In the wind . . .

I didn’t know there were any of you left.

Frequently I am invited to speak about the pipe organ to community gatherings, AGO meetings, and the congregations of churches with which we work. Those who have heard me give such a talk have likely heard the description of a hypothetical scenario: You’re meeting people in a social situation—a cocktail party for example—standing in a little circle going through predictable small-talk. Someone asks what you do for a living. One replies, “I’m a college English professor.” “I’m an investment banker.” “I’m a pipe organ builder.” “A pipe organ builder, I didn’t know there were any of you left.” This happens to me often enough to be comical. Yesterday I heard a new sarcastic twist: “That’s funny, you must be the sixth organbuilder I’ve met this week!”
Those conversations typically continue as nice opportunities to talk about our trade, and when I say that there are professional trade organizations with conventions and monthly journals, my interlocutors are again amazed.
Last month I attended the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders (AIO) in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is a great region for the pipe organ. There are a number of outstanding builders located there, and a fleet of terrific organs. The scenery is spectacular. Mt. Rainier (14,410 feet) pokes its snowy head through the clouds, the Seattle waterfront is a blend of busy international port and picturesque marketplace. The Olympic Mountains loom to the west across Puget Sound serving as host to grand sunsets. And the city itself nestles between the waterfront and dramatic hillsides. Ferryboats and seaplanes are important parts of Seattle’s transportation system. Public cultural events such as concerts and theater are scheduled to work with the ferry schedule lest a concert be disrupted by the departure of hundreds of audience members determined to catch the last boat.
An AIO convention includes plenty of visits to churches and concert halls for demonstrations and concerts on a variety of organs. The rollicking bus rides are a mainstay just as they are at conventions of the AGO or the OHS. There were lectures on a variety of subjects at the convention hotel, and many suppliers to the trade were exhibiting their wares and services in the exhibit hall, which also served as center of much of the socializing. (I treated myself to a long-coveted set of wood-handled brass tuning cones at the Laukhuff booth.)
The AIO convention was the last week of three on the road for me. The Organ Clearing House had just completed the delivery of M.P. Möller’s Opus 5819 to the University of Oklahoma. (You can read about this exciting project elsewhere in this issue of The Diapason, and I will write about it in detail next month.) Originally housed in the Philadelphia Civic Center, and given to Oklahoma by the University of Pennsylvania, the organ will be the centerpiece of the American Organ Institute directed by Professor John Schwandt.

It’s all the same to me.

My trip included a week each in Philadelphia, Norman, Oklahoma, and Seattle. I changed planes in Atlanta and Denver. Starting and ending in Boston, that made seven flights and six airports, and the common thread was sameness. The vendors in all the airports were virtually identical. I started the trip with a book of crossword puzzles that was less than I hoped, but couldn’t find a replacement because Hudson News was carrying the same book in all its stores across the country. The culinary experience in our airports is barely worth mentioning. The sameness of the airports makes it easy to find your way around—signage, numbering systems, even layout is very similar from place to place. But a little exposure to local color would be nice. Having changed planes in Denver, one cannot say one has been to Denver.
From the air you see interchangeable real estate developments, shopping malls, industrial parks. And although the landscapes are different (to someone from the Northeast, Oklahoma sure is flat), once you get away from the airports there is much sameness. We are trained to recognize corporate logos enough to leave no doubt that you are passing Home Depot, Applebee’s, or Sears even if you are too far away to read the text on the sign. I did some shopping in Norman and, although the names of the department stores were different, the floor plans were sure familiar (you can’t get anywhere without having to walk through the cosmetics department!). A striking and unsettling example of sameness is found in the national chains of bookstores. You would think that the interests of readers would vary between regions, but the front tables in Barnes & Noble stores are identical in Boston and Oklahoma City. All of that chain’s buying is done in an office in New York by people who must know best what all Americans should be reading.
National chains of restaurants allow us to buy a predictable meal in any city. I’ve heard people say that this eliminates the risk of having a bad meal. I suggest it’s more like choosing a bad meal instead of risking a good one. Leave a hotel looking for a family-owned restaurant and you’re likely to be disappointed.
While spending time chatting with the good folks in the exhibition booths at the AIO convention, I reflected that there is a significant vein of sameness in the American organ industry. A couple generations ago, if an organbuilder wanted to include a combination action in an organ’s console, they had to build it themselves. Those were the days when many organbuilders had hundreds of employees, and we marvel at the long lists of monumental organs built by the big firms in the early 20th century (the Skinner opus list shows that Ernest Skinner built 39 four-manual organs before the end of 1915), forgetting perhaps that those shops employed hundreds of workers. Many of today’s small organbuilding firms would be hard pressed to build their own combination actions. The fact that organs built by a dozen different companies might have identical combination actions is actually an advantage. The elegant and reliable products offered by such firms as Peterson, Solid State Organ Systems, Laukhuff, Heuss, Artisan Instruments, and Classic Organ Works (among others) make it possible for the independent organbuilder to focus on the artistic content of their instruments.

Who’s driving?

It’s a well-understood fact that the organs of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) were the driving force behind an entire school of organ composition. Composers such as Franck, Widor, Dupré, Tournemire, Vierne, Messiaen, and Mulet were inspired and challenged by those grand organs that featured countless mechanical and tonal innovations. It’s not as easy to tell who was in charge in other eras of organbuilding. J.S. Bach was knowledgeable about the organs of Gottfried Silbermann, but who was teaching whom? We know Bach worked as a consultant, hired by churches to review new organs when they were completed. His comments were sometimes negative—he was especially critical of inadequate wind systems—but one can say that his music was exploring the capabilities of the organs he played. The mid-20th-century American Organ Renaissance was to some extent a collaboration between organists and organbuilders. Organists helped raise awareness of the classic traditions while organbuilders worked hard to interpret them. But the fact that organists became divided (sometimes bitterly) over the issue of tracker vs. electric implies that the organbuilders were really running the show.
During the convention, I was impressed by the number of conversations among organbuilders that focused on playing. During the 1980s there was a disappointing drop in the number of young people studying organ, and several prominent schools have recently closed their organ departments. But AGO Pipe Organ Encounters have been enormously successful, and a number of important university organ departments are thriving. There is a clear upswing in the number and quality of young organists, and our brilliant young players are demanding much of their organbuilders. In my experience, players are increasingly aware of the quality, refinement, and versatility of their instruments. They have sophisticated understandings of organ sound and highly developed personal approaches to registration, not relying on accepted standards of registration but using their ears to blend colors. They are demanding much of their instruments and much of those who build and maintain them. This is a very good thing.
While organbuilders in general have often been inclined to talk about instruments as if they were separate from the music, I observe that players are increasingly the focus. I had several conversations at the convention with colleagues who wanted to share how moved they were by hearing what a particular player brought out of an instrument. More than one expressed that the experience “made it all worthwhile.” Aha—we are building instruments for the sake of music. A layperson might see a pipe organ as a mechanical marvel (of course that’s true!), but a well-conceived and beautifully built organ in the hands of a great player transcends the mechanical.

Nothing new under the sun?

The October issue of The American Organist features an article by Moo-Young Kim that presents a study of the programming of recent American organ recitals. Using pie charts and other graphic illustrations, the frequency of performance of pieces of organ literature is analyzed. The result of the study is easy enough to predict—if you took away the top 20 or so titles you’d have little left. This reflects a dilemma. We know that audiences lean toward the familiar. (How many times have you tried to steer a bride away from Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring or Canon in D?) But finding ways to balance the familiar with new music that will challenge, inspire, and thrill the public must be one of our principal goals. We all know that the pipe organ was integral to the musical life of a community 200 years ago. What about today? What about tomorrow?
In answer to this I share thoughts about what was for me the high point of my experience in Seattle. St. Mark’s Cathedral (Episcopal) is an unusual building in a dramatic location on one of the city’s hillsides. The building was planned in 1928 combining traditional Gothic lines with newly developed poured-concrete construction. The collapse of the stock market in 1929 caused the collapse of the funding of the project, and only the crossing was completed. The cathedral’s website refers to the building as the “Holy Box.” The organ is a knockout. It was built by Flentrop in 1965, a monument of the earlier-mentioned American Organ Renaissance. It has four manuals, 58 stops, and is located in the rear gallery. I don’t have numbers to back up my observations, but to my eye the room is pretty close to a cube in dimension—the height of the ceiling is close or equal to the length and the width. The organ has a real 32' façade—flamed copper Principal pipes that are a true eyeful. The overwhelming visual impression is of immense height.
The stoplist comprises Dutch nomenclature, so familiar from my days as a student at Oberlin (a town of 8500 people that was home to more than 20 Flentrop organs in 1978), and implies a clear historically focused style of organbuilding. I’ve heard this organ on four different occasions, and each time I’ve been amazed at its versatility. The organ’s sound is brilliant and full. It’s expressive and sweet. It’s powerful enough to defy the low wind pressures. It’s simply thrilling to hear. It’s more than 40 years old and must be considered one of the monuments of 20th-century organbuilding.
Douglas Cleveland was the recitalist. Having just read the previously mentioned article in The American Organist, I noted quickly the predictability of the program: Bruhns G major, Vivaldi/Bach D minor, Schübler Chorales, St. Anne Prelude and Fugue. Nothing new under the sun—except for two important points: first, Mr. Cleveland is a stupendous player, and second, that was only the first half. His presentation of those standards of the repertory was fresh and inviting. The second half of the program included Ave Maris Stella by Pamela Decker, Pièces de Fantaisie (Deuxième Suite) by Louis Vierne, and the world premier of Four Concert Etudes by David Briggs. Perfect. In the first half, Mr. Cleveland’s playing and the Flentrop organ won me over with their classic beauty. In the second, I (and the friends around me) was dazzled by the grandeur, excitement, and the sheer sonic power of the marriage between the organ and this smashing new music. I hope that Briggs’s Four Concert Etudes will get many more readings. Mr. Briggs is himself a marvelous organist—his music reflects that deep understanding of his instrument—and Mr. Cleveland knew how to interpret it with his understanding of the terrific instrument given for his use that night, and the audience was the richer for it. More, please!

