In the Wind: Youthful fantasies

Adventures and transitions

In the last six weeks, Wendy and I have attended three singular events involving three very different pipe organs. One was small and in poor condition, another was a grand instrument in an iconic church, and the third was so large as to be off the charts. Most instruments have little variations in size—a violin is a violin, a trumpet is a trumpet—but pipe organs span huge ranges of size as well as styles and even purposes. These events provided a fun overview of extremes.

We traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on April 5 to hear the brilliant young organist Anna Lapwood play a recital on the massive Midmer-Losh organ in Boardwalk Hall. No other organ in the world has ten 32′ ranks, and those are just ten of 447 ranks; the organ has 33,111 pipes. You can find the stoplist and list of ranks at boardwalkorgans.org. (See also the cover feature of the November 2020 issue.) There is an impressive restoration effort underway there, a daunting task being faced by a professional staff and a troupe of volunteers under the direction and curatorship of Nathan Bryson.

According to its website, the interior of Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long, 310 feet wide, and 137 feet high. Remember that a football field is 300 feet long, and you might imagine the scale of the place. Among the activities in the hall beside organ recitals are car races, tractor pulls, and rock concerts, and it is the only space in the world that has hosted an indoor helicopter flight. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was nominated to be a candidate for president of the United States during the Democratic National Convention in Boardwalk Hall.

The stage of Boardwalk Hall is 148 feet wide, and the main organ chambers flank the proscenium arch. The size of the organ and the number of expressive divisions were obvious to the audience as the organ chamber lights remained on throughout the concert. All the individual sections of the instrument were evident, and hundreds of huge shutters opened and closed suddenly and majestically.

Anna Lapwood is twenty-eight years old and has risen to international fame through her fantastic abilities, popular appeal, and masterful use of social media. Enter her name in search fields for Google, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, and one will find days of fun listening. She was recently appointed an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for her service to music. According to her official website, Anna “holds the position of director of music for Pembroke College (Cambridge), associate artist with Royal Albert Hall, and artist in association with the BBC Singers. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ award from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist.”

Knowing that this would be a popular event among organists and organbuilders, I bought our tickets for Anna’s concert at Boardwalk Hall immediately after they went on sale in early February, and Wendy and I enjoyed our seats at a table on the main floor. Since Boardwalk Hall’s seating capacity is over 10,000 we were not worried about missing the concert. While the main floor was nearly full, the audience of around 1,200 people had plenty of space to move around. We cruised the floor, drinks in hand, greeting old and new friends, and chatting with my admired colleagues who serve on the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, responsible for this, the most massive of organ projects.

Ms. Lapwood’s entry to the concert stage was one only possible at Boardwalk Hall. We heard the blast of a car horn, and a 1938 regency blue Chevrolet Master Sport Sedan entered the hall from the left wing. With horn blowing, British flag waving, headlights blazing, and the audience cheering, the uniformed chauffeur, owner Chuck Gibson, walked around to open the passenger door. Ms. Lapwood stepped out onto the vast floor clad in sparkles and gold shoes, mounted the stage energetically, and we were off. The program featured her transcriptions of Hans Zimmer’s music from Interstellar, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and my favorite, Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain.

I have attended dozens of organ concerts offered by serious, even stuffy artists, including many of those I have stuffily played myself. Organ music can be very serious, confusing, arcane, and difficult for lay people to understand and appreciate. Anna Lapwood’s arresting stage presence and honest enthusiasm for the instrument and the music she played filled the cavernous space with excitement. It was a thrilling evening, and that is one room that can truly support 32′ organ tone.

Goodbye, good friend

In November 2023 friend and colleague Brian Jones passed away. (See “Nunc dimittis,” January 2024 issue, page 6.) Brian had been organist and choir director at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston from 1984 until 2004 where he built a widely admired choir program, making brilliant use of the church’s resources and central location to attract wonderful singers to the program, both professional and amateur. Brian along with associate organist Ross Wood and the choir produced eight recordings including the wildly successful Carols for Choirs, which helped transform Trinity’s Christmas carol service into a must-go experience for Boston audiences, so popular that after several years they started offering it twice on a December Sunday. One year Wendy and I took her mother for drinks in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel before crossing Saint James Place to enter the church early enough to find seats. I was honored to serve as organ curator at Trinity during Brian’s tenure, and I wrote about some of the experiences we shared in the February 2024 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9).

