Thomas H. Anderson dead at 86

Thomas H. Anderson

Thomas H. Anderson, 86, of North Easton, Massachusetts, died December 30, 2023. Born May 25, 1937, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he met his late wife Susan in Belfast, where they grew up on the same street.

Anderson started working at age 14 as an apprentice pipe maker at an organ pipe manufacturer in Belfast. At age 19, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked at the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, Boston, Massachusetts, as a pipe maker. Later he started his own company, Thomas H. Anderson Organ Pipe Company. He traveled around the country working on various projects including the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In his later years, he traveled to teach others to make organ pipes.

Anderson’s wife Susan died December 31, 1996, almost 27 years before the date of his death; they were married 38 years. They raised four children who survive him: Gail McGill and her husband Mark of Raynham, Massachusetts; Thomas Anderson of Lake Wylie, South Carolina; Cheryl Dekeon of Haverhill, Massachusetts; and Elizabeth Lehr and her husband Donald of Berryville, Virginia. He is also survived by six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

The funeral for Thomas H. Anderson, Jr., was held January 6 at Southeast Funeral and Cremation Services, Easton, Massachusetts, with burial following at South Easton Cemetery. Memorial gifts may be made to Old Colony Hospice and Palliative Care (oldcolonyhospice.org).

Harold Gilchrest Andrews, Jr.

Harold Gilchrest Andrews, Jr., of High Point, North Carolina, died December 3, 2023. He was born March 31, 1932, in Framingham, Massachusetts, and grew up in Centerville on Cape Cod. At the age of eight, under the tutelage of Virginia Fuller, his first piano teacher, Andrews played services at the local Unitarian church. After his 1949 high school graduation, he attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, Ohio, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in organ performance. After college, he served in the United States Army for two years as an organist at West Point. He then moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, playing first at First Friends Meeting House and then at Guilford Park Presbyterian Church. During this same period, he began his long tenure as a professor of organ at Greensboro College, where he remained until 1988. The C. B. Fisk, Inc., organ, Opus 102 (1993), at Finch Memorial Chapel of Greensboro College was donated and installed through his efforts. He also co-founded the Greensboro Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

Leaving Guilford Park Church, Andrews took the position as organist and master of choristers at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, High Point, where he would spend the next 55 years. While working at St. Mary’s, Andrews completed a Master of Music degree in organ and church music at Oberlin Conservatory and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University.

Andrews founded and owned Organ Craft, a local organbuilding company. He built and installed pipe organs all over the east coast, including part of the organ at Christ United Methodist Church in Charlotte and the organ at Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro. The organ at St. Mary’s in High Point was also significantly altered over the years by Andrews.

As an organist, he offered recitals in Europe, including at Canterbury Cathedral; St. Paul’s Cathedral, London; Saint-Sulpice, Paris; and Chartres Cathedral. In his retirement, he finished his manuscript for a study of music in the works of William Shakespeare.

Harold Gilchrest Andrews, Jr., is survived by one brother, Robert Francis Andrews. His funeral featuring Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem was held at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, High Point, on January 27. Interment in the church columbarium followed. Memorials may be directed to the music endowment at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 108 West Farriss Avenue, High Point, North Carolina 27262.

Charles Edmund Callahan, Jr.

Charles Edmund Callahan, Jr., 72, died December 25, 2023, in Burlington, Vermont. He was born September 27, 1951, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Callahan was a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned graduate degrees from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He held the Associate and Choirmaster certificates of the American Guild of Organists. In 2014 he was honored with the Distinguished Artist Award of the guild.

Callahan taught at Catholic University; Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont; Baylor University, Waco, Texas; Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; and the Bermuda School of Music, Hamilton, Bermuda. He served as organist and music director for churches in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New York, Vermont, and his native Massachusetts. Callahan moved to Orwell, Vermont, in 1988.

He was consulted often on the design of new organs and restorations and improvements of existing instruments. His two books on American organbuilding history, The American Classic Organ and Aeolian-Skinner Remembered, became standard reference works on 20th-century American organ history.

