mentioned. The machine-formed silver contacts in the vertical gang switches were breaking and falling like pine needles in the forest. There were scores of those switches operating windchest cutouts, single ranks with independent actions, couplers, offset bass chests, and the scores of magical effects found in a huge organ.

When the contacts were manufactured, the bends were formed too crisply, and the wires broke at the bends, with new failures appearing every week. What happened when they fell? They got tangled in the contacts below them and caused cluster-ciphers of five or six notes, terrible interruptions to the marvelous playing of Dr. Thomas Richner, organist of the church, known to generations of students and admirers as Uncle T. “Peepee” (he called everyone Peepee), he’d say, “there’s a little problem in the Pedal Ophicleide.” Some little problem, when a half-dozen notes sounded as one in a stop like that! One afternoon, I was pointing out to Jason how the rows of transistors on the big switching panels compared to the rows of contacts I was so busy repairing. He shook his head and said quietly, “this is for you young guys.”

During those months, as Jason and I shared lunches and coffee breaks, he told stories from his past. He remembered seeing the 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason from the Hutchings organ in Boston’s Symphony Hall, across Massachusetts Avenue from The Mother Church, chain-sawed into pieces and stacked on the sidewalk to make way for the new Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1134, 1947). He remembered talking with Marcel Dupré as the great French organist prepared a recital at King’s Chapel in Boston (Aeolian-Skinner Opus 170-A, 1946), asking how often the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice was tuned. “Not until the next cleaning.” Jason was a direct connection between Marcel Dupré and me.

Jason recommended me to a dozen or so other churches, one of which was especially meaningful. The Congregational Church of West Medford, Massachusetts, was home to Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 692 (1928), a lovely instrument with fourteen ranks. Jason was twenty-two years old when he worked on that installation, under the personal supervision of his employer, Ernest Skinner. The organ was fifty-nine years old when I became the second technician to care for it. Jason was a direct connection between Mr. Skinner and me.

Jason McKown and his wife Ruth were devoted members of Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, where the Bauhaus sanctuary housed a 1973 three-manual Casavant with a harsh angular case design. Jason did not much like that organ, but he maintained it until the end of his life with all the care and skill he gave to his favorite Skinner organs. In those days I drove an eight-passenger van; I ferried a carload of people from The Mother Church to attend his funeral in 1989.

Centre Methodist Church closed in 2007. The Organ Clearing House sold and moved the Casavant organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia. A new case was designed and built by QLF Organ Components, a subsidiary of Lively-Fulcher Organbuilders. Jason was not generous with his comments about the original Casavant case design. I think he would have liked the new one.

Chapters

My friendship with Jason spans eras. I was in my early thirties when I knew him, and over thirty years after his death, I value that he was my personal connection to Ernest Skinner. I admire his longevity, diligence, and devotion to the organs in his care, and I was influenced by his respect especially for Mr. Skinner’s genius. Though he knew it was too late for him to learn about solid-state organ controls, he was open to the new technology being installed in The Mother Church organ. Stories like the destruction of the old Symphony Hall organ told of how he had witnessed deep change in the name of progress.

When Jason first worked at The Mother Church, the fifteen-acre site included the Original Edifice (1894), the first church building built by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; “The Extension,” the marvelous domed wedding cake of a building (1906) that seats 3,000; and the Publishing Society, home of the renowned international newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. The site was transformed in 1971 with the construction of the new Christian Science Plaza with three new significant buildings, including a twenty-six-story administration building and a seven-hundred-foot reflecting pool, and the entire plaza was paved with bricks. Jason had been friends with the man whose life work was the creation and care of an extensive rose garden next to the church along Huntington Avenue. When the plaza was built, the rose garden was destroyed. Jason told sweetly of the heartbreak of his friend seeing his life’s work disappear.