John Bishop, executive director of the Organ Clearing House, graduated from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a degree in Organ Performance. He has had a 30-year career as a church musician, most recently serving for 17 years as director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. His activities as an organ builder started with summer jobs as a teenager with Bozeman & Associates, and include nine years with J.G.P. Leek of Oberlin, Ohio, three years with Angerstein & Associates of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and the last 14 years as President of the Bishop Organ Company, Inc. As an organ builder, he has purchased several organs through the Organ Clearing House, with the assistance of longtime director, the late Alan Laufman. He is active in the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. For the past four years, Mr. Bishop was the author of the monthly column, “Miscellanea Organica,” in The American Organist.

The pipe organ gives us all a lot to talk about. We can trace its history back to the panflutes of the sixth century B.C. The hydraulis, the earliest real pipe organ we know of (complete with keyboard, a mechanical action controlling valves, pipes blown by air, and a regulated wind supply) was created by Tsebius of Alexandria in about 246 B.C. It’s depicted so accurately in an ancient mosaic that modern working reconstructions have been built using that image as a guide. We study the history of the instrument, comparing musical styles, voicing techniques, and mechanical innovations between regions and eras. We debate whether a certain organ is suitable for the performance of a particular piece. The organ is the subject of many scholarly books rife with numbers, charts, and appendices—comprehensible and interesting to organbuilders, but no more accessible to most organ lovers than celestial navigation or ancient Greek.

We need this minutia. Without it we would not be able to understand and appreciate the richness of the instrument. But beyond that, the instrument is a marvel, a source of joy and inspiration, in one sense un-understandable. I’ve worked in organbuilding since I was a teenager and I love those studies of numbers, history, and style. But it wasn’t the numbers that first attracted me to the organ. When you participate in a grand hymn in a great acoustic your spirit soars, not because of your awareness of the organbuilder’s proclivity with the numbers but because there is something magic about how all that sound comes from moving all that air.

It’s indescribable.

To be sure, it’s indescribable in part because we’ve done such a good job describing it—making it technically possible, but if the description overshadows the mystery we’ve lost a special something. It’s breathtaking because it’s founded on breath.

Takes your breath away

I’ve loved Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night for as long as I can remember. An art history professor at Oberlin College helped me understand it a little better than I could have just by seeing it on T-shirts, mouse pads, or coffee mugs. But I’ll not forget the first time I saw the painting itself, exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rounding a corner into a gallery I was stunned, gasping, weeping. It did not take my breath away because I could say something erudite about brush strokes or color contrasts. It simply took my breath away.

I am excited to have this opportunity to share thoughts about our grand instrument with you. I feel honored to share these pages with the many scholars who help us better understand the instrument and its music. And I hope you will join me using that understanding as a tool for ever better communication between us inside the organ world and the public of lay people upon whom we depend as both consumers and patrons—those who appreciate our playing and our instruments, those who fund the purchase and maintenance of this most wildly expensive of instruments and upon whom we depend for its presence in future generations.

I’ve heard colleagues refer to that public as “the great unwashed.” Does this imply that we are somehow better, cleaner, than those who are not familiar with the intricacies of the organ, who think that Toccata and Fugue in D minor was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, or who commit the unthinkable and unpardonable by applauding between the Prelude and the Fugue? Fully aware of our superiority we knowingly shake our heads, driving away a future organ lover with each successive wag. What’s wrong with a little misplaced enthusiasm?

A Möller’s impact

It should be our mission to share our enthusiasm with others. Last fall the Organ Clearing House was preparing to dismantle a monumental organ built by M. P. Möller in Philadelphia in the Civic Center, a truly mammoth building built in 1930 with 13,500 seats slated for demolition to make space for the expansion of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The organ was housed in chambers above the ceiling of the auditorium, 120 feet high, and had not been played in public since a convention of the Organ Historical Society in 1996, before that, not since the American Theatre Organ Society convention in 1990. By the time we were there surveying the organ, the building was full of hard-hats working on asbestos abatement, salvage operations, and the myriad details that precede the demolition of such a place. Because we were to have the support of several of the contracting firms involved for rigging, scaffolding, building crates and the like, many of these workers were aware that something was up with the organ.

Of course, we had to try to make the organ play. With the help of Brant Duddy, the Philadelphia organ technician who had for many years worked on the maintenance and renovation of the organ, we got the blowers running and the rectifiers turned on. We spent a few minutes pulling pipes to stop ciphers (there was a doozy in the bass of the 16’ Diaphone that must have been audible in Scranton) and, son-of-a-gun, it played! The consoles were on the two-acre floor of the auditorium (the same floor on which Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers had played) in front of the stage (the same stage on which Franklin Roosevelt accepted his nomination for a second term as President in front of the 1936 Democratic National Convention), below the tiers of thousands of seats (from which audiences had heard the likes of The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and The Metropolitan Opera). As I played there came a procession of more than a hundred hard hats through the many doors into the auditorium and down the aisles toward the console as though I was accompanying some huge and bizarre Christmas pageant. It would have been perfect had they been carrying candles—we settled for flashlights and electric hand tools. They came to experience this acoustic-mechanical magic. I played the National Anthem and some measures of Widor. Someone asked for The Phantom of the Opera. I played Bach.

As our work progressed over the following weeks, many of these men and women visited us in the organ, expressing their amazement at the spectacle of all that material (16 semi-trailers full) adding up to a musical instrument. You don’t need to be in such an outlandish setting to make an impression. Show a good pipe organ to someone who has never been near one, and you’re sure to make a big impression.

What an organ.

It has 86 ranks of pipes. Twenty of them are reeds. Four of those are Tubas! Who ever heard of an organ with four independent Tubas? Three of the Tubas are in the Solo Division—Tuba Profunda, Tuba Sonora, and Tuba Mirabilis. Really! There’s a 32’ Double Open Wood Diapason that’s twenty-five inches square at CCCC and a 32’ Contra Bombarde that’s twenty-two inches in diameter—some of the largest (and heaviest) organ pipes I’ve ever seen. The lowest wind pressure is 10≤. There’s a windchest in the Great with 22⁄3’, 2’, 13⁄5’, 11⁄3’ 11⁄7’, and 1’—on ten inches of pressure! Tuners, how do you like that thought?

Did you catch the plural when I mentioned consoles? On the floor in front of the left-hand end of the stage was an elegant four-manual drawknob console. At the right-hand end, a four-manual theatre console with more than two hundred stop tablets in a variety of colors arranged on horseshoe-shaped stop rails. Because of the immense distance between consoles and pipes, and the unusual power of the organ, there is an independent tuning keyboard in each of the four chambers complete with stop controls. Added up, this is surely the only twelve-manual organ Möller ever built! (See photo: “A Twelve-Manual Organ.”)

A bipolar Möller

The drawknob console, known as the classic console, controls a very powerful and colorful straight organ with fully developed principal choruses, lots of strings and celestes, beautiful flutes, and a wide range of reed tone. Only one of the ranks of pipes in the complete roster is not included in the classic specification—an 8’ Kinura of seventy-three notes. (A Kinura is a reed stop something like a Trumpet without resonators that produces a characteristic bleating tone commonly found in theatre organs.) To get at that, you have to move to the theatre console where you also find all the toys and gadgets you could hope for, including but not limited to Song Birds I, Song Birds II, Sleigh Bells I, Sleigh Bells II, Auto Horn, Telephone Bell, Fire Gong, Steamboat Whistle, Locomotive Whistle, Siren, Factory Gong, Surf, Door Bell, Aeroplane, Chinese Gong, Persian Cymbal, Grand Crash, Glass Crash. There are a half-dozen different drums that can either tap or roll, and an array of percussions like castanets, tambourines, and Chinese Block (tap or roll). Top it off with four different tuned percussions (Harp, Celesta, Glockenspiel, Orchestral Bells) and a piano with a vacuum-powered player-piano style action, and you’ve got quite a sandbox to play in.

