Solid State Organ Systems at Disney Hall

Craig R. Whitney, an organist since he was a teenager, worked as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at The New York Times over forty-four years, retiring in 2009. Among his books is All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters (PublicAffairs, 2003).

The twenty-two-rank electro-pneumatic-action pipe organ designed and built by the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co. of Boston, Massachusetts, for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and installed there in 1966 was taken out for a long-needed thorough rejuvenation over the summer by the Schantz Organ Company of Orrville, Ohio. The unique instrument with two manuals and 1,289 pipes in twelve voices and twenty-two ranks was whisked away from Lincoln Center to Ohio last April after undergirding that season’s final performance of Tosca. It was trucked back to New York and reinstalled backstage in the vast opera house at the end of August in a new steel-framed, wheeled enclosure, in time to give powerful support to orchestra and chorus in Tosca again starting October 4, in Peter Grimes a few days later, and Lohengrin in February.

The organ, Aeolian-Skinner’s Opus 1444, was the work of Joseph S. Whiteford when he was company chairman and tonal designer. Schantz made no tonal changes to the instrument, its vice president, Jeffrey Dexter, affirmed. “This was literally a restoration,” he told me. One of the Opera’s organists, Dan Saunders, summed up what had to be done this way, “We played it to death—it needed to be brought back to life.”

Thomas Lausmann, who became the Opera’s director of music administration at the start of the 2019–2020 season, soon heard about the organ’s problems from Douglass Hunt, who looks after organs all around New York City and has been the Metropolitan Opera’s organ technician for thirty-six years. “Doug was afraid that the two main reservoirs might fail,” Lausmann said. “I began to see that the organ was holding on, but for how long, we couldn’t know.” Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s director who had taken on the additional position of music director at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018, heard about the problems and turned to a friend for advice. This was Frederick Haas, himself an organist and a director of his family’s Wyncote Foundation in Philadelphia who has steered major donations to the Philadelphia Orchestra and many other institutions. Historic organ preservation projects are high on the list. “I was always intrigued that the Metropolitan Opera had an organ, and I went up and played it,” Haas told me. “It is original—a weird specification, but then, the organ in an opera is supposed to be under and over the orchestra, not through it.” He agreed that if it needed a complete restoration, he would see to the cost. Wyncote has—all $500,000 of it.

In a sense, Whiteford’s design for the instrument was something of an experiment in the mid-1960s. Aeolian-Skinner and Whiteford had built a four-manual concert hall organ for Philharmonic Hall, next door to the Opera, in 1962, but the opera house did not need a huge instrument; it needed one that could reinforce and undergird full orchestra and chorus in some scenes, and delicately support soloists in others. Writing in The Diapason in 1965, he allowed that the company had produced “a two-manual plan which looks very strange on paper and it is probably the only one around with a 32 ft. reed.” Aeolian-Skinner came up with that plan after doing “a great deal of research” into how many operas called for an organ or harmonium, “a surprising number,” Whiteford admitted. “The organ for opera, in a sense, is like scenery—it is not a complete organ,” he wrote. This one, in his words, is “essentially a Bombarde Organ superimposed on a small but varied group of flue voices.”¹

The whole organ was housed in a single enclosure with swell shades on its front side, all on wheels so it could be moved around. But moving such a bulky and heavy instrument posed challenges, and it was instead planted permanently backstage, stage left (the right side, as seen from the audience) for most of fifty-six years, unseen—but heard, thanks to the ingenuity of the Opera’s technical staff and organists in coping with its peculiarities.

One of the first on the bench was the late John Francis Grady, who went on in 1970 to become organist and music director at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. He was asked then what it was like to play in the opera house. “You might say I play on 63rd Street and the pipes are on 65th,” he told The New York Times. “They’re about a block and a half away, and I must be a quarter of a beat ahead of the conductor at all times.” With most orchestras usually just a shade behind the conductor, he said, “It comes out right when I’m early, they’re late, and he’s in the middle.”²

One of his successors playing organ at the Opera now, Bradley Moore, told me that it was difficult to see the conductor from the console, deep in a far corner of the orchestra pit, under the lip of the stage. “And you couldn’t hear yourself very well down there,” he said. “In Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg once I started playing at the end of the ‘Prelude,’ and when the orchestra subsided and I could hear the organ I realized that I was a whole measure ahead of them.”

So the technical staff devised a visual monitor aimed at the podium that allows the organist to see the conductor on a little screen above the keyboards. They also put a microphone near the organ pipes 150 feet away to allow the organist to hear the instrument more clearly through an audio monitor at the console when it was playing with the orchestra or while accompanying singers.

