In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Tan shoes and pink shoelaces . . .
You can spot him a mile away. Red checked pants, a striped shirt, paisley tie, and a cute little wool cap with a pom-pom—a veritable cornucopia. All the colors are too bright and they all clash with each other. How do we know they clash? I know there’s a physical reason—the physics of light, that is. Mix two cans of paint with the same ingredients, and put a few drops of a tint from the other end of the spectrum in one of them, and voila! They clash. But spectrographic explanations aside, I’m reminded of the comment made by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart while hearing an obscenity case in 1964: “. . . pornography is hard to define . . . but I know it when I see it.” No question, those pants and that shirt clash.

A polka-dot vest, and man, oh man. . .
Organ-folk are quick to make judgments about clashing styles or poor taste. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a friend or colleague make a knowing and snide comment about the tacky decorations of a church interior, I’d have a lot of nickels. I’m not sure I know from where this predilection comes, but it’s strong and prevailing. The funny thing is that while the comments are delivered in a sardonic tone, sometimes accompanied by a little sniff, they’re usually right. Seems that most every time I hear such a comment, I agree with the sniffer. I wonder if others hear me making comments like that.

Tan shoes and pink shoelaces. . .
You catch a glimpse of a church building out of the corner of your eye from a fast-moving train, and you know without thinking about it that the architect got the proportions wrong. Simple rules and mathematical ratios were worked out millennia ago to define good proportions. A building façade that’s twice as tall as it is wide simply doesn’t look as good as one where the width is three-fifths of the height. In round and rough terms, that’s the Golden Section—the builders of the Parthenon used it, Leonardo da Vinci drew and defined it, and Arp Schnitger used it. Frank Gehry has gone as far away from it as he could, the theory being that if all the lines are curved, proportions don’t apply. (Oops, there I go with a snide judgment—in fact, I like the looks of most of his buildings.)
A big panama with a purple hat band.1
Last week I participated in a conference presented by the City University of New York Research Center for Music Iconography, and the Organ Historical Society. “Organs in Art/Organs as Art” included many interesting discussions of how the pipe organ appears as visual art. The schedulers grouped several papers on pipe organ design into one day, providing a fascinating overview of how organbuilders struggle with design issues. In one sense, a pipe organ is a furnishing in a room. But because the organ is likely to be the largest and often the most complex design element within an architectural space, there are all sorts of possibilities for clashing designs and ideas. This struggle has been going on for centuries—there are many places where a Baroque organ was imposed on a Romanesque church, for example. And today we see modern organs with ornate classical designs placed in simple contemporary rooms. Is the mixing of architectural styles on a monumental level necessarily the equivalent of that clash of plaid and stripes?

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I’ve been reflecting on modern church buildings, especially about how many new churches are built and decorated as though they were private homes. The ceilings are low, flat, and plain, perforated in some sort of geometric pattern with recessed light fixtures—as if upside-down prairie dogs would poke out their heads to look around. Windows are plain, perhaps in wan pastel tones. Plush carpets absorb the nasty shuffling sound of the congregation coming and going along with the carefully prepared music and spoken words, so public address systems are installed to overcome the lack of resonance and the worship takes on a clangy, brash tone of voice. Door hardware is straight from Home Depot, and fancy electronic lighting controls adorn the walls by each door.
These fixtures give the place a look of utility and efficiency, completely ignoring the idea of creating a place conducive to worship. The efficient-looking fixtures are often accompanied by a squad of volunteers who run around before each service plugging in microphones and taping notes to the walls about which switches should never be touched, This means you!
From outside, the building looks like a ranch house. Steeples are made of aluminum in factories and arrive at the construction site on trucks. The spire, originally serving as a symbol of closeness to God, has become a decorative element stuck on the roof, a pro-forma icon.
Many buildings that fit this description do not have pipe organs, or even the facsimile of pipe organs. And I suppose it’s not up to me (or us) to make judgments about that. But when such a building does get a pipe organ, it can be exciting for the organbuilder to design an instrument that instills the sense of worship that the building otherwise lacks. The pipe organ makes the place be a church. And because there’s precious little in the way of architectural expression with which to clash, the organbuilder can have a field day introducing splendor without fear of upsetting the natural laws.
I know of many instances where an attractive, decorated organ case brings beauty to a plain building, creating a sense of worship in a drywall box. But above all, it’s the responsibility of the worship leaders, clergy, musicians, and lay people alike, to create that sense, whether in a thrilling stone building with Gothic arches or in a glade under a sunny sky.