Brian’s memorial service was held at Trinity on April 27, 2024. We had dinner with friends the evening before and spent the night at a fine hotel on Copley Square. As we approached the church on Saturday morning, we were greeted by Lydia, Brian’s beloved 1933 cobalt blue Chrysler Coupe, complete with rumble seat and oversized headlamps, parked in the same spot next to the church where I parked every Friday morning for my pre-recital tuning all those years ago. Lydia was a common sight among Brian’s friends, her “ooo-gah” klaxon horn heralding her imminent arrival. She once made an appearance at our house in Maine, that crazy horn blaring through the woods as she came down our long driveway. Seeing that car invoked memories of the immense pleasure Brian got from driving her around, his ebullient, toothy smile as he enjoyed the daylights out of corny, often racy jokes, and his joy of sitting around a table with friends and family.

Brian’s memorial service was a reunion of dozens of colleagues, some I had not seen in years. People came from great distances to be with him in spirit one last time in that great church where it had been Brian’s childhood ambition to serve as organist. The building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and decorated by John La Farge, is a symphony of crotch-matched marble, painted stenciling, rich dark woodworking, and a magnificent pair of organs, Skinner Organ Company Opus 573, revised, and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-C. A small herd of organists took turns at the great four-manual console, and Colin Lynch, Trinity’s director of music, led a large and enthusiastic alumnae choir.

The choir sang a collection of anthems including two great swashbucklers that I first heard sung by the Trinity Choir under Brian’s directions, pieces that he loved and that I taught the parish choir I was leading at the time. “Kyrie,” from Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, expresses the height of the French Romantic symphonic literature for organ as inspired by the stupendous expressive organs built in many of France’s great churches by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, including the doozy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where Vierne was organist from 1900 until his death at the organ console with his foot on low E at the end of his 1,750th recital at the church. The organ accompaniment is worthy of Vierne’s six great symphonies for organ, and the choir sings dramatic expressive passages culminating with a soaring soprano line in the closing statement of “Kyrie eleison.” The choir was rehearsing that piece as we entered the church, and I burst into tears. “I can name that tune in one note.”

Brian Jones loved sublime pieces like the Vierne and the carols of John Rutter, and he had a soft spot for syrupy, nostalgic music. A beautiful reading of Adolph Adam’s O Holy Night was included in the recording Carols for Choirs, and Stephen Adams’s The Holy City was a perennial favorite. Colin Lynch and the alumnae choir gave us The Holy City with its dramatic sweeps and swoops, rolling triplets in the accompaniment bass line, and the treacly text that combine to make the piece a sentimental favorite:

And then me thought my dream was changed, the streets no longer rang, hushed were the glad Hosannas the little children sang, the sun grew dark with mystery, the morn was cold and chill as the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Hark, how the Angels sing Hosanna in the Highest, Hosanna to the King!

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Listening to that marvelous barnburner of an anthem, I remembered a moment during my time caring for the Trinity organs. I was sitting at the console, maybe planning the next hour of tuning, when a foreign tourist came up to the velvet rope, got my attention, and asked, “Can you play zee Holy City?” I gave him a chorus of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” and went down the steps to shake his hand.

Anyone who has attended a convention of the Organ Historical Society has witnessed the best of hymn singing as it is a tradition of the society that the audience/congregation sings a hymn at each recital. That Saturday morning at Trinity Church, Mr. Richardson’s massive roof was raised as the throng of organists and singers poured their emotional hearts into singing some of the great hymns of the faith led by that gorgeous heroic organ, all of them except me, because I cannot sing while weeping.

Brian’s grown children, Eliza and Nat, gave loving moving eulogies, speaking for Brian’s widower Mike and the entire family. Brian had a distinctive, often stentorian voice and a repertory of standard phrases always delivered in the same singsong fashion. Nat Jones’s imitations of his father were so authentic as to bring Brian into the room with us, both hilarious and unnerving. It was a grand morning remembering a grand man.

Why we do this

All that wonderful music in that beautiful place was a reminder of the magic that is the instrument we love so much. In a lofty setting like Trinity, the organ is a monumental presence. Years ago, when I still worked at Trinity, I was at a meeting on Cape Cod discussing the possibility of bringing an organ to a summer chapel there, when a retired Episcopal bishop hearing that I worked at Trinity referred to the organ there as a “weapon.” I am not sure that was the right word, but I think I know what he meant. That organ is a great example of an instrument perfectly suited to its room, with a range of expression from barely audible mystery to thundering triumph, all under the hands and feet of a single musician. The nerdy organbuilder in me sits in a pew picturing the thousands of pouches and valves flapping away inside the windchests, pouring air into thousands of pipes, lifting our spirits. It is mystical, magical, and majestic all at once. That’s why we do this.

Inaugurating a new ministry

Since we moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a couple years ago, Wendy and I have been attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street across from the Red Lion Inn. I have a previous personal connection with the parish as my grandfather, the Reverend Dr. George Douglas Krumbhaar, was rector there from 1960 to 1974, from when I was four years old until I graduated from high school. I have fond memories of holiday family visits to the rectory, and solo summer weekend trips when my grandparents treated me to concerts at Tanglewood. I practiced and played a couple recitals on the Roosevelt organ as rebuilt with neo-Baroque accent in the early 1960s, and walking around town as an adult fills me with memories from over fifty years ago.