Before we dismantled this mighty organ I spent ten days studying it. If all goes well we will put it back together someday so we needed to learn as much as we could about it. We preserved the electro-pneumatic relays as a Rosetta stone for making the organ work again. Those automobile-sized machines that filled an entire room were the key to how the engineers at Möller made it possible for one organ to have two personalities. It’s enough of a trick for an organbuilder to conceive of a cohesive instrument—one in which choruses blend with themselves and with each other and in which reeds can both contrast and complement flues. It’s a much greater achievement to produce a single instrument that allows two styles of playing that are so radically different. I value highly the recording made by Tom Hazleton provided to me by Brant Duddy which juxtaposes Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique with Hazleton’s own Oklahoma Medley. Individually each sounds terrific—comparing the two seems nearly improbable. You can hardly imagine that both are played on the same organ.

The theatre console plays nineteen ranks of the organ--those ranks with unit actions. There are sixteen different tremolos that turn on singly or in combination. For example, a tablet on the theatre console marked Woodwinds Vibrato turns on 5 tremolos in four different chambers. The piano plays at various pitches on every keyboard. There are toe studs that control the piano’s damper and sostenuto pedals, and pistons, tablets and toe studs that play all the percussions and toys. There’s a piston (duplicated with toe stud) engraved “Change Title,” part of the razzmatazz of accompanying movies.

It took something like four hundred fifty person-days to dismantle, pack, and store this organ. Remember, every piece had to be lowered more than a hundred feet to the floor. This was all made possible by the University of Pennsylvania as part of their effort to preserve something of the heritage of this heroic building.

The organ is safely stored. The floor of the organ chamber was 120 feet above the floor of the auditorium. The organ did not speak directly into the hall, but toward the front of the hall away from the audience, above the stage, into a tone chute 100 feet wide, 17 feet deep, and 45 feet high. The organ’s sound came down that tone chute through grillework in the ceiling in front of the proscenium arch, projecting back under the organ, a change of direction of 180 degrees. From that disadvantage it filled the 400’ x 175’ x 120’ room. Eighty-six ranks make a good-size organ, but not a behemoth. This organ is a behemoth. It would be a rare church that could house it. It’s unbelievably loud. How about a baseball stadium?  I already know the National Anthem.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Shiny side up
The work of the Organ Clearing House involves trucks. Lots of trucks. We rent trucks when we are working on projects small enough to fit into a single truck body. And we have a trucking company in Nevada that we call when we need a semi-trailer or a little fleet of semi-trailers. After many years of jumping around from one company to another, it was a relief to begin working consistently with a single firm that could meet most of our needs.
When we are dismantling an organ, loading day is heavy work. A crew runs in and out of a church building all day long carrying heavy parts down stairs and fitting them into a truck like a giant Tetris® game. When the truck is full there’s often a moment when the crew and truck driver “shoot the breeze” for a few minutes before the load hits the road. We’ve heard a few doozies. One driver mentioned that it was a good thing we weren’t sending him to Canada because he had been convicted for smuggling firearms and wasn’t allowed to drive there anymore. We had just loaded an Aeolian-Skinner organ into his trailer.
Sometimes it’s pearls of wisdom: “You can drive down that hill too slow as many times as you want. You can only drive down it too fast once.”
And the friendly greeting as he puts it in gear and lets out the clutch, “keep the shiny side up!” Good advice, especially with my organ in the back!

Skootch
In 1979 I was part of a crew installing a new European organ in Cleveland. (You historians can route out which organ that was . . .) The church’s sexton, a fifty-ish German man, was involved in setting up the scaffolding, and I as “the young guy” was up there with him. As we were putting up the last scaffold frame we ran into the pitch of the ceiling. “Hold this,” he said, handing me the scaffold frame. I was standing on a plank. He pushed against the ceiling with his hands, gave the scaffold tower a kick with both feet, and the whole thing jumped a couple inches toward the center of the room. We were up high enough to be able to put a bridge from the top of the tower across the top of the organ to another tower. It was a three-manual free-standing organ in a classic organ loft with a spiral stairway. Must have been 50 feet. After his kick the tower didn’t stop making noise for several seconds, and because I was holding that frame I couldn’t steady myself. Nothing bad happened, but as I reflect on that moment, especially watching our crews set up massive towers of scaffolding today, I can hardly believe the risk that guy exposed me to without asking. I would have said no.
In another Cleveland church my boss and I witnessed a near disaster. We walked through the nave heading for the rear gallery where we were finishing renovation of the antiphonal organ. The pews were divided into three sections across the room, so there were in effect two center aisles and no side aisles. The walls featured unusually large stained-glass windows. A couple guys from the church’s maintenance staff were changing light bulbs in the chandeliers, using the kind of scaffolding that’s made of two-inch aluminum tubes and has a two-by-six-foot footprint. They were four sections high, and had the outriggers (stabilizers) pointing up the aisles the “long way,” rather than between the pews. From inside the organ chamber we heard “that” noise and ran down the stairs to find the tower at a 45-degree angle, the bottom of the tower still in the aisle, and Mr. Lightbulb on top with his foot on the wall next to a window. A couple inches to the right and he would have gone through the glass and fallen a long way to the lawn. Telling him to hang on, we yanked the tower straight again, and I had to go up to help the guy down.
What kind of maintenance supervisor would let that happen? Oh yeah, in the first story he was the guy on top of the tower with the big feet.

Those little voices
That Cleveland area organbuilder I was working with is Jan Leek of Oberlin, Ohio. I was privileged to work in his shop part time when I was a student, and then full-time for about five years after I graduated. He had learned the trade in Holland in what could best be described as an old-world apprenticeship, and as he taught me how to handle tools and operate machinery, he had a way of saying, “listen for those little voices.” If the little voice in your head says, “you’re going to cut your finger with that chisel if you do that once more,” the little voice is right. It’s a great image, and I am sure that his description taught me to conjure up those voices. I can still hear them. “The paint is going to drip on the carpet.” “The keyboard is going to fall on the floor.” “Your finger will touch that saw blade.”
The apprentice doesn’t hear the voices. The journeyman hears them and doesn’t listen. The master hears them and does listen.
An open quart can of contact cement is sitting on the chancel carpet next to the organ console. Of course it’s going to get knocked over when you stand up. The price of the glue, $4.79. The price of the carpet, $47,500.
A row of tin façade pipes is standing against the workshop wall. A worker is using a five-pound hammer to break up the crates that the pipes came in. The head flies off the hammer and dents one of the pipes, and they all fall over, one at a time in slow motion like 15-foot-tall tin dominos and there’s nothing anyone can do.
Cheery, isn’t it?
This subject is on my mind for several reasons. One is that I’ve spent the last couple days negotiating the rental of a huge amount of scaffolding and rigging equipment for a large project we will start next week, so I’ve been talking with salesmen about weight and height limits and what accessories are necessary to ensure safety. Another reason is that a locally owned small manufacturing company near us suffered a catastrophic fire last week. And as we work with scaffolding companies in New York we hear stories about the construction industry, especially relating to recent serious accidents involving cranes used in the construction of high-rise buildings.
I love the image of the organbuilder at a wooden workbench, a window open next to him providing a gentle breeze, a sharp plane in his hands, and the sweet smell of fresh wood wafting off the workpiece as the shavings curl from the blade of the plane. Or that of the voicer sitting in seclusion with beautiful new pipes in front of him coming to life under his ministrations.
But think of that majestic organ case in the rear gallery with an ornate monumental crown on the top of the center tower, covered with moldings, carvings, and gilding, and pushed up against the ceiling. Uplifting, isn’t it? It might be eight feet long, six feet wide, and three feet tall. It might weigh 500 pounds, and someone had to put it there. Making it is one thing. Getting it 50 feet off the floor and placed on those 20-foot legs that hold it up is another thing altogether. Uplifting, all right.
Organbuilders have a variety of skills. We work with wood, metal, and leather. We work with electricity and solid-state circuitry. We have acute musical ears for discerning minute differences in pipe speech and for setting temperaments. And we must be material handlers—that specialization of moving heavy things around safely.
To put that tower crown in place you need scaffolding, hoisting equipment, and safety gear to keep you from falling. How high up do you need to be before you need that gear? Easy. Ask yourself how far you’re willing to fall. Twenty feet? Thirty feet? Four years ago the Organ Clearing House dismantled the huge Möller organ in the Philadelphia Civic Center. (That organ is now under renovation in the new workshop of the American Organ Institute at the University of Oklahoma.) The organ chamber was above the ceiling, 125 feet above the floor. The demolition company (the building was to be torn down) cut a hole in the floor of the blower room big enough for the organ parts to pass through. And we were left standing on the edge of an abyss. We used full-body harnesses and retractable life lines. If you fell you’d drop about six feet and the ratchet-action of the retractable would stop you, something like the seatbelts in your car. And there you are, hanging 120 feet up.