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A few weeks ago I was riding the Broadway Express “1” train in New York, when a woman toting an electronic keyboard and a milk crate got on board. The doors closed with the ubiquitous New York electronic voice braying, “Stand clear of the closing door, please,” the milk crate became a podium and with an artificial boom-chicka-chick snare-brush background, that familiar strain from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 147, Jesu bleibet meine Freude filled the air. At one end of the car a cell phone rang with the opening mordents and scales of BWV 565: beedle-deeeee, duddle-duddle-dut-daaah—beedle-deeee, dut-dut-dut-daaah. Such trivialization of such magnificent music. The subway car resonated with cheapness that originated in the mind of one of music’s greatest liturgists. Another cell phone proclaimed the eight-note chaconne of the Taco-Bell Canon.
I got off the car three stops early and waited for the next train. I chide myself for sounding like an old fogey, but I really dislike the trivial use of such grand literature.
Commercial classical radio stations seem only to have a half-dozen recordings. I know it’s not literally true, but as I travel around the country tuning in to the local station in a hotel room, I get the sense that if Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, and a few war-horse piano pieces were banned, there would be no more commercial airing of good music.
Barnes & Noble is a symbol of the homogeneity of our cultural lives. There’s no denying that those big temples of literature with snazzy espresso bars and overstuffed chairs attract people to bookstores like never before. Twenty years ago we might have dreamed about a chain of 75,000 square-foot bookstores with 200-space parking lots and escalators. But the fact is, the books they stock and feature are all bought centrally, so avid readers in Washington, DC and Cheyenne, WY are seeing the same things. If the buying-gurus of the massive chains don’t think a book will sell, it may not get published. The commercialization of literature gets in the way of freedom of expression.
Likewise, I think it easy to draw the conclusion that there are only a couple dozen decent pieces of organ music. I go in and out of many church buildings and always look at last week’s bulletin to take notice of what’s being played. It’s remarkable how homogeneous the programming of church music has become. Many of us lament the trend of churches seeking alternative forms of musical expression, but repeat my exercise with commercial classical radio and remove Carols for Choirs from every music library in the country, and a mighty number of church musicians would have no idea what to do for Christmas.
Take away Purcell, Stanley, Pachelbel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner and there would be no more wedding music. I know that the bride’s mother always insists on the same music, but let’s use some imagination here. Challenge yourself. Plan an entire year of preludes and postludes without repeating a single piece. If you play Toccata and Fugue (you know the composer and the key without being told) every six weeks, you may unwittingly be contributing to the onward march of praise bands. It’s a great piece, but isn’t there something else to try?
We lament the dilution of the centuries-old tradition of the pipe organ, but we fail to champion new ideas, new expressions, or new thoughts that make the music in our church different from others.
Back to Frank Gehry with his bendy rulers. Never was an architect so imaginative as to design whole buildings with no straight lines. His Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles is a kaleidoscope of forms and shapes that challenges and delights my eye. Contrary to the traditional forms of concert halls, I find it hard to relate the shapes of the interior spaces to those of the exterior. And the organ—man alive, what a wild conception. I’m sure there are plenty who think it’s horrible, but I love the fact that he was willing to stretch the boundaries and produce a new form. During my first visit to the instrument, I was fascinated to hear colleague Manuel Rosales describe the design process—his insistence that the organ must work as a traditionally conceived musical instrument, common somehow to the experiences of a broad range of players. But while the great classics of the literature sound stunning, the phantasmagorical façade cries out for new forms of expression.
It is our responsibility to present the pipe organ, even in its most traditional forms, to the public of the twenty-first century in such a way as to inspire modern minds, which are apparently so easily satisfied by homogeneity—by Big Macs, Barnes & Noble, and, God forgive me, Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

John Bishop is Executive Director of the Organ Clearing House.

Organs aloft
A good friend worked with me for several years as a tuning assistant. He’s a grand singer with lots of theater experience, and is music director of a nearby church where he presides over an ambitious choir program—one of those with the enviable problem of bursting the seams of the church’s building. When someone new joins the choirs, it’s hard to find her a seat. One day we were driving together to a tuning job, and I was guessing that the organ would be below pitch and we’d likely have to correct it—start over with a new “A,” a new temperament, and then tune every pipe. Using sloppy slang, I said to Mark that we would probably pitch the organ. He jumped instantly into a hilarious romp with a flawless Scottish accent in which Organ Pitching was added to the Scottish Games.
If you’re not familiar with Scottish Games, I invite you to take a look at <www.caledonian.org/usheavyevents.html&gt;. This page is from the site of the Caledonian Club of San Francisco, and describes the history and rules of games such as the Caber Toss in which competitors throw a tapered section of a tree trunk, and Weight for Height where competitors in different classes throw 28, 42, or 56 pound weights over a bar (maybe the origin of the phrase, hoisting a few). I confess that I find a comical side to what is clearly a serious competition, and I still chuckle when the phrase Organ Pitching crosses my mind—not infrequently in the work of the Organ Clearing House! Don’t know yet if we’re going for distance or height. In either event we’re likely to go akimbo—or is it a-kilter?
Sounds disrespectful I know, but there is a practical reality.