Saint Paul’s is a beautiful building, designed by Charles McKim and richly decorated with appointments by John La Farge and Stockbridge resident Daniel Chester French.¹ Its stately location with adjoining rectory on the northeast corner of the main intersection gives it a local prominence, and its doors are perpetually open, welcoming the many tourists who visit for skiing in the winter and the countless artistic outlets during the summer.

On May 8 we were thrilled to join a throng of clergy, members, and guests attending the installation of the Reverend Samuel T. Vaught as the twentieth rector of Saint Paul’s. Father Sam is young, a newly minted priest, and this is his first appointment as rector of a parish. It was an involved and poignant service full of symbolism and hopefulness. Especially meaningful was the prayer of the new rector, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, yet you have called your servant to stand in your house and serve at your altar. To you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit.” He proved his youthfulness by delivering the prayer kneeling on the bare stone floor and when finished, standing smoothly with nary a grunt, creak, or stumble. Father Sam is ambitious, hoping to stay long enough to make a difference, and as one of the many silver-haired people in the congregation, I hope that his youthful enthusiasm will attract younger families to join the fun.

Saint Paul’s has the thoroughly picked over old bones of Hilborne Roosevelt Opus 127, built in 1884, the same year that the building was completed and dedicated. The replacement of principal stops with tapered pipes along with the addition of an especially narrow-scaled mixture, Scharff, Sesquialtera, and Krummhorn on electric windchests have obliterated much of the organ’s original character. I am pretty sure that Mr. Roosevelt never heard a Krummhorn. Besides the poorly conceived and executed alterations, the organ is in horrible condition. I have not mounted the steps to the organ loft buried in the base of the tower since my return to Saint Paul’s, but from sitting in the pews, I can list on my fingers which Bourdon pipes have cracks or fallen stoppers and which are dead, which manual notes are prone to ciphering, and which notes of specified stops are out of tune by more than two whole tones. Yikes. There is no choir, and there are two organists casually employed who take turns at the keydesk. Although there is not much of a music program, it is still nice to hear a pipe organ.

In addition to his priestly presence, Father Sam is an organist and pianist. I enjoyed a coffee date with him a few weeks ago during which he expressed the ambition that the church should have an appointed parish musician who could start a program involving solo and choir singing. Knowing that for at least the current moment there would be no money available for significant organ repairs or replacement, I offered to inspect the instrument and suggest what might be repaired with a little bit of local elbow grease, and I am pretty sure I could improve the tuning supposedly applied during Holy Week. While money was paid, it does not sound to my ears that much good happened.

In an age when many parishes flounder, it is fun to think of the possibility of reinvigorating this venerable parish that I have been associated with for more than sixty years. As a twelve-year-old, I thought the organ was great. As a sixty-eight-year-old, not so much. Here’s hoping and anticipating that the arrival of an energetic young priest will bring new life to the place. I think the town is ready 
for it.

Notes

1. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is best known for his monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Chesterwood, is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Wandering

When I was born, my father was rector of the now-long-gone Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was on Washington Street near the Sullivan Square “T” Station; there is a Brazilian barbeque restaurant in that location now. It was a small parish, but I presume there was a pipe organ—all churches had pipe organs then. I was four months old when Dad was named the first priest for the new Episcopal mission of Saint John in Westwood, Massachusetts, just outside Route 128 (now I-95), which was the first circular perimeter commuter highway in the United States. We moved briefly to a rented house in Westwood, and in 1958, before I was two years old, we were ensconced in the brand-new rectory adjacent to the church building. 

There was a pipe organ at Saint John’s from the start, with a juicy tidbit of American organ history to boot. It was built in 1959 by the Andover Organ Company, then owned by the thirty-four-year-old Charles Fisk. It had one manual, six stops, and a two-manual detached, reversed console, all mounted on a platform—a strange little setup until you realize that it was intended as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual organ, the Great and Pedal to be built later in a free-standing case as the parish grew and funds became available.

The mission building was a simple frame structure with a linoleum floor, and the organ sat down front on the left. The building was also designed to be expanded to greater glory, and that happened starting in 1963 when two towers were added with stained glass faces (I got bagged when at seven years old, I climbed to the top of the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower only to see my parents’ car coming up the road), and a rear balcony was built. My earliest organbuilding memory was seeing that organ hanging outdoors from a crane. The roof had been opened in two places and the organ, pipes and all, was hoisted to its permanent home. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home.

