Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens raising funds to restore its 1915 Aeolian organ

Jerome Butera is editor of THE DIAPASON.

One of America’s leading concert organists, Todd Wilson is head of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also teaches at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and serves as organ curator of the Norton Memorial Organ (E. M. Skinner, 1931) in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has recently been appointed as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Cleveland, and as House Organist at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron.
For nineteen years he was director of music and organist at the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian) in Cleveland. From 1989 through 1993 he was also head of the organ department at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music in Berea. Prior to these positions, he served as organist and master of the choristers at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. In New York, he taught on the faculties of Adelphi and Hofstra Universities and was organist of the George Mercer School of Theology.
Todd Wilson has been heard in concert throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1992 he was a recitalist for Austrian Radio in Vienna, and he has performed for the American Guild of Organists national conventions. He has recorded on the JAV, Delos, Disques du Solstice, and Gothic labels.
Todd Wilson has won numerous competitions, including the French Grand Prix de Chartres, the Fort Wayne Competition, the Strader National Scholarship Competition, and the national competition sponsored by the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. A sought-after adjudicator, he has been a member of the jury for many of the world’s most prestigious competitions such as the Nuremberg Competition (Germany), the Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition, the St. Albans International Organ Festival (England), the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Toulouse Festival Competitions (France), and the American Guild of Organists National Young Artists Competition. Todd Wilson is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists, <www.concertorganists.com&gt;.
I met with Todd at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland in May 2008 and at Trinity University, Deerfield, Illinois in April 2009.

Jerome Butera: Tell us about your childhood and early training. Where did you grow up? Did you come from a musical family?
Todd Wilson: I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. My father was an amateur musician—he played the French horn in his early years and always loved the horn. During the years I was growing up, he didn’t have the time to keep up his playing. Then, much later, ten years before he passed away, he went back to horn playing and enjoyed it greatly. My early musical recollections are LPs of Sousa marches and the Mozart horn concertos played by Dennis Brain. My dad played those all the time. To this day I still adore Sousa marches and all the standard horn repertoire.

JB: Did you start with piano lessons?
TW: Yes—my real start in music was at age nine or so. The church we attended was Trinity Episcopal in downtown Toledo, which had a wonderful Skinner organ and in those days a thriving men and boys choir. When I was in the fourth grade I was recruited for the choir. The choirmaster was a wonderful man named Wesley Hartung. He came to our house, we all sat down in the living room, and he said “I think Todd would be a good boy for the choir.” I was just transfixed by the whole thing—I loved the choir, the camaraderie, the singing, and the organ. This was quite a grand old Skinner organ that had many beautiful sounds and a thrilling 32-foot Bombard that shook the whole building.
You can imagine this 9-year-old drinking all this in. I went to Wesley Hartung and said “I want to play the organ.” I can still remember him looking down at me and saying “You shouldn’t even touch the organ until you’ve had many years of piano.” So I said “OK, let’s get going with the piano right away.” He was a wonderful teacher, a very strict old-school teacher, and you didn’t pass one piece until every “I” was dotted and every “T” crossed and you could play it perfectly from memory. Everything had to be just so. He started me off by setting the bar very high, and I’ve always been hugely grateful for that.

JB: Did you study organ with him also?
TW: No, unfortunately he passed away before I was able to start on the organ. I always kept up the piano, and to this day I still love playing the piano. The literature and the feel of the piano—it’s so good for the fingers. I continued piano study with Hugh Murray, who was the organist at Rosary Cathedral in Toledo, and started the organ in high school with a wonderful man also there in Toledo named James Francis, who was the organist at Collingwood Presbyterian. Collingwood Church has a Holtkamp, Sr. organ from about 1955 in the balcony—Rückpositiv on the railing, all exposed, so it was the opposite of the big Skinner organs that I had experienced at that time.
I can still remember walking in for that first lesson with Jim Francis when I was a freshman in high school. I remember the sound of the organ and the feel of it—I remember being struck by how different and how clear this organ was. That was another little turning point for me as an organist—my first exposure to a “modern organ,” as it were.

JB: What kind of teacher was he?
TW: He was a terrific teacher, very encouraging to me. He allowed me to play some things that were a little beyond what I should have been doing through high school, but at the same time that stoked my enthusiasm in a big way. I remember I did a recital my senior year in high school and really worked hard on it—that was the first full organ recital I played. Jim Francis was a wonderful man and fun—a very different personality than Wesley Hartung. He was younger with a vivid sense of humor.

JB: Were you playing at a church in high school?
TW: Yes, all through high school I always had little church jobs around Toledo, and Jim would set me up with substituting here and there. I remember a few jobs where an organist would be out for several months. Jim would get wind of it and recommend me.

JB: That’s great experience; you got to see a lot of different organs.
TW: Different organs, different services, different denominations, hymnals and all that. My senior year in high school I had a nice little Methodist church that was my first time being responsible for a choir week by week. I still keep in touch with a few people from that choir. There was a nice two-manual organ and the choir was right in front, and I got to do lots of standard choral literature, Palm Sunday cantata, all sorts of things like that. For a senior in high school to be in charge of planning, rehearsing, performing, publicizing—it was all a valuable and exciting experience.

JB: What led you to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music?
TW: Jim Francis had studied there in the early ’50s with Wayne Fisher, with whom I went on to study.

JB: What kind of teacher was Wayne Fisher?
TW: He was a remarkable teacher. I was so lucky when I think back on it, to have stumbled on these fabulous teachers—my folks didn’t know much about organ teachers so they weren’t in a position to choose one who was better than the next, and I didn’t know enough—it was all just mostly dumb luck to follow on these people one right after the other. I always felt very fortunate about that. Jim Francis suggested I should go down to Cincinnati for a high school summer music institute. I went for two summers in high school, and Wayne Fisher and I hit it off right from the beginning.
He was a fabulous teacher. He was one of those bachelors whose students were his family, and it was a multi-generational family. He kept in touch with all the students from years before; there’d be parties and it was such fun. I would say that I worked very hard and played very hard in those college years. I practiced like mad and learned a lot of things then that are still at the core of my repertoire—because I learned them so well in those years and memorized them solidly.

JB: As a player, was Wayne Fisher flamboyant or scholarly?
TW: No, not scholarly, he was not of that scholarly generation. He grew up in the ’20s and the ’30s and studied with Dupré in France in the ’30s; his bachelor’s degree was in piano, and his master’s degree was in organ. So he had wonderful fingers, very live fingers I would say—he was that kind of player. His playing at its best was full of rhythm, full of vitality, full of color. He was a musician who loved the organ and played it very well, but his interest in music and I think his general approach to music was not that of an organist only. He had a huge record collection, and only a small bit of it was organ. He was a great fan of the piano literature and Rachmaninoff in particular. I remember Wayne Fisher telling me about traveling in the early ’30s to hear Rachmaninoff play a solo recital at Severance Hall in Cleveland.

JB: Todd, you’ve been in Cleveland for almost 20 years. Can you tell us a little bit about the positions you had before you came to Cleveland?
TW: I had always been much involved with and enthusiastic about the English cathedral repertoire and Anglican music in general. I really wanted to go to England and spend some time soaking up things day by day in an English cathedral. During my master’s degree preparation I thought more seriously about that, and several people helped me out, Gerre Hancock in particular.
I wrote letters to several English cathedral organists asking if I could come over and hang around. Nowadays that sort of thing is pretty common, but in those days there weren’t so many opportunities. I remember Jim Litton had done that early in his career and John Fenstermaker had as well. I talked to both of them and they suggested a few people to write to.
One of them was Allan Wicks at Canterbury Cathedral. Of the folks I wrote to, the first one who wrote back and said yes was Allan Wicks. So, after finishing my master’s degree, I spent about a year in Canterbury, playing some and accompanying some, watching the rehearsals day by day, and listening to every service the choir sang. I helped out in various ways and also had the chance to travel around England and Europe and hear the music in other collegiate chapels and cathedrals.
It was during that fall that I thought I should enter the Chartres Competition. I was feeling burned out from competitions because I had entered a lot of them in college, and I thought I’d do one more and really give it my best. So I worked hard that summer preparing. There were three rounds, and you had to play everything from memory, and it was a very demanding competition. I was very fortunate to win, and that enabled me to play some concerts around France—it was great fun. But I spent that year mostly in England, based at Canterbury, and it was a wonderful experience.
When I came back to the U.S., I took the job that my former teacher had had at Collingwood Presbyterian Church in Toledo for a year. I was able to do lots of things because I was full of youthful enthusiasm, and we did concerts and many ambitious programs that I never had the resources to do at a church before.
But I really wanted to be in an Anglican situation, so I was very happy a year or so later to get the job at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. That’s a cathedral with quite a long and interesting history—not a terribly large building, but very beautiful. I loved working with the men and boys choir. The years there were some of the happiest of my life. I still look back with the fondest memories and still keep in touch with some of the kids who were in the choir—those were very special times.

JB: Did you go from Garden City to Cleveland?
TW: Yes, after brief stays back in Cincinnati and in Paoli, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia). Our first child had been born in Garden City, but even in those days, of course, Long Island was a very expensive place to live, and we paid what seemed a fortune for a small one-bedroom apartment. We came back to Ohio where housing prices and the cost of living in general were much more modest and still are.

