Noack Organ Company, Inc., Opus 162, recently completed in St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., was dedicated in recital by Philippe Lefevbre, organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris, on November 14.
The three-manual, mechanical-action instrument has 47 stops and two enclosed divisions.
For information: www.noackorgan.com.
When you blow through here, music comes out.
The long-running syndicated cartoon, The Family Circus, features a mother and father and four kids, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and P. J. One early episode had Daddy, Dolly, and Billy coming home after attending a game. Daddy was bedraggled, carrying a blanket; Dolly and Billy were excitedly carrying team banners as they shouted to Mom, “. . . and we each had a bottle of soda. Daddy brought his own in his pocket.” There are several circulating versions that show the family leaving church, with one of the kids saying something hilarious. My current favorite shows Billy holding a trumpet and pointing at the mouthpiece, explaining to the toddler P. J., “when you blow through here, music comes out.”
That’s the magic of the pipe organ. When you blow through here, music comes out. We refer to the organ as a keyboard instrument. Fair enough. But the keyboards are nothing but user interface. The organ is a wind instrument. I believe that you can tell by listening if the player thinks of it as a keyboard instrument or a wind instrument. The legends of Aeolus, the god who in Greek mythology is the divine keeper of the winds, and who has given his name to at least two organ companies, can provide a fanciful magical idea of the power of wind. But in fact, a musical tone coming from a single organ pipe with the Pythagorean overtone series intact is magic that can be explained scientifically and can be left in the background as the tone soars through the air toward the listeners’ ears.
But wait. Draw twenty stops and play a four-note chord. Now you have eighty of those Pythagorean masterpieces singing at once. As I write, my tuner’s ears tingle with delight. Eighty different sets of overtones, each in the myriad a perfect interval, all clanging against the tempered intervals imposed by the rigors of the keyboards. No miniscule inflection by bending a string with your finger or squeezing your lips around a reed to tweak something into exact tune, just the thrilling clangor of pure and tempered intervals pushing against each other. It is like combining chili pepper and honey to make sweet-and-sour sauce, or warm pastry and cold ice cream to make baked Alaska. Bourbon and vermouth, gin and tonic, peanut butter and jelly.
Wendy and I are in Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the new Noack organ at Saint Peter’s Catholic Church on Capitol Hill. We arrived on the first day of the public impeachment hearings in Congress, and we were interviewed by NPR and FOX News as we ate lunch in a pub. Text messages and emails poured in during the evening as friends and family heard Wendy speaking on All Things Considered.
I stopped in the church after lunch to greet Philippe Lefebvre, the recitalist, and Didier Grassin of the Noack Organ Company, and was privileged to walk through the organ with Didier as Philippe worked on registrations. Inside the organ is the worst place to listen for balance, but it sure is fun—all those trackers flitting about. There is no better place to be reminded of Billy’s quip, “When you blow in here, music comes out.” There’s a whole lot of blowing going on inside a big organ like that.
That ingenious business
So reads the title of Ray Brunner’s monograph about America’s only eighteenth-century organbuilder, David Tannenberg, who built his first organ in 1770. Recently, I visited a couple of organs in Germany built earlier than that, both huge ebullient ornate masterpieces located in stupendously decorated churches. But think of America in the 1770s. In Lexington, Massachusetts, Minutemen were skulking along behind stone walls, peppering British Redcoats with musket fire. The buildings were all four-sided, wood-framed structures. Fun-loving Puritans felt that putting decoration on a wall might inspire dancing, and only heaven knows what that might lead to. By comparison, the monks in the Abbey of Saint Martin in Weingarten must have had plenty of fun. Remember, Weingarten translates to “wine garden,” and the organbuilder Joseph Gabler was treated to enough wine to fill the largest organ pipe as a completion bonus.
Since those beautiful and simple organs of Tannenberg, we have had the robust organs of E. & G. G. Hook, the innovative and expressive instruments of the Skinner Organ Company, the amalgamated workhorse organs of M. P. Möller, the powerful renegade early organs of C. B. Fisk, the procession of “boutique” tracker builders like Taylor & Boody, Paul Fritts, and Richards, Fowkes & Co., and the serene majestic work of Schoenstein.