Still, Howard Watkins, who has been with the Opera for twenty-four years and often plays organ parts, said “the old beast” had become more and more cantankerous over the years—sometimes unexpectedly going silent and sometimes not turning on at all. “Once, in Tosca, it started working but then cut out—the tech staff worked on it almost all through the first act before they could get it going again for me.”

So with the finances for a renovation assured, the Opera decided to go ahead last spring, and Schantz got the job and took the organ away. Lausmann had been through a similar restoration of an opera-organ in his previous post at the State Opera in Vienna. He, Jeff Mace, director of productions operations, and Doug Hunt as project consultant and organ expert all agreed that only one minor change in the pipework ought to be made—replacement of the unusually-shaped shallots in the bottom twenty-four pipes of the 16′ Bombarde register and its extension in the Pedal as a 32′ Contre Bombarde. Whiteford had installed these shallots as an experiment, with a curved shape that had long made the thundering lower notes hard to tune—“fidgety,” as Hunt put it.

Once in Ohio, Schantz built a new and stronger enclosure. Most of the summer, the factory workers were busily cleaning pipes, releathering reservoirs and pneumatics, renewing worn electro-pneumatic components, and they replaced those twenty-four curved-face shallots with straight ones. A small team from the company, led by Rob Baumgartner, then brought it all back from Ohio to New York on a flatbed truck in late August and unloaded it backstage at the Opera. Everything looked good as new as they spent a week putting the organ back together. Smaller pipes were laid out in neat rows on the floor as the workers were putting them into place on the chests, while the big closed 16′ pedal bass pipes stood guard at the other end of the cage—all while dozens of workers from the Opera’s team scuttled around pushing and pulling sets and fixings to get ready for the September season opening.

Baumgartner said Schantz would have brought a bigger crew, but some of the company’s workers lacked covid vaccination certificates, and the Opera has required those of everybody who comes in. But the opera stage crews pitched right in whenever help was needed, as when they lifted an 800-pound chest into place inside the chamber that Baumgartner said would otherwise have required him to build a hoist mechanism. “These are great workers here,” he beamed.

The new enclosure is really a big swell box, a chamber that encloses the whole organ, seventeen feet wide, seventeen feet high, and nine feet deep. It has wheels, steel ones, but since the whole instrument weighs about nine tons, it probably isn’t going to move around any more than it did over its previous lifetime. Its back and side walls of KorPine one-inch thick are overlaid with sheet metal, all flat black. In front, the expression louvers—the original ones, restored—have protective steel bars outside them to ensure no danger of accidental damage from all the surrounding backstage activity. The organ case’s roof is reinforced like its walls to ward off falling objects, and its front is canted upward to 17′ 10¾′′ to better project the organ’s sound. The audience hears the organ after its sound has passed to the main stage and then out into the vast opera house, which can hold up to 4,000 people.

And the organist can only hear it then, too! The console, with two sixty-one-note keyboards, stop and expression controls, and thirty-two-note pedalboard, is almost buried in the orchestra pit, where it always was before, deep down under the lip of the stage on the far-left side as seen from the audience (stage right). The player is facing but cannot see the conductor unobstructed, because of the intervening double-bass stringed instruments and players. Schantz renewed and updated the console mechanism controls with a new solid-state system to transmit commands from organists’ fingers and feet and signals from combination pistons and couplers to the pipes, all designed to be trouble-free, a Multisystem II by Solid State Organ Systems. And all of the new electrical needs of the instrument and connections between the console and the organ were designed and fabricated by the Met’s own electrical department and metal shop personnel.

“Our hope is that we gain a lot more security and better sound,” Howard Watkins said. That is, no more failures, and clearer tone.

Tuning and final voicing touches were being done in September by another team from Schantz led by Jeffrey Dexter, its tonal director. The temperature must be cooled down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit to get the required A–440 Hz pitch, but the Metropolitan Opera can do that even in a heat wave.

And then it was off to the 2022–2023 season. “There’s nothing more thrilling than playing in the ‘Te Deum’ at the end of the first act of Tosca,” enthused Dan Saunders, who was the first to do it again on the restored organ on October 4, hoping to evoke what his colleague Howard Watkins calls “its own magisterial color” and move the audience with the thrilling power of its deep bass and bombarde pedal pipes. And all who were there that night were deeply moved as the full chorus, orchestra, and organ all roared out Puccini’s thrilling setting of “Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur.”