Callahan was a prolific composer; his compositions include commissions for Papal visitations to the United States and from Harvard University. His four-movement orchestral work, Mosaics, was premiered at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, Missouri, and other works have been performed at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities.

Charles Callahan was laid to rest with his parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Memorial contributions in his memory may be made to the music programs at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 326 College Street, Middlebury, Vermont 05753, or Cornwall Congregational Church, 2598 Route 30, Cornwall, Vermont 05753.

James P. Callahan

James P. Callahan of St. Paul, Minnesota, died December 28, 2023. Born in North Dakota and raised in Albany, Minnesota, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1964 from St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, and his Master of Fine Arts degree in piano and a Ph.D. in music theory and composition from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In addition, he studied at the Mozarteum University, Salzburg, Austria, and Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Vienna, Austria. His teachers included Anton Heiller, organ; Willem Ibes and Duncan McNab, piano; and Paul Fetler, composition.

Callahan was Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught piano, organ, composition, music theory, and piano literature over a 38-year period, retiring in 2006. As an organist, Callahan performed recitals in the upper Midwest, New York, and Austria. His performances appeared on the nationally broadcast radio program Pipedreams. He was instrumental in overseeing the commissioning of the organ for the chapel at the University of St. Thomas, Gabriel Kney Opus 105, completed in 1987. On this instrument he recorded a disc for Centaur, James Callahan: Oberdoerffer, Reger, Rheinberger, Schmidt. He also performed solo piano recitals and made concerto appearances. In addition to his solo performances, he was a member of the Callahan and Faricy Duo piano team, performing throughout the upper Midwest.

James Callahan composed over 150 works for piano, organ, orchestra, band, opera, and chamber ensembles. Cantata for two choirs, brass, percussion, and organ premiered at St. John’s Abbey Church and was performed at the Cathedral of St. Paul in 1975. His Requiem was premiered by Leonard Raver in 1990 at the University of St. Thomas. Callahan’s music was published by McLaughlin-Reilly, GIA, Paraclete Press, Abingdon Press, and Beautiful Star Publishing. Awards included a study grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Bush Artist Fellowship.

Quentin Faulkner

Quentin Faulkner, 80, died December 30, 2023, in Houston, Texas. He was Larson Professor of organ and music theory/history (emeritus) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a writer of scholarly books in the areas of church music and J. S. Bach performance practice, the translator of German treatises of the 17th and 18th centuries, and an organ recitalist.

Faulkner earned his undergraduate degree in organ and church music from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey, where he studied organ with George Markey and Alexander McCurdy. He received graduate degrees in sacred music and theology from Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, where he studied conducting with Lloyd Pfautsch, organ with George Klump, and liturgics with James White. Faulkner completed his doctoral studies at the School of Sacred Music, Union Theological Seminary, New York City, where he studied organ with Alec Wyton. Each of these schools subsequently awarded him its distinguished alumni award for his contributions to the field of church music. While a student in New York City, he served for three years as assistant organist at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, during which time he led the musical celebration honoring Wyton at his retirement and was the organist for Duke Ellington’s funeral.

For 32 years Faulkner served on the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he developed a comprehensive cycle of courses in church music and received numerous teaching awards. He and his colleague George Ritchie were co-coordinators of a distinguished series of organ conferences at the university, each conference with a distinct topic of scholarly investigation and culminating in the first conference held in Naumburg, Germany, at the newly restored 1746 Hildebrandt organ in St. Wenzel’s Church. In 1998 Faulkner was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach as guest professor at the Evangelische Hochschule für Kirchenmusik in Halle, Germany, a position to which he returned for the academic year 2006–2007 following his retirement from the University of Nebraska.

Faulkner’s professional career included both academic and practical pursuits. He was equally respected for his scholarly investigation in the field of church music (Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church, Greenwood Press, 1996) and in historical performance practice of the organ works of Bach (J. S. Bach’s Keyboard Technique: A Historical Introduction, Concordia, 1984; The Registration of J. S. Bach’s Organ Works, Wayne Leupold Editions, 2008; Johann Sebastian Bach, The Complete Organ Works, Series II, Volume I, The Performance of the Organ works: Source Readings, Leupold Editions, 2020). He translated historic German treatises into English, and then edited and annotated the translations to make them accessible to contemporary students and scholars (Jacob Adlung, Musica mechanica organoedi, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Zea E-Books, 2011; Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia, Parts III–V, Zea E-Books, 2014).