The organ loft
There’s a narrow door in the narthex of the stone building. You open it and find a tight-radius spiral stairway. The wooden door at the top of the stairs is swollen in its frame—you have to give the bottom corner a little kick, and the door makes a characteristic shuddering sound as it opens. (There’s usually a musty smell.) But your struggle is rewarded. You come around the corner to a breathtaking view down the nave. And there’s the organ console, inviting you to send majestic sounds across the abyss. I’m thinking of an enchanting morning I spent at La Madeleine in Paris about ten years ago when a sub-organist showed me the organ that had been played by Saint-Saëns and Fauré. He said he had to go to a meeting—I could leave with him or be locked in with the organ for an hour or two until the meeting was over. I chose “B.”

Lofty ideals
I know a different kind of organ loft. The hobbyist notices that a local church is closing. He has an old barn behind the house—why not nab the organ from the church and put it up in the hayloft. “I’ll fix it up and install in the loft—it’ll sound just like it did in the church.”
Two or three sweaty Saturdays later, the organ is among 80-year-old vestiges of actual farming. “That’s all the time I have right now. I’ll set it up in a couple years.” A year later, he sees a set of old wooden organ pipes at a flea market. Up into the loft they go. That’s when he notices that mice have been running around the first deposit. “Oh well, I’ll clean that up when I put the organ together.” And so on . . .
It’s easier to start a project than finish one.
Forty years later, the Organ Clearing House gets a call. “We’ve just bought a house, and there are a lot of antique tubes in the barn. Someone told us they’re worth a lot of money.” You know what, probably not. On more than one occasion, I’ve recommended that such material be discarded or sent to the melting pot of an organ-pipe maker. And on more than one of those occasions, I’ve been berated, even abused, by people who angrily inform me that they thought the Organ Clearing House was “committed to preservation.”
Rule number one: we can’t save them all.
Rule number two: we should be sure we’re working hard to save the good stuff.
Rule number three: you rarely find good stuff in a hayloft.

What can be saved?
The preservation of pipe organs is the principal activity of the Organ Clearing House. But as we are in the front line receiving news of organs being offered for sale, we know as well as anyone that it’s not practical or possible to save them all. Our warehouse is full. If we come across an instrument important enough to preserve by placing it in storage, another has to be discarded. So how do we choose?
The obvious first answer is that we try to save the best ones. But it’s not that simple. I notice that there are organs with lesser artistic content that are higher in usefulness. There are at least two basic styles of pipe-organ action that allow for more compact layouts—a good instrument in one of those styles may offer a terrific opportunity for a church that has limited space. Or a simple and non-descript electro-pneumatic organ might prove to be readily adaptable to a tricky physical situation. You can view such an organ as a kit by putting a good tonal structure on those sturdy chests. Be sure a good voicer has the chance to work his magic, and you’ll have a winner on your hands. There’s economy available in the reuse of well-made reservoirs, chests, swell boxes, and building frames, even if they’re not from a major builder.
I believe that the ubiquitous 15-rank Hook & Hastings organ on which the OCH built its reputation is one of the most pure and artistically sophisticated versions of the American pipe organ, but I’ve learned to accept that those organs can be difficult to place in new homes. Along with their thrilling tonal structures come beefcake physiques. A 12-stop organ might have a footprint of fifteen feet wide and eight feet deep—simply too much for a lot of buildings. Most organs of that style (and they’re not all by Hook & Hastings) are arranged internally with Swell-behind-Great. There’s a simple frame with four sturdy legs and two long chest bearers holding up both manual windchests with walkboard between, and the organ is pretty deep from front to back. The relatively rare “stacked” version with Swell-above-Great is typically snapped up because those instruments require less floor space—but of course they stand taller and won’t fit under the ceilings of many buildings.
Living in New England, we’re surrounded by stately older churches. These are the buildings for which the 19th-century American tracker organ was conceived, and of course there’s space for them. But today’s architecture has taken us far from the “here’s the church, here’s the steeple” kind of building. Contemporary churches can be high-end exciting buildings with creative designs and innovative interior spaces or simple buildings held up by laminated beams. In the first, perhaps the architect has not done enough homework to know how much space and what sort of acoustical environment a pipe organ needs. In the second, it’s common that the area of the floor plan is misleading because the side walls are short and the pitch of the roof starts early. Nestling an organ up against a side wall doesn’t allow the necessary height for an organ. And the rear balcony in such a building is likely to be suited for a Lilliputian choir, let alone anything resembling a pipe organ.
The standard and simple A-frame church building has been the natural breeding ground of the digital substitute for the pipe organ.