JB: In Cleveland you were able to combine Church of the Covenant and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Was that a joint appointment?
TW: There was the possibility of it. I started teaching at CIM the second year I was here. Karel Paukert who had taught at CIM was ready to give that up, and it was very nice that it worked out.

JB: And you were able to have some of your organ students as organ scholars at the church.
TW: We’ve had church music interns over the years at several churches here in Cleveland––Covenant being one of them—a terrific succession over 20 years of wonderful students, several of whom have gone on to fine careers of their own.

JB: Was the choir an all-professional group?
TW: No, it’s a mixed group, with usually ten paid singers. We often had some students who sing with us, but I tried to have section leaders who were not students to lend continuity over the years. We had some wonderful singers who stayed with us for a long time.

JB: How do you balance the demands of your church work, teaching schedule, recitals, recordings, and family—what’s your secret formula?
TW: As you well know, it’s never easy and it’s a constant juggling act. It’s very rare that I feel I’ve done a perfect job of it.

JB: What do you enjoy doing the most?
TW: I enjoy all of those things. As an “older” father with kids spanning quite a number of years, I love the time with each of them. It’s a challenge to do everything and feel like you’re doing your best all the time. Sometimes when you’re doing that many things you feel you’re stretching yourself a little thin. Often it’s good for us to be stretched; you realize it forces you to be economical with your time and make really good use of a limited number of hours.
I love the teaching, I love the church work; the balance of those two things over the years has been very rewarding. We’ve had some terrific students who have been such a joy, and the annual cycle of the church year has been very helpful, sort of an anchor in life. I love playing the Sunday service. No matter how scattered you may feel in other ways, having the chance to play great hymns on a wonderful organ with a really good choir—it keeps you grounded. So much inspiring choral literature comes up again and again; you think of all the wonderful Advent anthems, and you think “oh boy, it’s about to be Advent again,” and the same for every season. I’ve enjoyed all of that tremendously.

JB: When did you come under management?
TW: A long time ago—just before Karen McFarlane moved the agency to Cleveland, it must have been about 1982 or so. I was in Garden City. I remember quite vividly Karen called me and asked if we could have lunch, and we met at a little deli in New York. She invited me to be part of the management, which I accepted very gratefully, and have been happily a part of the management ever since.

JB: You’ve played recitals all throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including some of the significant orchestra hall installations—Walt Disney Hall, the Meyerson, and here in Severance. Could you single out a few especially memorable recitals on fine organs?
TW: Well, there are so many organs that are really a delight in various ways. I always find that question a little hard to answer, because I usually forget to mention some organ. In recent years I certainly loved playing the Disney Hall organ because I was able to play with the L.A. Philharmonic—and I especially love playing with orchestra. I think for any of us those gigs are always infrequent, especially when you get to play with a top-level orchestra in a beautiful hall on a wonderful organ. It’s rare that all those things happen to come together. So that was a real treat. I played a number of years ago for the OHS national convention at Girard College in Philadelphia, and that was a big thrill. Just recently I have to say the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus is sensational—certainly one of the great organs I have played in this country or anywhere else.

JB: Tell us about your role as organ curator at Severance Hall and about the restoration.
TW: I wasn’t really a part of the restoration. They invited me to take this position as curator when the organ was done, and it’s a joy to be connected to such a fine organ in a beautiful hall, and with one of the world’s great orchestras.

JB: And you’ve done recordings here too, haven’t you?
TW: A couple of recordings. The Musical Arts Association of the Cleveland Orchestra asked me to do one of Christmas music, which I believe is still the only solo recording of that organ, and then a couple of years ago a CD with Michael Sachs, the principal trumpet player of the Cleveland Orchestra. We did a recital at Severance of organ and trumpet things and recorded that program.

JB: I’m looking over your discography, and there’s such a range. You’ve done the complete Duruflé works, a disc of Widor, Jongen, Langlais, Bonnet, Demessieux and Dupré, the complete Thalben-Ball, the complete Frank Bridge, a 2-CD set for Delos (In a Quiet Cathedral), Double Forte with David Higgs, and National Cathedral Live. You’ve mentioned the trumpet and organ CD here and you’ve done an organ and cello recording with your daughter Rachel. Tell us about that one.
TW: That was really fun to do, and we did it in your neighborhood at St. Luke’s in Evanston. Rachel is my oldest daughter, and she recently graduated from Ohio State University. She studied cello from about age five and is a very gifted cellist, really a beautiful player with a very fine ear. Her ear is certainly much better than mine. I remember when Rachel was nine or ten she’d hear a soloist in a choir, someone I’d think was singing magnificently, and she’d say “you know, that note was a little sharp.” It sounded fine to me, but that’s the kind of ear she has.

JB: The list of recordings represents, one would have to say, a very eclectic repertoire. Do you find yourself drawn to any particular period of music or any particular composer?
TW: I think as the years go by my interests in music and organ music are more and more eclectic. I’ve always enjoyed playing 19th and 20th century music, and I suspect that if I were going to name any area I might say that, but I certainly would not want to be limited only to that repertoire.

JB: You’ve had experience with Skinner organs and have played many Ernest Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs—do you have particular fondness for that type of organ?
TW: I enjoy them very much, and appreciate all the remarkable craftsmanship and the beautiful sounds, often very extraordinary sounds. But I enjoy playing lots of different organs, and as the years go by I am more and more persuaded of the great value of playing mechanical-action organs on a regular basis. So I wouldn’t want to limit myself to playing electric-action organs by Skinner or anyone else. Mechanical action makes you more aware of details that even with your best efforts you’re not sensitive to in electric-action instruments. You listen in a different way, your perception is much heightened, I think. I’ve certainly noticed that in teaching. I can see such a difference in students when they play regularly on a mechanical-action organ.

JB: Do you have any comments on the current organ scene—the renewed interest in Cavaillé-Coll, certainly in Skinner and Anglican-style organs, as well as the continued interest in historical building styles?
TW: It all seems to me very healthy. I remember so well growing up that there were very rigid camps: this was OK, and that was not OK, and there was very little sympathy or empathy between those various camps.
There’s not much of that anymore, and so many fabulous organs are being built in all these different styles, with a remarkable degree of quality and musicality. It’s all very good. It’s wonderful as players, as musicians in the broadest sense, to be able to play all these different kinds of organs with an appreciation for what it takes to play a particular type of organ really well. It makes us broader and more complete musicians. The organ profession is much livelier, I think.

JB: Do you have any observations on the general style of teaching and playing from your college days to where you are now?
TW: I think the teaching and the playing reflects that same thing. The standard, the versatility, and the knowledge required to be an adaptable organist nowadays are a great deal broader than they were 30 years ago, and that’s all to the good.

JB: Has your playing changed in the last 30 years?
TW: I hope so! It’s hard to be your own best judge, but one learns so much through teaching. It’s listening, it’s thinking how does this music work, what is it all about, how can I help this student to zero in on that. Of course, you deal with that in terms of your own playing as well, and I think the instruments are a great prod to better playing, better teaching, better listening with all these different styles. You travel around and play recitals and you’re going to play a wide variety of organs nowadays in all the styles that you mentioned.

JB: Now you’ve also done some silent film accompaniment. Tell us how you got involved in that.
TW: I’ve always enjoyed improvising, and the first year I was in Cincinnati was Gerre Hancock’s last year there before he went to St. Thomas in New York. Another influence for me was Jim Francis, my teacher in Toledo. When I went down to Cincinnati as a high school student, he said “Now you’ve got to visit Christ Church and hear Gerre Hancock play.”
I was so bowled over, I can still remember that first service I heard. It was the middle of the summer, nothing big going on, but his service playing was such a departure from anything I had heard before. I was smitten by it, and have been a huge admirer of Gerre’s ever since. We had him here at Covenant for a weekend a year ago. He worked with the choir and improvised and gave a talk at our AGO annual dinner. It was such a treat for me to have him work with the choir—we did a whole program of his music.
Hearing Gerre play really fired my interest in improvisation, and I’ve always kind of dabbled in it. I started doing the silent films at Covenant on our summer concert series. Sure enough a lot of people showed up, and one thing led to another. Every so often someone asks me to do a silent film.

JB: What music do you play for that?
TW: My repertoire of films is not very large, so I usually have some themes for each film and I do leitmotifs, a kind of quasi-Wagnerian approach. I have a little theme for each main character, drama themes, and love scene themes; but mostly I try to have some identifiable themes for the main characters and then fill in around that. And then it’s fun to put in little snippets of standard organ literature depending on the audience. If I’m playing for an AGO chapter, I try to put in dibs and dabs of famous organ pieces, just sneak enough in that they might guess what that is.

JB: You’ve referred to your cellist daughter Rachel; can you tell us more about your families?
TW: Anne and I had two children, Rachel and Clara; Clara just finished her sophomore year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and is working on a pre-med track. She’s a fine pianist and loves to play. I’m married to a wonderful woman, Jenny Eppich, who is an urban planner, and we have two children: Ben who just turned nine, and a little daughter Ruth who is four.

JB: Are they musical children too?
TW: Ben has a very sweet voice, and I think he could be a fine member of a boys choir. He matches pitch well and also plays the trumpet. We did Britten’s St. Nicolas a while ago at Covenant, and Ben sang the boy Nicolas to great acclaim—that was a very special moment for me as his proud papa, as you can imagine.

