In the Wind: Why sell an organ?

One stop shopping

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

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

There are two kinds of birds . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Now we’re getting somewhere.

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

Tracker or electric?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s going to build it?

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

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

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

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

Go Yuja.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Preservation by relocation

News of churches closing crosses my desk ever more frequently and shows up as rants on social media forums at the same pace. I read comments claiming that a closing is “criminal” or “unconscionable” as if reasonable and caring people did not spend years discussing how to manage an albatross of a building with the tithes of fewer and fewer congregants. In the early 1990s, I renovated a large three-manual organ at the First Baptist Church of Arlington, Massachusetts, and continued to maintain it until a couple years ago. There were 150 pledging families at the time of the organ project. By the time I retired from maintaining organs, there were fewer than fifty families struggling to maintain the huge stone building with a 1,000-seat sanctuary and monogrammed china service for 1,200.

As we completed that project, I got to know Eleanor Metcalf, an elderly church member who played the organ, practiced at the church, and substituted occasionally for the regular organist. She had grown up in the Baptist church in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where she studied with the organist as a teenager and loved to sit in a particular pew where she had a view of the organ’s pedalboard. She was a lifelong fan of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532, which she said she could never play herself, but was thrilled to watch her teacher whip through those opening scales on the pedals. When she and her husband celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they engaged me to play a recital for their family and guests on the Watertown organ. Of course they sat in her favorite pew, and of course I played Bach’s D Major. A few years after that, the Watertown church closed, as the congregation had dwindled past sustainability. The building was subdivided into condominiums, and the organ, which was not of great distinction, was discarded.

Last week I received a call from a member of the Belmont-Watertown United Methodist Church, a congregation created ten years ago by the merging of the Belmont and Watertown churches, saying they were interested in selling one of their organs. (Belmont, Watertown, and Arlington, Massachusetts, are neighboring towns, about five miles west of Boston.) I had maintained the organ in the Belmont church for years, and as it too lacked distinction, I was glad to hear that they wished to sell the exceptional organ in the Watertown church.

As it happened, I was planning to drive between our homes in western Massachusetts and coastal Maine the next day so it would not be far out of my way to make a quick visit to Watertown. Wendy sealed the deal by reminding me that there is a spectacular Middle Eastern grocery store in Watertown. The congregant, Laurel, told me the story of their decision process that led to the merging of the congregations ten years ago. The Watertown church has a long history of outreach that led to dozens of weekly meetings of self-help and social organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the like. The merged congregations had been worshiping in the Belmont church, renting the Watertown sanctuary to a Korean congregation, and continuing the outreach programs in the Watertown building.

They have recently decided to sell the property in Belmont and the large stone parish house that adjoins the Watertown church building, which will be converted to condominiums, and redevelop the church to accommodate the merged Methodist congregation and all the outreach activities. The church building includes a large sanctuary, an adjoining fellowship hall, and a large basement with classrooms and open space. The chancel, which contains the organ in side chambers, will be separated from the nave to create an additional large meeting room, which explains the idea of selling the organ in the interest of its preservation.

. . . and what an organ

While the organs in the Belmont Methodist and Watertown Baptist churches were unremarkable, the Watertown Methodist church has a spectacular instrument, Skinner Organ Company Opus 459 (1924), with four manuals and thirty-four ranks. Skinner produced many organs of this scale based on a scheme of expression and flexibility. This organ has four enclosed divisions (Swell, Great, Solo, Echo), three sets of Celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Flauto Dolce), three 8′ Open Diapasons, nine reeds, a two-stop Echo division (Chimney Flute and Vox Humana with Chimes), and a Harp/Celesta. It is full of lavish extras like celestes that start at low C and sixteen-stage expression motors. A creative organist can do anything with an instrument like this. As I write in mid-June, the organ will appear on the website of the Organ Clearing House in the next few days. I wonder if it will still be available as you read this in early August.¹

Laurel told me how the congregation loves that organ and respects its heritage, and though they are heartbroken at the thought of losing it, they know they would never be able to fund the necessary renovation. When I visited the other day, the organ had not been used for six years. When I started the blower, there were dozens of ciphers and only a few notes on a few stops that played. From that perspective, the organ seems like a wreck, but when I climbed around inside the two chambers I marveled at the “like new” condition. Scrolls on reed pipes were neat and tight, everything was standing straight, and there was none of the tuner’s detritus we often see laying on perch boards or in corners. I imagine that in the ninety-eight years since the organ was built, no inept service technician ever entered the organ chambers. I understand and respect the decisions made by the board of trustees of the merged congregation, and I am confident that another congregation will acquire and restore the marvelous organ for another century of inspiring use.

Another transplant

In the June issue of this magazine, I wrote about visiting the Organ Clearing House installation of an organ by Gabriel Kney at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.² That organ became available when the church that commissioned it in 1980 decided to divest itself of real estate and use the proceeds of the sale to create a fund forming the core of a church devoted entirely to public service. Once again, the decision was the result of years of reflection and discussion as they realized that it did not make sense for the ever-smaller congregation to try to sustain a complex physical plant. The people of that church were thoughtful, creative, and eager to continue serving the community as effectively as their resources would allow, and they are pleased to know that their organ is now being used daily in the chapel of a flourishing seminary.

From Passaic to Ingelheim

Around the year 2000, the First Presbyterian Church in Passaic, New Jersey, was experiencing decline in membership and was saddled with a large complex building it could no longer afford to maintain or operate, and it entered into an agreement with a neighboring growing congregation to swap buildings. I do not remember the details of the deal, but I know that the result was that each congregation wound up in a building of appropriate size. The swap was completed with the understanding that the Presbyterian church’s Skinner organ (Opus 823, 1930) remained their property, and that the organ could be removed when it was sold.³ In 2008 we organized the sale of the organ to the Evangelische Saalkirche in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany.

The organist of the Saalkirche, Carsten Lenz, was enamored by Skinner organs and had long dreamed of importing one to Germany. He first visited me at the Organ Clearing House exhibition booth during the 2002 convention of the American Guild of Organists in Philadelphia. Later, we met in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Skinner organs. It took several years for his church to raise the funds and negotiate the sale, but in 2008 we dismantled the instrument and shipped it to Klais Orgelbau, who renovated the organ and installed it in Ingelheim.

