Cover feature

Former glories

I love visiting church buildings. I love experiencing all the different forms these buildings can take, reading bulletin boards to try to understand what’s going on in the place, meeting with church officials, hearing organs, imagining what organ from our lengthy list of available instruments might best suit a given church. I love the vitality of an active church—gaily decorated classrooms, purposeful rooms for the rehearsing and production of music, busy offices chattering and clattering away. I love the sense that all that activity and dedication of treasure is focused on the public worship of a faith community. And I love meeting with the committees charged with the task of acquiring a new organ for their church, discussing the various forms of the pipe organ, and helping them focus on how to conceive a plan and present it to their superior committees.

Around 2000 when I had just joined the Organ Clearing House, I visited a church building and was greeted by the organist who recognized me and asked, half in jest, “What are you doing here?  We love our organ!” I guess my reputation preceded me. It was the first time I realized that I might be considered the Grim Reaper of the pipe organ. I like to think that what I do is bring beautiful vintage organs into church buildings, but I realize how likely it would be that I would be known for the reverse—taking organs out of buildings.

There’s a church in suburban Boston that I’ve known for more than 25 years. In the early 1990’s, my firm, the Bishop Organ Company, renovated the organ. We installed new pitman windchests replacing poorly designed and sluggish ventil chests, releathered fifteen reservoirs, and installed a solid-state combination action and relay. It’s a big organ, more than 60 ranks with nine 16′ voices. It’s a big church building—the sanctuary seats 1,200. But when we did this extensive project, there were only 75 pledging units—church-finance-speak for “families.” The job cost more than $250,000. Do the math.

Elsewhere in the building there is a dining hall that is served by a big commercial kitchen, all fitted out with the latest restaurant-style appliances from about 1952. Adjacent to the kitchen is a pantry lined with elegant oak-and-glass cabinets filled with what must be a thousand place settings of china, all monogrammed with the church’s initials. It must be 40 years since they had a really big dinner, but all the stuff is there and ready to go. This church is doing pretty well. There’s a relatively new pastor who is attracting new people, they have a good organist who is inspiring people to join the choir, and in general they are doing quite a bit better than holding their own.

There are many buildings like this around the country. Great big places originally built and furnished to serve huge congregations are now being operated by dwindling groups of faithful who struggle with fuel oil bills approaching $10,000 per month, and 80-year-old roofs that are starting to fail. It’s increasingly common for a congregation to worship in a chapel, parlor, or low-ceilinged fellowship hall during winter months to reduce the heating bill. And it’s common for these churches to close. 

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We at the Organ Clearing House have had many experiences with people who are losing their church. We organize the sale of an instrument, and arrive at the building with scaffolding, crates, and packing supplies to start the dismantling of the organ, and an elderly church member comes to us with a photograph of her parents’ wedding taking place in front of that organ. Her parents were married and buried, she and her husband were married, her husband was buried, and her children were all baptized, confirmed, and married with that organ. 

It’s a regular and poignant reminder of how much the church means to people. There have been a number of occasions when people have wept as we start to dismantle an organ.

Last year I was invited to assess the pipe organ in a church building in New Jersey that had closed. It was a grand building with mahogany-fronted galleries surrounding the sanctuary, sweeping stairways, and an organ with more than 80 ranks. This place was unusual in that there had apparently been no planning for the closure. It was two years since the last worship service, and the place looked like a ghost town. It was as if the organist finished the postlude, the ushers turned off the lights, the sexton locked the doors, and no one came back. The last Sunday’s music was still on the console music rack. Stuffed choir folders complete with lozenges and Kleenex were piled on the choir room piano. Half finished glasses of water were on the pulpit, there was unopened mail on the secretary’s desk, and the usher’s station at the rear of the nave was still stocked with bulletins, attendance records, and the neat little packets of biblical drawings and crayons for little children. All it needed was tumbleweeds being buffeted down the center aisle.

Some churches form a “disbandment committee” that is charged with the task of emptying the building, divesting of furnishings, and archiving parish records. I contact the chair of that committee when I want to bring a client to see and hear the organ. There’s a myth that says that the nominating committee is the worst duty to draw in a church (or in any non-profit institution) because you get rejected so regularly, but I think the disbandment committee must be worse. Pageant costumes, Christmas decorations, hymnals, folding chairs, classroom supplies, communion sets, Styrofoam coffee cups, choir and acolyte robes, and all the other gear it takes to run a church are piled in corridors, destined for dumpsters. People leaf through it all thinking there must be uses for it, without registering that there are a hundred other churches in the state going through the same thing. You’d think you could sell a nave full of pews in a heartbeat, but more often, a nave full of pews is heartbreaking.

There’s a positive side to all this. Often we can save the organ, and when we do it moves to another parish representing a spark from its original home.

Woburn (WOO-burn), Massachusetts is a suburb of Boston with a population of a little under 40,000, located about ten miles north of the city. During the nineteenth century Woburn was a center for the tanning of leather—the high school football team is still called “The Tanners.” It’s the next town to the north from my hometown, Winchester, and when I was in high school I was assistant organist at the First Congregational Church of Woburn, home of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 283 built in 1860, with three manuals and 31 speaking stops. I think I had an idea at that young age of how fortunate I was to be playing on such an instrument. William H. Clarke was the organist of that church when the organ was installed, and ten years later he was organist of the First Unitarian Church, just across the town square, when the Hook brothers installed their Opus 553 in 1870. (Note that Hook covered 270 opus numbers in ten years!) A few years after that, William Clarke left the Boston area to establish an organbuilding shop in Indianapolis, taking with him Steven P. Kinsley, the head voicer from the Hook factory.

Opus 283 is still in its original home. It is still playable, though the parish is not strong enough these days to mount a proper restoration. But Opus 553 is now in Berlin, Germany—widely referred to as “Die Berliner Hook.” When the Woburn Unitarian Church closed in 1990, the organ was sold to the church in Berlin, and the proceeds from the sale were saved under the stewardship of former church member Charlie Smith with the intention that they would be used when an appropriate opportunity came along. (See “Hook Opus 553 to Berlin, Germany” by Lois and Quentin Regestein, The Diapason, October 2001.)

Stoneham, Massachusetts is the next town east of Woburn, with a population of about 21,000. In 1995 the Stoneham Unitarian Church was closed, and the building was converted into a nursery school. A crew of organ lovers managed to get E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 466 (1866) out of the building and into storage before the balcony was boarded up, and the organ was offered through the Unitarian Universalist Association to a “neighboring church that could give it a good home.”  

Lexington, Massachusetts is the next town west of Woburn (it also adjoins Winchester). It has a population of 30,000 and is home to the Lexington Battle Green, where the first battles of the American Revolutionary War took place. Facing the Battle Green is the stately First Parish (UUA) Church, home to a marvelous three-manual Hutchings organ. On the east end of Lexington on Massachusetts Avenue (Paul Revere’s Ride) is the Follen Community Church (UUA), a unique octagonal structure built in 1840. In 1995, the organ at the Follen Church was a hodge-podge affair that had been assembled from parts by an enthusiastic member of the church. It had a 48-volt DC electrical system, unusually high voltage for pipe organ action, and as the organ deteriorated, the console emitted puffs of smoke that unnerved the parishioners.

When members of the Follen Church heard through the UUA that the Hook organ from Stoneham (#466) was available, they pounced on the opportunity. Organ committee chair Wendy Strothman spearheaded a campaign that raised the funds necessary for the restoration and installation of the organ. The organ was first played in its new home on Easter Sunday 1997.