Faulkner reveled in working at the intersections of various disciplines, particularly enjoying the interplay of the scholarly and the performing musician and extensively studying the relationships between and among religion, culture, and the arts. He served as a member of the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments for Garland Publishing Co., as consultant for the J. S. Bach Tercentenary publishing project of Concordia Publishing House, as editor for performance issues for the Leupold Edition of J. S. Bach’s organ works, and as a member of the advisory board of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He also led multiple tours of Bach’s Organ World in eastern Germany, sharing his passion and knowledge with participants as they studied, played, and listened to instruments with direct connections to J. S. Bach.

Throughout his career and in retirement, Faulkner remained a performing musician, presenting organ recitals, workshops, and lectures. He and his wife served as church musicians in Dothan, Alabama; New York City; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Greenfield, Massachusetts. He was particularly concerned with music in small churches and wrote numerous practical articles for professional journals, composed anthems for small choirs, and served as a clinician for more than fifty church music workshops in Nebraska. He served the American Guild of Organists on various local and national committees and as its national councilor for education. He was an honorary lifetime member of the Lincoln Chapter of the AGO.

Quentin Faulkner is survived by his wife of 56 years, Mary Murrell (Bennett) Faulkner, three brothers, a daughter and son-in-law, a son and daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren. A memorial service will be held April 20 at Christ Church Cathedral, Houston, Texas. Memorial contributions may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association (Attention: Donor Services, 225 North Michigan Avenue, Floor 17, Chicago, Illinois 60601; alz.org/donate), Church Music Institute (5923 Royal Lane, Dallas, Texas 75230; churchmusicinstitute.org/donate), or the charity of one’s choice.

Brian E. Jones

Brian E. Jones, 80, organist and choir director, died November 17, 2023. A native of Duxbury, Massachusetts, he began piano studies at age eight and discovered the pipe organ soon thereafter. During his first visit to Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts, as an eager ten-year-old, he was said to have exclaimed, “I want to be the organist here someday!” Some three decades later, his dream became a reality.

After earning an undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Jones landed a teaching position at Noble and Greenough School, Dedham, a post he would hold for the next twenty years. Concurrently he completed the Master of Music program at Boston University. While at Noble and Greenough he conducted numerous choral groups and expanded the music program to include the production of a wide variety of musicals.

Soon after commencing his teaching career, Jones was appointed music director of the Dedham Choral Society, a position he held for 27 years. During his tenure, the group grew in size from 25 to 150 members, expanding their audiences by performing in Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall in Boston. In 1984 Jones fulfilled his childhood dream when he was appointed director of music at Trinity Church, Boston. Over the next two decades he and his choirs produced five recordings, including the Christmas CD, Candlelight Carols. In addition to his work as a choral conductor, Jones enjoyed a solo organ career, performing concerts and dedicatory recitals in churches and cathedrals throughout the United States and England. Upon assuming the mantle Emeritus Director of Music and Organist at Trinity Church in 2004, Jones accepted interim positions from as far afield as Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2007 a number of former Trinity choir members coalesced to form The Copley Singers under Jones’s direction. This semi-professional group of musicians began performing together several times each year, most notably during the holiday season.

Brian E. Jones is survived by his husband, Michael Rocha, with whom he shared the past 35 years, as well as two children, Eliza Beaulac and her husband, Joe, and Nat Jones and his wife, Kiera; four grandchildren and one great-grandson. A celebration of life is planned for spring. Memorial gifts in memory of Brian Jones may be made to the Parkinson’s Foundation (parkinson.org).

Uwe Pape

Uwe Pape, 87, died August 13, 2023, in Berlin, Germany. He was born May 5, 1936, in Bremen, Germany. In his early life, he studied mathematics, physics, pedagogy, and philosophy at Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, graduating in 1959, earning a doctorate in computing technology at Technische Universität Braunschweig in 1971.