This was another example of the “smallish” four-manual organs by the Skinner Organ Company with thirty-nine ranks and thirty-six stops including four 8′ Open Diapasons, four celestes (Gamba, Salicional, Echo Viole, Dulciana), eleven reeds, three expression boxes, and a Harp/Celesta. Sorry, no two-stop Echo. Like the Watertown organ, this scheme developed by Mr. Skinner defines an exceptionally versatile and expressive instrument. I was excited to visit the organ in Ingelheim in 2019 and pleased that while Klais had made some modifications to the instrument, the Skinner organ was otherwise intact and recognizable in its new home. Carsten gave me an energetic demonstration and tour and told me that German organists have responded to it enthusiastically.

Worthy of preservation

I have mentioned two organs that I deemed unworthy of preservation. Both were useful, serviceable instruments that enhanced worship and brought pleasure to listeners. Remember Eleanor Metcalf worshiping in Watertown as a teenager in the 1930s in the thrall of that organ. You might think there must be some place for it. But the fact is, there are hundreds of organs available at any given time, and it is a good year when we place more than twenty. If I can offer a masterpiece like the Skinner in Watertown, it is hard to justify encouraging a church to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ordinary or even mediocre instrument. View it through a wider lens. There is a finite amount of money spent on pipe organs in the United States each year. Isn’t it our responsibility to see that most of it is spent on excellence?

There is an exception to this idea. The church that owns and loves a reliable, useful organ, one that might not merit the cost of preservation through relocation, should be encouraged to keep it in good condition, even if it needs an expensive renovation like releathering. I am not thinking of a wreck of a pipe organ that has been “improved” by unqualified technicians. Eleanor’s church in Watertown maintained their organ well until they realized that the entire campus was beyond their means.

Former glories

I mentioned 1,200 sets of monogrammed china to provoke the image of a parish hall set up for a huge dinner, backed up by a professional kitchen that could produce that volume of food, tuna casserole being the 1950s equivalent of loaves and fishes. There are photos of just such an event hanging in the parish hall of that church, the men wearing identical skinny ties and white shirts under their jackets and the women with updos. In the age of TV dinners and cars with tailfins, suburban Protestant churches around Boston were packed on Sundays, home to softball and bowling leagues, and the huge buildings they left to their descendants have become impossibly expensive to maintain.

Over twenty years with the Organ Clearing House, I have spent hundreds of hours in church buildings that have been closed. I have heard about how much a church meant to lifelong parishioners. They have shown me photos of their children’s baptisms and weddings and parents’ funerals, and now they are reduced to clearing decades of churchy stuff out of a building. What do you do with 500 pew Bibles, fifty choir robes, a hundred bottles of Elmer’s glue, or a library of choral music? In at least one church, the last-standing loyal parishioners were members of the “Disbursement Committee.” Without exception, these people are heartened to know that their organ will have new life, metaphorically carrying the life’s breath of their church to worship somewhere else. While it is always sad to see a church building breathing its last, it is a privilege to be able to preserve a good organ.

Some years ago, I visited a church building in New Jersey that had been purchased by a new congregation. It was a large, elegant structure in a prominent downtown location with hardwood paneling on the front of the wrap-around balcony and a big Austin organ down front. The original congregation had abandoned the building without any planning. It was during the last service that the people were informed that it was the last service. They simply closed the doors and put the building up for sale. The bulletins were in a dusty heap at the ushers’ station, the water glasses were on the pulpit, the altar flowers were long rotted, and that Sunday’s anthem was heaped on the choir room piano. It was the only church I have visited that was closed without years of careful, thoughtful planning. There must have been some angry people after church that day. I wonder if there was a coffee hour.

It is more usual for a closure to happen after years of deliberation. If two congregations are merging, which building is retained? There are likely to be conflicting sentimentalities competing with practicality. One building might be better suited for redevelopment for another purpose. It can be tricky to build condominium residences in a Gothic building. What do you do with thirty-foot stained-glass windows? In some cases, one building is chosen, but the better organ from the other building is moved. Each individual case is a sad story. Each involves personal and community loss. But this trend is undeniable, inevitable, and in most cases, unavoidable. It is not useful to rattle along on social media about criminal negligence, irresponsibility, or thoughtlessness. It just is.

I am impressed by the story I have learned about the churches in Belmont and Watertown. I think they are being creative with their heritage and their resources. I am sorry that the wonderful Skinner organ will have to leave town, but I know it is worthy of proper restoration, and I expect it will be easy to find it a new home.

Good old Mr. Skinner

When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, we were all in the thrall of modern tracker organs built on classical models. I did not understand or appreciate Mr. Skinner’s ideals; in fact I admit I was disdainful of them. Of course, the trumpet and mixture should be on the Great. What sense does it make to bury them in the Swell? Wait. I get it. More of the “meat” of the organ is under expression. Couple the Swell to the Great and start the verse with the box closed. It is a great effect to put the wind at the back of the processing choir by opening the box slowly.

The Ernest M. Skinner Company built its first four-manual organ for Grace Church in New York City (now home of a smashing organ by Taylor & Boody) in 1902. The organ in Watertown, built in 1924, is the 103rd four-manual Skinner, most of which are modest in size with fewer than forty ranks. This scheme was a wonderful subset of Skinner’s prolific career with imaginative use of a relatively small number of voices combined with seemingly lavish excesses of construction.

I have listed some of the attributes of Opus 459. G. Donald Harrison joined the Skinner Organ Company in 1927, three years after the Watertown organ was installed. In 1936, the newly formed Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company installed the iconic organ at Church of the Advent in Boston (Opus 940),4 long recognized as a near perfect example of the American Classic organ with three fully developed principal choruses, a Positiv division, and several mutations. Under its two names, the company produced 481 organs between Watertown and Church of the Advent, a little over forty a year.

Ernest Skinner grew bitter in his old age as the style of organ he developed fell out of favor. Walter Holtkamp, Sr., rebuilt the Skinner organ at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While that project was underway, Holtkamp saw the elderly Ernest Skinner standing forlorn and alone at a function of the American Guild of Organists. He thought to himself, there is one of our greatest organ builders and no one wants to talk with him. He walked up to Skinner and introduced himself as Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland. Skinner, who was hard of hearing, snapped back, “Cleveland? One of my finest organs is in the art museum there, and some damn fool is trying to change it.”

Notes

1. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/22899.