Away aloft
A sailor hollers “Away aloft” as the halyard hoists the sail up the mast. The rigger might do the same. He ties a line around the load, hooks it to the line from the winch, and up it goes. It’s important to choose the right type of line—you don’t want chanciness caused by a line that stretches, for example. But what really matters is the knots you use. Some knots are meant to slip. Some are meant to be permanent. A favorite is the bowline, which cannot untie, but also cannot pull so tight that it cannot be undone. It was developed by early sailors to tie a ship to a dock or mooring. Think of a large sailing vessel, bow tied to a mooring, bouncing on the waves and pulled by the wind for weeks. There’s a terrific amount of force on that knot. But you give the top of the knot a push sideways and it can be taken apart easily. Beginning sailors are taught how to tie the bowline both left- and right-handed, blindfolded. I once had to tie a bowline while diving under a boat in order to repair a centerboard control.
Different knots are intended for different purposes.
A half-hitch is a great knot for securing something temporarily, but it looks a lot like a slip knot. If you don’t know the difference you might tie a slip knot by mistake. How will that work when the weight of a windchest shifts while being hoisted into the organ?
If your skill set doesn’t include three or four good reliable knots, I recommend you learn them. There are neat books for this purpose, predictably available from boating-supply companies. Some come with little lengths of line so you can practice in the comfort of your home.
When hoisting heavy parts you can also use nylon webbing. It’s available in neat pre-cut lengths with loops on each end for easy tying. The webbing is easy on the corners of the piece you’re lifting, and it’s very strong. A one-inch wide web is rated for 2,000 pounds in vertical lift. But keep a good eye on its condition. Recently there was an eerie photo in the New York Times in the aftermath of the collapse of a construction crane. It showed a piece of torn webbing dangling from a hook. That photo prompted us to purchase new webbing for our next rigging job!
In the nineteenth century, the great Boston organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook suffered two serious fires, both of which destroyed their workshops. I know of two North American organbuilders who have had bad fires in the last decade. Neither was caused by carelessness; in fact, one was caused by lightning. I thought about those two colleague firms working to rebuild their companies when we heard of a terrible fire at a boatyard near us. Washburn & Doughty is a family-owned company with about a hundred employees that builds heavy commercial vessels like tugboats, fireboats, and ferryboats. It’s quite a spectacle to see a hundred-foot tugboat under construction in a small village. And a mighty amount of steel goes into the building of such a boat. On Friday, July 11, sparks from a cutting torch ignited a fire that destroyed the building. It was routine work for a place like that, and newspaper stories told that the fire was officially accidental. They were able to save a hundred-foot tug that had been launched and was being completed at the dock—they cast it adrift! But two others that were still in the buildings were lost and 65 employees were laid off temporarily while the owners work out how to rebuild.
Ten years ago I was restoring an organ built by E. & G.G. Hook with lots of help from volunteers from the parish. We were refinishing the walnut case, and I mentioned the fire hazard of rags that were soaked with linseed oil. They must be spread out to dry. If they’re left in a heap they will spontaneously combust. One of the volunteers took a pile of the rags home and put them in a bucket in the middle of his backyard. He told us later that it had only taken about ten minutes before the bucket was full of fire!
This is a pretty gloomy subject. But I write encouraging my colleagues to look around their workplaces with a critical eye toward safety. Be sure you have the proper gear for lifting and moving the things you’re working on. Store your paints and finishes in a fire-proof cabinet. Eliminate the possibility of sparks finding a pile of sawdust and spread out those oily rags. Encourage your workers to use safety equipment. Safety glasses may look nerdy, but it’s not cool to lose an eye!
Get your hands on a good industrial supply catalogue—I have those from Grainger and McMaster-Carr on my desk. Go to the “safety” pages and leaf through. You’ll see lots of things that protect against stuff you haven’t imagined could happen! Organbuilders are precious. Let’s keep them all in good health.

50 years of teaching at The University of Michigan, Part 2

Part 1 of this interview appeared in the October issue of The Diapason, pp. 16-21.

Q: I just wonder how you get all your energy.

A: Well, maybe it's because I'm from Oklahoma. I do exercise a lot. I walk quite a bit and I used to bike a lot, too.

Q: Does everybody in Oklahoma have energy like that?

A: It depends on the genes. They're always friendly, I know that.

Q: What suggestions do you have for young organists?

A: There might be some suggestions which are based on my own experience. One of them is the Boy Scout motto: "Be prepared," because as I look back the break that I had was in 1950 when the Boston AGO called me to say "Robert Ellis was to play and he cannot play. Will you play the Schoenberg 'Variations' for us?" I had less than two weeks to prepare this piece. But fortunately I had been prepared. I'd had my lessons with Schoenberg. I'd been preparing the piece and playing it for some time. I had it memorized.

The second thing is to be flexible. That is, if someone asks you to play, don't say, "I won't play because we don't have four manuals." Don't say, "I can't play because there's only two manuals."  Roll with the punches, be willing to fit into the situation. It's better to be playing a recital and have to make a few compromises than not be playing at all.

The third thing, very important, is be dependable. If you say you will be there, if you say you will do such and such, be there, do it. Be known for your dependability and your accountability.

Don't procrastinate. That comes along with being dependable. Don't put things off. I have a very fine colleague in the organ department--James Kibbie. He is the splendid example of this. He never procrastinates. If I suggest something or if I ask him to do something, he does it immediately. I think that's an important aspect of our work. If for any reason I might have to put off something, it's because my inner sense of the whole situation says "wait." We all know of situations where if you had waited a little bit things would have worked out a little better than if you had gone ahead immediately. So I say procrastination with a grain of salt--using your own judgment.

These four things matter: to be prepared, to be flexible, to be dependable, and not to procrastinate.

Q: Please tell about the Fisk organ here which is named "The Marilyn Mason Organ."

A: The organ which stands in the Blanche Anderson Moore Hall in the School of Music is a result of a lot of thinking and consulting and wondering what was going to happen next with our department. Robert Clark was teaching with us at the time we were thinking and trying to decide. He had just made his first trip to what was formerly East Germany. We knew that we were going to have this fund started by Judith Barnett Metz. She told me, "I would like to do something in your honor. Would you like a Marilyn Mason scholarship?" I said, "Well, we need an organ more than anything." So she gave Michigan the initial funds. Bob Clark said, "We should have a copy of one of those beautiful Silbermanns because we don't have anything like that." At that time, about 1979-80, there was nothing like that in the States. So he was the one who gave us that marvelous idea, and the whole faculty--Robert Glasgow, James Kibbie & Michele Johns--thought it was the right thing to do. So, that's what we did. The interesting thing is how it came about. I went to our Dean, Paul Boylan (and he had just become the Dean in 1979). I said, "We're going to have this money for an organ, but we can't have an organ without a place to house it." He said, "I want to have a rehearsal/concert hall for musical theater, because we're expanding that wonderfully." Then he said, "Can't we think about combining the two?" which is of course what we did. So we arranged to visit President Shapiro (this was during his very early days in office) and called on him together with this proposal. He said, "I'll be glad to help you and I think it a good idea." So he was very helpful in getting us funds from the legislature. Then there was other money which helped us get the Palmer Christian Lobby. People donated for that. The Earl V. Moore people donated for that. Bill Doty, Mildred Andrews and Franklin Mitchell also donated to the lobby. The hall is named for Blanche Anderson Moore (wife of Earl V. Moore) who was a very devoted patron of the arts. She came to many organ recitals. I remember seeing her at Hill Auditorium when some of us were playing. And so we named this hall in her honor. The organ contract was signed in 1980 with Charlie Fisk, who said, "I won't have the organ for you until 1985." We said, "Oh, it will never come." He said, "It will be here quicker than you can realize." That was really the truth--it was here very quickly. We dedicated the organ on October 4, 1985, and it was a special occasion.

Q: Was the organ named for you at that time?

A: No, that was a few years later. Dean Boylan said that it should be named for me because the initial funds had been given by Judith Barnett Metz in my honor. This was a very nice gesture, and I appreciate it very much.

The organ is modeled after a Silbermann, but there is no specific organ which it copies. We would not want, and  we could not make a perfect copy simply because the hall is different and the time is different. We're no longer in the 18th century. In most of the churches where the Silbermanns stand the organ is in the west gallery, while this one is in the front. We have a very nice situation the way the hall is built. There are tiers of steps that go up to the organ. Last night, as part of our Institute, there was a choral concert with James Abbington, conductor. The singers were standing on these different steps, and it was nice for the 20 singers to be heard that way in  acoustics quite sympathetic for the voices.

Q: The Fisk organ has provided the students there with an opportunity to encounter historic organ building principles that they wouldn't have in other places.

A: Exactly. It's been a big impetus for us. I am especially glad that we could provide the original type winding: the bellows may be hand pumped and a recital could go on despite an electrical storm, and Michigan has them. With this organ, our teaching organs and the organ at Hill Auditorium, we feel very blessed. We have 16 practice organs plus 3 teaching organs and 2 performance organs. We have the magic number of Bach--21.

Q: Would you talk about your family?