A Brobdingnagian setting
Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) gives us satirical views of international travel. Lilliputians (the residents of Lilliput) are about one-twelfth the size of humans, while Brobdingnagians (the residents of Brobdingnag) are about twelve times our size—a neat study in reverse ratios. These contrasting imaginary nations often enter my thinking as I travel among our clients. Too frequently I run my Stanley Fat-Max® tape measure up the back wall of a church and wish I could pull out another eight feet. (The Stanley is great for this because the blade is wide and rigid, and with a little practice you can run it 25 or 30 feet up a wall—a little like balancing a ball on your nose.)
Too often the challenge of the contemporary American organbuilder is to reconcile the seating capacity of a room with its ceiling height. We can imagine or devise formulas that define number of seats-per-rank, which are spoiled when given an 18-foot ceiling. Put 300 singing congregants in a room and you really want a 16-foot Principal.
When designing a sailboat, the difference in a foot or two of overall length can mean a huge increase in weight, sail area, and cost. Go from 35 to 37 feet and you might add 12,000 pounds to the weight of the boat. An architect or engineer can tell you the difference in price between an 18-foot and a 20-foot ceiling in a new church building. The 20-foot ceiling might allow that 16-foot Principal, but the cost of the building goes up by 40 percent. (This is when the price-per-stop of an organ becomes fictional—count in the cost of the new building and the 16-foot Principal becomes a four-million-dollar stop!)
But consider the example of the 1880s New England church building. A floor plan of 90-by-50 feet calls for a ceiling height of maybe 30 feet. There’s a balcony stretching around sides and back, a seating capacity of 800, and that 40-stop organ sits comfortably up front. It’s not necessary to make the lowest notes of the 16-footer be Haskell basses, it’s not necessary to jam the Great chorus against the ceiling, and it’s not necessary to cut the maintenance access under the Swell to 18 inches. I’ve measured people’s shoulders to make that crawl-space as small as possible—that’s not a good way to ensure the long-term reliability of a pipe organ.
I’ve got two things going on here—the preservation of vintage organs and the proportions of church buildings. The organs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries are telling us something about the natural proportions of buildings. Later 20th-century advances in building techniques have altered the proportions of modern buildings. My 19th-century model church is dominant in the local skyline because of its style of construction. A given floor plan determines a ceiling height. The ceiling height determines the pitch and loft of the roof because the timbers that hold up the ceiling are directly related to height of the roof.
The builder of a new pipe organ has some flexibility in design to make a few large pipes lie down or go wider rather than taller. But if you’re interested in the preservation of a vintage organ, you have a hard time when working in modern cost-effective worship spaces.
Reinforced concrete and steel or laminated beams allow us to have lower ceilings in wider rooms. Saves money in construction, but the majesty is lost. When your church is thinking of building a new sanctuary, slip a few photos of the “real thing” on the conference table. Your organbuilder will thank you.
And as we preserve those instruments built in earlier ages, let’s be sure we’re choosing the good ones. There’s no room for mediocrity in pipe-organ building. That’s when we decide to pitch them.
While you’re reading online about Scottish Games, take the natural leap to read about bagpipes, especially the jokes. How can you tell a piper with perfect pitch? He can throw a set into a pond without hitting any of the ducks.

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. 

Location, location, location

Near where I live there’s a long hill with a sweeping curve on a two-lane U.S. highway. It’s often snow-covered, or worse, covered with black ice, that spookiest of road conditions where a sheet of invisible ice lurks to deceive the unwary. Just about halfway up the hill there’s an auto body repair shop. When I drive by I wonder if the proprietor chose the site because it would take just a few seconds for him to get his tow truck onto the road. His location must be a primary source of his success. When we place a pipe organ in a church building, we should remind ourselves of this basic wisdom. Not that the organ is preying on the unfortunate for its success, but that good placement is simple wisdom. It doesn’t make much sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an organ that is hindered by poor placement.
The organ should be placed where it can be best heard, where it can best lead, where its visual presence is most inspiring. The placement of the console or keydesk should allow the organist a view of the choir, the altar, pulpit, center aisle—all the places in the building where things might happen that would affect the player’s timing, response, and participation in the flow of worship. Also, the experience of the congregation can be enhanced by their ability to see and interact with the organist as a worship leader. One church where I served as music director had the organ console placed in an awkward hole in the chancel floor, out of sight for most of the congregation. There was a wonderful woman in the congregation who habitually sat in the little area where eye contact with the organist was possible. Every time I started a hymn, she’d nod or shake her head to let me know whether or not she liked that one. It was a ritual that I really enjoyed.

What’s Wright for one . . .

