In the wind . . .

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Aeolus
Ruler of the winds. That’s who he was. According to Greek mythology, he was son of King Hippotes and custodian of the four winds, keeping them in the heart of the Lipara Islands near Sicily. At the request of other gods, Aeolus would release gentle breezes or fierce gales, depending on the circumstances. He was something of a vendor to the gods. The Greek hero Odysseus visited Aeolus, who gave him a parting gift of the four winds in a bag to ensure his safe return to Ithaca. During the voyage, Odysseus’s crew was curious about the contents of the bag. When they were finally close enough to actually see Ithaca, Odysseus fell asleep. Members of his crew opened the bag, releasing the winds, and the ship was blown disastrously off course.1
It’s not for nothing that there was an organbuilding company named Aeolian, later merged with the Skinner Organ Company to form the august firm of Aeolian-Skinner, builder of many of America’s greatest pipe organs. The Aeolian myth is the heart of the pipe organ.

§

I love wind. We live near the ocean where the wind can have the special quality of having moved unobstructed for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Sometimes it’s gentle and refreshing, sometimes it’s bracing and challenging, and sometimes it’s downright scary—but it’s always blowing and feels like a friend to me. Maybe this is a reaction to having spent thousands of hours in the deep and dark recesses of church buildings, toiling and moiling on recalcitrant machines. Leaving a building at the end of the day, I love that wonderful feeling of air moving around me. I picture the day’s dust and debris wafting from my erstwhile hair, something like Charles Schultz’s creation Pigpen, friend and confidant of Charlie Brown.
I love harnessing the wind to make a small sailboat go. With tiller in one hand and main-sheet in the other, the feeling of owning the wind—of inviting it to draw me where I want to go—is a thrill. I can see the approach of a puff—an extra burst of wind—making tracks on the water coming towards me so I can loosen the pull of the sail at just the right moment to retain control of the boat. I know the marks on the water are a little behind the leading edge of the puff so the puff actually hits my sails before the rougher water hits the hull. If I’m sailing across or into the wind, I’m aware of its power moving past me. If I’m sailing with the wind at my stern and everything’s going right, my boat moves at close to the same speed as the wind, so it seems relatively calm.
When I was kid, I learned about the principles of lift by holding my flat hand out the car window as my parents drove. If I cupped my hand a little so my knuckles were higher than the tips of my fingers, my hand would be pulled upwards. I now know that I was simulating the curved upper surface of an airplane’s wings, causing the air above my hand to move faster than the air under it. The faster moving air created a lower pressure above my hand, causing it to lift. My curved hand gave the same effect as the curve of my boat’s sails. The sails are mounted upright—so the air moving faster across the convex curves of the front of the sail draws the boat forward. The only time the wind actually pushes the boat is if the wind is from behind. Otherwise, the boat is being pulled forward by that pressure differential.
As a student at Oberlin, I was privileged to practice, study, and perform on the school’s wonderful Flentrop organ. It was brand-new for my freshman year, right in the heart of our twentieth-century Renaissance, the revival of classic styles of pipe organ building. While many of us were used to the solid wind of early twentieth-century organs, that instrument had a flexible wind supply, terrific for supporting the motion of Baroque music, but a certain trap for the inattentive organist. Approach a big chord wrong, and the sagging of the wind would remind you of the feeling you get in your stomach going over the top of a roller-coaster hill. If you played with a firm hand on the main-sheet, watching the wind like a hawk, you’d return safely to the dock boosted by your friend the wind.
I don’t do the thing with my hand out the car window any more because I’m almost always the one driving. Judging from my neighbors on many highways, I should keep my hands free for texting, flossing my teeth, or putting on makeup. But I don’t text or brush my teeth while I drive, and I never wear makeup.

§

Harnessing the wind has been a human endeavor for millennia. There are images of sailing vessels under weigh on coins dating from about 3000 BC, and by 500 BC sailing ships had two masts and could apparently carry 200 tons of freight. The Persians developed windmills for grinding grain around 500 BC. And the earliest form of the pipe organ dated from around 250 BC.
Just as wind draws a sailboat rather than pushes it, the wind itself is usually drawn instead being “blown.” Meteorologists tell us of high- and low-pressure areas. A low-pressure area represents a lighter density of air, and high-pressure air flows toward it. A “sea-breeze” is formed by convection. If a coastal area warms up in the sun around midday, the air above the land rises and cooler air from above the water flows in to take its place. So most winds are “flowing toward” rather than “blowing away.”
The motion of air that we know as wind is one of the greatest forces on earth. If a gentle wind blowing over the table on your porch can send a plate of crackers flying, think of how much aggregate force there is across ten or twenty miles of porches. You could move a lot of crackers. This might not be the place for political or social opinions—but I’d rather see windmills than strip mines. Both are bad for birds and both interrupt the landscape, but one doesn’t lead to smog or acid rain. And let’s not even mention spent nuclear fuel rods. Spent wind is fully recyclable!
Harnessing the wind is the work of the organbuilder. We create machinery that moves air, stores it under pressure, distributes it through our instruments, and lets it blow into our carefully made whistles. The energy of the moving air is transformed into sonic energy. As one mentor said to me years ago, air is the fuel we use to create organ tone. Ever wonder why a wider pipe mouth, open toe, or open windway creates louder tone? Simple—more fuel is getting to the burner.
When I sit in a church listening to a great organ, I imagine thousands of little valves flitting open and closed, and reservoirs and wind regulators absolutely tingling to release the treasure of their stored fuel into the heavens as glorious sound. They may be machines, but when they’re doing their thing during worship, they take on what seems like human urgency.

