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In the wind . . .

John Bishop
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Yesterday was Easter. I’ve spent the last three weeks roaring around New England in a flurry of organ tuning. As I moved from church to church I had the feeling that organ tuners get to see and smell more lilies than anyone besides florists. Each place I went had a more glorious display than the last. It’s a treat to witness the excitement of preparation in so many parishes and a privilege to play a part in that excitement by working to see that organs are at their best.

I think of all those sanctuaries now, the morning after. There’s a particular aroma—the mingling of white lilies and candle smoke. That aroma in turn mingles with the springtime sunshine as the sexton clatters around the nave straightening hymnals and gathering the bulletin inserts that name the donors and memorials for “this year’s Easter flowers.”

The organist left on vacation last night, to return in ten days to a choir room piled high with choral music left from the Holy Week services and the task of planning the music for the next liturgical cycle (dare I say that it’s only 32 Sundays until the beginning of Advent?). One of the trumpet players left behind his music stand and his check—we’ll hear from him soon. Otherwise, things will be quieter until Pentecost and Church School Sunday.

As for me, I lost my last mixture-tuning brush under a rackboard on Good Friday afternoon—I need to make a new batch. My car is full of tools, cleaning supplies, and the hardware store bags that supplied a dozen miscellaneous improvised repairs. There’s a long list of non-organ-repair phone messages on my desk, and heaven knows how many e-mails.

In the last few weeks I’ve visited about 30 organs. I’ve oiled blower motors, un-stuck keys, tuned reeds (lots of reeds!), replaced pouches, adjusted tremulants, regulated actions, cleaned keyboards, vacuumed under pedalboards (I always keep the pencils I find), and removed potted plants from the tops of consoles. I’ve removed the remains of moths, flies, mice, and one bat from critical locations in organ chambers. I’ve stood in the nave and listened to balances between organ and choir, and I’ve played passages for organists so they can hear their registrations. I even did a lunchtime music store errand for an organist—we are a full-service organ company!

A busy season of maintenance visits is a fine time to reflect on the majesty of the pipe organ. Each one is different. Each has its quirks. Some pipe organs are mediocre, nondescript, even poor. A fine pipe organ of any style, description, or size is an artistic treasure. In the February 2006 edition of this column, I posed the rhetorical question: which is better, tracker or electric action? There is no limit to how this question might be answered, but if I would propose a correct answer to my own rhetorical question, it would be: “A good organ is a good organ—a poor organ is a poor organ.”

I suppose the next question is how do you define a “good” organ? I’ll give it a whirl and I’ll be pleased to hear what you readers have to add.

1. A good organ is the product of an organbuilder’s artistic vision and philosophy, not the product of mass-production. Many instruments built by large firms certainly are good organs—as long as the leadership of the firm conceives their products as artistic creations.

2. A good organ is designed and built to be a credible vehicle for the presentation of great compositions of organ music. (I’m not addressing the question of whether every organ should be able to present many different styles of music.)

3. A good organ is compatible with its surroundings. It must be of a size and scale appropriate to the room it’s in. It must add to, not detract from, the architecture of its home.

4. A good organ has mechanical and structural integrity, which is synonymous with comfort and ease of playing, reliability of performance, and economy of maintenance.

5. A good organ has the metaphysical qualities necessary to excite the senses and move the emotions of both players and listeners.

These are all relative qualities, difficult to describe, easy to debate. How do we define good? What makes a good bottle of wine? What constitutes a good sermon, a good college course, or a good day? I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it. What makes a good meal? One that “does the job” by filling you up, or one that presents a subtle combination of flavors—perfectly cooked and beautifully presented—that goes beyond simple nutrition or satiation to reveal the philosophy and artistry of the chef? Can this analogy apply to the organ?

The rapid advance of digital sound creation and reproduction has complicated this debate. In his editorial letter published in the April issue of The Diapason responding to the February 2006 edition of this column, Dr. Christoph Tietze wrote, “I believe that the almost universal acceptance of electric action is partially responsible for the growing acceptance of electronic instruments today, for it is only one step further from fooling the fingers to fooling the ear also.” I suggest that fooling the fingers is hardly the point. How the music-making happens is between the instrument builder, the composer, and the performer—perhaps an unholy alliance, and certainly often an ongoing argument. The effective performer is free to add comment to the music but that presentation is always subject to the listener’s judgment. It should make no difference to the listener whether the keyboard is electric or mechanical—what does matter is whether the performer is comfortable with the instrument, whatever it is. As long as we have different performers, it must be acceptable to have different instruments.

Another reader responded to Dr. Tietze’s letter by carrying the debate a step further saying, “all art is, to a certain extent, fakery . . . There are some awful pipe organs . . . and it is [unreasonable] to claim that for all time and everywhere on earth, NO electronic organ would be better than such.”

As an advocate of the pipe organ, I am disinclined to compare them with digital substitutes. And I reject the idea that all art is fakery. Rather, I say that real art is real, and imitation or substitute art is fakery. One might say that a digital musical instrument is analogous to a print of a famous painting. It might be a very good print—I took a look at the online store of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and saw a print of a painting by Mark Rothko for $175—but it’s still a print.

As I scrolled through the MoMA catalogue, I didn’t see any copies of poor art. The marketing people have chosen outstanding art to reproduce and offer for sale. I can understand replacing an ugly original painting with a reproduction of something excellent. Does that describe some purchases of electronic instruments? If so, the person I’m most disappointed in is the builder of the inadequate pipe organ.
My analogy has a serious flaw. It’s easy to say that I’d rather view an original artwork than a reproduction, but while I have been in a few private houses that have original masterworks on the walls, I realize that such luxuries are not available to many of us. An original masterwork might be worth a million times the price of a reproduction (the MoMA store sells reproductions of Monet’s Water Lilies for $17.95). This ratio does not apply to pipe organs and their substitutes. If a pipe organ cost a million times as much as a digital one, perhaps even I would have second thoughts.

While I accept that some churches choose to replace pipe organs with substitutes, I do not accept the claim or even intimation that “you can’t tell the difference.” Of course we can tell the difference. We might choose the substitute anyway, but we can tell the difference. We can tell the difference between fresh-squeezed orange juice and frozen concentrate. We can tell the difference between a burger from the backyard grill and one from a fast-food joint. We can tell the difference between a live symphony orchestra and a recording of one. We can tell the difference between real flowers and plastic flowers.

We’ve all heard the economic arguments comparing pipe organs with electronic instruments. Does it take two, three, even four electronics to produce a combined life expectancy equal to that of a pipe organ? Depends on the organ. We often hear the claim that a pipe organ will last a hundred years between renovations. But consider this story. For the past twenty years I have maintained a large tracker-action organ that was built in the early 1970s—it was just over ten years old when I first tuned it. Since then we’ve replaced the original solid-state combination action and drawknob motors, the slider motor controls, and the leather of the schwimmers. When the largest pipes of the 16' Posaune collapsed, we repaired and reinforced the resonators and built new supporting racks. And when the original “space-age” lubrication of the sliders turned to glue, we took all the pipes out of the organ, cleaned and lubricated the sliders, and retuned everything. The total cost of these repairs far exceeded the original price of the organ. In most ways this is an excellent instrument, but if it was not owned by a parish that is truly committed to having a fine pipe organ, it could well have been replaced by a substitute.

I’m fortunate that my work keeps me in constant contact with the best (as well as the worst) pipe organs. For example, I’ll be in New York City this weekend where I’ll have to cull a long list of wonderful opportunities to experience great music in worship. There’s nothing quite like the experience of singing hymns in a huge church with a thousand souls in the congregation, a brilliant choir, monumental organ, and imaginative organist. I confess that I’m often unable to sing because of the lump in my throat. The organist improvises an interlude, the swell boxes open, the choir adds a descant, and I melt. Feel free to accuse me of sentimentality when I sling an old cliché, that’s what it’s all about.

It’s a natural extension of such an experience to want to try to emulate it at home. Visit the church of St. Sulpice in Paris and realize what Widor had in mind as he wrote his music. That famous Toccata wasn’t intended as a five-and-a-half-minute machine-gun volley of virtuoso notes, but a series of long rolling chords, four to a measure. Because so many of us revere it as a masterpiece, we play it on whatever organ we have, in whatever acoustical environment—but it’s a distortion of scale.

A musical instrument should reflect the scale of its surroundings. A somewhat sassy example is to be reminded that bagpipes were conceived as outdoor instruments. Appropriate scale is critical to the success of a fine pipe organ. Designing a pipe organ is a balancing act—the struggle (it’s almost always a struggle) to achieve balance between the musical needs of the parish, the available space, the available budget, and the builder’s philosophy. Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator on ABC television’s 60 Minutes, once said he’d been eating working-day lunches in New York restaurants for decades and had never once been surprised by a check that was lower than he expected. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine and nearly impossible to remember the organ project where there was both enough money and enough space!

In my opinion, including a digital 32' stop in a modest pipe organ in a modest building is a violation of scale—the building cannot support the development of that very special sound, and it sounds out of place. In other words, if the real thing wouldn’t fit, the fakery doesn’t belong. Likewise, we frequently see a digital instrument that emulates a pipe organ with 30 or 40 stops, installed in a sanctuary that seats fewer than 200 people. A pipe organ of 10 ranks would be plenty, but the buyers are beguiled with the grand specification and the resulting impressive console. With all due respect, I wonder if it’s necessary to be able to play the music of Widor in every church building. It’s the musical equivalent of stuffing a grove of 20-foot-tall plastic lilac and cherry trees into a sanctuary with an 18-foot ceiling. It’s out of scale, so it’s out of place.

I know that digital instruments are here to stay, and I know that many churches are delighted to own them. I’ve been working in and around pipe organs for almost 35 years, and I expect I’ll always be advocating the pipe organ. But I agree with one thing said by the reader who responded to the response—there surely are awful pipe organs out there. My last word to the buyers and builders of pipe organs today: the future of our passion depends on excellence. Keep buying and building the best organs you can.

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In the wind . . .

