In the Wind: What's important?

If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one there to hear it . . .

Suppose that we are sharing Christmas dinner. We are sitting with family and friends at a “groaning board” festooned with Granny’s stemware and china, ironed linen napkins, and the best silver, freshly polished. Red juices flow from the beef tenderloin as slices fall from the knife. Please pass the potatoes.

Over the clinking of silverware I happen to mention, “By the way, did you hear that all the churches will be closed for Easter?” Silence. “And not just Easter, Palm Sunday, and all of Holy Week.”

Shazam! I was right! To be truthful, I did not foresee it. No one did. According to Science Daily (April 9, 2020), by Christmas 2019, COVID-19 was more than a glimmer in the eye of a Chinese bat, but no one imagined that it would be spreading across the globe like wildfire a few months later. When my family and I left New York City for our house in Maine on March 14, there were fewer than 500 cases reported in the city. Three weeks later there were more than 20,000. Today, just one month later, there are over 110,000 confirmed cases with over 10,000 deaths in New York City alone. With the deadline for submissions to The Diapason six weeks before publication, writing these essays is no way to report the news. I am writing in mid-April, and you are reading in early June—plenty will have happened in the meantime. I hope some of it was good.

March 14 was the day Pope Francis announced that Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City would be closed to the public and Easter Masses would be celebrated with no congregation. Thousands of churches around the world shared the example. The internet was rich with video clips of worship being led by two or three people in an empty church or by individuals participating in orders of worship individually from their homes, iPhone videos spliced together for broadcast on Sunday morning. Thousands of brass players and singers lost income. Hundreds of thousands of volunteer choir members missed the high point of the season. And thousands of preachers delivered Resurrection messages via their laptop screens.

The New York Chautauqua Assembly was an adult education, entertainment, and social movement founded by 1874 for the purpose of bringing cultural experiences to rural communities. Started as a summer camp on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in western New York, it grew to have chapters across the country. President Theodore Roosevelt commented that the Chautauqua Assembly was the most American thing in America. In the June 1883 issue of the journal, The Chautauquan, the question was posed, “If a tree fell on an island where there were no human beings, would there be any sound?” The essay went on to say, “No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion.” I am not smart enough to second guess such an august source of philosophy, but my crude understanding of the science of noise is that sound is created by the vibration of air stimulated by some physical source and exists as sound waves that travel whether or not there is a receptor. That rhetorical question is reminiscent of Neils Bohr challenging Albert Einstein to prove there is a moon without looking at it.

Because of the widespread shutdown in response to COVID-19, we are learning a lot about working empty rooms. Late-night television hosts are trying to get big laughs while sitting in their living rooms. Symphony orchestras are presenting live broadcast concerts in empty halls. And we hear the peace and word of the Lord by way of a MacBook Pro, a church’s organist leading Zoom worship from his piano at home. All performing artists know that audience reaction is palpable. When you are playing before an enthusiastic crowd, you can feel the excitement, even if you are sitting with your back to them, buried behind a massive Rückpositiv case. Many of my performing friends have identified this as a challenge during recording sessions. Does your performance sound, feel, and project differently when the audience is absent? How do you get that fire in your belly when playing for a few recording engineers and a roomful of microphones? Part of the magic of public worship is sharing the experience with the people around you, both old friends and strangers.

I love the notion that congregational singing led by a pipe organ is a physiological phenomenon in which all the producers of tone are using the same body of air as fuel. What the singers exhale goes into the blower intake, and a great circle is established. That is not happening on Zoom.

Alternative worship

This phrase brings fear into the hearts of many organists, conjuring up images of guitars, drum sets, and songs with four notes, four chords, four lines, four stanzas, and four tuned strings. Several years ago, I was assembling the restored tracker action of a nineteenth-century organ, working toward an Easter deadline. The church’s contemporary ensemble needed to practice, and I needed the time, so we agreed that I would just keep working quietly inside the organ while they rehearsed. One thing was certain: they needed to practice. Another thing was certain: it didn’t help. Their rehearsal technique was to barge through a song four or five times compounding the mistakes and slapping each other on the back as if they had just finished their set at Woodstock.

But alternative worship can mean many different things. A little over twenty years ago, I was working on a project on the campus of UCLA and staying in a twenty-room hotel on campus that was operated by students in the hotel management school. The icy phone calls during which my first wife and I were separated happened when I was in that room. It was not a fun time.

I was interested in hearing and seeing the mammoth organ at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles and planned to attend worship there on Sunday, but I was on Eastern time and woke up at three in the morning. Organ preludes would start at 10:30 a.m., so I figured I had plenty of time for a drive up the coast, thinking that some wind off the ocean would ease the darkness I was feeling. I do not remember just where I wound up. A glance at a map suggests it must have been somewhere between Ventura and Santa Barbara where I noticed a group of at least fifty people gathered on a bluff staring at the ocean with binoculars. I was curious—what would bring so many people together so early in the morning—so I parked my car and walked toward the group.

Someone welcomed me in and explained what was going on. The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Cetacean Society was counting migrating whales. There were tables set up with coffee and pastries. The people with binoculars were shouting out numbers while people with clipboards were recording them. There was a strong sense of comradery driven by a common purpose, and I quickly abandoned my plan of going to church. Standing by the ocean with a group of friendly people watching the glory of creation swim by was worshipful enough for me that day, lifting my spirits and clearing the mess from between my ears.

That singular Easter has just passed. We are all learning new ways to worship. Facebook is often a wormhole of self-satisfaction. I am not interested in your haircut or your magnificent meal. But I sure am interested in the dozens of posts I have read from colleagues sharing what it was like to participate in virtual Easter. Some showed clips of people dressed casually, leading a hymn from the piano in their living room, shifting to a pastor sitting at a desk leaning earnestly toward the screen speaking of the Resurrection “in this unusual time.” Others showed elaborately vested social-distancing priests at a high altar festooned with lilies, beeswax candles afire, a group of singers standing six feet apart, and the organist raising the dead with blazing trumpets.

Our rector in New York City spoke of taking a walk in abandoned lower Manhattan and seeing a small fleet of refrigerated trucks serving as temporary morgues behind a neighboring hospital. Realizing what they were and struck by the tragic loneliness of the scene, he stopped and offered a blessing. How’s that for an Easter message?

Resiliency

In the relative safety and serenity of our place in Maine, we have had two dramatic weather events in the last few days. In the afternoon of Holy Thursday, the wind came up, heavy rain turned to far heavier snow, the power went out, the generator came on, and the storm whipped through the night. On Good Friday, we woke to six inches of white wet glop, nearly impossible to walk on. Lichen-encrusted branches had fallen everywhere, and walking a few dozen yards up the driveway with a dog was like running a gauntlet with snow and debris falling from trees every few steps. The driveway is a half-mile long. It was grocery day, and I was planning to go to town. I put a saw in the car and spent a couple hours moving stuff off the road into the ditches.

The power was out all day, through Friday night, through Saturday night, and into Sunday afternoon, coming back on just as hundreds of colleagues would be launching into “the Widor” across the country. The head of our driveway is four miles down a rural road from the village, and the power lines snake through a maze of branches. There was a heavy ice storm shortly after we moved in the winter of 2001, and the power was out for nearly a week. That was when we installed the generator, and it has been a trusted part of the household since.

On Easter Monday, the rain started again, and the wind whipped up to gale force. The temperature was mild so there was no snow, but that storm stood out for the velocity and ferocity of the wind. The trees along the shore at the bottom of the yard were whipping wildly back and forth. After dinner I sat on the deck in the lee of the storm watching the crazy motion in the darkness and listening to the roar of the wind when it stopped. It did not lessen and die down. It just stopped. The roar became silence. The next morning, we confirmed that nothing new had fallen in the yard or on the driveway. After all that whipping about, no trees had fallen. Such resilience. Such strength. Such stability. A metaphor for facing life today.