Another renewal, next to the Opera House, followed a week later, the reopening of the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which had an Aeolian-Skinner concert organ when it opened as Philharmonic Hall in 1962 but removed it in 1976 when the hall, renamed earlier for Avery Fisher, was acoustically redesigned. Now, after another renaming as David Geffen Hall, it has been redesigned again. Fred Haas would have been willing to help contribute to get a pipe organ, but, he said, “The powers that be just didn’t want it.” Instead, they settled for a large, pipeless, electronic organ.

Notes

1. Joseph S. Whiteford, “Two Manual Organs,” The Diapason, September 1965: 35.

2. McCandlish Phillips, “St. Patrick’s Names Met Organist as Music Director,” The New York Times, August 31, 1970.

1966 Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co. Opus 1444

MANUAL I (enclosed)

8′ Prinzipal 61 pipes

8′ Bourdon 61 pipes

4′ Oktave 61 pipes

2′ Super Oktave 61 pipes

Mixtur IV–VI 277 pipes

Man I 16

Man I 4

II to I 16

II to I 8

II to I 4

MANUAL II (enclosed)

8′ Gemshorn 61 pipes

8′ Rohrflöte 61 pipes

4′ Flûte Harmonique 61 pipes

2′ Blockflöte 61 pipes

Ripieno VI 366 pipes

16′ Bombarde 61 pipes

8′ Trompette 61 pipes

Man II 16

Man II 4

PEDAL

16′ Subbass (a) 12 pipes (ext Man. I 8′ Bourdon)

16′ Sanftbass 12 pipes (ext Man. II 8′ Rohrflöte)

8′ Prinzipal (Gt 8′)

8′ Gemshorn (Sw 8′)

4′ Prinzipal (Gt 8′)

32′ Contre Bombarde (b) 12 pipes (ext Sw 16′)

16′ Bombarde (Sw 16′)

8′ Bombarde (Sw 16′)

I to Pedal 8

I to Pedal 4

II to Pedal 8

II to Pedal 4

Accessories

6 Ensemble (General) pistons

General Cancel

Balanced expression shoe (with bar graph indicator)

Balanced Crescendo shoe (with bar graph indicator)

Wind indicator

5-3⁄8′′ wind pressure

22 ranks, 20 stops, 12 voices, 1,289 pipes

(a) Pipes in stock, possibly from Opus 408, Trinity Church, New York City, unverified.

(b) Possibly Opus 1433 chest and pipes from First Unitarian Church, Worcester, Massachusetts, unverified.

The life of π

If you have maintained bird feeders, you know what squirrels can do. They are powerful, lithe acrobats, and they can outsmart almost any attempt to deter them. I recognize several individual male gray squirrels in our yard that are strong and agile enough to leap three or four feet from the ground on to the cone-shaped baffles. They shinny up the steel poles, over the tops of the feeders, hang upside down, and gorge themselves.

Some days I think it is okay to feed the squirrels as well as the birds, letting them take turns, but one day last week as I watched them dominate, it occurred to me that I could make a new baffle of different design, a two- or three-foot disc of plywood with flashing around the edge. If they jumped on it, it would surely flip and dump them off. I took a quick measurement and set off to the lumber yard for a sheet of half-inch exterior plywood and some flashing. How much flashing? It comes in ten-, twenty-, and thirty-foot rolls. I told the kid behind the sales desk (he’s younger than my kids) that I planned either a twenty-four- or thirty-inch circle. Let’s see. Twenty-four inches is two feet. Two times π is about six-and-a-quarter feet. Thirty inches times π is a little less than eight feet. Easy. Ten feet will do it.

The kid asked, “What’s π?” I told him it is a number discovered by a Greek mathematician named Archimedes who lived around 250 B.C. that defines all the properties of a circle. Π = roughly 3.14. Multiply π by the diameter of a circle and you get the circumference (c = πd), or multiply π by the radius squared to calculate the area of the circle (a = πr²). I added that Archimedes came up with other really useful ideas like the continuous inclined plane (the thread of a screw), and the properties of levers. “So a carpenter can use math,” he observed. I told him he could also use π to figure out the difference between a twelve- and sixteen-inch pizza. 3.14 x 12 = 37.68 square inches. 3.14 x 16 = 50.24 square inches. (I used the calculator in my iPhone.) Adding four inches to the diameter makes the pizza a lot bigger. If a bite of pizza is two square inches, the bigger pie has twenty-five more bites.