John Bishop
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Did you say millions?
It’s like making sausages. You might enjoy the finished product but you don’t want to know what went into it. Each month I sit to write, often after the official deadline has passed. If I’m lucky, I start with an idea that I’ve been chewing on for the past couple days. I’ve written a few notes on the index cards I keep in my briefcase and car, maybe I’ve even recorded a couple audio notes on my cell phone as I walk the trails in the park next door. The paragraphs are flowing before I get to my desk.
More usually, I sit down and stare at a blank screen waiting for inspiration. I play a recording of organ music, trusting that I’ll agree or disagree with something I hear or that the music will bring up a thought that I can spin into an essay. I type the usual heading, and there I sit. It’s like staring at your closet wondering what to wear to dinner. If only that shirt was clean I’d be all set. I fidget. I clean my glasses, I clean the screen of my laptop, I organize the piles of paper on the desk, allowing myself to be distracted by details I’d better get done first. I change the recording and try again. (Some of you have gotten e-mails from me commenting on your recordings—e-mails written as I get traction on my subject du jour (I don’t know the French word for month!)
When I have finished writing a column, re-read it several times, and shared it with my editor-wife for her observations and input, I attach the Word.doc to an e-mail addressed to my friend Jerome Butera, tireless editor of this journal, and press <send>. Often I hear from Jerome within minutes—there’s never any waiting before I know his reaction.
E.B. White was a celebrated writer for The New Yorker magazine and award-winning writer of children’s books (Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web). Shortly after his second marriage to Katherine Sergeant Angell in 1929 (an editor at The New Yorker) he moved his family from Manhattan to a farmstead in rural Maine and continued his weekly writing for the magazine. Let me be quick to say I draw no personal comparisons to Mr. White, whose writing I admire and enjoy enough to justify periodic re-reading. But I can imagine the anguish and insecurity he felt waiting the days and weeks it took for the 1929-style U.S. postal service to get his manuscripts to New York and his editor’s responses back to Brooklin, Maine. (I know he had those feelings because he wrote about them—thank you, Jerome, for your dependable quick responses.)
Once a piece is in the hands of the editor, a new set of anxieties crops up. You know the thing about a tree falling in the forest—if there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course, we know it does—a sound wave is a physical thing that results from a transmission of energy, whether it’s a tree falling or air blowing through an organ pipe. You can’t stop physics. But it works as a rhetorical question: if no one reads what I’ve written, there’s no exchange of information. So once I’ve pressed <send> I wonder where my thoughts will wind up.

§

In mid-April this year when I wrote for the June issue of The Diapason, Wendy and I were fresh from Easter services at St. Thomas’ Church in New York. I was the one in the congregation scribbling notes on the bulletin and I knew exactly what I wanted to write. I could hardly wait to get home—but wait I did, because after a Midtown lunch we had matinee tickets for a play at the Manhattan Theater Club on East 55th Street in which the son of good friends was a cast member.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I wrote about the majesty and beauty of festival worship in that great church, about the brilliance of John Scott, St. Thomas’ organist and director of music, and about the public appeal from rector and organist for funding to support the commissioning of a (very costly) new organ. I wrote about how organs are likely to be replaced as styles change, even as organists succeed one another, and how the other artwork (reredos, windows, etc.) in places like St. Thomas’ Church is seldom changed.
This is one time that the tree made noise when it fell. Even before I received my mailed copy of the June issue, I had received e-mails and phone calls from friends commenting on what I had written, and in the next weeks Jerome forwarded two thoughtful letters he received from readers of The Diapason. Several important points were raised, and I thought it would be worthwhile to respond directly by way of continuing the conversation.
First, your assignment: re-read this column in the June 2011 issue of The Diapason.
Arthur LaMirande, concert organist from New York City, wrote:

It is with interest that I have read “In the wind . . . ” by John Bishop (The Diapason, June 2011). In particular: his remarks with regard to the Arents Memorial organ at St. Thomas Church, New York City.
Opines he: “We scarcely bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ.”
Is he serious? He goes on to say: “Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences [italics mine] of current musicians…”
He continues: “Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ . . . ” [italics mine].
Now, Mr. Bishop surely must be aware that there are hundreds of organs in Europe that are fully functioning and that have been in existence and in use for centuries! (Never mind mere decades!) Even the organ at Notre Dame, Paris, which has been rebuilt several times, contains pipes that go back to the 18th century.

I don’t think I was opining, rather simply reporting. Plenty of perfectly good pipe organs have been replaced at the urging of a newly hired organist or because the church across the green got a new and larger instrument. It’s true, Europe is rich with hundreds of venerable instruments, and we can celebrate that their artistic content and historic value is recognized, allowing them to stay in situ and in service. And there are many wonderful historic instruments in this country that have survived the ravages of innovation and fad. Equally, I know many churches where early organs by E. & G.G. Hook were replaced by new-fangled Skinners in the 1920s that were in turn replaced by “revivalist” tracker-action organs in the 1970s—a new organ every fifty years whether you need it or not. When I was starting my career, an older colleague gave me this sage advice: never build an organ for a wealthy church. You’ll put your heart into your magnum opus and they’ll replace it during your lifetime.
States Mr. LaMirande:

On May 1st this year, I gave a recital on the Arents Memorial organ at St. Thomas Church. The major work on that program was the rarely performed Chaconne by Franz Schmidt . . . For an organ that “is on the verge of catastrophic collapse” [from the brochure passed out at St. Thomas Church to which Mr. Bishop makes allusion], it seemed to work extraordinarily well for me. With the exception of one cipher on a (non-essential) stop during rehearsal, I had no problems whatever with this organ. It succeeded in doing everything that I demanded of it. And that for a massive work calling for numerous changes of registration!

We might take exception to the phrase catastrophic collapse as used by St. Thomas’ Church. After all, assuming the organ hasn’t collapsed physically into the chancel wiping out the altos in the choir, what’s the big deal if an organ ciphers? (Organists: sorry to say, but there is no such thing as an organ that will never cipher.) Mr. LaMirande experienced a cipher while practicing for his recital, usual enough for any instrument. And if an organ ciphers during worship in a suburban parish church, we might shrug and chuckle, climb the ladder to pull the pipe, and go on with the show.

Keep your pants on.
I’ve found a delightful video on YouTube showing a significant wedding faux pas in which the best man’s pants fall down just as the couple starts to exchange their vows. As you might expect, the groom found that to be pretty funny—hilarious, in fact. The bride joined in, and the church was full of real, honest laughter for quite a while. The minister was a trooper, acknowledging the humor of the situation. You can find the video at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26a8JITwImQ&gt;. You’ll love it. It’s easy to say “things happen” and enjoy the moment. There’s a nice-looking pipe organ in the church. If any of you recognize it, let me know.
But we have a fresh international example of worship and religious festival in which one would not chuckle at the slightest glitch. On April 29 many (most?) of us watched Will and Kate’s wedding. Lovely couple, weren’t they? Her dress and hair were just right. He had a nice twinkle in his eye, and I enjoyed his little quips to his brother and his new father-in-law. Good thing Prince Harry’s pants didn’t fall down. The television coverage allowed us glimpses into the personal level of the occasion. But this was a big occasion. Heads of state were omitted from the guest list because of ongoing political and military circumstances. The dignity of the nation’s royal family was on display at a time when many Brits are wondering about its future. Heaven only knows how much money was spent. If you include all that was spent by the news media in the weeks leading up to the wedding, the total certainly surpassed the gross national product of many countries. As far as we can tell, it went without a hitch. And the pressure on the staff and officials of Westminster Abbey was made obvious in another wonderful moment immortalized on YouTube when a verger expressed his relief by turning cartwheels across the nave when the whole thing was over. I know I’m giving you a lot of research to do, but don’t miss this one either: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Obpxf_pd8&gt;.

Off with his head.
The four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ in Westminster Abbey has 84 stops and was installed in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI. How’s that for pressure on the organbuilder—miss that deadline and you’re in the dungeon. Had that organ ciphered during Will and Kate’s wedding, it would have been reported all over the world. Imagine that service grinding to a halt while some technician raced to the chamber. Seventy-five chefs at Buckingham Palace would have panicked. Think of the soufflés. The Queen’s lunch would be in ruins. I wonder what Katie Couric and Barbara Walters would have said. The pipe organ universal would have a big black eye. And it would not have been a non-essential stop. There can be no doubt that it would have been the 32-foot Double Ophicleide or the Tuba Mirabilis. Vox Angelicas don’t cipher when the pressure is on, and if it had during all that hoopla no one would have noticed. There’s an apocryphal story about a team of voicers (I think they worked for Skinner) finishing an organ. The man at the console shouted, “Is the Vox Angelica on?” From the chamber, “Yes!” “Make it softer.”
While it may be okay for an organ to cipher or a participant’s pants to fall down somewhere else, it is not okay at Westminster Abbey. And St. Thomas’ Church shoulders a similar responsibility for dignity, grandeur, eloquence, and perfection, inasmuch as perfection is humanly possible. The much-altered Aeolian-Skinner organ there is not the artistic equal of the famed and fabled St. Thomas’ Choir, and while the brilliant musicians who play on it don’t miss a beat, we can only imagine what it will be like to experience worship there when the new organ is complete. The musicians there can almost taste it. And the responsibility born by the leadership and membership of that church is heightened by the simple fact that in an age when a pipe organ of average size installed in a “usual” church can cost more than a million dollars, an instrument for such a place as St. Thomas’ absolutely costs many millions.
Samuel Baker of Alexandria, Virginia wrote:

In the June issue, John Bishop suggests that perfectly good pipe organs are discarded and replaced with instruments more in tune with current trends and more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians because pipe organs are in motion, whereas windows and statues are not replaced because they are static; physically they stay still.
Despite Bishop’s claim that seldom if ever are original design elements integral to the style of the building itself subject to change because they are considered old fashioned, many examples are easily found in my neck of the woods of Federal-style churches being “Victorian-ized” or Victorian-style churches receiving neo-whatever treatments.
And certainly organs are replaced because styles of organbuilding and preferences of musicians change but, rather than ascribe the reason that windows and statues are safe but organs are not to the premise that one is in motion and the other isn’t, I would propose that many more pipe organs are replaced because they were poorly designed, built with sub-standard materials, received little or no voicing, and were wholly unsatisfactory installations in the first place. The same fate awaits stationary items of poor quality and artistic merit with equity.
I agree fully with everything Mr. Baker says here. I appreciate his interest in including these thoughts in this debate. I’ve been in and out of hundreds of church buildings (actually probably thousands, but that sounds specious) and I’ve seen countless examples of beautiful liturgical and architectural appointments that have been discarded in favor of newer, lesser “looks,” and I’ve seen less-than-thrilling original equipment replaced to great benefit. However, what I wrote (page 12, fourth column, second paragraph) is, “But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas’ Church replacing their windows or reredos.” The key word is “like.”
I wrote, “Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos.” The allusion is to the vestry and rector at St. Thomas’ Church, not the Second Congregational Church in Newcastle, Maine. On Easter Monday I was writing with tongue in cheek—but it’s fun to revisit the image. I don’t know any of them personally, and I haven’t been in their meeting rooms, but I imagine it would be an august group of accomplished, insightful, and influential people sitting at an elegant table in a grand room. And they would be stunned. Images of that reredos have been published on calendars, record jackets (remember those old black LPs?), CD jewel-cases, postcards, and publicity photos for generations. The choir, resplendent in scarlet and white, stands in the chancel with that heap of saints in the background. Replace the reredos? No, Father. It’s staying.
The Aeolian-Skinner organ was famously revised by G. Donald Harrison in 1956, converting the 1913 four-manual E. M. Skinner instrument (91 stops) from symphonic to neo-classical in style. Harrison was personally working on the project, hurrying toward completion in time for the AGO national convention that year. Taxi drivers were on strike and Harrison had to walk many blocks in city heat to get home. He died of a heart attack on the evening of June 14 (93 days after I was born) while watching Victor Borge on television. The organ has subsequently been revised several times. It’s 98 years since Ernest Skinner finished the organ, which has now been altered just about every generation with diminishing degrees of success.

When there’s so much need in the world . . .
Mr. LaMirande’s letter ends:

Incidentally, I can’t resist pointing out that while St. Thomas Church is prepared to spend the extraordinary sum of $8 million the homeless and destitute are ensconced on the front steps of this church every night of the week! . . . How many homeless and destitute could be fed, clothed, and housed for that $8 million?