JB: You’ve had an interesting year. Tell me about the time at Indiana University.
TW: It’s been an interesting and challenging year! I taught at CIM one day per week, and continued as curator of the organ in Severance Hall, while commuting to Bloomington and teaching there for three or four days each week. I enjoyed teaching at IU, but ultimately we were not able to move to Bloomington on a permanent basis. I sure became a fan of books on tape during those long drives back and forth!

JB: What are some of your goals now in Cleveland?
TW: I look forward to the continued evolution of the CIM organ department. We have a wonderful new president of the school, and it really is the start of a new era there. We’ve been fortunate to have terrific students, and I enjoy working with them as performers and church musicians. It’s an ongoing pleasure to look after the organ at Severance Hall, certainly one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. I’m thrilled to be part of the music program at Trinity Cathedral! It’s a beautiful building with two Flentrop organs, a very lively and diverse congregation, and a superb new musician in Dr. Horst Buchholz. Another fun new project will be to create a concert series and other uses for the newly restored Aeolian organ at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron. Stan Hywet is the amazing Tudor Revival-style home built by F. A. Seiberling, the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The house organ is located in a spacious and remarkably beautiful music room.

JB: Do you have any recording projects on the horizon?
TW: I’m making a recording on the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a sensational organ, pretty eclectic, really more so than Fritts’s earlier work—very successful and very exciting. You can play quite early music, Renaissance and pre-Bach, and everything right down to the present day. It’s a very large and complete 3-manual organ in a superb acoustic. We’ve already recorded the music for organ, cello, and English horn, and I’ll record the solo pieces in the next few months.

JB: What’s on the recording?
TW: The Reubke Sonata, which people have been after me to record for a very long time. It’s been one of the cornerstone pieces of my repertoire since college days. So often people ask after recitals if I’ve ever recorded it, and I never have. When I played that organ in Columbus I thought it would sound fabulous there. So, the Reubke, some Widor, a piece for organ and cello by Craig Phillips, and Calvin Hampton’s Variations on Amazing Grace for organ and English horn, which is a piece I’ve always been very fond of and I don’t believe there’s any commercial recording available. This will be on the Delos label.

JB: Any humorous experiences you would care to share?
TW: I don’t have the best memory for funny events, except when they happen to float to the surface prodded by something else. I was recently reminded of one quite funny story, which is funnier now that I look back on it some years later.
This would have been ten or twelve years ago when we got a new console at Covenant, a movable console that’s been such a joy to play, built by the Holtkamp company. The organ is essentially an Aeolian-Skinner. In the mid-90s Holtkamp provided a console and made a few tonal additions as well. We had a dedication service for new console, with fancy music and blessings. Tom Trenney was my student assistant at the time, and we both played lots of stuff.
There is a big hooded trumpet in the rear balcony that’s by far the loudest stop on the organ—a wonderful stop, and it plays from the gallery Swell. One of our frequent habits was to put that on with the Unison Off so we could have it available when we wanted it, but it wouldn’t play through the normal Swell to Great coupler. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little electronic bug in the console, and all the gallery Swell played through the front Swell coupler—so when we had that big trumpet ready it turned out to be playing all the time. The console is positioned around the corner and we really couldn’t hear all that well. So, I think we played nearly every verse of every hymn with that great big Chamade trumpet on without knowing it—which would have been deafening in the congregation and most atypical certainly. The grande dame of the congregation said after the service that the organ now had “that Holtkamp edge.” Chick Holtkamp and Karen and everybody laughed greatly afterward.

JB: What are some of your non-musical interests?
TW: I treasure time with my family, as the years seem to pass ever more quickly. We all especially look forward to our annual summer get-away to Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Jenny and I love bike riding and gardening together. I’m an avid reader, particularly of anything historical. Sports-wise, I am a lifelong baseball fan, and also enjoy golf, even though my golf game has gone mostly downhill since I was in high school. Pie baking has become my cooking specialty, and I hope to find time to broaden my cooking repertoire in the years to come.

JB: Todd, thank you for the interview. We wish you continued success and will follow your career with great interest.

The high cost of beauty

When the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, the world went agog over the dazzling beauty of the artifacts that had been hidden since his death some 3,300 years earlier. There were large pieces of gilded furniture, ornate masks, jewelry, and lots of hieroglyphics and paintings. The level of craftsmanship was bewildering, given the degree of antiquity. Other members of Egyptian royalty were buried in similarly grand circumstances, in tombs located under the great pyramids. And who built the pyramids? Slaves.

Big-time personal money always has and always will be part of the arts world. If there had been no Medici dynasty, we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, to name just a few. How did the Medici make their money? They were bankers, the wealthiest family in Europe. They parlayed their wealth into political influence, and many family members became important politicians. The family even produced four popes in the sixteenth century. If that implies it was possible to purchase a papacy, I’m surprised that Silvio Berlusconi didn’t try it. A family tree I found online shows more than twenty generations of Medici between 1360 and about 1725. 

We’ve learned a lot about the ethics of banking and investment in recent years, where executives use their clients’ money to leverage their own fortunes, bring down institutions, and go home with bonuses that equal the annual wages of hundreds of normal workers. I’m not setting about a researched dissertation on the source of the Medici’s money, but I’m willing to bet that much of it came at the expense of others.

Heavy metal

The Carnegie Steel Company was one of the country’s first major producers of steel, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, it developed important improvements in the manufacturing process, including open-hearth smelting and installation of advanced material handling systems like overhead cranes and hoists. The result was higher production levels using increasingly less skilled labor, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck against the Homestead Steel Works. There were various waves of strikes, and at first the union prevailed. 

Henry Clay Frick ran the Carnegie Steel Company for his eponymous partner. He announced on April 30, 1892, that he would keep negotiations open with the union for thirty days, and on June 29, he locked down the plant and the union announced a strike. Frick engaged the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security, and more than three hundred armed Pinkerton agents were involved in bloody battles with striking workers. The Pinkerton force surrendered, and the governor sent in the State Militia and declared martial law. There was a failed assassination attempt against Frick. The union was broken and collapsed about ten years later. 

It was important to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to beat down the union because they had their lifestyles to maintain. Carnegie built a majestic home on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street in New York (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) in which he installed a large Aeolian pipe organ. He paid about $65,000 for the organ at the time when workers in the Aeolian factory earned about $600 a year. Hmmm. The organ cost as much as the annual wages of more than a hundred workers. Not as bad as King Tut, but sounds about right.

Henry Clay Frick installed a large Aeolian in his gracious home on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (now housing the Frick Collection, commonly known as “The Frick”). These guys really knew how to build houses. Hank and Andy must have warmed each other’s hearts living just twenty blocks apart—an easy twenty-minute walk, just long enough to smoke a hundred-dollar cigar (six weeks for that Aeolian worker). Frick also built a tremendous Aeolian in his summer home at Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts and gave a four-manual job to Princeton University. That’s four big pipe organs built on the backs of striking steel workers.

Three years before the Homestead Strike, Andrew Carnegie paid about $1,000,000 to buy the land and construct the venerable Manhattan concert hall that bears his name. The place was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925 when they sold it to a real estate developer.

I’m giving Mr. Carnegie a hard time, because at least some of his business practices were mighty ruthless, and the mind-boggling wealth that he accumulated was not a reflection on his largess. But it’s important to remember that he was also an important philanthropist and the foundation that was founded on his fortune is still a major source of grants for all sorts of educational programs, scientific research, and artistic endeavors. Visit the website at www.carnegie.org.

I served a church in Cleveland as music director for about ten years, where a four-manual Austin was installed as a gift from the Carnegie Foundation in 1917. The Bach scholar Albert Riemenschneider of Baldwin-Wallace College was organist there when the instrument was installed—the perfect organ for a performance of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.

Among many other projects, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation installed more than 8,800 pipe organs in America’s churches and founded more than 2,500 public libraries. That’s important.

Moving musical chairs.

On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Wendy and I attended a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to hear Stephen Tharp play the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra of Aaron Copland. Until about three o’clock that afternoon it was doubtful that the concert would happen because Carnegie Hall’s stagehands had struck the night before, causing the cancellation of the concert on October 2. They were striking over the rules for soon-to-be-opened educational spaces above the hall, claiming that they should have the same jurisdiction as in the great hall itself. Carnegie Hall’s management took the position that as it would be an educational venue, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees should not have such control. It’s probably not this simple, but should Theatrical Stage people control educational spaces?

The New York Times reported that Carnegie Hall employs five full-time stagehands with average annual compensations of more than $400,000 a year, with additional part-time union members brought in as needed. I know a lot of organbuilders who would make great stagehands, and Wendy was quick to say that I missed my calling.

The strike was settled in time for us to hear Stephen play with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported that the union backed off, as it seemed ridiculous to almost anyone that a teenaged music student would not be allowed to move a music stand. You can read about that strike in the New York Times at: www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/carnegie-hall-and-stagehands-sett….

It’s an exquisite irony that the October 2 concert cancelled because of the strike was to be a gala celebratory fundraiser for the Philadelphia Orchestra, recently revitalized after years of labor disputes. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was to open his second season as music director in what was billed as the triumphant return of that great orchestra to its role as a national leader.

Vänskä-daddle

On October 3, 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Osmo Vänskä had resigned from his position as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His action was anticipated. The musicians had been locked out by the Board of Directors for more than a year in a dispute that pitted the player’s requests for salary increases against the board’s decision to spend $52,000,000 renovating the concert hall while claiming there were no funds to increase salaries.