I took the ten-foot roll of flashing, drove into Building 3 to pick up the plywood, and went home to cut my circle. I decided on thirty inches and tied a Sharpie and an awl to a piece of string fifteen inches apart to make a rough compass. I marked and cut the circle, used little screws to attach the flashing to the sombrero-like gizmo, and mounted it on the pole under the bird feeder. It took the squirrels less than two days to get to the feeder.

Simple Simon met a π-man . . .

Carpenters work automatically with increments of sixteen inches, the standard distance between studs, joists, and rafters. To make things easy, most metal tape measures have clear markings every sixteen inches. A good carpenter knows sixteen inches perfectly. A baker makes a twenty- or thirty-pound batch of bread dough and cuts it into one-pound pieces. Maybe he checks each one with a scale, but he develops a knack for the heft of a pound. Our butcher does the same. I ask for a pound of ground beef, he grabs at the bowl, and puts 15.77 ounces on the scale. “You’ve done this before.” Experienced organ tuners develop a similar knack for the length of a pipe relative to the pitch. You hear the pitch and reach for the pipe of the correct length.

I worked in an organ shop that used twenty millimeters as the standard thickness for milling lumber for organ cases. We bought 4/4 (one-inch thick) rough-sawn wood from a lumber yard. Planing it flat and then to thickness, we could reliably get twenty millimeters from it. I had twenty-millimeter wood in my hands so much that I could tell if a stick was nineteen or twenty-one millimeters. Likewise, we set the “key-dip” on a keyboard, the distance of travel for the natural keys. It is usually something like ten or twelve millimeters. If you have spent three or four days leveling keyboards and adjusting key-dip, you can tell a millimeter difference in a heartbeat.

∏ is special. It is approximately 3.14, more accurately 3.14159265359 . . . . There is apparently no limit to the number of digits—as of now, it has been calculated to 31.4 trillion digits and counting. I have no concept of how those digits are calculated, so I accept 3.14. That is a lot fussier than sixteen-inch studs, and it is a great example of a concept that is all around us that we do not necessarily think about. 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 simple circle equations, a = πr² and c = πd, are pretty familiar. I will take it a step further. The volume of a cylinder is πr² (the area of the circle) times the height (v = πr²h). The volume of a cone is v = πr²h/3. The volume of a cone is one-third the volume of a cylinder of the same dimensions. The volume of a sphere is v = 4/3πr³. I suppose you can guess I was pleased with myself for the little math lesson I gave the kid in the lumber yard. But what do bird feeders have to do with pipe organs?

The organ pipe maker is the π-man. People who make organ pipes live and breathe π. To make an organ pipe, you cut out three pieces of metal, a pie-shape (no relation to π) for the foot, a rectangle for the resonator, and a little circle for the languid (the horizontal piece at the joint between the foot and the resonator). The width of the rectangle and the length of the curved top of the cone both equal the circumference of the pipe. The circumference of the languid equals the width of the rectangle.

I wish that every organist could witness the making of organ pipes, the soul of our instrument. The metal is blended in a melting pot (just the right amount of lead, tin, eye of newt, and toe of frog) and cast into sheets on a long table. A few seconds after the sheet is cast, there is a magic moment when the liquid metal becomes solid. You can see it happen. The metal is planed to exact thickness, and some organ builders hammer softer metals (those with higher lead content) to make the metal denser.

Thick and strong metal sheets are cast for larger pipes. Low C of an 8′ Diapason is typically about ten feet long, including the foot and sometimes some extra length for tuning. (The speaking length of any organ pipe is measured from the lower lip of the mouth to the tuning point.) The highest note of that Diapason is a couple inches long from mouth to tuner, but take a look at some little mixture pipes, or the top octave of 1-1⁄3′ or 1-3⁄5′ ranks. The speaking length is a half inch or quarter inch and the diameter is a quarter inch or less. I will play with π a little to estimate that the rectangle of metal is 78/100 by 25/100 (1⁄4) of an inch, smaller than a chiclet. That’s a fussy little piece of metal to cut, much different from the carpenters’ sixteen-inch centers. The pipe maker forms that chiclet into a cylinder around a steel mandril, then solders the seams. Careful not to burn your fingers.

The pipe maker cuts sixty-one pieces of pie (toes), sixty-one rectangles (resonators), and sixty-one circles (languids), one of each for every note on the keyboard. Each is a different size. While the length of the pipes halve at every octave, the diameters of the pipes halve every seventeen notes or so. It is that halving that keeps scales (diameters) of the treble pipes large enough to speak, and it is that halving at seventeen that forms the beautiful parabola of the tops of the pipes as they sit on a windchest. When all those pieces are laid out in order on a table, they show the image of a rank of pipes. As I can tell the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters in my fingers, so the pipe maker can pick up one of those rectangles and know what the diameter of the pipe will be.