As the restoration progressed, Charlie Smith of Woburn got wind of the story, and offered the Woburn organ fund to the Follen Church to support the care of the restored organ, and to support regular organ concerts there. So Hook Opus 553 wound up supporting Opus 466 in its new home—and Wendy and I are married!

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As I write, the Organ Clearing House is participating in another project that allows a redundant organ a fresh start. Christ Church (Episcopal) in South Barre, Massachusetts closed its doors last year after a long period of declining membership and dwindling funds. Their organ was Hook & Hastings Opus 2344, built in 1914, a sweet little instrument with three stops on each of two manuals, and a pedal 16′ Bourdon. The impeccable craftsmanship of its builders and its mechanical simplicity combined to make the organ a remarkably reliable and durable instrument. The Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts contacted us about the disposition of the organ as the building was being offered for sale, but a few weeks later called again with a fresh suggestion. 

St Francis Episcopal Church is in Holden, Massachusetts, about 15 miles east of South Barre. Several of the parishioners from Christ Church in South Barre had begun worshipping in Holden, and some people wondered if the Hook & Hastings organ in Christ Church would be appropriate for installation at St. Francis. We compared measurements in the two buildings, and sure enough the organ would fit beautifully. The vestry of St. Francis put that project together in record time, and we are in the midst of relocating that organ now. It’s especially meaningful for the members of the former Christ Church to be able to bring their organ with them as they suffer the loss of their church and work to get used to a new worshipping life. As we came to town to start dismantling the organ, one of those members told me that she had been a member at Christ Church for 65 years. She lives across the street from the building. It’s personal.

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Sometimes the relocation of an organ is an artistic exercise, taking an instrument from a long-closed building and seeing it through installation with little or no contact with the people who were its original owners. This is rewarding work, as we know we are preserving the craftsmanship of our predecessors, reusing the earth’s resources by placing an organ in a building without having been a party to contemporary mining and smelting, and refreshing our ears with some of the best organ voicing from a previous age.

But when the relocation of an organ can involve the people who worshiped with it in its original home, and especially play a role in the blending of two parishes, the process is especially meaningful. It’s personal. 

Ingenious design

After spending hundreds of nights in New York hotels over the years, and having had the opportunity to borrow a friend’s place in Greenwich Village for several months, Wendy and I decided last winter that we should have a place in the city, and we started shopping. We had fallen in love with the neighborhood of that borrowed apartment, and sure enough, we found a terrific place in the building next door. It’s on the corner of Broadway and East Ninth Street, halfway between the Hudson and East Rivers. We’re on the southwest corner of the building with lots of windows facing in two directions. We can look west down Ninth Street, over the top of the West Village, and across the Hudson to see the sun set over New Jersey—how romantic.

The previous owner had done a thoughtful job decorating the place, blending several tones of blue and gray paint in the kitchen and living room. But the ceiling of the bedroom was metallic silver, the sliding doors of the hall closet were bright purple, and the inside of the front door was neon orange. What was she thinking? We got out our paint brushes, set everything right, and moved in in mid-February.  

I know that the choice of decorations is a personal thing, and I suppose the previous owner really liked the color scheme, but we thought it was revolting, as did the few select friends who saw the place before we painted.

Organ facade design

I’ve been thinking a lot about design because over the last month I’ve been working with a client on the layout and façade design for the relocation and installation of a large organ in a building currently under construction. I’ve conferred with the architect of the building, and now an organ architect is at work creating a concept. I have the building drawings spread out on the worktable in my study, and bundles of information about pipe scales, chest layout, and specifications. It’s thrilling and more than a little daunting because we’re working with a very large organ, and I’m well aware that the appearance and musical impact of the organ will dominate the worship of this church for generations. Later this summer we will present the design to the church. I imagine there will be some discussion and probably some revisions before the design is approved and we can get to work building the organ.

The New York architecture of 

Stanford White

Our apartment in New York is near Washington Square Park, a vibrant gathering place in the midst of the campus of New York University. On a summer evening, there are street performers and musical jam sessions. One night, there was a group of students who had wheeled a piano out into the square. There are stone tables with permanent chessboards where our son Andy loves to go pick up games with the crowd of regulars. And the architecture of Stanford White is all around you. Stanford White (1853–1906) apprenticed with the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), who is best known for his design of Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston. For much of his career, White was a partner in the extraordinarily prolific and revered firm of McKim, Mead & White.  

White designed an impressive catalogue of buildings in New York and around the country. One of his grandest was the original Madison Square Garden, located at Madison Square on Madison Avenue between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Streets. Ironically, that was the site of White’s death. He had an apartment in the building, where he apparently entertained a gorgeous young actress named Evelyn Nesbit. Evelyn’s jealous husband Harry Thaw shot White point-blank during a theatrical performance. (Funny that today’s Madison Square Garden is an architectural nightmare at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-First Street, more than a half mile from Madison Square.)  

In 1889, New York City celebrated the centennial of the inauguration of George Washington as the first president of the United States. Stanford White was commissioned to design a temporary arch across Fifth Avenue about 150 feet north of Washington Square. It was a spindly thing made of wood and plaster, and White capped it with a cheap statue of Washington that he found in a New York junk shop—it looked a little like the tacky plastic bride-and-groom figures on a wedding cake.  

A year later, the cornerstone was laid for a permanent monumental stone arch on the north edge of Washington Square, which is the beginning of Fifth Avenue—an apartment building there is called “One Fifth Avenue”—isn’t that a classy address? The 70-foot marble arch, reminiscent of L’arc de Triomphe on the Champs Élysées in Paris, was dedicated in 1895. It’s fun to note that the faces of the angels in the spandrels on either side of the arch are those of Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, wife of the treasurer of the arch project, and of White’s wife, Bessie!¹

Standing in the middle of the square, looking north up Fifth Avenue is one of New York’s great views showing the Empire State Building framed in the arch—especially dramatic at night as the buildings are well lit.

On the southern edge of the park is Judson Memorial Church, another of White’s buildings, which features a ten-story campanile modeled after the tower of the twelfth-century church of San Giorgio in Velabro, Italy.² To complete the sumptuous design of this magnificent building, the windows are by John La Farge. The Judson Church is home to a 28-rank Roosevelt organ built in 1892—now available through the Organ Clearing House.

The Church of the Ascension (Episcopal) is five blocks up Fifth Avenue, home to a terrific new organ built in 2010 by Pascal Quoirin of St. Didier, Provence, France. Visit <http://nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/AscensionEpis.html&gt; for a description of this marvelous and unusual instrument. (See also The Diapason, November 2011, pp. 1, 30–32.) Above the altar is a spectacular mural by John La Farge, depicting, you guessed it, the Ascension of Christ with an ostentatious gold faux (painted) proscenium arch designed by Stanford White.

In 1882, the famous jeweler Charles L. Tiffany commissioned White to design a family residence on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-Second Street. The mammoth building included separate “apartments” for Mr. Tiffany and two of his children, one of whom was the great artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. That made White a “designer’s designer” and he and Louis Tiffany had a long collaborative relationship.³ 

It’s amusing to note that while Stanford White was able to satisfy and please Louis Tiffany, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer was among the fussiest of White’s clients. White designed renovations of a house owned by Pulitzer, which later burned, and was subsequently engaged to plan Pulitzer’s new house on East Seventy-Third Street. Pulitzer rejected several plans presented by White.  

Both Tiffany’s home on Seventy-Second Street and Pulitzer’s on Seventy-Third included large Aeolian pipe organs equipped with the famous automatic roll players.

