In the wind . . .

The sum of the parts
Spring comes late where we live. Business travel this year has treated me to springtime in California and Virginia, but here in Maine it’s about thirty degrees this morning. The ground freezes pretty deep here, so when it starts to thaw in spring the moisture cannot seep into the ground. It sits above the freeze level and produces what we affectionately call mud season. The driveway feels like taffy under the wheels of the car, and there are places in the yard where you go in up to your ankles.
Chilly nights continue for another month, so we don’t get the gardens started until mid-May, when we can sneak in the first peas and lettuce. Sounds grim to those of you who live south of us, but the trade-off is that our high summer is glorious with ocean breezes and brilliant sunshine. And by then the garden is filling the kitchen with glory.
Today is the Ides of April, that most taxing day of the year, and although the thermometer warns, it’s sunny and clear and I started the day in the garden cutting back the remains of last year’s perennial growth and raking and turning over the raised beds where we start the early vegetables. One of those beds is devoted to chives and mint, both of which grow abundantly and add much to summer meals. As I cut back the woody sticks of last summer’s mint plants, I got a good whiff of that real minty smell, and my mind went directly to a summer evening cookout, of tzatziki, that cool refreshing dressing made of yoghurt, garlic, olive oil, cucumber, and mint that goes so beautifully with grilled lamb, and of course Mojitos and Gin and Tonics. Or is it Gins and Tonic?
Those mental pictures and virtual smells brought real pleasure to the chore of turning over the soil, reminding me of why we do this work.

Start with the basics
Having my hands in the dirt early this morning reminds me of a sense I like to keep alive in our workshop. There might be a Swell engine on someone’s workbench—a complicated, even goofy-looking contraption with puffers and pullers that was seemingly and improbably inspired by the gear used to hitch up horses. The person at the bench can scrape off old leather and glue on new, lubricate the mechanical parts, clean up the finish and get it ready for new wiring and installation without ever really knowing what the thing is for. I like to be sure that our crew gets to hear organs often enough that they can have some idea of how a machine is used—what it’s for. If while you’re scraping off the leather you can hear in your mind’s ear a processional hymn with swell shutters opening in front of the reeds as the choir reaches the chancel steps, perhaps the machine you’re working on will work a little better when you’re done. It’s the same as smelling that mint on a frosty morning—the tzatziki you make in August will be that much better because you had it in your mind in mid-April.
By the way, The New Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin 2000) defines “whiffletree” as “The pivoted horizontal crossbar to which the harness traces of a draft animal are attached and which is in turn attached to a vehicle or an implement.” The horse-and-cart whiffletree was the inspiration for Ernest Skinner’s famous Whiffletree Swell Engine. It’s a good thing Ernest was working in the days when you still might see horses hitched to a carriage or we might have Swell motors that incorporate trailer balls.

It’s all in the ingredients
I love to cook. I love thinking about what we’ll have for dinner, being sure that we have everything we need, and firing up the kitchen at quitting time. It’s fun to clean, scrape, chop and combine those ingredients and apply heat to them in just the right way. Will we grill or broil the meat? Will we steam or sauté the vegetables? Should it be dill or tarragon? And the meal is made or broken by the quality of the ingredients you start with. Forty years ago, Julia Child told us not to use that cheap jug wine in your cooking—if you wouldn’t choose to drink it, why would you want to eat it? Since Julia encouraged Americans to feel free to cook well, we’ve lived in a revolution of understanding how important it is to start with the right ingredients. It’s okay to put leftover vegetables in a stock pot, but not rotten ones.
The organbuilder chooses his materials with the same care a chef might use squeezing tomatoes in the market. The chef doesn’t decide on the menu until he’s been to the market. With all the talk about combining flavors to create a finished dish, one of the best tasting things I’ve ever eaten is the hot-in-the-sun cherry tomato snagged off the vine while driving by on a lawnmower. Think of the salad inspired by that flavor. It’s a better salad than the one that’s made because you know there should be lettuce, onion, tomato, and dressing. Make the salad by how each ingredient tastes, not by a standard list.
It’s a little like the organist who automatically draws eight-four-two-mixture without listening, or without thinking of trying it with a soft flute added, a gentle sixteen-foot reed, or leaving out the two-foot to make the sound a little more transparent. Registrations chosen by listening will always sound better than those chosen by list.
The organbuilder comes across a special piece of wood—beautiful grain pattern, unusual colors—sees what it should be made into, and sets it aside for the perfect music rack, name board, bench top, or pipe shade. Fifty years later, the organist sits through the thousandth sermon admiring that beautiful grain pattern. (When I left my last church position to join the Organ Clearing House, I calculated that in seventeen years I had listened to something close to 800 sermons and led close to 2300 hymns. Makes my fingers hurt.)
Remember Michelangelo choosing his piece of marble and removing everything that didn’t look like a saint? The chef starts with a carrot and takes away everything that doesn’t belong in the soup. We chose not to eat the bitter skin or the tough top raw, so why would cooking it make it better?
Likewise, the organbuilder puts a skin of leather on a light table and marks the imperfections with a Sharpie® so he can avoid everything that shouldn’t be part of an organ. A little pinhole in the leather will leak a tiny bit of air and make that pouch move just a touch slower. Will the organist notice that when playing a quick scale or trill? He might not be able to put his finger on it, but there’s something not quite right. And by the way, that pinhole is a weakness in the leather—that pouch will be the first one to fail seventy-five years from now. Maybe it would be five more years before the next one failed. That little pinhole had a noticeable effect on the lifetime of the organ.
The sheep had a run-in with a barbed-wire fence and the resulting scar is a little tough spot in the skin. The pouch made of that piece of leather might open the valve a little cock-eyed. One time in ten thousand, that valve will catch on the edge of the toe-hole and cause a cipher. The same pipe is played three sixteenth-notes later and the cipher goes away, but the observant organist had a split second of wondering what was going on. And it happened so fast that she couldn’t keep track of it and couldn’t write it down after the service. It happens again the next Sunday. This time it doesn’t go away and the cipher interrupts the service, all because the scar stayed in the pouch. It’s like finding a little stone in a beautiful dish of risotto.
We drop a peach in boiling water for a minute or so, and the skin comes off easily. It’s an extra step, you might scald your fingers on the hot peach, but there’s no fuzzy mouthful of skin interrupting the experience of eating the tart. Ptooey!
Before the Swell motor goes back in the organ we clean the pins by scraping with a knife or rubbing with some emery cloth. This guarantees a good connection when the new wire is soldered on. It will never be that a stage of the motor fails to work because of a dirty solder joint. After all, what good is a fifteen-stage Swell motor? That choir mounting the chancel steps wouldn’t notice that stage number 7 didn’t work, but the effect was lessened just a tiny bit. (I get a funny picture in my mind of a couple of indignant choir members confronting the organist after the service complaining that the Swell box didn’t sound just right!) If it’s good enough for government work, is it good enough for God?