In the 1964 film Mary Poppins, George Banks (played by David Tomlinson) works for the Dawes Tomes Mously Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. He is the father of Jane and Michael, husband of Winifred, and Mary Poppins’s employer. He is a man of rigid routine. Early in the film, arriving home from the office, he sings:

I feel a surge of deep satisfaction

Much as a king astride his noble steed.

When I return from daily strife to hearth and wife,

How pleasant is the life I lead . . . .

. . .  I run my home precisely on schedule.

At 6:01, I march through my door.

My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02,

Consistent is the life I lead.

The trouble is that while he is singing, Winifred is trying to interrupt to tell him the children are missing.

I can hear Wendy snickering. Cocktails here are at six-oh-oh. Dinner at eight-oh-oh. The routine is regular enough that Farley the Goldendoodle can tell time. “Paws up” on the bed at 6:30 in the morning. (That is the only time he ever gets on furniture.) A couple minutes before cocktails, he is sitting watching me. He gets an ice cube or two when I am fixing drinks and a dental “chewy” when we sit down with them. He depends on that routine as much as I do. We have laughed about it many times. Sometimes wryly.

But consistent no more. Our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter who live in Brooklyn, New York, came to Maine with us—and their dog. Remembering those refrigerated trucks, we are glad we can offer them shelter from the ravages of the city. We are four adults, a toddler, and two dogs, and the quiet, comfortable routine of two empty nesters is on sabbatical, if not just gone. We are five weeks into it now, and I have had some tough moments adjusting. But think of our Brooklynites. At least we are at home. We have lived in this house for almost twenty years, the longest either of us have lived in one place. We have clothes in the closets, unread books on the nightstands, extra toothbrushes in the drawers in the bathroom. It is familiar. They have left their home behind, all their daily routines, and all their stuff. We are coming up with new common daily rhythms, and the great news is that we are getting more time with our granddaughter than we could have imagined.

The new normal

I wonder when things will go back to normal. I wonder what the “new normal” will be. We were living in an unusual time before the start of the pandemic. Yesterday, CBS News reported that this is the first March since 2002 without a school shooting in the United States. Why? Simple. Schools are closed. Every significant arts organization in the country is closed. Thousands of orchestral musicians, actors, stagehands, ushers, and administrators are out of work. When the Metropolitan Opera laid off its entire staff with pay ending on March 31, I wondered if that fantastic assembly of talented skilled people could ever be gathered together again? But it is not as if disgruntled, they would take other jobs. There are no other jobs.

I can imagine sitting down again with trusted friends for a drink or a meal, maybe not so long from now. I can imagine taking an unessential drive to a park for a picnic. I can even imagine booking a hotel room and working on a job away from home. But knowing how I feel when I have to walk past an unmasked stranger in a grocery aisle, I cannot imagine walking through a foyer into a crowded theater or concert hall, exposing myself and those I love to whatever foolish indiscretion a seatmate might have committed. I assume I will go to a concert again, but I cannot imagine it yet. A vaccination against COVID-19 must be the greatest brass ring for medical research since polio.

The community of the church choir has always been a source of recreation and spiritual enhancement. In a video interview produced by the publisher J. W. Pepper in 2015, composer and conductor John Rutter says, “. . . choral music is not one of life’s frills. It is something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls.”¹ I first sang in a children’s choir in 1966 when I was ten years old. I have vivid memories from a few years later of using my new grown-up voice as a member of the adult choir singing Bach’s Cantata 140. (Va-ha-ke-het auf, Va-ha-ke-het auf, Va-ha-ke-het auf—two, three, one—ruft die Stimme!) I trust that future generations will have similar thrills, knowing the joy of singing closely with others.

In this column in the May 2017 issue of The Diapason, I wrote under the title, “Music in terrible times.” Wendy and I had just heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. I started that essay with Leonard Bernstein’s famous quote from the Vietnam era: “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensively, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” I wrote of the siege of Leningrad in which more than a million people died, a battle that inspired Shostakovich’s masterpiece. I wrote of the bombing of Coventry, England, in 1940 from which came Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. I wrote of Stalag VIIIA where Olivier Messiaen was a prisoner of war and a sympathetic guard provided him with pencil and paper, allowing him to create Quartet for the End of Time.

Those great masterpieces are all the expressions of creative geniuses responding to vast human crises. The people who lived those days must have wondered if it would ever end. And horrible as they were, they all did end. Many people suffered, many people died, families were destroyed, and dreams were shattered. I trust that we will see each other at the symphony again. We will go to the theater again. We will go to ball games again. We will go sailing again. For now, we have to stay strong, take care of the people we love, and nourish the creativity within.

Now go practice while you have a chance.

Notes

1. You can see the interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U.

Photo: John Cantrell, choirmaster and organist, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, New York, New York. John records rehearsal tracks for choir members, they practice and send in their videos, and he mixes them into a virtual choir, adds readings recorded by parishioners at home, sermon, and voilà! (Photo credit: Kathleen Cantrell)

Breathtaking

My father was, among many other things, an ardent and slightly kooky baseball fan. He grew up in Cincinnati watching the Reds at Crosley Field and started a lifelong relationship with the Boston Red Sox when he was in seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was eleven years old in 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream, when the Red Sox won the American league pennant behind the bat and fielding of Carl Yastrzemski. I think it was that summer that Dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time.

I will never forget my glimpse of all that beautiful green grass as we entered the stands from the scrum in the tunnels beneath. After watching dozens of games on black-and-white television it was breathtaking, and as I write that word, I imagine that I can feel the gasp. It took my breath away. A couple days ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about Iranian women being allowed to watch a live soccer match for the first time in forty years. (Google “Iranian women soccer,” and you will find a slew of stories.) One woman interviewed brought a tear to my eye when she mentioned “all that green grass.” I knew just what she was feeling, except that I have always taken my access to major league sports for granted.

I had the same sort of feeling the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live in Symphony Hall. I had never heard anything like those double basses. My breath was taken away again when I stepped into a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and saw Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night in real time. It looks great on a coffee mug or a t-shirt, but that is not the same.

A couple weeks ago I spent a week in Germany visiting an organbuilder’s workshop to discuss a future project. An American colleague was also visiting to give first lessons in voicing organ pipes to a bright young apprentice. And while I was there, I visited three historic organs. Two were iconic eighteenth-century masterpieces, gleaming away in their natural habitat. The third was a beauty built in Boston in 1930 for a church in Passaic, New Jersey. What are you doing in Germany?

A glass of wine, Herr Gabler?

The Basilica of Saint Martin is perched on a hill in eponymous Weingarten, the principal town in a region known for growing grapes and producing wine. I had my first glimpse of its towers as I turned a corner passing Burger King. It is a town of about 24,000 people with a long and complicated history of changes of government and processions of Lord Mayors and Abbots. The exterior of the huge building is simple enough, and it is surrounded by the dormitory-like buildings of what was one of the largest monasteries in Germany.

I first saw photos of the organ built by Joseph Gabler when I was a kid, most likely after that first baseball game because my organ lessons started when I was twelve. Visually, it is at the top of the list of all-time greats, on a par with and wildly different from the Müller organ at Haarlem, you know, the red one with the lions. Enormous organ cases decorated with faux-marble swirl around six huge round windows, everything festooned with putti, moldings, carvings, and virile statues to Rococo extremes. I entered the Basilica of Saint Martin from the west end, under the organ, so my first view of the place was down the three-hundred-foot nave, across a fantasyland of decoration. The arched ceiling, nearly a hundred feet up, is adorned with murals in which painted drapery crosses borders to become real drapery.