Organ case architecture

One of the compelling features of a fine pipe organ is its architectural appearance. We are all familiar with the great classical organ cases, the best known of which is the organ completed by Christian Müller at St. Bavo in Haarlem, Holland in 1738. It is 274 years old, and played regularly for worship, concerts, festivals, and recordings. It has all the architectural features of the organs of its day—towers and fields of façade pipes, lots of moldings and carvings, brilliant colors, and gold leaf. But when you stop and think, you can see that many of these features are driven by the internal design of the organ.

Most classical organ cases are symmetrical. Symmetry is pleasing to the eye, but there are practical reasons for it. The symmetry of an organ case reflects the symmetry of the organ’s interior. When the interior of the organ is symmetrical, the weight is balanced, and it’s easier and more economical to build a symmetrical structure than one that is out of balance. Tell that to Frank Gehry, designer of the wild façade of the Glätter-Gotz/Rosales organ in Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. It must have cost a fortune to make those curved wooden Violone pipes.

Classical organ cases have architectural towers that contain the larger façade pipes. These are typically either pointed (triangular in plan) or rounded. Round towers are sometimes modified half-octagons. Obviously, the towers are integral to the architectural appearance of the organ, but there’s a practical reason as well. Placing the largest pipes of the organ in towers that are effectively outside the organ case saves a significant amount of space inside the case. Stop to think how much larger the Haarlem case would have to be if the 77 large pipes in the seventeen towers were all crammed inside.

The case of the Haarlem organ is a wonderful example of what came to be called Werkprinzip in the revival of classic organbuilding during the twentieth century.  Simply put, Werkprinzip means that the appearance of the organ reflects its basic tonal structure. In the classic Bauhaus-style organ (the stereotypical Holtkamp organ, for example) we see the separate divisions clearly, enough that it’s possible to guess much of the stoplist by what you see from the pews. The Haarlem organ’s case doesn’t tell us whether the pedal Bourdon is wood or metal (while the Holtkamp often does!), but it does clearly show us the three manual divisions (Rugpositief, Bovenwerk, and Hoofdwerk) and the Pedaal division.

There are many photos of the Haarlem organ available on the Internet.  Here’s the best one I find today: <http://twomusic.home.xs4all.nl/christine/bavo/source/01bavo_haarlem.htm…;. Take a good look. There’s a lot going on there! At first look, you might think it’s a big rollicking rococo lollipop. But in fact, notwithstanding a lot of trumpeting and strumming angels, gold, and a couple huge lions, a lot of the design is “form follows function”—well settled in the eighteenth century—and it took until the twentieth century for Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier to define it!

Architecture in Columbus, Indiana

The first internal combustion rotary engines were built in the late nineteenth century, using the highly refined petroleum distillate, gasoline, as fuel. The fuel is ignited by an electric spark in a cylinder, which pushes a piston away from the explosion. The linear motion of the piston is converted to rotary motion by the action of the piston shaft. In 1895, Rudolph Diesel invented the alternative internal combustion engine that still bears his name. The basic difference is that the fuel is ignited solely by heat generated by the compression of the fuel inside the cylinder. The total internal capacity of the cylinders is the “displacement,” which is a measure of an engine’s size. We refer to a 300-cubic-inch engine, or a 1,500-“CC” (cubic centimeters) engine—the cubic measurement being the displacement.

Diesel engines are heavier “per cubic inch” than gasoline engines, but in vehicles large enough that a little weight doesn’t matter, diesel engines are more efficient, and therefore more powerful “per cubic inch.”  

The Cummins Engine Company was founded in 1919 in Columbus, Indiana by Clessie Lyle Cummins. For the first ten years sales were pretty slow, but in 1929, Clessie Cummins executed the marketing idea of a lifetime by installing a diesel engine in a used Packard limousine and taking Columbus banker and investor
W. G. Irwin for a Christmas Day ride. Irwin injected tremendous capital into the firm, catapulting it toward becoming one of the major suppliers of engines to the American trucking industry.

J. Irwin Miller was W. G. Irwin’s nephew and second CEO of the Cummins Engine Company. Miller was a brilliant businessman who was devoted to modernist architecture. He instituted a program in Columbus, Indiana, through which the company would pay the architect’s fees for public buildings designed by architects selected from a list developed by Mr. Miller, a program that was later continued by the Cummins Engine Foundation. As a result of this unique and remarkable program, that town with 44,000 residents boasts a panoply of buildings designed by such modernist luminaries as Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Cesar Pelli, and Harry Weese, among others. In one extraordinary neighborhood, there is a monumental bronze arch by British sculptor Henry Moore on the plaza in front of the I.M. Pei-designed public library, across the street from Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church.  

Throughout history, there are many examples of successful and innovative business leaders whose philanthropy through the arts created a lasting impact. We think of the Medici, Esterházy, and Mellon families as great patrons of the arts and builders of public buildings. The Rockefeller family has given us many important architectural masterpieces. But it seems improbable that a small town in rural Indiana could become an absolute museum of the best of modernist architecture.

Columbus is located about 35 miles south of Indianapolis, an easy drive from Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, and many other cities. The Visitor’s Center, which features large glassworks by Dale Chihuly, provides tours both guided and self guided (a map gives phone numbers one can call to hear descriptions of the various buildings). Several public schools, City Hall, medical clinics, fire stations, banks, newspaper offices, even the jail are all fantastic modernist buildings. Altogether there are more than 60 modernist buildings in town, six of which (built between 1942 and 1965) have been designated National Historic Monuments.

Take a look at the website <http://www.columbus.in.us/&gt; to get a quick idea of what the place is like, and take my word that it’s worth a trip to visit.  

Design inspiration

Leaf through the pages of Vanity Fair or The New Yorker magazine, and you’ll see dozens of advertisements for “designer wear.” It might be a dress by Versace that looks like a combination of a corn stalk and a chicken ($1,700) or a handbag covered with el-vees ($2,800), or a pair of shoes rejected by Lady Gaga (priceless!), but if it has a designer name it must be good. You see an advertisement for an “architect” house and assume it has no closets and the roof leaks (so that’s why they call it “Falling Water”). It seems we’re willing to pay a premium if there’s a fancy name attached to a product.

But good design is important to us. Louis Tiffany wrote, “God has given us our talents, not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our brains and our imagination in order to obtain the revelation of True Beauty.”⁴ Tiffany’s eye for design gave us those gorgeous lampshades, magical dragonflies, stained glass daisies, and a broad range of spectacular liturgical windows.  

Stanford White inherited the magic of the late nineteenth-century version of the Romanesque arch from his mentor H. H. Richardson. It’s remarkable to compare the façades of White’s Tiffany house in New York to the H. H. Richardson rectory of Trinity Church, Boston (Clarendon and Newbury Streets). The big stone arch of the main entry is common to both houses. White traveled throughout Europe collecting architectural images so his buildings reflect a cross section of many centuries of style.

The fortune made by manufacturing diesel engines was converted into dozens of stylish and practical modernist buildings in a small midwestern town surrounded by farmlands. You have to see it to believe. Don’t miss it!

Classical pipe organs have combined ebullient decorative architecture with the dictates of the musical contents of the instrument.

Where in your life are you inspired by the unique imagination of a great designer?

Notes

1. David Garrard Lowe, Stanford White’s New York, Doubleday, 1992, p. 189.

2. Ibid., p. 127.

3. Ibid., p. 86.

4. Ibid., pp. 86–87.

Raymond J. Brunner founded R. J. Brunner & Co. in 1981. He is a graduate of Lehigh University and a member of the American Institute of Organbuilders and the Organ Historical Society.