A: My first husband was Professor Richard K. Brown. Many of my students knew him. He was a true gentleman, a wonderful engineer and teacher, a man whom I had first met in 1945. We were married in 1949 (long enough time for him to see me in action, so to speak, and he knew what he was getting). He continued teaching at the University of Michigan until he retired in 1987.

We have two sons. The first is Merritt Christian Brown (named after my father and Palmer Christian), born in 1955. He's a scientist who earned his Ph.D. here at Michigan. He took classes with his father in engineering. He would come home and tell his father, "You could make that course even more strict. You have some very gifted students in there." Richard would say, "But I'm aiming for the middle students as well as the gifted ones." Then he would say to his son, "Please, don't go into engineering." Our son played the violin just wonderfully, studying with Gustave Rosseels at Michigan. When he would finish practicing, I would say, "Oh, Chris, you play so beautifully, but please don't go into music." So, here was this young man with opposing directives, so he chose acoustics. After earning the Ph.D., he continued research in the Kresge Hearing Laboratory. Later, he read a paper at an acoustical conference in Los Angeles. An engineer who heard him there said, "We would be very interested in having you join our research at Massachusetts General Hospital." Chris was intrigued with the work they were doing, so he joined that research group. His mentor there was Nelson Kiang. Dr. Kiang later invited him to teach at Harvard. He is Associate Professor at the Harvard Medical School where he teaches physiology. His specialty has been the inner ear. His music and his engineering led him into this.

To me, that's a lesson that young people must know. You must explore the options, and how better to explore the options than to go to school. If you're a freshman or sophomore in school and not happy with what you're doing, it may be that the Lord in telling you to go in a different direction.

I had a wonderful student, Weston Brown. After his sophomore year, he said, "You may be mad at me, but I think I want to change my major." I said, "No, I want you to do what you want to do." He said, "I am making straight A's in German and I am making a B in music history." I said, "The Lord is trying to tell you something." He said, "I love German." He earned the Bachelor's and Master's and later a Ph.D. from Columbia in German and musicology. That's a fine example of how you can find options if you keep watching. The best advice is to watch for the options and hope to find something that you enjoy doing. Try not to think about money. If you think only about the money you will make, you may end up doing something that you don't enjoy .

Our second son is Edward Brown, a wonderful young man who's a free-lance photographer. He lives in California. He likes California because the light is always wonderful there. But I think he loves it because there's no snow, fog or ice.

Q: Did either son have an urge to play the organ?

A: Not really, probably because they heard so much playing. It didn't turn them off, but they probably thought one organist was enough. I practice the piano a lot a home. Once one of our neighbors, Mary Sinnott, said to our son Edward, aged 10, "What's your mother doing?" He said, "She's playing the piano." The next day, Mrs Sinnott said, "What's she doing now?" He said, "She's still playing the piano." They got used to that.

When they were younger, I put them to bed with organ music on the house organ which my husband and I assembled in 1955. I gave that organ to two doctoral students, Howard & Marie Mehler. We purchased a small Walker tracker for practicing. My family has always been very supportive but also understanding with my schedule. The dishes may not get done or the beds made if I have to practice.

In 1991 my husband had enjoyed four years of retirement. Gardening was one of his interests and his beautiful rhododendrons still bloom. He suffered a stroke on May 7, 1991. We had to take him to the hospital. We thought he would recover from this, but on July 23 he slipped away. Both of our sons were extremely supportive of me at that time. Even though I had this great loss, I still had my teaching which was a comfort to me. I had become organist of the First Congregational Church in 1984. There, Tom Marshall had been my trusty assistant. I had the inspiration of the Wilhelm organ at the church and we had the Fisk here.

In the autumn of 1991, I felt more settled. Music was a great support to me. One of our good friends, Jim O'Neill, formerly chairman of the French department, called. "We have a dear friend and he would like for you to play a memorial service for his wife who died some time ago." Other friends, Mary and Bill Palmer, arranged dinner where I met William Steinhoff. Later, he came to the house to discuss music he wanted--mostly Bach and Mozart. I played for that service in January of 1992. After that, we had lunches and dinners. It was satisfying to spend time with someone who was not in music and yet who was very supportive. It's important to have a sympathetic person near you, someone who understands you. He is an emeritus Professor of English Literature at Michigan. Although he had taught here for 30 years, I had never met him. We were married on May 8, 1993. Someone said, "What did you do about music?" I said, "I played for my wedding!" We were to be at the church Saturday morning at 11:00. My sons were there along with Bill's nephew and niece. No one else was present. I said, "Well, I'm just going to play the prelude." So I played the Guilmant March on a Theme of Handel. Bill came in, saying, "Am I late?" So, Terry Smith performed the service for us. Then I moved to the organ and played the Widor "Toccata." That was a fine ending for our wedding service.

Q: Do you have brothers and sisters who are musical?

A: My brother James Clark Mason was musical. He was a wonderful family man, and loved his four children and wife. He died two years ago. My sister, Carolyn Mason Weinmeister, is active in computers and computer programming.   She enjoys music and sports. She lives in Oklahoma City and has one daughter and son.

Q: How do you keep your positive attitude?

A: A lot of this is based on the loving care that we had as children. Both our mother and father were supportive of us. My mother always did the cooking and dishes so that I could practice the piano or go to the church and practice the organ. A loving home, to be surrounded by such love, and a religious home, to be surrounded by Presbyterian Protestantism--these things are what you cannot take away but also what you can't buy. Parents must be aware of this when raising children. That religious upbringing that I was given is something that no one can ever take away and I hope I never forget.

Q: You continue to be a church organist, and you've been a church organist for a long time along with your teaching. Have you been an organist at several churches in Ann Arbor?

A: I was a substitute organist at the Presbyterian Church where we belonged for many years. When Zion Lutheran needed an organist, the music committee invited me to play there. I was the organist for many years in the early sixties. John Merrill was the choral conductor. I enjoyed the liturgical service and the Lutherans. I enjoy being a church organist and I like to play hymns.  I sometimes remind the students that if they are church musicians the title "church" comes first, with the flexibility and dependability that I mentioned earlier. And, after all, that is usually where the best organs are!

We were out at our lake cottage one Labor Day weekend, and I had to return for church on Sunday at Zion Lutheran. I went to the Schantz organ, saw the bulletin and #15 for the processional hymn. I opened the hymnal and found "Joy to the World." This was on Labor Day weekend! I thought--these Lutherans, if they want "Joy to the World" they're going to have it! I really gave it the full treatment. The choir came down the aisle with their books under their arms. Not a person was singing. When they arrived in the chancel the minister announced, "And now we'll have the opening hymn, number such-and-such." I had misread it and the "15" was the page number for the order of service. Regardless, I enjoyed the Lutheran service very much.

In 1963, I had a fine student, Donald Williams, who was just graduating. I recommended that he take over and he was invited. Dr. Williams was the organist/choirmaster at Zion Lutheran for over 30 years.

We need not frown on church and service music. As I said, that's where the good organs will be. We have at First Congregational a wonderful conductor, Willis Patterson, who inspires us all. My assistant, James Nissen, is Associate Director of Music. He is so versatile that he can play if I am gone or conduct if Willis is gone. That is good.

Q: The fact that you keep active in church music is a testimony to your own students and a good way that you can tell your students what they are going to experience when they go out to church jobs as well, because you know just what they will encounter. I think a lot of organ teachers in colleges are detached from that.

A: I don't want to ask my students to go into church music without experiencing it myself. We must not be detached from church music. We must be right in the swing.

One thing I do tell my students who move into church positions: You're a new organist and choir director in a church. If you don't hear anything, you're terrific. Keep telling yourself that. You'll always hear when somebody doesn't like it. When they don't like it, you must smile and try to agree. Don't be defensive. They may have a reason for saying so.

Q: I'd like to know when the cooking requirement came into the DMA program.

A: All my students, even Master's degree students, are invited to cook a meal for us. That idea came in the '50s. One of the nice meals that was prepared was by John McCreary and Phil Steinhaus. They knew that Jean Langlais was coming. They said, "We'll prepare a Master's dinner." So they prepared a wonderful dinner for us. It's referred to on page 15 of the book, Hommage à Langlais, in Langlais' diary, where he says, "We've had a dinner with the students and Marilyn Mason and her husband." That dinner was memorable because there was a pot roast which was luscious. The flavoring on the meat, the carrots and onions were delicious, but the potatoes had been added too late and they were hard. Langlais was trying to eat them with his knife and fork and said, "Is this some new vegetable in the United States that we don't know about?" Poor John was so chagrined. Those potatoes will always be remembered as the ones that didn't make it. That was the beginning of that requirement. And I am now so proud of Phil, his wonderful career as organist/choirmaster and his work with Aeolian-Skinner, and with John, too, 30 years in the Cathedral in Honolulu as Organist/ Choirmaster! I do feel we had that cooking requirement especially for the men, but we must all learn to cook.

Q: You're certainly well known for your jokes. For many years you had a joke book that you lost along the way.