2. organclearinghouse.com/sold#/3085-gabriel-kney-dallas-tx.

3. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/23629.

4. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/7407.

On the Hook

When I was a teenager, I had an unofficial job as assistant organist at the First Congregational Church of Woburn, Massachusetts. My mentor and friend George Bozeman was the organist there, and he brought me on to help when he was home and to take over the helm when he was away installing an organ. The organ is E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 from 1860 with three manuals, thirty-one stops, and thirty-four ranks.¹ It was one of about five organs I had played by then. I knew it was mighty special and especially mighty, but fifty years later I know a lot more about how lucky I was to play such an instrument.

Opus 283 is one of the last surviving of a distinctive breed, the three-manual pre-Civil War American pipe organ. There were two such Hooks in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, one of which (Opus 253, 1859) was destroyed by fire with the First Baptist Church in 2005.² “Mine” was one of three grand Hook organs in Woburn. E. & G. G. Hook Opus 553 (1870) was in the First Unitarian Church and is now in the Heilig Kreuz Kirche in Berlin, Germany, and commonly called Die Berliner Hook;³  and E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 646 (1872) is in Saint Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.⁴ In my first days as director of the Organ Clearing House, I was privileged to speak at a conference about the preservation and relocation of historic organs at the Heilig Kreuz Kirche in Berlin representing the work of the Organ Clearing House. As owner of the Bishop Organ Company, I maintained the organ at Saint Charles for thirty years. That one has two manuals and twenty-three ranks and sits high in the rear gallery of the lofty church with some of the best acoustics one will find in an American parish church. It is a bold, brilliant organ with amazing lungs. I releathered the huge double-rise reservoir in place twenty years ago.

I also maintained E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 635 (1872) in the First Baptist Church of Wakefield, Massachusetts.⁵ That was the home church of old friend and colleague John Boody of Taylor & Boody Organ builders—his grandfather had been pastor there. John and I shared a special bond because of that organ, which was sadly destroyed by fire on October 23, 2018.

I grew up in the Boston area, the home of the Hook brothers, and I have serviced, played, restored, and relocated many of their instruments. Admitting this personal bias and remembering that the grand organ in the First Congregational Church of Woburn was one of the first organs I knew, I have long felt that E. & G. G. Hook and its continuation as E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings to be among the very best organ builders in history. I once had the good fortune to hear Dame Gilliam Weir play a recital on the iconic Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris and Peter Sykes in recital at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, otherwise known as the Jesuit Urban Center,⁶ within the same week. I was struck by the comparison of those two grand instruments. The Cavaillé-Coll had the edge with the power and romance of its reeds, but to my ears, the Hook & Hastings took the lead with its variety of principal and flute tone and clarity and beauty of individual voices. The Immaculate Conception organ was originally built in 1863 (and later expanded by Hook & Hastings in 1902), just three years after the Saint-Sulpice organ, and the two beauties have a lot in common.

Long dismantled and languishing in storage, the organ from the Jesuit Urban Center holds a special place in my heart, as my predecessor Alan Laufman’s memorial service was held there in the spring of 2001. There was a huge congregation of “organ people” present, and the congregational singing supported by that heroic organ was beyond belief.

Brothers and partners

Elias Hook (1805–1881) and George Greenleaf Hook (1807–1880) were sons of a cabinet maker in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1822 Elias apprenticed with the Boston organ builder William H. Goodrich, and it is supposed that George followed him. George built a one-manual organ in 1827, and the two brothers built an organ together in 1829 for the Unitarian Church of Danvers, Massachusetts. In the company’s first eighteen years, they built one hundred organs; Opus 100 was finished in 1856. The next hundred organs were built in seven years, and numbers 400 through 500 were built in just three years, between 1866 and 1869.

Frank Hastings (1836–1916) joined the company as a draftsman in 1855 and worked in every department of the factory building windchests, pipes, bellows, cabinets, and mechanical actions—all the thousands of components that make up a pipe organ. In 1870, when George was 63 and Elias was 65 years old, they made Frank Hastings a partner in the firm and changed the name to E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings. After 1881 when both brothers had died, Frank purchased their shares and moved the company from its longtime home in what is now Roxbury, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, to then farmland, now the suburb of Weston, ten miles west of the city.

The 1880s were a time of increasing labor unrest in the United States. There was a series of violent railroad strikes, and an anarchist exploded a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket in 1886, the same year that the American Federation of Labor was formed. In 1892 there was a highly publicized, exceedingly violent strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Mill near Pittsburgh, and there was a violent and costly strike at the Pullman Rail Car factory in Chicago in 1894 that spread to other localities. Aware of these events, Frank Hastings wanted to maintain a harmonious work environment.

Hastings purchased half of his family’s homestead in Weston in 1884. In 1886 he bought the remaining forty-five acres and an adjoining 150-acre farm, and the new factory was opened in 1889. In 1893 the company was reorganized and renamed the Hook & Hastings Company. Frank created a “community of labor,” building homes that he made available to workers with low-interest loans, a community hall, a theater, and a company school. By the end of 1893 the company had completed its Opus 1590.

We know little about Frank Hastings’s first wife. His son Francis Warren Hastings was an officer in the company, but because of failing health he moved to Bermuda in 1895, where he died of consumption in 1903 at the age of 41. After Warren died, Arthur Leslie Coburn (brother of Anna Coburn, the company schoolmistress) became president of the company. Frank Hastings married Anna Coburn in 1899 when he was 62 and she was 46 years old.

Frank Hastings died in 1916 at the age of 80. Arthur Coburn continued as president of the company, and long-time Hastings associates Norman Jacobsen and Alfred Pratt were the other officers. The legendary quality of Hook & Hastings organs continued, but the pace was diminishing. The company produced eighteen organs in 1916 and fifteen in 1917.

Then came the years of the Great Depression, Hollywood introduced “talkies,” and the radio and phonograph were becoming popular. Municipal music programs were dramatically diminished during the Depression. Perhaps more importantly, in those years Ernest Skinner was ensconced in Dorchester, Massachusetts, building organs by the hundred for an increasingly loyal patronage. All these factors contributed to the weakening and ultimate failure of the Hook & Hastings Company.

