In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Decisions, decisions
We are rebuilding an organ. It’s about 90 years old. It has electro-pneumatic action. The main manual windchests have ventil stop action. It has three manuals and 33 ranks. It was built as the “downstairs” organ in a large Roman Catholic church—a common layout for the quintessential huge Catholic parish that allows Masses to be celebrated concurrently. In our work at the Organ Clearing House we’ve been involved in the relocation of quite of few “downstairs” organs as parish leaders find it attractive and useful to redevelop those huge spaces into reception rooms, classrooms, offices, rehearsal space, and of course to create spaces that can generate rental income.
The organ has been purchased by a church that has a strong liturgical tradition and an elaborate music program, located in a big city. Over the course of a year or so, the church’s organist and I developed a plan that includes adding six ranks of pipes and a couple 16′ extensions to existing ranks. Originally the Great and Swell divisions each had two windchests, one for lower pressure, one for higher. The high-pressure Great chest will become the Solo division playable independently on Manuals I and II. Because we will be able to incorporate some good-quality 16′ ranks left from the church’s previous organ, our 39-rank specification will include eight 16′ ranks including three open ranks, two reeds, and three stopped wood ranks. There will be seven ranks of reeds, two on high pressure. The only reed not under expression will be the Pedal Bombarde.
In the last few weeks I have been designing the technical specifications of the project, working with suppliers and our client to make decisions about which materials and which equipment will make up this organ. We have faced quite a few complicated technical choices, and the nature of this project means that there are some philosophical questions to answer.

Restore, rebuild, renovate
It’s easy to say we’re restoring an organ—but I think the word restore is overused. I prefer to use that word literally. When we restore an organ to its original condition we don’t add or subtract any pipes. We don’t introduce modern materials. We don’t even change the color of the felt around the drawknobs. It’s impossible to restore an organ if you’re using a solid-state combination action (unless the organ originally had an identical system!). Using this definition, I’d say there are very few real pipe organ restorations completed in the world today. The argument can be taken so far as to say that a restoration cannot include new trackers (even if the old ones are hopelessly broken)—in other words, literally restoring an organ can result in an instrument that cannot be played.
The word rebuild when used to describe an organ project is much more general and not very limiting—a “rebuild” of a pipe organ is a philosophical free-for-all. We buy or make materials and parts that will “do the job.” We want the organ to perform well, that all the notes work correctly and the tuning is stable. We want the job to be both economical for the client and profitable for the organbuilder, a seemingly oxymoronic goal. But we are not necessarily making an artistic statement.
I prefer the word renovate. It comes from the Latin root “nova” which simply means new. My dictionary gives the word novation as a legal term describing the substitution of a new obligation for an old one—I’m no attorney, but I presume that describes a contract that has been renegotiated or an agreement that has been cancelled and replaced by a new one. In organbuilding, I use the word renovation to describe a project that focuses philosophically on the work and intentions of the original organ builder. It allows for the addition of ranks, especially if the original specification was obviously limited by constraints of space or budget. It allows us to modify an instrument to better suit a new home. And it forces us to make myriad decisions with the ethic of the original instrument in the forefront of our minds.
Our current project is a long way from a restoration. We have chosen to replace large and important components. We are adding several ranks. We are including a sophisticated combination action. We expect that the result will be an instrument with plenty of pizzazz, extensive expressive capabilities, and a wide range of tone color. There will certainly be plenty of bass and fundamental tone. We intend for the console to be welcoming to the player, expecting that the organ will be played by some of our most accomplished organists.
In this and other professional publications, we are accustomed to reading descriptions of completed projects. As I work through this long list of decisions, I thought it would be fun (and useful to my process) to discuss them in broad terms as the project begins.

Adding ranks
If this instrument was originally a “downstairs” organ, I think it’s fair to say that it was a secondary instrument. In fact, the church it came from has a magnificent and much larger organ in the main sanctuary. Our instrument was not decked out with some of the fancy stops that are appropriate, even required for the sort of use it will get in its new home. The voices we’re adding include French Horn, Tuba, and Harmonic Flute. We’re adding a second chorus mixture (there was only one). We’re adding a second Celeste (there was only one). We’re adding 16′ extensions to a soft string and an Oboe, as well as a couple new independent sixteen-footers. Most of these additions are being planned based on the scaling of the rest of the organ. And a couple of the fancier additions will be based on the work of a different organbuilder whose specialty stops are especially prized.
I believe that many additions are made to pipe organs based on nomenclature instead of tone color. If the last organ you played regularly had a Clarion in the Swell, the next one needs one too. I think it’s important to plan additions with your ears rather than your drawknob-pulling fingers. Some specialty stops stand out—an organ with a good French Horn can do some things that other organs can’t. But describing an organ by reciting its stoplist does not tell me what the organ sounds like. An organ without a Clarion 4′ can still be a wonderful organ.
The additions we’ve chosen come from many long conversations concerning what we hope the organ will be able to do. And these additions are intended to transform the instrument from its original secondary character to one suited for all phases of high liturgy and the performance of the organ repertory.

Windchests
Ventil stop action is one in which each rank is mounted over a discrete stop channel. When the stop is off, the organ’s air pressure is not present in the channel. The stop knob controls a large pneumatic valve that allows air pressure to rush in to fill the channel. This is one of the earliest types of pneumatic stop action, invented to allow for the transition away from the slider chests of the nineteenth century. Both electro-pneumatic and tubular-pneumatic organs were equipped with ventil windchests. When they are in perfect condition and perfectly adjusted, they operate quickly and efficiently, but there are some inherent problems.
The nature of the large valve (ventil is the word for a pneumatic valve) means that there’s a limit to how fast the air pressure can enter the stop channel when the stop is turned on, and a limit to how fast the air pressure can exhaust, or leave the channel when the stop is turned off. To put it simply, sometimes a ventil stop action is slow. It’s especially noticeable when you turn off a stop while holding a note or a chord—you can clearly hear the tone sag as the air leaves the channel. Pitman chests introduced the first electro-pneumatic stop action in which the stops are controlled at the scale of the individual note. Turn on a stop, air pressure enters a channel in the Pitman rail, the row of 61 Pitman valves move, and each note is turned on individually and instantly.
Another disadvantage of ventil stop action comes from the fact that electro-pneumatic actions work by exhausting. A note pouch at rest (not being played) has organ air pressure both inside and out. Play the note and the interior of the pouch is exposed to atmosphere. The air pressure surrounding the pouch collapses it, carrying the valve away from the toe hole. In a Pitman chest, a hole in a pouch means a dead note, annoying but not disruptive. In a ventil chest, a hole in a pouch means a cipher, annoying and disruptive. The cause of the cipher is air pressure exhausting from the interior of pouches of stops that are on into the stop channels of stops that are off—the exhausting happens through the holes in pouch leather of stops that are off. It’s easy to diagnose because the cipher will go away when you turn on the stop. In other words, a hole in a pouch in the Octave 4′ will allow the pouches of the other stops to exhaust through it into its empty stop channel. Turn on the Octave 4′ and the Principal 8′ can no longer exhaust that way so the cipher goes away—but the note in the Octave is dead!
With the revival of interest in Romantic music, cathedral-style accompanying, and symphonic organ playing, instant stop action is critical. We have decided to convert the stop action in our instrument from ventil to Pitman.