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right
I’ve participated in dozens, maybe hundreds of meetings with church committees discussing the sale and purchase of pipe organs. Often enough there’s one guy (it’s always a guy!) who says, “We’ve got a roof that leaks, a parking lot with potholes, the city is making us install an elevator and ramps, and the organist says we need a new organ. What can we do to save some money on this unit?” (It’s the word “unit” that gets me.) I respond, “All those projects are important, but I don’t think that the organ is on the same list as parking lots and elevators. I think it’s on the list with communion silver and stained-glass windows. It’s liturgical art, not a ‘unit.’”
By far the vast percentage of money I’ve earned during my career has been donated money—those cherished funds, prayerfully raised by the faithful of the congregation. On one hand, it’s hard to say that you shouldn’t go with the lowest bidder when purchasing a pipe organ. But in fact, if the organ is liturgical art, doesn’t it somehow transcend money? I know that’s not a practical point of view, but without such thinking how did the great cathedrals get built? Certainly there was a cheaper way to build a huge church than festooning it with vaulted ceilings, and why do you need a three-hundred-foot tower if only to hold up a bell? Those buildings are expressions of faith. The twenty-million-dollar tower is a symbol of faith, forming a physical connection between heaven and earth as if a community were holding its hands to the heavens. You didn’t need that huge stone tower. You didn’t need the simple wooden steeples you see on country churches throughout New England. You didn’t need the expensive stained-glass windows, the carved saints, or the marble altar. And you didn’t need the magnificent pipe organ.
But we have those things, we care for those things, we respect those things because of how effectively they express our faith. The building committee of the First Baptist Church in Damariscotta, Maine didn’t pay for the steeple when the church was built in 1862 because it would look good on twenty-first century postcards, they built it because it would stand as a symbol expressing their faith to their community. It’s at the top of the Main Street hill. You can see it from a couple miles down the river, and you can see it from the highway that bypasses the town. That building committee got their money’s worth. Today the steeple is sitting somewhat forlornly on the lawn next to the church. It was leaning a little to the left and the town participated in a fund-raising drive to rebuild it. No one could imagine the town without it.
So we justify the cost of a pipe organ. As we discuss the specifications and the related costs, we are continually reminded of the need to economize. But can we also inspire that committee to think beyond the nuts and bolts of the price and think of the instrument as the fulfillment of a vision? It’s not a “unit,” it’s an expression of faith. It will be there seventy-five years later for the weddings of their grandchildren. It will be built by craftsmen who know how important it is to scrape those pins, mark those pin-holes, choose those boards. No fifteen-stage Swell engines here.
A carpenter building a house might grab the next two-by-four off the pile and nail it in. It takes a little more time for the organbuilder to set aside that special burl and turn it into a music rack.
The moment when the congregation really understands why the organ would cost so much is the moment it comes out of the truck and its parts are laid out across the backs of the pews. Thousands of parts, each beautifully made. The congregants walk around the room thinking in terms of what they’ve paid for a dining table or a credenza, and the whole thing starts to make sense. Shortly after the Organ Clearing House started installing an organ in Virginia last fall, there was an evening event to which the congregation was invited. More than a hundred people came to see the organ half assembled, to see the parts and pipes spread around the room, and to hear something about how the organ works, how parts are made, how we care for our craft. I like to think that they went home knowing they were getting their money’s worth. I recommend such an evening as part of every installation.
And afterwards, sit down to a meal beautifully prepared from the freshest and finest ingredients, no stones in the risotto, no cheap wine in the sauce, and no fuzz in the tart. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Now that I’ve finished writing, it’s time to go to the market.

Put your best foot forward.

I live in a village at the head of the Damariscotta River in Maine. It’s a tidal river—so, to the surprise of many tourists not familiar with ocean tides, the river’s current changes direction four times each day. It is by definition an estuary—a long arm of the sea that stretches inland, very much like Norway’s fjords. The tide rises and falls between nine and twelve feet each day, depending on the phase of the moon and on what meteorological events at sea might be pushing extra water our way. The timing of the tides is related not to solar days—the regular 24-hour periods by which we organize our lives—but by lunar cycles. A lunar day is a little shorter than a solar day so the timing of the tides advances about 40 minutes each day. This morning, high tide was at 12:39 am, this afternoon it will be at 1:24 pm. Tomorrow morning, 1:27 am, tomorrow afternoon high tide will be at 2:12 pm. There’s a tide clock on our living room wall that has a 24-hour face much like any clock, but it has only one hand. High tide is at the top of the face, low tide at the bottom. The trick is that it counts lunar seconds so it gains the right amount of time against the “other” clock each day. In the British Navy during the 19th century, the payroll of officers was based on the 13-month lunar year.
The river is 12 miles long and as much as 150 feet deep in places. Down near where the river meets the ocean there is a narrow passage (The Fort Island Narrows) through which pass 3400 cubic yards of water each second at full tide race. In his charming book about life on the Damariscotta, a local writer converted that number to 283 dump-truck-loads-per-second!1
Where we live, it’s about 25 feet deep in the central channel at low tide, and the banks drain to mud flats. I can see clam diggers from my desk most days at low tide. Because the mud is rich in clay, there was a booming industry of brick-making along the river throughout the 19th century. Several places along the shore are littered with bricks that cracked or twisted in the kilns and were discarded on the beach. We pass by Brick Kiln Road and Brickyard Cove on the way to our house. The other big industry in town was ship-building. Four- and five-masted schooners were built here and sailed down the river to the ocean.
Main Street comprises a three- or four-hundred yard stretch of businesses and shops, most of which are housed in 19th-century brick buildings. It’s quite a bit more crowded in the summer than in the winter, but the town has been able to maintain its historic flavor. (Last winter, in order to prevent Wal-Mart from opening a store here, the Town Meeting voted a size cap for commercial buildings that allows a typical supermarket, but nothing larger.) You can buy T-shirts with a seagull or a fish and the name of the town, but there’s no saltwater taffy shop and no miniature golf course.
Recently a local gallery hosted an art festival that concluded with a solo cello recital—three of Bach’s unaccompanied suites played by a friend of ours. My wife and I were pleased with the performance—a well-conceived and presented reading of that magnificent music. But there was a problem with communication. There was no printed program. The performer told us that he would play three suites and each suite has six movements, so we could count on our fingers and know when to applaud, but lacking the names of the movements the astute listener had no chance to deduce the difference between a Courante, a Sarabande, and an Allemande (are they dried fruits?). He gave brief spoken notes in which he compared the three suites he was playing with the other three—meaningless to an audience of laypeople. And he referred to his own scholarship in oblique terms—also meaningless. After the recital, my wife and I were chatting with him (they served champagne and strawberries dipped in chocolate) about his approach to the music. He talked about different styles of Allemandes, one of which involves a given number of couples with an extra single man, something like a game of Musical Chairs. Apparently, some of the suites were written following the death of Bach’s first wife. How fascinating that the Allemande included a figurative odd-man-out. I bet that everyone in the audience would have loved to hear that.
What do we say about what we play? How do we share the mystery, the excitement, the playfulness, the pathos of our music? How do we communicate our relationship with our instrument and its music to the listeners on whom we depend so much? Here are some rhetorical questions that come from my own experience as a concert presenter and a better-than-average informed listener of organ music. I invite you readers (as important to me as the audience at a recital) to reflect:

• How often have we given knowing chuckles or annoyed glances when a well-meaning, even enthusiastic concertgoer applauds between the Prelude and the Fugue?
• How often have we addressed an audience using organ-only jargon? “ . . . and then I will add the Fourniture and Cymbal to emphasize . . . ”
• How often have we addressed audiences with implied assumptions? “ . . . and of course you know that Herr Scheidemann . . . ”
• How often have we played chorale settings with German titles as Sunday-morning preludes without offering translation or explanation to the congregation? “Doesn’t everyone at the First Baptist Church know that you have to play Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland on the First Sunday of Advent?” Balbastre’s settings of traditional French carols are as much a part of Christmas to me as eggnog and ribbon candy, but it’s not fair to assume that everyone in pews has the same reaction.
• How many recitals have we programmed according to historic progression and accuracy without considering the audiences’ appreciation and enlightenment?

Any of these scenarios (except perhaps the first) are appropriate for a university graduate recital or a recital at an AGO convention. But consider the old saw, “preaching to the choir.” In my practical experience, the choir does not necessarily agree with the preaching. If we assume too much in front of any audience, that audience’s first perception will be that the performer is aloof, even arrogant. I am fortunate to know many brilliant organists. Some are flamboyant, some are quiet and reserved, but every one of them has a powerful ego that makes it possible for them to perform. Playing any musical instrument well is a marvelous skill, and many of your audience members will be impressed, dazzled, and mystified by what you do. But they will appreciate the experience of hearing you play so much more if you let them in on the joke or relate the music and the historic figures around it to real life. Any concertgoer knows that Bach was a great composer. But how many know that he imbedded coded names (his own and those of family members) in his music? (Thanks to the vast success of The Da Vinci Code, audiences are really interested in codes these days.) How many know that he was a fiery guy who stood up to the City Council in Leipzig (his employers) and got in trouble?
Recently James Levine added the musical directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to his portfolio of responsibilities. (If you were leading the Metropolitan Opera wouldn’t you be looking for something else to do in your spare time?) He entered the scene in Boston without a trace of a suggestion that he was fitting his new job into the interstices of his life. It didn’t take long for the orchestra’s players to renegotiate their contract to allow for higher pay for the concerts Levine conducts because the rehearsal schedule and the music they are playing are so much more demanding. The orchestra’s Board of Trustees created a new endowment to pay for that. Mr. Levine is well-known for his love of contemporary music, and he has been challenging the audience with many complicated pieces that are, shall we say, less easy to hear and understand than the more traditional fare of symphonies by Brahms, Mozart, and Beethoven. Last season featured a series of concerts that contrasted and compared the music of Beethoven and Schoenberg. Schoenberg can be tough going for the average concertgoer. (In fact friends of ours gave us the chance to take over their choice subscription seats because they’d had enough of the modern music.) But presumably under Levine’s influence, the BSO created an elaborate and extensive museum-quality display of the life and work of Arnold Schoenberg. It was located in one of the large second-floor public rooms (no doubt at the sacrifice of considerable bar revenue) where the audience could view it before and after concerts and during intermission. It included biographical information and photos of Schoenberg with wives, family, and friends, even playing tennis, as well as reproductions of autograph scores and Schoenberg’s paintings. The display was effective at introducing us to Schoenberg as a man, informing us so as to allow us to appreciate the music from a wide platform of understanding. Program notes described musical motives and gave keys as to how the audience could follow the “story” and know specifically what the composer had in mind. Wonderful.
I know well from my travels that many people consider the pipe organ to be a hold-over from an earlier time. It is often and widely perceived as archaic, antediluvian, or eccentric. If we are not careful, if we fail to be good stewards and ambassadors of our instrument, that perception could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We as educated and experienced lovers and practitioners of the organ must present the organ as a vital and integrated part of modern life. Offering concerts in the interest of the preservation of antiquity is both well and good (old music and old organs). But as we encourage congregations and concert halls to purchase pipe organs whose prices startle and amaze, we must present the organ and its music so as to raise the appreciation, awareness, and understanding of our audiences, and encourage their proselytizing. We must conscript the audience, not alienate it. The audience that goes home from a concert pleased and proud of its newly acquired knowledge will be more likely to come back than the audience that leaves a hall bewildered and excluded by the erudition of the performer.
Another old saw: “A rising tide floats all boats.” Bring your audience up to your level and everyone will be happy.
As I started with a river theme, so I’ll close with one. The Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Methuen, Massachusetts is a facility unique to American life, located on the shore of the Spicket River, a tributary of the Merrimack, which is a grand river meandering through New Hampshire and Massachusetts to the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Methuen resident and amateur organist and enthusiast Edward Francis Searles (1841–1920) started life in the fabric and interior design business and later had the immense good fortune of marrying Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins, the widow of railroad magnate Mark Hopkins. The couple shared a deep interest in architecture and design until her death in 1891, when Mr. Searles inherited an immense fortune. In 1899 he acted on his love of the pipe organ, his love of architecture, and his wife’s fortune by commissioning Henry Vaughan (brilliant architect, famous for the design of many fabulous church buildings, notably the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) to design a hall for the monumental organ built by E. F. Walcker of Ludwigsburg, Germany, built for and subsequently rejected by the Boston Music Hall. Mr. Searles bought the instrument from storage at auction for $1500, established a resident organbuilding firm, installed the organ in the hall, and began its long-term renovation.
Organbuilder Ernest Skinner owned the building and the organ between 1931 and 1942, operated his company in the adjoining workshop, and presented concerts to the public including major choral works and recitals by the organ virtuosi of the day such as Marcel Dupré, Lynnwood Farnam, and E. Power Biggs. In 1946, the building and organ were acquired by a new charitable corporation created to operate the hall as a cultural center. Following several earlier periods of rebuilding and alteration, the organ was substantially rebuilt by Aeolian-Skinner in 1947 (Opus 1103), leaving little of the original character intact.2
There is no other experience in America like entering this building. The ornate Rococo interior is dominated by what must be one of the most massive, famous, and photogenic organ cases in the world. The trustees of the Methuen Memorial Music Hall (MMMH) present an annual series of Wednesday night organ recitals. You can learn more about the hall, the organ, the organization, and the recital series at their website: .
 

