Largest residence organ in DC to be moved

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Can it be fixed?
I love to cook. Wendy says I have a lot to show for it. I usually don’t follow recipes but I enjoy reading cookbooks to learn how successful chefs think about food, how they blend and enhance flavors, what techniques they enjoy. As an organbuilder I’ve spent a lifetime learning about tools, handling tools, trying to choose the right tool for the right job. My attitude and affinity toward tools spills over into my pleasure in the kitchen.
One of my favorite implements is a Weber four-burner propane grill that has lived on the back deck of our house in Maine for more than eight years. I know purists only barbeque with live fire, and of course we have a couple charcoal grills and a smoker, but that slick gas grill is a versatile, reliable, and convenient tool. The four-burner design allows me to cook with “indirect” heat—turn on the outer two burners, and whatever is in the center of the grill is not directly over the flame. I often roast a chicken in a cast-iron frying pan (breast down) over the center of grill. We roast vegetables and potatoes, and of course grill meat. I use it all year unless we’re away from the house through a couple snowstorms and the deck gets away from me.
Last month the burners gave out. Though they are made of stainless steel, eight years of weather and cooking heat was about all they could take. I checked at the hardware store where I bought the grill and saw that replacing it with the current similar model would cost most of nine hundred dollars. But the grill-guy at the store suggested I contact Weber with the serial number and see if it was still under warranty. Sure enough, a friendly woman answered the phone, verified that the ten-year warranty was still in effect, and sent a kit with four burners and two igniters at no charge.
I set aside a Saturday morning for the chore, expecting a greasy and smelly ordeal of rotted screw heads and caked-on cooking residue all over everything. What I found was four stainless-steel screws in near perfect condition, simple construction, and everything except the burned-out burners in terrific shape. It took about twenty minutes to take it apart, slip out the old burners, put in the new ones, clean all the parts, and put it back together. It worked perfectly. I was delighted—and had to dream up another chore to complete the morning. Or maybe I went off to the cooperative butcher thirty minutes up the road to prepare for the rededication.
This experience led me to reflect on the importance of “repairability,” a concept critical to the life of a pipe organ. Repairability is one of the by-products of mass production. Thousands of identical automobiles are produced using interchangeable parts, so assuming a good distribution system, it’s easy to repair your car by replacing an alternator, a timing belt, ball joints, even a transmission or engine. Some components of pipe organs can be mass-produced with good effect, but even if thousands of Skinner keyboards are more or less the same, the complete organ is most often a “one-off,” comprising a catalogue of components in unique combination. It reflects well on an organbuilder when a technician expects a repair to be difficult and is pleasantly surprised by how easy it is.
Ernest Skinner intended his organs for indefinite life. He knew that pneumatic leather would fail eventually, though I know of two organs in the Boston area built in the 1920s by Mr. Skinner that are still working on their original leather—imagine, 90-year-old pouch leather! His windchest design provides for future releathering. If a Skinner windchest is releathered two or three times it will be necessary to plug and re-drill many screw holes, but otherwise, it’s a snap to get the chests apart.
The keyboards in most electro-pneumatic consoles are designed so a technician can easily reach tracker-touch springs, contacts, and various adjustment points. In Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner consoles, for example, you remove two screws from under the keytable, the keyboards slide out in a stack, then each keyboard can be hinged up for access to the contacts. In the console of an electro-pneumatic organ by Casavant, the keyboards are usually removable. They are positioned accurately by heavy steel pins—you just lift them off their dowels and out they come.
We all know of those installations where the console is built into the choir risers. The organist who plays on a big three- or four-manual organ has great sightlines that way. But what if something goes wrong inside the console? I remember vividly a repair I made to the combination action of a big three-manual Casavant organ. It had the standard-issue electro-pneumatic-mechanical combination action prevalent in Casavant organs of the 1940s and ’50s—the console was jam-packed with intricate mechanical gizmos. The design of the console allowed for access to accomplish the repair, but we couldn’t get to the console panels. It took two days to take apart the choir risers, and even longer to put them back together—a week’s work for two guys because a piston wouldn’t set correctly. That was an expensive repair.

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Thanks to a lifetime of recreational cooking and some input from the gene pool of a family populated with tall people with big bones, there are places inside some organs where I can’t go. I’ve had many an unpleasant afternoon slithering my “dainty little body” across a filthy floor trying to reach the leather nuts of a pedal action. I especially enjoy the encounters with broken light bulbs on those dirty floors. The other day I visited a church that’s home to an 1868 W.B.D. Simmons organ. (Lovely organ, by the way, and about to go on the market.) I climbed a very rickety 143-year-old ladder inside the organ and crossed a walkboard behind the Great windchest so I could get a look through the Swell shutters. I walked as though on eggshells, knowing that if I fell through I’d wreck the tracker action behind the keyboards.
At a recent convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, I sat on a panel with several colleagues discussing the maintenance of pipe organs. Mark Venning (then managing director of Harrison & Harrison Ltd., organbuilders in Durham, UK) spoke eloquently about the dangers of organ maintenance, suggesting that it’s the responsibility of the technicians to insist on safety in the organs they service. One instrument I maintain has a tall freestanding case with the Great division at the top. There’s a wooden walkboard against the back of the case about eighteen feet up, on which you stand to reach through the case doors to tune the Great. The walkboard is painted to match the case—a hard and glossy paint. The dust that collects on that slick surface feels just like ball bearings under my shoes. I really should ask the church to let me build a railing.
In the late 1970s I was working with John Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. (John’s son James now runs that neat little company.) We cared for a large Hook & Hastings organ in the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Cleveland, where we also did a lot of large-scale renovation work. One Friday afternoon, thinking of rush-hour traffic (if you know Cleveland, you’ll know “Dead Man’s Curve” on I-71!), I was hurrying across the top of the Swell box, arms full of tools, to the ladder that would get me twenty feet to the floor. I jumped on the ladder in the usual cavalier fashion (when you get used to the geometry of a particular ladder you can get careless), missed a step, and down I went. It was a narrow little chute surrounded by façade pipes, swell box wall, and some pedal pipes, so there was no option but to stay upright. I landed hard on my feet and my breath was knocked out. My ankles and lower back were sore for days. If that happened to me today I doubt I’d escape uninjured, although in 1589 on the famous leaning tower by the cathedral in Pisa, Italy, Galileo used different sized cannonballs to prove that I wouldn’t fall any faster today than I did in 1979! Oof. But come to think of it, this story is about me more than about the design of the organ.
It has been my privilege to be shown through the magnificent and immense Newberry Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University by my friend and colleague Joe Dzeda, who with Nick Thompson-Allen serves as curator of that mighty instrument. Now that’s a big organ. It has 197 ranks and it goes from way over there to way over the other way. And it’s tall. There’s a spot up on the top level of the organ that is not for the faint of heart—you step out across an abyss where you can look down through multiple layers of the instrument. Your heart skips a beat and over you go. Oopah! Reminds me of photos I’ve seen of the suspension bridge made of rope in the Himalayas.
While there are lots of organs where you open a door and go inside, there are also many instruments, especially those in shallow freestanding cases, where all the maintenance work is done by reaching into the case through panels and doors. These organs are typically very crowded inside. And if the organ is large enough that the case is deeper than the reach of the technician, things can get very difficult. If a bass pipe in the far corner is not speaking properly, you can find that you have to remove ten reed pipes and ten mixture notes so you can stand on a walkboard—tricky and cumbersome if you’re working from a narrow walkboard high off the floor—you hate it when a Trumpet rolls off the edge of the walkboard. (That never happened to me—I’ve just heard that it’s possible!) A simple tuning can become a multiple-day event.
I care for an organ on Cape Cod built in the 1980s that has tracker action, a freestanding case for the Great, and a second case behind for Swell and Pedal. I’m sure that when the organ was being planned, a musician or member of the clergy insisted that the organ couldn’t project forward toward the nave past a certain point—the result being that the space between the two cases is narrow enough that I can get on the Great walkboard only if I remove all the case panels, my belt, wallet, and strip to my tee-shirt. Then I can just wriggle past the posts of the case. Looking at the organ now, it’s hard to imagine that there couldn’t have been just an inch or two more space—that wouldn’t have changed the floor plan for the choir and clergy a bit. But the way it is, it’s terribly difficult to tune that organ or to reach the tracker action that runs between the two cases. It’s as if the builder didn’t want anyone getting inside the organ.
Another organ, also on Cape Cod, is so tight inside that I make a point of wearing “sacrificial” tee-shirts when I go there. It’s one step worse than the last organ I mentioned because I know I can’t get inside the organ to tune without tearing my shirt on the iron hooks that hold the windchest bungs closed.
Another problem in maintaining organs in shallow cases is that opening doors or access panels changes the acoustics inside the case and the tuning is altered. In other words, a pipe that’s in tune when the doors are closed goes out of tune when they’re opened. The first time I encountered that as a fledgling tuner in the late 1970s was in a Flentrop organ in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. The only way to get pipes properly in tune was to listen, open a panel and tap a pipe, then close the panel and listen again. You can sometimes figure out that opening a door on the C-side of the organ doesn’t change the C#-side tuning, so you can reach across, but then you have to be careful that your body heat doesn’t change the organ’s internal temperature. Oh, and be sure you’re not holding on to a brass tuning cone for too long, because the tool heats up in your hands and changes the temperature around the pipe you’re tuning. Whose idea was all this, anyway?
And while we’re talking about temperature, what about all those incandescent light bulbs inside the organ?

