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.

Giants among favorites

I am often asked if I have a favorite organ, a single instrument that stands out among the multitude as the best, the most expressive, the most impressive, among the hundreds I have visited, played on, or worked on. I am never able to answer clearly by citing a single instrument. There are organs that have been important in my life, but great life experiences do not necessarily focus on superb organs. I am very proud of some of the projects I have done on simple organs that I was able to expand and improve so the congregations that own them were thrilled with the result.

I have heard some of our finest musicians play thrilling programs on magnificent instruments and come away from those experiences with gratitude for a life surrounded by great musicians and great organs. I have been moved by beautiful playing on exquisite smaller instruments and amazed by the relationships of beautiful organs with the acoustics and architecture of their buildings.

I have fond memories of the organs I knew when I was a teenager first learning to play, some of which I still see regularly, and memories of rich evenings with beloved colleagues—sitting with an organ, listening to its tones, experimenting with its mechanics, marveling at its design, historical importance, heritage—and then retiring to a restaurant for a great meal. I have visited many organs nearing completion in colleagues’ workshops and then heard them as finished instruments in their “forever homes.” And as director of the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that what seemed like a forever home for an organ can vanish, leaving the organ homeless. I am especially proud of some of those when we were able to find new homes for them and see them restored for a second century of use.

There are dozens, hundreds of organs I can think of that I love and respect as great technical, musical, artistic achievements, but there is not one that I can point to as the best or as my favorite. I will cite a few standouts.

Warner Concert Hall

I was an eighteen-year-old incoming freshman at Oberlin in November 1974, my third month as a grown-up organ major, when the grand Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. I was fortunate to have grown up in Boston where I heard many wonderful new mechanical-action organs, but the Flentrop dazzled me. Painted red and blue and wearing gold negligee, it looks fantastic in the mostly whitish room. I did the hard work of practice, lessons, studio classes, and required performances including my senior recital on that organ. After a long absence I had a chance to visit it again last summer, and as you read this, I will have attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that organ over the weekend of November 15, reuniting with dozens of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Basilica of Saint Martin

I visited Stefan Stürzer at Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Pfullendorf, Germany, in September of 2019. Manuel Rosales was there working on the earliest stages of the monumental organ they are building together for Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. Stefan, Manuel, Glatter-Götz’s then-new employee Felix Müller, and I had a chance to visit the Josef Gabler organ (completed in 1750) in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Weingarten, Germany. The only time we could schedule our visit was during a Mass on a Friday afternoon, but since the organ gallery is very high in the rear of the building, we were able to walk around chatting. In between leading hymns, psalms, and incidental music, the organist opened panels to show us inner workings, and he made a point of demonstrating some of the unique sounds of that remarkable organ, especially the haunting Vox Humana in the Brüstungspositiv (Rückpositiv).

There is a fascinating legend regarding that Vox Humana that had Gabler struggling to recreate the human voice exactly, and one attempt after many others fell short. The devil offered a deal: consign your soul to the devil, meet in a prescribed lonely place in the forest, and you will receive the secret for the perfect human voice, which turned out to be a piece of metal to be used to build the rank. It is not clear how Gabler got out of that pickle, but the organ was successful enough that the abbot presented him with enough wine to fill the organ’s largest pipe. (If the pipe was twenty-four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long, that would be around seven-hundred-fifty gallons.) The name of the city and abbey gives away the source of such a plentiful supply. I remember that as a remarkable encounter with a spectacular organ in the company of admired colleagues, pretty heady stuff. That night, Felix took the photo of me that shows every month at the top of the right-hand page of this column.

Saint-Sulpice

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential organs in the world. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré filled that organ bench for a hundred years as they taught generations of students. Imagine hearing Widor’s “Toccata” from the Fifth Symphony in that church for the first time. “Oh Maître, I hope you’ll play it again.” I attended a recital there played by Gillian Weir and could do nothing but weep. Putting my fingers on the keys played by Widor and Dupré for thousands of Masses and countless hours of practice was both humbling and thrilling.