The show must go on.

During the week of May 21, 2006, New England experienced torrential and seemingly continuous rainstorms, and many areas suffered severe flooding—so severe that friends from Europe called to check in after seeing TV news reports about Methuen. By Monday, May 22, the water had risen above the top of the organ blower of the Methuen organ. (I’m told that the high-water mark is well up on the rubber-cloth sleeve above the blower!) The season’s opening concert (May 24) was cancelled and those scheduled for May 31 and June 7 were much in doubt, but with heroic efforts from trustees and the people of the Andover Organ Company (especially Robert Reich), the blower was dismantled and dried out, rectifiers repaired, and the organ was ready to play on Monday, May 29. Margaret Angelini (Dean of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists) was the scheduled recitalist for the 31st. She was gamely waiting in the wings not knowing if the organ would be ready, and of course losing most of her scheduled practice time! But the show must go on. A large and enthusiastic audience was on hand to hear a wonderful recital.
Though the organ is up and running and the recital series is continuing, there is a great deal of restorative work still to do. The trustees of the MMMH published this notice on their website:

We are back in operation!!!
The trustees and program committee of the Methuen Memorial Music Hall are pleased to inform you that we are resuming the 2006 summer recital series with the concert on May 31.
Please understand that the magnitude of the flood caused severe damage to the basement of the Hall, the organ blower, electrical systems and interior walls. We continue our recovery efforts. If you would like to make a donation in any amount to help us, it would be greatly appreciated. Contributions may be sent to:

Flood Recovery Fund
Methuen Memorial Music Hall, Inc. c/o Elaine M. Morissette
10 Overlook Drive
Methuen, Massachusetts 01844-2372

In tribute to this marvelous landmark of American culture, the people who care for it, and at the risk of offending the men and women of the United States Navy as I exercise my First Amendment right of free speech, I offer these words to be sung to Melita (the Navy Hymn):

Aeoli’n-Skinner, foreign made, your blower gurgles ’neath the waves.
We bid the mighty Merrimack, recede, dry out, and ne’er come back.
Oh hear us as we try to see the way to keep you mildew free.

Aeoli’n-Skinner, wide admired, your sounds for years have us inspired.
We feared you might not sing again—the forecast only told of rain.
Now Diapasons’ moistened breath show how you have forsaken death.

Aeoli’n-Skinner, grand encased, the flood has threatened, now effaced.
The waves now flow between the banks, our colleagues offer hymns of thanks.
The basement will be freed of mud, the Spicket’s spigot tames the flood.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

A show of hands

It’s the middle of March and here in the frigid Northeast we had a little tease last week when the temperature outside went up into the fifties for a day or so. But while this is a beautiful sunny morning, it’s around twenty degrees outside, and the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. It’s bone-chilling cold and so dry that joints in floor boards are wide open, and my hands feel like baskets full of fall leaves. The almond scent of Jergens™ fills the room to no avail. 

In the last few days I’ve been working with the old-fashioned hot glue that organbuilders favor. I start with crystals of dry glue the consistency of fancy rough-grain raw cane sugar (funny how much extra we’re willing to pay for something that isn’t highly processed!) and cook them with water in my temperature-controlled glue pot. It’s a versatile glue because I can make it as thick or thin as I want. It bonds leather and other materials to wood beautifully, and fifty years later when it’s time to replace the leather again, it can be removed from the wood with hot water.

I’ve been gluing the hinges, belts, and gussets on an Aeolian-Skinner wind regulator (bellows). I spread glue on the wood and the material I’m applying, put it in place, and rub it down with a hot damp rag, squeezing excess glue out of the joint so the chemical bond is between two pieces of material, not a layer of thick glue.

I have a big double-boiler—the kind of thing from which you ladle soup in a cafeteria—to keep that rag nice and hot. It holds two gallons of water (or soup) and keeps it as hot as I can stand. I put my hands in the water, then wring the rag as dry as I can. No wonder my hands are uncomfortably dry. It has led to one of those painful splits at the corner of my right thumbnail.

But wait, there’s more. The other day I was installing a new rectifier in that same Aeolian-Skinner organ because the old one was soaked in the flood that wrecked the regulator. The wires that carry the direct current power from the basement to the console and organ chambers three floors up are about the thickness of my little finger. When I was stripping the insulation from the wires, I took a teeny sliver of copper through the skin of that same thumb. Now as I write, every time I touch the spacebar my thumb throbs. I’m a big guy and I think of myself as pretty tough, but those two little injuries are nearly all I can think about just now.

Hanging by a thread

According to USA Today, there were five major league pitchers with annual salaries above $20,000,000 in 2012. These are the cream of the crop of prime starting pitchers, so they would be starting about every fourth game. Each team plays 162 games each year, so without injury, those pitchers would start about forty games. Let’s say for argument that they pitch six innings each time they start a game, face five batters each inning, and throw five pitches to each batter. That’s 6,000 pitches in a season or $3,333.33 per pitch. Do the same math another way and it comes to roughly $500,000 per game. One of those guys gets a hangnail and each time he throws the ball he’s in agony. His accuracy suffers, and the manager puts him on the bench. Okay for him because he’s on salary. But his employers lose the benefit of $500,000 worth of his effort for each day of the hangnail.

Me, I just go back to the glue pot and put my hands in the hot water. Walk it off. You’ll be fine.