Restoration of the 1770 Tannenberg  organ at Zion Moselem Lutheran Church, Moselem Springs, Pennsylvania, was completed in September 2011 by R. J. Brunner & Co. of Silver Spring, Pennsylvania. The earliest of the nine extant David Tannenberg organs, it predates the Revolutionary War and is perhaps the oldest surviving organ built in the American colonies. As such, it is of great historic importance, and its restoration allows us to learn more about 18th-century organbuilding as practiced by Tannenberg and other German immigrants to Pennsylvania.

Tannenberg was a Moravian and built many organs for Moravian congregations in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. He also supplied organs to Lutheran, German Reformed, and Catholic congregations. His instruments ranged in size from four-stop positive organs for Moravian use to a large three-manual, 34-stop organ for Zion Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. Tannenberg’s Moravian organs had a predominance of unison-pitch stops, since those organs were generally used in conjunction with other instruments. His Lutheran organs had more developed choruses that might include mutation and mixture stops, as well as reeds. The Moselem organ has eight stops on one manual, with a total of nine ranks. Built early in Tannenberg’s career, it provides an opportunity to learn more about the evolution of his organbuilding. It is the only surviving example of his organs with a walnut case.   

The Moselem organ was completed in 1770 and installed in the stone Zion Lutheran Church building, where it was located in a small gallery. This building was replaced by a new brick structure in 1894, at which time the organ was moved and rebuilt by Samuel Bohler of Reading, Pennsylvania. Bohler replaced the original bellows with an internal winding system and replaced the keydesk and keyboard. He altered the stop action and also removed the Terz and Mixtur stops, replacing them with lower-pitched unison stops. By then the walnut casework had been painted over. The casework was eventually painted white, imitating the appearance of other Tannenberg organs.  

In 2010, R. J. Brunner & Co. was chosen to undertake a historic restoration of the organ. Organbuilder Raymond Brunner was in charge of the project, and his previous research and restoration experience with several other Tannenberg organs was a valuable asset to determining how the work should be done. It was decided to restore the organ to its original form, including replacement of the two missing original stops and construction of an authentic winding system. Fortunately, the unaltered 8-stop Tannenberg organ at Hebron Lutheran Church in Madison, Virginia provided many of the answers. Although built 32 years later, it has an original pair of wedge bellows that could be copied for the restoration. Another fortunate event was that Brunner was able to obtain parts of two different period wedge bellows sets, once used on Pennsylvania German organs that are no longer extant. Using these historic fragments from other organs enabled the recreation of an authentic set of bellows like the original winding of the organ. An electric blower provides an alternate source of wind.

Twenty-five pipes of the Principal 8′ and ten pipes of the Principal Octav 4′ are in the façade. The Flaut Major 8′ and Flaut Minor 4′ are identical open wood ranks made primarily from pine and walnut. The rack board for the Terz shows that this rank did not contain a break. 

The restoration required making a new keydesk and stop action, as well as a new keyboard. The keyboard was copied from the Madison instrument, with the natural keys covered with ebony, while the walnut sharps are capped with reclaimed ivory from old keyboards. Removal of several layers of paint revealed the beauty of the walnut casework and the fine quality of this master organbuilder’s work. The façade pipes were restored to their original appearance by removal of ears that had been applied when Bohler rebuilt the organ. A metallurgical analysis of the pipe metal was done to determine the proportions of lead and tin, as well as the amount of impurities in the metal. New Terz and Mixtur pipes were made for the organ by the Paul Fritts shop in Tacoma, Washington. Restoration of the original pipes and voicing of the new pipes was done by Hans Herr in the Brunner shop.   

The organ was re-dedicated on October 2, 2011 with a concert played by Philip T. D. Cooper; it was hand pumped for the entire concert. Mr. Cooper also assisted in historical research for the restoration and was instrumental in encouraging the church to undertake the project. The fine sound of the organ delighted the large crowd in attendance, and Zion’s organist Nancy Keller has been using the organ on a regular basis. This instrument should serve the congregation of Zion Moselem Lutheran Church well for many more years, and the organ can be heard once again as David Tannenberg intended.

What’s in a name?

Did you ever meet someone named Smith? Ever wonder where that name came from? Ever wonder why Smith is such a common name? Your friend John Smith is descended from a blacksmith, or maybe a silversmith. Smith is a common name because centuries ago, a much higher percentage of the population was involved in actually making stuff by hand. How about Cooper? They made barrels. How about Sawyer, Taylor, Shoemaker, Brewer, or Cook? Come to think of it, my name is Bishop—but I know it’s not relevant.

Just like those common surnames, lots of functions and devices in our world have names that are descriptive, and I think many of us seldom stop to notice how accurate those names are.

Likewise, I know that lots of people take for granted how something works. You flick a switch and a light comes on. Don’t bother me with stories about fuel sources, generating plants, transformers, distribution systems, self-burnishing contacts, correct choice of wire gauges, or tungsten filaments.

The long and short of it

After graduating from Oberlin, we lived in an old four-bedroom farmhouse in the farmlands a couple miles out of town. It was a lovely place if a little ramshackle. The rent was $225 a month, and there was a natural gas well on the property—foreshadowing the controversial fracking going on now in that area. The electrical system in the house was just terrible, and all the lights and outlets in the kitchen, utility room, and dining room were on one circuit. I was cooking dinner one night when the lights went out. There was toddler Michael, sitting on the dining room floor, a startled look on his face, a black mark on the wall around an electrical outlet, and a pair of scissors on the floor. He looked at me and said, “hurtchoo.”

What was it he did that caused the lights to go out? I know, I know, he stuck the scissors in the outlet. (Today, responsible parents put little plastic pluggy things into the outlets so that can’t happen. In those days, we did have seatbelts in our cars, but not those pluggy things.) What he actually did was shorten an electrical circuit. He tried to use the scissors as an appliance. We’re used to operating devices that are designed to consume electricity, whether it’s a motor we use to make daiquiris, a heating device we use to melt cheese on a piece of bread, or a light bulb that illuminates our world. Each of those items “burns” electricity to do its job.

The wiring in your house is all in circuits. Each circuit originates at an electrical panel, goes to whatever appliances it’s supposed to run, fuels them, and returns to the source, which is protected by a circuit breaker that shuts off the circuit if something goes wrong. (Our house in Oberlin had fuses, which have the same function as a circuit-breaker.) If something happens to connect the outgoing and incoming sides of the electrical circuit before it gets to the appliance, the result is a “short circuit.” Michael’s pair of scissors was not designed to perform a function when fed with electricity. All it could do was make a big spark. He “shorted out” the circuit. We laugh now, but bad things could have happened.

A couple more simple points. That circuit breaker I mentioned is designed to break the circuit (turn it off) when it’s overloaded by a short circuit, or by the attempt to run too much power through the circuit by plugging in a vacuum cleaner in addition to a space heater. Too much power and the wires heat up. If there’s no safety system, they start a fire. The old-time fuses have a piece of wire in them engineered to carry only a certain amount of power. When that was exceeded, the wire burned safely inside the little glass enclosure.  

And many of the circuits in our houses are actually left open in the form of outlets. A ceiling lamp is a closed circuit, but an outlet doesn’t become a complete circuit until we plug something in—not a pair of scissors, but something that includes an appliance that consumes electricity. 