Progress

I am a loyal fan of Patrick O’Brian’s marvelous series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I have audio recordings of all twenty-one books and often listen to passages in my workshop or as I drive. Captain Jack Aubrey, one of the central characters, is a skillful and courageous frigate captain, and his friend Stephen Maturin is a physician who travels on Jack’s ships as surgeon, which serves as cover for his central activity as a member of Naval Intelligence. Jack plays the violin, well enough to tackle the Bach Chaconne in D Minor, and Stephen plays the cello. As they sail around the world, they play the classics together deep into the night. Jack distinguished between his sea-going fiddle and the precious Amati that he kept at home. One night as they were tuning their strings, Jack’s steward Killick griped to the steward’s mate, “Scrape, scrape, screech, screech, and never a tune you can sing to, not if you were drunk as Davie’s sow.” Those stories are rife with adventure and intrigue. O’Brian was a devoted student of that history, writing dialogue using two-hundred-year-old figures of speech, and for this enthusiastic sailor, he accurately and dramatically describes the act and art of sailing big ships. 

As the wars dragged on toward 1815, steam-powered ships were being introduced. It was easy for Jack to understand the advantages of steam power, allowing a ship to sail directly into the wind or without any wind at all. Guns could be mounted facing straight forward and backward, while sailing ships were encumbered by sails and rigging in both those directions and limited to firing broadsides. If your ship had steam power, you had an immense advantage over sail; if you were sailing and encountered an enemy in a steamship, you were in grave peril. Nonetheless, one tradition-bound and slightly drunken admiral lamented loudly about the Navy contemplating losing its skillful sailors to “a hoard of mechanics.”

Steam locomotives powered railroads from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. Diesel powered (and diesel-electric) locomotives were first introduced around 1930. By around 1950, diesel locomotives were more powerful, more economical to maintain and operate, and safer than those powered by steam, and steam locomotives became a thing of the past. Many engineers revered the elegance of steam machinery and regretted their demise, but today with few exceptions, steam locomotives are limited to historical exhibits and attractions, and a troupe of hobbyist organbuilders I know.

Friends of ours have a huge old iron cook stove in their kitchen. Susan is a virtuoso with the cooktop lids, lifting them as she converses to drop in a log or two. She manages different levels of heat from one side to another and has pots of savory smelling stuff simmering away. The hulking thing sure does make the kitchen toasty warm on a cold night, but she uses the modern gas cooktop mounted in the counter for most of the cooking. Her curmudgeonly husband Barnaby thinks food tastes better from the wood stove, but he does not cook, ever, and Susan has her way. “Barnaby, have another bourbon.”

Charles-Marie Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris for sixty-three years. Something like halfway through his tenure the first electric blower was installed on the Cavaillé-Coll organ. By then he had written the ten organ symphonies that are the backbone of his output, played for thousands of Masses, hundreds of concerts, hundreds of funerals, weddings, and festivals. He must have spent thousands of additional hours at the organ practicing and teaching. Through all of that, the hundred-stop organ was pumped by human power. What a liberation it must have been for him to climb the steps to the organ loft, switch on the power, and play to an empty church using all the wind he wanted.

There are a number of modern mechanical-action organs built under classic inspiration that are pumped by reconstructions of ancient human-powered systems, and in the late 1990s I restored an organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook (when my great-grandmother was one year old), including restoring the hand pumping system. Yuko Hayashi, the revered long-time professor of organ at the New England Conservatory of Music, brought her organ classes to that church so they could experience hand-powered organ wind, comparing both sources of wind playing the same passage of music. It is a fascinating study, helping us to understand just how music sounded when played centuries ago, but I doubt many of us would forsake the convenience and stability of the electric blower.

The passage of steam-powered ships and locomotives, Susan and Barnaby’s woodstove, and Widor’s hand-pumped organ are all examples of innovations replacing “the old way.” Many pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts are admirers of the old way. “If God intended us to have more than four general pistons, Mr. Skinner would have given us five.” But today’s conversation is not about venerable electro-pneumatic organs being replaced by modern trackers, and it’s not about historic tracker organs being replaced by modern electro-pneumatic instruments. It’s about the future of the organ, the future of all organs.