The Noack organ at St. Peter’s represents a large part of that progression. The company’s founder Fritz Noack learned the trade at Beckerath in Hamburg, Germany. He worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brumzema, and Charles Fisk before founding the eponymous company in 1960. Early Noack organs were experimental, among the first to reintroduce tracker action to the United States. Some were quirky, some were wind sick, some were spectacular. Along with Fisk, the Andover Organ Company, and a few others, Noack was reinventing the wheel, bringing centuries of knowledge to a new forum.
Fritz Noack told me that Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts, is the only street in the United States zoned specifically for pipe organ building, so designated when he applied for a variance to convert an old school building into a workshop. Entering the workshop, you encounter a photo gallery showing each instrument, up to Opus 162 at Saint Peter’s in Washington. One hundred sixty-two organs is an impressive life’s work, produced over fifty-nine years, with the Washington organ being the first to be produced entirely under the leadership of Didier Grassin. One hundred sixty-two organs that represent the last five decades of the organ in America. The designs evolve from simple and unadorned to a variety of lavishly decorated styles and show the development of an artist over a long career.
The organ at Saint Peter’s combines elements of all these styles. It has sensitive mechanical keyboard action, quick and silent electric-solenoid slider stop action, a sophisticated solid-state combination action, two effective enclosed divisions, a beautiful solid oak case, and an elegant detached console, perfectly placed to allow an organist to lead a choir and to sit back a few feet from the organ to better hear the balance between divisions.
Make straight in the desert a pathway . . .
You may think that the act of building an organ is only just that, building an organ, but in fact, that is the easy part. Behind every new organ there are years of discussing, negotiating, and compromising before the people of a church ever talk with an organbuilder. Providing an organ with a comfortable political base is the first challenge. One might think that the process of creating a work of art is simple. Choose an artist, pay the money, and sit back and watch—but no. Start with the organist who “needs” a Flûte Harmonique, and the organbuilder who says it will not fit. Continue with the architect who resents the imposition of something designed by others being plopped into his perfect space. And what about the priest who considers the organ a distraction from the liturgy? A harmonica and kazoo duet would be less intrusive.
American comedian Allen Sherman (1924–1973, famous for Hello mudda, hello fadda, here I am at Camp Grenada . . . .) created a hilarious parody of Peter and the Wolf that he sang with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, which included the quip, “. . . and we all know the saying that is true as well as witty, that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.”
Next week, my colleague Amory Atkins and I are traveling to visit a future client to discuss the preparation of a large church building for the installation of a new organ. When we arrive at the church, we will have time to inspect the building before participating in a meeting with architects, engineers, clergy, and musicians, with eighteen people present. No one from the company that’s actually building the organ will be there so we will be representing them in a conversation that will include people bringing at least four different points of view to the table. Eighteen people.
This may seem unwieldy and wasteful, and in fact, it probably will be unwieldy. But the point of the meeting is at least parallel and in some ways unrelated to the building of the organ. The point of the meeting is to prepare a place for the organ, making “the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.” It will be our job to produce a level floor (place a marble on the floor, and it will stand still), square walls, neat and smooth surfaces, and to create an environment for the organ that will be dry, clean, and have an even and reliable climate. If the floor is not level, the organ’s soft metal pipes will be first leaning, then bending, then crimping at the rackboards and falling over. If the floor is not level, the mechanical parts will operate with extra friction. If the floor is not level, the organ will look cockeyed. If there is not a reliable climate, the organ will not retain tuning, and soft parts will get moldy, hard parts will oxidize, and the whole system will slow down.
A living art
The art of organbuilding came alive for me again last night as we sat in Saint Peter’s Church. The evening began with a service of sung vespers. The church’s organist Kevin O’Brien led choirs of children and of adults through the world premieres of several settings of antiphons, and Bishop Michael Fisher of the Archdiocese of Washington blessed the organ:
Lord God, your beauty is ancient yet ever new, your wisdom guides the world in right order, and your goodness gives the world its variety and splendor. The choirs of angels join together to offer their praise by obeying your commands. The galaxies sing your praises by the pattern of their movement that follows your laws. The voices of the redeemed join in the chorus of praise to your holiness as they sing to you in mind and heart. We your people, joyously gathered in this church, wish to join our voices to the universal hymn of praise. So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty, we present this organ for your blessing: grant that its music may lead us to express our prayer and praise in melodies that are pleasing to you.