§

Wendy and I have been enjoying the use of an apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village that belongs to friends of my parents. Yesterday we went up to Midtown to attend an Easter festival service at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. We chose the early Mass at 8:00 because the church’s website assured us that the music would be the same as at the later version but the crowds would likely be less. Preludes with organ and brass started at 7:30, including music of Pelz, Howells, Gabrieli, Dupré’s Poème Héroïque, and Richard Strauss’s Feierlicher Enzug—a mighty amount of music for that hour of the day. The Mass setting was the premiere of John Scott’s Missa Dies Resurrectionis.
John Scott must be the greatest addition to American church music since electric organ blowers. His superb musicianship, immaculate sense of timing, welcoming leadership of congregational singing, touching rapport with the boys of the choir, concise and unobtrusive conducting, and by the way, marvelous organ playing made our two hours in that beautiful church as meaningful and memorable a musical experience as I can recall. The new Mass setting was gorgeous, moving from recognizable folk tunes to riffs reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen in the Sanctus. (Is it OK to say Messiaenic when describing Easter music?)
I love noticing the way the sound of an organ can change with different players. Dr. Scott was conducting for most of the Mass, and we were treated to the wonderful playing of associate organist Frederick Teardo and assistant organist Kevin Kwan. Dr. Scott slid onto the bench for the postlude, Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogué, and off we went. Oopah! It was my impression that Scott’s years at London’s cavernous St. Paul’s Cathedral prepared him to treat the magnificent sanctuary of St. Thomas Church as an intimate space. Such rhythm, such drive, such energy, such clarity. Wonderful.
And speaking of wind . . .
There were six extraordinary brass players (plus percussion), about 30 boys and 20 men in the choir (I didn’t count, so I’m probably not accurate), ten clergy and attendants, and maybe a thousand congregants. Quite a hoopla for eight in the morning. The Great Organ in the chancel has 159 ranks, and there’s a gorgeous Taylor & Boody organ in the gallery with 32 ranks. Add us all up and we were burning a lot of fuel. It’s beautiful to me to stand in the midst of all that sound, thinking of it in terms of wind.
The word inspiration has two distinct meanings: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative; and the drawing in of breath. These two meanings come together dramatically during festival Masses in our great churches.
When we worship in great churches like St. Thomas in New York, we are surrounded by opulent works of art. The reredos created by sculptor Lee Lawrie is 80 feet tall, 43 feet wide and contains more than 80 figures. (If we say it’s a 159-rank organ, do we say it’s an 80-saint reredos?) The stained-glass windows are spectacular, including a rose window of unusually deep colors that is 25 feet in diameter.
Most churches that own fancy stained-glass windows have to face expensive restoration projects at some point. The effects of air pollution corrode a window’s metal components, and simple weathering compromises a window’s structure and its ability to keep out the elements. I was maintaining the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston when the magnificent windows by John LaFarge were removed for restoration. There were more than 2,000 pieces of glass in some of those windows, and it was just as complicated to restore them as to restore a large pipe organ. And while I think there’s less that can go wrong with a reredos than with a window or a pipe organ, I’m sure that at least that great heap of saints has to be cleaned one in a while—a job that would involve the careful choice and use of cleaning solvents and solutions, a big assortment of brushes, a hundred feet of scaffolding, and a fancy insurance policy. Imagine the fiscal implications of dropping a bucket of water from 80 feet up in a place like that.
But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas Church replacing their windows or reredos. The original designs are integral with the building, and it would hardly cross our minds to say that styles have changed and we need to overhaul the visual content of our liturgical art every generation or so to keep up with the times. Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos. “It’s just too old fashioned . . . ”
We hardly bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ. Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians, and ostensibly more economically maintained.
Why is this? Simple. Windows and statues are static. They stay still. The sun shines through them and on them, air (and all that comes with it) moves around them, but physically they stay still. A pipe organ is in motion. When you turn on the blower, reservoirs fill, wind conductors are stressed by pressure, leather moves, the fabric of the instrument creaks and groans as it assumes its readiness to play. When you play a note, valves open, springs are tensioned, air flows, flecks of debris move around. When you play a piece of music, all those motions are multiplied by thousands. The Doxology (Old Hundredth) comprises 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. Play it on a single stop and you’ve moved 128 note valves, plus all the attendant primaries, magnet armatures, stop and relay switches. Play the same 32 chords on a big organ using 90 stops (nothing out of the ordinary)—11,520 valves. And that’s just the Doxology. I’ll let you do the math for a big piece by Bach or Widor that has lots of hemi-demi-semi-quavers. I suppose Wendy and I heard the St. Thomas organ play millions of notes yesterday in that 8:00 Mass. There would be another identical Mass at 11:00, an organ recital at 2:30, and Solemn Evensong at 3:00. A wicked workday for the musicians, and a fifty-million-note day for the organ. Just think of all those busy little valves—millions of tiny movements to create a majestic body of sound.
And the organ wears out. Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ, technicians move around through the instrument tuning, adjusting, and repairing. Musicians practice, tourists receive demonstrations, liturgies come and go. That organ blower gets turned on and off dozens of times each week. The daylight streams through the windows, but the daylights get beaten out of the organ.
I’ve been in and out of St. Thomas Church many times. I’ve heard plenty of brilliant organists play there, and I’ve never been disappointed by what I heard. But I’ve known for years that the chancel organ is in trouble. It has played billions of notes. It’s been rebuilt a number of times. And it’s simply worn out. It’s a rare church musician who would intentionally offer less than the best possible to the congregation—or to God—during worship. And musicians of the caliber one hears at St. Thomas are masters at getting water from stone. As an organbuilder with a trained and experienced ear, I’m aware of the organ’s shortcomings. But as a worshipper, I’m transported.

§

I single out St. Thomas Church because we worshipped there yesterday. I know those responsible for the organ, so I know something about its real condition. And prominent on the church’s website is an appeal for gifts to support the commissioning of a very expensive new organ. There were even letters from the rector and organist inserted in the Easter service booklet repeating that appeal. An elderly woman, impeccably dressed and obviously of means (she was wearing the value of a fancy car on her fingers), arrived a little after us and joined us in our pew. When the processional hymn started, she let loose a singing voice of unusual power and beauty. I whispered to Wendy, “She’ll give the new organ.” We chuckled, but a piece of me says I could have been right. I hope so.
Our church buildings are designed with expensive architectural elements. Including steeples, towers, stained-glass windows, to say nothing of Gothic arches and carvings in wood and stone, they all add mightily to the cost of building a church. But once it’s all there, we think of it as a whole. It would be hard to look back on the history of St. Thomas Church and say the tower was actually unnecessary. Of course they built a tower.
The organ is right up there on the list of expensive indulgences. How can we say we actually need such a thing? But how can we imagine Easter without it? There’s still plenty of wind available. At least there’s no fuel bill. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

Michael Barone is host and producer of American Public Media’s Pipedreams program, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2007. Pipedreams can be heard on radio stations across the country, also on XM Satellite Radio Channel 133 and in Hong Kong on Radio Four. Barone is a native of northeastern Pennsylvania, a music history graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, and a nearly 39-year employee of Minnesota Public Radio.