The panda’s thumb

Our hands define us. They define us as a species, they define us as individuals, and they define us as musicians. We join some of the primates including the great apes, a few rodents, and to a lesser extent, the panda, in being blessed with an opposable thumb. While the primates use their thumbs to climb trees, and make primitive tools from sticks, our thumbs have allowed us to achieve extraordinary dexterity. We use that dexterity for practical tasks and for expression.

There are twenty-seven bones in each of our hands and a complex network of muscles and nerves. It was the physical therapy I had following a bout of “Carpenters’ Elbow” (I don’t play tennis) that taught me how the tendons and muscles in our forearms are related to the bones in our hands like the strings of a marionette. Put your left hand on the beefy part of your right forearm and wiggle your right fingers, and you’ll feel those little strings moving around like manual trackers. Come to think of it, they are like manual trackers.

Keyboard musicians are defined and define themselves by their hands. I have to admit I’m amused by publicity headshots of colleagues that include their hands. The photographer has struggled to find natural looking poses to include the hands in a close-up of an organist’s face, when most of the reasons we bring our hands to our faces shouldn’t be photographed. I chuckle as I remember my grandmother chiding me and my siblings to “get your hands away from your face.”

Wave it like it is.

Wendy has been actively involved at her alma mater, Brown University, as long as I’ve known her. She served on the Board of Fellows (she was a jolly good fellow!) for most of twenty years, as an officer of the Corporation for much of that time, and now serves as co-chair of the committee planning the observation and celebration of the university’s semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary. Last weekend we were on campus for the grand kickoff of more than a year of anniversary events including a President’s Colloquium on the Virtues of Liberal Education. One of the panel discussions that day brought four sitting state governors together with a professor of political science as moderator for a wide-ranging discussion about modern American politics. 

Two of the participants, Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont, had hands that were unusually large and expressive. They were seated in plush armchairs (brown, of course) onstage in a large lecture hall, and I was struck as I listened and watched at how much their beautiful hands added to the effectiveness of their delivery. The other two governors had good things to say, but they seemed less eloquent.

In March of 2011, Wendy accompanied her client, former United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall, to the White House as he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Among the tales with which she came home was the lengthy conversation she had with another honoree, Van Cliburn, the storied pianist who won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Along with comments on his legendary grace and regal carriage, Wendy spoke of his enormous, expressive hands.

I googled Van Cliburn and watched a few performances on YouTube. I saw the obligatory tours de force of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, but was singularly impressed by his presentation of the National Anthem at the start of the 1994 opening day game of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers in the newly completed Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. We’ve all seen the worst of so-called musicianship in such venues, not to be confused with soprano Renée Fleming’s marvelous offering at this year’s Super Bowl, but watching the sixty-year-old Van Cliburn stride on to the playing field dressed in white tie and tails, waving to the crowd, and seating himself at the piano was to witness a classy man bringing his classy act to a venue otherwise not known for my present definition of class.

And those hands. They were big as all outdoors. I marveled as I saw that left hand playing three- and four-part chords at the spread of a tenth in rolling eighth-note passages. It looked as though there was about eighteen inches between the piano’s fallboard and Van Cliburn’s wrists.

You can read about this performance and see the video at http://tinyurl.com/p6faslj. I bet you’ll agree, the Fort Worth Symphony didn’t add much to the experience, except that it was fun to see Van Cliburn stand for the second verse, place a huge hand over his huge heart, and sing. Isn’t America a great country? 

Last night, Wendy and I attended an all-Beethoven concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi. They opened with a lackluster performance of Leonora Overture Number 3, and then were joined by pianist Yefim Bronfman for the First and Second Piano Concertos. That’s pretty good work for a pianist, especially when you consider that he plays the remaining three concertos and the Triple Concerto with the same band in the next two weeks. Wow, what a lot of notes.

Mr. Bronfman does not cut a dashing figure as he crosses the stage toward the piano. But I don’t have to risk my relationship with him by describing any further because I can rely on novelist Philip Roth to do it for me. In his novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), the narrator observes the main character, the disgraced Coleman Silk, having his somewhat creepy and typically Rothian way with the fragile woman on whom he is preying during a live rehearsal at Tanglewood:

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the Brontosaur! . . . He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso . . . someone who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman . . . Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than the guy who is going to move it . . . this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew.

Philip Roth can say what he likes, because Mr. Bronfman is more than just a pretty face. He can rely on his hands to speak for him. I often marvel at how a great pianist can project the illusion of fluidity when in fact, the tone of the piano is generated by percussion. The musician’s hands allow a control that produces the image of a waterfall rather than a hammer hitting an anvil. And Yefim Bronfman sprinkled that magic all over Symphony Hall. It’s impressive that he played two concertos—I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of notes there were, and not one out of place. As I sat listening with my thumb throbbing, I marveled at the understated assurance of his hands—those amazing structures of joints, muscles, and sinews—and how they could project such torrents of expression and emotion. 

We’ve got to hand it to you.

The business of learning to play a keyboard instrument involves training the hands to perform specialized tasks. We develop those muscles in unusual ways, refining the accuracy of aim and attack, and learning to simultaneously apply different amounts of pressure so as to emphasize notes of a melody. The muscles in our hands develop their own memories for the patterns of fingering in scales and passages in the pieces we learn. Our hands grasp the unique patterns of each of the twelve major and minor keys as easily as a doorknob. It is that tactile memory that allows us to play without looking at our fingers.

As miraculous as the human hand on the keyboard might be, the basic position of our hands on the keys as we play is common to many other activities. Place your hands flat on your desk and you have a pretty good start for the hand position of a keyboard player. Contrast that to the left hand of the violinist or guitarist. I grab a handful of nuts from a bowl by turning my hand over and clasping my fingers in a position similar to what I might clumsily do on the neck of a violin, but if I move my fingers I drop the nuts. The position of the violinist’s hand as he selects notes by pressing the strings against the neck is pretty much opposite that of an organist. 

Take the violinist’s tactile control a step further. It’s difficult enough to learn to play the right notes on a piano keyboard. But let’s face it, we’re given a simple choice and a relatively wide margin. If you manage to play the key that is F-sharp without touching another key, you get whatever F-sharp the instrument has to offer. On the violin, some combination of seeing, hearing, and feeling must be achieved to allow the player to seemingly randomly select an accurate note. Listen for a few seconds to a beginning violinist and you’ll know what I mean. The first four measures of Twinkle, twinkle, little star is like looking at your reflection in a fun-house mirror.