I wonder how Archimedes came across π. What induced him to think so intently about a circle? Did the formula appear to him in a dream? Did he use trial and error? How did he check himself? Did he draw a grid on a circle and count the squares?

Radical radii

I spent a couple weeks in Germany in September of 2019. I wrote about organs I visited on that trip in the December 2019 issue of The Diapason, pages 14–15. I spent about a week in Überlingen, on the shore of the Bodensee, visiting my friend and colleague Stefan Stürzer, director of the respected organ building firm Glatter-Götz in nearby Pfullendorf, perhaps best known in the United States as builders, with Manuel Rosales, of the iconic “Disney Organ.” I sat one afternoon with Heinz Kremnitzer, the designer and engineer for the company, who told me about the process of designing and making the huge, curved pipes that have given the organ the sobriquet, “A Large Order of Fries.” Frank Gehry, architect of Walt Disney Concert Hall and creator of the organ’s visual design, called for the curves.

The first question was whether such an organ pipe would speak, so Glatter-Götz built low DDDD of the 32′ Violon as a prototype. The curves were marked on the huge boards that would be the sides of the pipes and cut using a hand-held circular saw. Big deal. We all have “Skilsaws” in our shops. But remember, that pipe was almost twenty-eight feet long, the length of an average living room. To assemble the pipe, the flat board that would be the back of the pipe was placed on sawhorses spaced far enough apart that the board sagged to approximate the correct curve. Glue was applied, the pipe assembled, and as anyone who has heard the Disney organ knows, the pipe spoke. Stefan told me that they borrowed dozens of extra clamps from neighboring organ companies to accomplish that complex job.

Each curve is a segment of a circle with a huge radius. Twenty-seven pipes of the 32′ Violon and ten pipes of the 32′ Basson are curved. Four different radii were used: 51.545 meters, 32.102 meters, 20.586 meters, and 13.027 meters. How much is 51.454 meters in feet? 169.11 feet. Double the radius to picture a 338.22-foot circle. That is more than the length of a football field, including both end zones. The length of the segments of those circles would be the speaking length of each pipe. With today’s sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD), that would be simple enough to draw. But turning that digital arc into a pencil line on a board is quite a process.

But wait, there is more. Remember there are ten curved reed pipes, the longest of which is over thirty-one feet and remember that reed pipes are tapered. How do you curve a tapered pipe? Easy, there are two different radii for each pipe.

Heinz spent weeks in the Los Angeles offices of Gehry Partners, LLP, designing the complicated supports for the curved pipes. The supports would have universal joints on each end to achieve the multiplicity of angles, and each pipe would have two supports to achieve rigidity. Heinz drew the supports into the CAD drawings, weaving each between the complex shapes and layout of the pipes. Take a look at a photo of the organ and imagine the task. Heinz’s last word on those big, curved pipes, “It was a challenge I really enjoyed.” Great thanks to Stefan Stürzer and Heinz Kremnitzer of Glatter-Götz for giving me permission to publish this fascinating information. I am not going to ask how Gehry arrived at a radius of 51.545 meters as the perfect curve.

A penny for your thoughts?

Our system of telling time has been derived from the movements of celestial bodies. The earth rotates in twenty-four hours. The moon orbits the earth in twenty-seven days. The earth orbits the sun in 365 days. There are anomalies in the way those cycles have been divided. Our months have different numbers of days, and there is a corrective “leap day” every four years allowing us to catch up. The exact measurement of time is a complex science, one that I do not have to worry about because my iPhone is the most accurate clock I have ever had. When I cross into a different time zone (which I will do “full-vax” in two weeks for the first time in almost fifteen months), Steve Jobs gives me a nudge with the exact local time.

Mechanical clocks are marvelous machines, and it takes meticulous attention to achieve really accurate timekeeping. Ian Westworth, the clock mechanic for the Houses of Parliament in Great Britain, is leading a team in the restoration of the Great Clock built in 1859 and installed in the Elizabeth Tower of the Palace of Westminster. While many people think “Big Ben” is the name of the clock, in fact, “Big Ben” is the name of the largest of the five bells, the solemn boom that tolls the hour.