The company continued for several years after Coburn’s death in 1931, until Anna Hastings felt that the quality of the company’s products was declining sufficiently to close its doors in 1935. Remembering that her husband had always put quality before price, she felt that when organ builders started talking about price first, it was time to stop. A contract was signed with the Mystic Building Wrecking Company of Chelsea, the buildings were demolished, the lumber was salvaged, and the company was dissolved in April of 1937. The final tally was 2,614 organs in 110 years—a remarkable record of longevity, quality, and artistic achievement. Elias and George Hook built the company, and Frank Hastings carried their artistic vision into the twentieth century while creating a model for employee relations in a time of vicious labor disputes.

These details about the history of this great organ company come from the enormous and exhaustive book, Farm Town to Suburb: The History and Architecture of Weston, Massachusetts, by Pamela W. Fox, published by Peter E. Randall, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Pages 196 through 217 include the historical details accompanied by numerous photographs. Pam gave a lecture on this subject at the 2000 convention of the Organ Historical Society in Boston. Later, I developed a lecture on the subject, and Pam welcomed me into her home and shared photos and historical details not included in the book. I admire and commend Pam for her exceptional work and am grateful for her generosity.

I have also relied on The Hook Opus List, compiled by William T. Van Pelt and published by the Organ Historical Society in 1991. The book’s preface written by my predecessor at the Organ Clearing House, Alan Laufman, is a concise history of the Hook companies.

A relocation tale

In 1995, I had a call from the chair of the organ committee at Follen Community Church (Unitarian Universalist Association) in Lexington, Massachusetts, about the church’s organ that had been assembled by a well-meaning parishioner using “parts-n-pieces” from various sources. The resulting hodge-podge was unmusical and unreliable, and the committee was considering options for its repair or replacement. I inspected the organ, and we began a conversation about how the situation could be improved without offending the faithful congregant who had “created” the organ. The process was accelerated when the 48-volt electrical system in the console shorted out and the congregation witnessed smoke emerging from within.

At the same time, the congregation of the First Unitarian Church of Stoneham, Massachusetts, disbanded, and the building was sold to a children’s day care center. A group of volunteers led by organ historian and consultant Barbara Owen dismantled the two-manual Hook organ (Opus 466, 1868)⁷ and placed it in storage. Barbara, working as an agent for the Unitarian Universalist Association of Boston, advertised the availability of the organ in a UUA newsletter, “Free to a good home.” The chair of the Follen Church committee saw the notice and called me wondering if this might be an option for them. A quick study showed that Follen would be an ideal home for the organ, the church received ownership, and the Bishop Organ Company was engaged to restore and install it.

Volunteers from the church helped with the heavy work of refinishing the case and setting up the organ. They came to my workshop to clean small components and wind new tracker ends while I restored the windchests and releathered the double-rise reservoir and its two feeder bellows. The organ was first played in its new home on Easter Sunday of 1996.

I spent about six months up close and personal with Opus 466, handling every part myself. I dismantled the windchests and decided that the original chest tables could be retained if I routed out a few cracks and filled them with shims. I put new leather on the pallets, cleaned the pipes, reconditioned the actions, and replaced the bushings in the keyboards. Milling a couple pipes from the salvaged 16′ Subbass of another Hook organ into a mile of tracker stock, I noticed that the “virgin” nineteenth-century pine lumber was white, not the rich deep brown we are used to seeing inside historic organs. Could it be that when the organ was new, its interior was bleached-blond-white wood?

I felt as though I got to know the people who built the organ in 1868. When they were working on that organ, Ulysses S. Grant was elected president of the United States. Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama were admitted back into the Union following the Civil War.
E. & G. G. Hook built thirty-six organs that year. I marveled at the precision of the woodworker’s measure markings and the elegant penmanship of their labeling—how did they get their pencils that sharp? I saw the marks of hand tools and milling machines on the thousands of parts. I wondered what a worker in that factory would bring for lunch and how many hours they worked each day. They must have taken pride in their work, or it would not have been so good. Each of the multitude of parts was crafted with exquisite care.

Stephen P. Kinsley was the head voicer in the Hook workshop. In each organ he voiced, he left his mark on the first pipe of the Open Diapason that sat on the Great windchest, a half-step up from the smallest façade pipe. It is a shield drawn in ink, inscribed “Wind, S.P.K. 25⁄8, 1868.”⁸ When I first picked up a pipe of this organ and blew in it, I was surprised by how much sound was produced with so little effort. Remember that in those days, all organs were hand pumped. Efficiency of tone production was essential to their success.

Mr. Kinsley is the only person I know by name who worked on that organ. Frank Hastings had been working for the Hook brothers for thirteen years and was thirty-two years old. In 1868, Frank was still working his way through all the departments of the company. As thirty-six organs were built there that year by over two-hundred craftsmen, he may or may not have put his hands on any piece of the instrument. Perhaps he admired it when it was complete on the shop floor ready for shipment.

Follow the money.

When Hook Opus 553 was sold by the Unitarian Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, to the church in Berlin, Charley Smith, a longtime church member, became steward of the proceeds of the sale. Since Woburn, Stoneham (the original home of Opus 466), and Lexington (home of the Follen Church, the new home of Opus 466) are all adjoining towns,⁹ Charley knew that the Stoneham Organ was being preserved by relocation. Since both organs were built within two years of each other, he recognized that they were sisters, and the Woburn organ fund was donated to the Follen Church to be dedicated to the care and use of the newly installed organ. Members of the former Woburn church were present at the dedication of Opus 466 in Lexington, closing the circle that started when their church was closed and their organ was sold overseas.

§

George and Elias Hook sure started something. George was an organist with a musical ear and led the company’s artistic development. Elias was a genius manager who established the strong financial base of the company and enabled the correspondence necessary for contracting, designing, building, and installing as many as fifty-five organs in a single year. Remembering the state of communication and transportation in the second half of the nineteenth century, that alone was a great accomplishment. The factory equipment was powered by a large stationary steam engine, and materials were delivered and finished organs were shipped on horse-drawn rail cars at night, using tracks that carried trollies by day.

E. & G. G. Hook, E & G. G. Hook & Hastings, the Hook & Hastings Company, and Hook-Hastings combine to form a great heritage of artistic development and musical excellence. I was fortunate to practice and perform on one of their masterpieces when I was a pup. Those beautiful tones informed my naïve ears, and I am thrilled anew whenever I encounter one of their organs.

Notes

1. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6083.

2. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/5994.

3. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/49571.

4. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6962.

5. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/6950.

6. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/5670.

7. pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/8579.

8. 2-5⁄8′′ was the original wind pressure. When we received the organ from storage there was a note saying the pressure had been measured as 3-1⁄8′′. When commissioning the wind system, we set the pressure according to Mr. Kinsley, and original voicing sang clear.

9. My hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts, adjoins Woburn, Stoneham, and Lexington.

Down front or up in the back?

My home church is the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was called as rector in 1966 when I was ten years old. The song, “Winchester Cathedral,” written by Geoff Stevens and recorded by The New Vaudeville Band, was released in August of 1966, and Dad received several copies of the recording as gag gifts from friends (Oh voh-dee oh doh). I had three years of piano lessons before we moved to Winchester, but singing in the choir there was my first experience participating in the music of the church. The harpsichord maker Carl Fudge was the organist, and as I have written frequently, he had a lot to do with my early career choices.

The organ at Epiphany, the first I played, was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company (Opus 128), a very early and seriously rundown example of Mr. Skinner’s work. The church is brick, of Gothic influence, and mythically shares proportions with “the” Winchester Cathedral. There is a classic Gothic chancel up several steps from the nave, and the choir was situated in fixed carved oak pews on either side. The Skinner console was on the Epistle side nearest the communion rail, right by the little alleyway through which the congregation returned to their seats in the nave after leaving the rail. I started organ lessons when I was twelve, and my first experience playing in church was when Mr. Fudge allowed me to slip onto the bench and noodle a bit while he received communion.

The church had an ancient forced-hot-air heating system with large registers in the floor. If you were a clever choir member or acolyte, you would finagle standing on one, and your cassock would inflate like a dirigible. There must have been a history of choir members fainting because the choir pews were equipped with smelling salts. These fifty-five-year-old childhood memories bring a burst of nostalgia. I am thinking of Eleanor Banks, the burly alto in the senior choir, who wielded a hairbrush like a nunchuck as the robed junior choir filed out of the choir room. In hindsight, it was good none of us had lice—she would have spread them through the whole choir.

I left Epiphany at thirteen to begin my career as an organist, filling in at the First Baptist Church (with a three-manual Estey), then as organist at Saint Eulalia’s Catholic Church (Conn Artist—you cannot make this stuff up), and then in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts (three-manual 1860 E. & G. G. Hook, a stupendous organ). While I was building my resumé before leaving town for Oberlin in the fall of 1974, the people of the Parish of the Epiphany were grappling with the condition of the wheezing Skinner organ. In that Boston suburb, we were in the heart and heyday of the tracker revival, and Mr. Fudge with his early music background was advocating a new tracker organ to be placed in a not-yet-built rear gallery.

Meanwhile, down the street . . .

The First Congregational Church in Winchester has a commanding location on a hillside above the town center and an immense steeple that leaves no doubt that the Congregationalists got the concept of “location, location, location.” Their much-rebuilt 1925 Hook & Hastings organ was replaced in 1969 by
C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 50, a three-manual, mechanical-action organ with twenty-seven stops. Mr. Fisk wanted to place the organ in the rear balcony, but the church insisted on a chancel installation. His solution was to build a very wide, very shallow organ on the chancel wall. In fact, the organ breaks out of the wall and looms into the chancel airspace. The keydesk is on the floor under the organ facing the opposite wall, and the mechanical action goes under the organist and up the wall to the organ. Large doors open into the hallway behind to expose the action. Originally, there was a setter-board combination action behind that door that has since been replaced with a hundred-level solid-state system.

John Skelton was organist of the First Congregational Church back in the day, and he was my organ teacher through my high school career. The church was a five-minute walk from home, and I had generous practice privileges, spending most weekday afternoons in the thrall of the music and the instrument, learning to wrap my fingers and feet around the notes. Mr. Skelton was a gentle and generous teacher who encouraged and nurtured my passion. I loved working with him, and I loved playing on that organ. In summer of 2021, my son Chris and his wife Alex bought a house near where the Skeltons live, and while I was helping Chris with some repairs and modifications before they moved in, I had a swell evening with John and Carolyn.

A new Fisk organ was installed at the Parish of the Epiphany in 1974, just as I was leaving for Oberlin. It started with twelve stops on two manuals, and seven “prepared for” voices were added in 1983. The parish made the difficult decision to move the music making out of the chancel. The new balcony cost more than the $35,000 organ (imagine, a Fisk organ for $35,000), and while some parishioners were unhappy with the change, the relatively small organ was given a commanding position in the relatively large sanctuary. Of course, people familiar with Fisk organs know that “Charlie” was not known for having trouble filling churches with sound.

I did not play as much on Opus 65 as on Opus 50, but I did play a few recitals, perhaps a dozen services, and my sister’s wedding there. I have not been in that building since my father’s memorial service eight years ago, but I will always love the place and value its role in my earliest experiences with the music of the church. I will also always cherish the privilege of playing such brilliant, responsive organs when I was a pup.

Those two organs make a terrific comparison, built five years apart by the same firm in churches a half mile apart, and placed so radically differently in their buildings. They are both vibrant presences. The chancel placement in the Congregational church is surprisingly successful, partly because the chancel is very wide, so the organ’s sound directly reaches a large percentage of the area of the nave, because the acoustics are lively, and because the organ chamber is barely three feet deep.

The people at Fisk have dubbed these organs “Winchester Old” and “Winchester New,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the hymntunes for “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” and “On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry,” respectively.

As much space as you need?

I am fond of telling clients that there are two rules about placing a pipe organ in a church today. Rule #1: There is never enough money. Rule #2: There is never enough space. I have been in scores of older church buildings in which space was no issue. Think of a Catholic church built in 1880 seating 1,200 people. The ceiling is a barrel vault eighty feet up, so even if the balcony rail is twenty-five above the nave floor, there is still fifty-five feet of ceiling height. It is not unusual to find a nineteenth-century organ that is thirty-five or forty feet tall with a footprint of twenty by thirty feet with room left for a fifty-voice choir. Think of the grand organ formerly in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, now in storage. It is a rare modern building that will accommodate anything like that. It may be that the only chance of relocating such an organ would be to build a new organ from the pipes down and save the original voicing.