The orchestra had long planned to play a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York during the fall of 2013. Ironically, Vänskä was widely celebrated for having brought the MSO into new prominence with several seasons of brilliant performances and celebrated recordings, and the Carnegie Hall concerts were to celebrate the MSO’s bursting into the upper echelons of American symphony orchestras. Vänskä had announced that the dispute must be settled so rehearsals for those concerts could begin on September 30. If not, he would resign. It wasn’t, and he did. Former Senator George Mitchell, famous for negotiating settlements of disputes in Northern Ireland and steroid use in Major League Baseball, had been enlisted to help with the MSO negotiations—turned out that Northern Ireland had nothing on the MSO.

In the past several years, a number of important orchestras have suffered serious financial stress leading to labor disputes, including the orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

Eerily, on September 30, 2013, the same drop-dead-date for Väskä’s resignation, Norman Ebrecht of ArtsJournalBlogs reported that players in one hundred German orchestras struck simultaneously to draw attention to the increasing number of orchestras closing because of dwindling government support. There were 168 orchestras in Germany at the time of reunification in 1991, and there are 131 today. It’s a big deal to lose nearly forty orchestras in twenty years.

Do the numbers.

I love to do goofy math. In the 1970s when I lived on a farm outside Oberlin, Ohio, I wondered how much corn might grow in a day. I measured a couple dozen plants in the morning, then again in the evening, and came up with an average amount of growth. I measured and multiplied to get the number of plants in an acre, then again by the number of acres on the farm. Of course I can’t remember the numbers, but I know it added up to many miles of growth in a day. You could almost hear it while lying in bed at night.

I did that recently with the economics of a symphony orchestra. I found a list online of American orchestras with the largest operating budgets. Los Angeles tops that list at $97,000,000. Boston is second at $84,000,000. I stuck with Boston because it’s home, and I got the rest of the information I needed. The BSO plays about a hundred concerts a year—that’s $840,000 each. Symphony Hall seats about 2,600 people. The average ticket price is around $75, so ticket revenue for a full house is about $195,000. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 per concert that must be made up by private and corporate donations, campaigns, bar and restaurant revenues, and heaven knows what else—if they sell out each concert. Read the program booklet of the BSO and you’ll be surprised how many of the orchestra’s chairs are “fully funded in perpetuity,” named for their donors. Three cheers for them.

I know very well that this is bogus math. There are many variables that I’ve overlooked, and doubtless many of which I am not aware—but I think it’s a reasonable off-the-cuff illustration of the challenges of large-scale music-making in modern society. You can buy a pretty snazzy new pipe organ for the $645,000 that’s missing for each BSO concert after ticket sales.

While I was surfing about looking for those numbers, I learned that the starting salary for a musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is about $135,000. That’s pretty good when compared to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra where the starting salary is more like $48,000. I suppose that senior members of the BSO must earn over $200,000. In the business world, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe would qualify as an Executive Vice President and head of a department—worth $250,000 or $300,000, I’d say. But not as much as a stagehand. 

I guess I’m laboring under an old-fashioned concept that the artistic content should be worth more than the support staff. Big-time stagehands are hardworking people with important jobs. It’s not just anyone who can be trusted to fling high-end harps around a stage. But how many church choir directors would like to have someone else available to set up the chairs?

If the cost of operating a symphony orchestra seems high, get a load of the Metropolitan Opera. I found an article in the New York Times published on October 1, 2011, that put the Met’s annual budget at $325,000,000, of which $182,000,000 is from private donations. The Met had just passed New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the arts organization with the largest budget. (Counting baseball, New York City has three Mets.)

I found a page on the Met (opera) website that listed the administrative staff, which includes the General Manager (Peter Gelb), Musical Director (James Levine), and Principal Conductor (Fabio Luisi), along with twenty-five assistant general managers, artistic management, design, production, finance, development, human resources, house management, stage directors, stage management, carpenters, electricians—a total of more than three hundred administrative employees. Add a symphony orchestra, costumes, make-up, custodians, ticket sellers, and—oh yes—singers, and you wind up with a whopping payroll.

Since I’m not a stagehand, I pretended I was going to buy one ticket online. I chose a performance of La Bohème on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m. I couldn’t choose between a seat in Row B of the Orchestra (down front, near the stage) for $300, or one in Orchestra Row U for $250. And nearly half of the operating budget is funded by donations. If you take a date and have a nice dinner and a glass of wine at intermission, that’s pretty much a thousand-dollar night, something stagehands could afford if they could get the night off.

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The source of much of the money that has funded the arts over many centuries is questionable, and it’s especially difficult to accept how much of has been the product of slavery. But scary as that is, I’m sure glad we had the Medicis and hundreds of others like them. It would be a barren world without the art and architecture that they funded. I have to admit that when I’m standing in a museum looking at a work of art, I’m not fretting about the suffering involved in its production.

Today’s system seems more just—concert-goers buy tickets, and corporate and individual sponsors theoretically make up the rest. That works as long as costs are reasonably controlled, and donors can be kept happy. The problem with that is how it can affect programming. 

If you listen regularly to a commercial classical radio station anywhere in the country, you would be able to list society’s favorite pieces of music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 9th, Mozart’s 40th Symphony and 23rd Piano Concerto, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances—you get the idea. Organists know how hard it is to get a bride to choose something other than the Taco-Bell Canon, or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Lots of serious classical music ensembles, from local choruses to major symphony orchestras, adjust their programming to please their patrons. The box office at Boston Symphony Hall has a long-standing tradition allowing people to pass on their subscription seats to friends. When James Levine came to town as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he increased dramatically the amount of contemporary music on the programs, and friends of ours who had long held great seats on the balcony above the stage asked if we wanted to take them over because they couldn’t take all the modern music. We did.

And, in a related matter, the players of the BSO made public the extra workload brought on by Levine’s energetic and imaginative programming. On March 17, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that orchestra players were concerned about longer concerts, extra rehearsals, and programming of exceptionally difficult music. You can read it online at www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_prove…. They cited aggravation of injuries and increased stress and negotiated with Levine to alter some of the planned programs. And the BSO Trustees created a special fund to support the cost of the extra rehearsal time. But smaller institutions with limited resources would not be able to do the same. So it’s back to the crowd-pleasing favorites at the cost of innovation.

I’ve often repeated a story about an experience Wendy and I had with artistic patronage. An exceptionally wealthy friend, now deceased, was well known in his community as a generous supporter of the arts. He lived in a city that is home to a nationally prominent repertory theater company that was mounting the premiere production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home. The play tells the story of a family’s gay son contracting AIDS, with the main dialogue happening in the family car driving home from a holiday celebration. The production was to include larger-than-life bunraku puppets that would provide the action less suited for the stage, conceived by the playwright, to be constructed by a New York-based puppeteer. Our friend was asked to fund the puppets, which were to cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He told us the story over dinner, saying that he hated the idea, was uncomfortable with the subject, but thought he should provide the funds because he knew it was important.

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Recently organist David Enlow and harpist Grace Cloutier performed a recital at David’s home church, Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, where the Organ Clearing House installed an instrument a couple years ago. At dinner after the concert, we were discussing the instruments we play, and I noted that with the exception of pianos and high-end violins, the harp is probably one of the most expensive instruments that musicians typically own privately. Organists have to rely on the institutions for which they work to provide them with an instrument to play. And they sure have gotten expensive.

I’ve always felt that a three-manual organ with forty or fifty stops is just about right for a prominent suburban church with a sanctuary seating five hundred people or more. But a first quality organ of that size will push, and easily exceed, $1,000,000. It’s pretty hard for many parishes to justify such a whopping expenditure. I grew up in the era when it was all the rage for churches to replace fifty-year-old electro-pneumatic organs with new trackers, and many organists fell into the habit of getting what they asked for. Those days are largely over, because now that we really know how to build good organs of any description, we also know what they cost! We have to remember what a big deal it is for a church to order a new instrument.

§

I’m troubled by the striking stagehands. I believe in the concept of the labor union. They were formed to confront real injustice, and in the strange and shaky state of our economy, injustices are still firmly in place. But this is a time when they’ve gone too far. That kind of labor organizing can threaten the future of live music in concert halls.

The Organ Clearing House uses Bank of America because we work all across the country, and it’s convenient to be able to get to a bank pretty much anywhere we go. But we were not bursting with pride when Time magazine reported on November 9, 2013, that the bank was to be fined $865,000,000 for mortgage fraud related to the Countrywide Financial scandal. At the same time, our bank is a Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Alvin Ailey Dancers, and the Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcasts in public schools. We thank them for all that.

Bank of America is also a “Season Sponsor” for Carnegie Hall, supporting the Hall’s mission “to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of the legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences,” as stated on Carnegie Hall’s website.

So the concert hall that was built on the backs of striking steel workers, whose schedule was recently interrupted by striking six-figure stagehands, is now supported largely by a bank guilty of major mortgage fraud. 

May the music keep playing. Sure hope it does. The stakes are high. 

What’s it going to cost?

When you’re shopping for a car, it’s reasonable to start by setting a budget. Whether you say $10,000, $30,000, or $75,000, you can expect to find a vehicle within a given price range. Of course, it’s up to you whether or not you stick to your budget, but we all have experience with the exercise, and there’s plenty of solid information available. Printed advertisements broadcast prices in huge type, and you can fill in forms online with details about a given car to receive a generated price.