Keep the pressure on

Water towers are architectural icons and infrastructure workhorses on Manhattan Island. Every building more than eighty feet high needs one, and there are a lot of buildings more than eighty feet high in Manhattan. We can see thirteen water towers from our apartment in lower Manhattan. They are necessary here because there are simply too many faucets and toilets for the municipal water provider to be able to supply pressure hundreds of feet in the air to thousands of buildings. So a building has a tank on the roof and a pumping station in the basement. Filling the tanks works something like a toilet bowl. Water is pumped into the tank. When it’s full, a ball-cock valve operated by a float turns off the pump. As water is used, the float goes down with the water level and turns on the pump to maintain the proper level.  

The water tower on an average apartment building holds around 10,000 gallons, and the pumps are capable of filling a tank in two or three hours. Larger buildings have huge internal tanks mounted high inside. The Empire State Building, which is 1,250 feet tall, has water tanks every twenty floors. Buildings that size use as much as 40,000 gallons per hour.

I imagined that the source of the water pressure from a rooftop tank would be the weight of the water as affected by gravity, and I read that in a couple news stories, but I read on a “science-fact” website that it actually comes from hydrostatic pressure, which is a factor of elevation. The higher in the air the tank is located, the greater the pressure. Shameless and unscientific rounding off of numbers I found at <www.howstuff works.com> shows that every foot of elevation produces about .45 PSI (pounds per square inch) of pressure. A tank that’s a hundred feet up produces about 45 PSI, which is the kind of pressure we’re used to when we open a spigot to take a shower or wash the dishes.

There is one way that the weight of water plays a role in this system. The tanks are built like old-fashioned barrels (built by coopers) with wooden staves held in place by iron hoops. The hoops are closer together at the bottom of a tank, and spaced increasingly further apart toward the top. The graduated spacing is similar on all the tanks, which makes me think there’s a mathematical ratio involved, something like Pythagoras’s overtone series. That provides extra strength down low to contain the great weight of water at the bottom of the tank. Water weighs about 8.35 pounds per gallon, and when you stack it up in a tank, the weight is concentrated toward the bottom. A 10,000-gallon tank holds more than forty tons of water!

There are two companies in New York City that still build water tanks: the Rosenwach Tank Company, and Isseks Brothers, both located in Brooklyn. Rosenwach builds between two and three hundred tanks each year. The tanks must be serviced annually to remove sediments from the water, and they usually last about forty years, though the Rosenwach website (www.rosenwach tank.com) says that some tanks made of redwood are still in service after ninety years. Wood is considered the best material because it is hoisted to lofty roofs relatively easily—it would cost a fortune to lift a 10,000-gallon steel tank to the roof of a twenty-story building—and because it has terrific built-in insulation qualities. Imagine if your source of cold water was a metal tank on a sunny roof. The wood is not treated with any paint or preservatives so as not to taint the water. Rosenwach uses so much lumber that they have a sawmill located in the heart of Brooklyn.

Wind regulators

The principle I described of graduating the spacing of the hoops around a water tank appears in many other ordinary facets of our life. Long runs of pipes for fire-suppression sprinkler systems are visible in the fellowship halls of many church buildings. Notice how they’re larger in diameter at the end where the water originates than at the end of the run. This accounts for the ever-smaller demand for the volume of water as you pass each sprinkler head, and maintains the appropriate amount of pressure for the last sprinkler in the line.

This exact principle exists in pipe organs that have multiple wind regulators (reservoirs). The windline is largest in diameter where it enters the organ from the blower room, and the diameter decreases as you pass the regulators, ensuring that the wind pressure is adequate at the end of a long run.

We can compare the wind system of a large pipe organ with the water system in Manhattan. A rooftop water tank is both a reservoir and a pressure regulator, kept full and ready for use by a pump, and equipped with a valve that fills the reservoir as water is used. An organ regulator is kept full of air by a pump (the blower), regulates the pressure through the use of weights or springs, and has a valve that keeps it full as pressure is used. The valve is typically a curtain valve that works something like a window shade, connected to the top of the regulator with string or chain that runs across a system of pulleys. In a water system, pressure and volume is used when we fill a teakettle. In a pipe organ, pressure and volume is used when we play a hymn.

Electricity in pipe organs

You walk into the chancel, change your shoes, open your briefcase, put something up on the music rack, slide onto the bench, and turn on the organ. What’s happening? You have started a big electric motor, and if your organ has electric action, you’ve also turned on a rectifier. The motor turns a fan (the organ blower), which blows air through the organ’s windlines to the reservoirs, which inflate to a controlled height, and create stored wind pressure. Until you play a note, the organ is idling, sitting still at a constant pressure.

Did he say rectifier? What’s a rectifier? What needs to be rectified? Is there something wrong? We use electricity in two basic forms, AC (alternating current) and DC (direct current). Electricity is polarized—one side is positive (+), the other is negative (–). In direct current, the polarization is constant—positive is always positive, negative is always negative. In alternating current, the sides alternate, swapping positive and negative back and forth at a rapid rate. We refer to 60-cycle current because standard AC power swaps sides 60 times a second. Fluorescent light tubes emit a 60-cycle hum.

Our household (and church-hold) electricity is AC power at 120 volts (volts is a measure of power), but pipe organ actions are designed to operate on DC power at around twelve volts. A rectifier is an appliance that converts 120VAC to 12VDC, rectifying the discrepancy. (While the voltage of house current is standardized, the DC voltage in pipe organs varies, usually between 12 and 16 VDC.) How does it work? A rectifier contains a transformer—an appliance that transforms AC power to DC power.

George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison were both pioneers of the industrial and residential use of electricity, and both are credited with the invention of many related devices and processes. They both found financial backers who supported the construction of neighborhood-wide systems to light houses—J.P. Morgan’s house on Madison Avenue in New York was the first to be illuminated by Edison. Edison was a DC man, and Westinghouse focused on AC power. Neither was willing, or perhaps able, to promote both. As the public was learning to accept the concept of having this mysterious power in their homes, there was a debate comparing the relative safety of the two systems, and Westinghouse and Edison each went to great lengths to try to discredit the work of the other by publicizing levels of danger. When the first electric chair to be used for executions of prisoners was built using DC power, Westinghouse and AC power gained traction in the public eye. If DC could kill people, we don’t want it in our houses. It was political. Today, when we hear of a construction worker getting electrocuted, it’s proven to us that AC power can kill, too. Michael was lucky.

Pipe organ wind

When I talk about pipe organ wind, I keep mentioning reservoirs and regulators. Don’t I really mean bellows? Like the short circuit, and the circuit breaker, I suggest we use the name that best describes what the thing is actually doing. A bellows produces a flow of air. A blacksmith uses a bellows to blow on the fire in his forge just as we use a bellows at our living room fireplace.  

A reservoir is a storage device. A rooftop water tower is a reservoir. In modern pipe organs, the bellows have been replaced with electric blowers, so what we might call a bellows under the windchest of the organ is actually a reservoir. But the reservoir also regulates the wind pressure. We use weights or spring tension to create the pressure. The more weight or the heavier the springs, the higher the pressure. But in order to create pressure, we also have to limit how far the thing can open—that’s another function of the curtain valve. The organbuilder sets it so the valve is closed when the reservoir is open far enough. Otherwise it would inflate until it burst, which is the air pressure equivalent of a short circuit. So the balancing of weights, springs, and limit of travel determines the wind pressure. And, the curtain valve I mentioned earlier opens to allow more air in as you consume air by playing. So I think the most accurate term to describe that unit is “regulator.” Reservoir is correct, but incomplete. The rooftop water tank is also a regulator, though the regulation of pressure happens automatically as a function of physics—remember that hydrostatic pressure. Hydro means water, static means “lacking in movement.” You get pressure regulation without doing anything!