There was a collective gasp from the organbuilders present as the bishop sprinkled holy water toward the organ. We were in about the fifth pew from the front, a hundred feet from the organ so we could not really see, but I guessed that the water did not actually hit the organ—I suppose the bishop had been coached—but I am sure some choir members went home blessed.
After an interval before the recital, the Reverend Gary Studniewski, the gregarious pastor of Saint Peter’s, addressed the congregation, referring to the long history of parishioners who “provided the means” for this organ and to the “passion of not a few” as he introduced Didier Grassin, president of the Noack Organ Company. Didier poetically compared the role of the organbuilder at the dedication to the boat builder who launches his product on the sea, or the parent who launches a child into the world—the organ enters the world with its unique voice, and “ultimately, its soul.”
He pointed out that the pipes that are visible, including thirty polished Principal façade pipes and forty-two horizontal Trumpet pipes, are among the 2,599 pipes in the organ, and he colorfully compared the nine hundred cubic-feet-per-minute capacity of the organ’s blower to the breath of three thousand people. I like the imagery of the organ and the singing congregation sharing the same body of air to produce their tones, which I believe is a metaphysical argument in favor of acoustic pipe organs. It seems natural to expand that image to give the organ a three-to-one advantage in breath capacity over a congregation of a thousand people. Use it wisely, you organists. No one likes a bully.
Didier concluded with the image of the organbuilder returning to the workshop, taking on the next project, knowing that the organ would be present for the people of the church, “Sunday after Sunday.”
Parish organist Kevin O’Brien reflected on the seventeen years that have passed between expression of a vision and the dedication of the new organ. He acknowledged his gratitude for the opportunity to work with the several priests who led that journey. He thanked the choir for their companionship and musicianship, expressing his love for them and calling them the “hardest working people on Capitol Hill.”
Philippe Lefebvre’s recital was sensitively chosen and masterfully played. Each piece had significant chromatic content, especially Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. He neatly demonstrated the difference between eighteenth-century French and German music by juxtaposing Louis Marchand’s “Grand Dialogue” from his Troisième livre d’orgue and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (listed in the program as Fantaisie chromatique et fugue, transcription by Lefebvre)—the organ showed the majesty equal to both the French king and the German duke. While some organists might refuse to play Franck’s Choral in B Minor on an organ lacking a Vox Humana, Lefebvre dipped into alchemy and invented one by combining Oboe, a flute, a string, and a tremulant. Dupré’s Cortège et Litanie, Debussy’s Claire de Lune as transcribed by Lefebvre, and Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain joined as tribute to great organists, now deceased, who were important to Lefebvre. The closing improvisation opened with a fugue, and moved from impudent to Messiaenic (watch your spelling), from majestic to ferocious, and from academic to fanciful, all built on the deep harmonic understanding of a real master of music.
Why are we here?
I was fed by the prayer of dedication offered by Bishop Fisher as it eloquently summed up fifteen centuries of sacred music. “So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty,” we design and build these instruments, placing their voluminous lungs in support of singing congregations.
“So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty,” we tune and maintain these organs, keeping their tones true and pure, and their mechanical systems function reliably in support of the efforts and skills of those who play them.
“So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty,” we practice diligently to develop the skills you have given us, learning and polishing the familiar and creating new music to offer in your praise.
“So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty,” we lead and train choirs who offer music of praise in times of sadness and jubilation.
“So that our song may rise more worthily to your majesty,” we gather to dedicate and celebrate a new organ, and return to our workshops and rehearsal rooms with alacrity to repeat the cycle of praise, preparing the instruments for leading worship and the music that will be played on them, expressing our prayer and praise in melodies that are pleasing to you.
photo credit: Didier Grassin
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”
Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.
RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here
In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.
But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr2 (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.
Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.
Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.
Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:
When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.
The last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr3. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr2h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.
My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.
I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.
Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.
Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.
If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.
Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.1 The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.
As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.
There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.
During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.
A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.
The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.
In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.
Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.
I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.
He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.
I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.
Notes