When you set out to buy a piano, you can start with a simple search, and get a quick idea of price ranges. I just spent a minute or two surfing the internet to learn that a new Steinway “B” (that’s the seven-foot model) sells for over $80,000, and that you should expect to pay about 75% the price of a new instrument to purchase a reconditioned used piano. If you start with that in mind and do some serious shopping, you may well get lucky and find a beautiful instrument for less, but at least you have a realistic price range in mind before you start.

There is simply no such information or formulas available for the acquisition of a pipe organ, whether you are considering a new or vintage instrument. In a usual week at the Organ Clearing House, I receive at least two, and as many as ten first-time inquiries from people considering the purchase of an organ. These messages often include a stated budget, usually $100,000, sometimes $200,000, and they typically specify that it should be a three-manual organ. Each time, I wonder how that number was generated. Was it the largest amount they could imagine spending? Did they really think that an organ could be purchased for such an amount?

It’s as if you were shopping for that car, but you promised yourself that this time, you’re going to get your dream car. You test-drive a Mercedes, a Maserati, and a Bentley, and oh boy, that Bentley is just the thing. You offer the salesman $20,000. He rolls his eyes and charges you for the gas. It’s a $250,000 car.

§

There’s a popular myth out there that people think that organ companies can be compared by their “price per stop.” The most common source for public information about the price of an organ is the publicity surrounding the dedication of a monumental new organ. You read in the newspaper that Symphony Hall spent $6,500,000 on a new organ with 100 stops. Wow. That’s $65,000 per stop. We only need a ten-stop organ. We could never raise $650,000.

The problem with this math is that the big concert hall organ has special features that make it so expensive. The most obvious is the 32′ façade. How much do you think those pipes cost? If they’re polished tin, the most expensive common material, maybe the bottom octave of the 32′ Principal costs $200,000? $250,000? More? And if the organbuilder pays that to purchase the pipes, what does it cost to ship them? A rank of 32-footers is most of a semi-trailer load. What does it cost to build the structure and racks that hold them up? This week, the Organ Clearing House crew is helping a colleague company install the 32′ Open Wood Diapason for a new organ. It takes ten people to carry low CCCC, and once you have it in the church, you have to get it standing upright. Years ago, after finishing the installation of a full-length 32′ Wood Diapason in the high-altitude chamber of a huge cathedral, my colleague Amory said, “Twelve pipes, twelve men, six days.” It’s things like that that pump up the “price per stop.” In that six-million-dollar organ, the 32′ Principal costs $400,000, and the 13⁄5′ Tierce costs $700.

Here’s another way to look at the “price per stop” myth. Imagine a two-manual organ with twenty stops­—Swell, Great, and Pedal, 8′ Principal on the Great, three reeds, and the Pedal 16′ stops are a Bourdon and a half-length Bassoon. The biggest pipes in the organ are low CC of the Principal, and low CCC of the Bourdon, and the organ case is 18 feet tall. Add one stop, a 16′ Principal. Suddenly, the case is twice as large, the wind system has greater capacity, and the organ’s internal structure has to support an extra ton-and-a-half of pipe metal. The addition of that single stop increased the cost of the organ by $125,000, which is now divided over the “price per stop.”

Or take that 21-stop organ with the added 16′ Principal, but instead of housing it in an organ case, you install it in a chamber. In that comparison, the savings from not building a case likely exceeded the cost of the 16′ Principal.

Ballpark figures

On June 10, 1946, a construction manager named Joseph Boucher from Albany, New York, was sitting in seat 21, row 33 of the bleachers in Boston’s Fenway Park, 502 feet from home plate. Ted Williams hit a home run that bounced off Boucher’s head and wound up 12 rows further away. Boucher’s oft-repeated comment was, “How far away does a guy have to sit to be safe in this place.” That still stands as the longest home run hit at Fenway, and Boucher’s is a solitary red seat in a sea of blue. That’s a ballpark figure I can feel comfortable with. I have other stories saved up that I use sometimes as sassy answers when someone asks for a “ballpark figure” for the cost of moving an organ.

If you’re thinking about acquiring a vintage organ, you’ll learn that the purchase prices for most instruments are $40,000 or less. Organs are often offered “free to a good home,” especially when the present owner is planning a renovation or demolition project, and the organ has transformed from being a beloved asset to a huge obstacle. But the purchase price is just the beginning. 

If it’s an organ of average size, it would take a crew of four or five experts a week to dismantle it. Including the cost of building crates and packaging materials, dismantling might cost $20,000. If it’s an out-of-town job for the crew, add transportation, lodging, and meals, and it’ll cost more like $30,000. If it’s a big organ, in a high balcony, in a building with lots of stairs, and you can’t drive a truck close to the door, the cost increases accordingly. With the Organ Clearing House, we might joke that there’s a surcharge for spiral staircases, but you might imagine that such a condition would likely add to the cost of a project.

Once you’ve purchased and dismantled the organ, it’s likely to need renovation, releathering, and perhaps reconstruction to make it fit in the new location. Several years ago, we had a transaction in which a “free” organ was renovated and relocated for over $800,000. The most economical time to releather an organ is when it’s dismantled for relocation. Your organbuilder can place windchests on sawhorses in his shop and perform the complex work standing comfortably with good lighting, rather than slithering around on a filthy floor in the bottom of an organ.

The cost of renovating an organ is a factor of its size and complexity. For example, we might figure a basic price-per-note for releathering, but the keyboard primary of a Skinner pitman chest with its double primaries costs more than twice as much to releather as does a chest with single primary valves. A slider chest is relatively easy to recondition, unless the windchest table is cracked and split, and the renovation becomes costly reconstruction.

It was my privilege to serve as clerk of the works for the Centennial Renovation of the 100-stop Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine. (It’s known as the Kotzschmar Organ, dedicated to the memory of the prominent nineteenth-century Portland musician, Hermann Kotzschmar.) That project included the usual replacement of leathered pneumatic actions, but once the organ was dismantled and the windchests were disassembled, many significant cracks were discovered that had affected the speed of the actions for generations. Another aspect of the condition of that organ that affected the cost of the renovation was the fact that many of the solder seams in larger zinc bass pipes were broken. The effect was that low-range pipe speech was generally poor throughout the organ, and it was costly to “re-solder” all of those joints, a process that’s not needed in many organ renovations.

It’s generally true that if an organ that’s relatively new and in good condition is offered for sale, the asking price will be higher knowing that the renovation cost would be low or minimal. But sometimes newer organs are offered for low prices because they urgently need to be moved.

Let’s consider some of the choices and variables that affect the price of an organ:

Reeds

With the exception of lavish and huge bass stops, like that 32-footer I mentioned above, reeds are the most expensive stops in the organ. They’re the most expensive to build, to voice, to maintain­—and when they get old, to recondition. When you’re relocating an organ, the quality of work engaged for reconditioning reeds will affect the cost of the project and is important to ensuring the success of the instrument. You would choose between simply cleaning the pipes and making them speak again by tuning and fiddling with them or sending them to a specialist who would charge a hefty fee to repair any damage, replace and voice the tongues, mill new wedges, and deliver reeds that sound and stay in tune like new.

Keyboards

An organbuilder can purchase new keyboards from a supplier for around $1,000 each to over $10,000. The differences are determined by the sophistication of balance, weighting, tracker-touch, bushings, and of course, the choice of playing surfaces. Plastic covered keys are cheaper than tropical woods, bone, or ivory, which is now officially no-touch according to the United States Department of the Interior (remember President Obama and Cecil the Lion). Some organbuilders make their own keyboards and don’t offer choices, but especially in renovations, such choices can make a difference.

Climate

If an older organ has been exposed to extremes of dryness, moisture, or sunlight, it’s likely that the cost of renovation will be higher because of the need to contain mold, splits, and weakened glue joints.

Casework

A fancy decorated organ case with moldings, carvings, and gold leaf is an expensive item by itself. As with keyboards, some builders have a “house style” that is built into the price of every organ they build. If you don’t want moldings, towers, and pipe shades, you can ask someone else to build the organ. Especially with electro-pneumatic organs, chamber installations are often an option, and are considerably less expensive than building ornate casework. However, I believe that it’s desirable for a pipe organ to have a significant architectural presence in its room, whether it’s a free-standing case or a well-proportioned façade across the arched opening of a chamber.

Console

Drawknob consoles are typically more expensive than those with stoptabs
or tilting tablets. Sumptuous and dramatic curved jambs speak to our imagination through the heritage of the great Cavaille-Coll organs, especially the unique and iconic console at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Those dramatic monumental consoles were the successors of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stop panels, as found on the Müller organ at Haarlem or the Schnitger at Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. The default settings of most woodworking machinery are “straight” and “square,” and by extension, curves require more work and greater expense.

Many modern consoles and most renovation projects include the installation of solid-state controls and switching. There is a range of different prices in the choice of which supplier to use, and the cost of individual components, such as electric drawknob motors, vary widely.

What’s the point?