Console
The console is the place where we’ve faced the most choices. In the early twentieth century, the great heyday of organbuilding, each builder had specific and unique console designs. Each manufactured their own drawknob mechanisms, their own keyboards, their own piston buttons. Each had a particular way of laying out stopjambs. An experienced organist could be led blindfolded to a console and would be able to identify the organbuilder in a few seconds.
Most of those organs were built by companies with dozens or even hundreds of workers. A factory would house independent departments for consoles, windchests, wood pipes, metal pipes, casework, structures, and wind systems. Components were built all around the factory and brought together in an erecting room where the organ was assembled and tested before it was shipped. Today, most organ workshops employ only a few people. There are hundreds of shops with two or three workers, a small number of dozens of shops with between ten and twenty workers, and a very few with more than twenty.
When building small tracker-action organs, it’s not difficult to retain a philosophy of making everything in one workshop. Without distraction, two or three craftsmen can build a ten- or fifteen-stop organ in a year or so, making the keyboards, pipes, action, case—everything from “scratch” and by hand. When building large electro-pneumatic organs, that’s pretty much impossible. Too many of the components must be mass-produced using metal, too many expected functions of such an organ (like combination actions) are so complicated to build by hand, that it’s simply not economical to do it with a “build everything here” philosophy.
That means that a few organ-supply companies provide keyboards, drawknobs, combination actions, piston rails, and other console controls and appointments for the entire industry. It’s something of a homogenization of the trade—just like you buy the same books in a Barnes & Noble store in New York or in Topeka, and a McDonald’s hamburger tastes the same in Fairbanks as in Miami, so the drawknob action is identical in the consoles built by dozens of different firms.
The upside of this conundrum is that the companies that produce these specialized and rarified controls (you can’t go to Home Depot to buy a drawknob motor) have the time and ability to perfect their products. So while the drawknobs we will install in the console for this organ will be the same as those on many organs in that city, they are excellent units with a sturdy old-style toggle feel, beautifully engraved knob faces, and of course, compatibility with today’s sophisticated solid-state combination actions.
This week we placed the orders for new drawknobs identical to the original (we’re expanding from 33 to 60 knobs), drawknob motors and tilting tablets for couplers, new keyslips with many more pistons than the original layout, and engraved labels for indicator lights and the divisions of stops and pistons.

Combination action
It used to be “ka-chunk” or “ka-thump.” One of the factors of that blindfolded test would be pushing a piston. Compare in your mind’s ear the resulting sound in a Skinner console with that of an Austin. If you’re familiar with both builders you know exactly what I mean. The sounds are as distinctly different as are the diapasons of each builder. In many renovation projects, a solid-state combination action is installed to operate the original electro-pneumatic drawknobs—a nice way to preserve some of the original ethic of an organ. But when the specification of an organ is changed as part of a renovation project, it’s not easy to adapt the original knob mechanisms by adding knobs. In fact, it’s typical for there to be plenty of space in a chamber to add all kinds of new ranks, but no way to add the controls to the console without starting over. It’s no good to add a stop to the organ when you can’t include the knob in the combination action.
There are a half-dozen firms that produce excellent solid-state controls for pipe organs. They each have distinct methods, the equipment they produce is consistent, and each different brand or model combination action has myriad features unheard of a generation ago. Programmable crescendos, piston sequencers, manual transfers, expression couplers, melody couplers, pizzicato basses, the list seems endless. Multi-level systems have been with us for long enough that we’re no longer surprised by hundreds of levels of memory.
But when we’re renovating a console, we face the challenge of including lots of new controls for all those, dare I say, gimmicky functions. We build drawers under the keytables so the flashing and blinking lights and readouts are not part of our music-making, and the organists complain that they whack their knees when they get on the bench. We add “up and down” pistons to control memory levels and sequencers. We have bar-graph LED indicators for expression pedals. And we even install USB ports so software upgrades and MIDI sequencing can be accomplished easily. I suppose the next step will be to update a combination action by beaming from your iPhone. It’s easy to produce a console that looks like a science lab or an aerospace cockpit, and it’s just as easy to fall into thinking that the lights, buttons, and switches are more important than the sound of the organ.
It’s our choice to keep the “look” of the console as close as possible to its original design—it is a very handsome console. But keeping that in mind, you will want some modern gizmos close at hand.
There are lots more things to think about. Are we holding up bass pipes with soldered hooks or with twill-tape tied in knots? Are we making soldered galvanized windlines or using PVC pipe or flexible rubber hoses? It’s relatively easy to make a list of all the right choices for the renovation of a fine organ built by a great organbuilder. But the challenge is to retain the musical and artistic qualities of the organ, renovate an organ using the same level of craftsmanship as the original builder and produce an instrument that thrills all who make music and worship with it, while keeping in mind that the future of the pipe organ is ensured by the appropriate balance between artistry and expense. Thoughtful organbuilders face that question every time they pick up a tool.

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

§

It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

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This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

§

When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.

“Won’t you be my neighbor?”

Do you associate a tune with that sentence? The cardigan sweater, the sneakers, the catchy melody, and the slightly off-pitch singing are all icons for the children of baby boomers—those who grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I picture a quiet suburban cul-de-sac with ranch houses, station wagons parked on concrete driveways, bicycles on their sides in the tree lawns, kids being sent next door to borrow a cup of sugar, and maybe a spinet piano covered with framed photos. Fred Rogers did his best to teach our children and us how to be good friends and neighbors over the airways of Public Television.
There’s an eight-rank Aeolian residence organ in my workshop right now, Opus 1014, built in 1906 for the home of John Munro Longyear in Brookline, Massachusetts. Mr. Longyear discovered huge mineral deposits in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, acquired vast tracts of land, and made a fortune bringing the ore to market. He and his wife Mary were devoted students of Christian Science, and they moved to Boston in 1901 where Mary Longyear became a close friend of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Following their deaths, their home was left to a foundation in their name that developed the building and grounds into a museum about Christian Science.1 After the museum closed in 1998, the estate was purchased by a developer who built a community of condominium residences on the site. The Organ Clearing House acquired the organ in the summer of 2005, helping the developers create space for a fitness center.
This is a terrific organ, complete with a 116-note roll-player, the famed automatic device that plays the organ using paper rolls. Spending a few months with an organ like this gives one great insight into the standards of a legendary company. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Aeolian began building a list of clients that reads like Who’s Who of the history of American corporations. Aeolian didn’t get such a good name by accident—their organs are beautifully made and uniquely conceived as the last word in personal luxury of their day. The idea that a pipe organ like this would be considered a must-have furnishing in a grand house has captivated me, and with the help of a smashing book I’ve formed a picture of a neighborhood that would knock Mr. Rogers’ socks off.
Rollin Smith’s The Aeolian Pipe Organ and Its Music was published by the Organ Historical Society in 1998 and is available through their catalogue. Go to and buy a copy or two. I took quite a bit of grief at home when my wife realized that the book I was chuckling over was about residence pipe organs, but when I read her a couple passages my point was made. Mr. Smith understands that the heritage of the Aeolian Company is something very special, and he has told us all about it. The book contains plenty of facts about the company’s history. The stories about the early twentieth-century organists who played on, composed for, and recorded on the Aeolian Organ form a fascinating picture of the styles and opinions of early twentieth-century virtuosi—many of whose names are familiar to us today. The importance of the Aeolian Organ as documentation of a school of playing is unequaled—remember that the phonograph was primitive in those days—and the Aeolian rolls are among the earliest accurate recordings of such masters as Marcel Dupré, Clarence Eddy, and Lynwood Farnam. An example of the accuracy of this musical documentation is found on page 227, where Mr. Smith provides a comparison of the first eight measures of the score of the Daquin Noël with a reprint to scale of the same passage as recorded on the Aeolian roll by Dupré. By looking at the length of the notes on the roll, an organist familiar with piece can see clearly that Dupré clipped the first note of the piece short and accented the second (fourth beat of the measure), that he added a low D in the left hand on the fourth beat of the fourth measure (not in the score!), and that he started his trills on the lower note. What a lot of historical information to get from a few dots on a page.
Mr. Smith emphasizes the importance of this documentation by quoting a statement made by Charles-Marie Widor in 1899:

How interesting it would be if it were possible for us to consult a phonograph from the time of Molière or an Æolian contemporary with Bach! What uncertainties and errors could be avoided, for instance, if the distant echo of the Matthäus-Passion, conducted by the composer, could still reach us.
Is it not truly admirable to be able to record the interpretation of a musical work with absolute exactitude and to know that this record will remain as an unalterable document, a certain testimony, rigorously true today, which will not change tomorrow—the quintessential interpretation that will not vary for all eternity?2

But enough about the organists—it’s the patrons that got me going. One of the book’s appendices is an alphabetical list of those who purchased Aeolian organs (page 384). Another is an Opus List that includes the street addresses of Aeolian installations (page 319). Published lists don’t always make good reading, but when I started flipping back and forth between these two I started humming Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood song while in effect reading the Manhattan phone book!
With the help of these lists, I’ve imagined a walking tour of some very special residences, all home to Aeolian organs. Let’s start on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 92nd Street in Manhattan. Central Park is on the west side of Fifth. When we stand with our backs to the Park we’re looking at the home of Felix Warburg. Mr. Warburg was in the diamond business, and was one of New York’s most enthusiastic musical patrons, serving as a member of the board of directors of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic Society. In the 1930s he rescued many prominent Jews from Germany and supported the emigration of musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifetz.3 Mr. Warburg’s Aeolian organ (Opus 1054, II/22) was installed in 1909.
We walk south to 90th Street to find the residence of Andrew Carnegie. Inside is Aeolian’s Opus 895 with three manuals and 44 ranks, built in 1900.4 Mr. Carnegie, founder of the Carnegie Steel Corporation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an active philanthropist whose generosity resulted in what is now Carnegie-Mellon University. His foundation was responsible for the construction of 2,509 public libraries throughout the English-speaking world.5 And since Mr. Carnegie believed that “music is a religion,” the Carnegie Organ Fund gave millions of dollars in matching grants to help build more than 8,800 pipe organs.6 Walter C. Gale was organist to the Carnegie family for seventeen years, arriving at the house at seven o’clock every morning they were in town. Mrs. Carnegie kept a log book of their Atlantic crossings in which she wrote about their return from Liverpool on December 10, 1901, driving directly to their new home to find “Mr. Gale playing the organ and the garden all covered in snow.”7 One door south from Mr. Carnegie is the residence of Jacob Ruppert8, brewing magnate (Knickerbocker Beer) and owner of the New York Yankees. Unfortunately Mr. Ruppert’s was not the complete household—no Aeolian organ. Still heading south, we cross East 89th Street and pass the Guggenheim Museum. At 990 Fifth Avenue (at 80th Street—two blocks south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) we find the residence of Frank W. Woolworth who nickel-and-dimed himself into prominence with a chain of stores bearing his name. Mr. Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s best customers. His first instrument was #874 (II/16, 1899). In 1910 the organ at 990 5th Avenue was enlarged to three manuals and 37 ranks (Opus 1144). But why limit yourself to just a city organ? Mr. Woolworth installed Opus 1318 (II/23, 1915) in his second residence, which he called Winfield (his middle name) in Glen Cove (Long Island), New York. Winfield was destroyed by fire in 1916 but fortunately for the local trades and for the Aeolian company, it was rebuilt at three times the original cost, and Mr. Woolworth bought his fourth and largest Aeolian organ, Opus 1410 (IV/107).9 Installed in 1918, this grand organ included the first independent 32¢ Diapason in an Aeolian residence organ.10
Frank Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s few patrons who could actually play the organ. He was wholly devoted to Aeolian organs, to the company, and to the music it provided. His contract for Opus 874 included 50 rolls of his choosing and free membership in the Aeolian Music Library for three years to include an average of twelve rolls per week.11 When mentioning Aeolian rolls, it’s interesting to note that in 1904 the price of the roll-recording of Victor Herbert’s Symphonic Fantasy was $9.25 and a worker in the Aeolian factory earned $11 per week.12 Frank Taft, art director of the Aeolian Company, was one of Woolworth’s close friends. It was Mr. Taft who played the organ for Woolworth’s funeral at his home at 990 Fifth Avenue (Opus 1144) in April of 1919.13
Our tour continues six blocks south to the home of Simon B. Chapin at Fifth and 74th. I wouldn’t have recognized Mr. Chapin’s name without having had an encounter with his “country organ” several years ago. Mr. Chapin was a successful stockbroker. Among other pursuits, he invested his immense personal wealth in large and successful real estate ventures. Most notable among these was his partnership with Franklin Burroughs in the development of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina into a popular resort. The firm of Burroughs & Chapin developed the Seaside Inn (Myrtle Beach’s first oceanfront hotel), and the landmark Myrtle Beach Pavilion. The new shopping district was anchored by the Chapin Company General Store, and to this day Burroughs & Chapin is a prominent real estate development company. He built a lakefront vacation home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1898, about 75 feet from the shore. The house presents a 115-foot façade that includes a 55-foot screened porch. Aeolian’s Opus 1000 (II/18) was installed there in 1906. He must have been pleased with the instrument because that same year he purchased a two-manual instrument with 15 ranks for his home on Fifth Avenue (Opus 1018).14 One block further south on Fifth Avenue and a couple doors east on 73rd Street we find the home of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer where Aeolian’s Opus 924 (II/13) was installed in 1902. Edward Rechlin was organist to the Pulitzer family, playing from 9:30 to 10:00 each evening they were in town. He was paid $20 an evening and $25 for a family wedding.15
Keep going east on 73rd Street, turn right on Madison and walk one block south to East 72nd and you’ll find the home of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Now this guy knew something about quality of design, and the folks at Aeolian must have been very pleased when Mr. Tiffany contracted for Opus 925 (II/12) in 1902. And once again, a city organ wasn’t enough—Aeolian’s Opus 1146 (II/27) was installed at Tiffany’s second home in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1910.16
By the way, Mr. Tiffany’s appreciation of the Aeolian organ was shared by his clients. The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, started their career building automobile chassis for the Ford Motor Company. It didn’t take them long to realize that they would make more money building entire cars, and they formed the company that still bears their name. They each had large Aeolian organs in their Michigan residences. Horace’s first organ was Opus 1175 (II/15) and his second was Opus 1319 (IV/80). John’s only Aeolian was Opus 1444 (III/76). Perhaps Horace was threatened by his brother catching up because in 1920 he purchased Opus 1478. With two manuals and 16 ranks, this organ was not so impressive by itself, but its setting certainly was. It was installed in his steam-powered yacht, the Delphine. The Delphine was 257 feet long, had five decks and a crew of 58, and its interior appointments were designed by Louis Tiffany. The organ was installed across from the fireplace in the walnut-paneled music room.17 It’s fun to imagine Mr. Tiffany and Mr. Dodge sharing their appreciation of the Aeolian organs at Tiffany’s drawing board over snifters of cognac.
From Louis Tiffany’s house, we walk two blocks south on Madison Avenue, then back west to Fifth Avenue, to the home of Henry Clay Frick, another steel industrialist from Pittsburgh. The Frick family moved to New York in 1905 and rented the William H. Vanderbilt residence on Fifth Avenue at East 51st Street (no organ). During this period they built a vacation home at Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, and Aeolian Opus 1008 (III/44) was installed there in 1906. Once that house was complete, the Frick family started building their own home in Manhattan at One East 70th Street, on the corner of Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park. This home was graced by Aeolian 1263 (IV/72), which was shipped from the factory in March of 1914. Mr. Frick also donated an Aeolian organ (Opus 1334, IV/64) to Princeton University in 1915, where it was installed in Proctor Hall of the Graduate College.18
We’ve walked 24 blocks, and I’d like to show you one other organ. It’s a little too far to walk so we’ll take a cab. Charles Schwab, the first president of U.S. Steel, built his West Side home to occupy the entire block between 72nd and 73rd streets on Riverside Drive. With 90 bedrooms it was the largest residence in Manhattan, but Mr. Schwab started small in the Aeolian department—Opus 961 (1904) had only two manuals and 33 ranks. Perhaps he was inspired by his steel colleague Mr. Frick when he ordered the enlargement of the organ (Opus 1032, 1907) to four manuals and 66 ranks.19 We might imagine that Frick’s response was to up the ante with Opus 1263 (IV/72). Do you suppose that the man from Aeolian was encouraging these guys to outdo one another?
Our little tour has taken us past some of Manhattan’s grandest sites. Many of the homes I’ve mentioned have been replaced by modern high-rise luxury condominiums, but it’s fun to imagine a day when Fifth Avenue was dominated by some of the grandest single-family homes ever built. What was it about the Aeolian organ that excited the interest of this group? What extravagant home furnishings are available today that can compare to a $25,000 or $35,000 pipe organ built in 1910 or 1920? However we answer those questions, the Aeolian Company got it right for about 30 years. Then came the Great Depression.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User Interface
In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, wrote about the special relationship a violinist has with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
(Regular readers here will no doubt recognize this quote, as I cited it in the July 2007 edition of this column.)
This is a beautiful image of an artist inseparably entwined with his instrument. Any thoughtful and caring musician would wish to have that kind of relationship. But Mr. Steinhardt doesn’t want to share his thrall. He continues,

    Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the timpani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say.

As I pointed out last July, the bassoonist puts the instrument in his mouth. You don’t get more personal than that. While at first read Mr. Steinhardt’s affair with his instrument is beguiling, when I think about it a little, it takes on an elitist sense that is less attractive. I’ve never been a fan of claims that one instrument is more difficult to play than another, or that one is in any sense better than another. While it’s okay for a musician to feel a little chauvinism, each instrument has its place in the rainbow of musical sound, and each has technical challenges for the player to overcome if there is to be true music-making, true art, unfettered by physical limitations.
A timpanist has just as personal a relationship with his instrument as the violinist. The orchestral timpanist caresses the skin of his instrument, puts his ear to it, fiddles with the screws that adjust the pressure of the head so the sound will be perfect when he raises its thunder at the behest of the conductor. A modern orchestral hall is likely to include a special work station for the timpanist with equipment for soaking and preparing the skins, analogous to the “reed room” reserved for those who play and fiddle with the instruments with single and double reeds.
Besides the range of technical challenges facing musicians, there are also intellectual and spiritual challenges. We get used to an instrument, learning its strengths and weaknesses, learning how to make it project best to the listeners, learning how to mold it around the music we are playing. Organists must not only master the instrument, but also the relationship of the instrument to the room. The pipe organ is a spatial instrument, one that relies on its room for resonance and projection, as well as physical beauty. And the keyboards are the connection between the instrument and the player.
User interface is a phrase recently added to our lexicon. We never thought of the steering wheel of a car as a user interface, or the tiller of a boat, the handle of a shovel, or the knobs of a radio. But as soon as computers became everyday devices, user interfaces became ubiquitous.
Our keyboards and pedalboards are the user interfaces of the organ.
I’ve made thousands of service calls in 35 years of caring for organs, and I’ve learned to notice a lot about organ consoles—especially as they reflect the habits and preferences of the local organists. Many are obvious. In churches where I’ve cared for organs for many years, I know what kind of candy or cough drops the organist prefers. Some have remarkably consistent habits over decades, the sounds echoing endlessly over those hallowed (cherry) Halls. The organist who is particular about his fingernails keeps a nail clipper next to the keyboards. Some organists are paper clip junkies—the hymnals are loaded with them, and the floor under the pedalboard is littered with them. When such an organist calls to report that two adjacent keys are sticking, I know instantly that there’s a paper clip caught between them. One organist I knew actively hated paper clips and was abusive in his comments about people who rely on them. “They make such a mess of the hymnal.”
I know which organists put sugar in their coffee—it’s unmistakable in the spills on the pedal keys, spills that are often the cause of dead notes in the pedals as the sugar retains dust that fouls the contacts.
But some of the local organists’ habits and preferences are subtler. I notice that many organists have what I call a “home key.” When sitting down to try a new instrument, they play five-note scales up and down or chords in their home key. If that organist has played on the same instrument for many years, you can see signs of the home key in the way the console is worn. That home key is usually C major. But one organist I know is focused on G, a fact made obvious by the wear of the pedal keys.
It happens that many of my favorite pieces are in E-flat and B-flat major and in F minor. Does that mean that the tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant notes of those keys are more worn on instruments I play frequently? Notice the notes that are common between those keys. I suppose I’m inclined to play the tonic and dominant notes with more élan—and I suppose that end-of-the-piece flourish wears the notes more than an everyday scale.
It’s only the most sophisticated and innovative organists who wear the top eight notes of the pedalboard as much as the bottom eight.
The Organ Clearing House is working on the relocation of a 90-year-old Casavant organ, and yesterday I took the manual keyboards to the workshop of a colleague who specializes in renovating and restoring keyboards. He produces much of the cow bone that is used in keyboards around the world, obtaining animal “quarters” from slaughterhouses, boiling and bleaching the bones, and milling them into eighth-inch-thick blanks to be turned into key surfaces. He sells some of the finished bone to those who make keyboards, and uses the rest of it in his own restoration projects. His workmanship is much sought after. Keyboards are pretty much all he does. There are keyboards everywhere in his shop, and the ambient smell is reminiscent of the dentist drilling out a cavity in your tooth.
So we talked about keyboards. He made interesting comments about how keyboards wear, mentioning as an example that the accompaniment manual on a theatre organ is likely to be especially worn in the tenor octave. We talked about pitfalls of keyboard construction—where a sharp edge or corner is liable to injure a player’s fingers. (Once playing on a new organ, I cut a finger seriously enough that I had to leave the console to find a bandage in the middle of a service.) We talked about how different materials used for the playing surfaces absorb moisture more easily. An organist with naturally oily skin will be less comfortable playing on plastic keys than on bone or ivory. And the keyboards played by an organist with naturally oily skin get dirtier faster. This is not a criticism, just an observation.
There is huge variety in the design, size, style, and feel of pipe organ keyboards. As a student at Oberlin, I often practiced on a tiny three-stop “practice machine” built by John Brombaugh. The keyboards were smaller than what I was otherwise used to. The distance between the front of the naturals and the front of the sharps seemed impossibly tiny. The edges and corners of both naturals and sharps were keen—not so as to be dangerous, but so as to be obviously different from other styles. The tracker action was precise—you might say horribly precise—the “pluck” of the keys was both distinct and delicate. While intellectually I know that “pluck” is caused by resistance of the wind pressure against the pallet with the unmistakable little “whoosh” you feel when the air rushes around the released pallet and essentially blows it open, as I play I feel it as a physical click. These characteristics of that practice organ provided a terrific pedagogic medium. The keyboards demanded exact accuracy. If you were in the least way unintentional, the notes came in clusters instead of chords and scales. If you could play a passage musically and accurately (are the two separable?) on that instrument, you could play it anywhere. Reminds me of the legend of Abraham Lincoln practicing oration with pebbles in mouth.
That’s a wonderful way for a keyboard to feel, and wildly different from the keyboards of an elegant electro-pneumatic instrument. Organs built by Ernest Skinner have terrific keyboards. They have large, even gracious playing surfaces. Sharp keys are tapered front to back, allowing plenty of space for piston buttons without having the distance between the keyboards be too great. There is a carefully constructed and regulated “pluck” known affectionately as “tracker touch.” This is created by a spring that toggles as the key travels down and up, producing an accurate and subtle “click” in the motion of the key.