John Weaver, one of the America’s finest concert organists, celebrates his 70th birthday on April 27, 2007. The following interview is offered in honor of this milestone.
Dr. Weaver was director of music at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1970–2005, and served as head of the organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia 1971–2003, and also chair of the organ department at the Juilliard School 1987–2004.
His formal musical studies began at the age of six, and at age 15 he began organ study with Richard Ross and George Markey. His undergraduate study was at the Curtis Institute as a student of Alexander McCurdy, and he earned a Master of Sacred Music degree at Union Theological Seminary. In 1989 John Weaver was honored by the Peabody Conservatory with its Distinguished Alumni Award. He has received honorary Doctor of Music degrees from Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2005 he was named “International Performer of the Year” by the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
In addition to his work at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, he has taught at Westminster Choir College, Union Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music. He has written numerous articles for organ and church music magazines and has served as president of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.
Dr. Weaver has been active as a concert organist since coming under management in 1959. He has played throughout the USA, Canada, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. He has performed on national television and radio network programs in the U.S. and Germany, and has made recordings for Aeolian-Skinner, the Wicks Organ Company, Klais Orgelbau of Germany, a CD on Gothic Records for the Schantz Organ Company, and a recording on the Pro Organo label on the new Reuter organ at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. His most recent recording, “The Organ and Choral Music of John Weaver,” is available on the JAV label and features his own organ and choral compositions. His published compositions for organ, chorus/organ and flute/organ are widely performed.
He currently lives in Vermont and continues to concertize and lead workshops and masterclasses around the world. The Weavers love to climb the New England mountains, and have a tradition of an annual ascent of Mt. Washington. Marianne is an avid gardener, and John’s hobby is a deep fascination with trains, both model and prototype.
This interview took place July 11, 2005, at the Weaver home in the rolling countryside near West Glover, Vermont.

MICHAEL BARONE: How did John Weaver stumble into the world of the organ?
JOHN WEAVER: We moved away from the little town where I spent the first four and a half years of my life. I have very few recollections of that place, except one of them that’s very strong—the organ at the church where my father was the pastor had a wonderful sound on low E. Something about the 16' stop on that organ resonated in the room in a glorious way, and I fell in love with that. As soon as I learned how to play a few notes on the piano, my favorite thing was to hold down the sustaining pedal and play an arpeggio—slowly at first—and just listen to it ring like an organ. Something in me has always been attracted to that sound.
MB: With whom did you study and how would you characterize those years?
JW: My first organ lessons were with a wonderful organist in Baltimore, Richard Ross. He died at age 39 shortly after having given me a lesson on a Saturday afternoon—just failed to show up the next day at church. Ross was becoming one of the best-known and finest organists in the country. When I first went to him, at the age of 15, instead of auditioning me at the organ, he told me to go up onto the stage of the Peabody concert hall and play for him on the piano. Well, there was a big Steinway up there, but the thing that really interested me was the 4-manual E. M. Skinner. I could hear air escaping from it, and I coveted playing that instrument so badly that I can feel it still today.
Nevertheless, Ross told me that he wanted to hear me play something on the piano. So, I stumbled through my Mozart sonata that was not really very good at that point, and afterward he said to me, “I don’t want you to study organ yet. You need to study at least another year of piano and really work at it very hard.” And then he also said something that I’ve always remembered: “If in the meantime you study organ with anybody else, I will never teach you.”
Well, I took his advice, and I went back to my piano teacher and really did work for a year—then came back the next year and played for Ross again. This time I played the Beethoven “Pathétique,” and I played it pretty well. Ross said, “OK, now you can start studying organ, but you must continue to study piano as well.”
Fortunately I had a very good piano teacher, and I studied with Ross for about a year and a half, until his death. The Peabody Conservatory brought in George Markey as an interim to fill out the rest of that academic year. While I was studying with Markey, at this point as a senior in high school, he said “Where are you going to go to school next year?” I just assumed I would go to Peabody because we lived in Baltimore, and Markey said, “Well, have you considered auditioning for the Curtis Institute of Music?” And I remember asking him, “Where is that?” I was soon to find out a lot about Curtis and also about the great teacher there, Alexander McCurdy. I did audition and was accepted, and had four glorious years in Philadelphia.

MB: McCurdy is something of a legend, and the stories about him are numerous. I expect you have more than a few.
JW: I’ve described him on numerous occasions as an Old Testament figure. He was someone you both loved and feared at the same time—certainly, not one to suffer fools. If you went into a lesson unprepared, you were sure to get a dressing down that would do a drill sergeant credit. But when words of praise came, they were so precious and so rewarding that they could light you up for a whole week. He was a very liberal teacher in that he did not insist on playing any piece of music in any certain way. Within that department at that time we had about six students—there was one student who was very much a disciple of E. Power Biggs, and there were others of us who were much more in the Virgil Fox camp. That was sort of the nature of the department, but McCurdy was as enthusiastic about the fellow who was a Neo-Baroquist as he was about the rest of us. That person, by the way, is Temple Painter, who is one of the leading harpsichordists in the city of Philadelphia and still plays organ as well.

MB: What were McCurdy’s techniques to get the best out of students? What did he create in you that might not have been there before? And then how did you take what you learned from McCurdy and shape that with your own personality?
JW: McCurdy had several ways of getting the best from us. I’ll never forget my first lesson: he assigned a chorale prelude from the Orgelbüchlein, which I had not played, and he said, “Mr. Weaver, I’d like you to play this next week from memory in organ class.” Well, right away it was jump-starting; and seven, eight hours a day of practicing became the norm. At my second lesson, he assigned the Vierne Cantabile, from the second symphony, and said, “I’d like you to play that next week in organ class in front of your peers.” Well, that was really a struggle. And he did that for about three weeks at the beginning of the four years. After that, he never assigned a piece again. But he got me into the habit of learning—I knew he expected that kind of production from week to week.
That’s a Curtis tradition that was started by Lynnwood Farnam, continued by Fernando Germani and by McCurdy, and I believe is still the case—each student comes every week with a new piece memorized to play in class. This could be a little one-page chorale prelude for manuals alone, or it could be a major prelude and fugue, a big romantic work, or a modern work—you could repeat something from previous classes, but you always had to have a new piece also. It got us into the habit of assuming when you started to learn a piece that you were eventually going to play it from memory. There are some pieces that I have never been able to play from memory. I’ve memorized a fair amount of Messiaen, but with more atonal pieces, I find that I am just not comfortable playing without the score.