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Most pipe organs seem pretty sturdy at first glance, but there are lots of ways that a poorly designed structure can interfere with the care of the organ. I know of a very large organ in which the walkboard for access to the Great is in contact with the wind system. When a tuner stands on the walkboard, the wind-pressure increases—this makes tuning theoretically impossible.
I know of another organ in which the Great rollerboard (a major component of the tracker action) is suspended from the Great walkboard. When you stand on the walkboard the action sags, the pallets (pipe valves) close partially, and the wind to the pipes is diminished—another instance where tuning the Great is theoretically impossible.

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If an organ is easily serviceable, it will have a longer life. If components of an organ cannot be reached, they cannot be maintained. If an organ is difficult to get around in, the well-meaning technician cannot do a good job. I care for a few instruments that are difficult and uncomfortable to manage, and I admit that’s on my mind when I’m on way to one of them. I wake up in the morning thinking, “Yuck. I have to go there today.” You struggle all day to tune, knowing that the organist won’t be able to tell that you did anything.
On the other hand, a well-designed organ is a pleasure to care for. You can spend a day doing mechanical adjustments and repairs and tuning, and leave knowing that you’ve made a difference. You know the organist will be pleased, and the church’s money is well spent.
Here are some of the factors common to organs that are well designed, well built, and easily maintained:
Only high-quality materials are used.
• If a console is full of cheap plastic parts, the technician can hardly help breaking things.
• If a windchest is full of cheap parts, it will not stay reliable through changes in weather and climate, and the technician cannot help breaking things.
Every part of the organ can be reached by a person of at least average size.
• I admit I’m on the large side—but too much of too many organs can only be reached by teeny people, if they can be reached at all.
• If you can’t reach a pipe you can’t tune it.
• If you can’t reach a pipe, you can’t correct its speech.
• If you can’t reach a leather nut, you can’t adjust the action.
• If you can’t reach a keyboard spring, you can’t replace it.
• If you spend time taking things apart to reach that pipe that’s not speaking, the tuning bill skyrockets.
The organ’s structure should be sturdy and rigid.
• If a windchest can move, the action will always be changing.
• If a technician’s weight on the walkboard changes any function of the organ, tuning is theoretically impossible.
• If a ladder is flimsy or unstable, the technician is either in danger (as is the organ) or the technician may choose not to climb up. (I’m not going up to the Swell until I can install a new ladder—life is short enough without taking industrial and personal risks to tune the Oboe.)
The organ’s interior is well lit.
• If I can’t see it, I can’t fix it.
• Maybe I should start billing my clients for tools that I lose when I can’t see inside the organ.
If you’re ever in the position to participate in the conception of a new or relocated pipe organ, consider starting from the tuner’s point of view. You want your tuner to look forward to visiting your church. Then after a pleasant day of making the organ sound and function better, he can pick up a nice piece of meat on the way home to throw on the grill. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Advent in New York
Today, as I write this column, is the third Sunday of Advent. The Organ Clearing House is installing an organ in Manhattan, and my wife Wendy came down for the weekend. We went to a Christmas choral concert last night on the Upper East Side. We’ve had a string of nice meals together. And this morning we attended the 11 am Choral Eucharist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.
That landmark church is a huge and spectacular place. It’s a true stone Gothic building, especially fascinating as its perpetual state of incompletion allows the architecture aficionado to study the construction techniques—what the massive stonework looks like under the finished limestone veneer. The place is 601 feet long inside. The ceiling is nearly 125 feet above the floor. Single rooms just aren’t that big. There’s something like 15,250,000 cubic feet of air contained inside. Don’t even think about the fuel bill. The idea that a building that large could be dedicated to worship is solid testament to the power of faith—not just American Episcopalianism, but any faith anywhere.
It’s awe-inspiring. It’s breath-taking. It’s humbling. And thinking back on the history of cathedral building, so highly developed in twelfth-century France, it’s easy to understand how people were motivated to create such elevating structures. In rural areas, the cathedral building is visible for miles. Approaching Chartres in France, for example, one sees the famous cathedral on the horizon from a great distance. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC dominates the top of a hill, so it can be seen from Route I-95 some ten miles to the east of the city. In upper Manhattan, there’s really no place that I’ve found on ground level where you can see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine from any great distance. If you approach by subway, you get off the 1-2-3 train at 110th Street, walk north to 112th, turn right, and there you see the west-end façade of the cathedral at the end of the block. Heading up Amsterdam Avenue from Midtown, you don’t see the cathedral until you’re right on it. It blends in with the hundreds of façades that line the east side of the street. When you pass 110th Street, the cathedral campus opens up to the right—a dramatic and verdant two-block oasis in that busy urbanscape.

You can’t hold a candle to it.
Worship in the cathedral was a wonderful experience for us. Although the nave can seat thousands, there were enough people in attendance for the place to feel populated. There was a raft of clergy in beautiful vestments, clouds of incense wafting to the heavens, and a brigade of acolytes. I chuckled at the sight of a pint-sized acolyte bearing a candle on a pole that must have weighed as much as he did—and in order to show up in such a vast place, altar candles need to be fifty-pounders.
Perhaps the grandest thing about the place is the sound. We usually measure reverberation in half-seconds. At St. John the Divine it’s measured in days. Walk in on a Monday morning, and yesterday’s postlude is still in the air. Close your eyes and spin around, and you can no longer tell where a sound originates. The organ chambers were 150 feet from where we were sitting. The organ’s sound is powerful and rich. Gentle individual colors are easily distinguishable. Of course, we expect always to be able to tell when a Clarinet is playing, or when it’s replaced by an Oboe, but I am somehow surprised that subtle tones carry so distinctly in such a vast space. Some of the most impressive subtle tones in a monumental organ are the quiet 32-foot stops. An 800-pound Bourdon pipe consumes a hurricane of air through a four- or five-inch toe-hole to produce a rumbling whisper. It has to be the most extravagant consumption of materials and forces in the entire world of music. But when you sit a hundred feet away in a vast interior space, it’s impossible to put a price on that quality of sound.
The grand choruses of principals and reeds create huge washes of sound. The organ is powerful enough to startle you from across the room. There’s a good variety of bold solo reeds that bring clarity to hymn tunes. And perhaps the most famous organ stop in the world is 600 feet away high on the west wall under the great rose window—the State Trumpet. It’s blown with 50 inches of wind pressure—that’s more than twice what we otherwise consider to be high pressure. And do those pipes ever sound. One would never ask, “was that the State Trumpet?” The only answer would be, “If you’ve gotta ask, that wasn’t it.”
If you’ve never been able to experience the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, go. Just go. You can get there easily on the subway from Pennsylvania Station or Grand Central Station. You can find plenty of great meals within a few blocks. There are terrific hotels nearby, especially in my experience along Broadway between 75th and 80th Streets—just a few subway stops from the cathedral.
In summer 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri completed their restoration of the cathedral’s mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. You can read about that project in detail in the November 2009 issue of The American Organist. The Organ Clearing House was engaged to assist in the installation of the organ, and it was our privilege to spend that summer hoisting and assembling thousands of organ parts in the chambers, nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the cathedral. Sometime soon I’ll write about that experience in more detail. For now, take my advice—just go.