Even Gothic-style cathedrals pose serious challenges for organbuilders. The builders of the ancient cathedrals never imagined that people would be finding spaces for a hundred-plus ranks of organ pipes with all the associated mechanicals. The vaulted ceiling in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City is 112 feet off the floor, but the two 32′ stops are lying down in the triforium, the Contra Bombarde along Fiftieth Street and the (Double Open Wood) Diapason along Fifty-First Street. At Durham Cathedral, there are, count them, two big Open Wood Diapasons, both standing on the floor in the aisles beside the chancel, the sixteen-footer on the south aisle, and the thirty-two-footer on the north. At York Minster, the 32′ metal Diapason also stands on the floor of the aisle by the chancel, painted to imitate the stone fabric of the wall.

It is often problematic to place pipe organs in newer church buildings. The great interior height in many older church buildings is the result of the desire for proper proportions and the lofty superstructure that supports that high ceiling. Modern construction materials and techniques allow low ceilings to span great distances, and the economics of construction say that as a building gets taller, its cost increases exponentially. Are you paying $500,000 for each additional foot of height? Many modern churches are built without any planned accommodation for an organ, and plenty of architects do not know how much space and what sort of environment an organ needs.

The most extreme experience I have had with this was when a church in Virginia asked me to advise them about placing a pipe organ in their new building. I traveled there to find that although they had asked the architect to provide space for an organ, there was no place in the building to put it. The architect was present at this meeting, and he showed me a photo of an organ façade on the wall of a church and pointed to a space on an outside wall. He blanched when I told him that such an organ would be eight- or ten-feet deep behind the façade. It was an awkward moment. Disappointed, the church bought a digital instrument.

I view the task of evaluating a church building for the placement of an organ as harvesting space. Where in the building might an organ go? Can a classroom be converted to an organ chamber? Can additional height be captured by breaking through a ceiling into attic space? Will the organ be liturgically useful and acoustically successful if we put it there? In newer church buildings, we frequently find a sacristy behind the wall behind the altar. We could harvest the sacristy, open into the attic above, open the wall behind the altar, and make a perfect place for an organ—but I sure have run into opposition when I suggest taking the sacristy.

§

The people of Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Shoreline, Washington, were willing to rethink and redesign the front of their church to accommodate a new organ. I visited there in 2016 to consult with them and found an amateur installation of a relocated organ with two “flower boxes” perched on the front wall and an enclosed swell stuffed in an attic behind the wall. There was a waist-high wall separating the choir from the altar and two false walls projecting from the front, enclosing the choir in a pseudo-chancel. Jonathan Ortloff’s design for the new organ created a proper chamber front and center. All the artificial barricades were removed, leaving a wide-open, flexible space for clergy, lay leaders, and musicians.

Susanna Valleau is music director at Saint Dunstan’s, a position she has held since before the inception of the organ project. She reports that Ortloff’s design was quickly accepted by the church’s rector and wardens and embraced by the congregation. The new flexibility of the sanctuary has allowed growth in the worship life of the parish as well as opening possibilities for community outreach, especially a variety of concerts.

The chambered organ

In the beginning of the twentieth century, it became popular to place organs in remote chambers, spaces separate from the rooms in which they would be heard. This can be partly attributed to economy—you save a lot of money when you do not have to build a case. It also means that you do not have an organ cluttering up the floor of the sanctuary (if you choose to look at it that way). This would never have been possible as a wide-spread practice without electricity. Electric keyboard actions made it possible to have great distances between keyboards and windchests, and organists had to learn to play by remote control.

Electricity was also crucial in enabling organs to break the bonds of their chambers, thanks to the luxury of virtually limitless wind supplied by electric blowers. Remember, Widor wrote all ten of his organ symphonies for the hand-pumped organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France. Organ builders developed techniques of voicing with higher wind pressures, producing ever-more-powerful sounds. While the wind pressure of a large organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in the 1860s might have been two-and-a-half inches or three inches, it is common to find five inches of pressure on the Great and eight inches on the Swell of a Skinner organ dating from the 1920s, not to mention solo reeds on fifteen inches or twenty-five inches. Air is the fuel we burn to create organ sound. When Mr. Skinner put his Swell celestes and Flauto Dolces on eight inches of pressure, he coaxed them out of the chamber and into the room, stepping on the gas by running more air through the pipes.

Today we can compare the experiences of playing and hearing organs in chambers and in free-standing cases. In fact, there are several American churches where you can hear both in the same room. The First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, has a three-manual organ by Rudolf von Beckerath (1972) in the rear gallery and a four-manual W. W. Kimball (1931) in chancel chambers. What a wealth of organ tone to experience under one roof.

The chapel at Duke University has a four-manual, hundred-rank Aeolian located in chancel chambers and a four-manual, hundred-rank Flentrop in a high gallery on the rear wall. There is also a small Brombaugh organ tuned in meantone in a side chapel. The Organ Historical Society held a national convention in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2001 during which we heard the ultimate comparison of organs with recitals on each of those organs in the same day—Mark Brombaugh played the Flentrop, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played the Aeolian. The range of music played was profound, from Frescobaldi to Wagner and Liszt, and conventioneers got a real earful that day.

Prepare the way.

When an institution is planning a room that will include a pipe organ, it is wise to engage an organ expert in the design process. It is a rare architect who would have a deep grasp of the space needed for an organ. In fact, without real practical knowledge, planning the size of an organ is likely to be arbitrary. How many stops must it have? Would it have fewer more powerful stops, or would the tonal variety that comes from a larger number of stops serve the needs of the institution best? These questions apply both to churches and universities. If it should be forty stops, should it be electric or mechanical action? And how do you arrive at forty stops? Where should the organ be placed for best acoustical advantage and logistical usefulness? You do not want to place a mechanical-action organ with an attached keydesk alone in a gallery with choir seating on the floor under it or at the other end of the room. The independent organ consultant can help answer all these questions without the conflict of angling for the contract to build the organ.

What will be the electrical requirements? How much might the organ weigh? How are the building’s walls constructed to maximize their effective resonance? In a recent job where an organ was removed for renovation and returned to its original location, the flimsy drywall behind the organ was reinforced with new heavy material, and the effect on the organ’s sound was dramatic.