In the Skinner keyboard, the pluck is mechanically unrelated to the making of the contact—the function that actually makes the organ note play—but it’s essential that the keyboard be adjusted and regulated so that the relationship between the pluck and the action point is consistent from note to note. If it’s not, your carefully issued scale cannot possibly be even.
Keyboards can be decorated with lines scored in the surfaces or polished to smooth perfection. They can have light-colored naturals and dark-colored sharps, or the reverse. The playing surfaces are typically made of exotic materials—cow bone, ivory, ebony, boxwood, fruit wood (pear is especially nice)—because of the qualities of hardness and stability that is consistent with tight and close grain. It’s amazing to think that the amount of friction that can develop between human fingers and a hard surface like ivory or ebony can cause wear, but anyone who has played on an organ that’s been used frequently over 30 or 40 years is familiar with the “dips” worn in the keys. It’s especially common in the “hymnal” range of an organ keyboard, cº–c2. In my experience, organs in seminary chapels are the most heavily used—it would be usual for there to be two or three services each day—and there I’ve seen holes worn right through the ivory key covering. And once you’ve worn through the ivory, you tear through the wood very quickly and the edges of the ivory around the hole are as sharp as knives.
Keyboards are typically made of soft, straight-grained wood—spruce and basswood are favorites. Boards are glued together to make a “blank,” a solid panel the width of the keyboard. The boards should be chosen as “slab” grain—when you look at the ends of the boards, you see that the wood is cut so the lines of the growth rings are parallel with the tops of the keys, not the sides. As wood warps away from the center of the tree, keys made with slab grain wood can only warp up and down, not side to side. Such warping affects the regulation of keyboard springs and contacts, but makes it impossible for the keys to warp into one another and bind. This matters.
The keyboard frame comprises two “key cheeks” (the side rails of the frame that protrude to form the ends of the keyboards), and usually a front guide rail and a balance rail. The keyboard blank is fitted to the frame. The layout of the keys is drawn on the board, and the positions for guide and balance pins are marked. The holes for the pins are drilled through both blank and frame. Some craftsmen drill the balance pin holes through the top of the keyboard blank and into the frame, then drill the guide pin holes through the bottom of the frame into the bottom of the keyboard blank. This keeps the guide pin holes from going through the top of the key where you would most likely be able to see a hint of them through the keyboard covering. The surfaces of the naturals are glued on the blanks, sanded flat and given a round of polishing, the keys are cut apart, the sharps are glued on, and everything is polished. Sounds simple? Trying putting wet glue between an ebony sharp and a basswood key body and then tightening a clamp to help the glue set. The glue acts as a lubricant and the ebony sharp slides sideways. Many hours of filing, fitting, buffing, regulating, and adjusting complete the picture.
A well-made keyboard is a work of art, a vehicle for the relationship between the player and the instrument. It should feel familiar and welcoming under one’s hands, and should provide smooth, accurate, and flawless response whether the instrument has mechanical or electric keyboard action.
Take care of your keyboards. When I tune your organ I can tell how serious you are by how you keep the console. Is your console a combination between desk and boudoir, loaded with personal googahs and enough office supplies to run a university? Or is it the musician’s beloved seat where the intimacy of the relationship with your instrument is fostered and nurtured? Don’t bring food and drink to the organ console. Spills will seriously affect the responsiveness of your keyboards. Crumbs will attract critters—and critters will set up house in the console making their nests from felt stolen from keyboard bushings. It is absolutely common for the organ technician to find dirty little trails left by generations of mice running across the keyboards inside the console. One pictures Daddy Mouse saying to Mommy Mouse, “If he plays that Widor one more time . . . ”
Clean your keyboards—not just the top surfaces, but the sides of the keys as well. Use a paper towel or soft cloth rag, moisten it, put a tiny bit of mild soap on it, wring it out with all the force you can muster, and wipe the keys clean. Use a second rag, slightly moist, to remove any soap film, but remember that excessive moisture may spoil the glue that holds on the ivories. You’ll feel refreshed the next time you play.
Aeolus was a mythical Greek deity who was cited by Homer in The Odyssey for giving Odysseus a bag of captured wind to help him sail back across the Ionian Sea to Ithaca. The keyboard puts the captured wind at the player’s fingertips. We may not be placing our instrument between our brains and our beating hearts and lovingly stretching our arms around its neck (does Mr. Steinhardt ever feel like strangling his beloved?). Instead, we are doing nothing less than conjuring the very wind by wiggling our fingers. Nice work.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The truth about holes
Almost thirty years ago my wife and I were expecting our first child. I was working for organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, and we were in the midst of building an organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. I was drilling the holes in rackboards—those horizontal boards mounted on windchests that support the pipes about six inches above the toeboards.
It wasn’t a large organ, only eleven stops on the manuals, so including the Mixture, there were about 760 holes to drill. That’s not quite 14 ranks times 56 notes, but some were in the façade, and some others were tubed off the main chests and mounted on the inside walls of the case.
You determine the sizes of the holes using a jig that is a mock-up of a toeboard-rackboard assembly with holes drilled in the rackboard to match all the appropriate drill sizes. You move each pipe among the holes in the jig until you find the right size, then write the drill size on the rackboard by the mark for the pipe hole. That being finished, I had laid out all the marked rackboards on a table near the drill-press and was going through all the boards with each change of the drill-bit. I start with the smallest holes in the remote chance that I might drill one extra hole of a given size. If you make a mistake, it’s easier to drill a hole bigger than smaller!
I suppose I would have been using around 30 different bits for this job, starting with something like 7/32″, graduating by 32nds to one inch, by eighths to two inches, and by quarters to three. I guess it took about a day-and-a-half, and all the while I was expecting that call from home. I was sure it wouldn’t be on Wednesday. It would have to be Thursday, because that would mean I’d have to cancel choir rehearsal, an ice storm was predicted, and the hospital was an hour away in Cleveland. Sure enough, Michael joined us on Thursday afternoon. A couple days later I went back to finish the rackboards. I have no specific recollection, but I bet there were a few mistakes.
If you’d like to know something about this organ, go to <A HREF="http://www.stalbansva.org/">www.stalbansva.org</A&gt;, click on “Ministries,” then click on “Music.” You’ll see photos of the organ and its stoplist.