When I turned around to look at the organ for the first time, I had two quick impressions. In spite of the 32′ façade pipes, it is up so high that it does not look very big, and its magnificent gaudiness cannot possibly be captured in a photograph. There is so much going on visually that I could not take my eyes off it. It is when you climb the many stairs (I forgot to count) to the organ loft that you find out how big it is. You can hardly see the top of the organ. The biggest façade pipe is 32′ DDDD (the two largest are inside the cases). The loft must be fifty feet across, and you could imagine that there are three or four independent organs up there until you realize that the console is up six steps on a platform that allows tracker action to run every which way, and the floor boards between the base of the console platform and the two cases on the gallery rail have iron rings so they can be lifted to access the mechanics.

I visited Weingarten with the three colleagues from the workshop. Stephan Debeur, organist at the abbey, had only limited time coinciding with my visit, so he invited us to join him at the organ while he played for Mass on Friday evening. The steps to and from the organ console were especially squeaky, making me nervous about distracting the worship, but Stephan assured us that he regularly had visitors while playing, and because of the size of the place, it was not an issue. In the lapses between playing, he led us around, opening access doors so we could see interior pipes and action. He kept his ears on the action downstairs and darted back to the console at appropriate moments. I was amused as he played the role of cantor, braying without amplification down the length of the immense church while accompanying himself on that spectacular organ.

He made a point of demonstrating the Vox Humana, an iconic stop in an iconic organ, a stop of such beauty that a legend grew around it. Joseph Gabler experimented with countless combinations of metal and wood, striving to build the pipes that would perfectly imitate the human voice and failing frequently to his disappointment. The legend has him approaching Satan to exchange his soul for the perfect piece of metal, and that idyllic voice was born. Stephan played “Ich ruf’ zu dir” from J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40), alternating the solo voice up and down by octaves in subsequent lines. Gorgeous.

The organ has many singular features. Every façade pipe is a speaking pipe, even the teeny ones lofted above the high center window. Gabler had planned to have an entire division in that location but settled for running long tubes to conduct wind to those pipes from a windchest far below. There is a stop called La Force (The Power), which plays forty-nine pipes simultaneously on low C of the pedalboard. I was sorry not to hear it, as it is apparently not conducive for use in a simple evening Mass. I guess I will have to go back.

There is a voice in one of the Positiv cases with twenty pipes of solid ivory. Take a look at your lathe, remove the motor, and pump the thing with a foot lever, and try to make an ivory organ pipe without chipping it. And while you are at it, note that the massive drawknobs and their square shanks are also solid ivory. There is elaborate marquetry everywhere you look, on banisters, newels, and console panels. There is hardly a square inch that lacks added ornamentation.

Every time I hear an instrument built in another age, I am struck by the timelessness of the sound of a pipe organ. The organ at Weingarten predates American Guild of Organists console standards by more than 150 years, and it is an awkward sit at first whack. But Stephan ably demonstrated that a modern organist can easily play a modern Mass, changing stops like a conjurer, sending beautifully balanced voices across the immense space. Perched on that six-step platform, he has a spectacular view to the altar, surrounded by mammoth organ cases. It is thought to be the first pipe organ built with a detached console.

When Gabler completed the organ in 1750, the delighted monks presented him with a bonus—enough wine to fill the largest pipe. Assuming that 32′ DDDD has a diameter of twenty inches and dusting off my π, that is about 22,600 cubic inches, which is almost ninety-eight gallons. A standard pour for a glass of wine is five ounces. Herr Gabler could entertain a lot of friends with 2,500 five-ounce glasses.¹

Follow the Fox to Munich.

When I asked my friend Stephen Tharp which organs stand out in the neighborhood I was visiting, he all but blurted out Fürstenfeld. The organ in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck was completed by Johann Georg Fux in 1736. The church, though smaller than that in Weingarten, is still immense, and sports the same degree of fantastic opulent decoration. There are side altars with spiraling columns in every bay, angels with sunbursts, carvings, and murals everywhere. Once again, the organ is placed so high in the church that it looks small at first. But though it has fewer than thirty stops, it has a 32′ façade. The tallest pipes are mounted on the impost that is well out of reach from the floor. I guess the organ is over forty-five feet tall.

With Stephen’s help, I met the organist Christoph Hauser after Mass on Sunday morning, so I attended Mass to hear the organ well from the floor. It was dazzling. Christoph’s playing was colorful, thoughtful, rhythmic, and inspirational. It was all improvised excepting the hymns and congregational responses, and that ancient organ filled the room with the liveliest tones, both delicate and charming, and full ablaze.

After Mass, I returned the hymnal to the rack and wandered about keeping my eyes on the rear of the room, assuming that Christoph would appear there. A few moments later, I noticed a dapper gent at the front of the room, looking exactly like an organist (you bet I was profiling). Turns out that the stairs start in a sacristy next to the chancel. And such stairs. Once again, I forgot to count, but this organ is in a second balcony, and there were plenty of them. We passed the antique mechanism of the tower clock, the size of a small car with counterweights as big as oil drums hanging from cables high above. The stairs changed from stone to wood, the stairwell grew narrower, and my tuner’s knees along with all they support was barely a match for the thirty-something spry organist I was chasing. We arrived into a gallery that spanned the length of the room, passing through narrow arches at each bay, until we reached the organ. The organ loft is about ten steps down from the gallery allowing a grand view of the side of the organ case, but it was not until I got down those stairs to stand on the same floor as the organ that I could appreciate its size. The 32′ façade pipes are topped by ornate crowns laden with putti, carvings, and more sunbursts, and are mounted on an impost that is well out of reach.

If Weingarten has the oldest detached console, does Fürstenfeld have the tallest two-manual organ?

Speaking of AGO standards, the Fux organ has “short and broken” bass octaves. Both keyboards and the pedalboard are missing the lowest C#, D#, F#, and G#. What looks like E is actually C. What looks like passing from F# to G is actually D to G. Christoph agreed that it took some adjustment, and now that he is used to it, he has to think twice when moving to more usual keyboards. After lots of digging, he determined that Bach’s Dorian Toccata is the only large piece by Bach with a big pedal part that he can play on the organ. I invite and encourage you to type “Hauser Fux Dorian Toccata” into your YouTube search bar. Hang on to your hats: it is a thrilling ride.

Mr. Skinner goes to Ingelheim.

In 2008, the Organ Clearing House sold Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 823 (1930) to the Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany. The church’s organist Carsten Lenz had long intended to import a Skinner organ to Germany, and this exciting transaction happened after four years of conversations, lots of touring around the eastern United States, and a frightening heap of paperwork. The organ was shipped to Klais Orgelbau in Bonn where it was releathered, renovated, and reconfigured under the supervision and with the advice of Skinner experts Sean O’Donnell and Nelson Barden.

The church in Passaic, New Jersey, where the organ was originally installed, had been purchased by a new congregation, and the decorated façade pipes were to stay in place, so Klais produced a new case of contemporary design including new pipes to replace the original speaking façade pipes from 16′ and 8′ Diapasons. The organ was originally placed in deep chambers in a large room with plaster walls, carpeting, and lovely pew cushions. The new setting has the organ placed in a new shallow case in a high balcony on the center axis of a brick and stone room. The thoughtful installation included placing the large wood pedal pipes in front of the exposed Great division to control the egress of tone. Even with that precaution, it was still necessary to hang heavy sheets of felt in front of the Great to balance the tone in the lively acoustics.