Stop and think about it

Many of the common names for organ stops are descriptive, even definitive. “Prestant” comes from the Latin, prestare, which means “to stand before.” So a Prestant, by definition, is an organ stop that stands in the façade. Many organs have misnamed Prestants. A Chimney Flute is a capped pipe (usually metal) that has a little chimney sticking up from the cap. The purpose of the chimney is to emphasize the third overtone (22⁄3′ pitch). That’s why a Chimney Flute is brighter than a Gedeckt.

I don’t need to say much about Clarinets, Oboes, Trumpets, or Flutes. But a Harmonic Flute is special because the pipes are twice as long as Principal pipes, and the characteristic hole halfway up the resonator breaks the internal sound wave in half, so the double length produces normal pitch, but with a much richer harmonic structure.

Diapason is a mysterious word, until you look it up. I found two good applicable definitions: “a rich, full outpouring of sound,” and “a fixed standard of pitch.” Go to <www.diapason-italia.com&gt; and you find an Italian manufacturer of high-quality audio speakers—“a rich, full outpouring of sound.”

Quint = fifth. A 22⁄3′ Quint speaks the second overtone above fundamental pitch—one octave plus a fifth. A Quintadena emphasizes that overtone—that’s why it’s brighter than a Bourdon. 

Tierce = third.  A 13⁄5′ Tierce speaks the fourth overtone—two octaves plus a third.

A Resultant is a tricky one.  Turns out that if you play 16′ and 102⁄3′ pitch together, your mind’s ear is tricked into thinking that you’re hearing 32′ pitch, because 16′ and 102⁄3′ are the first two overtones of 32′. The result is that you imagine you’re hearing a 32′ stop.  Hah!  Fooled you!

By the way, why does blowing on a fire make the fire bigger? Simple. Fire uses oxygen as fuel. Throwing a blanket over a fire cuts off the oxygen supply, as does the acolyte’s candle-snuffer. Blow air on a fire and you increase the oxygen supply. Poof! S’mores, anyone?

Létourneau Pipe Organs worked closely with the cathedral’s architect, Craig Hartman of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to develop the organ’s visual design, through a process of discussion, collaboration, and at times, mutual compromise

Létourneau Pipe Organs, 

Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada

Opus 118 (2010)

The Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, California

From the director of music and 

organist

In July 2009 I was appointed director of music and organist for the Cathedral of Christ the Light, well after the cathedral was built and the organbuilder had been selected. Unlike similar organ projects, I could not take credit for the new instrument. However, even in the early stages of the design of the cathedral, the pipe organ formed an integral part of the building’s design. The cathedral’s architect, Craig Hartman, was extensively involved in the design of the pipe façades and the organ console, so that they complement the overall design of the cathedral.

At the time when it became clear that Oakland would be home to a great cathedral, Daniel Whalen and his wife, Katharine Conroy Whalen, thought of her mother, Gerry Conroy. The Whalens soon made the decision to give a custom-made pipe organ in her memory and, as such, all funding for the Conroy Memorial Organ came from the gift of Daniel and Katherine Conroy Whalen.

The organ committee did extensive research and visited several instruments by several different builders before the decision was made to commission an instrument from Létourneau. Because of the layout of the cathedral, it was apparent from the project’s inception that a tracker instrument was impossible and that electric action would be necessary. The organ needed to serve both as a liturgical instrument and as a concert instrument. It needed to be capable of accompanying choral repertoire and congregational singing, providing processional fanfares, and playing a variety of organ literature in both liturgical and concert settings.

The instrument has been a great success, serving the Diocese of Oakland and the cathedral parish well in liturgical settings, as well as making the cathedral a sought-after venue for organ and choir concerts.

—Dr. Rudy de Vos

From the builder

Létourneau pipe organs are custom-built for their surroundings, and we strive for a good fit, both architecturally and tonally. From time to time, we are privileged to work in some exceptional surroundings. We knew this to be the case from our first contact with the Cathedral of Christ the Light in the spring of 2006. Though the cathedral existed only as a design on paper at that time, the clarity of the worship space’s towering architecture was as striking as the use of sunlight filtering through the ceiling’s central oculus, and the hundreds of wooden louvers making up the sides of the worship space.

Also striking were the locations set aside for a pipe organ in the architectural plans. Large canopies on either side of the cathedral’s central omega window were designed to display a significant instrument, while a discreet organ chamber was provided behind the seating area for the cathedral choir. The lateral and vertical distances between these three locations presented a number of intriguing possibilities but also a number of challenges.

Having agreed to work closely with the cathedral’s architect, Craig Hartman of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, we developed the organ’s visual design through a process of discussion, collaboration, and at times, mutual compromise. From the outset, Mr. Hartman wanted the organ’s visual aspect to leave an organic impression (no pun intended), with organ pipes arrayed unpredictably, as one might find with trees in a forest or tufts of wild grass. The great majority of the organ’s façade pipes were accordingly constructed from clear Douglas fir to match the surrounding ribs and louvers. Special narrow scales were developed to provide the wooden basses for the Great and Bombarde 16′ principal ranks, while the Pedal 32′-16′-8′ Contra Bourdon and 16′ Open Wood are more typical, with generous cross-sections. All wooden façade pipes were constructed with wooden skirts to conceal the pipe foot, providing a uniform appearance from top to bottom.

Likewise, the 32′-16′ Trombone and 16′ Bombarde stops were provided with full-length wooden resonators in the bass octaves and appear to sprout up through the organ façades. The number of tin pipes in the façades was carefully limited, while a unique finish was developed to ensure the metal did not appear overly brilliant relative to the surrounding surfaces.

Oakland’s previous cathedral, the Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales, was heavily damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and was eventually condemned. The new cathedral’s structure was consequently designed to absorb large seismic shocks; the entire building sits on isolator pads to resist oscillations in the event of an earthquake. The organ, too, was built to a rigorous standard for seismic reasons. The visible portions of the instrument are built around substantial steel frames, which are anchored to the platform of each canopy. The irregular arrangement of the façade pipes ruled out the usual linear pipe racking, and instead, most pipes are supported independently from behind by steel rods.

The main level of the cathedral has a substantial climate control system inconspicuously built into the nave floor. The system can heat or cool the ambient air to a height of approximately 15 feet above the floor. Being built into the reliquary wall, the organ chamber is likewise controlled for temperature. However, the immense volume of air above this 15-foot height has no climate control at all, and air temperatures can vary greatly depending on internal and external conditions. This is to say that temperatures on the two organ canopies would vary unpredictably from the organ chamber below but could also diverge between the two sides of the building.

Given the disastrous implications this would have on tuning, it was nonetheless with some reservations that we agreed that some form of climate control had to be provided for the organ canopies themselves. After many meetings and discussions, a system was put into place; it is comprehensive and self-regulating. Each organ canopy has its own microclimate control system capable of providing heat or cool air as required. A total of eight sensors per canopy monitor temperatures from strategic locations, and treated air is then directed as needed to twelve diffusers per side. From the outset, it was understood that the system could not provide absolute temperature stability, but would minimize temperature variations among the organ’s divisions as much as possible, ensuring the instrument is broadly useable.

The stoplist for the instrument evolved over the life of the project, based both on our own design and with input from the cathedral’s organ committee. We felt from the outset that the lower organ chamber needed to house an instrument that could function independently from the main organ when desired. The result was a 25-rank orgue de choeur (essentially the two Choir divisions) that was installed as the first phase of the project and was first heard at the cathedral’s rite of dedication on September 25, 2008.