A clean sweep
So we’re installing an organ. Sunday is over and we’re into the work week. Sometimes we work in parish church buildings in quiet little towns. There’s a big parking lot where we can leave our cars. There’s plenty of space around the building for maneuvering trucks. And the sidewalks are quiet, so it’s easy to walk around while carrying heavy loads. There’s a hardware store just up the street, next to a sandwich shop that sells great coffee in cardboard cups.
Not this time. We’re working on 74th Street in Manhattan, just east of Park Avenue. It’s a great neighborhood, but it’s very busy. Park Avenue is lined with high-end housing—high-rise condominium buildings with uniformed doormen, expensively dressed women with little expensively dressed designer dogs, and snazzy green awnings. I think the nearest business on Park Avenue is the Maserati dealer. I’ve never been inside. They don’t have anything there that I need.
Lexington Avenue is one block to the east. It’s a much more interesting street, with hundreds of shops, cafés, restaurants, groceries—and thousands of people on the sidewalks. You can buy coffee, but it’s four or five dollars a cup. The hardware store is a half-hour round-trip walk (forget about driving—you’ll never find a parking space). There are delivery people on foot and on bicycles carrying everything from flowers to groceries to meals. 74th Street is supposedly one lane wide with parking on both sides.
The north side of the street is cleaned every Monday and Thursday—the south side on Tuesday and Friday. “Alternate Side Parking” is the regulation regarding street cleaning. The big street-sweeping machines are escorted by a fleet of public works cars. They come into the street and fan out, sticking to windshields aggressively tacky stickers that scold residents for thwarting their efforts to keep the city clean by leaving their cars in violation of the sweeping schedule. Seems that they don’t need to issue citations—the stickers are so difficult to remove that they are punishment enough. One car had three weeks’ worth of stickers. I guess the owner just gave up.
There’s a nursery school in the church building. At 8:30 every morning a platoon of kids arrives in the building escorted by parents and au pairs. A lot of them come by car.
Last week we brought a large truck into the neighborhood to deliver a load of organ parts. We got it here before 6:30 in the morning because we knew there’d be a scene. It’s difficult enough to park a car on a Manhattan cross-street. Just try to parallel-park a 45-foot-long truck. It was street-sweeping day, and the garbage trucks came at the same time as the street-sweepers. The nursery-school delivery was in full swing. There’s a private school across the street—a few hundred middle-schoolers added to the mix. And the sidewalks were jammed with people hurrying to work. Professional dog-walkers with their dozen-at-a-time charges sniffed their ways along, criss-crossing their leashes like a maypole dance. Building contractors were leaning on brooms, finishing their morning coffee. We were carrying 16-foot-long wooden organ pipes (500 pounds each) out of our truck, across the sidewalk, and into the church. It was quite a spectacle. It’s amazing how little patience people can have for people doing their work.

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Once we get everything inside, the fun really starts. This organ is going into two locations in the building. The Swell, Great, and large Pedal stops are going in a high organ loft on the rear wall of the building. The Positif, Solo, and the rest of the Pedal are going in a chamber in the chancel. The Solo will be above the Positif, speaking through grilles in the arched chancel ceiling. We’re starting with the gallery organ. Today we hoisted the larger of the two Swell windchests into place. It’s about fifteen feet to the floor of the gallery and another eight or nine up to the frame where the chest sits. We have towers of scaffolding set up on the floor of the nave, with a bridge between that supports an electric chain-hoist. We can use the hoist to get the heavy parts up into the gallery, but we have to manhandle them from the gallery floor to their resting places in the organ’s framework. The 16-foot Double Open Wood pipes (those 500-pounders) are lying on the gallery floor under the organ. The organ’s floor frame is supported above those pipes. The tall legs that support the windchests are on top of the floor frame. And the 12-foot-high Swell box sits on top of all that.
The organ is a heavy industrial machine. It comprises many tons of wood along with hundreds of other materials. There are leather valves and bellows, steel springs, and every imaginable type of fastener. There are sophisticated valves for regulating wind pressure, compensating between the flow of air from the blower and the demand for air from the player and, by extension, the pipes. There are bearings that allow Swell shutters to operate noiselessly. There are powerful pneumatic motors that operate those shutters. There is a complex network of wind conductors that carry the pressurized “organ” air from blower to reservoirs and from reservoirs to windchests and various other appliances.
It can seem overwhelming as you get all that material out of a truck and into a building, then up into place. And after all that, it has to work. There are weeks of work finessing connections and adjustments, tuning, adjusting the speech and regulation of thousands of organ pipes.
The electrician is coming today to wire the blowers. That makes one more truck in the neighborhood, one more vehicle liable for citations, one more guy we’re depending on who’s liable to be held up in traffic.
It takes tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and install a pipe organ. It would be nice to be able to count and control how many times each part of the organ gets lifted—a busy organ company lifts many thousands of pounds of material every day.

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When it’s all done we sit down to play. We forget the splinters, the cuts and bruises, the sleepless nights sitting up thinking through problems. We forget the sidewalk congestion, the hassle of plowing through dense city traffic in an oversized truck. We forget the endless days of hoisting, fastening, balancing, and fitting thousands of oddly shaped and unwieldy pieces. And we forget the hundreds of hours of powerful concentration as we adjust keyboard springs and contacts and strive to eliminate the music-spoiling effects of poor mechanical operation.
We hear the magic of air-driven musical sound reverberating through the building. We feel the incomparable vibrations of immense bass pipes rumbling along the bass lines of the music. We experience the energy of the congregation’s singing, complemented and enhanced by the majesty of the organ’s tone.
Imagine a church up the street receiving delivery of an electronic organ. It comes out of a truck, gets moved inside, plugged in, speakers hooked up, and you sit down and play.
It would be much easier to find funding for pipe organs if they were the essential engines of international finance. There are bankers within blocks of me here in Manhattan whose offices cost more than the organ we’re working on. Because pipe organs are “engines” of worship and because churches are the institutions that depend most on them, there will always be a struggle between the cost of producing them and the owner’s ability to fund them. There have not been many organs built without some kind of financial constraint. If we could have raised another $30,000 we could have had that Bourdon 32′.
I’m often asked how I got involved in organbuilding. Fact is, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing. 

An Interview with Nora Williams

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, Pennnsylvania, teaches organ and piano at Lafayette College, piano at Moravian College, and is interim director of music at DeSales University. He has recently founded The Vermont Organ Academy, a website dedicated to promoting the organ and its music, located at .

Those interested in organ playing and organ building have since 1909 turned to The Diapason as a font of information. There have been wonderful articles over the years about gentlemen and ladies who have distinguished themselves as organists; Clarence Watters, writing on his mentor, Marcel Dupré, and the recent tributes to Marilyn Mason come to mind immediately. There has been a dearth of information about female organbuilders. Certainly there have been women involved in organ building over the decades, past and present. Recent developments in society in general towards more equality in the workforce can only have a beneficial effect in this direction. We are fortunate indeed to have this historical vignette by the first lady of American organbuilding, Nora Williams.
—Charles Callahan
Orwell, Vermont

An Interview with Nora Williams
March 10, July 1, 2, and 3, 2005
New Orleans

LM: Your family installed and maintained some of the great Aeolian-Skinner organs in this country. How did you get started in the business, and how did your family’s affiliation with Aeolian-Skinner come about? NW: My father-in-law, Thomas Jackson Williams (Jack, or T.J., as he was known) was from Ripley, Tennessee. He came to New Orleans to install a little Möller pipe organ in Algiers Methodist Church, met Jimmy’s mother, and they married. Jimmy was their first son, and then they had Jack—Thomas Jackson, Jr.
I met Jimmy on March 15, 1947, and we got married on March 28, 1947. (We waited a week because his daddy was out of town.) We knew it was a take from the beginning. I had been singing with a band on a riverboat, had signed to go on tour in a road show, and was supposed to leave town for rehearsals in Mobile on March 23. When I met Jimmy, and we fell in love, I told him I had to leave town on the 23rd. He said, “You’re not leaving, even if I have to marry you to keep you here.” I said, “That’s the only way you’ll keep me here.” Sure enough, we got married in the same little Methodist church where his mother and daddy were married.
I knew nothing about pipe organs. I was just the average person who sat in church on Sunday. As a kid, I would look at the front pipes, wondering how they got all those different sounds out of just 27 pipes. I was always curious about that. The first time I ever ventured into an organ chamber, Jimmy’s daddy was at the console. He waited until I was in the middle of it, and then really let go with a big chord. I went running out of it, thinking, “This thing is a beast!”
Jimmy had been in another line of business. For convenience’s sake, he started working with his daddy, and I went along with them. On one job, in Gilmer, Texas, I was watching Jimmy splicing some cables. He would take his knife and strip a wire, twist it on, then go to the next one. I said, “That looks like fun. Can I do one?” He had four or five lined up in a row. He said, “Sure, go to it,” and handed me a knife and a pair of cutters. I just went phfft, phfft, phfft, phfft, phfft, and had it done in no time, asking him for another one. He said, “Did you already finish that one?” When I said yes, he said, “Look, I’ll go do something else!” He handed the whole job over to me. That is how I got started. We went from job to job after that.

LM: Were you working for Möller exclusively at that time?
NW: Daddy was his own independent service man, but did a lot of work for Möller, and had always taken care of the organ in Kilgore [*First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas], which was a Möller at that time. In 1948, Roy Perry [*organist-choirmaster at First Presbyterian Church for 40 years] wanted to make some changes in the organ, and asked Möller to do the work. Möller told him they were too busy to fool with it, so Roy went to Boston and talked to G. Donald Harrison about the changes he had in mind. Mr. Harrison said Aeolian-Skinner would be happy to make the changes. Roy told him he wanted his own organ men to do the installation, and Mr. Harrison agreed, since Aeolian-Skinner always sent out an outside crew to do its installations.
We got on the job, and in no time, had it finished. Mr. Harrison was astonished that it had gone so smoothly, without our ever calling in griping about not having this or that. He was so impressed that he asked us to go to San Antonio to put up an organ at Laurel Heights Methodist. We went down and installed it, and, again, Mr. Harrison was pleased with our work. Meanwhile, Aeolian-Skinner was about to ship the organ out to First Baptist, Longview, Texas, and Mr. Harrison asked us to install that one. He came down on the train during its installation—he loved taking trains. One of the biggest compliments we ever received in our career took place when we were up in the organ chamber. Mr. Harrison said, “Would someone go down and turn on the wind, please?” Jimmy said, “Mr. Harrison, the wind is on.” He looked at the reservoir and said, “Oh, my word, it is.”
And, so, we had a marvelous relationship with the company from the very beginning. Mr. Harrison started requesting us for other installations. Meanwhile, Roy was so carried away with “The Boss,” as he always referred to Mr. Harrison, and with the sound and the product, that if anyone came to him for advice about an organ, he would say, “Aeolian-Skinner.” All Roy had to do was get an organ committee to Kilgore. Once he played the organ for them, they would just cry, it was so beautiful. There was no question who they were signing with, especially when they found out Aeolian-Skinner cost more than anybody else did! They wanted the top of the line.