We can’t save them all.

In the 1920s, American pipe organ builders were producing twenty-five hundred new organs each year. Suburban churches had sixty voice choirs and sixty-stop organs, and a thousand place settings of monogrammed china. Those churches now have dwindling congregations, staggering fuel bills, and leaky roofs. In a world weakened by epidemic, smaller, weaker parishes are struggling like never before, and pipe organs are coming on the market like fireworks on the fourth of July. Hundreds of organs, many of them priceless historic artifacts, are glutting a market in which churches choose between pipe organs, electronic instruments, or no organ-based music at all.

My desk at the Organ Clearing House is proof of that. My inbox is full of pleas to “save this beautiful organ.” We can place only a fraction of the available instruments, and it is hard to justify encouraging a church to purchase an organ of poor quality and doubtful musical interest when so many wonderful organs are available. Once it was hard for me to condemn an organ to the knacker’s yard, but I have gotten over it. I know that there is a finite amount of money spent in the United States each year on pipe organs, and it feels like smart duty to see that as little as possible is spent on lesser organs. If we are going to have fewer organs, they might as well be the best.

An unwanted pipe organ is among the greatest of white elephants. This applies to instruments of high pedigree and important historical value as much as to small, simple, ordinary instruments. When progress means that a building has to go, whatever is inside goes with it. If it is a historical home with a beautiful organ, when time’s up, time’s up. If it is a spectacular church building, ravaged by time and weather and failing budgets, whatever is inside goes with it.

If you learn that a church in your neighborhood is planning to close, encourage them to think right away of the artifacts that should be saved. Pipe organs, stained-glass windows, and liturgical furnishings can all be preserved and relocated, but it takes time. If my first contact about an available organ is from the real-estate developer who bought the building and plans to gut the interior in two weeks, there is no hope. As it takes years for a church to decide to commission a new organ, it takes years for a congregation to embrace the idea of disbanding. Plan ahead.

Most importantly, we must care for our profession. Colleague organbuilders and organists must project their work in the music of the church as a rich gift. We have received our talents as gifts. It is our responsibility to nurture those talents and share them with the people in our churches, those in the pews, and those around the table at weekly staff meetings. Make them love what you do. I am tired of seeing memes showing the Dowager Countess of Grantham with pursed lips, saying that people who think the organ is too loud “don’t have any taste.” I am tired of seeing images of gag stop knobs engraved with “Rector Ejector,” or “Cut Pulpit Mic.” They may be good for a smirk between organists, but they imply an underlying disrespect that is not good for our future.

An organist accepting a new position “if there will be a new organ” is an affront to church music. Maybe the place should have a new organ, but that should be the collective decision of a generous and worshipful community with the support and encouragement of the musicians, not an arrogant demand. You likely know more about church music than those around you, but with your help, they can love it as much as you do. That is what honors the links between you and the centuries-old procession of brilliance which is the heritage of our music and our instruments. That’s our future.

Photo: 1952 Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, The Mother Church Extension, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts (photo credit: William T. Van Pelt)

Organs and boats (There he goes again.)

Mystic, Connecticut, is a fun destination for people like me with a love for saltwater sailing. The area was originally home to the Native American Pequot people, was settled by British colonists around 1640, and was one of the first ports in New England. It is now home to the Mystic Seaport Museum, which has a vast range of exhibits about the history of sailing in the region. The museum includes a large and comprehensive working wooden boat shop where many important historic vessels have been restored.

Ours is a catboat, one of a class of broad-beamed boats developed for nineteenth-century fishermen in New England, handy enough to sail alone with a large, single sail, stable in choppy water, with plenty of capacity for a large catch. Since Kingfisher entered our lives, we have been members of the Catboat Association with some 2,500 other catboaters. The membership is listed twice in the club’s directory, once alphabetically by last name, and once by the name of the boat.