On Tuesday, April 13, 2021, The New York Times published a story by Susanne Fowler under the headline, “What Does It Take to Hear Big Ben Again? 500 Workers and a Hiding Place.” The hiding place is the secret and secure location of the workshop where the clock is being restored. Many of the 500 workers are involved in the restoration of the tower and the four twenty-three-foot glass faces of the clock. An amazing 1,296 pieces of mouth-blown pot opal glass have been made, and the fourteen- and nine-foot hands of the clock are being restored to their original condition.

Mr. Westworth explained how they regulate the speed of the clock to keep accurate time. When the clock is operational, its speed varies by plus or minus two seconds in twenty-four hours. The weight of the pendulum controls the speed of the clock. They have calculated that adding or subtracting the weight of a penny (3.56 grams) changes the speed of the five-ton clock by two-fifths of a second over twenty-four hours. The clock is wound each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The clock mechanics keep careful track of the time of striking and adjust the speed at each winding by adding or subtracting a penny or two. That might be the only way you can actually buy time.

Connectivity

It does not seem that long ago that packing a briefcase for a business trip meant gathering file folders and notebooks. Today, all my files are digital, and my briefcase is full of chargers for iPhone and iPad and the power cord for my laptop. I admit to carrying an HDMI cord with adapters so I can plug into the television in a hotel room and watch movies or other good stuff using laptop, iPad, or phone, and I carry an extension cord to be sure I can set up camp comfortably. I add to all that a Bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music and NPR programs with rich sound. There are a lot of wires in my wireless life.

My desk at home similarly includes wires that make the essential connections of my life, and I had to add one more yesterday. The printer in a drawer under my desk, happily connected to Wi-Fi, suddenly went hermit on me and refused to perform. I ascertained that the Wi-Fi connection had failed and spent most of an hour mucking around with passwords, straightened paper clips, and reset buttons . . . to no avail. If this had happened at our home in Maine, I would have jumped into the car (it was snowing) and driven forty-five minutes to Staples to buy a cord. Luckily, I was in New York, where Staples is immediately across the street from us. The only door I have to pass is an ATM. Even though it was snowing, I did not bother with a jacket and ran across to get the cord. I fished it through the hole I had made for the printer’s power cord, and I was back in business.

I suppose I will want to renew the Wi-Fi connection sooner or later, but as I only paid $125 for the printer, I may just buy another one rather than spending more time trouble-shooting. Wendy’s printer is working fine, as is all of our other wireless gear, so I feel safe assuming that the printer is the culprit. It is not all that long ago that I put paper directly into a typewriter, and there was no question about the need for connectivity.

§

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers were racing against each other to perfect the harnessing and application of electricity for everyday life. J. P. Morgan’s mansion at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street in New York City was illuminated by Thomas Edison in 1882. There was a fire that spoiled Mr. Morgan’s expensively appointed study that necessitated replacing a lot of wiring, but he was very proud to be on the forefront of that revolution and invited hundreds of people to parties at his home, encouraging them to marvel at the new equipment.

Three years earlier, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings had completed a 101-rank masterpiece of an organ for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not done the research, but I feel safe guessing that it was the largest organ in the United States at that time. (https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=7254) Just look at that Great Chorus! Though the organ now has electric action opening the pallets, it was built without electricity, with mechanical key and stop action and a human-powered wind system.

Within ten years of the completion of the organ at Holy Cross, organbuilders were experimenting with electric power in pipe organs. Builders like George Hutchings and Ernest M. Skinner were developing the electro-pneumatic actions with which we are familiar today. In 1906, Mr. Skinner completed his massive instrument (Opus 150) for the newly unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With four manuals and eighty-four ranks, it was among the first really large fully electro-pneumatic organs in the world, completed just twenty-four years after the Holy Cross organ. (http://aeolianskinner.organhistoricalsociety.net/Specs/Op00150.html) And by the way, it had electric blowers.

That was quite a revolution. It took barely a generation to move from tracker action, proven to be reliable for over five hundred years, to electro-pneumatic action—that new-fangled, up-and-coming creation that provided organists with combination actions, comfortable ergonomic consoles (decades before the invention of the word ergonomic), myriad gadgets to aid registrations, and, perhaps most important, unlimited wind supplies. Many organists were skeptical of the new actions, thinking that because they were not direct they could not be musical.

In spite of the skepticism, electro-pneumatic organs sold like fried dough at the state fair. Before the end of 1915, the Ernest M. Skinner Company produced more than 140 organs (more than ten per year), forty-six of which had four manuals. (Who would like to go on a tour of forty-six pre-World War I four-manual Skinner organs? Raise your hand!) The negative side of this is the number of wonderful nineteenth-century tracker organs that were discarded in the name of progress, but it is hard to judge whether the preservation of those instruments would have been advantageous over the miracles of the innovation of electro-pneumatic action.