Some of the items I’ve listed represent significant differences in the cost of an organ, while some are little more than nit-picking. Saving $30 a pop by using cheap drawknob motors isn’t going to affect the price of the organ all that much. And what’s your philosophy? Is cheap the most important factor? When you’re commissioning, building, purchasing, or relocating a pipe organ, you’re creating monumental liturgical art. I know as well as anyone that every church or institution that’s considering the acquisition of an organ has some practical and real limit to the extent of the budget. I’ve never seen any of the paperwork between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II, who commissioned the painting of the Sistine Chapel, but it’s hard to imagine that the Pope complained that the scheme included too many saints and should be diminished.  

You may reply that putting a 20-stop organ in a local church is hardly on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, but I like to make the point that the heart of planning a pipe organ should be its artistic content, not its price. If you as a local organist dream of playing on a big three-manual organ, and you imagine it sounding like the real thing, and functioning reliably, you can no more press a job for $100,000 or $200,000 than you can drive away in the Bentley for $20,000.

Let’s think about that three-manual organ. Money is tight, so we think we can manage 25 stops, which means that while you’ve gained some flexibility with the third keyboard, that extra division might only have five or six stops, not enough to develop a chorus and provide a variety of 8′ tone or a choice of reeds. Sit down with your organbuilder and work out a stoplist for 25 stops on two manuals, and you’ll probably find that to be a larger organ because without the third manual you don’t need to duplicate basic stops at fundamental pitches. Manual divisions with eight or ten stops are more fully developed than those of five or eight, and let’s face it, there’s very little music that simply cannot be played on a two-manual organ. Further, when we’re thinking about relatively modest organs in which an extra keyboard means an extra windchest, reservoir, and keyboard action, by choosing two manuals instead of three, you may be reducing the cost of the mechanics and structure of the organ enough to cover the cost of a few extra stops.

Let the building do the talking.

Because a pipe organ is a monumental presence in a building and its tonal structure should be planned to maximize the building’s acoustics, the consideration of the building is central to the planning of the instrument. It’s easy to overpower a room with an organ that’s too large. Likewise, it’s easy to set the stage for disappointment by planning a meager, minimal instrument.

Maybe you have in your mind and heart the concept of your ideal organ. Maybe that’s an organ you played while a student or a visiting recitalist. Or maybe it’s one you’ve seen in photos and heard on recordings. But unless you have the rare gift of being able to picture a hypothetical organ in a given room, there’s a good chance that you’re barking up the wrong tree.

While I state that the building defines what the organ should be, five different organbuilders will propose at least five different organs. Think about what the room calls for, think about the needs of the congregation and the music it loves, and conceive what the organ should be. Then we’ll figure out how to pay for it.

Follow the money

In August of 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, ending a long process of suspicion, investigation, and Senate hearings into allegations that the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) used subterfuge and “dirty tricks” to sabotage the efforts of the Democratic Party leading up to the presidential election in 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post, were central to that investigation, jumping on the story of the notorious break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex near the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. They worked so closely together that they were known by their names melded as “Woodstein.” The story as they told it is widely regarded as the birth of modern investigative journalism.

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation, Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), which was a precursor to the 1976 movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. There’s a scene in the film where Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) is interviewing an accountant who worked for CREEP, who revealed that there was a stash of money—a secret fund—that was used to bankroll those dirty tricks. As Bernstein questioned her, she said, “Follow the money.” I suppose that phrase had been used before, but it’s popularly understood that it originated in that movie.

Woodward and Bernstein followed the money, which led them to discovering how many White House officials and Nixon appointees were involved in the scandal, ultimately unraveling Nixon’s presidency. I’m writing this in mid-September, and I realize that you will likely be reading it a few days before Americans go to the polls to decide what must be one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in the nation’s history.

Don’t take it for granted.

When I was a kid, I had practice privileges in four different local churches. I came and went as I pleased and made plenty of noise while I was there. I even had keys to a couple of them. One was the church where I had my lessons. Looking back, I suppose my teacher had made the arrangements for me, but I don’t remember any of the details. If I remember right, I played for an occasional funeral—I guess that was in return for the right to practice. I’m pretty sure that money never changed hands, and I know I took it for granted. Wasn’t I lucky?

When I arrived at Oberlin as a student in the fall of 1974, I was flabbergasted by the number of organs. There were sixteen practice organs, four in teaching studios, a big Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, and the brand-new Flentrop in Warner Concert Hall. Organ majors had two weekly lessons—one in the studio and one in the concert hall. And of course, we needed practice time in the hall. That was the way things worked, and I never paid attention to how frustrating it must have been for students studying other instruments. If you wanted to rehearse a string quartet in Warner Hall, you had to sneak past all those organists.

Of course, Oberlin also had a lot of pianos—hundreds of them. There was a marble plaque on the wall near the dean’s office that read, “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Music.”¹ I remember paraphrasing it: “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Steinway & Sons.” There were close to two hundred Steinways in the practice building, Robertson Hall. There was a Steinway “B” in every teaching studio, and two Bs in every piano teacher’s studio. Two Bs, or not two Bs, there was no question that we had access to excellent instruments wherever we turned. I suppose there were close to three hundred pianos. I wonder what that cost? The pianos were there in support of all the students—flautists, singers, violinists—but the organists sure ate up most of the real estate. 

We all had our favorite instruments. I certainly knew which practice organs I preferred, but I also had a half-dozen favorite pianos. I knew them by room number and serial number. Wasn’t I lucky to have a half dozen favorites out of the multitude? I once had a dream that Oberlin was replacing all the pianos at once, and they were discarding all the old ones. To make the disposal easier in the wacky world of dreams, the pianos were placed on the curb in front of houses all over town for trash day, and we raced about, looking at serial numbers to claim our favorites. I found mine on the curb in front of Fenner Douglass’s house on Morgan Street—the one with the big organ pipe out front. Lucky guy.

WWFS? What would Freud say? That I took it for granted that lovely instruments would be provided for me wherever I went? That I felt it was somehow my right? That was the time when I was getting deep into organ building and started to realize how much money was involved.

I’ve heard colleagues say something like this: “I’ll accept that job, but I told them they’ll have to buy me a new organ.” Have you ever heard anything like that? Have you ever said anything like that?

A crazy business

Picture a parish church with 250 “pledging units.” The organ is a broken-down, tired relic, and someone gets the idea that it should be replaced. How do we get started? What’s it going to cost? However they get started, somewhere along the line they start receiving proposals from organbuilders. $650,000. $800,000. $1,200,000. Wow! I had no idea.

To pay for an $800,000 instrument, every family in that church would have to donate $3,200. To pay for $1.2M instrument, more like $4,800. Of course, it never works like that. More likely, one family gives a third of the cost, three other families split the second third, and the rest comes in small gifts from the other 246 families. The smallest gift comes from the First Grade Class of the Sunday School.

Let’s think about this. A small community of people ponies up an average of $3,200 a head to buy a musical instrument. Crazy. Are they doing that as a gift to the organist? I doubt it. They may be doing it in recognition and appreciation for the wonderful music. The organist’s artistry may have inspired them. And they may be doing it in part to be sure they’ll be able to attract the next good musician. Whatever the motivation, we shouldn’t fail to notice what a remarkable process that is.

One brick at a time

Last April, Wendy and I spent ten days in the UK. She was attending the London Book Fair, so I had a few days on my own to explore the big city. After the fair, we traveled to Durham, to York, and to Oxford, especially visiting big churches and their organs.

I wrote about that trip in the June and July 2016 issues of The Diapason and touched on how the British National Lottery provides funding for the restoration of the pipe organs and church buildings through a program called Heritage Lottery Fund, which is dedicated to preserving the nation’s heritage. Durham Cathedral was built between 1093 and 1133, and a major renovation project is underway now. Dubbed “Open Treasure,” the project is focused not only on the fabric of the building, but on programming involving the use of the spaces as well. You can read about the project on the website: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/open-treasure.&nbsp;

The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the project in large part, but Durham Cathedral is responsible for raising a huge amount of the money. And there’s a marvelous project as part of that campaign. In the gift shop, a large and ancient room that also houses a restaurant, there was a Lego™ model of the cathedral under construction. It’s more than 12½ feet long, 5½ feet tall, and includes more than 300,000 bricks. For a donation of £1 per brick, you could add to the model. We gave £20, and with the help of a cheerful volunteer wearing an “Open Treasure” sweatshirt, I followed architectural drawings to install my 20 bricks.

There’s a website describing that project: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/visit/what-to-visit/durham-cathedral-lego-bui…. When I looked at it this morning, I learned that the project, which started in July of 2013, is now complete. That webpage includes a video in five parts that animates the history of the cathedral using Lego™ bricks, with terrific singing by the cathedral choir in the background.

A note to readers: I hope you open the links I publish with this column. And Google “Durham Cathedral Lego.” You’ll find lots of newspaper coverage of this unique project.

In the July issue, I shared the tenth-century story of St. Cuthbert and the missing cow, part of the legend of the founding of the cathedral. There’s a commemorative statue of a cow high on the exterior of the cathedral, and there’s a Lego™ cow in the model, along with a representation of the famous poly-chromed façade of the cathedral organ, notable because it sports two 16′ Open Wood Diapasons, one which extends to 32′! Now we’re talking.

Buy a pipe.

The idea of buying bricks is not new. There are a couple bricks with our names on them in the path leading to the Skidompha² Library in Damariscotta, Maine (population 2,218). And my grandparents donated stones in honor of me, my three siblings, and ten first cousins for the construction of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I have no idea where those stones are located, but whenever I’m there, I look up and think about it.