Each January, the Catboat Association holds a three-day meeting in a large convention hotel a few miles away, and we have had several fascinating dedicated tours of the museum. A highlight of one of those visits was a private tour of the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in existence, undergoing restoration at the time. She was built in 1841, is 107 feet long, nearly thirty feet wide, and was launched after restoration in 2013. During the summer of 2014, she was sailed by a specially chosen crew on a tour of thirty-eight New England ports and is now on permanent exhibit in Mystic.

The director of the restoration was our guide, taking a couple hours out of his hard workday. He showed us how they steamed fifteen- and twenty-foot-long, six-inch-thick oak planks and bent them to fit the compound curves of the ship’s sides, fastening them with heavy handmade wood nails and caulking the seams with tar-soaked hemp. He also shared a remarkable story of the unique problems of material supply in that specialized authentic field.

A main central beam supporting the deck along the length of the ship was rotten beyond saving, and the shipbuilders were at a loss to replace it, when they received a chance call from a contractor who was starting the construction of a large new building in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Wendy and I lived in the Navy Yard for ten years, which is also home to the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy, and is an interesting place to visit. When we had dinner guests whom we knew would be interested, we carried a cocktail around to the Constitution, because the ship fired the Navy’s regulation “sunset gun,” using 7:00 p.m. as the “official modified sunset” in the now residential neighborhood.

Excavation was underway at the site of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital at the north end of the yard when the contractors unearthed more than a dozen huge oak beams unknown in modern times that had been preserved by being buried centuries ago by Navy shipbuilders. The contractor had the imagination and presence of mind to contact the Mystic Seaport asking if they were of any value, and the next day the seaport sent flatbed semi-trailers to collect them. We were shown the beam that had been chosen for the Charles W. Morgan. Anyone interested in historic preservation in any field such as the pipe organ would surely appreciate the fortuitous discovery.

Organ installation

It is mid-January, and I am not here to play with boats. We are spending long working days in the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, a neighborhood of the town of Stonington. The organ was built by Austin Organs, Inc., in 1979 (Opus 2926), with two manuals and fifteen ranks—a modest and simple organ with a clever scheme of borrowing to create a flexible pedal division.

After the start of the second decade of this century, the people of Saint Michael’s were planning a new building, and in 2013 we were engaged to dismantle and store the Austin organ. We would install the organ in the completed new building under a separate agreement. The new building was designed by architect Brett Donham (who also designed the recent renovation of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Boston, and Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, Brookline, Massachusetts), who happens to be a friend of Wendy and me with a summer home just a few miles from our house in Maine.

In the new building, the organ would be installed in a free and open space on the main floor of the building, a rare instance of a new ecclesiastical building with no limitations for the placement of an organ. My organbuilder colleagues will chuckle “too good to be true,” and they would be right. Fundraising fell short, plans for the new building were scrapped, and the existing building would be stripped to its very bones and rebuilt on the same footprint. We would install the organ in the same loft from which it was removed, but—wait for it—the ceiling would be eighteen inches lower over the Swell, stealing space from the organ to allow an enhanced HVAC system.

A colleague subcontractor releathered the Austin actions for us, and we started the installation about ten days ago. Remember the “too good to be true part?” Today is Sunday, and I put the last two cables on the console junctions this afternoon. The church and the organ will be dedicated on Saturday in a two-hour ceremony led by the bishop of the diocese along with combined choirs and brass instruments. We have a busy week ahead of us. We have built a new swell box, repositioned the Swell in relation to the Great to make the most of the available space, relocated the four largest pipes (the only ones that would not fit under the new lower ceiling), and hung the chimes on the wall. We will spend the next several days setting the pipes on the chests, installing the last few appliances (fan tremolo and its electric relay, expression motor, etc.).