This is one of the most difficult questions we face as we propose, plan, and create pipe organs for our churches. Of course, it’s the mission of the church to care for homeless, destitute people—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It’s also the mission of the church to provide and present worship experiences at every level. The Royal Wedding was cause for national and international celebration, but Oliver Twist and his cronies still haunt the back streets of London. Without the church’s need for illustration of religious texts, tenets, and principles, we would not have the sculpture or painting of Michelangelo, the organ music of Bach, the choral music of Mozart and Haydn, or the Gothic cathedrals. If it had developed at all, without the influence and resources of the church, the pipe organ would be a wholly different entity. And the majesty of our great churches as they serve as figureheads and examples for all worshipful expression supports and inspires the work of the church at all levels and in all places. Those who toil in suburban and rural vineyards travel to the big city to experience “big city” worship in “big city” buildings, just as we marvel in the great museums, theaters, orchestras, and other institutions that can only be supported in a city like New York. I care a lot about the homeless and I try to do all I can to support them, but I don’t go to St. Thomas’ Church to hear a sub-standard organ any more than I want to see plastic flowers on the altar in front of that reredos.
All this talk about expensive art leads us to the world of philanthropy. Any church that plans to acquire a new pipe organ will rely on the availability of a few large gifts to make it happen. I’ve long assumed and often witnessed that those individuals who are capable of making a major gift in support of an organ project do so because of their personal interests. But I’ve been privileged to witness another level of philanthropy that has informed and affected me deeply. Wendy served on the board of a major university for nearly twenty years. During that tenure we became friends with a lovely couple of immense wealth. They are dedicated to philanthropy—she focuses on social and humanitarian projects and he supports the arts. Their names are at the top of donor lists for every show in town. Several years ago during dinner at our house, the husband told us how a repertory theater company had approached him asking for a significant grant to support the production of a controversial play that tackled some of our thorniest social issues. He disagreed with a lot of the content and was uncomfortable with most of it, but he thought it was his responsibility to make the gift anyway. He said something to the effect of, “I knew if I gave them the money I’d have to go see the play.”
I was impressed and moved by this story, and in the years since I’ve often reflected on the nature of philanthropy and how much we all benefit from it. Whether it’s a church organ, a statue in the park honoring a public servant, an academic building, or a shelter for the homeless, the world relies on philanthropy. The trick is to be sure that all the bases are covered. 

In the wind . . .

John Bishop
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Is it real?
Fifteen or twenty years ago there was an ad campaign for Memorex® cassette tapes in which various setups were created to compare “live” music with recorded music to see whether both would break a piece of fancy stemware. A popular singer would be featured offering a terrible, powerful high note, and inevitably the glass would shatter.
What did it prove?
I’ve heard some singers who could make me cringe, but how plausible is it that the actual, acoustic human voice would break a glass? Conversely, I wonder if any other recorded sound played back with enough wattage would break the glass—a hummingbird’s wings for example or a cat on a hot tin roof. I think the Memorex demonstration was at least a little bit disingenuous, and of course we heard the whole thing through whatever speakers came with our television set. Television advertisements for televisions imply that what you see on the screen may be better than real life, but again, your appreciation of the ad is limited by the quality of your present TV.
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000) defines the word virtual: “1. Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name . . . ” and “2. Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.”
I introduce the word virtual in this context of what I might call the “unreality of reality.” In recent years we’ve been given the phrase virtual reality, defined in the same dictionary as “a computer simulation of a real or imaginary system that enables a user to perform operations on the simulated system and shows the effects in real time.”
An oxymoron is not a person addicted to painkillers, it’s a “rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined.” To my ears, virtual reality is an oxymoron.

Let’s be real.
We might imagine that Bach would have stopped at 175 cantatas if he had been subject to phone calls from the clergy, or Mozart’s 30th symphony would have been his last had he been distracted by television, or—God forbid—video games. But simple things like hot water in the house and electric lights are taken for granted, and more complicated things like computers have become something close to necessities. I’m in favor of technology. The other day I stumbled over a box of detritus stored in an organ chamber by a long-gone organist. I was amused to see a 56K compact disc. 56K? How Stone Age. There’s a half-used 100-pack of 700MB CDs on my desk. Big deal. I replaced my previous 2GB laptop with a 60GB job because of the number of photos I carry around. There’s a 2GB memory card in my camera. What’s next? Remember NASA engineers using slide rules during Apollo flights? (I know that’s true because I saw it in a movie.) With a $400 GPS we have more navigation ability in a 20-foot motorboat than the entire British Navy had during the Napoleonic wars. How much more computing speed or data-storage capacity do we need?
Apply that same question to cameras (mine has more mega-pixels than yours), automobiles (mine has more horsepower than yours), or cell phones (mine’s a camera, a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock . . . ). How much more can they offer before they stop getting better?
Many of us in the organbuilding world are devoted to the pipe-organ-technology of the early 20th century—what Ernest Skinner considered adequate console equipment should be good enough for anyone. But let’s remember that hundreds of terrific Hook organs were replaced by Skinner’s new-fangled electric things where the organist was 40 feet away from the instrument. What makes the early electro-pneumatic pipe organ the ideal? How many organbuilders and organists disdained Skinner’s innovations as superfluous or unnecessary? “If God had intended us to push pistons we would have been all thumbs.” At what point in the development of any technology does one take a snapshot and declare the ideal, after which there’s no need for further development?

Electronics in the worship space
It’s more than 50 years since churches began purchasing electronic organs to replace pipe organs. I think many, even most of us will admit that the 30- and 40-year-old models that are still laboring along are pretty poor. While they have pipe organ names on their stop tablets, they never did sound like organs. They were cheaply made and not durable. A church I served as music director had a 20-year-old electronic in the chapel that wasn’t in tune, according to the technician couldn’t be tuned, and needed parts that weren’t available. Have you ever tried to get a three-year-old computer repaired?
While it’s always risky to generalize, it seems to me that the average church that was once proud of owning a modest pipe organ is inclined to buy an electronic console that emulates a 60- or 70-stop “real” organ. What sense does it make to have an “organ” with 32¢ sounds, batteries of reeds, and secondary and tertiary choruses in a sanctuary that seats fewer than 200 people? Is it so you can play music that was intended for buildings ten times the size? It’s a violation of scale, an anomaly, and artless expression. As I wrote a couple months ago, “the Widor” doesn’t work in every church.

The Virtual Pipe Organ
Trinity Church (Episcopal), Wall Street, New York, is a prominent, beautiful, historically significant edifice that houses a large and vibrant parish with an extraordinary music program. According to the church’s website , the parish was founded “by charter of King William III of England in 1697.” The present Gothic Revival building, designed by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated on May 1, 1846. The website includes an Historical Timeline that tells us that some of the church’s vestrymen were members of the Continental Congresses, that the parishioners were divided politically as the Revolutionary War progressed, but that the clergy sided with the crown. An American patriot, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Provoost, was appointed rector in 1784, and the New York State Legislature “ratifie[d] the charter of Trinity Church,” deleting the provision that asserted its loyalty to the King of England.
In 1770, just 28 years after Georg Frederick Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, Ireland, it received its American premiere at Trinity Church. Today’s spectacular and highly regarded Trinity Choir is heard on many recordings. Their annual performances of Messiah are legendary throughout the city. Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote, “All the ‘Messiah’ outings to come in the next two weeks will have to work hard to match this one.” And in 2005, the Times called Trinity’s performance of the great oratorio, “the ‘Messiah’ to beat.” (Now there’s an image!) What a wonderful heritage.
On September 11, 2001, Trinity Church assumed an essential national role by chance of place. Located adjacent to the World Trade Center, the church and its people were thrust into the center of that tragic story. St. Paul’s Chapel, part of Trinity’s “campus” and located a couple blocks away, became an inspiring comfort station for firefighters and other emergency workers. Through the ensuing months, as the rubble was unraveled, the chapel was staffed by the people of the church who provided food, refreshment, and a resting place for the rescue workers. The response of the clergy, staff, and parishioners to that national catastrophe was as inspirational as it was essential.
At the moment of the attack, a service was in progress in Trinity Church, the organ blower was running, and the great cloud of dust that filled the entire neighborhood found its way into the organ. It was later determined that the organ could not be used without extensive cleaning and renovation. A temporary solution was offered. Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, dealers of Rodgers organs in New England, had been developing the “Virtual Pipe Organ,” using a technology they named PipeSourced® voices. A large instrument using this technology was installed at Trinity Church as a temporary solution while the church researched the condition of the Aeolian-Skinner.
A year or so after the Virtual Pipe Organ was installed, I attended a service to hear the instrument and was impressed by the volume and intensity of the sound. The massive building was filled with the sound of an organ. There was no distortion. People were singing, and I’m willing to bet that many of them were well satisfied, even thrilled by the sound. I had not expected to be convinced that the Virtual Organ would really sound like a pipe organ. In fact I’m not sure how I could eliminate the bias of a lifetime as an “acoustic organ guy.” As full and intense as the sound of the Virtual Organ was, it was not the sound of a pipe organ. It lacked the essential majesty of presence, the special physicality, the particular “realness” of the sound of a great pipe organ.
The experience of listening to the Virtual Organ might be compared to listening to a recording of a great pipe organ, as the sound of both comes from speakers. I understand that sampling technology is not the same as recordings, and I expect that proponents of the virtual organ will object to my analogy, but it’s those speakers that make the essential difference. Sound coming from a speaker will always be distinguishable from sound coming from organ pipes.
I can recall the depth of my impressions when as a young teenager I first heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing in Symphony Hall. I think I expected the huge volume of sound and the intensity of the differences of the timbres, but I had no way of anticipating the presence, the majesty, the physicality of all that acoustic sound as enhanced by the magnificent room. Oh, those double basses!
There are few musical presentations more expensive than a symphony orchestra (except opera and ballet in which the symphony orchestra is combined with the theater). A hundred serious musicians on stage in a 300-million-dollar concert hall require important organization to sustain, but we don’t hear a move to replace that experience with digital sampling. We want to hear the real thing. The symphony orchestra and the pipe organ are special in our culture because they’re so expensive. I don’t mean that the money itself is impressive—but that the money represents how majestic the expression is.
In conversations with church members I frequently hear people say that the sound of a digital instrument is “good enough” for the untrained ear. One might respond, unless your fiancée is a jeweler, why bother with a real diamond? She’ll never know the difference.
I don’t want to eat a chemically produced substitute for lobster. I want the real lobster, and for goodness sake, don’t mess with the butter!
I read on Marshall & Ogletree’s website (www.marshallogletree.com) that they sample complete pipe organs: “PipeSourced® sounds, which are skillful note-by-note, stop-by-stop recordings of famous pipe organs (90% of them vintage Aeolian-Skinners), contribute unprecedented virtual reality to Marshall & Ogletree instruments, as well as to its combination organs and custom additions for new and existing pipe organs.” That’s a long, long way from the previous generation of sampling techniques, and proverbial light-years from the early rounds of tone-generators on which the development of the electronic instrument was founded.
There have been a number of articles written in praise of the Virtual Pipe Organ, including Allen Kozinn’s review of a recital played by Cameron Carpenter published in the New York Times on July 7, 2007, with the headline: “A ‘Virtual’ Organ Wins New Converts at a Recital.” And Dr. Burdick has written an apologia defending the church’s decision to sell the dismantled Aeolian-Skinner, retain the Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Organ, and to commission another virtual instrument for St. Paul’s Chapel, which concludes,
Trinity Church is proud of its role in developing the “virtual pipe organ,” which could only exist in this new century because of the continuing exponential growth of computer speed and memory. Without the brilliance of Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, whose research began in 1997 to develop an entirely new approach to the digital organ, we could never have achieved an instrument such as this. Furthermore, without Trinity Church having taken advantage of its historic opportunity by daring to consider such an interim instrument, the music world would not now have this dramatic new 21st century success: like an automobile with horsepower but no horses, a virtual pipe organ with musical potentials beyond anyone’s imagination.