Because the pipe organ is a monumental instrument, it relies on the integrity of its building for the projection of its sound. The building must provide the organ a safe and solid home. Flimsy construction absorbs sound. Rigid construction projects it. The organ should not be placed under valleys in the roof that would be prone to leak. Witness that the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Notre-Dame de Paris miraculously survived the catastrophic fire in 2019; the peaked roof above the organ between the two towers protected the instrument during that horrible event.

In many churches, it is obvious where the organ should go. In others, not so much. When you are going to the trouble and expense of acquiring an organ, set the stage well and get it right.

Humble π

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”

Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.

But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr² (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.

Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.

Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.

Achimedes’ mental model

Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:

When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

The last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr³. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr²h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.

My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.

I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.

Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.

If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.

Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.¹ The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.

An American renaissance

As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.

There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.

A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.

In a nutshell

The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.

In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.

Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.

I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.

He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.

I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

Youthful fantasies

Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, Massachusetts, was founded as a mission in September 1953, and services were first held in the Deerfield Elementary School at the end of Deerfield Avenue. A new church building was dedicated next to the school in March 1955, and my father was appointed the first full-time rector in October 1956. I was seven months old. We lived in a rented house nearby while the rectory was built adjacent to the church. I know from personal memory and family lore that we were ensconced in the new rectory before I was two years old. My earliest memories of those days included the bulldozers that were grading the lawn and building the driveway. My wife and sons would quickly agree that must have been the genesis of my fascination with heavy equipment, admittedly alive and well today as my sixty-eighth 
birthday approaches.

The Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts established Saint John’s as a parish in 1959, and that year the church acquired C. B. Fisk Opus 31 (then the Andover Organ Company), a one-manual, six-stop, mechanical-action organ mounted on a platform with a detached, reversed console. I learned later (!) that the organ was planned as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual instrument that could be completed if the new parish succeeded. At three years old, I did not yet know about detached consoles, but my child’s eyes remember where it was placed in the simple new A-frame building, itself designed to accept future enhancement.

Ten years after its founding, the parish mounted a campaign to build a parish hall and complete the church interior with formal decorations and furniture. Two towers and a rear gallery were added. A full-height stained-glass wall was installed behind the altar, a chancel with steps and altar rail was added, and hardwood pews were installed replacing the metal folding chairs.

Having spent a lifetime moving pipe organs, I am amused by the memory of my first organ relocation—that tiny Fisk organ hanging from a crane, pipes and all, being lifted from the front of the original sanctuary to its permanent home in the new rear gallery before the roof was closed. If I saw that happening today, I would run toward the crane operator, arms waving like a semaphore, shouting “Stop!,” but there it was, an organ hanging from a hook on a sunny day. I was seven. That same year, when my parents were not at home, I thought it would be fun to climb the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower under construction. It was a lovely view from the top, showing my parents’ car turning on to Deerfield Avenue, heading home. I got back down before they reached the driveway, but the guilt on my face was enough to spill the story.

Saint John’s organist’s name was Donald McFeely. He had the parish on the cusp of the tracker revolution, buying an organ from Charles Fisk and the Andover Organ Company before the founding of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in 1961. The Andover Organ Company completed the twenty-three-rank instrument in 1991, including the original six-stop organ as the Rückpositiv as planned by Charlie Fisk.

I remember several of the families of Saint John’s as friends of my parents, and as I write I realize what a heady time that was for them. It must have been thrilling to start with meetings to incorporate a mission, transforming it to a parish, and taking on two building programs in ten years. Through their commitment, effort, and money, they created a church that continues to thrive over seventy years later. My father was a young priest in his second appointment, and it must have been mind-boggling and life-altering for him to be at the helm of that rocket ship. Dad has been gone almost ten years, so I will never get to chat about that with him, but the notion adds to my admiration. By the way, I attended the Deerfield School, next door to our house, from first through third grades.

§

Since my first organ was a quasi-experimental dip into the early years of the Organ Reform Movement, it is ironic that the second organ in my life was built in 1905 by the Ernest M. Skinner Company at a time when Robert Hope-Jones (who grew into the genius behind theatre organs built by Wurlitzer) was working with Skinner. Dad was called as rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966, when I was ten years old. I was instantly pressed into the Junior Choir led by harpsichord builder Carl Fudge, the parish’s organist and choirmaster. As I think about it, the further irony is that Mr. Fudge as an early practitioner in the esoteric world of harpsichord building in the 1960s was saddled with an aging, wheezing, cadaver of an organ in such poor condition that my friends and I as ten-year-old choristers where well aware of its precarious state.

There was the Sunday when I heard my first cipher in the middle of a service. Mr. Fudge left the bench, crossed the chancel, reverenced the altar, returned with a ladder, reverenced the altar again, set the ladder against the impost, climbed up and pulled a pipe. He repeated the process to return the ladder, reverencing the altar twice more, wearing a black cassock through the entire sequence. I expect that his pious performance as the service progressed was calculated to draw attention to the organ’s failings, and it was only five or six years later that my father was involved in purchasing another organ from Charles Fisk, Opus 65, which was completed in 1973.

When I was twelve, I had my first organ lessons on the gleaming ten-year-old, three-manual Holtkamp organ in Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (ETS) in Harvard Square, later the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), now defunct. Though it has electro-pneumatic action, that organ was in the vanguard of experimental design with low wind pressures, classical choruses, and a Rückpositiv division (on a pitman chest) along the gallery rail. But my first experiences playing the organ during worship were on that home Skinner when Mr. Fudge allowed me to “noodle” a bit while he left the bench to receive communion, and later to play an occasional prelude or postlude.

It was not long before I went out on my own, taking a six-week gig playing on a three-manual Estey (long gone) at the Baptist church in Winchester, and then after Vatican II at St. Eulalia Catholic Church in Winchester on a Conn Artist. (You can’t make these things up.) My last high-school church organist position was at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played a three-manual, thirty-three-stop E. & G. G. Hook organ built in 1860, a very grand organ with real large-organ stops like 16′ Double Open Wood and 16′ Trombone with wood resonators.

Nostalgia

I am wallowing in childhood memories today because Wendy and I recently moved from Greenwich Village to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where my grandfather had been rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, just at the time when my family moved from Westwood to Winchester and I started to take organ lessons. It has been both fun and eerie to merge into life in Stockbridge, walking past the rectory on Main Street where my grandparents lived, counting the windows, and remembering the rooms that were so familiar when I was a teenager.