On with the show
The same number of holes must be drilled in the toeboards, the sliders, and the windchest table in order for the notes to play. That makes about 3,200 holes. But wait, I almost forgot to mention that the toeboards were laminated with interior channeling because the spacing of the slider holes is closer together than that of the pipe holes—so add another 780 holes.
We drill holes in the ends of squares and roller arms to accommodate the tracker action. We drill holes in the keyboards for balance and guide pins. We drill thousands of screw holes to hold the whole thing together. In an electro-pneumatic organ there are rows of holes that serve as pouch wells, pitman wells, housings for primary and secondary valves, and miles of channeling drilled through various windchest components to connect the interior of the pouch wells to the atmosphere, allowing pneumatics to exhaust when actions are activated. Counting on my fingers, I guess that there would be something like 7,000 holes in a ten-stop pitman windchest. Really!
You might say that the art of organbuilding is knowing where to put the holes, and what size each should be.
Drill baby, drill!

Just a little bit
There are hundreds of drill-bits in any organbuilding workshop. There are multi-spur bits that have center points for drilling larger holes. There are Forstner bits that are guided by the outside edge rather than by a center point, handy if you need to “stretch” a hole by cutting another half-moon. There are twist drills with 60º bevels on the points for drilling smaller holes such as screw holes. These are also used to drill holes in metal. There are countersinks that chamfer a screw hole so the flat head of a flat-head screw is flush with the surface of the wood. There are airplane bits, which are twist drills 16 or 18 inches long. I don’t know why they’re called airplane bits. Drilling holes in airplanes wouldn’t require a very long bit.
Any organ shop will sport an impressive rack with rows of bits arranged in order of size. The smallest might be around one-hundredth of an inch, the largest would be something like three inches.

Twist-and-turn
You need a variety of machines to turn those bits. The workbench workhorse is now the rechargeable drill. I have had a long habit of calling the electric hand drill a “drill-motor” much to the annoyance of at least one of my co-workers. In my mind this distinguishes the machine from the bit. You use a drill-motor to turn a drill-bit. I think that if you just say “drill” you could be referring either to the motor or the bit. Let’s be specific. I know I got that habit from someone else, but I don’t remember who. Terence, I didn’t make it up.
We have electric hand drills with half-inch chucks that can handle the larger multi-spur bits, but there is a lot of torque involved in drilling large holes, and if you are bearing down on the thing with your shoulder to cut through the wood you run the risk of getting whacked in the chin by the handle of the drill motor when the bit gets caught in the wood. It’s never actually happened to me but I’ve read about it! (But notice I said “when,” not “if.”)
The workshop workhorse is the drill-press. It’s a stand-up machine with a motor at eye level that’s connected to the arbor with a series of belts. The belts are arranged on stacks of pulleys—you can move the belts to different-sized pulleys to change the speed of the drill. There’s a sheet metal hood over the pulleys to protect the worker. We use slower speeds for drilling through metal—the harder the metal, the slower the speed—and if you’re drilling through a piece of steel, it’s a good idea to have a can of oil with you to lubricate the hole every few seconds. But be careful not to get oil on the surface of any of your wood pieces, as that will foil your attempts to glue pieces of wood together, or to put nice finishes on the wood when the piece is complete.
There’s a spoked handle that you turn to drive the drill-bit into the piece of work. There’s a table which is normally square to the drill-bit, but that can be adjusted if you need to drill a hole at an angle. We stand at the drill press, one hand holding the work firmly against the table, the other working the handle to move the drill-bit into the wood. If you have long hair and you’re not careful, you can get it caught in the pulleys and lose a tuft. If you have loose clothing or, God forbid, a necktie, you can get reeled violently into the machine like a big dull catfish being reeled into a boat.

Careful of blowout
When you’re drilling holes with multi-spur bits, you have to drill from both sides of the wood, or the bit will tear the opposite surface as it goes through the board. It will also tear up the table of the drill-press. So the location of the hole is marked with a smaller bit, say one-eighth, that goes through the board. You drill in a little way with the big bit, then turn the board over and drill from the other side. Doesn’t that double the number of holes you’re drilling?

The saw, the hole-saw, and nothing but the saw
A hole-saw is a specialty tool that’s turned by a drill-motor or drill-press. It’s a circular saw blade with the teeth pointing downward, something like an aggressive cookie-cutter. There’s a smaller twist drill-bit mounted in the middle that guides the center of the hole. They come in sets graduated by the quarter-inch, nestled inside one another like those Russian Babushka dolls. Hole-saws are relatively easy to handle up to six inches in diameter. Bigger than that and they get to be rambunctious. Hole-saws are great for cutting wind holes in reservoirs and windchests. Take a look at this McMaster-Carr page: <http://www.mcmas ter.com/#hole-saw-sets/=9qqoqp>.

Circle cutters
If you need a hole larger than three inches, use a circle cutter (http://www.mcmaster.com/#adjustable-hole-cutters/=9qqq0f). It has a twist drill-bit to center the hole, and a cutter mounted on an adjustable arm. You can set these up to cut holes nearly eight inches in diameter. But be sure to set the drill-press on the slowest speed, and use clamps to hold your work piece to the drill-press table. These tools are pretty scary. They can jam in the track they cut, and the holes often burn during drilling. And if you don’t tighten the set-screw that fastens the adjustable arm, it can get flung across the shop by the motion of the machine.

Oops
What happens if you put a hole in the wrong place? (Never happened to me.) You can glue in a piece of dowel and cut it flush, but the grain will be running in the opposite direction. Better to use a plug-cutter. With this neat tool you can drill into the face of a piece of wood and produce a cross-grained dowel about an inch long. Drill out your mistake with the correct size bit, and glue in your plug. Sand it off and you’ll have a hard time finding it again: <http://www.mcmaster.com/#wood-plug-cutters/=9qqszb&gt;.