From 1971 to 2001 Pape was professor of business informatics at the Technische Universität Berlin. He was visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974 and in 1984–1985; at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1975; at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976; and at the University of Szczecin, Poland, from 1988 until 1998.

Pape was recognized worldwide for his expertise in pipe organs, especially historic mechanical-action instruments. Pape had his first contact with organbuilding in 1953 at the Liebfrauenkirche, Bremen, where he studied with Harald Wolff and had contact with the organ builder Paul Ott. Pape began to document the organs of the Braunschweig Lutheran Church in 1959. In 1962 he founded a publishing house for works on organbuilding history, which exists today as Pape Verlag Berlin. He became a freelance organ expert for regional churches and foundations in Berlin, Bremen, Lower Saxony, and Saxony. From 1985 to 2016 he led a research project on organ documentation that resulted in an organ database at the Technische Universität Berlin. With Paul Peeters of Gothenburg and Karl Schütz of Vienna, Pape was one of the founders of the International Association for Organ Documentation (IAOD) in 1990. He made significant contributions to the documentation of historic north German organs. Among his many book-length publications is The Tracker Organ Revival in America/Die Orgelbewegung in Amerika, first published in 1978. One of his most recent publications is Organographia Historica Hildesiensis: Orgeln und Orgelbauer in Hildesheim, printed in 2014. For The Diapason, he wrote “Documentation of Restorations,” which appeared in the December 2006 issue, pages 20–22.

Alice Stuart Parker

Alice Stuart Parker, 98, born December 16, 1925, in Boston, Massachusetts, died December 24, 2023, in Hawley, Massachusetts. Having grown up in Winchester, Massachusetts, she graduated from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1947, having studied organ and composition. After earning a Master of Music degree in choral conducting from The Juilliard School in New York City two years later, she began teaching in a high school. Parker would then study and begin a long collaboration with Robert Shaw and the Robert Shaw Chorale. She would meet and marry one of the chorale’s singers, Thomas F. Pyle, in 1954.

As a composer she would pen more than 500 choral works and arrangements, from choral anthems to cantatas and operas. In 1985 Parker founded Melodious Accord, which presents choral concerts, singing workshops, and other events. The Musicians of Melodious Accord, a 16-member chorus, made several recordings with her. Parker authored books including The Anatomy of Melody in 2006 and The Melodious Accord Hymnal in 2010, both available from GIA Publications. She conducted masterclasses and seminars widely.

Alice Stuart Parker was predeceased by her husband in 1976. Survivors include her sons David Pyle and Timothy Pyle; daughters Katharine Bryda, Mary Stejskal, and Elizabeth Pyle; 11 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Michael Radulescu

Michael Radulescu, 80, born June 19, 1943, in Bucharest, Romania, died December 23, 2023. He studied organ and conducting with Anton Heiller and Hans Swarowsky in Vienna, Austria, at the Academy (now University) of Music and Performing Arts, where he taught as professor of organ from 1968 to 2008. His career encompassed work as a composer, organist, and conductor. With his debut in 1959 he presented concerts throughout Europe, North America, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. He regularly presented guest lectures and masterclasses in Europe and overseas, focusing mainly on the interpretation of Bach’s organ and major choral works.

As a composer, Radulescu wrote sacred music, works for organ, voice and organ, choral and chamber music, and orchestral works. He was frequently engaged as a jury member in international organ and composition competitions and as an editor of early organ music. Radulescu conducted international vocal and instrumental ensembles in performances of major choral works. As an organist, he recorded among other items Bach’s complete works for organ, without any technical manipulation.

For his musical and pedagogical contributions, Radulescu was awarded the Goldene Verdienstzeichen des Landes Wien in 2005. In 2007 he received the Würdigungspreis für Musik from the Austrian Ministry of Education and Art. In December 2013 Michael Radulescu’s book on J. S. Bach’s spiritual musical language, Bey einer andächtig Musiq: Schritte zur Interpretation von Johann Sebastian Bachs geistlicher Klangrede anhand seiner Passionen und der h-Moll-Messe, focusing on the two passions and the B-Minor Mass, was published. For The Diapason, his article, “J. S. Bach’s Organ Music and Lutheran Theology: The Clavier-Übung Third Part,” was printed in the July 2019 issue, pages 16–21.