The Choir, Echo Choir, and one 16′ pedal rank speak through a screened opening in the reliquary wall to the west of the central altar. The Choir division has the resources of a minor Great division, with complete principal and reed choruses, while the Echo Choir contrasts with more delicate colors. Essential for accompanying, both divisions are independently expressive, feature light 16′ manual stops, and offer distinct celeste effects. While not surprising, we have noted that the cathedral’s acoustic reacts in a decidedly muted manner to sound from the chambered divisions when compared to sound from the canopies above.

Befitting its visual dominance and the cathedral’s great interior volume, the main organ is grand in its scope. The Great division is particularly large and flexible, offering a 16′ principal chorus, a variety of foundation stops, and three mixture options, with the Cornet stop being made up of principal-scale pipes. The Swell is likewise colorful and is enhanced by its efficient enclosure; the 16′ Gamba pipes—open down to 16′ C—are mounted horizontally against the back wall of the division. The Solo division offers a number of specialized, even orchestral, stops that one reviewer praised as “retro Aeolian-Skinner voices.” The 8′ Doppel Flute makes for a powerful and harmonically rich solo voice, while the Viole d’orchestre and Viole céleste are razor-sharp in their tone. The Bombarde and Pedal divisions are inextricably intertwined, as the Bombarde stops are upward extensions of select pedal ranks to produce climactic choruses. The Bombarde division’s principal chorus is pleasingly dense, with the mixture adding weight and brilliance in equal measure. Other pedal ranks were deliberately not shared with the Bombarde division, to ensure the Pedal division could always have the last word; these include the 32′-16′-8′ Bourdon, the 16′ Open Wood, and the 32′-16′ Trombone ranks.

Reed choruses throughout the organ are intentionally varied; the Swell trumpets employ tapered English shallots to contrast against the French-inspired reeds in the Choir division. The Bombarde trumpets at 16′, 8′, and 4′ pitches are particularly grand in their effect, resulting from higher wind pressure, generous resonator scales, and Bertounèche-style shallots. The Solo 8′ Tuba, speaking on 18 inches of wind, uses closed Willis-style shallots and harmonic resonators from G20 up to achieve its particular pealing tone. In contrast, the 8′ Trompeta de luz is mounted horizontally in the organ’s façade and speaks on just over six inches wind pressure. The Trompeta de luz is not so powerful as to be harmful when brought in for the occasional final chord. The Pedal division’s 32′-16′ Trombone rank features our own Schnitger-type shallots for a firm, grounding bass tone.

The design of the unique four-manual console was also a rewarding collaborative effort with Craig Hartman. It was at his suggestion, for example, that the shapely upper portion was constructed using laminated strips of quarter-sawn oak. Our intention was to provide a uniquely uncluttered and timeless design; the final product has a total of 157 long-stem ebony drawknobs sweeping around the organist against a backdrop of rich walnut. Alert readers will note the console has three expression pedals, while there is a total of four expressive divisions. The default mode of operation has the Echo Choir following the Choir expression pedal, but it can be reassigned to any of the other pedals via drawknobs as well as programmed to change pedals on the General pistons. There is also an All Swells to Swell function for good measure. Other refinements include remote thumb pistons operating the General piston sequencer, to allow page-turners to assist with registration changes, and an All Pistons Next feature.

The opening concert was performed on February 11, 2010 by Parisian organist Olivier Latry. The program featured well-known works by Boëllmann, Bach, Barié, Vierne, Duruflé, Cochereau, Messiaen, and Widor. Marking the first time the instrument’s full resources were deployed, we noted that the capacity audience had a calming effect on the cathedral’s tremendous acoustic. This equally made our instrument sound with improved clarity and precision.

The morning after M. Latry’s concert, it was gratifying to receive a letter from Mr. Hartman with his reaction to the completed instrument: “The organ is just magnificent . . . I’ve been told the architecture sings, but, at last, it truly has a voice . . . The quality and precision that Létourneau’s craftsmen brought to this amazing instrument is everything I could have wished for and more . . . The entire ensemble—not only the pipe arrays but also the console—is truly an extension of the cathedral’s architecture.”

In closing, we would like to offer our thanks to the following individuals without whose help our Opus 118 would not be the success it is: Dr. Rudy de Vos, John L. McDonnell Jr., Mario Balestrieri, Father Paul Schmidt, Father Denis DesRosiers, Brother Martin Yribarren, Craig Hartman, Peter McDonnell, Eileen Ash, Eric Long, Gwelen Paliaga, Mike Brown, Maryliz Smith, Jack Bethards, and Phil Browning.

Andrew Forrest, Artistic Director

Fernand Létourneau, President

Dudley Oakes, Vice President for Sales and Marketing

A. David Moore, Inc., 

North Pomfret, Vermont

All Hallows’ Parish, Davidsonville, Maryland

From the builder

Designing an organ for All Hallows’ Church involved some unique challenges for its builder. The small brick building dates to 1734, and was gutted by fire in 1940. Rebuilt much as it was (without the Victorian alterations), the original walls and brick floor were retained. It seems that until 2010, the parish never owned a pipe organ.

The decision to place the organ on the left side of the chancel included the requests that the casework be no taller than the altar window, that the instrument be no larger than the sacristy in the opposite corner, and that the case was to “fit” the furnishings of the room. Thus, the back and left sides of the organ are against the walls, and maintenance can be done only through the front and right side of the main case. The detached console and Positiv division are one unit, adjacent to the case front, and facing the choir on the other side of the nave. Three flats of Open Diapason and Principal basses face the congregation, and the side contains two flats of Open Diapason basses, one of which is in a door that can be opened for Great and Pedal tuning. Those offset basses are operated by a remote assisting mechanism in which a small amount of air travels down a 5/16″ diameter tube that feeds a small wedge bellows and valve below each pipe.

The Great is on a C and C# chest, with the smallest pipes in the middle. The Positiv is played from the upper keyboard; the chromatic chest is at floor level; and the pipes are tuned by removing a grille on the top of the case. The manual keys are suspended, with a backfall system that pulls up the Positiv pallets; angled trackers and a rollerboard operate the Great pallets. The Positiv stop knobs are in the console and the Great knobs project from the main case on the organist’s left. The basswood tables of the chests will not split; the sliders are of quarter-sawn maple; the slider seals are of Neoprene; there is no plywood in the organ; the wind pressure is almost two inches; and the temperament is Kirnberger III.

Though the acoustics are quite good and the sound of the organ is focused by a curved ceiling, there is a slight “flutter echo” heard by a listener in the center of the room. The maple case is of wood harvested on the Moore farm in North Pomfret, Vermont, and sawn on location by a Wood-mizer band sawmill. There are no carvings on the case, but some subtle ornamentation appears at the tops of the pipe flats. The cornice of the case was copied from the 18th-century American case in Old North Church, Boston, and the All Hallows’ sacristy cornice was changed to match it.  

In the Great, the metal pipes are 28% tin and 72% lead, with small amounts of copper, antimony, and bismuth; the metal was cast from old organ pipes. The 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, and 13⁄5′ ranks are close to Hook pipe scales, and have fairly low cutups and moderate nicking. The Holpipe is a metal chimney flute, and has 12 stopped wood basses; a new Haskell bass serves the Viol; and the Hautboy is an exact copy of a Hook stop. The Positiv Stop’d Diapason is of wood, small in scale but with a good fundamental tone, and is copied from a Geo. S. Hutchings stop; the Flute is of stopped and open wood and has metal trebles; the Fifteenth has 24 Claribel-style open wood basses and metal trebles. The German scales for the Dulcian are a composite, and there are half-length resonators in the lowest octave. The basses have wood blocks and shallots made in one piece, and the dimensions for the shallot openings, bores, tapers, and inside resonator diameters are close to 18th-century North European practice. The use of wood for a shallot avoids the need for lead or leather facings. In terms of hardness, the wood is somewhere between lead or brass and a leathered surface, and the brass tongues are fairly wide and thick. Long tuning wires are labeled on the tops and are easily reached.