Saint James

When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, around 1980, we renovated a large Wicks organ in Saint James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, with three manuals and twenty-eight ranks. It was located in an ample and high loft at the rear of the church with a small two-division sanctuary organ burrowed into the reredos, an unremarkable organ except that it was in a huge, resonant church and was a product of the period when Vincent Willis III of the great eponymous British firm was working at Wicks influencing their tonal schemes.

There was a lot of unification in the organ, so there was a lot of wiring to do, much of which I did alone in a Zen state, sorting and soldering row after row of wires while listening to a gaggle of women with an occasional added man reciting the Rosary for an hour after the end of the 8:00 a.m. Mass. By the time the project was finished, that sequence of prayers was forever etched in my brain, and when I hear it today, I can smell the soldering iron.

I mention this organ because it opened my twenty-something, tracker-action, early music eyes and ears to a new understanding of Romantic music. One afternoon I was playing the ubiquitous Widor “Toccata” (he sure did play it again, and so has almost every organist since), reveling in the effect of the piece in that vast rolling acoustic. I was used to playing it on smallish tracker organs that made it sound like pelting marbles on a metal roof. So that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Maybe there is something to this music.

“The Busch”

E. Power Biggs lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was neighbor to great thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Julia Child. After working with G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner to create an “experimental organ” in Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (now known as Busch Hall), Biggs commissioned a three-manual, mechanical-action organ by Flentrop Orgelbouw of Zaandam, the Netherlands, which was installed in the gallery of the resonant hall in 1957. That instrument quickly became world-famous as Biggs recorded there his brilliant and influential series of LPs, E. Power Biggs: Bach Great Organ Favorites. I was deeply influenced by those recordings, and I have met countless other organists “of a certain age” whose life paths were set by those recordings. As a teenager I heard Biggs play several recitals there, memories that have stayed with me for over fifty years, and I have visited the organ several times since. It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Flentrop organ on American organ building at that time, as the renaissance that was the revival of the classic craft was gaining traction.

Trinity on Copley

I worked at Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 until Daniel Angerstein closed the workshop to become tonal director for M. P. Möller in Hagerstown, Maryland. Dan and I worked out that I would assume the many service clients that led to the founding of the Bishop Organ Company. Jason McKown was a legendary old organ technician in the Boston area who had worked directly and personally with Ernest Skinner and told endless stories about Mr. Skinner and many famous organists and organbuilders. He was over eighty years old and eager to retire as curator of the marvelous double organ at Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, where there is a four-manual instrument by the Skinner Organ Company in the rear gallery and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in a chancel chamber. Jason had been caring for the organ for over fifty years. The building is a heavy, dense, grand place with interior decoration by John La Farge, and the organs sound spectacular there. Brian Jones, the organist there and an old friend, introduced me to Jason, and I became curator of the organs.

Trinity Church has long been famous for noontime recitals every Friday, and I was there early every Friday morning for two hours of tuning. It was my habit to listen to Red Barber and Bob Edwards after the 7:30 a.m. headlines on National Public Radio in my car with a cup of coffee before going inside to tune.

Those Friday noon recitals meant I heard different organists play the organ every week. Some players were swallowed up by the complexity and sophistication of the big double organ with myriad controls and combinations. Others managed to tame the beast, and it sometimes seemed that the organ somehow knew when the person who slid onto the bench was going to give it a great ride. Over a period of about ten years, I heard more than 200 recitals there. Of course, there were many repeats, but hearing so many different approaches to a single organ was an important part of my learning.

A couple doozies

Once I was established at Trinity, Jason walked me the half mile up Huntington Avenue to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known familiarly as the Mother Church, home to Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, built in 1952. He had been caring for the organ since it was installed, and what an organ it is with over 150 stops and 237 ranks. Jason recommended me to the church as his successor, and I had a rollicking ten years learning the mysteries of taking care of a truly massive organ.