And a generation later, what went around came around when the new interest in tracker-action organs surged, and scores of distinguished electro-pneumatic organs were discarded in favor of new organs with low wind pressure and lots of stops of high pitch.

§

Early electro-pneumatic organs relied on elaborate electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching systems for their operation. Keyboard contacts operated matrix relays to control keyboard and stop actions. Consoles were packed full of coupling and combination machines, inspired along with the development of the vast multiplication of switching systems that supported the spread of the telephone. The wiring diagram of a Skinner organ is remarkably similar to the old telephone switchboards where operators inserted quarter-inch plugs into sockets to connect calls.

Along with “traditional” organs for churches and concert halls, the advance of electric actions fostered the theatre organ, a vehicle that allowed a musician to rollick through the countryside along with the antics and passions of the actors on the screen. The invention of double-touch keyboards expanded the scope of organ switching, as did the ubiquitous “toy counters” that duplicated the sounds of cow bells, train whistles, sleigh bells, thunder and lightning, car horns, and dozens of other sound effects that might have a use during a movie. Those novelty sounds were not synthesized, but produced by the actual instrument being manipulated, struck, shaken, or stirred by an electro-pneumatic device. Push the button marked “Castanets,” and a half-dozen sets of castanets sound across the Sea of Galilee. Ole!

The original switching system of a big electro-pneumatic organ is a thing to behold—electric relays in rows of sixty-one, seventy-three, or eighty-five (depending on the number of octaves in a rank, a windchest, or a keyboard). Each relay has a contact for each function a given key can perform. In a big four-manual organ with sub, unison, and super couplers every which way, multiple windchests for each division, and unified stops around the edges, one note of the Great keyboard might have as many as twenty contacts in various forms. Sometimes you see that many contacts physically mounted on each key, with miniscule spacing, and tiny dots of solder holding the connections fast. Spill a cup of coffee into that keyboard, and your organ technician will spend scores of billable hours cleaning up after you.

One organ I worked on for years was in fact two. The organ(s) at Trinity Church in Boston included a three-manual instrument in the chancel and a four-manual job in the rear gallery. Of course, both had pedal divisions. The console functioned as a remote-control device, its keyboards, stopknobs, pistons, and expression pedals operated a complex relay in a basement room directly below. The outputs for seven keyboards and two pedalboards (491), 175 stop knobs, 45 coupler tabs, 7 pistons, and 4 expression pedals (48 for shutters, 60 for crescendo) were in the cable going to the basement, a total of 826 conductors. But wait, there’s more. Since the combination action was also in the basement, the conductors from the combination action that operated the drawknobs and couplers were in the same conduit, bringing signals up from the basement. Drawknobs and couplers totaled 220, and each needed three wires (on coil, off coil, and sense contact)—660. All together, the console cable comprised 1,486 conductors.

When my company was engaged to install the new solid-state switching and combinations in that organ, we wired all the equipment to the existing relays in the basement and chambers, bought an orphaned console for temporary use and equipped it with new stop jambs with knob layout identical to the original, and set everything up with plug-in connectors. After the evening service one Sunday, we cut the console cable, dragged the original console out of the way, placed the temporary console, and started plugging things in. With just a little smoke escaping, we had the organ up and running in time for the Friday noon recital. One glitch turned up. One of my employees consistently reversed the violet/blue pair of conductors in our new color-coded cable so throughout the complex organ, #41 and #42 (soprano E and F) were mixed up!

When something goes wrong like a dead note or a cipher, physical electric contacts are fairly easy to trouble-shoot. Once you have acclimated yourself to the correct location, you are likely to be able to see the problem. It might be a bit of schmutz keeping contacts from moving or touching, it might be a contact wire bent by a passing mouse. Organ relays are often located in dirty basements where spiders catch prey, stonewalls weep with moisture, and careless custodians toss detritus into mysterious dark rooms. Many is the time I have seen the like of signs from a 1963 rummage sale heaped on top of delicate switching equipment.

Oxidation is another enemy of organ contacts that are typically made of phosphorous bronze wire that reacts with oxygen to form a non-conductive coating, inhibiting the operation of the contacts. Also, in a simple circuit that includes a power supply (organ rectifier), switch (keyboard contact), and appliance (chest magnet), a “fly-back” spark jumps across the space between contacts as a note is released. Each spark burns away a teeny bit of metal until after millions of repetitions the contact breaks causing a dead note. You can see this sparking clearly when you sit with a switch-stack with the lights off while the organ is being played.