Frank Lloyd Wright is revered for his visual designs. But when touring his buildings, one is struck by their impracticability. Houses have built-in severe furniture such as chairs with stiff upright backs and flat seats. Because Mr. Wright abhorred clutter, he designed houses without closets. We visited Taliesin West, the architecture school and enclave built by Wright on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. There we saw many examples of Wright’s imposition of his opinions on those who would use his buildings. I was particularly impressed by the auditorium, intended for performances of music, with very dry and close acoustics, and permanently installed seats and music racks for the performers. As a church musician, you might try that the next time a brass quintet comes to play—nail some chairs and stands to the floor and see what reactions you get.
In my work with the Organ Clearing House, I am often involved in determining the placement of an organ. Sometimes we are charged with placing an historic organ in a new location, and must deal with the constraints of floor space as it relates to the “traffic” of the leaders of worship. Sometimes we are consulting with churches that are planning new buildings, working with architects to help see that the building will have a good place for an appropriate organ. Any organbuilder can tell war stories about working with architects—and I expect that many architects have equivalent organbuilder stories. Several years ago a church engaged me as consultant. They had completed and dedicated a new building and were ready to discuss commissioning a new organ. Large gifts had been announced to begin a fund, and I was told how their architect had prepared a place for an organ. The drawings showed a figurative organ façade on the wall of the church and a location for a console. But the façade was on an outside wall. The architect showed some photos of organs he had copied from a book on liturgical architecture that showed façade pipes in various artistic arrangements on the wall of a church. When I told him (in front of the organ committee) that there would necessarily be an eight- or ten-foot deep room behind the façade, he admitted that he was not aware of that. I suppose the books to which he had referred left out that part. There was simply no place in the room where a pipe organ could be installed, and the parish was deeply disappointed.
A study of organ history allows us three rules for good organ placement:

1. The organ should be in the same room in which it will be heard.
2. The organ should be as high as possible on the center of the long axis of the room.
3. The organ should be in the same location as the choir and any other musical ensembles that would ordinarily perform with it.

Rules are made to be broken. The one about “the same room” is referring to organ chambers. Sound waves do not bend. They travel in straight lines. If an organ is placed in a deep chamber on the side wall of a chancel, most of the congregation will necessarily be hearing reflected sound rather than direct sound. Following my rule number one, this would be a recipe for an unsuccessful organ, but we’ve all heard wonderful instruments in situations like this.
Placing an organ as high as possible on the center of an axis implies that the instrument is either at the rear of the room, or front and center. When combined with rule number three, placing the organ in the back means that the choir is in the back also. This is a classic, traditional situation shared by the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and virtually all of the great churches in Paris. But many American congregations prefer the placement of the choir in the front of the sanctuary where they can be direct participants and leaders of the liturgy. St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York famously has the organ placed in chancel chambers above the choir stalls. Attend Evensong there and I promise you will not be distracted by the disadvantages of the placement of choir and organ.
Or walk two blocks east and three blocks south to St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, where you will find organs placed in the chancel, rear gallery, and above the dome, all played from one console, accompanying the choir seated in the chancel. Again, broken rules lead to terrific sound. The organ placed front and center in a church sanctuary is common enough, but it is often the source of discontent. The fair question is raised, are we worshiping the organ or the cross? Somehow, hanging a big cross in front of the organ doesn’t help. Other parishes find that the organ façade behind the altar provides a magnificent inspiring architectural background for worship.
The examples I’ve cited are all traditional settings. The challenge today is that contemporary styles of worship, various new technologies, and new methods of construction provide us with countless situations where traditional standards do not apply. If in the past, the architect and organbuilder would discuss the concept of optimal placement of the organ in a building, now those meetings include sound and video consultants. Public address equipment and enormous video screens are becoming part of church architecture, dominating forward sight lines and conflicting with the placement of the pipe organ. Should the placement of microphones influence the placement of a pipe organ in the hope that the sound of the organ will not be carried by the P.A. system? What’s next? I suppose they will institute instant replays with color commentary like a televised football game. (That reminds me of Peter Schickele as P.D.Q. Bach and the Beethoven’s Fifth Sportscast.) Organbuilders will shake their heads, but, like wedding videos, these things are here to stay.

The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.