There’s little doubt that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was not as distinguished as many other instruments produced by that firm. (It’s at least a little ironic that there’s agreement that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was less than great, but it’s replaced by something based on sampling “vintage Aeolian-Skinners.”) There’s no doubt at all that the Virtual Pipe Organ represents but a fraction of the cost of commissioning a Real Organ. After all, we live in the age of the seven-figure organ. There’s no doubt that Trinity Church has realized a significant short-term economy by eliminating the immense maintenance budget required by a large pipe organ. In fact, Dr. Burdick reports that they had been spending $56,000 annually to care for the Aeolian-Skinner—a specious argument in that there are many much larger and much older organs that are maintained effectively for less money. The organ world rumor-mill, that most active of subcultures, has reported many different numbers representing the cost of the Virtual Organ. I don’t know what the actual price was, but it’s safe to guess that it was a significant number of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Is it true stewardship of a church’s resources to spend such a volume of money on artifice? For centuries, Christians have given their all trying to make their worship spaces approach their respect for their faith. Huge treasures were spent in 12th-century France building cathedrals that still inspire us. Fortunes have been spent on stained-glass that fills church interiors with magical, mystical light. Trinity Church Wall Street is a spectacular edifice with beautiful vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, carved wood architectural elements and furniture. Hundreds of important preachers, humanitarians, and politicians have spoken there. To walk inside is to respect the care and vision with which the place was created. To walk inside is to find respite from a frenetic city and inspiration from all that has happened there. To walk inside is to worship. This is not a place for artifice.
As I’ve spoken about Trinity Church, I encourage you to read about St. Paul’s Chapel at www.saintpaulschapel. org/about_us/. Built in 1766, it’s the oldest public building in Manhattan that’s been in continuous use. Here’s an excerpt from that website:

George Washington worshiped here on Inauguration Day, April 30, 1789, and attended services at St. Paul’s during the two years New York City was the country’s capital. Above his pew is an 18th-century oil painting of the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782.
Directly across the chapel is the Governor’s pew, which George Clinton, the first Governor of the State of New York, used when he visited St. Paul’s. The Arms of the State of New York are on the wall above the pew.
Among other notable historical figures who worshiped at St. Paul’s were Prince William, later King William IV of England; Lord Cornwallis, who is most famous in this country for surrendering at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781; Lord Howe, who commanded the British forces in New York, and Presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and George H. W. Bush.

St. Paul’s Chapel stands as a shrine for all that happened in that neighborhood and to this country on September 11, 2001. This is also not a place for artifice.
In his Apologia, Dr. Burdick reports, “Because of insurance matters after 9/11, there was no question that we’d have to wait five to seven years for a decent replacement pipe organ, during which time I felt that we’d be starving for good organ sound.” Fair enough. That’s why the purchase of the Virtual Pipe Organ for temporary use was a good solution. But I am sorry that such a church in such a place with such a history would miss their opportunity to add not to the virtual world, but the real world of the pipe organ.

A conversation with Ken Cowan

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Notes 1. Frank Rippl, “OHS 52nd National Convention, July 11–17, 2007, Central Indiana,” The Diapason, February 2008, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 24–29.

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Since the beginning of this century, the recital calendar of The Diapason has included numerous listings for Ken Cowan. A native of Thorold, Ontario, Canada, Cowan was first taught organ by his father, David Cowan; he subsequently studied with James Bigham, with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Thomas Murray at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has held organist positions at St. Bartholomew’s, St. James Episcopal Church, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia; during his college years he was on the roster of associate organists for the Wanamaker Grand Court organ in Philadelphia. He presently serves as Assistant Professor of Organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey; Rider University has honored him with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.
A featured artist at the 2004 AGO convention in Los Angeles and during the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis (as one of several players during a concert recorded for Pipedreams), Ken Cowan has also performed at many AGO regional conventions, as well as at conventions of the Organ Historical Society and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. His discography comprises numerous recordings (for the JAV label) on Skinner instruments, including The Art of the Symphonic Organist, recorded on the 1921 Skinner organ at the Parish Church of St. Luke, Evanston, Illinois. (Note: John Speller’s review of this recording in The Diapason praised Cowan’s choice of repertoire, demonstration of the organ’s colors, and skill with buildup and decrescendo, calling the disc “one of the finest I have heard in some time.” See The Diapason, August 2004, p. 14.) With Justin Bischof, he recorded Aaron David Miller’s Double Concerto for organ with the Zurich Symphony Orchestra, on the Kleuker organ in the Tonhalle in Zurich (Ethereal Recordings). Cowan’s repertoire is broad, but favors nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, from Bossi to Liszt, Wagner to Widor, Dupré to Roger-Ducasse, and much in between. He is associated with transcriptions, yet these do not dominate either his recital programs or his recordings. As a performer he seems relaxed, taking any difficulties in stride. Ken Cowan is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

JR: Let’s talk about your DNA! Your father is an organist, and other grandparents were too, correct?
KC
: Yes, two grandmothers and great-grandmother Cowan. Thurza Cowan was an organist, and I think she must have been pretty good too, because the repertoire that is still sitting around my house in Canada shows she played some really difficult things.

JR: Were those the days when you had to have a pumper?
KC
: A little bit after that, I think it was. She played a Woodstock organ. I saw a picture of the old console, and it looks like a theatre organ console. But it would have been electrified, I think.

JR: And your grandmothers?
KC
: My father’s mother and my mother’s mother both played, each as a local parish organist.

JR: Did your grandmother teach your father?
KC
: No, actually; that’s not our family’s habit. My father studied with a local organist named George Hannahson, actually a very good player; the brothers Hannahson did a lot of the church music in the area. Except for the things that my dad showed me to get me started at the organ, I think everybody in my family who learned an instrument always studied with somebody outside the family.

JR: Were your first lessons with your father?
KC
: He got me started with the instrument. He didn’t teach me piano, so we always had it in mind that I would eventually find an organ teacher outside of our house.

JR: Did you insist on organ lessons, or did he suggest you should take them?
KC
: No, it was me. He insisted that I study the maximum amount of piano possible before I ever touched the organ. Ever since I was three years old, I would hang around the organ bench, and I knew what all the stops were. I knew the difference between a Lieblich flute and a Rohr flute when I was little—before I could play anything. And I was the token key-holder in the family—if the reeds needed to be tuned, I would be carted down to the church. The arrangement was that if I was well-behaved in church, he would play whatever my favorite organ tunes were before we would go home. I still remember that.

JR: So what were your favorite organ pieces when you were a wee lad?
KC
: They were a little different from what they are now! (laughter) Probably mostly little songs that I knew how to sing at the time. Or wedding pieces and old campy hymns, I used to like those too—and I knew all the words. Somewhere I have a tape of myself singing along, I think—locked away! Anyway, I was fortunate that there was a really nice Casavant organ from the ’20s in the church where my father played, a three-manual organ, so it was great just to get to know registration on a nice instrument first. And we always had a lousy piano—which is still there, actually! So to have this really nice organ—I couldn’t resist but to learn how to play it—or try.

JR: How old were you when you started playing the organ?
KC
: I knew how to play a hymn on the organ, but I really started to learn pieces around eighth grade, so twelve or thirteen. I knew how to play the piano pretty well by then. In fact, I got a lot more interested in piano after I realized how much I really liked playing the organ. I learned about some organ pieces that had been arranged for piano—I remember one was the Liszt B-A-C-H—I guess if you don’t realize that it’s a hard piece
. . . . So I improved a lot as a pianist after I decided I wanted to try to become as good an organist as I possibly could, and realized at that time, too, that piano was the key, at least for a lot of it. A couple years after that, studying some Bach and other things, I heard music of Dupré for the first time. So I went along for a while just learning all the pieces that made me think “oh, that’s a really neat piece!” It wasn’t the most logical progression, but it worked out all right.

JR: What was your first recital like?
KC
: First recitals on the organ—I was 13 or 14. At that time it was mostly playing the Widor Toccata, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor—I used to work on lots of Bach pieces when I was in high school, so I always programmed that. I could practice the same pieces quite a lot, unlike now where there are piles and piles of things to get through in a short amount of time. But at least when I began performing I was confident that “I’ve been playing this Bach piece for a few months, it’ll probably be all right.”

JR: What was your first church position?
KC
: I was sort of the perpetual assistant organist! I worked that way alongside my dad for the last year or so of high school, so I guess outside of any kind of familial supervision was when I went to college. I was assistant at St. Clement’s Church—and that was being thrown into the deep end of the pool, because Peter Conte was the organist at that time and of course ran a pretty tight ship, and still does there. I stayed at St. Clement’s the whole time I was in college in Philadelphia, and worked for a couple years at St. Mary the Virgin, and then at St. James Madison Avenue, and then at St. Bartholomew’s.

JR: You had said that when you were first studying, you weren’t sure about a career. At what point did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?
KC
: I think that when I went away to college I knew pretty well that music was going to be what I would do primarily. And I never had any doubt that certainly I’d always be involved in music in my life. But I guess I was brought up in a casual enough way that no one ever said “You must be a musician.” And there are plenty of other interesting things out there to do! So it was by the time I went away to Curtis for college. I was fortunate that they were willing to take me in, and it was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate, in every place and with everyone with whom I’ve studied—I really made some lucky choices.