Dad was called to be rector at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966. That is where I had my first experience playing an organ. A new organ by C. B. Fisk was installed there in 1974. I took organ lessons at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a Holtkamp organ installed when Charlie Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, just three years before the Saint John’s organ. I continued my lessons at the First Congregational Church in Winchester on the new three-manual Fisk organ, went to Oberlin to wallow in the renowned fleet of instruments there, and went out into the world as organist and organbuilder.

I have worked for four organ companies including my own, I have served two churches as organist for a total of thirty years, and I have been director of the Organ Clearing House for twenty, a position that has had me in direct contact with hundreds of organs. I have played hundreds (thousands?) of organs in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, even on a Cavaillé-Coll organ in Antananarivo, Madagascar. My wife and I have traveled extensively in Greece where there are very few organs, especially on sailing vacations in the Ionian and Aegean seas, but while I could not get access to it, I laid eyes on a tiny pipe organ in a high balcony in a Roman Catholic church on the Island of Siros. I am thinking that our Greek trips might be the only times since my birth that I have gone more than a week without playing, hearing, or seeing a pipe organ. Until now.

As the Covid-19 pandemic started to break out in early March, we left New York City with extended family for our place in Maine. A few days before that, I visited an E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ built in 1872 (Opus 668) that has been in storage for ten years. My colleagues and I were pulling it out of the container to measure key components to prepare for laying it out in a new location. It was the last instrument I saw. It has been 117 days since I laid eyes on an organ.

Remembering

In April 2016, Wendy and I spent a long week in Great Britain. We sure saw a lot of organs on that trip. I loved seeing the fifty-two-stop Willis organ (1891) in the library of Blenheim Palace. Following the tour path through the building, one first sees the organ partially through an archway at the end of the vast room. The organ was built in the height of the Victorian Era, and it looks it, bedecked with opulent swirls and swoops of carvings and elegant inlaid decorations across the keydesk. Beautifully made mechanical stop actions are visible from the sides, as well as miles of lead tube for the pneumatic keyboard actions. Next to the organ hangs a framed photo of Henry Willis sitting at the console, apparently working on tonal finishing. The case had not been installed yet, and lots of the organ’s innards are visible.

Our host was Andrew Patterson who serves as a volunteer curator of the organ and plays many of the regular recitals. He pointed out a dent in the largest façade pipe of the C-side tower, close to twenty feet off the floor. The story goes that the palace was temporarily home to a school for boys during the Second World War, and the dent was the result of an indoor ball game.

When I was in high school, I was assistant organist at the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, home of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 283 (1860). George Bozeman was the organist, and he figured out how to create a position for me so I could be his regular substitute when he traveled for organ installations. The parish has diminished quite a bit over the years, but the grand organ is still in place hoping for restoration. It was in good shape for my time there, and I learned a lot from it.

I had agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary school chorus in late June, not long before my graduation. I attended a couple rehearsals, and it promised to be a fine event. One beautiful June Sunday, a couple of my pals came to church in Woburn to hear me play, and we took off for the beach after church. I got home that evening to phone messages wondering where I was. You guessed it. I missed the concert. Carl Fudge, the organist of Epiphany in Winchester, was in attendance because his daughter was in the chorus. He volunteered from the audience to mount the stage and to accompany the concert. I wonder if any readers have a lifelong blush from a moment like that.

In the summer of 1976, I worked for Bozeman-Gibson for a few months. The shop was just completing a one-manual organ for the chapel on Squirrel Island, Southport, Maine. John Farmer, long-time organbuilder in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was my senior in the shop, and we would take the organ to Maine for installation. But first, over the Independence Day holiday, we installed the organ temporarily in the crossing of Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross for Barbara Bruns’s performance of Handel organ concertos with the orchestra of the Handel and Haydn Society for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, held in Boston that summer. We worked hard through a couple nights getting the organ set up. In those days, the Orange Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA, aka “the subway”) ran on tracks elevated above Washington Street, and the trains roared past the dark cathedral all night. Other highlights of that convention included Farmer and me playing the appropriate parts in a piece for organist and two organbuilders by Martha Folts on and in the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel, and E. Power Biggs’s last public performance, Rheinberger with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fiedler.

After the convention, we dismantled the organ and drove it to Maine, where we loaded it onto the Squirrel Island ferry, a small vessel a lot like a lobster boat—it took three trips to get the organ there. The only vehicle on the island was the superintendent’s ancient beat-up pickup truck, which took many trips up the dusty road from the dock to the chapel laden with organ parts. A cold beer never tasted so good.