A common gimmick for raising money for an organ project is “Buy a Pipe,” or “Adopt a Pipe.” The organbuilder and organ committee team up to create a catalogue of prices. You could list anything from a 13/5′ Tierce ($800) to a 32′ Bombarde ($75,000); a keyboard ($3,500) to a blower ($5,000). Donors could mark boxes on a form, and send in their checks. I’ve seen organ benches, carved pipe shades, and swell boxes listed as family gifts in dedication booklets. I’ve even seen an antiphonal Trompette-en-Chamade with the knob engraved Trompette Boyd, in memory of the son who died in the war.

This exercise is always a little mythical—it’s hard to make a list that accurately covers the entire cost of an organ. Windlines, schwimmers, ladders, and walkboards don’t make appealing memorials. Maybe you inflate the value of a music rack to cover a tuner’s perch. But it certainly is meaningful to donors to know they supported something specific. I often quip that raising money to build an organ is easier if there will be lots of space on the case for a plaque.

Place a big organ pipe, at least an 8-footer, in the narthex. Mark it with increments of $100,000, and fit it with a gold tuning sleeve. As gifts come in, move the sleeve up the pipe. Nice visual.

§

There are lots of reasons for a church to purchase a new organ. The old one is worn out, or the old one was never any good. A new instrument would help revitalize the place. We care deeply about the meaning and role of music in our worship.

And there are reasons not to. A couple years ago I worked with a church, helping them to sell a large tracker organ. It was less than twenty years old, and very fancy, with carvings and moldings, shiny façade pipes, and turned rosewood drawknobs. But a significant number of members had been bitterly opposed to the acquisition. Many of those people left the church, and the opposition that remained carried on the battle. The installation of the new organ could be traced directly to the failure of the church and the disbanding of the congregation. Soli Deo Gloria. 

Wendy and I recently joined a church that installed a new organ a few years earlier. It was named the Bicentennial Organ, commemorating the bicentennial of the parish, and it was paid for by the wide membership of the parish and surrounding community. As a new member, I’ve enjoyed meeting people there. When they learn that I’m involved with pipe organs, they light up and speak eloquently about the church’s new instrument. They’re well informed about it. They not only know it’s a good and important organ, but they know why. They’re proud of it, and its presence in the building means a lot to them.

Care for the money.

The people who paid for the organ are entrusting it to you. Be sure that it’s always well cared for. That means tuning and mechanical issues, but there are some bigger, less obvious reasons. There’s someone on the property committee, the finance committee, or the board of trustees who is responsible for the church’s insurance policies. You are the advocate for the care of the organ. Take a moment to ask if the organ is properly insured. The organ should be specified on the policy, with a letter of assessment attached. If the organ is damaged by fire, by a roof leak, or by vandalism, they’ll find out very quickly how much it will cost to repair. If the organ was purchased for $200,000 thirty years ago, it may have a replacement value of over $1,000,000—$200,000 wouldn’t even cover the Rückpositiv. It’s remarkable how many organs are not adequately insured.

When the parish is planning renovation in the sanctuary, you are the advocate for the care of the organ. Be sure the organ is properly covered. If it’s going to be really dusty, the reeds should be removed to storage. New carpets, sanding the floors, painting, and carpentry are all enemies of the organ. I once saw a painter standing on top of the swell box in an antique organ, working over his head, a drop cloth and roller pan at his feet. Paint was dripping onto the Great pipes, and the guy had no idea how little structure there was under him. He could have fallen though and wrecked the organ. Might have gotten hurt, too.

Make sure that your music is well chosen and beautifully played—an inspiration to everyone in the pews. Use the organ to nurture and lead the congregation, not to aggrandize yourself. Use the organ as if it’s a privilege to play it. The people who paid for it are entrusting it to you. It’s there to provide beautiful music, but more fundamentally, it’s there as an expression of the congregation’s faith.

The new organ is a gift to future generations of worshipers. Your gift to those future generations is the inspiration you’ve provided—the magic, mystery, and majesty you’ve added to worship—that has encouraged the congregation to express their faith by supporting that new organ. Aren’t we lucky? ν

Notes

1. While writing this, I learned that Steinway provided a second plaque celebrating 150 years, honoring Oberlin as an “All-Steinway School.”

2. “Skidompha” is an acronym using the first initials of the names of the members of the club that founded the library. First Lady Laura Bush awarded the National Medal for Museum and Library Services to the Skidompha Library in 2008.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The Centennial Sentinel
America’s heaviest president, William Howard Taft (cousin of Frank Taft, art director of the Aeolian Organ Company), was inaugurated on March 4, 1909. Apache Chief Geronimo died on February 17. Isaac Albéniz died on May 18, and organist Dudley Buck died on October 9. Giacomo Puccini was fifty-one years old, Claude Monet was sixty-nine, and Camille Saint-Saëns was seventy-four (he would live twelve more years).
Author Eudora Welty was born on April 13, and inventor of the electric guitar Leo Fender was born on August 10. George Gershwin, Louis Vierne, and Charles-Marie Widor still had twenty-eight years of life ahead of them—all three died in 1937. Gustav Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde, Richard Strauss wrote Elektra, and Will Hough and Frank Adams wrote I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. The City of San Francisco banned the residential ownership of cows.1
And on December 1, 1909, the first edition of The Diapason took newsstands by storm. The lead article praised the new Casavant organ at Northwestern University: “Canada has shown that if it is in any way behind United States enterprise, it is not in the field of organbuilding. . . . Casavant Brothers claim the proud distinction of never having built an unsatisfactory instrument in the fifty years they been in business.” (Wow! I wonder what Ernest Skinner thought when he read that! “Dear Editor: Please cancel my subscription.”)
Twelve hundred issues. The October 2009 issue is on my desk. The masthead proclaims “One Hundredth Year: No. 10, Whole No. 1199.” The heritage of the pipe organ covered in the magazine’s early days is the stuff of today’s legends. On page twelve, I read snips from seventy-five years ago (1934) under the heading “Looking Back.” The death of Edwin Lemare is mentioned, as is the work of T. Tertius Noble, David McK. Williams, and Pietro Yon. I suppose one had to choose between Sunday Evensongs at St. Thomas’s, St. Bartholomew’s, and St. Patrick’s, those great New York churches where Noble, Williams, and Yon held forth.
After church you could have dinner at Alexandra (8 East 49th Street: serves a champagne cocktail with dinner; price $1.10 to $1.50), something a little fancier at The Tapestry Room (Ritz Tower, Park Avenue at 57th St.: a small, intimate, charming place to lunch or dine; dinner $2.50 to $3), or go whole hog at Iridium Room and Maisonette Russe (Hotel St. Regis, Fifth Ave. at 55th St.: home of “High-class entertainment”; dinner $3.50 to $4).2 Note the convenience of my travelogue—all three churches and all three restaurants are within five blocks of each other. In three weeks you could attend each service and eat at each restaurant. You’d be out less than ten dollars a head, not counting what you put in the offering plate.
What about the organbuilders? It seemed that all important American organbuilders had showrooms in midtown Manhattan. Leave St. Thomas Church and find the Skinner Organ Company showroom across the street (Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street). One block north was Welte-Mignon (Fifth and 54th, across from the Hotel St. Regis). The Aeolian Organ Company had three Fifth Avenue addresses (at 54th across from Welte, at 42nd, and at 34th), which allowed easy access to the famed Aeolian Music Library. Aeolian patrons could borrow rolls from the library—some organ contracts included extensive “complimentary” library rights. It made sense to have a showroom every twelve blocks.
The Estey showroom was at Fifth and 51st, and the Los Angeles Art Organ Company was at Fifth and 34th, the same intersection as the southernmost Aeolian showroom. M. P. Möller was a block east in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at 49th and Park, no coincidence as there was a Möller theatre organ in the hotel’s ballroom. Each of these showrooms had at least one organ.3 You could walk past all these addresses in half an hour.

A trusted companion
The Diapason has chronicled a very active century. Its history spans almost the entire lives of both E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) and Virgil Fox (1912–1980), who together personified the two sides of a great twentieth-century debate. It includes the last fifteen years of Hook & Hastings, almost all of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner, the last eighty-three years of Möller, the entire history of the Organ Historical Society (founded 1956), and all but thirteen years of the American Guild of Organists (founded 1896).
In the last century, the American pipe organ industry has gone from building more than 2,000 new instruments a year to fewer than one hundred. Attendance at Christian churches has plummeted.
E. Power Biggs spoke of the time when more Americans attended performances of live classical music than professional sports events. Today the pressure for ice time has decimated youth choir programs, as it seems more important to many families (at least here in New England) that the kids be playing hockey at six on a Sunday morning rather than getting ready for choir practice. Non-profit organizations are struggling to survive. Countless technologies have been created and evolved to distract the public from the fine arts. And technologies have been created and evolved to supplant the pipe organ. It’s a pretty grim picture. So what’s to celebrate?