The birth of a new building

The finished church building is lovely. The windows and oak wainscoting are bordered with attractive and colorful stenciled patterns, the walls are painted a rich brick red, new light fixtures with fancy controls and state-of-the-art bulbs illuminate the place effectively, and an intricate system of wood trusses supports the pitched ceiling, a huge change from the tacky dropped ceiling in the original building.

The high altar and reredos are made of wood but are receiving a faux-marble painted finish by the Golubovic family. Milan Church Restoration is run by Marco Golubovic, whose family came to the United States from Serbia in the early 1990s. His parents are the artists who marbleized the altar. We have been watching them with interest as they transform the primed-white structure to stone, making mixtures of tubed colored oils and lined oil, sketching “marbly” designs in pencils, and applying the colored veins to the wood with fine artist brushes, sponges, and the occasional finger-painted streak.

The “altar system” has a special feature. The altar itself is mounted on well-concealed wheels and can be used either as a free-standing fixture with the priest facing the congregation or can be pushed against the reredos under the centered tabernacle so the priest can celebrate Mass in traditional style with his back to the congregation.

In 1979, I helped install the Flentrop organ in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, where I later played several recitals, and which was the site of my first wedding. The altar and pulpit in that church are made of richly veined marble that look for all the world as though they are made of blue cheese. The artists at work this week at Saint Michael’s are good at painting blue cheese. It is reminiscent of Homer’s account of the Greek god Poseidon who turned a Phaeacian ship into stone, punishing them for aiding his enemy Odysseus.

The Stations of the Cross are molded and carved pieces about thirty inches high and twenty-four inches wide. The figures and architectural images are colorfully painted, and each piece weighs about fifty pounds. The general contractor replaced the hardware and steel wire to hang them on the walls, similar to hanging a heavy painting in your home. The wire they chose was not up to the job, and last week two of the stations fell to the floor within twelve hours of each other. Late one evening, the priest and project manager removed the remaining twelve from the wall lest they, too, should fall. Fortunately, Milan Church Restorations also specializes in the restoration of liturgical art, and they were able to repair the severe damage to the plaster pieces on short notice. A different wire was chosen, and the pieces were quickly rehung.

The new sound system was tested and calibrated last week. I am not much of a fan of public address systems, and I have heard many that distort rather than enhance the spoken word. I have often noticed that the technicians who work with those systems are very good at counting, but their range is limited: “one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . .” It reminds me of the old vaudeville gag of a horse counting by stomping its feet. The techs were very proud to demonstrate that the microphones could handle anything they were offered. You could approach with voice meek and mild, the microphone pointing at your forehead, whimpering through a passage of scripture, or you could lean into it and thunder, fire, and brimstone. Goodness, he must have practiced that routine, and through it all, I was sitting on an upturned bucket, sorting wires at the junction in the back of the console (white with blue, blue with white, . . . violet with green, green with violet) with a PA speaker ten inches from my head. Actually, not through it all. After several minutes, I stood up, waved my arms above my head as if I was marooned on a desert island, and asked ol’ silver tongue to turn off the balcony speakers.

As we race toward completion, as the general contractor prepares to leave the building officially in a couple days, as the pastor paces around the building noting details, and as UPS delivers eight hundred new hymnals, we are aware of the sense of anticipation. They have been worshipping in a neighboring church for almost seven years, and they have missed their home parish. The pastor brings a small group of people into the building several times a day, and I have heard their exclamations, their excitement, even weeping. Some wander into the choir loft and shake their heads at the complexity of the pipe organ. Inwardly, we reflect that it is actually a very small and simple organ, but to them, who have never seen the innards of a pipe organ, it is as much a marvel as a Silbermann organ was to an eighteenth-century Alsatian vintner. It is certainly not my job to correct them, as in, “Actually, this organ is pretty simple.” It’s their organ, they’re proud of it, and they love it.