The island was buzzing with news of a recent faux pas. The island is roughly equivalent to a condominium corporation where homeowners own shares of the island and contribute to its upkeep. They had recently banded together for the construction of a water tower that brought “city” water to the island for the first time, eliminating the reliance on quirky wells. With construction complete, the tank was left full of a cleaning solution, and it was the superintendent’s job to empty it at a specified time and fill it with water. So he did, forgetting to open a valve allowing air into the tank as the fluid drained, and the tank collapsed inward with a big bang.

During the job, we took the ferry back to town for an evening or two and followed islanders’ recommendations to eat at Lobsterman’s Wharf in East Boothbay, Maine. My historically informed ongoing Oberlin education was enhanced by a local country-western band sharing such gems as I Just Kicked the Daylights Out of My CB Radio (Google™ didn’t turn it up for me, I wonder if it was an original?) and Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life, written and made famous by Bobby Bare and easily found on YouTube, which I later learned was Bill Clinton’s favorite country song. Forty-four years later, almost to the day, I am sitting at my desk in Newcastle, Maine, on the shore of the Damariscotta River, about six miles upriver from Lobsterman’s Wharf. We have often gone there by boat, tying up at their dock where I can hear the echoes of those two songs.

Adjacent to Lobsterman’s Wharf is the Washburn & Doughty Shipyard, famous for the construction of huge powerful tugboats that service the ports between Boston and New Jersey and move cargo, especially fuel, over the same waters. In July 2008, John Schwandt, then professor of organ at the University of Oklahoma, was staying with us while preparing for a concert on the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland. On July 11, John and I were sitting on a rock on the shore of the river when we noticed a vast plume of smoke to the south. Washburn & Doughty was on fire. The Boothbay Register reported that a 121-foot articulate tug barge and a 92-foot “Z-Drive” tugboat under construction at the time were towed to safety by the heroic efforts of lobstermen from East Boothbay and South Bristol across the river. The shipyard was rebuilt so quickly that local suspicion had it that plans and financing were in place for replacing the building before the fire started mysteriously.

Just a month before that riverside chat, I returned from my first trip to Madagascar. I had traveled on an invitation from Zina Andrianarivelo, ambassador from Madagascar to the United Nations, at the behest of Marc Ravalomanana, the Federal President. The president was also vice-president of the Protestant church there, and in preparation for an important upcoming anniversary, had asked the ambassador to “go back to America and find an organ for this church.” The cold call I received from Zina was the doozy of a lifetime, and I agreed to meet him in New York to discuss it. I was sure I was the only organbuilder at work at the United Nations that day.

I have written before about the travel plans that included no details about hotels or even a flight home. Once in the country, my name would be on a list for notification when there would be a flight back to Paris. Otherwise I had no itinerary whatsoever. Of course, I was treated handsomely. My flight arrived after midnight, I was met at the airport by snappily dressed presidential aides, treated to drinks in the VIP lounge, and whisked forty minutes to the capital where I checked into a room in a four-star, French-owned hotel reserved in the president’s name. As I ventured into the hotel restaurant for breakfast, a server informed me that my driver would be out front in an hour. Richard, the driver with a big government car, took me to the church where I met the ambassador, was given a cell phone, and was introduced to church officials who would show me the dozen or so churches the president wished to enhance with organs. 

I met Adolha Vonialitahina, a lovely young woman who had just graduated from Texas Christian University in a scholarship program instituted by the president. Adolha would be my translator and guide, so I had an entourage. The trip included many rich experiences, including a four-hour drive to Andasibe-Mantadia National Park where I saw lemurs in their natural habitat. We visited a church in Antananarivo (the capital city, colloquially known as Tanariv, or simply, Tana) where they showed me an organ in a non-descript plywood case. When I opened the fallboard I burst into tears. There was the familiar and distinctive gilded nameboard of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. I saw a lovely organ by Merklin in another church, reminding me that Madagascar was a French colony until 1963.

As I returned to JFK Airport, my wife Wendy was leaving for a trip to Jordan with a friend. We were in the airport at the same time. She saw my flight from Paris arrive, but we did not see each other in person, two ships passing in broad daylight.

Delivering an organ to a church in Arlington, Massachusetts, in about 1985, a co-worker slipped on a stairway. When he grabbed wildly to steady himself, he pulled a fire alarm and the city responded with vigor. We called him Sparky after that. And working in an organ loft in Manhattan, I forgot to turn off the smoke detector beam. When I walked in front of it, the horns started blaring. This time it was a big deal because there is a large and active day school in the building, and the FDNY knows to respond with intent. Fire apparatuses filled the cross street and blocked both Park and Lexington avenues. There must have been thousands of people affected, most singularly the rector who was in the shower in the sixth-floor rectory and came to the street with wet hair wearing a cassock. That memory is filed away next to the trip to the beach in 1974.