Saint Paul’s first building was a wood Gothic structure designed by Richard Upjohn and consecrated in 1844. The present stone building was designed by Charles McKim and consecrated in 1884. The organ was Hilborne Roosevelt’s Opus 127, also built in 1884, but it was drastically altered in the early-1960s, a project that included the addition of mixtures and mutations, the replacement of the original principal stops with ranks of tapered pipes, the addition of a pedal division and a couple unified reeds including a Krummhorn with electric action. I wonder if Hilborne Roosevelt ever heard a Krummhorn? Today I call it a scandalous treatment of a lovely venerable instrument, but when I was twelve and thirteen years old and allowed to practice on the organ, loud and shrill as it was, I thought it was the bees’ knees. I do not remember if I ever played a service there, but I know I played a recital or two—I’m sure my grandparents were very proud.

When I was a kid, we had family holidays in Stockbridge. Thanksgiving dinner in the rectory was a great treat, and my grandparents nurtured my nascent love of music by treating me to weekends at Tanglewood, just a few miles away. Those were my first solo trips away from home—my parents put me on buses and trains in Boston and grandparents picked me up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, quite an adventure for a thirteen-year-old.

Since I retired as a church organist when I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, we have not attended church regularly, but when we first moved to Stockbridge, we were quick to show up at Saint Paul’s. We went to the early service at 8:00 a.m. and were part of a congregation of five or six people. It was fun to meet a woman whose wedding had been performed by my grandfather and who had wonderful memories of him, but it was a pretty quiet affair. Shortly after, we learned that the rector had just received a call to move elsewhere, and after our first visit we went dormant.

A new rector was installed at Saint Paul’s eight weeks ago, and Wendy and I went to church there last Sunday, attending the 10:00 a.m. service along with more than forty others. It was great to hear the organ being played, though it is in terrible condition, and we were pleased with the good vibes, the singing of the hymns, and the fact that there were some people present who were younger than us. Maybe we will go back this time.

Altered states

I imagine we are all familiar with organs that have been altered, receiving new identities for better or for worse. Some are great successes. There are many organs built by the Skinner Organ Company and later modified by Aeolian-Skinner under G. Donald Harrison’s direction. Ernest Skinner hated that, but Harrison was able in many cases to retain the gravitas of the original organ while adding well-balanced choruses and mutations.

I had a long relationship with a 1906 Hutchings-Votey organ rebuilt by Kinzey-Angerstein in 1973 at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Holliston, Massachusetts. I joined the reorganized workshop of Angerstein & Associates in 1984, and the organ at Saint Mary’s was one of the first I tuned after taking that job. The occasion was a recital by Daniel Roth, then titulaire of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, celebrating the appointment of Saint Mary’s longtime organist, Leo Abbott, as director of music for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston and the end of his tenure at Saint Mary’s. The organ retained its original 8′ and 4′ principals, wood flutes, manual reeds, and pedal stops. Daniel Angerstein had added upperwork to the Great and Swell creating two fine choruses and a smashing 16′ Pedal Trombone. It is a grand organ with lots of pizzazz, and the new tonal scheme added wonderfully to the original foundation of the organ.

The Holliston organ was so successful because the new stops were scaled and voiced to complete choruses based on the original foundations. The added pipes were purposefully constructed to exacting specifications based on the scales of the original stops, so all voices blend as if the entire instrument had been built at once. Too often, organ technicians of lesser skill add voices to an organ based on the notion of an ideal stoplist without considering the scales, construction, or even wind pressures of the new pipes.

Earlier this year I visited an organ in Texas that has small-scale Baroque choruses added in the 1960s to a nineteenth-century organ with broad scales and heavy fundamental tone. The differences in harmonic structure between old and newer pipes is striking. The tonal effect is jarring, confusing, and difficult to sing with. The firm that added the high-pitched stops must not have made any effort to create a blend between old and new. The stoplist looks fine, but the organ sounds terrible.

When the revival of classic organbuilding was getting traction in the early 1960s, many of the new organs were focused on high-pitched voices as were the “Baroque-izations” of older organs. It is ironic because the great classical instruments of Europe on which our revival was based are typically not shrill instruments. Their stoplists show fully developed choruses crowned with multiple mixtures, but their foundation stops are rich and full with thrilling harmonic development to support all that upperwork. When twentieth-century organbuilders began building new mechanical-action organs with low wind pressure and open-toe voicing, the challenge they faced, whether they knew it or not, was to figure out to deliver lots of air, not pressure but volume, to the largest pipes in the organ, and to voice those pipes so they could really sing.

§

It is fun to think about the first organs I knew, how my youthful impressions compared to my current thinking after playing, working on, and listening to hundreds of organs. As a thirteen-year-old, I was enthralled by the idea that I could play music on those keyboards and fill a church building with sound. I have been around organs with serious intent for about fifty-six years, and the evolution of my understanding of organ tone is still in process. I have learned slowly how scale (diameter) and wind pressure affect what an organ pipe can do. I have learned how the shape of a pipe’s resonator (the long part) affects the harmonic structure of its tone, so it stands to reason that two stops that emphasize the same harmonics will blend well together—that is a simple glimpse of the complex structure of a Cornet, especially when a reed stop is added to it. (Think d’Aquin noëls.)

I sat in a pew at Saint Paul’s last Sunday, delighted that the organ was being played, but critical of its collection of unrelated stops, however much I enjoyed playing it fifty-six years ago. (Oof!) The church has had some hard times over all those years, but it is fun to think that we might breathe some new life into it. Wendy and I live a fifteen-minute walk from Saint Paul’s. Maybe I could help?

There have been many organs in my life that were altered from their original state and transformed into something different. Some are marvelous successes, some are unmitigated disasters, and some (perhaps most) are the transformation of a fine instrument into one that is mediocre and uninteresting. A well-intentioned local organ technician may have terrific skills, but may not have the knowledge, wisdom, and experience to “out-Skinner Skinner.” If the organ you play most regularly does not have a trumpet, you probably could add one, but it should be as close as possible to the trumpet the original builder would have included if the organ was to be one stop larger. The added stop must be heard as part of the original organ and not as irrelevant braying. It is not the stoplist that makes an organ, it is the tonal structure.

I was at dinner recently with two beloved and admired colleagues who are collaborating on an important new organ. I asked them what they hoped to achieve with that organ. One replied, “I want to make an organ that sounds beautiful so lots of people will be happy to hear it.”