MB: The challenge for the organist, of course, is that each instrument is different from the next and requires its own learning process. The traveling recitalist comes to a church, gets used to the instrument, gets used to the instrument’s response in the room, and then tries to make music with the repertoire that you’ve brought to town. Perhaps it’s no wonder that fewer organists want to memorize these days, but there’s still something about a performer totally connected to and deeply involved in the music that is missing when a score is being read.
JW: There is always the problem of the page-turner—or, if one turns one’s own pages, that has its risks as well. Page-turners can sometimes pull music down off the rack inadvertently, or pull a page right out of the book, or turn two pages—there are lots of risks. Page-turners also have a tendency sometimes to hum or to tap their foot. I’ve even known some who think it’s safe to step on the pedalboard to reach a page that’s far out of the way—that really does produce a catastrophe.
I guess it doesn’t make a lot of difference if the console is completely hidden. I wouldn’t know if someone was playing from memory or not, but pianists, violinists, singers are expected to walk on stage and play from memory. It’s harder for organists, yes. I like to have 12 to 15 hours at an instrument before I’m ready to play a recital on it. If I had 20 hours it would be better still. If I had 25, I would find a few more things to make that instrument come across in the very best possible way and the music to be the best that I could do. That kind of time is rarely available, but 12 to 15 hours is a norm.

MB: I always get the sense watching you that you really enjoy playing. Now is this actually true or are you just a very good actor?
JW: If it looks like I’m having fun, I’m glad for that because in a way, I am. I also am constantly aware of the pitfalls—how many things might happen that you don’t want to happen and sometimes do. But I do enjoy playing. I love playing recitals, though it scares me, and five minutes before the recital I ask myself “Why did I ever agree to do this?” But once I start playing, why, that departs and I really do settle down and enjoy what I love about the music that I play—hoping that people will catch something of what I’m feeling about that music and my devotion to it.

MB: How did you, a former student at the Curtis Institute, come to be the head of the organ department at Curtis?
JW: One fine day Alexander McCurdy called me up and said, “Mr. Weaver, I’m going to retire from the Curtis Institute, and Rudolph Serkin would like to meet with you and see if you might be an appropriate successor.” (Rudolph Serkin at that point being the director of the Curtis Institute.) Needless to say, I went down to Philadelphia and met with Serkin, and he suggested that I play a recital in Curtis Hall—it was never called an audition recital, but I think they wanted me to clear that hurdle before giving me a green light. Curtis Hall is one of the hardest places to play. It is totally dry acoustically, with a 118-rank Aeolian-Skinner in a room that seats about 200 people—probably more pipes per person than any place else in the world. But it’s an instrument that can, if one works with it, do remarkable things. So I did play the recital and did get the job, and was there very happily for many years. I started in 1971 and retired in 2003—32 years.

MB: How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?
JW: I’ve tried to follow the McCurdy mold. When I was at Curtis we continued the tradition of the organ class—memorization and new pieces each week. I also tried to not impose my own interpretation of any given piece upon the students that I was fortunate enough to teach, both at Curtis and at Juilliard. I do believe that everyone should somehow sound like themselves, that there is some part of themselves and their own musical personality that will affect the way that they perform any piece.
I’ve had students who were extremely flamboyant and almost overdone. I’ve tried to curb that a little bit sometimes, but I certainly don’t want to squelch the enthusiasm and the very strong personal interpretations that a student like that can bring. Sometimes I find a student’s playing to be too conservative, just dull note pushing, and then we talk a lot about the music and about its nature—its liveliness or passiveness or serenity or agitation—trying to have the student project something in the music other than just the notes on the page.

MB: Who were some of your outstanding recent students?
JW: Well, without naming any priority, certainly Paul Jacobs, who succeeded me at Juilliard; Alan Morrison, who succeeded me at the Curtis Institute; Diane Meredith Belcher, who’s on the faculty at Westminster Choir College; Ken Cowan, who is on the faculty of Westminster Choir College and is now the head of the organ department there—and a whole host of others. Those are four that are under management, nationally known, and do a great deal of playing—I’m very proud of them indeed.

MB: How did you come to be at Madison Avenue Presbyterian? What are the different demands, delights, and challenges of being a church musician as opposed to being a fancy-free artist in the world of recitals?
JW: For eleven years, I was at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York. While there, my wife and I started the Bach cantata series that continues to this day, and we really made that church known for performances of the music of Bach. In 1970, I knew that the position at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was vacant. It never occurred to me to apply for it. But one day, a gentleman came into the church office unannounced, no appointment, and asked to see me. When we met he said, “We,” meaning the search committee at Madison Avenue, “were hoping that you would apply.”
Well, having the door opened by him at that point, I decided to follow through with it, and I did so with a great deal of doubt because I had grown up in a Presbyterian church, where the din of the congregational chatter before the service completely drowned out anything that could possibly be done on the organ. And I had the impression that Presbyterians generally did not place a very high value on the quality of the worship, the sermon being the centerpiece of the whole Sunday morning experience. But I met with the committee at Madison Avenue and particularly with their pastor David H.C. Reed, in whom I found a Presbyterian with wonderfully high regard for worship and high expectations for the quality of worship. My fears were allayed. I did go to Madison Avenue in the fall of 1970, and immediately we began changing the nature of the worship service there. The congregation began to sing a great deal more—four hymns every Sunday, plus they began to sing the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.
That progressed until the congregation tended to draw people who liked to sing, and so the congregational singing was strong and is to this day. David Reed was followed by Dr. Fred Anderson, who was a musician—his first degree was as a music major—and a great lover of music and of worship. Now one could go to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and the worship experience would be very ecumenical. You would not be certain if you were in a Lutheran or a Roman Catholic or an Episcopal church. It’s very much Presbyterian, but at the same time very ecumenical and very rich liturgically.
MB: Have you considered yourself an organist who composes or have you always thought of yourself as a composer who had to make his way as an organist and a teacher?
JW: Very definitely the former: I’m an organist first and foremost, but I’m an organist who loves to compose. Many composers who try to write for the organ don’t understand the instrument and therefore write pieces that get a premiere performance and are never heard again. In fact, the organ literature that does become mainstream is almost always written by people who play the instrument. One great exception is Paul Hindemith, but he of course was able to write for any instrument, and he always did his research and knew what he was doing—he wrote three wonderful organ sonatas and a concerto.
Years ago, when I was in my early teens, I started going to Vermont in the summer to a music camp for theory. No lessons were taught on piano or clarinet or violin or anything like that. There was no applied music—it was all theory. We had counterpoint classes, form and analysis, and harmony and such, and the result of it was that the students of the camp composed because we had been given the tools of the musical language.
So I’ve gone to Vermont every summer of my life to compose, and now that I live here I hope to do a lot more composing. I’ve also composed primarily things that I myself could use. Although everything I’ve composed for the last 15 years has been on commission, I’ve always written something that I could use in my own work, either in recitals or in church services. I’ve written a lot of choral music and a lot of organ solo pieces and also several pieces for organ and flute because my wife is a very good flutist and we like to be able to play those pieces together.