Technological advances make things easier for us. People of my parents’ generation celebrated the introduction of refrigeration. My grandfather pointed out that his lifetime spanned travel by horse-drawn carriages, the introduction of the automobile, mechanized flight, and men walking on the moon. I have a love-hate relationship with the computer on which I write this column, but don’t suggest I should try to do without it.
I have friends who resist new technologies. One says he’ll never own a cell phone, one doesn’t even own a telephone answering machine. It’s very hard for me to be in touch with these people because my acceptance of cell phones, fax machines, and e-mail leaves me impatient. The seven seconds it takes for a document to open on the computer can seem like a long time. But I suggest that as we accept all these things and put them to use, we need to pay attention to their effect on our lives. Just because we have a cell phone in our pocket doesn’t mean we have to answer it if we’re talking in person with a friend (a recent newspaper etiquette columnist fielded a question about cell phones in public restrooms). Or we ask if anyone really believes that video games are enhancing the intellectual development of our children.
Enrico Caruso made quite a name for himself without the use of microphones. I doubt that the operas of Mozart or the plays of Shakespeare would have become so popular if their contemporary audiences couldn’t understand the words. The dramas of Aristophanes (448–380 BC), Euripides (440–406 BC), and Sophocles (496–406 BC) were enhanced by glorious amphitheaters whose acoustics would baffle the best modern audio consultant. Ten years ago I restored an organ for a small church in Lexington, Massachusetts, which enjoyed the legend that “Emerson preached here.” How did the congregants hear him without the tinny P.A. system on which they now depend? Or how did Phillips Brooks make such a name for himself preaching in the cavernous Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston without electronic enhancement—or without a jumbo-tron, for goodness sake? I just don’t believe they couldn’t be heard. We ask the simple question, why can’t we build buildings like the amphitheaters in Delphi or Athens or the grand stone churches of Paris? Simple answer—too expensive. A high ceiling means better acoustics (this doesn’t apply to amphitheaters!), but a modern building contractor can tell you the cost of each additional foot of ceiling height in a public room. We seat 400 people in a room with a 20-foot ceiling and soft walls, add carpeting and cushioned pews, and we get acoustics similar to those of our living rooms at home.
In order to be able to hear, we create artificial acoustics—microphones for speakers and singers and digital 32' stops so we can pretend we’re in a “real” building. I’m not suggesting the abolition of technology in worship. As I said earlier, it’s here to stay. I am suggesting that we consider its use and effect on what we do. If we are installing public address equipment, let’s be sure it’s of good quality, well installed, and that we know how to use it. Where’s the dignity of public worship if the opening words are “testing, testing . . . ” or the ubiquitous call that defines the early 21st century, “Can you hear me?”
What does this have to do with organ placement? Plenty. Among the designers, consultants, and contractors involved in the creation of a new church building, the organbuilder is likely to be alone in making an effort to filter the list of conflicting technologies. This can mean that the organbuilder is perceived to be backwards, resisting change, insisting that the old ways are best. A visitor to an organ shop might note the beauty of old-world craftsmanship, but that same visitor might find the organbuilder to be old-fashioned as he defends proper placement of the organ in a committee meeting.
Good organbuilders are informed by the past. They study the work of their predecessors and try to emulate them in their work. And organbuilders are among the strongest proponents of the way things ought to be made and the way things used to be made better. Take a look at a handful of woodscrews taken from an organ built in 1860 or 1915 and you’ll forever disdain the dull-threaded, shallow-headed, crooked-shafted, out-of-center junk they sell at Home Depot. But we don’t make friends of the architects, the acousticians, the audio consultants, or the members of the organ committee if we are known for disdain of things modern. I don’t mean we have to accept microphones without question, and I certainly don’t mean we have to incorporate video screens in our organ façades. We should look for any opportunity to inform or enlighten our clients about the factors that lead to a successful organ installation. We should encourage the design and construction of buildings that enhance sound rather than absorb it. And we should always be looking for balance between the ancient world that fostered our craft and the modern world in which we live.

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.

John Bishop is the executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The seat of the Bishop
I’ve always been a sucker for construction equipment. The other day I was walking up Second Avenue in New York, where a new subway line is under construction, and although I was on a schedule moving between appointments I couldn’t help but stop for five minutes to watch an enormous crane lowering an electrical transformer the size of a UPS truck into a hole in the street. You can read about this massive project on the website of the Metropolitan Transit Authority at <A HREF="http://www.mta.info/cap
constr/sas/">www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/"</A>. (sas refers to Second Avenue Subway!) I’ve been involved in a consultation project in New York that has led me to learn something about the city’s utility system, and I’ve seen maps and photos that show an underground labyrinth of train, maintenance, and utility tunnels, and electrical, gas, and steam lines. It seems unlikely that there’s any dirt left under the streets of the city. Knowing something about that subterranean maze helps me understand just a little of how complicated it must be to create a new tunnel some four miles long, and sixteen new underground stations. And hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of dirt, stone, and rubble removed to create the tunnel has to be trucked across the city’s congested streets and river bridges to be dumped.
It’s a massive project that’s made possible by millions of dollars worth of heavy equipment, including my crane, tunnel-boring machines, payloaders, dump trucks, and heaven knows what else. Equipment like this has been improved immensely in the last 20 years by advances in hydraulic technology. The principal of hydraulics is that specially formulated oil (I know the root of hydraulic refers to water) is pressurized in cylinders, that pressure being great enough to lift heavy loads, turn rotary motors, or steer huge articulated equipment. Without these advances we wouldn’t have Bobcats, those snazzy little diggers with cabs like birdcages that can turn on a dime.
Sometime around the year 1250, the great cathedral in Chartres was completed. Nearly 800 years later it still stands as one of the great monuments to religious faith in the world. Tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists visit there every year. The cathedral houses one of Christendom’s most revered relics, the Sancta Camisa, reputed to be the tunic worn by the Virgin Mary at the time of Christ’s birth. (Camisa and camisole come from the same root.) There is a labyrinth more than 40 feet in diameter laid in stone in the floor of the nave. The path of the labyrinth is about 13 inches wide and about 860 feet long (about a sixth of a mile), all twisted upon itself within the confines of the diameter. The towers are 300 and 350 feet tall, the ceiling of the nave is 121 feet off the floor, and the floor plan has an area of nearly 120,000 square feet, which is close to two-and-a-half acres.
Thousands and thousands of tons of stone lifted to great heights, and not a hydraulic cylinder in sight. The challenge and effort of building something like that with twelfth- and thirteenth-century technology is breathtaking. Most of us have been inside tall buildings, and most of us have been in airplanes, so we as a society are used to looking down on things. But imagine Guillaume, the thirteenth-century construction worker, coming home after a long day, flopping into a chair, taking a hearty pull from a mug of cider, and describing to his wife how that afternoon he had looked down on a bird in flight—the first man in town to be up that high!