Many of the world’s largest organs, say those with more than 200 ranks, were originally built as more modest instruments and evolved into their present glory under a string of opus numbers. One of the many remarkable things about Opus 1203 is that it was built all at once under one giant contract. Also remarkable is that it was built under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps, who was only thirty years old at the time. I know I thought I was quite something when I was thirty, but I am sure I could not have produced such a massive organ with such a sophisticated tonal scheme.

This amazing organ was at the center of my professional life for around ten years, and I had many important experiences and lessons there. I have written about it in these pages many times because pretty much any time I start writing about organs, it is there lurking—no, looming in the background.

I had a conversation the other day with Bryan Ashley, who has been the organist there since 2009. He revels in the organ’s majesty and subtlety and told me that it is the honor of his life to play it each week. The church has supported the organ with meticulous care since it was installed. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, has been working there since I left nearly thirty years ago, doing usual tuning and service calls as well as a comprehensive renovation under the direction of Phelps in the 1990s. The brilliant concert organist Stephen Tharp played a landmark recital on the Mother Church organ on June 28, 2014, the closing recital for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. He premiered his transcription of Igor Stravinsky’s world-changing Rite of Spring in a riveting performance that I thought changed the world of organ recitals forever. His fierce rhythmic drive and dynamic, fiery registrations had the huge audience spellbound. In testament to the quality and condition of that massive organ built in 1952, Stephen told me that he practiced energetically for dozens of hours in preparation for his recital and never had to call on the technicians to correct anything.

The Mother Church organ came to mind, as it does frequently, when I was in Salt Lake City this past August for the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, where the famous Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Mormon Tabernacle was featured in several programs. The Tabernacle organ (Opus 1075) was built in 1945, just seven years and 128 opus numbers earlier than the Mother Church organ. It originally had 187 ranks and has been gradually expanded to today’s 206 ranks by Schoenstein & Company. It was built under the directorship of G. Donald Harrison who considered it his masterpiece, and rightly so. A quick look at the encyclopedic stoplist shows its vast variety of tone colors and combinations.

There is a fundamental difference between these two extraordinary organs. While both can be considered “American Classic” instruments, the Mother Church organ has lower wind pressures. The Positiv division is on less than two inches of wind; it is amazing that the eleven-stop pitman windchest can function on such low pressure. Along with lower wind pressures, the organ has what could be considered Baroque choruses with German nomenclature. Along with the Great, Swell, and Choir you would expect to find the Hauptwerk and Positiv with distinctly lighter tone.

Both organs are rich with multiple pairs of “celesting” stops, mutations at every pitch imaginable, and many mixtures of varying character. It is important to note that both organs are scrupulously maintained in terrific condition, reflecting the dedication of those two institutions.

Look it up.

I have been rattling from one organ to another, and I imagine some readers would be interested to see the stoplists. You are in luck. The Organ Historical Society has a broad and valuable database of organs across the United States. Visit pipeorgandatabase.com, click on “Instruments” in the upper left corner, then click on “View/Search Instruments.” That will open a form with blanks to fill in: Location (Church, Institution, etc.), City, State, Builder, Opus Number, etc. You usually only need to fill in a few blanks before the organ you are looking for pops up.

The database is a fantastic resource with photos and information about thousands of organs. The website is open on my browser whenever I am sitting at my desk, and I routinely search for information about dozens of organs. A little hint: if an organ has been rebuilt, it is likely you will find it under that company rather than the original builder. For example, you will find the Mother Church organ under Foley-Baker, not Aeolian-Skinner. Three cheers to the OHS for conceiving and continuing with that valuable project, essential to those who work with and research organs, and fascinating to all of us who are just plain interested.

If you visit the database and do not see an organ you play regularly or just know and love, go back to the original menu, click “Instruments,” and then click “Submit New Instrument Entry.” Your submission will be reviewed, someone may ask you a question or two, and then you will have contributed to a unique and valuable resource.

Next time we meet, ask me what’s my favorite organ. I’m thinking about that all the time; you may get a sassy answer.