MB: Do you have any favorites among the pieces that you’ve written? JW: My favorites tend to be the ones that have been performed a great deal. The Passacaglia on a Theme of Dunstable—it may not in fact be by Dunstable, but it was thought to be by him, namely the tune Deo gratias—was composed for the 25th anniversary of the state trumpets at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and I played the premiere performance there. It’s a set of variations in passacaglia form, and one variation is designated for that magnificent state trumpet at the west end of that huge cathedral. Nevertheless, the piece works on instruments that don’t have that particular kind of stop available. The piece has been recorded by a number of people and has been played all over the world—that gives me a lot of satisfaction. It’s also one of my favorite pieces.

MB: How many compositions have you’ve written up to this point?
JW: I’ve probably composed about 20 choral pieces, that is, anthem-length pieces. I’ve also composed all four gospel settings of the Passion story, and probably a dozen solo organ pieces.

MB: And other than the commission that you just received on Friday, the future is an open book at this point?
JW: Yes, actually that’s the only commission I have in hand right now, but I am trusting that others will come in. And if they don’t I’ll write anyhow.

MB: Someone wanting to commission you would do what? Do you have a website?
JW: .

MB: Do you enjoy the process of recording? You’ve made some notable recordings. It ends up sounding as though you’re having a good time, even if you might not be.
JW: No, I hate recording. [laughter] There’s something a little bit antiseptic about it. First of all, one does not get that sense of response from a live audience. You simply do the playing, and then there are people sitting around with scores and dials and they’re wanting to do this over again and that over again—or a siren will go off or there’ll be a clap of thunder; things like that can make it very frustrating. When they listen to a recording, people have no idea about how long it takes to make that, because street noises or other interruptions can destroy what otherwise would have been a perfect take. It’s very hard.

MB: You’ve been performing in Portland on the Kotzschmar organ—well, you must have been a boy in knee pants when you started.
JW: It was in 1956—at the end of my first year as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music—when I first played the instrument that had been given to the city of Portland by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, whose daughter was the founder of the Curtis Institute. So there was a wonderful connection there. And I’ve been back every year since. [Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver played his 50th recital on the Kotzschmar in August 2005.]

MB: The organ is a challenge as a musical instrument—it is this device with so many opportunities for color and dynamics, and yet is an incredibly complex machine, which even at its best seems to be intractable. Is this something that organists don’t think about, they just do? Or is making music on the organ as difficult as it might appear to a layman, seeing all of those controls to be manipulated and the separation between the console and the pipework and all of that?
JW: Michael, I believe every instrument has its challenges. For pianists, the way in which the key is struck is so critical, and a pianist’s hands must cover a large key compass, whereas organs have a shorter keyboard, 61 notes as opposed to 88; and organ music tends to stay in the middle register, so, in a way, that’s much easier. Violinists have tiny strings and a fingerboard, and it amazes me that they can play a C major scale. Violin virtuosos are just astonishing. The challenges of the organ are mastering the pedals, mastering console technique that enables you to draw upon the resources of the instrument—and then also to a very great extent, the imagination that you can bring to bear with so many different colors available. Each person will choose sounds to produce the right color, if I might use that word, for the passage that they’re playing in a way that pianists and violinists couldn’t possibly do.

MB: In the 21st century young organists face not only sustaining the presence of their instrument but actually rebuilding an audience for organ music. I see this as a real challenge.
JW: Yes, it is. Every now and then though, one sees very hopeful signs—one of those being the recent installation within the last five to ten years of a great many organs in the concert halls of this country—something that’s fairly standard in Europe; for instance, the renovation of the wonderful Ernest Skinner organ in Severance Hall in Cleveland, a new organ in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the restoration of the organ in Boston Symphony Hall, the new Disney Hall instrument in Los Angeles. One could go on and on and name any number of places where new instruments have been installed or old instruments have been restored—to me this suggests that the organ will take, again, its place as a concert instrument and not just a liturgical instrument.
On the other hand, it must be said that concert halls are often not the most perfect, acoustically, for organs. Great organ music was written to sound its best in places with fairly substantial reverberation, such as a large stone church. So concert hall organs are wonderful, and I’m glad they’re being built, and they enable us to do organ concerti and sometimes organ solo recitals. But the church, particularly one that has a long reverberation period, is still where the organ seems most at home.

MB: How would you compare the scene for organs and organists in your day? Was this a peak of energy with that marvelous—some would say divisive, some would say energy producing—polarity between the historicists and E. Power Biggs on one side, and the theatricalists and Virgil Fox on the other? We don’t have quite that type of energy today. I daresay the man in the street, if asked to name a concert organist today, might be hard pressed, whereas back in the ’60s and early ’70s, the names of Biggs and Fox were very much in the public ear.
JW: Biggs and Fox, both of them very talented, extraordinary musicians, had a great advantage of working right at the time that the LP recording was becoming common in the American home. RCA Victor and Columbia were the big producers of LP recordings at the beginning of that time in the early ’50s. And there was Biggs and there was Fox, and these two polarities were represented in the recording industry—that did a great deal for the visibility of the organ and the popularity of organ music.

MB: It could be argued that now is both the best of times and the worst of times—there are far more organ recordings available, representing a much larger panoply of artistry and instruments both new built and historic, marvelously represented—and yet there is so much that the focus is lost to some degree.
JW: Yes, I think that’s right. When it was Biggs and Fox, you could expect to find their names in the crossword puzzle. No organist today has that kind of visibility. Another name that was right up there at the top was Marcel Dupré because of his extraordinary playing and also the fact that he had been the teacher of so many organists in the U.S. through the Fulbright program. There isn’t anyone who has really achieved that kind of star status in the organ world, which is not to say that there aren’t a great many wonderfully talented and brilliant performers. Maybe there are just too many.