I was delighted to see the shellac, ink lettering, distinctive racking styles, and beefy expression shutters we know so well from long experience with Skinner organs. I was delighted to hear the distinctive tones of Mr. Skinner’s specialty voices so far from home. And I was delighted to hear Carsten describe how German audiences have responded to the unique sounds of the Skinner organ.

We have heard criticism about exporting American organs, expressing the feeling that they should stay at home. I have two thoughts to share. Skinner #823, like many of the instruments we have shipped overseas, was on the market for five years before the church in Ingelheim purchased it. Better to be sent overseas than never to be heard again. And for the last seventy years, American organists and organbuilders have been influenced by European traditions. Reciprocity is a good thing. Germany has a five-hundred-year history of building pipe organs, but no one in Germany has ever built a Skinner organ. There is nothing else like it. Seems we can teach them a thing or two, especially, according to Carsten, when American organists come to play!

§

It is impossible to fully describe the experience of visiting a single fine pipe organ, writing a paragraph about each individual voice or chorus, describing the feel of different keyboards, the intricacies of design, the quirks, the chirps, and the foibles. In the mid-eighteenth century when the Weingarten and Fürstenfeldbruck organs were built, there was no other machine made by humans quite as complicated as a pipe organ. With more than seven-thousand pipes, the Weingarten organ is large by modern standards, and its console placement is visionary.

Returning to AGO standards, or what we are used to in organs, the twenty-nine-stop Fürstenfeld organ has only one reed, 16′ Trompas² in the Pedal (prominently displayed in Christoph Hauser’s recording of the Dorian Toccata). How can you play an organ with no manual reeds? Shut up and sing, that’s how. And by the way, most of the mixtures include tierces, and full organ sure sounds as though there are manual reeds.

I shared my thrill and thrall on Facebook after each of these visits and received a comment about Weingarten that stood out. “I’ve always thought that organ was a little soft in the church. I’m sure Gabler did his best.” Oof. Herr Gabler’s worst is far better than the best of most organbuilders, even after 2,500 glasses of wine.

Notes

1. You can see the specification of the Gabler organ at Weingartern here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_the_Basilica_of_St._Martin_(Wein….

2. Yes, it really is 16′ Trompas. You can see the specifications of the Fux organ at Fürstenfeldbruck here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgeln_der_Klosterkirche_Fürstenfeld.

Spice is the variety of life.

Wendy and I love to cook. We send recipes from newspapers back and forth and thumb through cookbooks planning what the next fun will be. We have picked up the vernacular of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean dishes. We grill and smoke meat and vegetables outside at our place in Maine (running a smoker in a New York City apartment is frowned upon), and we even have a lamb-sized charcoal rotisserie that has produced several memorable holiday events.

Some years ago, my brother and his wife gave us an assortment of spice mixes from a local boutique, and I have been ordering stuff from them ever since. Something as simple as their Tellicherry peppercorns are a revelation. The name does not refer to a place of origin, but rather to the larger size of the peppercorns. Open the jar, take a whiff, and you know you are into something special. We have Caribbean seasoning with dried orange peel, chili peppers, and ginger that adds a dimension to grilled chicken. We have a Moroccan spice rub that is heavenly on grilled pork tenderloin with pilaf on the side, and a Merguez mix often found in lamb sausages that is marvelous on a butterflied leg of lamb.

We have an artisanal butcher near us in Maine (I often send him photos of my outdoor triumphs), three or four organic farms, and as we are on the Maine coast, there are lobster, oysters, clams, scallops, and all sorts of fish. We keep a small garden with basil, oregano, sage, and chives. I consulted for a private school in Thailand in 2010, where I learned a few magic hints about how to achieve authentic flavors, and my pad thai is a family favorite. Our daughter and son-in-law live in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, home of a wonderful middle eastern Halal market, and as our son-in-law is Greek, we have discovered rich sources of Greek ingredients in Astoria, Queens.

As the day ends, an hour and a half in the kitchen is a time for reflection, creativity, special little tastes, and marvelous aromas. Add to that the smell of woodsmoke and a cocktail, and all is right with the world.

Variety is the spice of life.

Consider the clarinet. While clarinetists know the differences from one instrument to another, to the untrained eye one clarinet looks pretty much like the next. The same applies to violins, flutes, trumpets, and pianos. But compare a monumental organ with hundreds of ranks of pipes to a three-stop continuo organ, and even a skilled organist might shake his head. It is hard to imagine that the two can be the same instrument. I have had rich experiences with dozens, even hundreds of organs of all shapes and sizes. Let me tell you about some of the organs I have known.

Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 (1951)

The organ at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (also known as the Mother Church), in Boston, Massachusetts, is a mighty instrument with 241 ranks, 166 stops (that’s right, lots of compound stops), more than forty ranks of reeds, ten sets of celestes, and forty-two independent ranks in the Pedal division alone. I was organ curator there for around fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, and managing its care was the challenge of a lifetime. While many organs of this scale had more modest beginnings and were gradually increased in size, #1203 was built as one opus number all at once, and its original design is breathtaking. It is three stories tall and three “departments” wide, with the thirty-eight-rank Swell division (including a full-length 32′ Kontrafagott and 5-1⁄3′ Quinte Trompette) at the center. The Solo division that includes the Cor des Anges on twenty-five inches of wind speaks through a round grille high in the room to the left of the organ. While I was sitting next to a colleague listening to Catharine Crozier’s recital at an American Guild of Organists convention, my friend leaned over and whispered to me, “This organ is a gold mine at mezzo piano.” And it is loaded with real gold, too. There is an acre of gold leaf on the magnificent display of façade pipes.

I was thrilled to play “First Night” concerts there several years in a row with a brass quintet from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and audiences of more than 3,000. Thinking that I would be the big man at the helm of that huge organ, I learned a lesson about the power of the bass line from Chester Schmidt, tubist for the BSO, whose rhythmic drive meant I had a tiger by the tail.

Bedient Pipe Organ Company Opus 42 (1994)

After he retired from a long ministry in Winchester, Massachusetts, my father was interim rector of Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is a lovely little church right on the fabled beach, with a rectory next door, a swell place to spend time. The organ is about as far as you can get from the Mother Church, tracker action with three stops, 8′ Gedackt, 4′ Rohrflute, and 2′ Praestant. Oh, and there is a pedalboard with a coupler. It is barely six feet tall, and sitting on the bench, you can wrap your arms around the case. While Dad was serving there, I played an evensong recital for the congregation, a program of sweet little pieces by Handel, Bach, Krebs, and the Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto. I’m a big guy, and I felt as if I was riding a tricycle.

An elderly couple, members of the church and one of the first couples to “come out” in Provincetown, gathered the money to pay for the organ by collecting returnable cans and bottles. They rooted through restaurant dumpsters, combed the beaches, collected empties from their friends, and they raised more than $25,000—a nickle at a time. It is a parish tradition to have a potluck dinner on the Fourth of July ahead of the fireworks display over the water. Tom tried a piece of cake and went back for a second piece. Thinking no one was looking, he swooped back and walked off with the entire cake. Someone whispered to the woman who had brought the cake, and she replied, “I’m glad he liked it.”

I maintained that organ for about twenty years, visiting once a year whether it needed it or not. The drive to Provincetown covers all points of the compass. After crossing the bridge from the mainland, you drive east to Orleans, north to Truro, west into Provincetown, and south to the church. It is about 115 miles from Boston, a long way to go for three stops.