JR: At this point, could you identify who your big influences are?
KC
: I think now it’s sort of a conglomeration. But there’s no one that I’ve ever studied with who hasn’t been an influence, and recordings are very valuable too. I remember when I was in high school—even though it wasn’t a complete immersion in music like college, I remember clearly what I learned from James Bigham, who was my teacher at that time—a major influence and a masterful player and teacher. At Curtis, of course, I was studying with John Weaver, and he had a different approach to teaching and was demanding about what was to be expected week to week.
My experience at Curtis was great. I still remember bringing in—I think it was my second year there—the Liszt Ad nos, and I was trying to be conservative, in the sense of not using countless general pistons. At that time the organ at Curtis Hall had just twelve general pistons, so I learned it using only one level, and I thought, “well, that’s a bit of restraint here”—a mere twelve generals, with lots of divisionals. I finished playing through it, and we talked about the music, and John Weaver said, “Now, I just should tell you, that when you’re approaching the registration of a piece like this, you can’t always count on having a dozen general pistons. I just bet that through use of more divisional pistons, I could work out all the registrations for this piece with no compromise whatsoever, on six general pistons.” And the amazing thing is—that he could! He was really impressive in that way, because, having decades of touring experience, he’s mindful that there weren’t always multiple memory levels. So he was very encouraging about people not being a slave to a computer combination action. For example, if you hit a piston for a chorale prelude registration that had a flute here and a cornet there, you’d be asked—“Can’t you remember these stops? Why do you have to hit a piston?”
Then of course, Thomas Murray is sort of a wonder in his own way. I enjoy just watching him at an organ—how he approaches the instrument, how to choose registrations—musically and registrationally always doing the most with the least, and loving every minute of it. I think a lot of people associate him with “oh, and he hits 500 Swell pistons.” Actually he doesn’t; he uses the fewest number to get the greatest effect. I didn’t realize that until really watching.
Martin Jean began teaching at Yale the same year I began studying there, and he was a really interesting person to study with as well. I had lessons with him for a semester at Yale while Tom Murray was on sabbatical; in addition to a coaching here or there at other times, students in the Yale department were free to coach with faculty outside of their own studio. Martin was full of curiosity about compositions and their possible interpretations, so I would always leave lessons with him pondering many possibilities. And I remember along the way I had a few lessons with McNeil Robinson, and he, in terms of how to learn a piece of music in a really thorough way, is just masterful. But you don’t have to study with someone for five years to get something immensely valuable, that you’ll never forget.

JR: Were you fairly confident with your registration ability before you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray?
KC
: I guess I was. Since I was a little kid I was fascinated with how stops were built, what the different ones did, the difference between the various colors, and so on. And there were enough nice instruments around that I pretty much understood how that worked—also, my dad was good at registration himself; that helped. If you’re around someone just an hour a week, that’s different than being around somebody all the time—as an aside, you can at any point say, “hey, how come you would do this, as opposed to something else?” And then Jim Bigham, with whom I studied in high school, just has an amazing imagination for registration and a huge instrument at Holy Trinity Lutheran; that was another great stroke of good fortune for me.

JR: When you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray, did you work more on interpretation, or did they spend a lot of time with registration?
KC
: A little of everything. Tom Murray in particular is very attentive to registration; even if he doesn’t change something radically, he is very sensitive to the finest details. Even if you can row your own boat to start with, I’d say to study with Weaver is to learn his system of managing a big instrument. He’s quite amazing in that he can register an entire recital in a couple of hours, and it will sound as though he’s played the organ for a long time, just because he’s so clear about exactly what he’s going to do at every point in a piece. Tom Murray is known as this “orchestralist,” who gives each color in an instrument its best opportunity to shine, so just to watch him do what he does is really an education!

JR: At Curtis, you were required to play pieces from memory. How many pieces have you memorized?
KC
: Oh, probably hundreds. I think from year to year there are pieces—especially pieces that I learned when I was in high school—that I find I can usually play without really thinking about it much at all. From year to year I’ll carry around a few recital programs’ worth of repertoire, at any given time, and I try to keep on expanding that. During school semester, for example, there’s just not time to practice the number of hours a day that I’d love to, so I’ll always practice technical things on the piano, even if I don’t touch an organ. I find that to maintain a few hours of music is manageable, but it takes a lot more time to be constantly learning dozens of pieces.

JR: Do you have some favorite pieces? Desert island pieces?
KC
: I’ve always loved Bach, and I think as is the case with so many people I ended up playing the organ because of the music of Bach. As things have gone, I’ve gotten into a lot of repertoire that is far from Bach—I’ve always loved symphonic organs, orchestral transcriptions and that sort of thing. But I think I could do just fine with some of the great works by Bach.
Now as far as what’s fun to play in a concert, on, say, a particular type of organ—for Skinner organs, they’re great at something English Romantic; the Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue is a fun piece to play because it relies quite a lot on the interpreter, as does Liszt, Reubke, Reger—if you hear three people play the same piece by Liszt, or Reger, or Reubke, it will sound completely different, as I think it should.
Many people who play those pieces think that it couldn’t possibly be done any other way than their own, because they require a very strong interpretive perspective, but in reality there are of course many possible interpretations. I love playing transcriptions, because on an American symphonic organ, you really push the instrument to the edge of what it’s able to do, and that’s always kind of fun. And historically it’s been controversial because for much of the twentieth century the attitude of most organists was “why would you do such a thing? Go learn some more legitimate organ pieces!”

JR: It’s nice stuff!
KC
: Yes, there are so many great pieces that weren’t originally composed for the organ. I think once you do learn most of the standard organ repertoire, it’s fun to look beyond it a little bit and see how an instrument can work at interpreting something else. I have to confess, too, that I started listening to records of transcriptions when I was in high school. I have old recordings by George Thalben-Ball, for example, and I still remember getting two recordings of transcriptions by Tom Murray and Thomas Trotter, I think both made in the ’80s, and so I thought, “Wow! That instrument sounds great—and very expressive. Wouldn’t it be fun to learn how to do that?”
Anybody who gets into this kind of orchestral stuff might be pigeon-holed with “Oh, all he plays is Wagner,” or, “All he plays are transcriptions,” which of course I don’t think is true of anybody who does. One of the keys to having success with transcriptions, though, is to know when it’s a good idea not to play something, because one of the pitfalls about the organ is you cannot bring exactly the same program to every instrument, or else you’ll win some and lose some. I find as with some of the big Romantic works, a transcription can sound great on an ideal instrument and it can sound like a dismal failure on the wrong instrument. I hope to usually be a good judge of when’s the time, and when’s not the time, to play a particular part of the repertoire.

JR: How about the future of this instrument with young people?
KC
: I’m always glad when I know someone is bringing kids to a recital. And in a way, it’s a good reason to think about programming very carefully. Every once in a while I’ll play a program that might get a little too—mature for the newcomer.
If I were only playing for myself, I could go on for days listening to very intense-sounding organ music. But I’m not just playing for me; though I guess some people would say you should always be playing as though no one else is there—but someone else IS there. (laughter) So I am usually quite cognizant of the fact that there may be some young person there who’s never heard an organ recital before.

JR: Do you ever program a specific piece with children in mind?
KC
: If I know they’re going to be there, yes. Things that are very effective with kids are pieces that are programmatic and tell a story, or pieces that really are “visual” in how the instrument is used. Kids immediately get a kick out of the fact that there are all these different colors and that wow, the organist plays with his feet, and beyond that things like Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre are great for kids, because they understand—they can tell what’s going on in the story as it’s going along. Of course, that’s a transcription, but there’s George Akerley’s A Sweet for Mother Goose nursery rhyme suite—that would be just the thing. I’ve heard some people do things like Carnival of the Animals and so on—that’s another work that’s not originally an organ piece, but can certainly get children’s interest in the instrument. And they all love the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!

JR: How do you plan a program? Fast–slow, or loud–soft, or keys?
KC
: Having interesting key relationships can be nice, particularly if you segue from one piece to the next. More importantly, just not flogging people with the same kind of piece over and over again is a good rule of thumb. For example, I wouldn’t play half a program of, say, a prelude and fugue by Bach, followed by a preludium by Buxtehude followed by Prelude and Fugue on the Name of BACH, and so on—but contrasting forms, contrasting styles. I’ve never been much into the philosophy that “we should always go in chronological order.” It’s more a question of how can you give a good psychological flow to it? I guess that’s the right way to describe it. And it’s different on recordings, too. I think how you listen to a recording is a little different. In a concert, you can go from fast and furious to very intimate, to scherzo, back to this, back to that. On a record, if you do exactly the same thing, you end up with people constantly adjusting the volume control.
Programming is a constant challenge. And then the trap is, when you find a combination of things that you think works really well, to then be able to get out of it. I remember reading an article years ago about Glenn Gould’s thoughts on why he stopped playing concerts; he said he was feeling that sometimes he settled in on the same small number of pieces, the philosophy being, “well, the Beethoven worked in Toronto, it’ll probably work in New York, too, so I’ll play it again!” And again, and again—and so on it goes. Trying something new, even if it means going out on a limb, is a good idea, I think.

JR: You’ve long been an Organ Historical Society convention favorite. How did that get started?
KC:
Good fortune, I guess! When I was working at St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, I think it was 1996 the OHS had their convention in Philadelphia; at that time we were doing an Evensong at St. Clement’s as part of the convention, and they wanted Peter to play something, and he was already going to play a recital at the Wanamaker Store, so he said, “I’ll play the prelude, and why don’t you have my assistant play a short program after the Evensong?” I think there was some trepidation at first; “who is this guy?” I guess they liked it. And one thing led to another there; I’ve been back several times since.

JR: Yes, including in 2007 with your wife! Tell me about her, and how you cooked up this scheme.
KC
: We met in graduate school; she went to Yale too. While we were students there, I had always liked an old recording I had of Jascha Heifetz and Richard Elsasser playing the Vitali Chaconne, as arranged by Leopold Auer. So on one of JAV’s Skinner series recordings, Joe Vitacco asked me to go out to Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian in Detroit, and I checked out the organ and it’s a great instrument—huge sound, and very mellow sound. I thought this would be a good accompanying organ, and that it would be neat to try and do a violin piece. So I asked Lisa to come along then, and that was the beginning of playing together. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asked to play duo programs together, so we’ve always been on the lookout for good repertoire that has been written for violin and organ, and things that transcribe well. We’ll often do an early piece, maybe something that’s contemporary written for those instruments; from the Romantic period, Rheinberger wrote some violin and organ works. I’ll often transcribe a concerto accompaniment for the end, and do a violin concerto as a violin and organ piece. And then we’ll usually do a solo piece each, too.

JR: The review of the OHS convention in the February 2008 issue of The Diapason mentions Lisa playing behind a screen.1
KC
: We did the Karg-Elert Fugue, Canzona and Epilogue, for organ and violin, and a quartet of women’s voices is included at the end. I think Karg-Elert may have started this tradition himself, but there’s been a long practice of putting the violinist and the singers either offstage or in the Swell box. And at this particular church it worked, because you could open the door behind the Swell box and there was a hallway in behind. So everyone crammed in behind the chamber and you could have this diminuendo to nothing at the end. It was very unexpected color coming out of the organ chambers suddenly! It was a lot of fun, and everyone was a very good sport about the whole thing. The instrument was a Kimball organ, and certainly played repertoire well, but maybe accompanied even better. So it was nice to show that side of things.

JR: At the AGO convention in Minneapolis you played some new works. Do you play new pieces from memory?
KC
: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. One of the things I’ve been working on this week is memorizing them. I find if I have a deadline, it doesn’t take long to get things like that learned. I probably spent a week or so learning each of the preludes and fugues. But then the question is—what do you want to do with it? There’s no question that I play a piece better after a year than after a week. So the rest of the time is spent just trying to refine things and get a clear interpretation, especially with brand-new pieces. The composer Henry Martin is a pianist and is probably known for composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and he teaches jazz and music theory at Rutgers, Newark. The reason for the commission was that Michael Barone really liked his piano pieces, and so commissioned him to write a couple for organ. Not knowing what his musical taste is—of course, when you learn a piece like that, I found I was initially sort of cautious in an interpretive sense—if it’s not written in the score, well, is it OK to do something? Well, he has a great imagination, and is a good sport about everything. That was actually nice to discover. Interpretive freedom is good! So I really liked them—they’re difficult, but I think will make nice pieces.