On the road again

In the 1980 movie, Honeysuckle Rose, Willie Nelson played Buck Bonham, a country music singer looking for national fame. His life as a traveling music star is a strain on his marriage to Viv, played by Dyan Cannon; one thing leads to another, and not everyone winds up happy. The best thing that came out of that movie is the song, “On the Road Again,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Song and an American Music Award for Favorite Country Single.

In the 1980s I was working in an organ shop where some of us preferred classical music and some preferred rock and roll. In the days before earpods when music was played through speakers we had to compromise—ours was often country music. It was fun to make up words to go with the rhyming schemes, and some of the country songs of those days were simply hilarious. Bobby Bare’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life,” Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and Dolly Parton’s “Better Keep Your Hands Off My Potential New Boyfriend” (really) gave us lots of material.

“On the Road Again” seems full of hope, opening with a major sixth (“My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. . .”), with lyrics about the pleasure of “making music with my friends.” There is a sort of choo-choo-train-like rhythm underneath, and some lithe, right-in-tune harmonica playing. “Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway, We’re the best of friends, insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way is on the road again.”

My daily office routine includes lots of correspondence with people wishing to buy and sell pipe organs, and I keep a list of places that might be productive to visit, sort of like pins on a map. Several times a year, when those pins meld into a circle that I might drive in a week or so, I set off in my Suburban. I make a point of visiting any organ workshops that might be along the route, and I am often able to include errands for us or for colleague companies, like delivering a blower here, a rank of pipes there, or picking up a pedalboard—it helps pay for the gas. When I leave home, sappy as it may be, I think of the indefatigable Willie Nelson and dial up that song, fixing myself up with an earworm that will easily last a week.

§

Last December, Willie cheered me on as I headed for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. My first day out, I met with people at a church who are considering purchasing an organ and had dinner with my son in central Massachusetts. The following morning, I drove to New Holland, Pennsylvania, to visit New Holland Church Furniture, a company that builds miles of pews, thousands of chairs, hundreds of altars, and dozens of organ cases. The Organ Clearing House has helped with the installation of several large new organs with cases built by New Holland, and they have since engaged us to install a few other large pieces such as a cathedral reredos. I was given a lengthy tour of the facility and marveled at the production volume and values.

I was especially impressed by an extensive layout of curved pews in the shop for the floor and balconies of a large church under construction. It is one thing to build straight pews; all organ builders have equipment in their workshops for cutting wood straight. It is much more challenging to work with curves, especially because you would not necessarily use the same curved layouts in several different churches. The forms and patterns for gluing those long, curved boards are custom made for each location. And in this building, the balconies had layouts much different from the main floor, further complicating the job. Massive custom-built sanding machines finish those twenty-foot-long curves with the grain, as any good woodworker would.

Computer-driven machines were cutting out chair backs, pew ends, Gothic arches, and Stations of the Cross at dizzying rates. A procession of ten-foot-long pew seats, hanging from iron hooks like sides of beef, rode conveyors through a huge spray booth. Carts of chair frames rolled from gluing stations to assembly rooms. Engineers and designers stared at computer screens, moving pixilated lines around to create perfect drawings. Those drawings were fed into the machines that cut the wood. Semi-trailers were backed up to loading docks, ready to haul the finished products to their destinations. Seventy-five or eighty workers were toiling in the factory, combining artistry with automation, creating elegant furnishings for church buildings across the country.

New Holland is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I was sharing the roads with Amish families in black carriages drawn by single horses and large flatbed trailers drawn by teams of three horses, all with reflective triangles on the back. Driving around them in a big comfortable car with the heat on gently and music playing, I reflected on the contrasting lifestyles. I saw those buggies parked in the driveways of prosperous-looking farmsteads where oxen were waiting patiently to be harnessed to plows and reapers. It is quite a feat to make a living as a farmer in these times without burning diesel fuel.