A: No--it was stolen at Riverside Church. I was playing a recital there. The organ console had two large mirrors so the audience could see while you play. I thought I would put my purse right behind me. That purse had my joke book and some jewelry. Someone reached in behind and took the whole thing. Someone said, "What nicer way to lose it than to have it stolen from Riverside Church." But I've kept a lot of stories in my head. Along with flexibility comes a sense of humor--mostly to be willing to laugh at yourself. If we can have the light touch as we go along, I think that helps.

Q: Along with that, can you think of some humorous incidents in your travels that would be interesting?

A: I can think of some humorous things that happened here in Ann Arbor. I was playing for freshman convocation in the first week in September for about 4,000 new students. I had played the prelude, but they asked me to play a special piece. I chose the Haines "Toccata," which is something that I enjoy playing and can play without too much extra practice. The Dean of the Faculty, Charles Odegaard, looked over at me and said, "And now our organist will play --Miss Marilyn Monroe." All of these students just howled, and he was so embarrassed. He said, "Oh, I'm sure Miss Mason will do just as well." Then I did play and it was fun.

Another thing that happened at Hill Auditorium occurred in 1985. I had scheduled a series of 16 recitals of the music of Bach (1985 was 300th anniversary of Bach's birth). So I was doing that series here at the Fisk organ every Sunday afternoon at 4:00. But I was also supposed to play for a graduation ceremony at Hill Auditorium at 2:30. So I said to my colleague Sam Koontz (our organ technician at Hill Auditorium who knew the organ like the back of his hand and who had been one of my Master's students), "Will you please play the final hymn, which is the Michigan hymn, and then a postlude?" Sam said, "I'll be glad to." I played the opening prelude, the processional and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The console was in the corner on the far stage left. By this time it was about 3:00 and I needed to leave. So I left, and Sam was on the bench. I got to the Fisk on time and played the Bach recital in the afternoon. But I heard afterwards, the Vice President of the University, Richard Kennedy, had said at Hill (which he had never done before) "We're so happy to have our organist today--please thank Marilyn Mason." He looked back at the console. Sam threw up his hands in dismay, because I wasn't there. After that, when I was thanked for these occasions, Mr. Kennedy always looked back to see me.

Q: You mentioned that there have been 111 doctoral students. Do you have any idea of the total number of students you have taught?

A: No, I don't. But in over 50 years there were a lot of students. I wish I'd kept track, but at the time that is not the most important thing. Actually, we have graduated 600 organists in the Bachelor's and Master's programs since the first ones in 1932.

Q: I remember seeing the sea of people at your recognition dinner in 1986. All those people had been touched by your life, and also by the blue pencils that were given to each one.

A: I got the idea of the blue pencil from Palmer Christian. It's such a good way to mark music and it's easy on the eyes. It's a very important thing to mark fingering and how you're going to do things--not to have a Monday way, a Wednesday way, and a Thursday way. I have a student, Robert Jones, in Houston, who's fanatic about that. The strategy in the hand helps us to play. There are many people who say they're far too "creative" to mark their fingering. These are very often the ones who don't play as well as the ones who know where they're going.

The next thing is making the goals in your study. If you have a piece you want to learn, divide it into sections rather than trying to learn the whole thing all at once. Young people should have goals to learn certain music. In the semester system, we have juries for the music the student has learned. I don't know but that all of us don't waste time by being rather aimless. We waste time by not having an objective. That's why I've enjoyed teaching, because the goal is to be there and to have a plan.

Another goal I've had over the last five years is recording all the works of Pachelbel. He's such an imaginative composer. He doesn't have the rhetoric of the North Germans. He has a sweetness, placidity and strength in his music, and it has been a great joy to learn and play his music. These are recorded in the Musical Heritage Series. I began the series with the freely composed works, but then there were enough chorale preludes for three disks. The chorale preludes were written for services or as interludes for hymns. So we decided that the chorale would be sung first. A gifted tenor in the doctoral program, Robert Breault, sang the melodies. After  recording the chorales, we came to the Magnificats. I asked a Benedictine monk, Irwin West, to sing the alternation. There are more Magnificats written for the first tone than for any other. Dr. Tom Strode and his Boychoir sang the alternation for Volumes 7 and 8.

Q: Have you done some additional teaching elsewhere in addition to your teaching at Michigan?

A: I did some  teaching at Columbia University during summers while I was in doctoral studies. I taught at St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia, where Searle Wright was the organist. I also taught at Pomona College in Claremont and at the school in Brazil. But I love Michigan a lot. What's wonderful about teaching is that the clientele changes. I have had students for as many as four or five years. I have recommended that some of my students study with my other colleagues in the department. Prof. Glasgow, Dr. Kibbie, and Dr. Johns each have their own special things to offer.

Robert Glasgow excels in the nineteenth-century interpretations, while Dr. Kibbie enjoys the baroque and contemporary. Michele Johns with her expertise and experience has brought  much to our curriculum in church music practices. Her position as organist/choirmaster at Our Lady of Good Counsel, Plymouth, has given "hands-on" experience to so many of our students.

Q: Was there ever a thought that you would go anywhere else to teach?

A: I had a wonderful offer from USC  and Raymond Kendall in the '50s. But I talked to my husband and to Dean Moore and decided to stay here.

Q: In a job interview, someone once asked me what I would like written on my tombstone. What would you like to be remembered for?

A: You would like to think that the things you have done have been a blessing to other people and that you were kind. We all have our own opportunity to serve. So, for the stone, I have two suggestions: "She served and enjoyed" or "S. D. G."

Q: Thank you, Marilyn, for your 50 years of teaching at the University of Michigan and for the positive influence you have had on so many lives!

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

It’s the very Dickens.
Last week the American Institute of Organbuilders (AIO) and the International Society of Organbuilders (ISO) held concurrent conventions in Montreal. The convention was based in a large hotel adjacent to a suburban shopping mall. Montreal is a beautiful city, rich in history and cultural institutions, but the ubiquitous shopping mall is the same the world over. The hotel was efficient and comfortable enough, but I thought it was ironic for a group of people like organbuilders who are widely experienced with beautiful architecture and design to be trapped in a place like that. This is the kind of place where the patterns on the carpets are intended to mask accidents.
I wrote recently in these pages about the decline of the church and how it has affected the pipe organ. You can be sure that much of what we heard officially and discussed privately was related to that decline. Greeting an old friend, I would ask how things are going. The response was typically something like, “we’re busy, but we could be busier,” which I took as code that means, “I have no idea what’s going to happen next.” Several colleagues told me that while they were busy now they didn’t have much on the books for next year.
On the other hand, as I heard about the current and recent projects of many of my friends, I reflected that the quality of organbuilding is as good as ever, in fact perhaps better than ever. Reflecting on all this during my six-hour drive home brought to mind the opening words of the Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

While we might easily understand “the worst of times,” the other phrase seems more elusive. But the convention reminded me of how much skill and creativity there is in those two organizations. Some of the most brilliant practitioners were there. In fact, one wag suggested that should some disaster strike the hotel, organbuilding as we know it would end. Renewing friendships and making new acquaintances, I was reminded of some of the fabulous instruments produced by the firms represented.
And for me, the high point of the convention was a recital that certainly suggested the best of times. You must hear Isabelle Demers make music. This brilliant young artist is a musician’s musician. There can be no assembly more critical of organ playing than a convention of organbuilders, but the ovation that followed her performance was powerful and sincere. There was a remarkable level of energy and enthusiasm in the buses heading back to the hotel as conventioneers expressed their delight and amazement. It was said more than once that if there will be artists like Ms. Demers around to play organs, then we had better keep building beautiful instruments.

The age of wisdom
American and European organbuilding was revolutionized during the twentieth century. On both continents Victorian symphonic instruments gave way to industrialization, and by mid-century organbuilders on both continents had started a period of intense self-examination leading to the return to earlier styles of organbuilding, dramatically increasing the artistic content of the industry’s output. Today’s organbuilders are deeply immersed in the study of organ history and technology, and in the magical, mystical art of blending organ pipes with the wonderful heritage of music written for the instrument. The European Orgelbewegung and the American Revival of Classic Organbuilding have led the trade to an apex of knowledge and understanding.

The age of foolishness
While all the collective learning of the past half-century has brought us to new understanding of the art, it has also introduced a foolish aspect. When the so-called tracker revival was gaining traction in the 1960s and 1970s, the general public was drawn into the debate. The layperson who listened to organ music for the love of it found it necessary to declare preference. It didn’t seem possible to remain neutral. At first glance this might seem like an advantage—all that attention from non-professionals interested in understanding. But in fact I believe the tenor of the debate was harmful. Any potential new appreciator of the organ got dragged into the fray, and I fear that many were frightened off. Could be they would have preferred simply enjoying the music.
Also, while this movement was a true renaissance, there was no need to wait a couple centuries for historians to deduce that something interesting was going on. We all knew it at the time. We talked and wrote about it ceaselessly. And when you know you’re part of a renaissance it’s easy to let it go to your head. We presented instruments and performances that were artistically sophisticated and erudite, assuming that the public would appreciate without question. But that was a time when the public had more and more available to it. Transportation and communication was advancing, so the world was growing ever smaller. As a society, we learned to think little of teenagers traveling the world on exchange programs or sending photographs instantly through the ether. Remember when you used to have to get film developed? And we were deluged with myriad gadgets and entertainments till then unheard of. Organ recitals were among the most popular public entertainment in the 1920s. Now it seems a big deal when an audience breaks a hundred.