LM: That Kilgore organ is a special organ among Aeolian-Skinners. Is this because of Roy Perry?
NW: He had a lot to do with the scaling, but it was a collaboration between Harrison and Roy. Roy knew what he wanted to eliminate from the old organ. I know he insisted on keeping the Vox Humana and French Horn, because they were outstanding, among a few other things. People were outgrowing Vox Humanas at that time, but Roy could see beyond this trend, and thought the Kilgore Vox was very effective.
We always called Kilgore “Mecca.” When we heard that Trompette-en-Chamade for the first time, we didn’t know what to think. [*A-S Opus 1173, Kilgore, Texas, contains the first Trompette-en-Chamade installed in the United States.] We thought, “Did we do this right?” Roy was just scared to death. We had never heard such a thing, but knew it had to be spectacular. We thought about putting flags on it, and someone even suggested shooting me out of a cannon over the audience the first time it was played. But, as it turned out, it was more than a success. When Willie Watkins [*William Watkins, organist at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., and later organist-choirmaster at Georgetown Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., for 40 years] played the Healey Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue on it in 1950, it just knocked everybody over. We knew we had gotten it right.
It wasn’t long before we became representatives for Aeolian-Skinner—Jimmy, his dad, and Roy. As time went by, the bookkeeping became difficult. With the down payment on the contract price, then splitting the commission three ways every time a check came in, they finally gave Roy all the work in Texas, and we took all the work in Louisiana and Mississippi. But, we all worked together on each installation and on all the tonal finishing. That is the way it was for years.
Roy always came into a job before the pipework was committed, so he could set strengths and work out the scaling. Everywhere we worked, he would bring sample Cs and set them on site in the church, so that by installation time, the pipes were ready to go. This was our way of life for years and years. Occasionally Mr. Harrison would ask us to go out of our own territory for an installation, like St. Luke’s Methodist in Oklahoma City, or First Methodist in Marlow, Oklahoma.

LM: What was Mr. Harrison like?
NW: Mr. Harrison was a work of art. His hair was snow white, his eyes so blue, and his complexion so red that he looked like the American flag. He was striking and very beautiful—and laid back. We would haul him off to little towns like Georgetown, Texas, and he would love it. There was a restaurant in Georgetown that had wonderful scotch. He was devoted to scotch. He and his wife, Helen, had a little dog that Roy called a “Maggie and Jiggs” dog. It looked like it was made out of sticks. When they got onto the train, she would put this little dog into her knitting bag, and carry it on with them. Don’t ask me the dog’s name. Anyhow, after Mr. Harrison would take a sip of scotch, he would say, “My word, but scotch is good.”
But, Roy was the biggest character of anyone in my life I’ve ever met. He was a man of many moods. The first time I ever met him I was sitting in his office, which also doubled as the choir room. He came walking in, and I said “Good morning, Mr. Perry.” He just growled at me and did not say a word. I thought, “Well, pardon me!” I was petrified. But, after that, it wasn’t long before we became such good friends that he’d call me every night in New Orleans and say, “What are you cooking for dinner?” All of us loved to cook. He always called me a “Dolless,” saying I was a “doll turned inside out.” You work that one out for yourself.
Roy loved to giggle and have fun when he felt relaxed with people, but he could also be very mischievous. Margie and Marvin Hall had the drug store across the street from Roy’s church in Kilgore. Marvin was the druggist, and his wife expanded the store with gift items, traveling all over the country to stock it. Roy never went to the church without stopping by the drugstore to say good morning. One year, Roy’s birthday came along and Margie wanted to take him out to dinner to celebrate. Roy agreed to it, but made it clear to her he did not like anyone drawing attention to his birthday in public. He asked her not to have a cake or have anyone sing to him. Sure enough, after dinner, here came the waitress with a birthday cake and candle, singing “Happy Birthday.” Roy did not say a word. He just sat there and gritted his teeth. When he got home, he called a local chicken farmer and had him deliver a truckload of chicken fertilizer to Margie’s house and dump it in her front yard. Not only did it burn the grass, they had to hire someone to come haul it off, and the city fined them a $500 nuisance fee. They never bought Roy another birthday cake!

LM: When you installed an organ, did the church pay you, or did Aeolian-Skinner?
NW:The company paid us per job. We didn’t have a salary. We received ten percent of the contract price. If we needed incidentals, we would keep a list of our expenditures and Aeolian-Skinner would reimburse us. But, they always sent so much to the job, like friction tape and spools of wire, that we were pretty well set. We used our own tools, like a table saw and drill press, and just set up shop on site.

LM: After that first job in Gilmer, you were relegated to wiring?
NW: Oh yes, from then on. Jimmy hated wiring. The first kind of cable we had was cotton covered, with paraffin on it. I had to get it all straightened out, then “buzz it out” on the other end, meaning each end had to be identified. All the wires were white, so we would set up earphones on one end, using a little doorbell on the other to identify the different groups. The cable was done in groups of ten wires, so you could identify the groups as 1–10, 11–20, and then lay it in neatly going up the spreader strip. If I had a 61-note switch, I would hook that up first, then “ring it out” with the doorbell at the other end, to make sure everything was in order. It was messy. When I would untwist the wires at one end, I would end up with wax all over the floor. But, it was a system that worked. When the company told us they were switching to a new type of color-coded cables, I was sure I would never learn it, having figured out my own system. But, once I saw it, it was a dream. I could hook up one end, keep my own notes on it, and then hook up the other end and solder it without ever having to ring it out. Nothing made me happier in life than to have a switchboard full of wires to work on. I loved it!
When we were installing the organ at First Baptist in Longview, there was a copper shortage, and cable was hard to come by. Roy finagled around and got a roll of cable from somebody at the telephone company, which was disastrous. The wires were wrapped in paper, and I had the time of my life cutting that paper so the wires wouldn’t touch each other. If I’d had to do that on all the jobs, I would’ve headed for the hills.
Mabel Birdsong was organist there at the time. After she retired, they had a husband and wife team. He directed the choir, and she played the organ. We still serviced the organ then. The last time we tuned there, the wife came in and played a few notes, and said, “This note isn’t in tune.” I told her to just turn her head slightly, and it would be in tune. She didn’t understand that a note doesn’t sound the same in one area as it does in another. I learned that ages ago! Her husband, the choir director, was so jealous of that big Aeolian-Skinner console that he asked Jimmy to cut off the top of it. He said it “shouldn’t be the focal point of the church.” Later on I found out he had built a set of steps behind the console so he could stand above it and be the focal point himself! The pastor’s wife, Mrs. Ford, told me this, and I asked her if he ever got a nosebleed. Of course, we had worked with the church’s architect in the first place to design that console to match his designs for the building. It suited it perfectly. When that choir director asked Jimmy to cut off the top of the console, Jimmy told him yes, but they’d have to do without the combination action, couplers, and top few rows of drawknobs. That is the last time we ever entered that church. Those people were out of their element.

LM: What was Mrs. Birdsong like?
NW:She was the sweetest thing in the world. Her husband was wonderful. Their son, “Sonny,” is also a wonderful person. When they put parking meters in downtown Longview, Mr. Birdsong, senior, would go to the bank and get a bag full of nickels. He would walk around town, and if he saw an empty parking meter, he’d feed it, staying one step ahead of the law. That was his fun, going all over town feeding parking meters.
Mrs. Birdsong was a sweet, docile Southern lady. Dr. Ford, the minister at First Baptist, would say during the service, if her playing got too ambitious, “Mabel, you’re playing too loud. Tone it down a little.” Honey, this was East Texas! We didn’t like roll tops, and this organ did not have one in its design. So, Mabel brought a tea towel from home and put it over the keyboards, “to protect the little darlings.”
One time we were working at St. Mark’s in Shreveport, and Mabel came by with Sonny. She asked Jimmy to come over to First Baptist in Longview to fix a problem she had with the console. He asked her what it was, and she said, “I’ve got it right here in my hanky.” She pulled her hanky out, unrolled it, and there was the cancel button. Bless her heart. Can’t you just see her walking around with a cancel button in her purse?
They were such sweet people. Mr. Birdsong would catch squirrels in cages and then take them out into the woods to set them loose.