MB: Yes, it could be argued that the performance quality of the 21st century is higher than it’s ever been. Do you think that it’s possible with so much talent around for someone to distinguish themselves or do they have to almost jump beyond mere artistry and do something odd in order to be discovered? JW: Perhaps it would be best to think in terms of naming names. The name of Cameron Carpenter who studied with me at Juilliard comes to mind. Cameron is extraordinarily flamboyant, both in dress and personality and in playing. His playing annoys the purists terribly, but certain people are simply mesmerized by his performances. And he is a genius—there’s no question about that. Another name that gets a great deal of visibility these days is the young German organist, Felix Hell, whom I also had the honor to teach. Felix, at first, was famous because he was so very young when he was playing recitals all over the world, literally, as he still does. But now he is taking his place among the more mature artists of the younger generation and plays very well indeed—and has made numerous recordings. So these two are a little bit like Biggs and Fox—Felix tends to be a fairly conservative player, not extremely so but more middle of the road, whereas Cameron is way out there in show biz land.

MB: Presuming it’s something different from that marvelous, resonate low “E” that had you mesmerized as a child, when you play and hear the organ, what sort of thoughts go through your mind? What is it about the instrument that still captures your heart and soul?
JW: Who could not be seduced by the instrument itself? Just the mechanics of it and this great collection of pipes, some of them enormous, much larger than most people realize, and most of them very much smaller. I think when a layman sees the inside of a pipe organ for the first time, they’re always astonished—even if it’s a small instrument, it looks amazingly big and complex. And the large ones, of course, are simply mind-boggling. So there’s something about the instrument: its bigness, its history. When I’m playing an organ, if I’m playing Bach I’m thinking about instruments I’ve played that Bach may have played—there’s this great history and great repertoire, and frankly the sound of the instrument has always seduced me.

MB: How would you characterize your playing style?
JW: Probably other people should do that. I would say that I am in the middle someplace. I probably am a little bit on the extrovert side of dead center, but I also am not one to completely disregard the knowledge that musicologists have brought to us of performance practice, of historic instruments—but sometimes I will just say “this piece that I’m playing on this particular instrument cannot be played in a good, authentic, 18th-century style.” Something must be done to make the music and the organ come together in a way that is satisfying and gratifying. And sometimes that means just throwing the rulebook out the window.

MB: Did you set out with goals? You probably didn’t begin your study imagining you would go to Curtis, and then after having studied at Curtis, you probably hadn’t thought that you might end up teaching there, or at Juilliard for that matter. You’re like a natural surfer who has swum out into the sea and found a fantastic wave and you’ve been able to ride that wave through your career with skill, with accomplishment, certainly with a sense of pride. How do you look back at your career from this point?
JW: I would have to say that as with many careers, a great deal of it has to do with being at the right place at the right time, but also having ability to do the job that is required. I’ve often thought that if I had been five years younger, the Curtis Institute would not have thought me an appropriate age to head that organ department. If I had been five years older, it’s likely that they would have chosen someone else from among Alexander McCurdy’s students.

MB: You have moved on from three prestigious positions and you’ve now settled in what used to be your summer home in rural Vermont, up in the marvelous rolling countryside in the northeast corner of the state. Somehow, I can’t think of you as retiring. What projects have you set for yourself for the future?
JW: The mail recently brought a new commission for a new organ piece—that’ll be one of the things. I do want to continue to compose. I’m playing a number of recitals this year including two that I’m extraordinarily excited about, because I will be reunited with the instruments that I had my first lessons on. One of them, the Peabody concert hall Skinner, was put in storage for about 40 years, and then set up at a big Roman Catholic Church in Princeton, New Jersey. A week later I will be playing a recital on the wonderful Skinner organ at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, where my teacher Richard Ross was the organist, and before him, Virgil Fox—a beautiful, perfectly untouched Ernest Skinner that really is quite a marvelous instrument. And I’m playing some other recitals and some dedications around the country.

MB: So, you keep your organ shoes polished and ready to go?
JW: Indeed so.
[Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver has announced that the 2007–2008 concert season will be his last for regular concert activity.]

MB: Tell me about some of your memories from being “on the road.”
JW: The wonderful occasions that I love to think back upon are two recitals that I played—one in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for a national convention of the American Guild of Organists, in which everything went the way I wanted it to. I loved the instrument, the audience was wonderful, the acoustic was great. And the other one was the Mormon Tabernacle—a recital I played when the Tabernacle was having a three-day symposium to celebrate the restoration of the organ there. Everything was fun, and the instrument was to die for, and of course the acoustics are world famous.

MB: Tell me about your railroad fascination. Where did you grow up? Mauch Chunk?
JW: Yes, Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, is a little town north of Allentown and Bethlehem, about 20 miles up into the Pocono Mountains—it’s in a ravine cut by the Lehigh River, and there was a railroad on both sides of the river that ran through the town. The town is now called Jim Thore, but its historic name of Mauch Chunk has great importance. Anyhow, it was a railroad town, and being in this mountain ravine, day or night you could hear the sound of a steam locomotive. The bells and the whistles and the smell of coal smoke were a constant feature of that place. I can remember standing by the railroad track and holding my father’s hand and counting the number of cars on a freight train as it rolled through. It became a part of my life—a very strong hobby, and we are seated right now in the midst of a model railroad that I’m creating that is 26 by 36 feet and has 390 feet of track in it. This is my last model railroad—if I live to 150 I might actually finish it.

MB: And you had one in your office at Madison Avenue Presbyterian.
JW: Yes, unfortunately when I retired from Madison Avenue that meant the end of that railroad, but all of those trains and the structures and the little people and the automobiles and all that are now a part of the railroad here.

MB: I’m sure the compositions that you created for Madison Avenue Presbyterian remain in the files there for the choirs to sing. It’s too bad that your railroad installation in the office wasn’t kept by your replacement.
JW: In the search for my replacement, a fondness for railroads had nothing whatsoever to do with their choice. So.

MB: What of your siblings and in what directions did they go?
JW: My older brother took piano lessons from the same teacher that I had, and he could see that I was making faster progress, so he switched to violin and became in his high school years a reasonably good violinist—he played second chair, first violin in what was at that time a very good high school orchestra. My younger brother is a wonderful tenor, does a lot of solo work in the western Massachusetts area, teaches mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, has an abiding passion for music and even does some composing—he has been published.