Roy Carlson (ca. 1968)

I was director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, for almost twenty years where the Carlson organ had three manuals and thirty-six ranks. Every stop was useful, and several of them were beautiful; otherwise the organ was unremarkable. There were two open 16′ flues, Principal and Spitzflute, that spoke promptly and well, and two expressive divisions. I played this organ more than any other instrument I have known. The chapel was air-conditioned, so we worshipped there in the summer. We used the main sanctuary for forty Sundays each year, so I guess I played more than 750 services. Twenty weddings a year made the total nearly 1,500, plus recitals and more. I was comfortable at the organ, played all sorts of repertoire, and led the choir through all the usual masterworks.

There was a large, dedicated choir room under the chancel. It was a luxurious space, but a little musty as it was a basement room, so I bought a couple dehumidifiers to take care of the piano, the music library, and the people, but they did not seem to work. I had asked the custodian to maintain them, and it took a few weeks before I realized that he was filling the tanks.

For the 275th anniversary of the parish, our pastor, Mark Strickland, went for the gold and invited William Sloane Coffin to speak at the celebratory banquet. He accepted. The choir and I prepared a review of hymns that might have been sung in different eras of the church’s history. When we got to “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” the Reverend Coffin shouted, “I haven’t heard that one in years,” ran over to the choir, and joined in, every verse memorized long ago.

Flentrop Orgelbouw (1977)

Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, is a lovely Gothic building on Euclid Avenue, just east of downtown. I was a student at Oberlin and working for John Leek when the Flentrop organ was delivered there. John was a first-generation Hollander and friends with the people at Flentrop, and we were hired to help with the installation. The organ arrived from Rotterdam to the Port of Cleveland on the container ship Calliope, and we carried the bulk of the organ up the stone steps into the cathedral. I was used to the three-manual Flentrop at Oberlin that was dedicated in November of my freshman year, and was deep into historic performance practices, so I noticed with interest when I carried a box of expression shutters into the cathedral.

A small organ loft with a spiral staircase had been prepared, and we set up scaffolding towers on each side so we could hoist the heavy parts. I was on top of the growing tower with Jan Radenführer, the church’s sexton, when it looked as though we were going to run into the slope of the ceiling. Jan gave a shove and moved the tower from the top, an experience that informed me that, while I was not afraid of heights, I sure was afraid of falling. In those days I was the young strong guy. I wore a leather holster as if I was carrying a flag in a parade and walked slowly up a ladder with each shiny façade pipe hanging from my belt, while others above me balanced and guided them. Leaving the cathedral at the end of the day, we turned back to look at the organ, and the façade was basking in blue and red light from the afternoon sun shining through the stained-glass windows.

Daniel Hathaway was organist of the cathedral, a friend from my teenage days, and together we played four or five duo-recitals, four hands on the Flentrop and with the smaller Flentrop that had been installed a couple years earlier. Beethoven and Rossini sounded great in Werckmeister. Michael Jupin, who had been associate rector to my father in Winchester, was dean of the cathedral. My first wedding was held at Trinity with Mike, my father, two of my uncles, and my godfather as vested priests. That was the first big organ installation I participated in, and it was a formative experience to work and socialize with the talented people from the Netherlands.

Johann Georg Fux (1736)

In September of 2019, I spent a long week in Germany visiting a colleague organbuilder, and I made a few side trips to see and hear iconic organs. The organ by Johann Fux in the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck is a knockout. The church is one of those Rococo masterpieces with side altars with spiraling columns, murals, and statues everywhere—an army of carved angels. The organ is in the second balcony, high enough that it looks small. One reaches the organ by climbing and climbing and climbing an ancient stairway at the front of the church and walking down the length of the building about fifteen feet higher than the floor of the organ—you approach the organ from above. That’s when you realize that while it has fewer than thirty stops, those are 32′ pipes in the façade. It is enormous. It is humbling to think of that beautiful casework, huge pipes, gorgeous keyboards, and complex mechanism being built with eighteenth-century technology and hoisted to that lofty place.

Christoph Hauser is organist of the Kloster. I attended a Sunday Mass and was delighted by his tuneful, humorous, even sassy improvisations. His affinity for the organ was obvious and infectious. I was to meet Christoph after Mass and assumed he would appear at the back of the room. Quite a bit of time passed before I spotted him, looking every bit the organist, standing down front. We climbed the ladder behind the organ and opened case panels, getting a good look at the beautifully made components. He showed me the newly restored bellows, and he played for me. The organ is lusty and colorful. There are gentle flute and string voices, the big choruses with tierces are ebullient and boisterous, and the reeds are authoritarian.

That an organ more than 280 years old could have such relevance to our modern ears is testament to the timelessness of a great instrument. I was in the building for barely three hours including the Mass, but that intimate time with the organ will always be with me. I am grateful to Christoph for his generosity in sharing it with me.

E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 (1860)

Woburn, Massachusetts, adjoins Winchester where I grew up. It was home to three organs by E. & G. G. Hook: Opus 646 (1872) in Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, Opus 553 (1870) in the First Unitarian Church, and Opus 283 in the First Congregational Church. Two are still there, but the Unitarian church closed in 1990, and Opus 553, beautifully restored, is now in the Heilig Kreuz-Passion Church in Berlin, Germany, where it is known as “Die Berliner Hook.” Organ builder George Bozeman was organist at the Congregational church when I was in high school, and he asked me to join him as assistant organist so I could cover for him when his work took him out of town.

Opus 283 is a large, three-manual organ with trumpets on the Swell and Great, lots of lovely color, a big Double Open Wood Diapason, and a walloping Possaune [sic] with wooden resonators. The case has elements of Moorish design with round towers with minarets, and the organ has a commanding position high in the front of the room. I played there with and for George for about two years and have been back to visit the organ many times since. This organ has a famous twin, Opus 288 (1860) in Saint John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine, making a spectacular pair of pre-Civil War instruments.

The Congregational Church was about two-and-a-half miles from our house, and I often walked the distance. One afternoon I arrived at the church and realized I had forgotten my key. No problem, one of the big windows was unlocked, so I opened it and climbed through. The thing is, the police station was next door. I told the friendly officer that I was the organist and had forgotten my key, and he believed me.

As my senior year of high school was ending and commencement was approaching, I agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary chorus in a school near my house. I attended a couple rehearsals, and all was well. Friends suggested we go to the beach after church. Sure, sounds like fun. When I got home from the beach, I learned there had been a slew of telephone calls. I had missed the concert. To deepen the embarrassment, it was the organist of my home church where Dad was rector, whose daughter was in the chorus, who answered the call from the stage if anyone in the house could accompany the concert.

Oh remember not the sins and offenses of my youth, but according to Thy mercy, think Thou on me, O Lord.

Photo credit: John Bishop

Photo caption: The amphitheater at Epidaurus (photo credit: Carole Raddato, used through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

A break in the action

Last night, my wife Wendy and I watched the American Masters documentary, “Where Now Is,” about Michael Tilson Thomas, widely known as MTT, who recently retired as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. His tenure in San Francisco spanned nearly twenty-five years during which the orchestra grew in stature and popularity. I admire how a brilliant conductor can build an orchestra over time, nurturing the musicianship of the individual players and the strength of the ensemble. I consider the symphony orchestra to be one of the greatest achievements of human culture. It amazes me that all those musicians, each an accomplished soloist with the requisite ego, can come together on a hundred-foot stage and perform with such precision of ensemble.

MTT had a dramatic conducting debut at a very young age. On October 22, 1969, William Steinberg was conducting a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, opening the program with Brahms’s Second Symphony during which he fell ill. At the end of the piece, Steinberg left the stage, found MTT, assistant conductor of the BSO, said something like, “Put on a suit. You’re going to conduct,” and was taken to Roosevelt Hospital. 