Let us remember a time when most every local, even rural church had a four-, six-, or eight-rank pipe organ that they loved and valued. M. P. Möller built over thirteen thousand organs, most of which were smaller “factory models,” as did Casavant, Reuter, Schantz, and others. While so many smaller churches purchase substitute instruments now, we celebrate those that own and cherish a real pipe organ.

My friend Jim

I have wired dozens of organs in my career. It is work I enjoy, and I draw from my experience as an organist to enhance my understanding of the complex wiring schemes. When I am sorting out cables, I can picture the musician using a particular function of the organ. I know why it is there, how it is used, why it is important, and I love hooking up those wires. (“She’s gonna use the Great to Pedal reversible a lot.”) Wendy is an avid weaver who revels in the complex patterns possible with the multiple shafts of the loom. There is a poetic similarity between weaving and organ wiring—both crafts create matrices with two axes, both rely on neatness and predictability for their beauty. (The trackers and stop actions of an organ with mechanical action also have rich parallels with weaving.)

My career started in the late 1970s, just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were becoming common. A few of the first organs I renovated and installed had electro-mechanical switching systems with phosphor-bronze contacts as developed by early twentieth-century organ building pioneers like Austin, Skinner, Casavant, and Möller, but since at least 1980, virtually every organ I have finished has included solid-state controls. The Austin organ at Saint Michael’s has analog switching—the simple relays (touch boxes) at the tail end of the keyboards in thousands of Austin organs. It is the first time in decades that I have wired an entire organ “the old-fashioned way.”

It is ironic, because my old pal Jim Mornar retired from Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc., at the end of 2019. Back in the 1980s when I was first working independently, I attended a couple informational seminars at the Peterson plant to enhance my understanding of their equipment. That is when I got to know Jim personally, and in the ensuing decades, with his help, I purchased dozens of systems from Peterson for rebuilding consoles and updating entire organ systems.

I have spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Jim, each call starting with casual banter and moving gradually toward the problem at hand. Often, it was “my bad.” “Did you connect the ground?” “Yes, of course, . . . oooh, . . . maybe not, . . . never mind.” Sometimes it was a serious puzzle. I would describe a problem in excruciating detail and could picture Jim’s hand rubbing his chin as if I was nuts. “That can’t be.” “It is.”

When placing a call to Peterson (answered by Marlene or Karyn) I would ask for Uncle Jim. (He is just a couple years older than I am.) They often told me he was on the phone. He would call back an hour later, just to get on a fifty- or sixty-minute call with me. I suppose his job was to talk on the phone, but I know he designed and built the systems I ordered.

There are hundreds of organists who have no idea how important Jim Mornar was to the effectiveness and reliability of the instruments they play. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.) Nice work, Jim. You are the best.

Going out in flames

I mentioned Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, which was recreated by architect Brett Donham after a significant fire in the 1980s. It is home to an organ built by George Bozeman & Company of Deerfield, New Hampshire, affectionately known by the Bozeman workshop as Orgelbrookline. I worked for George during the summers of 1975 and 1976, my first experience in an organ workshop. Early in the summer of 1976, we all participated in moving the shop to Deerfield from Lowell, Massachusetts.

When I was a young teenager, I sang in the choir of my home church with George’s wife, Pat, and together they were important mentors to me, introducing me to the world of the pipe organ, especially as it flourished in the heady days of the “tracker revival” in Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I will always be grateful for the care and attention they offered a young organ geek.

George retired, the company closed, and he continued to live in a cottage behind the main house on the property whose barn was the workshop, until recently when he offered the whole place for sale and moved to a retirement community. The Organ Clearing House had used the workshop for storage and a few small projects, and we removed our material in advance of the closing. The electricity had been shut off for quite a while as the building was barely being used. A few days after the closing, the new owner turned on the main switch and was checking some electrical circuits when there were sparks, and within a few minutes the building was engulfed with flames.

It was no longer George’s building and it was no longer an organ workshop, but it sure was sad to see it go down. The historic home of a creative company was lost.

Rites of passage. Thank you, George. Thank you, Jim.