MB: And your parents’ musical backgrounds?
JW: Both of my parents played the piano, my father better than my mother. My father had also studied organ for a year or two, and could get through a hymn—knew how to use the pedals a little bit for hymn playing. My mother was an artist, did a master’s at Carnegie Tech and then studied for a year at the Sorbonne—the walls of our houses are covered with paintings that she did over the years.

MB: With your family’s church affiliation and your being a church organist, it’s maybe not surprising that some of the most lovely works that you’ve created have been fantasies on or settings of hymn tunes. You certainly do respond to the church’s song in your compositions.
JW: Well, I love playing hymns. I especially love hymns when a congregation is stirred to sing really well—that’s a wonderful experience. Very often the reason for writing pieces based on hymns has to do with the nature of a commission that I have received. In fact, almost always when I have composed a piece based upon a hymn tune, it’s been requested by the person who commissioned the composition.

MB: Did your parents live to see the honor accorded their son who went on to great things?
JW: My father was very gratified to live to see my appointment to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was one year later that I was appointed to Curtis. By that time, my mother had died, and my father was not at all well. My father did not particularly encourage my desire to be a professional organist. He, as a minister of a medium-size church, saw that as being at best a part-time job, which would mean having to do something else on the side, and that’s always a difficult life. I think he was very happy to see that I had the security of a full-time church position that was also in a church of great prominence within the denomination.

Michael Barone adds: When I first heard John Weaver play, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for the AGO convention in 1984, I was charmed by his physical presence (Mr. Clean in a dinner jacket!), awed by his control of the instrument (and himself), and beguiled by his musicianship. Subsequent convergences have confirmed my first impressions. John is a modest man of major accomplishments, a patrician artist and persuasive virtuoso who has fostered and encouraged the talents and individuality of an inspiring array of youngsters. He is a musician whose own playing leaves a lasting memory, and whose compositions touch the soul. He’s a guy I’ve been both honored and delighted to know. Happy birthday, John!

John Weaver will be the featured guest/topic of a Pipedreams broadcast (#0717) during the week of April 23, 2007, which will remain available 24/7 in an online audio “programs” archive at www.pipedreams.org.

Michael Barone's John Weaver interview

See the interview here.

Other items of interest:

John Weaver honored by Juilliard

John Weaver honored by Union Theological Seminary

Honoring John Weaver's 80th birthday

John Weaver dies at age 83

John Weaver honored by long time representative

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Advent in New York
Today, as I write this column, is the third Sunday of Advent. The Organ Clearing House is installing an organ in Manhattan, and my wife Wendy came down for the weekend. We went to a Christmas choral concert last night on the Upper East Side. We’ve had a string of nice meals together. And this morning we attended the 11 am Choral Eucharist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.
That landmark church is a huge and spectacular place. It’s a true stone Gothic building, especially fascinating as its perpetual state of incompletion allows the architecture aficionado to study the construction techniques—what the massive stonework looks like under the finished limestone veneer. The place is 601 feet long inside. The ceiling is nearly 125 feet above the floor. Single rooms just aren’t that big. There’s something like 15,250,000 cubic feet of air contained inside. Don’t even think about the fuel bill. The idea that a building that large could be dedicated to worship is solid testament to the power of faith—not just American Episcopalianism, but any faith anywhere.
It’s awe-inspiring. It’s breath-taking. It’s humbling. And thinking back on the history of cathedral building, so highly developed in twelfth-century France, it’s easy to understand how people were motivated to create such elevating structures. In rural areas, the cathedral building is visible for miles. Approaching Chartres in France, for example, one sees the famous cathedral on the horizon from a great distance. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC dominates the top of a hill, so it can be seen from Route I-95 some ten miles to the east of the city. In upper Manhattan, there’s really no place that I’ve found on ground level where you can see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine from any great distance. If you approach by subway, you get off the 1-2-3 train at 110th Street, walk north to 112th, turn right, and there you see the west-end façade of the cathedral at the end of the block. Heading up Amsterdam Avenue from Midtown, you don’t see the cathedral until you’re right on it. It blends in with the hundreds of façades that line the east side of the street. When you pass 110th Street, the cathedral campus opens up to the right—a dramatic and verdant two-block oasis in that busy urbanscape.

You can’t hold a candle to it.
Worship in the cathedral was a wonderful experience for us. Although the nave can seat thousands, there were enough people in attendance for the place to feel populated. There was a raft of clergy in beautiful vestments, clouds of incense wafting to the heavens, and a brigade of acolytes. I chuckled at the sight of a pint-sized acolyte bearing a candle on a pole that must have weighed as much as he did—and in order to show up in such a vast place, altar candles need to be fifty-pounders.
Perhaps the grandest thing about the place is the sound. We usually measure reverberation in half-seconds. At St. John the Divine it’s measured in days. Walk in on a Monday morning, and yesterday’s postlude is still in the air. Close your eyes and spin around, and you can no longer tell where a sound originates. The organ chambers were 150 feet from where we were sitting. The organ’s sound is powerful and rich. Gentle individual colors are easily distinguishable. Of course, we expect always to be able to tell when a Clarinet is playing, or when it’s replaced by an Oboe, but I am somehow surprised that subtle tones carry so distinctly in such a vast space. Some of the most impressive subtle tones in a monumental organ are the quiet 32-foot stops. An 800-pound Bourdon pipe consumes a hurricane of air through a four- or five-inch toe-hole to produce a rumbling whisper. It has to be the most extravagant consumption of materials and forces in the entire world of music. But when you sit a hundred feet away in a vast interior space, it’s impossible to put a price on that quality of sound.
The grand choruses of principals and reeds create huge washes of sound. The organ is powerful enough to startle you from across the room. There’s a good variety of bold solo reeds that bring clarity to hymn tunes. And perhaps the most famous organ stop in the world is 600 feet away high on the west wall under the great rose window—the State Trumpet. It’s blown with 50 inches of wind pressure—that’s more than twice what we otherwise consider to be high pressure. And do those pipes ever sound. One would never ask, “was that the State Trumpet?” The only answer would be, “If you’ve gotta ask, that wasn’t it.”
If you’ve never been able to experience the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, go. Just go. You can get there easily on the subway from Pennsylvania Station or Grand Central Station. You can find plenty of great meals within a few blocks. There are terrific hotels nearby, especially in my experience along Broadway between 75th and 80th Streets—just a few subway stops from the cathedral.
In summer 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri completed their restoration of the cathedral’s mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. You can read about that project in detail in the November 2009 issue of The American Organist. The Organ Clearing House was engaged to assist in the installation of the organ, and it was our privilege to spend that summer hoisting and assembling thousands of organ parts in the chambers, nearly a hundred feet above the floor of the cathedral. Sometime soon I’ll write about that experience in more detail. For now, take my advice—just go.