Even the guitarist has it easy because his luthier has reduced care by adding frets. But as much as the frets ease some of the difficulty of playing the instrument, our guitarist relies on the strength and evenness of the nails on his plucking hand to create his tone. No bundle of horsehair for him. A cousin of mine who lives near Paris was married to a classical guitarist who asked me to help him purchase the 800-grit sandpaper he liked to use to preen his fingernails. Snag a nail pulling open a cardboard box and you’re on the bench, sitting next to the pitcher with a hangnail.

Practice and use has another effect on the fingers of a string player. Anyone else’s fingers would get pretty sore jumping around on those strings. I think mine would be bleeding in ten minutes. But witness a great violinist playing a complex concerto and you’ll know that thousands of hours of practicing is necessary to condition those little pads of flesh to endure that abuse. Adding to the physical punishment of playing the violin is the hickey they get from the neck rest.

§

Modern carpenters are armed with pneumatic nailing machines. Walking past a construction site you hear POW POW POW at march tempo as nails propelled by air pressure slam through wood. But a good carpenter still has the old-time rhythm of placing a nail with one hand and driving it home with three rhythmic strokes of a hammer in the other. Watching a beginner start a nail in a piece of wood is like listening to that infant violinist. Many of us know the special feeling when hammer strikes and thumbnail goes black.

A potter throws a lump of clay on a wheel, wets his hands, and coaxes it into center. Then with one hand open cupping the lump and the other closed with thumb pointing down, a cup or a bowl emerges by metamorphosis. Practice allows the creation of a set of plates similar enough in size to produce a set.

A surgeon uses forceps to tie complicated knots in monofilament thread to make leak-proof joints that can contain the pressure of blood as driven by the beating heart.

A tailor or seamstress puts the end of a thread through the eye of a needle, then bonds two pieces of fabric with microscopic stitches.

The massive boom of an excavating machine responds to the touch of the operator’s fingertips on the controls, combining multiple movements into fluid, nearly human motion. 

§

As generations pass, our bodies adapt to our circumstances. We rely on clothing and central heating systems to keep us warm so we evolve toward hairlessness. The balding man takes comfort in the knowledge that he’s more advanced than his hairy friends.

Early humans had to rely on large vestigial molars to reduce plant tissue to digestible forms. Think of a cow chewing her cud. Today the plants we eat grow in convenient forms and we get a lot of our nutrition from meat that is cooked and cut into small pieces, so we have evolved smaller jaws than our ancient predecessors. But we still have those pesky vestigials, ironically called wisdom teeth, and as few of us have space on our jaws for them, out they come.

Like our hair and our teeth, our hands have evolved and adapted to operate the devices we’ve created. One quick handshake is enough to tell the difference between a carpenter and an office worker. Notice how many tiny motions we combine to button a shirt. And look across the symphony orchestra to see how many ways our hands can be used. 

What’s next? If our hair is getting thin and our jaws are getting smaller, think of our thumbs. Sit on a seat in the subway or a bench at the mall and watch the teenagers texting and playing hand-held games. Our thumbs will keep getting more nimble and I figure we’ll always need our fourth and fifth fingers to grasp hand-held devices. But it will take fewer than a hundred generations for our index and third fingers to wither away from disuse. So put down that phone and go practice! 

Pay attention

Once I spent an afternoon with a friend, dare I say lover, sitting on a rock at the seashore. The tide was coming in, and we were sitting there long enough to watch the water gain the shore one pebble at a time, until it was covering our feet. It broke in little rivulets around the stones, moved quickly to fill in hollows, and floated the sprigs of rockweed. Clams sensed its approach and gave their little squirts from under the sand, and hermit crabs scuttled along discovering new territory. It was a magical time, and I remember marveling at how gentle the motion was but what a huge force is the tide.

We live on a tidal river in Maine. There is a freshwater source about five miles up from us, but for the twelve miles between the Gulf of Maine and our village, it’s fully tidal with the water level rising and falling between ten and twelve feet twice each day, depending on the cycle of the moon. For most of its length, the river is between a half-mile and one-and-a-half miles wide, but about three miles from the Gulf of Maine, there’s a spot where the entire tidal flood passes through a passage that’s just a few hundred feet wide. Tens of thousands of tons of water race through the narrows every minute—it’s a dramatic demonstration of the power of the tide as eight or nine square miles of ten-foot-deep water race by. And the amazing thing is that the flow reverses with each tide cycle. When the ocean drops below that of the river confined above the narrows, the water flows toward the sea until the levels equalize, the current slows, stops, and reverses. 

There’s a fascinating and huge example of tidal flow through a narrow passage at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea—the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait is not wide enough to allow the entire Mediterranean to pass through with each tide, so at the eastern end the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean Seas around Albania, Greece, and Turkey have no perceptible tides. It’s a little unnerving for someone from New England to see a ship on salt water tied up to a fixed cement pier. At home where the tide can be as much as twelve feet, every boat has to be tied to a floating dock.

The grateful church

As much as I love the ocean, it’s pretty rare for me to sit still on a rock for an entire tide, and it makes me wonder about the people who first noticed, and then bothered to understand the phenomenon. Think of the patience it took to sit there watching night after day after night. Mr. Tide would have had to make the connection between the motion of the water and the passage of the moon across the sky, so the realization that the moon orbits around the earth was part of the project. The fact that tides can be accurately predicted years ahead is the result of millions of hours of observation.

Then think of the people who deduced by looking at the stars that the earth is simultaneously and continually orbiting the sun and spinning on its own axis. People like Copernicus and Galileo must have been very stubborn men to have had the patience to sit gazing at the sky for years.

On September 9, 1998, Hal Hellman published an article in the Washington Post that opened:

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial at Inquisition Headquarters in Rome. All of the magnificent powers of the Roman Catholic Church seemed arrayed against the famous scientist. Under the threat of torture, imprisonment, and even burning at the stake, he was forced, on his knees, ‘to abjure, curse, and detest’ a lifetime of brilliant thought and labor.

In the fall of 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered that the evidence against Galileo be reconsidered, and he was acquitted in 1992.

Just keep writing

Mozart lived for about thirty-five years and wrote well over 600 pieces of music. Schubert wrote about 800 pieces and lived less than thirty-two years. If we assume that each had twenty-five productive years as a composer, they each would have about 219,000 total hours to work with (25 x 365 x 24). Some of that time was spent sleeping and eating, some was spent on the logistics of daily life. How much of their total time on earth did those guys spend putting ink on paper? How long would it take you to simply copy the score of Don Giovanni, let alone write it for the first time?