You can retro fit a switching system by installing diodes in each circuit (which means rows of sixty-one) that arrest the sparks. You can replace phosphorous bronze with silver wire that does not oxidize, but you still have to keep the whole thing clean and protected from physical harm.

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Just as the telephone companies have converted to solid-state switching, so has the pipe organ industry. Solid-state equipment is no longer new; in fact, it has been around as long as electro-pneumatic organs were before the revival of tracker organs. But perhaps some of you don’t actually know what “solid-state” means. A solid-state device controls electricity without any physical motion. Circuits are built using semi-conductors. What is a semi-conductor? A device that conducts electricity under certain circumstances or in particular ways, less fully than a standard conductor. A piece of wire is a conductor. Electricity travels freely over a piece of wire in any direction.

A great example of a semi-conductor is the diode I mentioned earlier that contains “fly-back” sparks when a circuit is broken. The diode can do this because it conducts electricity in only one direction. It has a wire on each end to connect to a circuit, and power can flow from the switch through the diode to the magnet (if you have installed it facing the right way!). When the contact is released, the power cannot come back through the diode from the magnet to the switch. Semi-conductor.

Some semi-conductors are in fact switches (transistors) with three legs. Apply power to one leg, and power flows through the other two. Integrated circuits are simply little gadgets that contain many transistors. Resistors are gadgets that reduce the flow of power by resisting it. The advance of electronics has been enabled by the reduction of size of these components. I have transistors in my toolbox that are replacements for common organ controls that are each the size of my pinkie fingernail. Huge! I have no idea how many circuits there are in my iPhone, but it must be millions.

I first worked with solid-state organ actions in the late 1970s. One job was in a rickety Anglican church on East 55th Street in Cleveland where we were installing one of the earliest Peterson combination actions in an old Holtkamp organ. The church had a dirt crawl space instead of a basement, and as the apprentice, it was my job to crawl on my belly with the rats (yup, lots of them), trailing cables from chamber to console. We followed the directions meticulously, made all the connections carefully, crossed our fingers, and turned it on. Some smoke came out. It took us a couple hours to sort out the problem, and we had to wait a few days for replacement parts, but the second time it worked perfectly. I do not believe we were very sure of what we had done, but we sure were pleased.

In around 1987, I became curator of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1202, 1951) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. With over 230 ranks and 13,000 pipes, the instrument had heaps of electro-pneumatic-mechanical relays. As I came onboard, wire contacts had started to break at a rapid rate, and as the switches were mounted vertically, when a contact broke, it would fall and lodge across its neighbors causing cluster ciphers. Ronald Paul of Salt Lake City, Utah, had been contracted to install a new solid-state switching system, and I was on hand to help him with many details. I was assuming the care of the organ from Jason McKown who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner at the Skinner Organ Company and cared for the Mother Church organ since it was installed. Jason was in his eighties and still climbed the hundreds of rungs and steps involved in reaching the far reaches of that massive organ.

Jason looked over all the shiny gear, bristling with rows of pins and filled with those fiberglass cards covered with mysterious bugs, shook his head, and said, “this is for you young fellows.”

Swing wide the gates.

Over the past fifty years, most of us have gotten used to solid-state pipe organ actions. In that time, we have seen the medium of connections go from regular old organ cable to “Cat5” to optical fiber. I know that some of the firms that supply this equipment are experimenting with wireless connections. I suppose I may be asked to install such a system someday, but while I am committed to solid-state switching and all its benefits, I am skeptical about wireless.

Forty years ago, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had a small and ancient electronic organ in the chapel. I was happy enough that I almost never had to play it, but there was one Thanksgiving Day when the pastor chose to lead an early morning worship service in the chapel. Halfway through that service, human voices blared out of the organ, decidedly irreverent human voices. The organ was picking up citizens band radio transmissions from Euclid Avenue in front of the church. I dove for the power cord. “Roger that, good buddy. Over and out!”

We have wireless remote controls for televisions, receivers, radios, even electric fans, and it is often necessary to punch a button repeatedly to get the desired function to work. And there was that printer yesterday, choosing idly to skip the bounds of our Wi-Fi router and booster, requiring the introduction of a new wire.

When I think of a wireless connection between the console and chambers of a large pipe organ, I imagine sweeping onto the bench, robes a-flutter, turning on the organ, pushing a piston, and garage doors throughout the neighborhood randomly opening and closing. Swing wide the gates, I’m coming home.