It was the epoch of belief.
I believe that the industries of organ building and playing have the opportunity for a fresh start along with the twenty-first century. We’re far enough into the millennium to be comfortable saying the date. I remember that during the nineties we wondered what we could call a year. Would it be two-thousand-four, aught-four, oh-four? We’re over that now. Although technology still advances with staggering determination, we’re used to that, too. We believe that the Internet is an effective tool for communication and the dissemination of information. We’re used to air conditioning, sophisticated automobiles, and high-definition television. We expect rapid innovation but I don’t think we need to be distracted by it anymore.
The organbuilding revivals have progressed through the vitriolic stage to that in which good organs of any type are generally appreciated. There are few of us left who insist on hearing or playing only tracker action. It’s a good time for another organ renaissance in which we shift our emphasis to communication with the audience; so instead of assuming that the public will automatically adore us for the fruits of our half-century of collective research, we set out with purpose to reintroduce them to the glory of the instrument, to the wide range of expression possible from a good organ, to the fun and excitement of hearing the world’s greatest music presented on the King of Instruments.

It was the epoch of incredulity.
It’s incredible that the pipe organ exists at all. I’m not saying I’m surprised it has survived this far, but that it ever developed in the first place. As we go through the extreme effort of building monumental organs, we reflect how unlikely, how incredible, how downright ridiculous it is to produce a 20- or 30-foot-tall whistle for the purpose of playing one note of one tone color at one volume. We might think that organs are priced by the rank, but an octave of 32-foot Principal pipes might cost $100,000—that’s $8,300 per note!
As we work in a church, a visitor comes in, curious about what’s going on. A ten-minute tour of the organ and its parts leaves him speechless, except to say, “I had no idea people still did this kind of work.” The pipe organ is one place in our modern world where “analog” is impressive. To create a machine driven by huge electric blowers with pressurized air passing through hundreds of feet of conductors, with thousands of hand-crafted specialized whistles, with miles of wire or tracker material, all to allow a single musician to command the acoustics of a vast room is incredible.
It’s incredible but we can do it.

It was the season of Light.
I’m not going to address the issue of organ cases covering windows. I’m thinking about Light (Dickens capitalized it) in reference to faith and inspiration. The pipe organ is the original instrument of the church. It has been central to our expressions of faith in public worship for hundreds of years. Let’s not forget that 500-year-old organs are still in service in Europe. I wonder if we (and I use the word “we” collectively to describe organists and organbuilders) have gotten so involved in the craft, history, and art of the instrument that we’ve overlooked the visceral reaction of the people in the pew when the organ sings out. I’m enough of a sap that I often find it difficult to sing hymns because I’m choked up by the effect of the organ.
We are well aware of the physics, the math, the nuts and bolts that comprise the organ, but we should put first the emotional impact of the instrument. Everyone in the room should be choked up.

It was the season of Darkness.
(Dickens’ cap again.) I visit a church to inspect an organ that’s being put on the market, and notice first the drum sets, amps, and microphone stands in the choir loft. “We want to get rid of the organ so we have more space for our musicians.” Through my work with the Organ Clearing House I may be the guy who hears the most reasons for “getting rid” of a pipe organ:
• Our new pastor introduced a new style of worship.
• The last guy to tune the organ said it needs a $100,000 repair.
• We may be closing the parish and putting the building up for sale.
• We can’t afford an organist. Or,
• We can’t find anyone who knows how to play it.
• It seems so old fashioned.
The list goes on.
There may not be much we can do about these things. But one thing we can do is to help our clients control the cost of owning and caring for an organ. As I’ve traveled around the organ world, I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about “what the organ needs.” We revere the instruments and know that they function best when every part is in the best condition. But we may be shooting ourselves in the foot if we insist on too much.
It’s not necessary to tune all the pipes every time you visit. In fact, it’s often better to pick out the lulus and leave the rest alone. A good tuner can keep a simple organ in tune with an hour or two of tuning each year. We and our clients have gotten used to thinking that an organ should be tuned for Christmas and Easter. It goes on the list with sending greeting cards and dyeing eggs. But where I live, that means the organ is getting tuned twice during winter weather, sometimes less than three months apart. Do we always need both tunings?
It’s nice to keep an organ clean, but it’s not necessary to remove the pipes for cleaning every generation. And while it can be profitable to replace an organ’s console or blower, I think that many churches have been convinced to pay for such projects unnecessarily. It is the duty of the modern organ technician to avoid suggesting work that is not necessary for the continued use of the organ. It’s essential to be sure that organ blowers are lubricated and in safe operating condition. It’s important to be sure that the organ doesn’t embarrass the player or the tuner. And it’s important that the organ be in good enough condition to sound well to the ear of the layperson. But the fact is, when a church’s music committee sees a bill for piano tuning for a hundred dollars and a thousand-dollar bill for organ tuning, the reaction is now frequently to stop tuning the organ.

It was the spring of hope.
This one is easy. I hope that the economy improves, making available funding for more interesting projects. I hope that our collective work continues to improve and to thrill congregations and audiences. I hope that pipe organs are still a valued part of our worship and cultural lives 50 years from now.

It was the winter of Despair.
I won’t say I despair. I’ll stay optimistic. But I have a growing sense that the future of the instrument is up to us. There was a time when organbuilders could assume that people would always be buying organs. The responsibility of the sales department was to be sure their firm got the job instead of the competition. Today it is the responsibility of the sales department to help sustain the future of the instrument itself. If we forget that, we’re doomed.

We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
It’s up to us.

We were all going to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Again, it’s up to us. But I wonder if a lifetime tuning organs is rewarded by an eternity tuning harps. And if so, which way is that? ■

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

A world unto itself

In July 2010, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal was working on a story in Washington, D.C., when she noticed a large group of people milling about on the front lawn of a church. Had it been a Sunday, it might not have attracted her attention, but this was a weekday morning, and the group was wearing nametags and sporting tote bags, a scene she recognized from countless conventions and trade shows. Her curiosity was piqued and she walked up to the group to ask what they were about.

You guessed it—it was the national convention of the American Guild of Organists, and the conventioneers were hanging about, waiting for the buses that would whisk them off to the next venue. The reporter was fascinated by having run into a group of devoted enthusiastic people involved in a world she had never thought about. Of course, there are pipe organs lurking in the balconies of thousands of churches, but who would have thought about the people who would have put them there, who would play them, let alone study or celebrate them.  

The reporter was Jennifer Levitz, who works from the WSJ offices in Boston. She called me in mid-August, telling me of her encounter with “our crowd” in Washington, saying that someone in that group had given her my name, and that she planned to write an article for the paper about current trends in church music as they relate to the pipe organ.

I was flattered by her interest and we talked on the phone for quite a while, ending the conversation by making plans to meet so she could interview me. We met in a coffee shop in Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace (that grand example of 1970s Urban Renewal, celebrated at the time as the revitalization of a derelict neighborhood, where today unwitting tourists are privileged by the opportunity to buy t-shirts and baseball caps festooned with lobsters—colloquially misspelled as lobstahs—and the logo from Cheers) and talked about the pipe organ for an hour-and-a-half. During the conversation, I mentioned that I was going that afternoon to visit a closed church building in neighboring Cambridge, where we were working on the sale of an Aeolian-Skinner organ. She asked if she could come along.

Is renewal another word 

for destruction?

The Organ Clearing House was founded in 1961—like our neighbor C.B. Fisk, Inc., this is our fiftieth year—the time at which urban renewal was gaining momentum, and the construction of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was in full swing. There’s no question that those highways were a stupendous improvement to the country’s transportation system (inspired by the German Autobahn, which so impressed General Eisenhower as a strategic military asset), but the clearing of the huge swaths necessary for highway rights-of-way caused the destruction of hundreds of neighborhoods, including homes, businesses, schools, and churches, along with their pipe organs. I’ve referred to the Organ Clearing House as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Pipe Organ Rescue Movement (DDEMPORM). OCH founder Alan Laufman was among the founders of the Organ Historical Society (which was established in 1956—the year of my birth and the death of
G. Donald Harrison, fifty-nine days apart) and an early leader in the renewed appreciation of America’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century heritage of organbuilding. The rapid and rampant destruction of venerable church buildings and their contents alarmed Laufman and his peers, leading to the inception of the work we now continue.

It’s easy to bewail the destruction of any great building. Candidly now, can New York’s Madison Square Garden be considered a cultural improvement over McKim, Mead, & White’s Beaux-Arts masterpiece that was Pennsylvania Station? And while anyone who’s visited New York City can appreciate the value and necessity of parking garages, that which replaced St. Alphonsus Church (310 West Broadway near Canal Street, the original home of E. & G.G. Hook’s Opus 576, built in 1871 and now located in St. Mary’s Church, New Haven, Connecticut) can hardly be considered an improvement.