The twist
Twist drill bits come in many sizes. I have three basic indexes of twist drill-bits near my drill-press. One goes from one-eighth to one-half an inch, graduated by 64ths. One is an industrial wire-gauge numbered set—the numbers go from 1 (.228″, which is a little less than a quarter-inch) to 80 (.0135″, which is very tiny!). And the third is “letter-gauge” that goes from A (.234″, or .006″ larger than the number 1) to Z (.4130″, or a little smaller than 7/16″).
I have a chart hanging on the wall nearby that shows all three sets graduated by thousands-of-an-inch. If you’re going to drill axle holes in action parts you choose the material you’re going to use for the axle (let’s say it’s .0808″ phosphorous bronze wire), then choose a drill-bit that’s just a little larger. The 3/32″ bit is way too big at .0938″. The #45 bit is .082″ and the #44 bit is .086″. Here the choice would be between the #45 and the #44, so I’d drill one of each and try the wire in the hole. But wait! I have one more trick—a set of metric twist drill-bits graduated by tenths-of-a-millimeter. The 2.2-millimeter bit is .0866″. That’s .0006″ larger than the #44 but I bet it’s too large. The 2.1-millimeter bit is .0827″. That’s only .0019″ larger than the wire—would be a pretty close fit—probably too tight.
If you’d like a glimpse at what these sets of bits look like, go to <http://www.mcmaster.com/#catalog/116/2416/=9qg6xs&gt;. This is page 2416 of the catalogue of McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply Company, an absolute heaven for the serious hardware shopper. The “Combination Set” at the top of the page has the 64ths to 1/2″, numbers 1–60, and 1–13mm graduated by half-millimeters–—total of 114 bits for $286.54. But be reasonable—this is not the perfect Father’s Day gift for every home handyman. A simple set that goes from 1/8″ to 1/2″ graduated by 32nds to 1/4″ and 16ths to 1/2″ will be plenty, available for about twenty bucks from your Home Depot or Lowe’s store. (I prefer the
DeWalt sets.)

Why the fuss?
You might wonder why I would spend so much energy choosing the right drill-bit, and spending so much money to have at hand an appropriate variety of bits from which to choose. (I bet I have more than $5,000 worth of drill-bits.)
A pipe organ is a musical instrument. It’s a work of art. It’s a work of liturgical art. It’s a very special creation. But look inside an organ—any type of organ—and you see machinery. You see thousands of parts and pieces all hung together to make a whole. Some organs look downright industrial inside. That defines a conflict. How can a ten-ton pile of industrial equipment be considered artwork?
The answer is simple. If it’s built to exacting specifications so the sense of the machine melts into the magic of musical response to the fingers and feet of the musician, then it’s artwork. No question, there is such a thing as a pipe organ that’s little more than a machine, but that is not the ideal which our great artist-organbuilders strive to achieve.
If I spend an extra hour making sure that the axle-holes I drill in the set of squares I’m making are exactly the right size, then that keyboard action will feel good to the organists’ fingers, there will be no slop or wobble in the feel of the keys, and the machine I’m making will not impose itself between the musician and the music. (Squares are those bits of tracker action that allow the action to turn corners.)
And remember, if I’m making squares for an organ, I’m making enough of them for each note on the keyboard, and if it’s a larger organ with several keyboards and actions that turn several corners, I might be making 500 squares for the single instrument. While I’m doing that, as long as I think there will be another organ to build, I might as well make a bigger batch—let’s say I’ll spend a week making 2,500 squares. Each has an axle hole, and each has an action hole at the ends of its two arms. That’s 7,500 holes. And those holes are so small that I’ll produce only enough sawdust to fill a coffee can. (I don’t know why I say sawdust when I’m talking about drilling holes, but I’ve never heard anyone say drilldust, and neither has my spellchecker.)

§

The other day I was in a meeting with people from a church who are in the very early stages of dreaming about acquiring a pipe organ. One fellow was really surprised by the cost of organ building—“how can it possibly cost that much to build an organ? You’re going to have to convince me.” I answered him by talking about thousands of person-hours, tons of expensive materials, a workshop equipped with a wide variety of industrial machinery and tools, and collective lifetimes of careful learning and experience forming our staff.
I also told the group that the moment the doubters in a congregation finally really understand why organbuilding is so expensive is the day the new organ is delivered to the church, and the entire sanctuary is filled with exquisitely crafted parts. I’ve been present for the delivery of many new pipe organs, and I’ve often heard the comment, “Now I see why it cost so much.”
As I drove away from that church, my mind took me on this romp about fussing with drill-bits, a reflection on the care, thought, precision, and resourcefulness that I so admire amongst my colleague organbuilders. So I ran back to my hotel room and started to write. I can do the same with lots of other kinds of tools. Want to come see my saws? ■

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Special delivery
The Bath Iron Works (a General Dynamics Company) is about fifteen miles from where we live. Located on the shore of the Kennebec River in Bath, Maine, more than ten miles up from the ocean, they build Aegis and Zumwalt class destroyers for the United States Navy. The shipyard is unique because of its immense lifting capacity—you can see their mammoth cranes from miles in each direction. This allows them to mass-produce ships in large sections because they can lift as much as a third of a ship at once. In the company’s heyday during World War II, they launched a completed destroyer every twenty-two days. Think of the supply chain. That’s a lot of steel—tens of thousands of tons. That’s a lot of wire, windows, pipes, engines, tanks, valves, and gauges. It took about 275,000 person hours to build a ship. Twenty-two days—that’s 12,500 hours a day, or 1250 workers working ten-hour days. To stay efficient, each worker had to have the right tools and the right materials at the right time. Any organbuilder’s head would spin to think of such a management challenge. It’s hard enough to organize 200 person hours per week in a five-person workshop.
In the 1870s and 1880s, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings was building new organs at the rate of something like one a week. We know that materials were delivered at night to that workshop in Boston by horse-drawn rail cars using the same tracks that the passenger trolleys used by day. Think of the mountains of American black walnut going into the maw of that place, all to be unloaded by hand. I suppose they had a night crew of men who did nothing but unload rail cars and make sure the materials were stored in the right place. And I suppose once the lumber was stored they loaded bales of sawdust to be carted off to line chicken coops.
While we think about the work involved in organizing a flow of materials into a nineteenth-century organ shop, what about the actual work of building the organs? When I started working in organ shops, we had screwdrivers that we turned by hand—analog screwdrivers. For a while we used electric screwdrivers that had wires hanging out of the handles—wires that could flop across the pipes of the Mixture while you were taking down a bottom board of an upper chest to repair a dead note. Now we have rechargeable cordless tools. And to top that, I have a battery charger that runs on the twelve-volt power in my car so I can recharge my power tools between service calls.
I’ve joked with the hypothetical question, “if Bach had a Swell box would he have used it?” I bet Mr. Skinner would have delighted in an eighteen-volt rechargeable DeWalt screw-gun. It’s even got an adjustable clutch to keep you from stripping the threads.

Supply and demand
We live at the end of a half-mile dirt road. I have a swell little workshop at the house where I tackle portions of our projects. I’m especially fond of working on organ consoles and I have a beauty in the shop right now, built by Casavant in 1916. We are renovating the organ for a church in Manhattan and I’m spending the summer plugging away at the console. Our house is at the end of the UPS route. A couple times a week at around 5:30 in the afternoon, the big brown truck hurtles down the driveway and careens into the dooryard. Nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and goldfinches scatter in terror, groundhogs and chipmunks dash into the stone walls—only the sassy and pugnacious little red squirrels seem ready for the challenge.
With diesel engine roaring and spewing, the driver (there are two regulars) turns the truck around so it’s heading home before he’ll even look at me. He tosses a couple boxes at me and blasts off in a cloud of fumes, dust, and pebbles. (If he had to take care of a long dirt road the way I do he’d never drive like that—each time he comes to the house, five shovels of my gravel goes into the woods.) Measuring sound in decibels-per-hour, the UPS guy makes more noise in two-and-a-half minutes than I do in a week.