The art of Aristide

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) was one of history’s greatest organbuilders. He’s on my mind a lot these days because I recently bought a copy of the superb documentary The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll released by Fugue State Films, and I’ve watched it several times. Buy your copy from the catalogue of the Organ Historical Society. If you have any affinity at all for the music of Franck, Widor, Dupré, Guilmant, Tournemire, Vierne, or any of the composers of French organ music since about 1835, you owe it to yourself to see this film. (See the review by Gene Bedient in the July issue of The Diapason.)

The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll tells of his childhood in Montpellier, located on the Mediterranean coast near enough to the Strait of Gibraltar to have tides of around one-and-a-half feet. It tells how Gioachino Rossini was exposed to the work of the young Cavaillé-Coll and encouraged him to move to Paris. And it documents his extraordinary career—how he won his first major contract when in his twenties, and how his imaginative innovations changed the world and music of the pipe organ profoundly and permanently. 

Cavaillé-Coll watched and listened to people playing wind instruments, and noticed that a trumpet player, for example, blew harder into his instrument to reach higher notes. So he divided his windchests, feeding higher wind pressure to higher notes, allowing solo stops like the Harmonic Flute to achieve a soaring quality.

Before Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations, changes of registration and dynamics were achieved by changing manuals or physically moving stop knobs. He divided his windchests across the other axis, separating mutations, reeds, and higher-pitched stops from the foundations—sixteen, eight, and four-foot flue stops. He invented the ventil—an air switch operated by the organist’s foot—that controlled the flow air to the chest with the reeds and mutations. This allowed the organist to “prepare” combinations of stops that could be added to a registration with a flick of the toe.

As Cavaillé-Coll’s organs grew larger and more complex, he incorporated the Barker Lever, an ingenious device that pneumatically magnifies the power and travel of an organ’s mechanical key action, reducing dramatically the force needed from the organist to play keys that open valves against high pressures, and with multiple couplers engaged. This allowed the effective size of organs to increase. The film tells the scurrilous story of politics and smear campaigns that finally allowed Cavaillé-Coll the free use of the Barker Lever, which had been developed by a competitor who controlled its use.

Cavaillé-Coll was influenced by the concurrent development of the symphony orchestra. He considered the organ comparable to the symphony, emphasizing the importance of solo voices, the ability to change combinations of sounds instantly, and the entire organ as a single mass of tone, capable of seamless dramatic crescendos through the vast dynamic range. Of course, his organs still had individual manual choruses allowing the long-established “terraced” dynamics of the vast body of organ literature. But his rethinking of the concept and potential of the organ inspired the musicians who played his instruments to create new worlds of expression.

Of more than five hundred organs built by Cavaillé-Coll, his greatest achievement was the tremendous instrument at Saint-Sulpice, completed in 1862, still in regular use and widely considered one of the greatest organs in the world. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was the largest organ ever built, and although it’s more than a hundred-fifty years old, it is still as vital, expressive, powerful, and impressive as it was when it was first played. Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was organist at Saint-Sulpice when the organ was completed, and we learn in the film how Cavaillé-Coll advocated his music, until he became aware of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens who was the organ teacher at the Royal Brussels Conservatory. Cavaillé-Coll tried to introduce Lemmens to the Paris audience, intending to spare Lefébure-Wély’s feelings by presenting him in concert with Lemmens. But the plan backfired, and Cavaillé-Coll and Lefébure-Wély had a falling out.

I was interested to learn that Widor studied with Lemmens in Brussels—that would give some insight into Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice, replacing Lefébure-Wély. And let’s remember that between 1870 and 1971, just two organists served that church—Widor, and Marcel Dupré. I think that single succession of organists and that singular instrument is enough to justify the claim of Cavaillé-Coll’s unique importance in the history of the instrument.

Cavaillé-Coll traveled throughout Europe studying other organs. The film recounts his impressions after visiting the great organ by Christian Müller at Haarlem. He built organs throughout France, in Spain and Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Venezuela, and Brazil, among other countries. This was at a time when it took days to travel across France, and weeks or months to cross the ocean. 

If Aristide Cavaillé-Coll had an iPad and a Facebook page, I bet we wouldn’t have had the organ at Saint-Sulpice.

Reviewing a life’s work

Some of our contemporary organ companies have impressive opus lists. Taylor & Boody is preparing to build Opus 70, and the Noack Organ Company is working on number 157—a fantastic productive life for a company with a single principal. Cavaillé-Coll’s workshop was much larger that any that are active today, but nevertheless, I’m staggered to think through the accomplishments of his life. He must have been thinking all the time. And he must have been on the move constantly. France was early outpaced by neighboring countries in the development of railroads, so for much of his career, Cavaillé-Coll would have relied on horse-drawn vehicles for his travel. Google Maps tells me that it’s 748 kilometers (465 miles) from Montpellier to Paris. It would take about seven hours to make that trip in a modern car on modern highways. What an effort it must have been to run between clients scattered across the country in the mid-1800s.

To supervise the sale, design, construction, and installation of more than five hundred organs was a stupendous achievement. To conceive and realize his inventions, from the circular saw blade to the Ventil, was a creative output unequaled in the history of the craft. And we know that Cavaillé-Coll spend much energy promoting musicians, encouraging compositions, and planning concerts.

TTFN, GPP

I’ve learned to refer to a website called netlingo.com when I come across an initialism that I don’t understand. When I received this one in a text message, I knew right away that the first one is “ta ta for now.” But the second one wasn’t on the list, and it took me some time to figure it out. When I realized it was from an organist who must have been sitting on the organ bench during a service, I guessed correctly, “gotta play postlude.” Really? Would that be the same organist who complains that churches don’t pay organists well enough? Would that be the same organist who feels disrespected by the clergy? Would that be the same organist who is disappointed because his idea of encouraging the church to acquire a new organ hasn’t gained traction?

Texting is a great example of how people fail to concentrate. We’ve only been texting for a few years—and I admit freely that I do all the time, and consider it a terrific way to stay in touch. Imagine the Organ Clearing House crew working in a distant city, picture them high on a tower of scaffolding, and Bishop needs to ask a question. A phone call would be a nuisance. A text message is like putting a sticky-note on someone’s refrigerator. I do that even to say, “CWYHAC” (call when you have a chance). 