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On December 27, 1892, the cornerstone was laid for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, one of only a few twentieth-century stone Gothic cathedrals. Celebrated as one of the largest Christian churches in world—the overall interior length of 601 feet is the longest interior measurement of any church building—it serves its modern congregation, hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors, and as the seat of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, it serves as a national centerpiece to the denomination.
While the full interior dimensions of the building have been completed, much of both the interior and exterior remain incomplete. The central tower, the transepts, much of the interior finish stonework, and the two west-end towers were never built, and the building carries the popular moniker, St. John the Unfinished. Given the staggering cost of this kind of construction, there are no plans for the completion of the building. Perhaps this stunning building stands as a metaphor for us who are all incomplete before God.
Two years ago the Organ Clearing House was privileged to work with the artisans of Quimby Pipe Organs installing the restored Aeolian-Skinner organ in the two chancel organ chambers, nearly 100 feet off the floor of the nave. We spent some three months in the building, working with humbling towers of scaffolding and an electric hoist that would have been the envy of those men in thirteenth-century Chartres. We had rare opportunities to see that grand building from angles not open to the general public—somehow a hundred feet seems higher indoors than out. And we witnessed some of the challenges of maintaining such a huge building. Fixing a roof leak is a big deal when you’re 150 feet up! That the cathedral’s administration can manage all this is hardly short of a miracle.
There’s a peculiar type of quiet present in such a building. The interior space is large enough that true quiet is probably impossible. When it’s very quiet inside, one is aware of the distant sounds of the city, and even of a kind of interior wind blowing. Sitting in the nave or the Great Choir in this special quiet, I imagine the hustle and bustle of construction: how workers managed 60-foot granite pillars that were quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, transported to New York on barges, and hauled across the city by steam-powered tractors in 1903; how workers hoisted tons of precisely cut stones to form the fabric of the vaulted ceilings; how workers created stone spiral stairways inside the cathedral’s walls leading to such places as organ chambers; and how workers created the ornate spectacular 10-ton marble pulpit—festooned with such delicate carvings that during the installation of the organ we built a heavy plywood barricade around it so as not to damage it with a battering-ram in the form of a 32-foot organ pipe!
And let’s not forget what could be considered the real work—the evangelizing, preaching, persuading, and cajoling necessary to raise the money for all this, unfinished or not.

A house for all people
Why do we go to all this trouble? This cathedral has been host to countless extraordinary events, held there because of the extraordinary scale and dignity of the place. Twelve-thousand-five-hundred people attended the funeral of Duke Ellington in 1974. (I wonder how much the cathedral organist had to do with that.) In 1986 Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who had walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, performed his work Ascent inside the cathedral, accompanied by the music of the Paul Winter Consort. Petit is listed on every service bulletin as one of the cathedral’s artists-in-residence. In the documentary film about his twin-tower feat, <i>Man on Wire</i>, Petit wore a “Cathedral of St. John the Divine” t-shirt.
In 1986, Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached an anti-apartheid sermon. In 1990, Big Bird, Bert, Ernie, and the rest of the Muppets helped celebrate the life of their creator, Jim Henson. In 1997, South African President Nelson Mandela preached at a memorial service for anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Trevor Huddleston. And in 2000, New York Mayor John Lindsay’s funeral packed the place. My wife Wendy attended that service and came home raving about how cathedral organist Dorothy Papadakos had played the crowd out at the end of the service with Leonard Bernstein’s tune, <i>New York, New York, It’s a Wonderful Town</i> (immortalized by Frank Sinatra), complete with fanfares from the State Trumpet under the west end rose window—perfect.
We need special places like that for events like those.

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Wendy and I have been in New York for two months, living in an apartment in Greenwich Village we’ve borrowed from my parents’ next-door neighbors. While Wendy has been working with editors in publishing companies promoting the manuscripts produced by her clients, the Organ Clearing House has tuned a few organs, and dismantled a marvelous, pristine E. M. Skinner organ from a closed church building in the Bronx for relocation to the new worship space of an active Lutheran parish in Iowa, to be restored by Jeff Weiler & Associates of Chicago. Last year we renovated and relocated a 1916 Casavant organ to a church in Manhattan—the dedication recital is in a couple days, and we spent the last week tweaking and tuning it in preparation.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is on my mind because we attended Evensong there last Sunday evening. It was a beautiful service, loaded with music, prayer, scripture, and a moving sermon. We sat in the ornately carved oak pews of the Great Choir, surrounded by magnificent decoration and in the midst of a modest congregation. The choir’s singing was wonderful, the organ was played with true inspiration, and I was aware that we were participating in regular weekly worship in that place where so many of the world’s most powerful and revered figures have led and participated in worship. The sense that the place equipped to welcome thousands to a huge event is open and welcoming to us on an ordinary Sunday afternoon was moving to me. You don’t often sing hymns in the presence of an organ with 150 ranks.