Pennsylvania and Ohio

I went from New Holland to Wooster, Ohio, home of Wooster College, where I helped maintain the large Holtkamp in the chapel and smaller practice organs when I was working with John Leek in the 1970s. I drove by those buildings nearly fifty years after I first worked in them, reliving John’s often humorous, sometimes stern teaching. I remembered standing on a ladder behind the Great windchest as a fledgling tuner, confronted for the first time by a Sesquialtera II, Mixture IV, and Scharff III, struggling to decipher the relationships between all those tiny pipes.

I drove past the First Presbyterian Church where in 1980 Leek and I attended the dedicatory recital of Karl Wilhelm’s Opus 76 played by my organ teacher, Haskell Thomson. Jack Russell, professor of organ at Wooster College and a former student of Haskell’s, was organist at that church. Jack is still a friend, now located in the Boston area. Opus 76 is a grand three-manual affair with thirty-six stops, free standing pedal towers, and beautiful carved pipe shades. What I remember most about that recital was a cipher that stopped Mr. Thomson in mid-sweep (his students will get an inward chuckle from that), bringing him to the balcony rail to ask for assistance, an organbuilder’s nightmare.

While in Wooster, I visited the newly formed Greenleaf Organ Company founded by Samantha Koch and her husband Daniel Hancock. They are working on the renovation of a 1916 Hook & Hastings organ purchased through the Organ Clearing House by a church in Kansas. The organ had been in storage for years in Newcastle, Maine, where I live, and it was fun to see “my baby” getting a new lease of life. The folks at Greenleaf are smart and skillful, and I look forward to seeing lots of great projects come from that shop.

I drove from Wooster to Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to school forty-five years ago. My timing was bad as I arrived a few days after the holiday break started, so there were not many people around. I had breakfast with Randy Wagner, longtime executive at Organ Supply Industries (OSI) in Erie, Pennsylvania. OSI has been for decades the largest company supplying to the organbuilding trade in the United States.

I met Randy in the 1970s when I was working for John Leek, and Leek and I traveled back and forth from OSI to deliver and pick up parts for our projects. Our relationship continued through my days with Angerstein & Associates, the Bishop Organ Company, and the Organ Clearing House. It is one of my longest collegial friendships. Randy retired to Oberlin where he cut his teeth working with Homer Blanchard in the 1950s. He shares with Barbara Owen the distinction of being one of two surviving participants in the founding meeting of the Organ Historical Society, held in the choir room at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1956.1

From Oberlin, I drove to Hartville, Ohio, for a quick visit with Charles Kegg of Kegg Pipe Organ Builders. Charles’s shop has a luxurious amount of space for his staff, with a snazzy collection of machines and equipment. His interest in automated musical instruments means that there are collections of paper rolls for player devices and a very rare machine that punches those paper rolls. Charles and I are collaborating on a project in New York City, and it was a nice opportunity to compare notes and questions.

And back to Pennsylvania

Organ Supply Industries in Erie, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest pipe organ companies in the United States and serves as a supplier to most of the independent organ companies around the country. My pal Bryan Timm, OSI vice president, gave me the “family rate” tour followed by a nice lunch. Their vast factory building is a wonderland where everything is on a huge scale, where forklifts stack organ parts sky high, and where the multiplicity of organ stuff boggles the mind. Eight pedalboards are lined up, in the early stages of their construction. A couple dozen keyboards are making their way through production. Thousands of the little dividers between coupler tablets roll off saws into boxes—the blanks that they are cut from look like houses and hotels from “Monopoly.” It takes hundreds of clamps to glue up things like the huge wood organ pipes from 16′ and 32′ open wood diapasons, and those clamps are stacked on carts, ready for the next project. Organ pipes of all sizes are under construction, and the countless forms and jigs needed to make pipes in an infinity of shapes and sizes are neatly organized in racks and shelves. Ranks of wooden pipes whip through their production department and wind up in crates labeled for shipment to organ companies all over the country. Huge woodworking machines seem to be everywhere, all connected with the metal ducts of the dust collection system that gathers tons of sawdust and plane shavings into hoppers, powered by immense vacuum motors.

OSI is something of a nerve-central for the American pipe organ industry. The bustle of activity through the various departments reassures us that pipe organs are being built across the country, and that talented and dedicated people are pouring their hearts into them.