But here’s where the issue gets complicated. I am not in the thrall of professional hockey and basketball, I am not interested in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show (though I loved the movie Best in Show), and it’s a long time since I’ve been to the circus, so at the risk of offending those who feel differently, I freely state my opinion that the construction of Madison Square Garden was not a worthy reason for the destruction of Penn Station. 

St. Alphonsus Church is another story. It’s a terrible shame for such a beautiful edifice to be razed, whatever the reason, and it must have been heartbreaking for the parishioners, clergy, and musicians who worshipped there and loved the place. But the hard fact is that hundreds, dare I say thousands, of church buildings have become redundant—not only in the United States but throughout Europe as well. When such a building is no longer useful, no amount of sentiment or nostalgia will refund its value or usefulness.

When the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston (home to a large organ by Hook & Hastings, which is one of America’s finest instruments) was closing, a group of local organists and organ-lovers gathered around, and one friend suggested it should be made into a concert hall. A lovely thought, but if the church is being closed because two million dollars of deferred maintenance was coming due and the frightful cost of heating the place was the death knell, how would we ever fund its transformation into a concert hall? Thankfully, the organ has been dismantled and stored, but this is especially poignant for us—I’ll not forget singing “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended” at Alan Laufman’s funeral in that building in early 2001.

§

My work with the Organ Clearing House makes me something of a grim reaper of the pipe organ (remember the scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life with the robed reaper and the tinned salmon?). More than once people have said to me, partly in jest, “What are you doing here, we love our organ?” But the reality of redundant church buildings is part of my daily work. Organbuilders are used to working with a church’s Organ Committee (often called Organ Task Force)—a committee that by definition, if not by actuality, is formed for the inception of a creative process. I’ve had dozens of associations with De-Accession Committees, sometimes called Disbursement Committee—that group of faithful worshippers charged with emptying their church building before Repurposing. These folks are filling dumpsters with church-school supplies, choir robes, and pageant costumes (I love the white Oxford shirt with cotton-balls glued all over to make a sheep-suit for Christmas Eve). They are packing hymnals and octavo scores to be given to neighboring churches, and they are ferreting off little mementos while (they think) no one is looking.  

They show me family photos of weddings, baptisms, funerals, and First Communions in which the organ is prominent in the background. Their eyes are moist, and sometimes they’re openly weeping.

One church I visited recently was simply abandoned. It was an 1,800-seat building with an 80-rank organ. The congregation, down to just a few dozen, had soldiered on until the last of the money was gone and simply walked away after the last worship service. The Sunday bulletins were still on the ushers’ station, the unfinished glass of water was still on the pulpit, and there was a melted unwrapped cough drop on the organ console. (Organists must have terrible health if the collective consumption of cough drops is any indication!) There was unopened mail on the secretary’s desk. It was like the scene in the movie where tumbleweeds blow down the street and the saloon doors are still swinging.

§

Jennifer Levitz’s article, “Trafficking in Organs, Mr. Bishop Pipes Up to Preserve a Bit of History,” appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Friday, September 16, 2011. Here’s a link that will take you to it on the WSJ website: . I’ve received a lot of winks and barbs from friends about the word trafficking.

Any company loves exposure like that. We were flattered and pleased to have Ms. Levitz’s attention, and there have been several inquiries in the past week directly attributable to the article. But here’s the problem. She did great reporting on all the reasons why pipe organs become redundant. We discussed “Contemporary Worship” and closing and merging parishes, but while I talked about the exciting sides of the organ business like the restoration of venerable organs and the construction of new ones, the general tone of the story was glum.

Ted Alan Worth, student and friend of Virgil Fox and a successful touring organist, has been quoted as saying, “The organ world is the worst world in the world.” I’m pretty sure he was referring to the gossipy, introverted, and sometimes nasty interchange between colleagues. Perhaps the most famous example was the decades-long squabble between Virgil Fox and E. Power Biggs, both important and brilliant performers from two divergent artistic points of view, whose disdain for each other was well documented. But that same artistic divide was extended to the devotees of organs with tracker action versus electric and pneumatic actions. I use the word “versus” with intent. When I was a young pup of an organist, reveling in the Renaissance of classic principles of pipe organ building in Boston in the sixties and seventies, I was aware and no doubt made use of terms like tracker-backer and pneumatic-nut. Those who preferred symphonic organs were decadent, as if the exploration of artistic expression were a character flaw; those who preferred tracker organs were zealots, anti-musicians, anti-expression.

In 1979 my mentor and I assisted a team from Flentrop Orgelbouw installing the grand new organ at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s a classic design—werkprinzip mahogany case with carved pipe shades, rückpositiv, and a spiral staircase to the tiny balcony. But as we unloaded the container on the sidewalk of Euclid Avenue (the organ had been shipped from the Netherlands directly to the port of Cleveland through the St. Lawrence Seaway—the name of the ship was Kalliope) I realized I was carrying a box of pipes marked Celeste. A bundle of Swell shutters followed. Humph! I didn’t know Flentrop built Swell boxes?

What I know now is that what’s important to us is good organs. Simple. I love good organs of any description. And there are just as many bad, even decadent tracker organs as there are bad electro-pneumatic or electric-action organs. The Renaissance Revival that has been so celebrated and ballyhooed certainly was cause for the destruction or displacement of many wonderful electro-pneumatic organs. My hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts has two churches in which organs by Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner were replaced with organs by Fisk. The Skinner was a very early organ (Opus 128, 1905!). My father was rector of the church, so I had easy access to it for practicing when I first took organ lessons, but I quickly moved to the neighboring First Congregational Church (where my teacher John Skelton was organist), whose Fisk organ was installed in 1972.  

I didn’t know much about Skinner organs then, and I celebrated its replacement by Fisk in 1974. I don’t think that particular Skinner was a very good instrument—but I’d sure love to get a look at it today to see what Mr. Skinner was up to in 1905.

§

The 1995 movie Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, et al.) was a gripping telling of the nearly disastrous explosion on that mission to the moon, launched in April 1970. Two days after the launch, an oxygen tank explodes and astronauts and NASA officials scramble to devise a way to abort the mission safely. In the chaos of the first moments of the emergency, NASA flight director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris) holds up his hand, calls for silence, and asks, “What have we got on this spacecraft that’s good?”

My thanks to Ms. Levitz for noticing the organ world lurking on that lawn in Washington, and for giving her considerable energy and talent to creating the story. But she told only half the story. The rest is up to us. And we’re at a great moment to do it, to tell it, to live it.

We are an energetic group of devotees to a high expression of the arts and humanities. The pipe organ stands for so much that’s good about the human condition. For centuries it was among the most complex of all human contrivances, for centuries it was the source of some of the loudest sounds anyone heard. Today, too many people see the organ as the realm of dead white men. That’s not the fault of the organ, it’s the fault, the oversight, the result of its professional practitioners getting wrapped up in scholarship—the understanding of this special niche, its complex history, the relationships between the instruments’ builders and the artists who created and played the music.  

Too often we present programs to the public based on our interest and devotion to obscure styles and periods of composition. This afternoon I was talking with a colleague on the lawn outside her church building. We talked about the levels of public interest in the music of the pipe organ. I said something like, “You don’t attract Joe Public into a church to hear an all-Buxtehude recital.” She said, “I love Buxtehude.” I said, “So do I (and I do!), but if we don’t give them something else, something that excites and inspires them, something they can sing to themselves in the car on the way home from the recital, they’re not going to come back.” And for decades now, they haven’t been coming back.

I celebrate the long list of young performers who are lighting new fires under the pews—those players whose impeccable musicianship comes first, who understand the art of performing, which is different from the art of playing, whose sense of programming inspires the simple and necessary act of attendance, and whose public carriage brings dignity and respect to a profession that has for so long been marked by flamboyant but shallow behavior and performance.

The organ world need not be the worst world in the world. It’s a world full of brilliant young talent. It’s a world full of talented organbuilders. It’s a world full of exciting new instruments. And it’s our responsibility to project the best of all of it to the public, especially those who are still unaware of the delights and majesty of the pipe organ.  

That revival, that renaissance has given us dozens of organbuilding firms who produce some of the best instruments ever made—both mechanical and electric actions. Compare an instrument built by Paul Fritts with one by Schoenstein. Compare an instrument built by C. B. Fisk with one by Quimby. Compare an instrument by Dobson with one by Nichols & Simpson. What’s not to like? Ours is a small world with space for everyone. 

I’m not suggesting we abandon Buxtehude, Scheidt, Scheidemann, de Grigny, and the countless masters whose efforts have collected to form what we know as the world of the pipe organ. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t celebrate the heritage of the organ. I am suggesting that a public that’s offered myriad opportunities for entertainment and enrichment ranging from professional sports to video games, to symphony concerts, and to organ recitals, is going to choose an option that’s exciting, stimulating, enriching, and at some level, just plain fun. You or I might think it’s fun to rattle through a half-dozen Buxtehude Preludes and Fugues, but would your next-door neighbor agree? n