A clean sweep
So we’re installing an organ. Sunday is over and we’re into the work week. Sometimes we work in parish church buildings in quiet little towns. There’s a big parking lot where we can leave our cars. There’s plenty of space around the building for maneuvering trucks. And the sidewalks are quiet, so it’s easy to walk around while carrying heavy loads. There’s a hardware store just up the street, next to a sandwich shop that sells great coffee in cardboard cups.
Not this time. We’re working on 74th Street in Manhattan, just east of Park Avenue. It’s a great neighborhood, but it’s very busy. Park Avenue is lined with high-end housing—high-rise condominium buildings with uniformed doormen, expensively dressed women with little expensively dressed designer dogs, and snazzy green awnings. I think the nearest business on Park Avenue is the Maserati dealer. I’ve never been inside. They don’t have anything there that I need.
Lexington Avenue is one block to the east. It’s a much more interesting street, with hundreds of shops, cafés, restaurants, groceries—and thousands of people on the sidewalks. You can buy coffee, but it’s four or five dollars a cup. The hardware store is a half-hour round-trip walk (forget about driving—you’ll never find a parking space). There are delivery people on foot and on bicycles carrying everything from flowers to groceries to meals. 74th Street is supposedly one lane wide with parking on both sides.
The north side of the street is cleaned every Monday and Thursday—the south side on Tuesday and Friday. “Alternate Side Parking” is the regulation regarding street cleaning. The big street-sweeping machines are escorted by a fleet of public works cars. They come into the street and fan out, sticking to windshields aggressively tacky stickers that scold residents for thwarting their efforts to keep the city clean by leaving their cars in violation of the sweeping schedule. Seems that they don’t need to issue citations—the stickers are so difficult to remove that they are punishment enough. One car had three weeks’ worth of stickers. I guess the owner just gave up.
There’s a nursery school in the church building. At 8:30 every morning a platoon of kids arrives in the building escorted by parents and au pairs. A lot of them come by car.
Last week we brought a large truck into the neighborhood to deliver a load of organ parts. We got it here before 6:30 in the morning because we knew there’d be a scene. It’s difficult enough to park a car on a Manhattan cross-street. Just try to parallel-park a 45-foot-long truck. It was street-sweeping day, and the garbage trucks came at the same time as the street-sweepers. The nursery-school delivery was in full swing. There’s a private school across the street—a few hundred middle-schoolers added to the mix. And the sidewalks were jammed with people hurrying to work. Professional dog-walkers with their dozen-at-a-time charges sniffed their ways along, criss-crossing their leashes like a maypole dance. Building contractors were leaning on brooms, finishing their morning coffee. We were carrying 16-foot-long wooden organ pipes (500 pounds each) out of our truck, across the sidewalk, and into the church. It was quite a spectacle. It’s amazing how little patience people can have for people doing their work.

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Once we get everything inside, the fun really starts. This organ is going into two locations in the building. The Swell, Great, and large Pedal stops are going in a high organ loft on the rear wall of the building. The Positif, Solo, and the rest of the Pedal are going in a chamber in the chancel. The Solo will be above the Positif, speaking through grilles in the arched chancel ceiling. We’re starting with the gallery organ. Today we hoisted the larger of the two Swell windchests into place. It’s about fifteen feet to the floor of the gallery and another eight or nine up to the frame where the chest sits. We have towers of scaffolding set up on the floor of the nave, with a bridge between that supports an electric chain-hoist. We can use the hoist to get the heavy parts up into the gallery, but we have to manhandle them from the gallery floor to their resting places in the organ’s framework. The 16-foot Double Open Wood pipes (those 500-pounders) are lying on the gallery floor under the organ. The organ’s floor frame is supported above those pipes. The tall legs that support the windchests are on top of the floor frame. And the 12-foot-high Swell box sits on top of all that.
The organ is a heavy industrial machine. It comprises many tons of wood along with hundreds of other materials. There are leather valves and bellows, steel springs, and every imaginable type of fastener. There are sophisticated valves for regulating wind pressure, compensating between the flow of air from the blower and the demand for air from the player and, by extension, the pipes. There are bearings that allow Swell shutters to operate noiselessly. There are powerful pneumatic motors that operate those shutters. There is a complex network of wind conductors that carry the pressurized “organ” air from blower to reservoirs and from reservoirs to windchests and various other appliances.
It can seem overwhelming as you get all that material out of a truck and into a building, then up into place. And after all that, it has to work. There are weeks of work finessing connections and adjustments, tuning, adjusting the speech and regulation of thousands of organ pipes.
The electrician is coming today to wire the blowers. That makes one more truck in the neighborhood, one more vehicle liable for citations, one more guy we’re depending on who’s liable to be held up in traffic.
It takes tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and install a pipe organ. It would be nice to be able to count and control how many times each part of the organ gets lifted—a busy organ company lifts many thousands of pounds of material every day.

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When it’s all done we sit down to play. We forget the splinters, the cuts and bruises, the sleepless nights sitting up thinking through problems. We forget the sidewalk congestion, the hassle of plowing through dense city traffic in an oversized truck. We forget the endless days of hoisting, fastening, balancing, and fitting thousands of oddly shaped and unwieldy pieces. And we forget the hundreds of hours of powerful concentration as we adjust keyboard springs and contacts and strive to eliminate the music-spoiling effects of poor mechanical operation.
We hear the magic of air-driven musical sound reverberating through the building. We feel the incomparable vibrations of immense bass pipes rumbling along the bass lines of the music. We experience the energy of the congregation’s singing, complemented and enhanced by the majesty of the organ’s tone.
Imagine a church up the street receiving delivery of an electronic organ. It comes out of a truck, gets moved inside, plugged in, speakers hooked up, and you sit down and play.
It would be much easier to find funding for pipe organs if they were the essential engines of international finance. There are bankers within blocks of me here in Manhattan whose offices cost more than the organ we’re working on. Because pipe organs are “engines” of worship and because churches are the institutions that depend most on them, there will always be a struggle between the cost of producing them and the owner’s ability to fund them. There have not been many organs built without some kind of financial constraint. If we could have raised another $30,000 we could have had that Bourdon 32′.
I’m often asked how I got involved in organbuilding. Fact is, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing. 

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.