LM: William Watkins told me Roy Perry would borrow the Longview 32' reed and use it in the Kilgore organ for long periods at a time.
NW: I remember they were making a recording at Kilgore once and there was one note on a reed that sounded just fine in the church, but sounded terrible on the playback tapes. We borrowed the undertaker’s car and borrowed the same pipe from the Longview organ for the recording. For some reason, it worked just fine!
Roy loved going to Boston, and he would run up there at the drop of a hat. He had a name for everyone: Tommy Anderson was “The Leprechaun,” and John Hendricksen was “The Dike Plugger.” One of the fellows in the shop, Bill McKenzie, once asked Roy if they had armadillos in Texas, and Roy said, “You’d better believe it. We’ve got them all over the place. When I get back to Texas, I’m going to send you one.” When he got back to Kilgore he got a bottle of booze, wrapped it up in a box, wrote on the address label, “Caution: One live armadillo,” and shipped it off to Boston. When Bill received it, he was too scared to open the box.
Mary McGaffigan was the secretary who handled all the company’s correspondence and sent out our checks. Roy would call her up and say, “Mary, go rattle your tambourine and see if you can come up with some money for us.” Whenever he wanted money, Roy would say, “Go rattle your tambourine.” But, Aeolian-Skinner always paid us on time. We had the perfect setup. The company was ideal to work for, and never gave us any problems. However, it was sometimes interesting to arrive on a job to see how the church people would receive us. Some of them saw us as common laborers, and others treated us like master craftsmen. Once, I was walking down the hall in a church in San Antonio in my work clothes. These ladies were having a tea, and insisted I come in and join them. Here I was in my work clothes, sitting in this brocade chair in an elegant parlor, sipping tea, and eating cake. They were very gracious and lovely. Other places were not like that. If they saw me coming down the hall in my work clothes, they would turn their heads to avoid having to acknowledge me. Of course, I can’t be bothered by that. Just the snooty churches acted that way.

LM: In Dallas?
NW: Houston! One minister there would turn his head rather than say hello to me. For recitals, of course, I would get dressed up. That was a different ballgame. He would then say, “Hello! It is so good to see you.” I wanted to say, “I’m the one you turned away from this morning!” So much two-faced phoniness goes on behind the scenes in churches that the average person never sees or realizes. Churches are often very shallow, for what they are supposed to represent.
Jimmy and his daddy were working in a church in Shreveport, pre-Aeolian-Skinner, re-covering some valves. This was before they had discovered my abilities, so I was absolved from doing any work. I was just sitting around. The preacher asked me if I liked poetry, and I said yes. He invited me up to his office, where he had lots of books. We went down the hall and around the baptistry full of flowers—it must have been a Baptist church. As we walked by, just to make conversation, I said, “Oh, these flowers are so beautiful.” He said, “They’re not as lovely as you are.” Red flag! We got to his office and I grabbed a book out of desperation. He had a new wire recorder he wanted to show me, saying they were able to record the services to take to the hospitals for people to hear. As he was demonstrating it, he kept getting closer, and closer, so I backed away behind his desk. I tried the opposite direction, and he followed me. After about three times around his desk, I flew out that office door. If I had told Jimmy’s daddy about it, he would have clobbered that man. I had already learned that.
Old St. Anna’s Church here in New Orleans was condemned, and had to be torn down. It had a pipe organ, so we disassembled it for storage. It had a very nice wainscoting in the choir chamber, and Jimmy’s daddy wanted to save it. We had a big chute going from the organ to send parts down to the main floor. Jimmy’s grandpa was still alive, and he, Daddy, and I were on the floor, with Jimmy and some other men up in the organ. We had some sawhorses set up, and I was knocking out nails, while Grandpa put them into little bundles. This man walked into the church and watched, and watched, and watched me while we worked. I didn’t realize it, but Jimmy’s daddy was seething. Finally, he had had enough. He looked at that man and shook his hammer, saying, “What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you ever seen a woman work before?” That man’s eyes got big as saucers, and he went tearing out of that church!

LM: When did Mr. Williams, senior, retire from the business?
NW: In the early 1960s. He had a bad fall in an organ chamber in Hattiesburg, and wasn’t able to do heavy work after that. He could still do small jobs, though. He was a good tuner, and used a tuning fork to set the temperament in the middle octave. That is how we tuned in the beginning, too. We didn’t have Peterson tuners then. I was always pulled to be the key holder, and would hold keys with one hand and work crossword puzzles with the other. When they came out with the Peterson tuners, I had to work the tuner with my spare hand. That’s when I started reading magazines and pocket books. I would tear all the pages out and put them onto the music rack. I had to do something or I would fall asleep. Two octaves of tuning will put you out faster than anything! We did have some wonderful adventures along the way, though, and reliving those are the rewards of organbuilding.
For instance, at St. Luke’s Methodist in Oklahoma City, Catharine Crozier and her husband were doing a symposium once, and we were there. It must have been right after we installed the organ. During her recital, someone from the church presented her with an Indian headdress to welcome her to Oklahoma, making her an honorary Indian and giving her the Indian name “Princess Crow’s Ear.” The church did this out of complete sincerity, and it was an honor. Poor Catharine just looked deadpan at her husband, Harold, like “What do I do now?” It was beyond her comprehension. If that had been Marilyn Mason, she would have given them their money’s worth!
Another memorable adventure we had was serving dinner to the Duruflés in Houston. They were playing a program at First Methodist, and we invited them over to Charles Moseley’s apartment following their recital. Mrs. Duruflé had to do all the translating because he could not speak English. Mr. Duruflé became very tired, and she explained it was such a strain on him not knowing the language. We were running late with dinner and could see he was getting edgy sitting out on the sofa, so Jimmy went out and gave Mr. Duruflé the menu. When he heard we were serving a chateaubriand with Madeira sauce, he perked up. It was something he had been missing on their tours, having been subjected to American cooking. Jimmy prepared a wonderful French dinner from beginning to end, and had carefully chosen the wines, too. The Duruflés were very friendly. She played the Liszt “Ad nos” on that recital, and it was just wonderful.

LM: Did you know Claire Coci?
NW: Oh, yes. She was from New Orleans, and was delightful and unpretentious. She felt at home in any setting. She was an exciting player, a fancy dresser, and wore a lot of makeup. She used to play in Laurel a lot, and I have a wonderful photo of her seated at the old Austin console there at First Presbyterian Church.

LM: How about Nita Akin?
NW: Yes. We installed the big Aeolian-Skinner in her church, First Methodist Church, Wichita Falls. That was a fine installation, except that Nita insisted on retaining a lot of their old Reuter, saying she needed certain stops “to bury babies.” She also insisted on keeping the old organ’s floating string division, available on every manual, so she could use it in the background to accompany prayers.

LM: Did you also know Dora Poteet Barclay?
NW: Yes. Perkins Chapel and Highland Park Methodist, in Dallas, came along right after we started with the company. Did you know that Dora could not reach a full octave? She was so tiny, and her hands so small, that it is a miracle she could play at all. But, she sure could get the job done. She was very nice and easygoing with us, but cracked the knuckles of her students from time to time. She wanted everything just right out of them. We also put in the organs at Caruth Auditorium, Lover’s Lane Methodist, Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, Temple Emanuel, and Church of The Incarnation, all in Dallas.

LM: How many employees did you take along for big lifting jobs at installations?
NW: We didn’t have employees, per se, but hired casual labor onsite for our installations. We had our own hoisting ropes and block and tackle. Jimmy wanted to keep everything on our own level, without having to worry about part-time or full-time employees. We did not want that kind of responsibility. When we put in the Aeolian-Skinner at St. Mark’s Church, Beaumont, Texas, we hired a local sheepherder to help. Right after that installation, we had to immediately start putting in the organ at Rayne Memorial Church, here in New Orleans. The sheepherder asked if he could come work on it for us, and Jimmy said yes. About two weeks into the job, Jimmy sent him to the hardware store for supplies. On the way back, he wrecked our car. That is why we preferred doing our own work—to avoid such headaches. We did however, have Tom Cotner work full-time for us for several years in the early ’60s. He joined us when we were putting in the organ at First Presbyterian Church in Wichita Falls, Texas. He stayed with us until 1965, when he went on his own. He is on my “A” list—very talented, and I would trust him with anything.

LM: Was there a noticeable change at Aeolian-Skinner after Mr. Harrison’s death?
NW: Yes—slowly at first. I think organbuilding was just a hobby for Joe Whiteford. He was a nice man but was a rich playboy. His family had money, and his job at Aeolian-Skinner was prestigious, but he did not sweat to put out organs as Mr. Harrison had. His main interest was opera, and he enjoyed going to all the opening night performances. He had a certain amount of input of value, but not like Harrison’s. After Mr. Harrison died, Joe realized the job was more than he could handle. He eased out of it, and that was the decline of the company. It went slowly downhill from there.

LM: How did you react to the news of Mr. Harrison’s death?
NW: I cried and cried and cried. And, I could do it very easily right now, too.