The installation of A. D. Moore’s Opus 34 was enjoyable, and there were many trips to Davidsonville for installation, final voicing, and tuning. The crew of builders—A. David Moore, Tom Bowen, John Atwood, and Lubbert Gnodde—stayed with Jan and Mike Power. Mike Menne is the organist at All Hallows’, and collaborated on the organ’s specification. Mr. Gnodde played the dedicatory recital on November 7, 2010, which included works by Alain, Bach, Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Buxtehude, Mendelssohn, Couperin, Langlais, and the “Flower Duet” from Lakmé by Léo Delibes, featuring Sharon Potts and Laurie Hays, sopranos.

—E. A. Boadway and A. David Moore

From the organist

All Hallows’ Parish, also known as South River Parish, is one of the original parishes established by Act of the General Assembly of the Province of Maryland in 1692. As a worshiping community, it existed as early as 1650, with its first written record that of the birth of Thomas Chaney on 1 March 1669. The original church building, now lost, was probably of timber construction, and either burned or deteriorated to the extent that a new building, at a new site, was constructed, with the aid of a levy of 20,000 pounds of tobacco, around 1727–1730. The church bell, in a separate wooden tower, bears the inscription “Belonging to St. All Hallows’ Church 1727” and was probably provided by Queen Anne’s Bounty. 

The 1727 building, still in use, is a modest brick, hipped-roof building, just under 30 by 60 feet. There are no records extant that show the original seating plan of the building, but in the 19th century a small balcony was taken down (probably originally for the use of some of the 200 slaves who had been baptized by the second rector), and at least twice remodeled in the Victorian taste of the times, with heavy dark wood furnishings, stained glass, and slip pews.

The church was nearly lost on 11 February 1940 when a disastrous fire broke out about an hour after a service, destroying everything but the brick walls. For the rebuilding, it was decided to return the building to the look and feel of the early 18th century with white walls, white box pews, and clear glass windows. 

There is no record of any pipe organ during the building’s first 280 years, so any description of musical accompaniment before the fire is purely conjectural. After the restoration, a series of electronic instruments was installed in the front of the room. When a new rector arrived in 2000, he hired his friend James Weaver, Curator of the Division of Musical Instruments at the Smithsonian and co-founder of the Smithsonian Chamber Players, to come to the parish and revive a flagging music program and small choir of willing and enthusiastic singers. During his tenure, Weaver established a high level of musical expectation but hesitated to begin a project to replace the dreary electronic. When he left to pursue other projects and I arrived, enthusiasm to begin an organ project was high and the process began.

Early on, it was determined that (1) the organ would have mechanical action, (2) it would be tonally appropriate to the age of the building, (3) it would be visually designed so as not to overwhelm the scale and balance of the architecture, and (4) the primary visual focus at the front of the room would continue to be the triple window behind the altar. The restoration of the early 1940s had created two large closets in the front corners of the building. One was used as a tiny sacristy, the other as storage and placement for the bass speaker cabinets of the organ. It was determined that the organ would be placed where the sacristy had been, and the sacristy moved to the other side. The Altar Guild was quite pleased, as they had improved facilities and more extensive storage. 

A number of organbuilders were consulted, both from the U.S. and abroad, in our search for a builder. Almost every builder proposed an instrument that would be the dominant visual focus in the room. Some of them were tonally based on no more than an 8′ flute. David Moore, recommended by St. Margaret’s Convent in Boston and United Church on the Green, New Haven, was the only one who demonstrated an enthusiasm to work within our constraints.

As the organ and case design progressed, David proposed a novel solution: place the console at right angles to the main case and put the second manual pipes in the console in the manner of a continuo. In that manner, the main case could be lowered to match the sacristy on the other side, maintaining the Georgian balance of the church interior, while providing the tonal resources we needed. It also made it possible for the organist to face the choir directly across the chancel, with excellent sight lines.

The tonal design had three major objectives: (1) to provide leadership for congregational singing, (2) to accompany a wide variety of choral music, and (3) within its modest resources, to play as wide a spectrum of organ music as possible. 

Early in the planning stages, it was determined that the foundation would be an 8′ Principal, with both an 8′ flute and string to provide solid unison tone. A full diapason chorus, including 22⁄3, would be included, but the modest size of the building made the inclusion of a mixture unnecessary. The suggestion of a Hook-style Oboe as the Great reed was inspired! We insisted on a Tierce as well, for both solo color and ensemble brilliance. Having used a continuo for a year and a half before the instrument was installed, a similar tonal scheme of 8′, 4′, and 2′ for the second manual seemed natural. David suggested a Dulcian to round out the resources of that manual, adding significantly to the color possibilities of the instrument.

The organ has proved a tremendous success. Visually, it slips effortlessly into its corner of the building. The three pipe flats of the case front echo the semi-circular arches of the tripartite east window, repeated in pipe flats on the case side. The most oft-repeated comment from parishioners was “It looks like it’s always been there!” It was decided to use the natural darker grey of lead/tin pipe metal in the display pipes rather than shiny tin to minimize visual distraction from the altar. The wood façade pipes of the 8′ flute of the second manual are painted white to match the case. Many people don’t realize they are pipes at all until they see the mouths near the floor! The use of removable slatted grilles at the top of the second manual case allows for both good tonal egress and tuning ease. 

Musically the organ has been a huge success. The modest stoplist of 13 registers, with two reeds, two mutations, and four unison flue ranks lends itself to performing a wide spectrum of music. Though much of the instrument is inspired by 19th-century American organbuilding, early music sounds extremely convincing. Bach sounds very convincing, Sweelinck variations show off varieties of tonal color, the Dulcian can sound like a Renaissance consort when used by itself but becomes a chameleon when combined with one or both of the Positiv flutes. The Hautboy functions as a ‘petit trompette’, smooth in the treble and bolder in the bass. It serves as a very attractive solo stop, but when combined with the principals, becomes bold and assertive. Add the Twelfth and Tierce and it becomes a fiery French Grand Jeu. The solid foundation tone makes the instrument an excellent vehicle for Mendelssohn, and the Viol, both alone and with the Holpipe, provides softer sounds. There is sufficient tonal variety for stirring hymn singing as well as accompaniment of Anglican choral music. 

In addition to a performance by the young Dutchman from David Moore’s shop, Lubbert Gnodde, further recitals in the inaugural series were presented by Mark Brombaugh, Bryan Mock, and myself, with repertoire ranging from late Medieval to William Albright. 

The instrument continues to serve as proof that a real pipe organ is within the realm of possibility for a small parish, and that it can provide more musical satisfaction than an electronic with a plethora of digital gadgets and twice as many stops.

—Michael Menne

Cover photo: Sabine Joyce

GREAT (I) 56 keys, CCРg3

8′ Open Diapason

8′ Holpipe

8′ Viol

4′ Principal

22⁄3′ Twelfth

2′ Fifteenth

13⁄5′ Tierce

8′ Hautboy

POSITIV (II) 56 keys, CCРg3

8′ Stop’d Diapason

4′ Flute

2′ Fifteenth

8′ Dulcian

PEDAL 30 keys, CCРg3

16′ Bourdon

Couplers

I–P

II–P

II–I