Twenty years ago, the Calgary International Organ Festival was my host for a project. The Calgary Stampede is held each year on the Fourth of July, a huge rodeo festival celebrating the end of the roundup and castration of the herd. When they asked what I liked to eat, I said since I am from New England, I would pass on Alberta seafood. One fellow rubbed his hands together and smiled, and off we went to Bottlescrew Bill’s Testicle Festival. They don’t taste like chicken.

Bottlescrew Bill’s, the 1976 American Guild of Organists Convention, my trip to Madagascar, the delivery of the organ to Squirrel Island, the tugboat fire, the fire alarm in Manhattan, and the missed concert in Winchester all happened within a week or so of the Fourth of July. Today is July 6th. I wonder when I will see an organ again.

Photo: Squirrel Island organ. Photo credit John Bishop.

Teachers

Elizabeth Swist was my first piano teacher. I was six years old. She lived with her mother, and their house smelled like boiled cabbages. It was about a mile walk—I know that for sure because I have driven the route watching my odometer a couple times. My lessons included the Hanon piano method and little novelty pieces that I played as loud and fast as I could; spinning wheels were a common theme in the music. My mother likes to tell how I came home from my first lesson, ran to our piano, played middle C and shouted, “I knew it. Middle C on Miss Swist’s (say it three times fast) piano is higher than ours.” Mother says she complained to the tuner, “I just paid $25,” but the tuner said I was right. It was an old second-hand upright, and he had not been able to bring it up to pitch. She tells that story every chance she gets; some of it might be true.

Miss Swist got married and moved into a house a little closer to ours that did not smell like cabbages. Mrs. Holderied, née Swist, helped me out of the beginner’s novelties into real music like Bach minuets and Clementi sonatas.

We moved from Westwood, Massachusetts, to nearby Winchester when I was ten, and I took up lessons with Edith Bolster, an elderly woman who lived in an apartment with two pianos. I do not remember meeting her partner, but I got an occasional glimpse of her lurking about. Ms. Bolster introduced me to Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the expressive qualities of the piano, and she encouraged me to play in recitals arranged by the various local piano teachers.

I was twelve when I had my first organ lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown at Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (later Episcopal Divinity School, now defunct) outside Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was the professor of homiletics there. The organ was built by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., in 1956, with three manuals including one of the earliest Rückpositiv divisions in the United States. I often rode my bike the eight miles over busy commuting roads through Somerville and Cambridge to get to my lessons. Dr. Cassels-Brown had been associate organist at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City during Alec Wyton’s tenure there. He seemed worldly to me and shared insights into the structure of music beyond stringing series of notes together.

I was a middle-schooler when Dr. Cassels-Brown showed me the Fibonacci series, how that sequence of numbers fit into the natural world and governed some of the flowing beauty of music. He also taught me to compare the characteristics of music of a given era between different nationalities—for example, eighteenth-century France and Germany—and how the different styles of composition reflected different types of organ building. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and I guess he was a thoughtful, conservative player. Sometimes, he asked me to sit with him during special services, turning pages and witnessing what went into structuring a worship service from an organ console.

After a couple years, Dr. Cassels-Brown recommended I shift to studying with John Skelton, organist of the First Congregational Church in Winchester, just a couple blocks from where we lived. The church had a brand-new, three-manual Fisk organ, and I was fortunate to have generous practice privileges there. Mr. Skelton had studied with Yuko Hayashi at the New England Conservatory and with Anton Heiller in Vienna, and was well connected with the exciting organ scene in Boston in the early 1970s. There were several young “boutique” organ companies in the area rejuvenating the concept of the mechanical-action pipe organ, and John made sure I got to hear recitals and attend workshop open houses, drawing me into that crowd as a young teenager. I remember an after-concert dinner at the Wursthaus (a long-gone favorite haunt of organists in Harvard Square) after an organ recital, at which someone pointed out that there were nine organists present who played for churches that had Fisk organs.

John Skelton understood and nourished my fascination with pipe organ tone, discussing the functions and construction of the various stops and allowing me to register the pieces I was learning. I loved listening to the organ’s voices as I chose them.

The harpsichord builder Carl Fudge was organist of my home church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where my father was rector. He led the junior choir, which was where I was first exposed to church music, and as my voice changed, I moved to the senior choir. Carl was supportive of my early studies and took me to organ recitals. I am especially grateful that I heard E. Power Biggs play on the Flentrop organ at the “Museum Formerly Known as Busch-Reisinger.” What a thrill it was to hear him play Charles Ives’s Variations on “America” as an encore following a recital of Baroque music.

Organbuilder George Bozeman was another mentor during my teenage years. His wife Pat sang in the choir at Epiphany, and together they took me around the circuit to concerts, workshops (George worked for the Noack Organ Company at the time), and social events. I worked in George’s new shop, Bozeman-Gibson & Company, during the summers of 1975 and 1976, after my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, my first real experiences as a newbie organbuilder.