A study in scale
Some months ago I brought a group of friends to see the cathedral. Organist Stephen Tharp was practicing in preparation for his presentation of the complete organ works of Jeanne Demessieux. As we listened, I told them a little about the size, resources, and complexity of the organ, and one asked me why you would need so many stops. I pointed out ornate decorations throughout the building—carved pews, filigreed lamps, Gothic arches and vaults, tiled stairways, wrought-iron gates, bronze medallions inlaid in the floor—and suggested that such a large organ complements a building with more than a dozen chapels and all this finery. We love the sound of a string celeste. It’s even better to have two celestes to choose from. But this organ has eight sets of celestes—unimaginable wealth, especially when you consider that all the celeste ranks except the Swell Unda Maris go all the way to low C! When an organist moves skillfully around this organ, the range of tone colors seems limitless—a kaleidoscope of tone color, with a range of volume from the roar of thunder to a barely audible whisper—exactly in scale with the size and decoration of the building itself.
And cathedral organist Bruce Neswick did just that in his improvised closing voluntary last Sunday—he morphed away from the tune of the recessional hymn into a harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated fantasy, gave a climactic fanfare on the State Trumpet, then melted seamlessly from the robust full organ to the whisper of that Unda Maris. You could hardly tell when the music stopped.
When the installation of the renovated organ was completed and the organ had been given a chance to “settle in,” the cathedral presented a series of dedicatory recitals by such distinguished artists as Daniel Roth, Olivier Latry, Gerre Hancock, Thierry Escaich, and Peter Conte. What a thrill to hear such programs on such an organ. But take it from me, Neswick shares that organ with the Sunday afternoon congregation as if the Queen was in attendance. Perhaps it’s his joy of sitting on the bench of such a distinguished and stunning instrument. Perhaps it’s his sense of the privilege of presenting music in worship in such a place. Certainly it made me feel like royalty to be so treated, the tariff being what I chose to drop in the basket during the offertory.

Party horn
Another example of the relationship between the scale of the building and the scale of the organ is the State Trumpet—a single eight-foot rank of trumpet pipes mounted horizontally under the rose window facing east down the length of the nave. This must be the most famous single organ stop in the world. It plays on wind pressure of 50 inches—something like the pressure of the air in a tractor tire, and nothing like the levels of pressure commonly used in organs. The pipes are shackled in place to prevent them from launching as missiles down the nave. And there’s an octave of dummy 16-foot bass pipes. They don’t speak—they’re there to make the rank of pipes look like something in that vast space. The thing is majestic. It’s almost 600 feet from the organ console—two football fields. It would take a little more than six seconds to cover that distance in a car traveling at 60 miles per hour. It seems as though you can draw the stop, play a note, and eat a sandwich before the sound reaches your ears. (No mayo on the keys, please.) The sound is broad and powerful, sonorous and thrilling. There can be no building better suited to enclose such a sound.
But here’s the problem. When the new State Trumpet was introduced in the cathedral as part of the 1954 expansion and rebuilding of the organ by Aeolian-Skinner, every ambitious organist wanted one. And too many organists got their wish. Today there are hundreds of modest parish churches cursed with the sound of a too-loud but not-too-good Trompette en Chamade, searing the airways six feet above the too-big hair of the bride and her attendants. The proud organist can’t get enough of it, but everyone else can. Just because St. John the Divine has one, the pretty church on the town square doesn’t need one.

It’s a matter of scale
All of us who have toiled in the vineyards of church music have experienced the “big productions” of our parishes—a Christmas pageant, the wedding of the pastor’s daughter, Easter Sunday with trumpets and timpani. Imagine the big production for the cathedral organist. The country’s president might be attending a memorial service. National television cameras are often present. And on a festive Sunday morning, 1,800 people might come to the altar to receive Communion. That’s a lot of noodling around with <i>Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees</i>.
Our two months in New York have brought lots of great experiences, dozens of subway rides, and the rich experience of getting familiar with all that a great city has to offer. I encourage and invite you to visit the city and to hear some of the great organs and great organists in some of the world’s great churches. Start with St. John the Divine, and work your way around town. The New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists has a fine website with a calendar of events.
And after Tuesday’s recital, I’m looking forward to going home next week where there really is dirt under the streets.

Photos of St. John the Divine courtesy Quimby Pipe Organs.