The following morning, Harold Schoenberg of The New York Times reported, “Young Mr. Thomas, 24 years old, had his golden opportunity and made the most of it. He conducted Robert Starer’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel with an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” (Leonard Bernstein had a similar sudden debut. He was twenty-five when he filled in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.)

MTT’s precocious brilliance kick-started his storied career as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic before going to San Francisco. Perhaps his crowning achievement is the creation of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida. Founded in 1987, the New World Symphony is an orchestral academy whose mission statement is “to prepare highly gifted graduates of distinguished music programs for leadership roles in ensembles and orchestras around the world.” 

I was especially moved to watch MTT in private coaching sessions with the young musicians of the New World Symphony, as well as his rehearsal techniques with the full orchestra. Wendy and I commented to each other that he was always smiling. Of course, the editor of the film may have had some control over that, moments of ill temper left on the cutting room floor, but I don’t think so.

Frank Gehry was the principal architect for the spectacular New World Center, home of the New World Symphony, opened in Miami Beach in 2011. Hilariously, it was noted that Gehry was MTT’s babysitter when both were growing up in Los Angeles. 

Watching that film was bittersweet. It has been more than a year since we sat in a concert hall to hear an orchestra perform. The last live performance Wendy and I saw together was a disappointing new opera, four days before she left the city for our exile in Maine. (I followed her four days later.) MTT’s enthusiasm and that of the many colleagues we saw in orchestras and in separate interviews was infectious and a poignant reminder of all that we have lost in the last year. As I remember our life in the city, I think of the many thrilling plays, musicals, and concerts we have seen. I think of the stagehands, ushers, electricians, carpenters, costume designers, and actors whose livelihood vanished overnight. A quick look at my calendar shows that I had dinner with a colleague in a posh restaurant in lower Manhattan on Thursday, March 12, 2020, the same day that forty-two Broadway theaters, countless off-Broadway venues, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and many other cultural venues closed. It first seemed that those places would reopen in a few weeks, but that was not to be.

Weathering the storm

In the December 2015 issue of The Diapason, I wrote of our first visit with our grandson Samuel, four days after his birth. In that essay, I wondered what life would bring him, I looked forward to being able to share cultural experiences with him and his older brother Benjamin, and I wondered what their educations would be like. I remembered the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who taught music in the public schools when I was a kid, making twice-a-week visits to each classroom, braying simple songs. She drew staves on the blackboard with that cool five-gang chalk holder and taught us musical notation. “Every good boy deserves fudge,” but come to think of it, I do not remember what the girls got. I don’t think that is going to happen for them in public school.

As I thought about that precious young life, I could not have imagined that he’d spend his fifth birthday on lockdown, or that Chris would take leave from his job as a high school teacher, develop a curriculum for approval by the school principal, and home-school his sons so they would not have to spend all of Covid-tide glued to screens. I could not have imagined that they would have to be isolated from their friends, many of whom they can see from the windows of their condominium apartment or learn to wear masks whenever they leave their home.

I wonder what it will be like for them when the coast is clear and they can re-socialize. Will they experience growing pains as they reconnect with their pals? Will it be hard for them to return to classroom learning? We all wonder together what the “new normal” will be, even as we look forward to returning to a former life.

Rusty

On February 3, 2021, Gregory Wallace and Pete Muntean reported on CNN that airline pilots who had been idled by reduced air travel during the pandemic are finding that they are rusty when they return to the air and making errors managing their aircraft. Early in their article they wrote, “‘This was my first flight in nearly three months,’ one pilot wrote in a June report explaining why he or she neglected to turn on the critical anti-icing system. ‘I placed too much confidence in assuming it would all come back to me as second nature.’” A few paragraphs down, there was a bold heading, “Boy, was I wrong!”

Watching MTT lead rehearsals had me wondering what it will take to rebuild musical ensembles when the spread of the virus is contained. A symphony orchestra becomes great because its members play together all the time. They are in rehearsal and concerts five or six days a week, and they learn the musical intuitions as well as the quirks and habits of their fellow musicians. A violinist might think to herself, “He’s going to flub that note at the page-turn,” and compensate subconsciously. A second clarinet is inspired by the principal to stretch that phrase just a touch. How much rejuvenation will it take to rebuild the intimate ensemble, that greatest of collegial achievements? Musicians often refer to a sloppy performance as a “train wreck.” I hope “plane crash” does not become part of that lexicon.

Will a rusty theater electrician fail to tighten a bolt allowing a light to fall during a play?¹ Will actors and dancers step on each other’s toes? Will they have crises of confidence? Performance is a tricky thing that blends pedagogy, intuition, memory, expression, and confidence. Remember Harold Schoenberg writing that MTT conducted with “an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” I love that his confidence was not misplaced. Any performer knows exactly what that means and so do astute listeners, as in, “He had no business being that sure of himself.” I know I have played concerts during which my confidence was misplaced.

§

Human creativity reached a zenith in the last centuries before the birth of Christ. The marvelous architecture of ancient Rome and Greece, the literature of Sophocles and Euripides, and the mathematical understanding of Archimedes and Euclid all bear witness to the genius of that age. And don’t forget my hero Pythagoras (570 BC–495 BC) who discovered the musical overtone series, defined musical intervals, and developed systems of tuning.

The Sacred Triangle of Greece comprises the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) in Athens, and the Temple of Athena Aphaia on the island of Aegina. The three sites were built within a few years of each other around 500 BC and form a perfect isosceles triangle, a hundred miles on each side. How did they plot that triangle when one leg crosses mountains and the other two cross bodies of water? Celestial navigation was first practiced by the Phoenecians around 2000 BC, and in the second century BC, Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer, developed the concept of longitude, assuming a spherical earth and dividing it into 360 degrees.

Several years ago, visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, Greece, her father-in-law Christos, an architect, took us to visit the Sanctuary of Asklepios, the god of medicine, at Epidaurus, about ninety miles from Athens. We have probably visited a dozen Greek amphitheaters, but the one at Epidaurus, built in the fourth century BC and seating 14,000, takes the cake. The immense structure is a section of a perfect sphere that produces whispering acoustics in a vast space and has remained perfectly level for over two thousand years. How did they do that without a laser-level? How did they know the ground would be that stable for millennia? How did they plot that perfect sphere?

Christos told how he worked for a large architectural firm that held retreats at that site, when the head of the firm posed the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the library at Alexandria?” That library was a depository of human knowledge recorded in hundreds of thousands of scrolls, estimated to be the equivalent of 100,000 books. Its destruction was part of the decline of intellectual activity that led to the Dark Ages, which ran roughly from 700 AD until the thirteenth century. It was a time of ignorance and war, and as populations increased faster than medical care developed, the era was rife with disease and pandemics such as the Black Death.

Humankind broke out of the Dark Ages into a time of explosive creativity. In the world of music, we remember the remarkable pipe organ in Sion, Switzerland (approximately 1390), Guillame DuFay (1397–1474), Johannes Ockeghem (died 1497), and Josquin des Prez (died 1521). Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had a lot to say in the arts and sciences, Titian (1490–1576) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) brought the visual arts to dizzying heights. 

§

Our year of pandemic is a hiccup compared to the Dark Ages, but just as the Renaissance bloomed out of despair, I think we are going to see an explosion of creativity when orchestras can return to the stage and rehearsal room, when theaters can open and host dramatic expression, when museums can welcome in crowds hungry to learn, and when we can gather with friends before or after a concert to revel in the thrill of creativity and the thrall of our lasting companionship.