Burton Cowgill was the music director at Winchester High School where I was put to work accompanying everything and everybody. I bet a lot of readers grew up as workhorse accompanists. As chorus director, Mr. Cowgill led us through a huge amount of sacred music, something that would likely get him in trouble today. The greatest hits of Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Gabrieli, among others, helped further my interest in that rich repertory. I accompanied rehearsals of the Madrigal Singers and hundreds of hours with productions of musicals (Oklahoma and Little Mary Sunshine). Mr. Cowgill encouraged me out from behind the piano, out of my comfort zone, to sing solos in a cappella pieces (“Fare thee well, my dear, I must be gone, and leave thee for a while. . . .”).

Twenty years later, I was privileged to lead the music for Mr. Cowgill’s memorial service at the church where he had been director of music. The church’s choir was augmented by a couple dozen of his former students, including several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we offered some of the classics he had taught us (“I got a robe up in-a the Kingdom, ain’a that Good News”).

Leaving the nest

I started at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1974 with Haskell Thomson as my organ teacher. I had been a big fish in the little pond that was Winchester, Massachusetts, and quickly learned that I was not going to be such a big guy in Lake Oberlin. Mr. Thomson was a very tall man, impressive in the confines of the teaching studio. He did a lumbering dance, swinging his arms with the arc of the musical phrase, chanting, “and then to here, and then to there, and turn around and go to here.” He wanted the music to sweep purposefully to points of arrival, and he loved the motion of music. I especially remember learning Bach’s Fugue in E-flat, BWV 522ii (“Saint Anne”), for my senior recital, making those soaring passages of sixteenth notes in measure 100 fly with the encouragement of Mr. Thomson’s swooping about the studio.

Oberlin’s semester system leaves the month of January open for independent study, still known as “winter term projects.” Mr. Thomson organized a beauty for a group of us, a month of intensive eurythmics with the Dalcroze disciple, Inda Howland. She was elderly, and she had retired from regular teaching at Oberlin but came back for this special month. She wore long, colorful scarves and beads and carried a little drum so there was always a beat. We bounced and tossed balls and pranced about at her direction, and that month’s workshop gave me more insight into the motion and direction of music than any other period in my education. Twenty years later, I engaged a eurythmics instructor to work with the choir I was leading at our season-opening retreat on Cape Cod.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I started working with John Leek, the school’s organ and harpsichord technician. In addition to his work at the school, John had a growing business maintaining organs in the area, and I went off with him three days a week for the rest of my Oberlin career. This did not please Mr. Thomson, because it cut deeply into my practice and study time on campus, but John was teaching me to tune and how the actions worked in a wide variety of organs. I knew I wanted to spend a large part of my life working as an organbuilder, and this was my start.

I have written often about working with John and about John as a teacher. He was an old-world craftsman who had apprenticed in the Netherlands in a cabinet shop as a child and with an organbuilder as a teenager and married the daughter of the shop foreman. He had come to the United States in the 1960s to work for Walter Holtkamp and saw the job posting for Oberlin’s organ technician when working on campus for Holtkamp. We had tons of fun and countless adventures together, and by the time I left his shop, I had a foundation as a woodworker, a mechanical troubleshooter, and a tuner. I had participated in building three or four new harpsichords, two new mechanical-action pipe organs, and I knew how to releather regulators, pitman windchests, and countless other specialized pneumatic actions.

You’re in the big time now.

In the spring of my freshman year, I was hired as director of music at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, a large, multi-racial congregation at East Seventy-Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue with a four-manual Austin organ and a volunteer choir with a couple paid singers. I had several simple church jobs while I was in middle school and high school, but this was a big church in a big city, and the job came with some responsibilities beyond plodding through choir rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Roger Shoup was the pastor at Calvary, a big bear of a man who had been associate pastor there through the integration of the formerly all-white congregation. Roger was a devoted and prolific pipe smoker, and his vast collection of carefully seasoned pipes was on display in his office. When a well-meaning cleaning staff carried them all to the kitchen for washing in soap and water, Roger managed to keep his cool. (Keep away from my iron skillets.)

Roger was a great champion of my early ambition, making sure that there was money available to hire musicians (typically my pals from Oberlin) for special performances and for expanding the number of regular paid singers, again drawing from my classmates. He had the treasurer teach me how to create and manage a budget, counseled me on how to get along with the variety of personalities in that big rollicking diverse place, and let me know when my naiveté got in the way of my creativity. I count Roger among my most important teachers. He helped me grow up.