A mid-century renaissance
I have written frequently about the Revival of Classic Principles of Organbuilding (caps intended), which roughly parallels my lifetime. The year of my birth saw the founding of the Organ Historical Society and the death of G. Donald Harrison. The Flentrop organ in the museum formerly known as Busch-Reisinger at Harvard was installed in 1958. At the same time, Charles Fisk was working with Walter Holtkamp as Holtkamp installed an organ with a Rückpositif (on a pitman windchest) at the school formerly known as the Episcopal Theological School in Harvard Square. Since then C. B. Fisk, Inc. has completed more than 130 organs, many of them monumental in scale. Sounds like a lot for a half-century of work, but it pales in comparison to Möller producing five or six thousand organs in fifty years earlier in the twentieth century. (Fisk has built their organs with around twenty-five workers—Möller had hundreds.)
By the time I caught the pipe organ bug, the revival was in full swing. Growing up in Boston, I heard E. Power Biggs play many times, most often at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. I was surrounded by the new organs of Fisk, Noack, Bozeman, and Andover. There were new tracker organs by foreign builders such as Casavant, Flentrop, and Frobenius. And of course there was the nineteenth-century heritage of organs by Hook, Hutchings, and Johnson, among many others. I was mentored and encouraged by the people who built, played, and envisioned all those instruments. There was one fascinating restaurant dinner (at The Würsthaus, formerly in Harvard Square) at which it was noted that nine of the people present were organists at churches with new Fisk organs. My lessons and all my after-school practice were on Fisk organs, and my first real job as a church organist placed me at a three-manual Hook built in 1860.
Ironically, it wasn’t until I was a student at Oberlin that I played regularly on an organ with electro-pneumatic action (a Holtkamp practice organ and the Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, since replaced by Fisk). But at Oberlin I was exposed to the international movement of early performance practice that was breathing new life into the music of J. S. Bach and his seemingly countless predecessors. We practiced scales using the middle three fingers of each hand. We limited registration changes to follow the major architecture of the music. We didn’t think twice about the absence of expression shutters. And we played the masterworks of Romantic organ music on unequal temperaments.

May the force be with you
I’ve alluded to the “Organ Wars” of the twentieth century. Vitriol was commonplace in the pages of The Diapason and The American Organist (the magazine formerly known as Music/AGO—we all said Music-A-go-go). The battle could roughly be described as “Biggs vs. Fox,” or the light side versus the dark side—and your version of chiaroscuro depended on your point of view. On one side were those musicians devoted to the new wave of old styles (tracker actions, early fingerings, crystal-clear registrations); on the other, the “comfortable” world of electro-pneumatic organs (multiple expression boxes, sliding thumbs soloing internal melodies). What one called bright, clear, and cheerful, the other called shrill and screechy. What one called smooth and expressive, the other called mushy and lugubrious. Cross-the-aisle name-calling was commonplace and nasty.
But it was a true renaissance. The entire industry was being renewed. Every tenet and tenon, every principle and Principal was being examined and questioned. We worked hard to develop historic justification for everything we did. We relearned the value of craftsmanship over mass production. We programmed recitals for scholarship over musicianship. And we installed pipe organs for the sake of the music rather than the liturgy.
As a large tracker organ with a classic French specification was installed in an important Episcopal church, the organ committee wrote that their study convinced them that the Classic French organ was ideal for the leadership of Anglican worship. It reminds me of a parishioner in my home parish upset over the introduction of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, who stated, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!”4
As we passed from the 1980s into the ’90s and watched attendance at organ recitals dwindle, it seemed to me that organists and organbuilders were finding themselves in ivory towers. I believe it was by default rather than intention. Our pride in our newly acquired corporate knowledge blinded us to the pleasures of our audiences: “You will sit there and listen to this historically informed recital played correctly on this historically informed instrument. You will not applaud unless or until I say so. It is through my enlightenment that you will enjoy yourself. Y’all come back now . . .”
This idea developed in my mind over several years, and I knew I was treading on dangerous ice, or was it thin ground? In essence, I was criticizing three decades of the thought and work of every one of my colleagues, not to mention myself. With care I began expressing it. I would lob it in the air between sips of brandy at the end of a long lubricated dinner. I would share it with those I was sure would agree. I would share it with people I supposed I could sway. Each time I knew I was expressing something controversial. When I realized that no one was disagreeing with me I grew bolder, sharing my thoughts and watching eyebrows arch.
A performance is enhanced by the historical awareness of the performer, just as we understand more about a Renaissance painting valued at ten million dollars when we realize that the artist died penniless and destitute. But it’s the audience’s response that matters the most, as it is the audience’s response that creates the ten-million-dollar value of that old picture. We rely on a large and appreciative audience to inspire our expression, to ask us back to play again, to fund the frightfully expensive organs on which we rely, and yes, even to appreciate our unusual skills. Our audiences are thrilled when we give them music they know and love, and tunes they can whistle and sing as they make their way home, as well as music that will expand and inspire them.
Of close to 1,100 violins built by Antonio Stradivari, some 650 are still in use, inspiring modern players and thrilling modern audiences. But not one is in original condition. Each has been given a new stronger neck, each has modern strings, each has been boosted to sound forth in the cavernous rooms in which we listen to music, and not one plays at its original pitch. Why should organists and organbuilders limit themselves to sounds of the past, sounds that are curious to the ears of modern listeners, ears that are jaded by stadium roars, jet airplanes, steel wheels on steel rails, and honking horns on Fifth Avenue?5
I was encouraged to find support for this thought in an editorial letter published in The Diapason:

Dear Sir: After many years’ association with the trade, the writer is inclined to the belief that pipe organ manufacturers, as a class, err in taking themselves seriously.
To listen to the tales of our adventures in this field of labor one might easily be convinced that all the knowledge of the past ages had become focalized upon our respective intellects, and that upon our demise the building of organs would become one of the lost arts . . .
Now, it is because of this, and the unresponsive attitude naturally following, that the commercial status of the trade as a whole is not resting upon a higher level. We have managed badly in many respects. Each has assumed that he is the only person in the world who can build a perfectly good pipe organ. We have ‘knocked’ each other, and have at least permitted our representatives to educate the public in the gentle art of ‘knocking.’ [The public’s] reaction we refuse to recognize as our own . . .
Every organbuilder knows that, compared with other industries of like responsibilities and risks, this is about the least remunerative. Started in a monastery, a work of love and devotion, it has never risen above that level sufficiently to classify the owners of factories as ‘capitalists.’
We really desire a remedy, and to most of us the nature of the remedy is obvious, but up to this time not one of us has taken the initiative. . . . The other builder, whose work we decry, can build a good organ—he probably does—and he would gladly build a better one if the conditions imposed by committees whom you have helped educate to demand almost impossible things did not prevent.
The trade CAN unite to PERMIT clean, remunerative business. No one should desire a union for the enforcement of anything.
Let’s get together. Who will make the first move?

This sounds like a time when the organ world started to come to its senses. It sounds like about 1988, when the Organ Historical Society held its convention in San Francisco and featured electro-pneumatic organs by Murray Harris, Austin, and Skinner (but no cows). Thomas Hazleton played music of Tchaikovsky, Guilmant, Howells, and William Walton on the four-manual Skinner at Trinity Episcopal Church, and the OHS presented the church with a plaque honoring the historic organ. A cross-section diagram of a complex electro-pneumatic action was published on the front cover of the convention booklet, taking the place of the ubiquitous ten-stop tracker organ.
It sounds like about 1992, when the monumental Fisk organ was inaugurated at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, an instrument universally celebrated as a successful orchestral powerhouse in spite of its tracker action.
It sounds like about 2004, when the indescribable masterpiece of commercial public organs in the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia (now Macy’s) was regaining its deserved status as one of the great organs in the world, even though it has eleven expression pedals.
Wrong. This passionate plea for honesty and unanimity in the organ business was published on the front page of the seventh issue of The Diapason, June 1, 1910, the same issue that announced that the annual meeting of the American Guild of Organists elected Frank Wright as Warden, William C. Carl as Sub-Warden, and Clarence Dickinson as one of the councilors. In that issue, the AGO membership committee reported 1,000 members, and the treasurer reported a balance of $551.87.
The year The Diapason first published an editorial calling on organbuilders to lighten up was the year the Boy Scouts of America was founded, when the U.S. Senate granted former President Teddy Roosevelt a pension of $10,000, when the Union of South Africa was founded as a union within the British Empire, when German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich announced a definitive cure for syphilis, and when Alva Fisher patented the first complete, self-contained electric washing machine.

Back toward the middle
Shortly after I graduated from Oberlin, I was involved in releathering a large organ by Aeolian-Skinner. I was intrigued by its expressive capabilities, but didn’t understand them and certainly didn’t know how to use them. And shortly after that graduation, I was involved in the installation of a large Flentrop organ—a glorious looking thing with polished façade, gilded pipe shades, and of course mechanical action. A shipping container (arriving in Cleveland on a Greek ship delightfully named Calliope) was delivered to the church. It was a full day’s work to unload the container, each piece of the organ being carried up the large stone stair from the street, and I’ll not forget the significance of noticing that the hundredth or so load I carried was a stack of Swell shutters. A few trips later, a box of pipes labeled Celeste.
Thirty years later, I’ve realized that the real reason we worked so hard not to use our thumbs when we played was that we’d need them to push pistons.
Let’s celebrate good organs. Good organs are machines that have wind supplies and beautifully voiced pipes. They have valves that allow musicians to run air through those beautifully voiced pipes. I don’t care if those valves are opened by levers, magnets, pneumatic motors, or sheer will power. What goes around comes around. Never throw out a necktie.
What will they write on the first page of issue 2400 of The Diapason, December 2109? If there are pipe organs to celebrate in 2109, it will be because we got it right today.