LM: I’ve heard that you would sometimes rescale some organs as they arrived from the factory after Mr. Harrison died.
NW: Honey! At St. Mark’s in Shreveport I had to cut every mixture pipe in that organ! They locked me in a room! Roy and Jimmy would take a sample pipe and figure out how high they wanted it cut, then would give me the proportional dividers. I would scribe it, go through and get them all marked, then cut them up. This went on for over a week—maybe even two. We would do this and not let the bosses know. It was always, “Don’t tell Whiteford,” or, “Don’t tell Gillett.”

LM: So you did it with other organs, too?
NW: Oh, yes—First Baptist in Chattanooga was one we messed with a lot. Don Gillett sent down what he thought were the perfect mixture compositions. We had boxes of our own pipes and used them to rescale his mixtures. Nobody ever knew the difference. In fact, Roy had taken Gillett to task when he was setting up the composition for those mixtures in the first place. Gillett would not back down, though, so Roy agreed to it. However, when the organ arrived, Roy had us change the mixture compositions to his own liking. When Gillett came down to try the organ, Roy asked him what he thought of the mixtures. Don played a few notes and said, “See, I told you it would work!” Roy said, “You were right.” We would go behind his back and change all sorts of things, and he never knew the difference.
This was just at the time of the death throes of the company. Aeolian-Skinner had hired a man from Canada to oversee all the installations. When we got on the job at First Baptist in Chattanooga, he had us working long hours. He really pushed us, and we would work some nights until midnight. He brought a man and his son from Canada to assist in construction and erection, while we worked on metal and wiring. At the end of each day, we would go back and soak in a hot tub—it was wintertime. Finally, this man from Canada came in and said, “Look, they’re running behind at the factory. Slow down!”
The Chattanooga organ is a nice one, but it was a difficult installation for all of us. Everything was coming down to an intermediate switchboard, so I had double the amount of cables to hook up. One wall of the room where I was working was covered with fiberglass. I didn’t realize it, but I was being covered with fiberglass particles. My arms felt like needles were going through them. And, at some point, Jimmy fell through a floor. Plus, it was cold, cold, cold.
Don Gillett came down to Chattanooga and was out at the motel with us. He always drank something called “Heaven Hills Whiskey.” Roy called it “Heaving Hill.” While we were sitting there, having drinks, Don told us about all the changes going on in the company. I looked at him and said, “This is the end, isn’t it? This is the swan song.” He wouldn’t say yes, and wouldn’t say no. I could tell by his silence, though, that the end was near.

LM: Was that your last installation for Aeolian-Skinner?
NW: No. Laurel, Mississippi was our last job with the company, although we rebuilt the Aeolian-Skinner in Columbus, Georgia shortly thereafter. We did the Columbus job independently. Don Gillett had overseen its installation, and it was a disaster. The preacher there, Jim Johnson, who had been in Laurel, Mississippi, was trying to get his former organist, A.G. Bowen, to come from Laurel to take the organ job. A.G. told the preacher he would only take the job if the organ were completely redone. The preacher said fine (he was one of the few preachers on the side of music), so, Jimmy and I went up to see it. I was very apprehensive. It was such a mish-mash that every piece of wood had a different job number on it. Aeolian-Skinner had made the organ out of scraps, and had used anything they had on hand, so that there was no continuity to it. Behind the façade was an enormous drape made out of what must have been the most absorbent material possible. The organ sounded like someone talking with his hand over his mouth. Everything was undercooked, and I had no confidence we could do anything with it. Jimmy was convinced we could, though, and we set up shop. Jimmy set up a voicing room, and we had John Hendricksen come down and revoice everything. We tore down acres and acres of cloth, rescaled things, and added an exposed division and a big reed. It turned out to be one of our best installations—First Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Georgia.
Jimmy incorporated the exposed Great into the existing façade, which had gold pipes. On the back of the new chest was a metal flute. This rich lady from the church came in one day and told us she did not like the way that flute looked there, and that her “architect” said its pipes should also be gold. Roy had already programmed one of his famous silver flutes into the design of the rebuilt swell organ, so he said, “Well, we’ll just have to have a ‘gold flute,’ too.” So, First Presbyterian, Columbus, Georgia is the only organ I know of that has a “Flute D’Argent” and a “Flute D’Or.”

The show must go on.

Each month, The Diapason sports a flashy color photo of a pipe organ on the front cover. (So do the other guys.) These photos show the glamorous side of the trade—exciting new instruments and important renovation projects. The “centerfold” articles typically include statements by the organbuilder, the local musician, the pastor, and chair of the organ committee. Each is testament to a bold adventure in which a local church or educational institution commits a lot of effort and a ton of money to the commissioning and building, or rebuilding, of a musical instrument.

Once an organ is installed, and the celebration is past, it’s important to maintain it so it will always sound its best, and the owners’ investment is protected. I’ve just spent a week in Boston doing service calls, reflecting on how that work has changed over the years, and enjoying those long relationships with the instruments and their buildings.

Job one

Tuning, cleaning, and repairing of dead notes and ciphers make up the bulk of the routine of pipe organ maintenance, but I think the most important part of the job is being sure the organ is safe. Countless organs have been damaged or destroyed by fire, roof leaks, vandalism, and other forces. This past August, an early organ built by John Brombaugh was lost when the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, was destroyed by fire, and I have been corresponding with a church in North Carolina that lost a fine Schantz organ to fire early this year. I know that the parish in North Carolina had proper and adequate insurance coverage, so they will be able to rebuild and to replace their pipe organ. I hope the same for the people in Lorain, but Brombaugh’s Opus 4 is surely irreplaceable.

The careful organ technician should encourage the owner of a pipe organ to review their insurance policies to be sure that the organ is properly covered. It’s common for people to find that the organ is insured for its original purchase price—fine if the organ is a few years old, but you’re going to lose big if your four-manual E. M. Skinner organ is insured for the same $27,000 that bought it in 1928. It’s usual for an insurance company to require an assessment of the organ. This can be provided by your organ technician, the company that originally built the instrument, or by any knowledgeable and reputable organbuilder. The assessment report should include photographs of the organ, inside and out, to document its complexity, accurate specifications, the history of any rebuilding projects or major repairs, and mention of any prominent musicians who have performed on it. And the figure stated as “replacement value” should include consideration of quality of construction, description of the degree of ornamentation of an organ case, gold leaf, and any special voices included that are particularly expensive or difficult to obtain. For example, an original Skinner Harp is worth a truckload of Tierces!

The careful organ technician will also encourage the organ’s owner to inspect the roof and walls that surround the organ, and the condition of heating, ventilation, and plumbing equipment that may pass through the organ chambers. Recently, a lovely Aeolian-Skinner organ in my care suffered significant damage to the static reservoir and Spencer blower located in the basement of the church, caused by the rupture of a frozen water main. The lower level of the building was flooded—lots of flooring, carpeting, and furniture were destroyed, and the repairs to the organ were fully covered by the comprehensive scope of the insurance policy.

One bad shingle, one missing piece of flashing, and the right storm can wreck an organ.

Hygiene

In my home parish in the 1960s the sexton was an old gent from the back woods of Maine, complete with the authentic accent and the salty talk. My father, the rector, kept a running list of Don Wilkins’s colorful turns of phrase and when Don retired, published a pamphlet recalling them. Don organized the care of the building’s “systems,” kept the floors clean, and wearing an old white Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled up and a skinny dark tie, made and served the Sunday morning coffee. Forty and fifty years ago, the standing equipment in a building like that wasn’t as sophisticated or complicated as it is now, and Don knew how to keep the place humming and sparkling.

It’s common now for churches not to have sextons, but to hire cleaning contractors instead. The volunteers on the property committee look after the physical plant, and simply put, I’ve seen some pretty big mishaps resulting from well-meaning, volunteer oversight. 

My dictionary has two definitions for the word oversight:

1. An unintentional failure to notice or do something.

2. The action of overseeing something.

Definition 2 describes the well-meaning committee member. Definition 1 describes the inevitable result of uninformed supervision. 

It’s too bad when failing to change a filter leads to a mechanical disaster. Hiring professional cleaners while relying on volunteer mechanical maintenance is a false economy. It would be better to have volunteers cleaning, and hire a stationary engineer to look after the equipment. A two-hour visit each month would do it. He would create a schedule for maintenance of the HVAC and elevator motors, alarm systems, and other necessary equipment. He would recommend contractors and oversee their work.

Over years of writing reports for consultation clients, I’ve used the term Institutional Hygiene. I use it to describe the general condition of a building as it affects and influences the care of the equipment. Using mechanical areas for general storage is the perfect example. Decades-old Christmas decorations stacked around and against a furnace is the next thing to arson. In one client church, I have to pass through an attic to reach the organ chamber. During a tuning, I noticed a “Manger Hay Bale” piled with the artificial Christmas trees. There was vapor, some combination of steam and smoke, coming from the bale—composting for Christ. I schlepped it down the ladder and mentioned it to the administrator in the church office, then went to lunch. When I got back, the hay bale was back in the attic, smoking away. Bad hygiene.