Leaning to the left
I suppose that if we were at the beginning of the route, the UPS driver would have a little more time to chat, but I remember reading an article that allowed a glimpse into the company’s efficiency. As traffic increases on America’s roads, we are all aware that you can wait a long time for a chance to make a left-hand turn on a busy road. Years ago I fell into the habit of planning errands to avoid left-hand turns. If I go to the hardware store first, grocery store second, bank third, the only left turn is when I leave the grocery store. I got teased about that some, but on December 9, 2007 the New York Times published an article that I believe excused my apparent eccentricity. Titled “Left-Hand-Turn Elimination,” the story told that that UPS has a “package flow” software program that maps out routes for the drivers limiting the number of left-hand turns as much as is practical. UPS operates 95,000 big brown trucks. By limiting left-hand turns they were able to reduce their routes by 28,500,000 miles, save 3,000,000 gallons of fuel, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 31,000 thousand metric tons. (Now you know what kind of mileage a UPS truck gets.) You can read the story at <A HREF="http://www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html">www.ny times.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09left-handturn.html</A>. Makes my five shovels of gravel seem a little less important!
After the big brown truck barrels up the driveway and turns right onto the road, I go back into the shop and open the boxes. What goodies I find: silver wire for key-contacts, woven felt for keyboard bushings, snazzy little control panels for solid-state relays and combination actions, specialty wood finishes from a one-of-a-kind supplier, useful tools that you can’t find at Home Depot. It’s like a little birthday party at the end of the day.
I need a huge variety of parts and materials to complete a project like this, and I spend a lot of time on the phone, leafing through catalogues (the big industrial-supply catalogues have more than 3,500 pages) and searching online. I rely on Internet access, next-day delivery, and specialty supply houses. And I can buy just about anything. Let’s say I need some red woven felt (bushing cloth) to replace the bushings in a mechanical part. I can use an X-Acto knife to get the old cloth out of the hole, but it’s really hard to measure the thickness of a piece of felt that was made ninety years ago. So what thickness should I get? Easy. If I search carefully online I can find it in thicknesses graduated by 64ths of an inch. I order a few square feet of four different thicknesses and experiment.

Close enough?
We talk about the importance of duplicating original materials when restoring an instrument. “If Mr. Skinner used 9/64″ red bushing cloth, I’m going to use 9/64″ red bushing cloth.” But I bet Mr. Skinner wasn’t choosing between eight different thicknesses listed on a catalogue page. I think he bought the stuff that was available and made it work.
The expression shutters of this Casavant organ we’re working on turn in bearings of woven felt. There’s a quarter-inch steel pin in each end of each shutter that serves as an axle. The pins turn in holes in wood blocks—those holes are bushed with green woven felt. After seventy years of regular use and twenty years of neglect, that felt is hard and worn. Over the years, organ technicians fixed squeaks and squeals in those shutters by glopping grease, oil, candle wax, mutton tallow, and more recently silicone and WD-40 from spray cans on those bearings.
I could buy Teflon tubing of quarter-inch interior diameter (1/4″ ID) from McMaster-Carr, an industrial supply company in New Jersey. I found it on page 91 of their 3,528-page catalog. It costs $1.28 a foot and comes in five-foot lengths. I could cut it into half-inch lengths (less than five-and-a-half cents each), and drill them into the shade frames to make perfect bearings for the quarter-inch steel axles. I bet it would be a long time before they squeal or squeak. It’s not historic, it’s not good restoration practice, but I bet those shutters would work beautifully for decades. I think I’ll go ahead and make that change. I’m confident that the organists who will play on this organ will never know we did, and I trust that Claver and Samuel Casavant will forgive me. My intentions are good and my conscience is clear.

An expressive conundrum
We have some tree work going on in our yard and one of the crew is a skillful equipment operator. He’s using a light-duty excavator that’s known as a backhoe because the bucket (or shovel) comes back toward the operator as it digs. The machine’s boom has three joints, roughly analogous to the human shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and the bucket compares to the hand, as it can curl under to scoop the earth. Each of the joints is operated by a hydraulic piston—that ingenious machine that uses the pressure of oil to extend or contract. It seems counterintuitive, but the engine of this machine drives no gears at all—its sole purpose is to drive a pump that creates the oil pressure. Even the wheels that drive the tracks are turned by hydraulics. The machine’s controls are valves operated by handles—those valves conduct the pressurized oil to the appropriate pistons.
The operator, a young guy named Todd who’s anticipating the birth of his second child as he digs in our yard, has his feet on the pedals that drive the machine forward and back. He has each hand on a four-function joystick. Each push of a control operates only one function, but Todd moves his hands and wrists in quiet little circles combining the machine’s basic movements into circular, almost human motions. His understanding of his controls is intuitive. He doesn’t have to stop to think, let me see . . . if I pull this handle this way, the bucket will curl under . . . He effortlessly combines the motions to extend the boom and the bucket, sets the teeth in the dirt, and brings the boom toward him as the bucket curls under filling with dirt. He whirls around to empty the bucket on a pile, and as he turns back to the hole, the boom and bucket are extending to be ready for the next scoop, which starts without a pause, a jerk, or a wiggle. He’s operating six or seven functions simultaneously. The power that operates the machine and the nature of the motion are both fluid.
I’ve read that some revered orchestral conductors eschew the pipe organ as an inexpressive instrument because it’s not possible for an organist to alter the volume of a single organ pipe. You press a key, the pipe plays. You pull a handle in a backhoe and the bucket moves in one direction. I can hear my colleague organists gasp as I compare Todd’s backhoe with an elegant musical instrument, but isn’t there a similarity between the two machines? After all, we don’t hesitate to call the pipe organ the most mechanical of musical instruments. And when we press that key, we’re opening a valve to let pressure through to do work. (I have to admit I’m glad we’re not messing around with hydraulic oil near a chancel carpet.)
The organist intuitively manipulates the controls—playing keys, changing stops, pushing pistons, operating expression pedals—and the result is fluid crescendos, accents, beguiling delays, great oceans of sound billowing through the air. Literally, organ music is the result of thousands of switches or levers moving at the will of the organist. That organist has practiced for thousands of hours, mastering the limitations of his or her body, teaching the body to perform countless little motions with ease and grace so the music flows free, denying both the physicality of the player and that of the instrument. Because the machine and player are both well-tempered, the music is infinitely expressive.
And of course we separate the organ from the backhoe. It’s nice to be able to move a ton of dirt in a few minutes without breaking a sweat, and we admire the skill of the guy who can make that machine come alive. But I couldn’t help notice that one of the joints on Todd’s machine has an important squeak to it, enough that when I was back in my workshop or office and couldn’t see the machine, I knew when he was extending or retracting the boom. Not my swell shutters!
A pipe organ is magic when all the squeaks and squeals are gone, when each function of the machine responds effortlessly to the intuitive motions of the player. In the workshop we make thousands of little choices about what material to use, how to adjust it, how to glue it down, so the machine will not stand in the way of the music. In the practice room we hone our skills so no knuckle cracks, no muscle binds, no fingernail hangs, and nothing about our bodies will stand in the way of the music. We dress in clothes that allow us to move freely, and we make sure our shoes are less than two notes wide. Our bodies and our instruments are conduits between the composer’s ideals and the ears of the audience.
Thanks to the UPS guy for bringing all those goodies, and yes—I’m certain that Bach would have used the expression pedal, but only if the shutters didn’t squeak.