While Facebook is full of flaws and has certainly made it easy for people to stir up trouble, I have loved witnessing the “creativity in exile” of many friends and colleagues. People have been sharing their Covid-tide projects, learning new literature, writing new music, finding ways to create ensembles online, all to keep the arts alive. I have seen performances of Bach cantatas on Zoom that project the intimacy of musical relationships and love of the music. If those great pieces can be brought alive remotely, I cannot wait to hear how musicians interact when they can gather in person again.

I have been thinking especially about church choirs. In my days as a church musician, choir night was a highlight of the week. Thinking of my own workload and availability of volunteer time, I appreciated the ability of people to carve out that time. Many of the members of choirs I led had young children, so their participation depended on the willingness of a spouse to be at home making supper, supervising homework, and making sure the kids got cleaned up and to bed on time. And each Thursday evening, as many as a dozen choir members came to our house for BYOB after rehearsal, singing around the piano, ordering pizza, building a loving social group as part of their volunteer service to their church.

Those deep and lasting friendships had everything to do with the quality of their music making. Chatting about the music over drinks after a rehearsal is a big part of ensemble building, as are shared visions, shared life experiences, shared opinions, and shared jokes. A choir that can laugh together sings better together. I remember an evening when we were working on a particularly difficult passage in William Byrd’s five-part (with two tenors) setting of Ave, Maria, when in frustration, one of the tenors burst out with “Oy vey, Maria,” and the choir fell into the kind of unstoppable laughter that makes your eyes water and your belly hurt. It took a few more readings of the piece before we could pass that measure without cracking up, but the performance was the richer for it.

Tens of thousands of devoted choir members are missing all that these days. I encourage those of you who lead choirs to be nurturing your groups, maintaining those social and musical relationships in any way possible, and helping the volunteers to look forward to returning to the marvelous work of making music for the church. Won’t it be great to see the vested choir waiting at the back of the church as you start that processional hymn with a room full of people?

It’s not a train.

There’s a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are spreading across the globe, and they are proving to be effective. While most large cultural institutions are still closed or operating with significantly reduced schedules and capacities, there is a sense that we may be over the hump. I know I am eager to get back on the road and resume my former pattern of visiting the organs that I am dealing with. As I correspond with so many of you, I am longing for the time when I can call and say, “I’ll be in town next week, can we meet?” And I am looking forward to witnessing the celebrations as orchestras get back to work and our beloved church choirs can be free to have their fun. Be sure you’re ready, and when the time comes, give it all you’ve got.

Notes

1. I was once sitting in a concert hall with my first wife, waiting for a friend’s voice recital to start, when a heavy stage light crashed in front of the piano, right where the singer would have stood. The falling light was enough to cancel the concert. This was when my children were young, and we got home far earlier than expected to find the babysitter on the couch making out with her boyfriend. “Hi, this is Jimmie.”

The Organ Clearing House goes to the movies.

In July 2010 Sony Pictures released Salt, a film directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Angelina Jolie and Liev 
Schreiber. Ms. Jolie’s character is Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent accused of being a Soviet spy. Salt sets out to prove her innocence, and lots of people get hurt. One of the pivotal moments is the funeral of the American vice president held at Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York City. The church’s organist and choirmaster at the time, William Trafka, and the Saint Bartholomew’s Choir would perform a bit of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor as the vice president’s dear friend, President Matveyev of the Soviet Union, ascended the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. Salt would enter the church’s crypt from an adjacent subway tunnel, sabotage the organ’s wind and electrical systems creating a roaring disturbance, then detonate explosives that would deliver the pulpit, president and all, to the crypt where she would shoot him. Just another day in the life of a church.

Leslie Rollins, the film’s set decorator, read an article in The New York Times about the restoration by Quimby Pipe Organs of the organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and the Quimby people recommended the Organ Clearing House to decorate the set of the basement mechanical room for the St. Bart’s organ. Leslie invited me to the film’s offices in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood where he led me into the world of make-believe-turned-believable, which is the motion picture industry. The office walls were festooned with concept drawings of the dozens of sets that would be built, and he led me through the story so I could understand the role of the set we would create.

I described the behind-the-scenes functions of a large pipe organ including the blower and adjacent static reservoir and an array of electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching equipment. Since this would be an active operating set, I arranged to take Leslie and a couple people from Special Effects (SFX) to visit a nearby church to see that kind of equipment in operation. As is usual when the blower was turned on, the static reservoir expanded about six inches. They were disappointed—it wasn’t dramatic enough. I told them that while I did not want to build anything that would not be credible to another organ builder, I agreed that we could fashion a mock-up regulator with a more dramatic range of motion.

We provided a large blower from our stock and a huge array of organ electrical equipment borrowed from the yet-to-be-restored W. W. Kimball Co. organ at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey (in return for a nice contribution to the restoration of that organ), and I built a hilarious double-rise reservoir using two-by-fours for top, bottom, and middle frames and ten-inch-wide ribs cut from plywood. I made the usual canvas hinges all around but only put leather on the three sides that would be exposed to the camera. Rather than the measly six-inch rise of a normal organ reservoir, this thing opened close to thirty inches.

The dozens of sets were built in a complex of unused aviation hangars in Bethpage, Long Island, previously owned by Grumman Aerospace Corporation, the site where the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) that landed astronauts on the moon was built. The crypt had ribbed arched ceilings, much fancier than the actual basement at Saint Bartholomew’s, made of two-by-four frames and Styrofoam painted to simulate stone masonry.¹

In April 2009 my colleague Amory Atkins and I gathered the blower and wind-system components along with metal windlines and regulating valves. I drove a truck to Atlantic City to collect the switching machines, and we met in Bethpage to assemble the fabrication. Once the big pieces were in place, we were joined by SFX who added the equipment that would animate the scene. Evelyn Salt would jump off a moving subway train, vault through an opening into the crypt, shoot the chain for the regulating valve causing the reservoir to rise dramatically, and shoot the switch stack causing a noisy explosion (way more sparks and smoke than a usual 12-volt DC organ system could produce). The organ above would roar into a mass cipher, the congregation would panic, Salt would scatter explosives under the foundation of the pulpit, and Bob’s your uncle. The set decorating team included a young hippie woman who floated a cart of art supplies about the place followed by a big floppy golden retriever. It was her job to make things look old. I gave her photos of a “real” organ blower room with the usual accumulation of dirt, dust, spider webs, and debris, and she worked her magic to make it look authentic.

I showed Leslie the completed set and described what Ms. Jolie would have to do to put all that in motion. Bewildered, he asked me to come back in a couple weeks for the filming of the scene so I could explain it in person. When I arrived, I learned that they were running behind and did not know exactly when I would be needed. Could I stay around and be ready at a moment’s notice? For two days I watched the various actors take and retake their scenes, building the movie a few seconds at a time. Phillip Noyce moved from set to set with an entourage of aides with clipboards and flunkies who carried his chair and computer monitors around. I watched Angelina Jolie vault through that opening into the crypt dozens of times—she was doing her own stunts. Then came an urgent message over the public address system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.”

Angelina Jolie came into my little sanctum with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I explained the set-up, “You shoot this chain;” “I can’t shoot that;” “I’ve seen you shoot.” Mr. Noyce invited me to sit with him to watch the take onto his monitor. “When I point at you, you yell ‘action’!” (My big moment.) Leap, shoot, whoosh, shoot, flash, blam, roar. Noyce hollered, “Fantastic, cause and effect in one shoot.” And that was it. Angie jumped out that tunnel at least thirty times, but she shot my chain in one try.²

With the shoot complete, we broke down the set and returned all the gear. I was on the job for about three weeks. I saw the setup outdoors that would catapult a car off a highway bridge. I witnessed actors who were playing small roles asking Angie for autographs. I saw Angie and Brad Pitt coming and going from her trailer. I learned that 150 carpenters were employed for that one film. And when I saw the completed film, I was struck by how much effort went into building and decorating that set for a scene that lasted just a few seconds. If you watch the movie, do not take your eyes off the screen once you see Salt on a subway, or you will miss it. I was disappointed to learn that you had to be a $100,000 vendor to make the credits. I mentioned that I could have charged that, but it was too late.³

It is easy to stream Salt. I watched it a couple nights ago on Netflix. I saw the completed sets for the barge, the tunnel, the CIA stairway, the office where Salt made a bazooka from an office chair, the hotel room, the Bolt bus, and the North Korean prison.