There was the frantic call on a Saturday morning: the church is full, the bride has arrived, and the organ won’t play. “I turned on the blower switch and the lights came on, but no sound.” I raced to the church, arriving to the din of vamping bagpipes, to find a card table sucked up against the air intake for the organ blower. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist who said she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. I found a stack of folding chairs on the reservoir, doubling the wind pressure. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist of the church with the card table, saying she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. This one was out of their control. The Public Library across the street was being demolished, and they were using dynamite to move stone so the foundation for the new building could be deeper. Every capped pipe and every reed pipe had the daylights knocked out of it!

There’s another level of hygiene that’s a little more sensitive to discuss because it involves your personal habits. A cup of coffee (especially with sugar) or a can of soda is a terrible thing to introduce to your organ console. Maybe it’s sitting innocently on the stop jamb and seems pretty safe, but there have been two episodes in my career when such a quaff has fallen onto the keyboards. Felt bushings, silver contacts, even the glue that holds the ivories to the keys can be compromised and the repair can cost many thousands of dollars.

I’m lucky enough to have a vintage rosewood Steinway at home that came to me through generations of my family. We have a sign next to it that says, “Nothing on the piano, please.” I do not hesitate to speak up when a guest places a drink on my rosewood. It’s not about the wood—there’s an impervious finish on it. It’s about the sensitive, delicate, balanced action inside, made of wood, and bedecked with felt and various fine metals. It’s one instance when a martini is not a preservative.

Many organists don’t like to be called on this issue, so take this as a quiet and anonymous hint. The damage caused by such a spill is not worth the cost of a cup of coffee.

Second to a sugary drink, paperclips are the enemy of the organ’s keyboards. They can cause keys to jam together, and they can wind up on the contacts causing wild cross-ciphers.

And there was the call…

There are a lot of things an organist can do to help the tuner/technician, and many of them are based in common sense. It’s not always easy to tell where a problem is coming from, and mishaps like ciphers can be intermittent. If an organist calls to say there was a cipher on Sunday, but it went away, there’s nothing I can do. If in the heat of battle, you hear a cipher but can’t stop to locate it, there are a few clues that might help recreate it.

Maybe you’re sharp enough to tell me which note of which stop ciphered. If you were playing a trumpet tune as a wedding march, I bet a dollar that the cipher happened when you trilled between F# and G on the Great Trumpet. But if it was more elusive, you can give me a hint.

As soon as you finish the hymn, anthem, or response during which the cipher occurred, jump for your Organ Notebook (don’t tell me there’s no organ notebook on the console!), and write down the piece you were playing, and what registration or piston you were using. Leave the music on the console with a note saying on what page, on what line, in what measure the cipher occurred. If I play the same music with the same registration, the cipher might reappear. If I hear it, I’ll fix it. You can even narrow down the division. While you’re hearing the cipher, make up an excuse to use the Swell pedal. You’ll know right away if the cipher was in the Swell. That may not seem like much, but a clue is a clue. If I know you had a cipher in the Swell strings, I’ll stand in the Swell box while my assistant runs up and down the keyboard. Maybe I’ll hear a little whimper. If I hear it, I’ll fix it!

And there was the call from the organist who left a message on the answering machine saying, “The F-key sounds funny.” (True story.) Hmm. There are twenty-five stops on two keyboards, and eight stops in the pedals. That makes 274 “F-keys” in the organ. And maybe it’s not a single pipe that sounds funny. I’m not sure of which equation to use to compute the number of possible of combinations, but let’s say I square 274. That’s 75,076 possibilities. You can be specific (Great Melodia, #30, F above middle C, etc.), or you can help me find it (Hymn 242, third line, second measure, General 3). I’ll find it.

And there was the call from the cathedral organist. That organ has more than eighty stops on four manuals, and it’s more than an hour away. He called in a panic: “The organ is wildly out of tune.” I know very well that unless there has been some big event, like the dynamite at the library, a huge organ in a big stone church doesn’t just fly out of tune. But I jumped in the car, and raced to the cathedral. One pipe in the Pedal Clarion was out of tune. To be fair, it was way out of tune, but to this day, I can’t imagine why he didn’t poke around for a moment to identify it. Was it worth my losing a Saturday afternoon with my family? I think he would have been fine without the Pedal Clarion.

And there was the call from the organist of a church on Martha’s Vineyard. If you’re not familiar with “The Vineyard,” all you need to know is that it’s a quiet little sand-spit of an island offshore from Cape Cod in Massachusetts that morphs into an elite playground for the rich and famous during the summer. U.S. Presidents go there to play golf. Senators keep their lavish wooden yachts there. The summer social life on Martha’s Vineyard is transplanted directly from Embassy Row in Washington.

But this call was off-season. It was Maundy Thursday, and the organ was ciphering. Early the following morning, Good Friday, of course, I drove the hundred miles to the ferry slip, paid $90 for a round-trip ticket, enjoyed the hour-long passage to the island, drove to the church, fixed the cipher, and went home. The whole adventure took ten hours, and included two hundred miles of driving plus the cost of the ferry. I sent an invoice for nearly a thousand dollars. The organist was furious. “You were only in the church for ten minutes.” True enough, but I fixed your cipher on Good Friday, and it took all day. (By the way, I had my own service to play that night.) 

The tuner is coming this week.

There is a short list of things that you, the organist, can do to prepare for my visit. I’m sure my colleagues in this important work will have things to add, and I look forward to hearing from them.

1. Clean up around the console. The tools of your trade include hymnals, organ music, octavo scores, empty coffee cups (tsk!), paper clips (tsk!), cough drops, Kleenex (fresh and used), nail clippers and files, Post-Its, rolls of tape, hair brushes, etc. I can move them for you, but the meter is running, and I’ll never be able to put things back where they were. I’ve used my cell phone camera to document the piles of music, but it’s a nuisance. If you know I’m coming, take a half hour after the service to straighten things up.

2. Be sure the heat or air conditioning will be on. The rule is simple: We want to tune the organ in the same conditions for which it’s used in public. If the heat is turned up to 68˚ two hours before the service, turn the heat up to 68˚ two hours before the tuning. There was the time when after three or four visits to a certain church with the heat forgotten each time, the sexton announced to us joyfully, “I’ve got it good and hot in there for you this time.” That didn’t help!

3. Leave me a note. I trust that you’ve been writing things down in the notebook. (Don’t tell me there’s no notebook!) But take a minute to share your observations and concerns. You can call, text, e-mail, or leave an “analog” note on the console. If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll do my best, but I may not stumble across what’s bothering you most.

4. Follow up. Please don’t call me ten weeks later saying, “Ever since you were here …” The organ changes character when the temperature changes, it’s affected by humidity—especially rain—or extreme dryness. If I missed something, or if something jumped out of tune, let me know that week.

If you don’t know the rules, let me clean the keyboards. A heavy spray of detergent and a lot of scrubbing will cause damage. 

Above all, it’s best if you and I know each other. We should have lunch together once in a while, or at least a good chat in the choir loft. I’d like to hear you play, to see how you sit at the keyboards. I can tell a lot by studying your piston settings, but the more I know about how you use the organ, the better. Feel free to ask me about the organ. The more you know about the organ, the better. Let’s keep that thing sounding good. 

Thar she blows—some more

While writing my column last month I ran out of space and had plenty of air left, so today I continue my stream-of-consciousness about organ wind. (You might want to reread the April typhoon first.) I ended last month with a literary reference—let’s start this month with another, this time from American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894):

The Organ Blower

Devoutest of my Sunday friends,
The patient Organ-blower bends;
I see his figure sink and rise,
(Forgive me, Heaven, my wandering eyes!)
A moment lost, the next half seen,
His head above the scanty screen,
Still measuring out his deep salaams
Through quavering hymns and panting psalms.

No priest that prays in gilded stole,
To save a rich man’s mortgaged soul;
No sister, fresh from holy vows,
So humbly stoops, so meekly bows;
His large obeisance puts to shame
The proudest genuflecting dame,
Whose Easter bonnet low descends
With all the grace devotion lends.

O brother with the supple spine,
How much we owe those bows of thine!
Without thine arm to lend the breeze,
How vain the finger on the keys!
Though all unmatched the player’s skill,
Those thousand throats were dumb and still:
Another’s art may shape the tone,
The breath that fills it is thine own.

Six days the silent Memnon waits
Behind his temple’s folded gates;
But when the seventh day’s sunshine falls
Through rainbowed windows on the walls,
He breathes, he sings, he shouts, he fills
The quivering air with rapturous thrills;
The roof resounds, the pillars shake,
And all the slumbering echoes wake!

The Preacher from the Bible-text
With weary words my soul has vexed
(Some stranger, fumbling far astray
To find the lesson for the day);
He tells us truths too plainly true,
And reads the service all askew,—
Why, why the—mischief—can’t he look
Beforehand in the service-book?

But thou, with decent mien and face,
Art always ready in thy place;
Thy strenuous blast, whate’er the tune,
As steady as the strong monsoon;
Thy only dread a leathery creak,
Or small residual extra squeak,
To send along the shadowy aisles
A sunlit wave of dimpled smiles.