JR: Teaching versus performing—do you enjoy the balance that you have right now?
KC
: Absolutely! I think it would probably be hard for me to only teach, because you end up living musically only through your students, instead of being able to do something yourself—so you need an outlet. On the other hand, it’s great to work with other people—it’s so satisfying and exciting when students work very hard and get a lot better, and you can help them along their way. This year, it was only the second time in recent memory that I didn’t play Easter Sunday some place. So before cooking dinner for family, I went to Trinity Church where two of my students play, and I had a better time listening to them accompany the Easter service than I would have if I’d done it myself! I’ve always been interested in teaching, so I have no regrets there at all.

JR: Tell us about your position at Westminster. Do you teach service playing, or does your teaching concentrate just on recital literature?
KC
: Mostly my colleagues Alan Morrison, Matthew Lewis, and I end up concentrating on creating some kind of structured program of study for each student. I do at times make students learn hymns and accompaniments as part of their lessons. I find that you can teach somebody about as much about creative possibilities at the organ through hymns and accompaniments, at least from a registration point of view, as from anything else, because so often with a lot of the primary parts of the repertoire—Bach, Franck, Vierne, and so forth—you frequently follow convention or instructions for registration; in service playing you have a blank slate, and can really get acquainted with the organ in a more individualistic way.
The school’s strong emphasis on choral training provides a great background for developing graduates who can become very effective church musicians. There are classes in improvisation, courses in organ literature, there’s a class on accompanying at the organ, which is primarily a service playing course. Then the sacred music department offers courses on the history of church music, theology, choral pedagogy and management of programs, worship planning, and congregational song. A broad range of guest lecturers in the organ and sacred music departments address other specific topics. It could be a masterclass on organ playing or literature on some occasions, or frequently guest perspectives on the general field of church music in America.

JR: Do you see any consistent patterns of problems among your students?
KC:
Nothing that applies to everybody. In fact, that’s one of the fun challenges of teaching—it’s all problem solving, but everybody’s a different case. For example, some students don’t learn pedal technique in a structured way, and I’m surprised that students coming in at the graduate level sometimes don’t understand very much about registration—that can be a big project. But that’s certainly not unique to everybody; some of them are great at that. Nuanced registration is a hard thing to teach in a short time. And if you encounter people who are trained to do only one thing in a particular situation, it can be a real challenge to make them more curious and sensitive to the precise character of each stop or chorus on different instruments, and how they combine with others. Then comes the issue of how to control the instrument in the context of a complex piece if they’ve never been trained to manage a console with a combination action.

JR: Do you have responsibilities at Westminster besides teaching?
KC
: I also am the coordinator of the organ and sacred music program. That involves plenty of meetings, planning, and discussions with other faculty about how to proceed with programs and curriculum. In the past year we have revised the entire curriculum in organ and in sacred music. This year began the implementation of those revisions, which is a big undertaking, but a necessary step to try to keep the program from getting behind the times. Of course, I’m not doing that on my own, but I certainly have to stay involved with how things develop. And then another task for sacred music at Westminster will be to find a faculty member to succeed Robin Leaver, who just retired. Hopefully we’ll soon be looking for the next teacher of sacred music there, but in the current economic climate, universities can be tentative about filling vacancies. Always something, you know! It’s the sort of place where I can stay there until ten o’clock every night and have plenty more to greet me the next morning.

JR: Are you ever able to go hear other organists or other concerts?
KC
: Here and there. There’s not as much time as I’d like there to be, because I’m often away weekends, when a lot of great concerts happen. Going to conventions and so forth, I can hear a lot of things in a short amount of time, just to keep track of who’s doing what. And then the nice thing living between New York and Philadelphia is oftentimes there will be good concerts on week nights. Plus, Princeton has some really good music series right in town. So whenever possible, I attend performances.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned?
KC:
For Westminster, keeping the department growing stronger is a priority. As far as playing goes, it’s asking myself, what do I want to play now that I haven’t played before? And I’ve got lined up some recordings that I’ve been promising to make and that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I’ll just keep chipping away at them. A new CD on the big Schoenstein organ at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, was just released this February on the Raven label. That disc has German Romantic repertoire (Reger, Reubke, Karg-Elert) and a transcription of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz #1. But otherwise it’s a question of just balancing responsibilities out—and finding some time for fun, too.

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

 

In the wind . . .

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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What’s in a name?
or,
Say what you mean.

JULIET:
O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

ROMEO [Aside]:
Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

JULIET:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is not hand, not foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.1

This might be one of the most recognizable moments in all of Shakespeare’s plays. What childhood is without some recognition of Romeo’s wherefores? And how many times has the sweet-smelling rose been misquoted?
I spend a lot of time writing. Each month I spend most of a day writing this column. Before I start, I’ve settled on a subject and have rattled it around between my ears for several days. In my work with the Organ Clearing House, I spend considerable time writing to describe the scope, details, and terms of proposed projects. The committee of a church might ask me to write up a description—I wonder how many committee members realize that the exercise might take a couple days of desk time.
Because I spend so much time working with words, I’m sensitive to (often annoyed by) their misuse—especially when that misuse finds its way into what might be called the official lexicon. Here’s an example. The word anniversary is defined as “an annual event.” (I’m taking all my definitions of English words from the American Heritage Dictionary published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2000.) By extension, annual is synonymous with yearly. So when I first heard someone refer to the “five-year-anniversary” of something, I thought it sounded funny. Considering the root meanings of those words, isn’t that something like saying “five-year-year?” I think it’s correct to say fifth anniversary. It’s clear, concise, and it’s not redundant. But I guess I’ll lose that battle. Even commentators on National Public Radio routinely get this wrong—according to them we’ve just had the sixty-seven-year-anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor. (If you agree with me about this, help me start a revolution.)
Any specialized field has its own language. My brother is a scientist and university professor working in genetic research. During his last visit, he was busy with a student’s dissertation—I glanced at a couple pages and knew instantly that if those were the secrets of the universe they’d be safe with me. I couldn’t understand a single sentence.
The organ is one of those specialized fields rife with jargon. My spell-checker lights up like the proverbial Christmas tree when I type a stoplist. (In fact, it doesn’t even approve of the word stoplist.) My brilliant brother would be just as lost trying to understand what I wrote as I was with his student’s paper. As I’ve gotten to know the pipe-organ jargon—thirty-five years in the vineyards will at least get you started—I’ve realized how specific and how misused it can be. For example, a drawknob marked Prestant 4′ means something very specific, and if I find one on an organ installed in a chamber with no façade, I consider it a misnomer.
The name Prestant comes from the Latin prestare, which translates roughly as “to stand in front.” So by definition a Prestant comprises the pipes of the façade. If you take the name literally (and I suggest we should), a Prestant does not stand behind anything. If the layout of the windchest has other stops in front of that four-foot Principal, call it something else—there are plenty of choices. But wait! If the division in question has a Principal 8′ you can’t use Principal 4′ because Principal implies the principal pitch of the division, and a division can only have one Principal. If there’s a Principal 8′ you call your four-footer Octave because that’s what it is. Sometimes a rose by any other name isn’t quite a rose. Or more accurately, a rose is a rose is a rose, but to equate with this organ-babble, horticulturists would need different words for the rose in front and the rose in back, even if both were red.
Werkprinzip is a precise organ term that describes an organ that explains itself. In such an organ you can tell by looking at the façade what the various divisions are, where they are located, and what their principal pitch is. In the Pedal you might have Principal 32′ and Octave 16′, in the Hauptwerk (literally “main work” or principal division) you would find Principal 16′ and Octave 8′, and in the Positiv, Principal 4′ and Octave 2′. In all three divisions, you could replace the name Principal with Prestant if the pipes were in the façade.
If the Positiv division is located on the balcony rail behind the organist’s back, you could call it Rückpositiv (German) or Rugwerk (Dutch) as rück or its variations means “back.” A German hiker carries a Rücksack. (The German language has some exquisite precision in its nouns—for example, a Handschuh (“hand shoe”) is a glove.) The hole in this theory would be the organ with a Positiv division on the balcony rail and a detached and reversed console. In that instance the organist would be facing the altar and therefore Positiv, with the bulk of the organ behind him. In that case I suppose we’d coin the name Vorpositiv.
The photo above is a postcard from our daughter, whose travel plans included a layover in Reykjavik, Iceland—such a good girl to go into a church and buy a postcard! It shows the Klais organ in the Hallgrímskirku in Reykjavik, a great example of a Werkprinzip organ. Assume that the door beneath the organ is about eight feet tall and use it for scale. With that, we know that the tallest pipes in the side towers are the Pedal Prestant 32′, the three towers of the upper case house the pipes of the Great (Hauptwerk) Prestant 16′, and the façade of the Rückpositiv is the Prestant 8′.
After I wrote the previous paragraph I went to the website of Klais Orgelbau in Bonn and found the specification of the organ (http://www.orgelbau-klais.com/m.php?tx=86). I’m proud to say that I got it just right, except that Klais publishes that the name of the division played by the lowest manual is Positiv (correct, although Rückpositiv would have been more explanatory), and those out-in-front Principals are called Praestant, also correct—simply a variation on Prestant.
In a three-manual American Classic organ such as those built in the mid-twentieth century by Aeolian-Skinner or M. P. Möller, we expect to find two enclosed divisions, Swell and Choir. Can we have Swell shutters in front of the Choir division? I think we should call them Choir shutters. Or if it’s bulky to have two different kinds of shutters in the organ, let’s simplify it and call them all expression shutters. I’m reminded of a succinct comment made to me by friend and mentor George Bozeman in 1976. I was preparing to play a recital on the Bozeman-Gibson organ in Castleton, Vermont, and George was coaching me: “If they named the division after hearing you play, they’d have called it Crush, not Swell.” His simple comment still informs my playing.
Individual organs are conceived and designed based on national and historic styles. We easily recognize the difference between a nineteenth-century French organ and a seventeenth-century Dutch organ. A stoplist that begins Prestant 16′, Octaaf 8′, Roerfluit 8′ implies something different from one with Montre 16′, Diapason 8′, Flûte à Cheminée 8′. Both describe Principals at sixteen and eight and an eight-foot Chimney Flute, but one is Classic Dutch, the other romantic French. In this context it would be technically correct to have Montre 16′ and Roerfluit 8′ in the same organ, but in my opinion it would be a messy cross-reference that could imply stops that don’t belong in the same organ.
In French, haut means “high” and bois means “ wood.” Haut also implies excellence. Haute cuisine is food cooked to a high standard, haute école (literally high school) refers to expert horsemanship. And by the way, the English word haughty (“Scornfully and condescendingly proud”) comes sarcastically from the French haut. Hautbois is literally the “high wood” of the orchestra—in English we say Oboe. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Hautbois and English Horn on the same stoplist, but Hautbois and Cor Anglais would be more linguistically precise.
As I write, I’m checking myself by flipping through various stoplists, and as I’m in a literal frame of mind I find many inconsistencies—instances of multiple languages used in the same instrument—and I realize that it is often intentional. After all, many organbuilders work hard to instill eclecticism in their instruments. They mean to imply the French characteristic of the Hautbois with the originally American invention of French Horn or English Horn (both invented by American organbuilder Ernest Skinner). They mean to have both Swell and Positiv divisions in the same instrument, though the names imply differing origins.
This allows the organist the flexibility to play baroque or romantic music with authentic registrations, assuming of course that the skill of the organ’s voicer provided a roster of stops that blend well with each other even if they are representing different historical and geographical styles. The rich harmonic development of the baroque Roerfluit would not blend well with the creamy Skinner Diapason, but both stops can be modified in character to approach each other in style.
The purist will say that this diminishes the quality and effect of the organ. If an instrument tries to cover too many styles it may fail at all of them, following the adage Jack of all trades and master of none. Conversely, installing a singularly specialized instrument in a modern church may not be serving well the needs of a congregation. After all, there is more to life than Sweelinck and Scheidemann, and while the modern churchgoer may be happy to hear one or the other once in a while, too much and too often will start to wear. Reminds me of A. A. Milne’s (1882–1956) touching reference to the haughtiness of assuming that someone likes something:

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s crying with all her might and main,
And she won’t eat her dinner—rice pudding again—
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,
And a book about animals—all in vain—
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;
But, look at her, now she’s beginning again!—
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train,
And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain—

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain,
And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Have I gone off the deep end, equating Scheidemann with rice pudding? I hope you get my drift!
These reflections on terminology may seem fussy, but pipe-organ jargon is a highly developed and precise language. If organbuilders use it thoughtfully as they create new instruments (or rebuild old ones), they provide insight for the musicians about how the organ is laid out internally. If the musicians use and understand the terminology well, they play their instruments with a deeper understanding of what’s going on inside—of how the sounds are made and how they blend.
But accurate use of the jargon is not the most important thing. I refer back to this column in the October 2008 issue of The Diapason in which I urged my fellow organists to listen. Listen to how the stops blend. Build your registrations because they sound good. You can and should be informed by knowledge of various historical styles of organs and organ music, but if you always and only play by established rules of registration, you’ll likely be dipping back into the rice pudding. A composer may have specified a list of stops, or research may tell you that a Cornet is the combination of stops of five pitches (8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). But does it tell you that all five should be flutes, or can you substitute a principal at 2′ for a brighter sound? If the five stops together produce a dark and heavy sound, try the various combinations. Leave out the four-foot. Try substituting something else for the eight-foot flute. No one will clap you in irons. It has to sound good.

§

With all this huffiness about precise language, a glaring error in the December 2008 issue of this column (page 12) sticks in my craw. I wrote about riding the subway in New York listening to a woman with an electronic keyboard grinding out some of the great classics of church music, and I referred to the Broadway Express as the “1” train. In fact, the Express trains are the “2” and “3.” The three lines run on the same tracks up and down Broadway, but the “2” and “3” stop only at express stops (42nd, 72nd, 96th, 168th), while the “1” fills in the blanks. If you want to go from the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ) on 46th Street to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (a great ride for the orgo-tourist), you can take the “2” or “3” from 42nd (Times Square) to 96th and transfer to the “2” or “3” for two stops to Cathedral Parkway (110th Street). The transfer is easy—you get off one train, walk about fifty feet across a platform on to the express train. Then you walk two blocks north on Broadway, turn right onto 112th and walk a quiet block past housing for Columbia University, facing the façade of the cathedral the whole way. I hope my misspeak didn’t lead anyone astray.■

 

In the wind . . .

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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Timelessness
I’ve had some nice experiences with older things in the last few days. This morning (it’s Tuesday) I saw a 1912 Cadillac on Main Street. Yesterday I tuned an organ built in 1928 by the Skinner Organ Company and made a quick service call on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1870 (#529). On Sunday my wife and I attended a recital played on an organ built by E. & G. G. Hook in 1868 (#466). And on Saturday, a colleague and I visited a restored narrow-gauge steam railway.
I’m writing on a Dell laptop that must be about 20 months old. Now that’s old. Funny how a laptop can be more rickety than a pipe organ built 140 years ago.
The Cadillac is a great-looking car (see photo). The paint job was vibrant, the leather seats had a distinctive luxurious smell, the chrome was polished, and the whole thing looked perfectly elegant. The engine ran smoothly, and the car drove regally down the street attracting attention from every direction. The owner has clearly invested a terrific amount of effort, knowledge, and money to make it look and run so beautifully, and I admire the passion behind the preservation of such an elegant artifact.
But the car had a simple cloth roof and it didn’t look as though the windows would achieve a very tight seal when closed. The windshield doesn’t completely separate the car’s interior from the wind, rain, or insects. The tires are thin and the wheels are made of wood. At the risk of offending those who have toiled and moiled preserving antique automobiles, I prefer modern cars for everyday use. I appreciate the fact that the windows of my car really close so I can choose between having the wind in my erstwhile hair and having the option to use the heater or air conditioner depending on the weather. I like the automatic transmission, the electric windows, the radio and CD player, and the cup holders. I like the windshield squirter and the multiple-speed windshield wipers. It snows a lot where we live. The large tires and four-wheel drive add a lot to our safety in the winter. And anti-lock brakes and air bags were both wonderful innovations, making cars much safer. I don’t think I’d like having to rely on a car made in 1912 the next time I have to spend a day driving in the rain. The modern car is better.
§
My friend Patrick Murphy is proprietor of Patrick J. Murphy & Associates, organbuilders in Stowe, Pennsylvania. His company has produced many fine new instruments, and has renovated or restored a long list of both mechanical and electro-pneumatic organs. Take a look at <www.pjmorgans.com&gt;. He is also a train buff. He’s interested and knowledgeable in the history and operation of railroads, and he owns model trains that run on live steam. Patrick and his wife Les spent last weekend with us in Maine, and while “the wives” found something else to do, Pat and I visited the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railway in Alna, Maine (see photo: WW&F).

The WW&F had roots from the 1830s and was fully established in 1894 as a two-foot gauge railroad. In the world of trains, the gauge is the distance between the rails. Modern railroads have a standard gauge of four feet, eight-and-a-half inches (4′ 8.5″). Strange number, isn’t it? It turns out that early American trains were patterned after English trains of the early eighteenth century. Those were built using the same jigs and tools used to make carts and carriages. The width of the carriages was intended to stay consistent with the width of ancient roads so their wheels would not be worn out by ruts of different widths. So who came up with that measurement in the first place? The horsemen of ancient Rome, who else? Four feet, eight-and-a-half inches was the standard width of a Roman chariot, wide enough to accommodate the rear end of a Roman war horse. Next time you see a modern train roll by, think of Charlton Heston in a toga!
Narrow-gauge tracks are less expensive to build than those for full-sized trains, especially considering the rough terrain of rural Maine, and the curves in the tracks can be tighter, but the trains themselves are small so they have less capacity for passengers and freight. The WW&F stopped operating in 1937. Most of the rolling stock was scrapped and the rails were torn up. The land that formed the right-of-way stayed in the ownership of Frank Winter, the last president of the railway. In 1940, he transferred ownership of the land to the Winter Scientific Institutes, a company he formed for the purpose of avoiding the taxes on the land. And in 1985, Harry Percival of Alna, Maine purchased most of the land. It was his vision to restore the railroad as a museum.1
To tell an extraordinary story in a few sentences, a non-profit corporation was formed, a large membership of volunteers assembled, and today there are about two-and-a-half miles of track re-laid by hand on the old rail bed. They have acquired two historic steam locomotives, one that is operational that came from another two-foot railroad, the other originally owned by the WW&F, currently being restored on the premises. The enthusiasm and quality of workmanship of these volunteers is displayed regularly when the museum is open. A modest admission fee gets you a ride on a steam-powered train and a tour of the workshops and museum. I recommend this to anyone traveling along Route 1 in Lincoln County, Maine. Visit their website at <www.wwfry.org&gt;.
This is testament to the vision of one man and the enthusiasm of hundreds more. But while this tiny train is fun to ride, I’d hate to have to rely on it to get from Farmington to Wiscasset, Maine in February. It would be a long, noisy, cold, uncomfortable ride. Your eyes are filled with smoke and cinders, and the seats in the passenger coach are pretty small (see photo: John and Pat).