I happened to ride past Saint Bartholomew’s in a taxi during the filming of the big explosion scene. There were dozens of fire trucks, police cruisers, and ambulances hovering about, and a crowd of extras big enough to create a church-filling congregation of mourners. I am sure the Fire Department of New York was a $100,000 vendor. They must have made the credits.

Let’s take it live.

My friend Angie got dozens of tries to make the perfect leap from the subway tunnel to the crypt of the church. Actors in live theater get one. They may have twenty or thirty performances, more if they are in a well-funded big-city show, but each night they get one chance for each moment of magic.

The other night, Wendy and I saw a production of Cabaret at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The venerable show has a cast of twenty-one, ten of whom are in the chorus known as the Kit Kat Ensemble—the Kit Kat Club is the main set for the show. The story is set in the jumbled unraveling of the cultural life of Berlin in the years leading up to Nazi domination and the start of World War II, where the Kit Kat Club is a refuge for a large part of the population we know today as LGBTQIA2S+, in a time when such self-identification was not understood or accepted by those outside the acronym. The atmosphere in the Kit Kat Club was of forced hilarity, longing, and sexual confusion.

The superb ten-piece orchestra was sitting on a tiered bandstand on stage, just as you would expect a band to be played in a dance club—think of Ricky Riccardo’s band on I Love Lucy—and the energetic dancing swirled around them. Sometimes a lead character would leap into the band to hide, lights out, as the scene was changed. Sometimes a member of the band was soloed-out, spotlight and all. And during the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” at the end of the first act, the lead keyboard player, who was also the conductor, scooped up a gleaming white accordion and led the ensemble to the front of the stage singing her heart out.

Cliff Bradshaw, the traveling, struggling American novelist, hopes to build a life with Sally, the club’s marquee singer. Herr Schulz, the neighboring fruit vendor, dreams of marrying Fräulein Schneider, the spinster landlady who rents rooms to the various women of the ensemble and tries to turn a blind eye to the parade of sailors coming and going in her house. Then Cliff realizes that he has been used as a courier for the Nazis. Herr Schulz is revealed as a Jew and Fräulein Schneider realizes that she cannot risk her scant living and safety by marrying him. Some characters deny the situation, some try to exploit it, and some are propelled by the frenzy of alcohol, drugs, and sexual freedom to the exclusion of everything else. The emcee is the heart of the show, inciting and weaving the intrigue, hinting at the macabre, reveling in the confusion, and has the longest list of dance steps, acrobatics, complex songs and monologues, costume changes, and sinister gestures of all the characters.

We were attending one of the last performances of the three-week run. As we arrived at the theater, we read that the curtain would be delayed. Sometime around the scheduled curtain time, it was announced that the actor playing the emcee was unable to appear, and the understudy was hard at work with the cast doing a last-minute blocking rehearsal on stage. A half hour later we entered the theater. “Willkommen,” the bawdy opening number, blasted onto the stage, and for two-and-a-half hours we watched, yelled, and whistled in awe as the understudy and heretofore chorus member James Rose (she/they), tall and slender with past-shoulder-length hair, brought the emcee to life in their first and last-minute crack at the role.

I am sure that Wendy and I have seen understudies taking on a role before, perhaps sometimes at the last minute, but not a role as complex as this. I doubt that this performance will go fuzzy in my memory but will join the file in my memory titled “Unforgettable.” The emcee is central to most of the songs and dances, and Rose’s interpretation included endless sinister, sensual, sensuous motions of their extra-long, extra-flexible fingers. I have no idea how much rehearsal time she had with that role, but she certainly spent a lot of time thinking and preparing for it. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that last-minute rehearsal while we were waiting outside for the house to open; it must have been a very dramatic hour.

Art of the moment

In last month’s issue of The Diapason, I wrote about our recent trip to Athens, Florence, and Bologna during which we visited as many museums as our stamina would allow—more, in fact. We reveled in the timeless works by Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Ghiberti, as art lovers have for 500 or 600 years. If we are still able, we could go back and see them again in twenty years. You lean in to look at brush strokes, chisel marks, dappled sunlight, and facial expressions. Favorite souvenirs from the trip are the two-inch pieces of Carrara marble that I picked up from the roadway when we visited the quarry that was the source of stone for the sculptures of Michelangelo along with many other artists. What makes those stones magical are the hundreds of tiny, shiny facets that sparkle when I turn them under my desk lamp, the quality that breathes life into those monumental statues.

The performing arts are different. A piano sonata, an aria, a symphony, a Broadway show, or a hymn happens in real time. If the artist misses a piston or flubs a note, or a couple dancers run into each other, the moment vanishes but stays in memory. Cooperative music-making is one of the high points of the human condition. A symphony orchestra is a spectacular achievement, a choir is equally special, especially considering that it is just human voices. An opera or the musical we saw the other night is multi-dimensional, including singing, dancing, instrumental music, and live drama, and that production is a real romp—there is something happening onstage every second.

This notice was included as an insert in the playbill for Cabaret:

Barrington Stage wants to remind you that this is live theater; and for some of us, it can be church. Just like in church, you are welcome to come as you are—to hoot and holler or to sit quietly in reverence. Worship and engage however you feel most comfortable. Laugh audibly and have natural emotional and sometimes vocalized responses if you feel it. Just remember that while it’s okay to engage, we should aim to neither distract nor thwart the performance.

I know I hooted a few times, and probably hollered, too.

§

On November 14, 1943, the twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein stood in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and his career took off like a rocket. James Rose’s performance the other night was other-worldly, and more breathtaking as she was a last-minute fill in. I wonder what was going through their mind during that curtain-delaying rehearsal. During the ovation at the end of the performance, fellow cast members were expressing their admiration, offering quiet, affectionate congratulations, and deferring to Rose for extra solo bows. It was a thrilling performance of a chilling character. The arts matter.

Nota bene

While I took hundreds of photos while working on Salt that show the various sets under construction, we were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that barred us from publishing photographs taken on the set, and expressly forbidden from photographing the actors. Even though it was almost fifteen years ago, and though I would love to share some photos here, I will stick to the agreement I signed.

Notes

1. A different set for the film used another neat “faux-trick.” Late in the film, there is a scene where the American president is hustled down an elevator to a secure emergency facility deep underneath the White House. The tunnel between the elevator and the facility was ribbed, the ribs were made of swimming-pool noodles covered with thick spray paint.

2. Burt Dalton, foreman of SFX crew, won an Oscar for his work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the year before. I was impressed by his status on the set. When he walked by, people whispered in awe and respect.

3. Follow this link to see listing of cast and crew for Salt: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm. There are over 180 cast members from Angelina Jolie as Salt to Zoë D’Amato, mourner. Scroll past the cast to see the crew, which included twenty-three makeup technicians and hundreds of others in the art department, sound department, special effects, visual effects, stunts, costumes, editorial, location, etc. It takes hundreds of people to make a movie like this.

Where it all begins

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

That Ingenious Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how much has changed

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

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

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

Drill sergeant

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

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

With your own eyes

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