Not all the preaching, O my friend,
Comes from the church’s pulpit end!
Not all that bend the knee and bow
Yield service half so true as thou!
One simple task performed aright,
With slender skill, but all thy might,
Where honest labor does its best,
And leaves the player all the rest.

This many-diapasoned maze,
Through which the breath of being strays,
Whose music makes our earth divine,
Has work for mortal hands like mine.

My duty lies before me. Lo,
The lever there! Take hold and blow!
And He whose hand is on the keys
Will play the tune as He shall please.

Such an eloquent daydream! Holmes was a doctor of medicine and held a chair of anatomy and physiology at Harvard for most of his working life.1 He has us in a church with “shadowy aisles,” but I picture him sitting in a white New England church with lots of clear glass, a little woozy from the bright sunlight. There’s a black-walnut organ case up front behind the pulpit, and the pump-handle sticks out the right-hand side of the case. Perhaps our dreamer missed a brilliant sermon that morning, but he seemed not to hold the preacher in high esteem: He tells us truths too plainly true, and reads the service all askew . . . Instead we get a rare glimpse at 19th-century worship in which we see the organ-pumper as a participant in the service, “scanty screen” notwithstanding. I’ve never designed or built a new organ with a manual pumping system. I would have imagined that I would try to place the pump handle out of sight so the motion wouldn’t detract from the worship, but perhaps that would deprive the congregation from deeper insight into the Word of God. The pump handles of many of the antique organs I know stick out of the side of the instrument where the motion of the pumping would have been quite a spectacle. I wonder how many worshipers made the connection between the volume of the music and the speed of the pumping?
The largest single part of most 19th-century American pipe organs is the reservoir. Recently I was inspecting a large Hook organ in New York City as the Organ Clearing House prepares to dismantle it, and I measured the reservoir at 12' x 6', double rise, with two feeder bellows underneath, each of which is half the size of the main reservoir. (In this organ, the pump handle was inside the case.) I was looking at it from a logistical point of view—the OCH crew will soon have to lift it out of the organ loft—but as I like to imagine the organ as a living, breathing entity, this enormous and heavy mechanism is one of the organ’s vital organs. If the reservoir is 12' x 6' and opens 18" when full of air, it has a capacity of about 108 cubic feet. The feeders open about a foot and are wedge-shaped—as they each take up half the area of the reservoir, each has a capacity of about 18 cubic feet. The pump-handle pivots between the two feeders—when the handle goes up, one feeder opens and the other closes so one cycle of the pump-handle (up and down) feeds 36 cubic feet into the reservoir—assuming no leaks, it takes three strokes to fill the reservoir. Right? Read on.
Fill the reservoir and then stop pumping. Play a hymn on one stop. You’ll get through a whole verse, maybe more, before the bellows is empty. Pump it up again and play the same hymn on full organ. This time you’ll run out of air before you finish the first line. You might have to pump twice a measure to keep air moving at full organ. How’s that for scientific?
With few exceptions, the case (especially the footprint) of a 19th-century organ is much larger than that of a modern organ with the same number of ranks. Why? I’ll give you one reason. Walk around the modern organ case and you’ll find the reservoir mounted on a frame behind the organ. The footprint of the 19th-century organ is established by the size of the reservoir located inside the case.
Most 19th-century instruments have a service access door at ground level which means that the first thing a visitor sees inside the organ is the reservoir. Actually, what they see is an ocean of bricks stretching into the darkness and they always ask why an organ needs bricks. The weight of the bricks creates the pressure. Forcing air into an elastic reservoir (an organ bellows with hinged ribs) will not create pressure until we add weight to the top of the reservoir. The amount of weight determines the level of pressure—add weight and the pressure increases.
One colleague of mine made it a practice to use indigenous materials to weigh the bellows in the instruments he built. One organ was near a granite quarry, another, marble. One was near old shoe-making factories so they used the cast-iron heel molds.
I said that three strokes of a 36-cubic-foot pumping cycle would fill a reservoir that holds 108 cubic feet. Wrong! To put air under pressure you compress it. So it takes many more than three strokes of atmospheric pressure to fill that reservoir. (That math is beyond me!)
Bricks used as reservoir weights are often wrapped in paper. Why go to all that trouble? Bricks are porous and can absorb moisture from the air, which increases their weight, and the paper inhibits absorption. The organ is tuned and voiced at a specific pressure. If the pressure goes up too much, the sound of the organ will be compromised. Imagine the reaction of the organ tuner when he arrives at the church and finds a stack of folding chairs stored on top of the reservoir!
The floating top frame of the reservoir with all its bricks is very heavy—you can’t budge it. But the organ’s wind lifts it effortlessly. And when it’s full, a touch at one end makes the whole thing rock gently—a wonderful illustration of both the power and the delicacy of this musical air. Our friend the organ-pumper can move mountains with his pump handle. There are few natural forces more powerful than air. An airliner overshoots the end of the runway, the landing gear collapses, and emergency workers lift the plane with huge inflatable bags placed under the wings. Air moving fast across the countryside (wind) blows the roof off a barn. You stand on the platform of a railway station and an express train roars through—the blast of air pushed aside by the locomotive almost knocks you over. Or sit in a sailboat at noon on a calm sunny day. As you glide gently along the glassy water you notice a line of rough water a thousand yards away moving toward you. The heat of the sun has warmed the land. The air above the land is rising, and the air above the cooler water is rushing ashore to fill the void. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. (A barometer measures atmospheric pressure—a falling barometer is an indication of coming wind—a fast falling barometer indicates an impending storm.) The wind is above the surface so your sail is filled before the rough water gets to you. The boat heels and the water bubbles out from under your stern as you race across the water. Does the blowing wind push the boat along? If that’s all it could do, then the boat could only move in the same direction as the wind. The curve of the sail is the exact equivalent of the curve of the top of an airplane wing, turned ninety degrees from horizontal to vertical. The plane is pushed forward by its engines. Since the curved top of the wing is a longer distance to cover than the flat bottom, the air on top of the wing moves faster. The faster moving air creates a lower pressure above the wing than below, and the plane lifts toward the lower pressure. The curve of the boat’s sail makes the wind move faster across the front of the sail than the back, and the boat is drawn forward. The racing sailor’s jargon includes the word lift which refers to a gust of wind. I got lifted to the first racing mark.
As I visit organbuilders’ workshops, I’ve noticed with both pleasure and amusement how common it is to find half-finished sailboat parts (rudders, tillers, etc.) stored under the workbenches; the employees’ weekend projects mix woodworking with wind. There is a strong correlation between sailboats and pipe organs. In my interpretation, it’s no accident that the logo of C. B. Fisk, Inc. (organbuilders in Gloucester, Massachusetts) is the masts, yards, and rigging of a square-rigged sailing ship.
When you play four verses of a hymn on a large organ you send 10,000 cubic feet of pressurized air (2500 ft3/minute x 4 minutes) out of the blower, through the reservoirs, through the pipes, and into the sanctuary converted into sound energy. I don’t believe speakers can duplicate that.
Today, we slide onto the organ bench and flip a switch. An electric motor comes on turning a fan that blows air through ducts into the reservoirs. When the fast-moving air is contained by the reservoir with weights (or springs) pushing down on its top, pressure is created, regulated, and stored until you are ready to use it by playing. In a large organ, the blower is a huge machine hidden in a remote location. It might be the size of a small car and have a 10, 20, or even 30 horsepower motor. Many people never throw the switch that turns on a machine that large. Among other industrial innovations, the development of the jet engine has resulted from research about the nature of moving air so modern blowers can be much smaller and quieter than the older monsters that lurk in church basements. It’s common for a newer blower to be installed right inside the organ. This means less work and expense building windlines, and it means that the organ pipes are sitting in the same atmosphere that’s being used to blow them. When an organ blower sits in a cold basement room, the cool air blowing through the warm pipes upsets the tuning. And remember our 10,000-cubic-feet-per-hymn; think of the waste of heating fuel when you blow that much basement air into a heated sanctuary.
The organ blower is a great convenience. Imagine if scheduling organ-pumpers were added to the more familiar chores of the modern church organist. But don’t take that blower switch for granted. Think of all that grand air rushing through your instrument, converting to sound energy as it goes through the pipes, blending with the body of air-driven sound coming from the lungs of the congregation. It’s a winning combination.
One Saturday morning I received a frantic call from the organist of a church whose organ I maintain. A wedding was about to start and the organ wouldn’t work. She could hear that the blower turned on and the console lit up the way it always does, but no sound anywhere. I rushed to the church to find limousines lined up out front, and photographers running around. The church was full, and the bagpipe was vamping (egads!) to fill the time. Sure enough, the blower was running and the console was lit (so I knew that the power supply was on), but the bellows hadn’t risen—there was no air pressure in the organ. I ran to the basement where I found a card table resting against the organ blower’s air intake. That’s all it took. No air, no music. Can a card table stop bagpipes?