I left Erie to visit an interesting vintage mechanical-action organ in a recently closed church in Canaseraga, a village of about 500 people in rural central New York, about sixty-five miles south of Rochester. Garret House (1810–1900) was the most prominent organbuilder in Buffalo, New York, of his time. He built a nine-rank, one-manual organ for Trinity Episcopal Church in Canaseraga, and my circle of pins included a snowy drive on long lonely country roads to meet with a small group of parishioners of the now-closed church. They were a cheerful band of lifelong residents, families who have been friends and neighbors for generations, and they are hoping we can find a new home for the lovely organ. Since I joined the Organ Clearing House, I have met with many such groups, sorry to have lost their church and eager for the organ to carry life’s breath to another congregation. Having gathered specifications, dimensions, and photographs, I was put in touch with the officer of the diocese who manages property. I hope we can offer the organ soon. Keep your eye on our website.

Saying goodbye

One of the sure effects of celebrating people I have known for forty or fifty years is the passing of treasured colleagues, mentors, and friends. Thomas H. Anderson was all of these. He was born in 1937 in Belfast, Ireland, and started as an apprentice in an organ pipe making shop when he was fourteen. He emigrated to the United States at age nineteen to take a job with the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. That was 1956, when Aeolian-Skinner built nearly twenty organs, including the beauty at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York (see footnote). Not long after that (not sure when), he started his own firm, the Thomas H. Anderson Organ Pipe Company. He purchased a home in Easton, Massachusetts, not far from Dorchester and Randolph, Massachusetts, where the Aeolian-Skinner facilities were located. His property included a handsome barn attached to the house that he converted to a workshop, and a long, low “chicken coop” where he stored large pipes and materials.

I first met Tommy around 1984 when I went to work for Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, less than ten miles from Tommy’s shop. What a convenience to have a pipe maker so close by; we frequently drove up and down Bay Road between the two shops. Daniel Angerstein closed his shop when he was appointed tonal director at M. P. Möller, and I started the Bishop Organ Company by assuming Dan’s maintenance business. At the same time, I assumed the care of the large Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, and I quickly had a list of rebuilding and restoration projects, most of which required Tommy’s help.

Tommy and his wife Susan grew up on the same street in Belfast. Once he was established in the United States, he went back to Belfast to marry her and bring her to join him in Easton. I imagine there were many letters between them in the interim, planning a life together in a new country. What a courageous decision it was for Susan to join Tommy here. They raised four children, six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all supported by Tommy, also known as Granda, hammering away in that workshop.

There are few craftsmen whose intuitive grasp of π can outstrip an organ pipe maker. When I was working in a shop every day, I could easily eye the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters, or between an inch and an inch-and-a-sixteenth. Tommy could hold a pipe in his hand and sense the width of the rectangle to cut to form an identical tube. Circles are the province of the pipe maker. It’s uncanny.

Susan passed away on December 31, 1996. Tommy passed away on December 30, 2023. His funeral service was held in Easton, just a mile from his house, on January 6, 2024. I was there with nine other organbuilders to meet his family and share stories of our work with him. One of his daughters remembered the chore of loading crates of newly made organ pipes into their van and delivering them to the Consolidated Freightways Terminal in nearby Canton, Massachusetts.

We were a group of old-timers, most of us had known Tommy for decades, and each of us know many organbuilders out there on the grapevine. None of us could remember hearing anything but lovely words about Tommy. He was kind, humorous, caring, diligent, and skillful—a valued and admired colleague. He made organ pipes. Tens of thousands of organ pipes. His work will sing on in dozens of churches around the country. He was a valued friend. He was a gentleman.

Notes

1. Pierre Cochereau, organist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to open the 1956 American Guild of Organists national convention with a recital on the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. During the months preceding that convention, G. Donald Harrison was racing to complete the organ. It was fiercely hot, and there was a taxi strike going on, so after a long workday on June 14, Harrison had to walk several long blocks to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner with his wife Helen, he sat down to watch Victor Borge on television and died of a heart attack. It is interesting to note that John Scott, future organist at Saint Thomas Church, was born on June 18, 1956, just four days after Harrison’s death.