I have named eleven of my teachers, and I have skipped over dozens who had important roles in my education. Those eleven were all one-on-one teachers or mentors. Each had different methods of teaching and different ways of being. Some were quiet and encouraging, some were demanding, purposefully driving me to be better. They each gave me part of who I am as a musician, craftsman, consultant, and entrepreneur, and I am grateful to them all.

The art of the question

Charles Fisk (1925–1983) was one of the pioneering organbuilders active in the Boston area when I was a teenager, and there was so much excitement about the resurgence of tracker organs. In the early days of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the company worked in a long, low building that had been a rope walk for the fishing industry. The people who worked with Charlie in the 1970s and 1980s knew him as a Socratic teacher, the eponymous style of teaching by asking questions. He gave design problems to small groups of his employees and guided them to solutions with questions. Robert Cornell, who worked in the rope walk in those days, told me that Charlie would look at a solution and say, “That’s good. Is there another way to do it?” Over the years, I have talked with several people who worked closely with Charlie who remember fondly his unique and gentle approach to teaching. Encouraging his people to participate in design and problem solving was his way of ensuring that his company would outlast him. Bob Cornell supposed that was because Charlie knew his would not be a long life. He died of cancer in 1983.

On the bridge

I am thinking so much about teachers and teaching because recently a friend and I were privileged to witness a bit of Socratic teaching. This being our first summer without a sailboat, Wendy and I had promised each other we would look for a special experience on the water, and in early September, along with our old sailing friends Bill and Marlene, we went on a cruise in Alaska’s Inside Passage. We were on a small ship, about 250-feet long with only fifty cabins, operated in affiliation with National Geographic. There were fewer than 100 passengers and about seventy crew members including nine naturalists who guided hikes and Zodiac (small inflatable motorboats) excursions and gave evening talks about the geography, flora, and fauna of the area.

The captain had an “open bridge” policy, allowing passengers to visit the bridge without appointment unless there was complicated maneuvering going on. Bill and I spent a lot of time there, chatting with the captain and the chief mate, a young woman who had graduated from California Maritime Academy, a brilliant ship handler and authority figure, and on the last afternoon, approaching cocktail hour, Bill and I were on the bridge as the captain was teaching a young third mate how to drop anchor. “What are we doing?,” asked the captain. “Dropping anchor,” answered the mate. “What do we need?” “A place to drop the anchor.” The captain led the mate through establishing an anchor field on the chart plotter (the electronic chart on the sweeping dashboard), identifying an area a half-mile in diameter with a relatively flat, muddy bottom (it’s hard to anchor in rocks), far enough ahead that the ship could be slowed enough in time. We were traveling at 7-1⁄2 knots,¹ and the anchor field was five miles away.

The captain asked, “What should you do?” “Slow down.” “Right. Be sure you maintain just enough speed to steer when you’re ready to drop.” The mate eased back on the two three-inch throttle levers, and the engine RPM dropped from 1,100 to 890. Captain: “You have an anchor field, and you’re slowing down. What do you need now?” Mate: “Anchor watch” (the crew members whose job it is to operate the windlass that manages the heavy anchor chain). Captain: “Where are they?” Mate: “Off duty.” Captain raises an eyebrow. Mate says, “I’ll call the anchor watch.” Keys microphone, “Anchor watch to your bow station.”

The mate adjusted the throttle every few minutes, and the ship continued to slow to a little over one knot. As the ship’s image crept into the red circle on the chart that marked the anchor field, it slipped a little to starboard (to the right). Captain: “What do you see?” Mate: “We’re drifting to starboard.” Captain: “How do you respond?” Mate: “We’re in the middle of the anchor field, dropping anchor.” Captain does thumbs up with both hands.

Bill and I were surprised that the captain allowed us to stay on the bridge. I am sure he knew that we would be interested to watch the process, but I do not know if the mate had been prepared to receive his lesson with an audience. He sure was concentrating hard—it took more than a half hour for him to slow the ship enough to drop the anchor. The captain quipped that it was like watching paint dry.

Watching this, I tried to picture Charlie Fisk leaning on a drafting table, asking questions of his eager students. I thought of organ lessons when a question inspired a realization. And I imagined that third mate as a captain, twenty years hence, teaching his third mate how to drop an anchor in Sitka Bay, Alaska. As we traveled home the next day, Bill and I agreed that we had witnessed something special, a high point of our exotic trip. For some of us, how we get there is as interesting and thought provoking as being there.

Notes

1. A knot is a measure of speed, one nautical mile per hour. (It is not correct to say “knots per hour.”) A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, which equals 1,852 meters or about 6,000 feet.

Out and about

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustatory tuning

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

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

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

Watch your step.

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

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

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

§

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

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

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

Over the years

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Let’s hoist a few.

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

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

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

The bells, the bells

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

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

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

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

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

Doing it the old-fashioned way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the impossible possible

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

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

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

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

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