The photo shows Patrick and me joining the engineer and fireman on board. I had the sense we might be too much for the thing! And I learned that one of the hazards of operating such small railroad equipment was that the weight of the water (to be converted to steam) carried in the tender behind the locomotive was sufficient to derail the train if the engineer took a corner too fast. The modern train is better.
§
Let’s compare the organs that I’ve seen and heard in the last few days. In 1868 and 1870, Elias and George Hook were building tracker-action organs, logical enough because electricity was not to be available for decades more. (Thomas Edison first equipped the Manhattan home of J. P. Morgan with 250 electric lights on Thursday, June 8, 1882.2) Ernest Skinner was committed to the use of direct-current electricity to operate the actions of his organs by about 1904.
The two Hook organs are pretty similar (see photo: Hook #466). Opus 529 has a Great Trumpet and a Swell 2′ stop not found in Opus 466—otherwise the stoplists are identical. The voicing is brilliant and clear, and the cases are made of black walnut. The sharp keys of Opus 466 are higher and wider than those of Opus 529, as if the builders realized that they were uncomfortable to the player and changed them in the intervening two years. Both of these organs have been renovated and are in terrific playing condition (see photo: Hook #529).
The Skinner organ is about 60 years newer than those Hook organs, but 80 years qualifies it as old. It has the symphonic voicing characteristic of Mr. Skinner’s vision. Many organists agree that the sharp keys on Skinner keyboards are as comfortable as any to the player. There’s a simple combination action, a concave-radiating pedalboard, and Skinner’s very effective eight-stage whiffle-tree engine.
(Here’s our second allusion to horses—a whiffle-tree is the rig used to connect a team of horses to a carriage that allows each horse to pull independently while the horsepower of all of them is added together. Mr. Skinner’s Swell engine incorporates the whiffle-tree concept to allow the pneumatic for each stage to move the shutters independently, with the motion of all pneumatics combining to provide the full range of power and motion of the shutters. Skinner made these motors in eight- and sixteen-stage versions.)
While the Hook and Skinner organs are very different, they have in common an essential element: all three of these organs are absolutely vital and appropriate for modern use. While you can say a modern organ is different, you cannot say that it’s better. Automobiles and railroad trains have been improved immeasurably over the years, but a pipe organ that’s 80 or even 140 years old is an organ for today. It’s timeless.
It’s amazing that you can play music written a year or two ago on an organ built just after the Civil War. How did the brothers Hook conceive of instruments that would be so useful now? Did Mr. Skinner know that his organs would sound good to people living and working in the twenty-first century? (Actually, from what I’ve read about him, he may have thought that his organs would be the only instruments worth playing in the twenty-first century!)
Many modern organists prefer to play instruments festooned with lots of electric and solid-state gadgets. Pistons and toe-studs with sequencers and multiple memories, transposers, and programmable crescendos are the playthings of the modern organist. There’s no question that gear like that allows ever more flexibility of registration, and after all, registration is one of the organist’s most important expressive tools; but the three organs I’m thinking about today all have fewer than 20 ranks and each of them are easily and effectively played without sophisticated modern controls.
And by the way, these three organs are within three miles of each other in Medford, Arlington, and Lexington, Massachusetts. Let me know when you’re coming to the area and I’ll organize your visit. You history buffs will be interested to know that the addresses of these churches (High Street in Medford and Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington and Lexington) are all on the route of Paul Revere’s famous ride on April 18, 1775 (Mozart was nineteen years old), warning the militias of towns in Middlesex County of the approach of the British soldiers (“Redcoats”) in the hours before the start of America’s Revolutionary War. Your visit could include a whole range of historical interest.
I’m especially fond of an historical marker in Arlington Center that tells of an 80-year-old patriot who killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775: “. . . He was shot bayoneted beaten and left for dead, but recovered and lived to be 98 years of age” (see photo: Samuel Whittemore).
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It may not make much sense to compare the timelessness of a work of art with the advance of technology. The usefulness of a modern automobile is relevant to today’s conditions. We expect to be able to drive at 70 miles per hour for hours without stopping, no matter what the weather. But we look at a Renaissance painting and appreciate its content and composition as well as the technique and vision of the artist, even if we could produce a more authentic image of the same scene with our 8.0-megapixel digital camera.
I believe that advanced technology has generally added to our world. I’m pleased with the BlackBerry that allows me to check e-mails in a taxicab. While I’m annoyed by people who use their cell phones rudely, I sure find it a convenience to have one when I’m traveling. (Maybe rude people will be rude no matter what equipment they have.) But I believe the advance of technology in the world of the organ has led to the compromise of authenticity. Solid-state switching has added much to the art of organ playing, but in my opinion, digital sound has not. The majesty of air-powered sound in a large building or the intimacy of air-powered sound in a small room is not improved upon with digital reproduction. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the specifications of a 100-stop organ in a 100-seat room. It is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to introduce the pitch produced by a 32-foot pipe in a room with a 15-foot ceiling. And it is not a musical, artistic, or liturgical advantage to have an antiphonal organ with Trompettes-en-chamade in a room with a 50-foot center aisle. A bride can walk that far in about eight measures of Purcell—why make such a racket?
Digital instruments are often purchased by small churches whose members claim there’s no space for an organ. But these churches are typically trying to get a large three-manual organ into their small room. Of course there’s not enough room. A room that seats 100 people needs an organ of eight stops. Don’t tell me you can’t play Widor on an eight-stop organ. I know that. I don’t want to hear Widor in a 100-seat room.
Funny, I don’t mind rolling up the windows of the car, turning on the air-conditioner, and enjoying a cup of coffee while listening to Widor played on Widor’s organ at full volume. Keeps me off the phone!■

In the wind . . .

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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Monumental intimacy
In the July 2007 issue of The Diapason, this column commented on a book by Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet. Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) is a sort of musical memoir—a great artist sharing his experiences as a child, a student, and an increasingly successful performer. He’s articulate, humorous, and just humble enough. He shares many wonderful reflections, and I’ve commented on the book several times subsequently. Early on he writes about his relationship with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
A beautiful metaphor—makes you want to run down to the church and fire up the organ. But as I commented in 2007, he’s leaving us out. He goes on:

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

Coincidentally, a friend who is violist of the DaPonte String Quartet (resident musicians in our town in Maine) recently asked me how organists relate to their instruments. She spoke of gigs she’s played in churches where she saw organists at work, wondering how you play an instrument that’s so far away from you. Of course I jumped in with these Steinhardt quotes, offering the opposite point of view. The organ is a monumental instrument. Your relationship with the instrument is as a vehicle with which you can fill a huge room with a kaleidoscope of tone colors.
I’ve always found it thrilling to hear my music come back as reverberation in a large room. I love the sensation of having a congregation barreling along with me as I lead a hymn. And I love the feeling that huge air-driven bass pipes can cause in a rich acoustic environment. So it was a gift when my wife shared this passage from I am a Conductor, the autobiography of Charles Munch (Oxford University Press, 1955):

The organ was my first orchestra. If you have never played the organ, you have never known the joy of feeling yourself music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities. Before those keyboards and pedals and the palette of stops, I felt almost like a demigod, holding in my hands the reins that controlled the musical universe. Walking [to work], opening the little door to the organ with a big old key, looking over the day’s hymns lest I forget the repeats, finding a prelude in a good key in order to avoid a difficult modulation, choosing a gay piece for a wedding or a sad one for a funeral, not falling asleep during the sermon, sometimes improvising a little in the pastor’s favorite style, not playing a long recessional because it would annoy the sexton—all this filled me with pride.

“ . . . a certain reserve built into the relationship . . .” Funny, I think some of my best moments on an organ bench have been when I was free of reserve.

Anything you can do, I can do better
What’s really going on between Arnold Steinhardt and Charles Munch? Is it like a playground spat that winds up with did-not, did-too? Or is it the childish idea that one instrument is more difficult to play than another? I’ve certainly heard people admire the complexity of playing the organ—all that dexterity with hands and feet. But can’t you also argue that the organist is only pushing buttons?
The violinist has to create an even and convincing tone through the manipulation of the bow against the strings while making the notes happen at the same time. And, while the organ produces notes that are in tune or not in tune no matter what the organist does (as long as he’s hitting the right notes), the violinist has to put the finger on the fingerboard in exactly the right place. (No worries. They leave the fretting to the guitarist.)
The flautist adds breath control to all the complexities of manual dexterity. The trumpeter has a finicky relationship with a mouthpiece. A trumpeter with a cold sore is like Roger Clemens with a hangnail. Neither can go to work that day. And singers? Let’s not even get started with singers!
No matter what instrument you’re playing, once you’ve mastered the physical technique you can get down to making music. As I get older, I notice that on the printed page I can track the development of my technique. I still play some of my favorite pieces from the same scores I had when I was a student, hopelessly marked up with teachers’ comments and registrations for dozens of different organs. Each time I get reminded of the physical crises of 30 or 35 years ago as I play past those passages that I just couldn’t get at 20 years old. You might say it’s the reward of a lifetime to be able to breeze past those danger zones—a lifetime of practice, that is.
Learning to drive a musical instrument is a barrier between you and artistic expression. Whether you’re learning the “pat your head and rub your tummy” thing about playing the organ, developing the finger strength and control to pluck harp strings, or the incredible muscle control of the mouth of the oboist, all you’re doing is teaching your body the physical tricks necessary for it to become a conductor between your mind and the sonorities of the music.
It’s the actual music that’s so difficult to do right. Shaping notes and phrases, placing the notes in time and tempo, and following your instincts to express the architecture of the music form the essence of the art of music. And you get a whiff of that essence when the physical act of operating the machine that is your instrument doesn’t distract you.
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There is an aspect of the art of organ playing that most other musicians don’t necessarily experience. A clarinetist might own the same instrument for most of his career, seldom playing on another. That is a very personal relationship that like any intimacy includes inherent danger. Imagine the master player who discovers a crack in his instrument moments before an important performance. Or worse yet, what if the treasured instrument is lost or destroyed in a fire? I suppose more than one musical career has ended simply because the musician couldn’t face starting over with a new instrument. Yo-Yo Ma famously left a treasure of a cello in a New York taxicab. It was later recovered because he had bothered to save his receipt and the cab could be tracked down. When you get into a New York cab you hear a gimmicky automatic recording—the voice of a celebrity giving safety tips. Along with Jessye Norman reminding you to fasten your seat belt, there’s one with Yo-Yo Ma advising you to keep your receipts!
The organist is at the mercy of whoever hires him. How many of us have arrived in town to prepare a recital, only to sit down at a mediocre instrument in terrible condition? You can refuse to play, or you can recognize that it’s the only instrument the local audience knows and accept the challenge of doing something special with it. “I’ve never heard this organ sound like that!”
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Busy organists might be playing on dozens of instruments each year, but there are also many examples of life-long relationships between players and their “home base” organs. Marcel Dupré played hundreds of recitals all over the world, but he was Organiste Titulaire at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 until 1971. He succeeded Charles-Marie Widor, who had held the position since 1870. So for more than a century that great Cavaillé-Coll organ was played principally by only two brilliant musicians. What a glorious heritage. Daniel Roth has been on that same well-worn bench since 1985. I first attended worship in that church in 1998 and vividly remember noticing elderly members of the congregation who would remember the days when Dupré was their parish organist. I suppose there still may be a few. I wonder if any of them cornered Dupré after church to complain that the organ was too loud!
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It’s the real thing, baby
My work with the Organ Clearing House often takes me to big cities where I get the thrill of hearing important organists playing on mighty instruments. Both the organist and the organ have a relationship with the church building—the sound rings and rolls around the place, the organist has the knack of timing the echo, and the effect is dazzling.
But most of our organists are playing on instruments of modest size in “normal” church buildings. The effect of the beautiful pipe organ in a small country church is just as dazzling as that of the 200-rank job roaring away in a room with a 150-foot ceiling. There’s such magic to the combination of the sound of wind-blown organ pipes and human voices, even in the setting of a small country church. The sounds meld together, exciting the collective air that is the room’s atmosphere. The organ has a physical presence in the room, letting us know before a note is played that there’s something special coming. We decorate church buildings with symbols of our faith. The organ joins pictorial windows, banners, and steeples as one of those symbols.
We plan a dinner party. On the way home from the supermarket we stop at the florist to get something pretty to put on the table. Likewise, we place flower arrangements on the altar on Sunday morning. In church, do we do that simply for decoration, or are those flowers a celebration of God’s creation—of the beauty of nature? Are there candles on the altar for atmosphere like that dining room table, or is there another loftier reason? Does a choir sing an anthem to cover the shuffling of the ushers as they take up the offering, or is the anthem a true part of the experience of worship? (If so, why don’t they take up the collection during a scripture reading, or during the sermon? Why all this tramping around while the music is playing? But that’s a rant for another month!)
The organ, that instrument that makes us “music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities,” stands in our churches declaring our devotion. The pipe organ is testament to the wide range of the skills with which we humans have been blessed. We’ve been given the earth’s materials and learned to make beautiful things from them. And for centuries the pipe organ has been part of our worship, monument to our faith, and symbol of the power of the Church.
But with the advance of technology we are deluded by dilution. We settle for plastic flowers. We buy cheap production hardware for the doors of our worship spaces. We substitute artificial sound enhancement for real acoustics. And we substitute arrays of circuits for those majestic organ pipes.
Walk through a museum and look at sculpture made of gold, jade, or ivory. Don’t tell me you can’t tell it’s special. When we experience something special, we know it’s special. Walk through a jewelry store and try to tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the fake costume stuff without looking at price tags. You will never be wrong. Of course we know the difference. If your fiancée is not a jeweler, don’t bother with a real diamond. She won’t know the difference. (Oh boy, are you in trouble.)
And buy a digital instrument to replace the pipe organ. “After all, I’m not a musician. I can’t tell the difference.” Baloney. Of course we can tell the difference. And our churches and we deserve the best.

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