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Manhattan. It was around seventy degrees, breezy and sunny, and thousands (millions?) of people were out and about. But I’m sure most of them were missing the beautiful day, because when I paid careful attention and counted on my fingers while walking a block or two, I noted that well over half the people were “in their phones.” They were texting, talking, e-mailing, probably searching for music, but they certainly weren’t paying attention to the beautiful day.

Perhaps the most dramatic result of the texting boom is the rapid increase in highway fatalities. It’s amazing to me that people think they can take their eyes off the road and their attention from their driving for long enough to write a note.

Initialism is a new word for acronym. It’s new enough that my spellchecker doesn’t know it. Initialisms in texting are typically short statements like SHWASLOMF (sitting here with a straight look on my face), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), or the teenager’s staple, PWOMS (parent watching over my shoulder). But there’s another that is a noun (the initials of a three-word name for a clinical condition) that’s started to turn up as an adjective: ADD—as in, “I’m pretty ADD today.” WWST (what would Shakespeare think)?

Our daughter Meg and her husband Yorgos have a beautiful dog named Grace. They got her from a shelter in Greece, before moving to the U.S. last fall. She’s part Irish Setter and, we think, part Saluki—which is the ancient Egyptian breed that is seen in many hieroglyphs. When they first had her, they thought they had her trained to stay off the furniture. But as Meg was studying the art of documentary film making, she got a cool time-lapse camera that sticks to a wall or window with a suction cup. They set it up with a laptop once when they went out, and were amazed and amused to see that in the span of a couple hours, Grace had climbed on and slept on pretty much everything in their apartment. Playing back the film shows a hilarious sequence of her changing her mind. It’s indicative of many people I know, who have such short attention spans that I wonder how they ever accomplish anything.

This is why I bring up the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Mozart, Schubert, and Cavaillé-Coll. I wonder what we are losing today because so many people are so wrapped up in the complexity of accomplishing nothing. I know a few people who actually stand out of the crowd because they have powerful and long attention spans. They really can sit on an organ bench for hours, practicing hard, without no powered-up phone sitting there waiting to ring. We’re increasingly surprised when someone plays an organ from memory, but it’s simple enough—they’ve done the serious work that it takes to master the music. They’ve paid attention.

A friend who is organist of a large and prominent church in Manhattan told me recently that he sits at the grand console in the chancel of his church looking out over a congregation full of people who are buried in their phones. He can see the telltale glow in their eyes. 

Are you paying attention? 

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 executive director of the Organ Clearing House

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?

I am writing in the days just after Christmas, working through the end of a calendar year, a high point in the church year, and the juxtaposition of contrasting personal events with the peripatetic life of working in the Organ Clearing House. I’m home in Greenwich Village this morning, seven days after returning from an installation trip in northern Idaho, and six days after the funeral of a close friend. I’ve tuned seven organs since, and a few days ago we celebrated the first birthday of our first grandson.

Coolin, Idaho, is located in the north-pointing panhandle of Idaho. It’s about seventy-five miles northeast of Spokane, Washington. I googled to learn the population and found a figure of 168—but when I mentioned that to the owner of the brand-new twelve-room Coolin Motel, he said simply, “There aren’t that many people here.” It’s on the shore of Priest Lake, a popular center for water sports, so the population swells dramatically in the summer. And there are four or five hundred miles of snowmobile tracks in the county, so when there’s snow, there’s another population of noisy recreational vehicles. 

The newest fad among the show-machine crowds is something called a Mountain Horse—a conversion kit that transforms a mountain bike into a cross between a snowmobile and a jet-ski. They’re scary-looking machines with motorcycle engine, transmission, frame, seat, and handlebars, a spring-suspended rear track, and a ski in front. Enthusiasts roar through forests and across frozen lakes at high speeds, giving us one more literal definition for the term break-neck.

My colleague Amory Atkins and I were there to finish the installation of a Möller “Double Artiste” on a specially designed organ loft in an elaborate and beautiful new home on the shore of the lake. The house is built around a gorgeous Craftsman-style post and beam frame complete with dovetails and hard ash pins, and finished with chest-high wainscoating of dark-stained alder, complete with raised panels, applied to all the walls including mud room, stairwells, guest bedrooms, and the powder room off the kitchen. All of the interior doors are American black walnut—any organbuilder I know would be proud to produce joinery of that quality.

The center of the house is a two-and-a-half story great room into which the organ speaks from its perch. Sitting at the console, one looks ten miles across the lake, which is surrounded by dramatic hillsides of red cedar forests plunging to the shore.

The owner is a successful attorney who lives alone. As we have a place in semi-rural Maine where the closest visible houses are a half-mile away across a tidal river, I understand the pleasures of solitude in a beautiful place. But there I can hop in the car and drive ten minutes to town where there is a very good grocery store. In our village I can buy gas, booze, and clothing, or get a haircut. There are several dentists, a couple of opticians, and a 38-bed hospital. There’s a nice bookstore, a couple of pharmacies, two good hardware stores, churches (three with lovely historic pipe organs), a movie theater, and a couple good year-round restaurants. And, we have a wonderful circle of friends, all with interesting professional backgrounds, with whom we can gather in all types of weather.

Our client’s house is twenty-eight miles up a tiny county road from the center of Coolin. There is a real grocery store in Newport, Idaho—about thirty miles from Coolin on the road to Spokane. But for medical services, haircuts, and any sort of comprehensive shopping, he has to drive the full hundred miles to Spokane. While we were there, that twenty-eight mile road was sheer ice—a scary and lonely trek from a tiny village to a remote house. And by the way, going north from Coolin past the house, it’s about forty miles to Canada. We didn’t ask if there’s a circle of friends.

If a tree falls in the forest…

Driving on that endless secluded road, I was reminded of the classic query, “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around, does it make a sound?”

This client was first in touch with us a couple years ago, sharing his plans for the house and asking about acquiring a pipe organ. Naively enough, I assumed that he had some past experience of playing the organ. Perhaps his childhood piano lessons morphed into organ lessons so he played for chapel services in prep school. But no! He doesn’t play the organ. He’s highly educated and has fantastic taste in music—during our stay he broadcast wonderful recordings through the house’s complex media system. When the organ came to life and I played Christmas carols, he stood next to me singing the tenor parts accurately, in tune, and with real phrasing. (I was at least partially right about the prep-school thing.) He explained that his daughters are musical, and told us of their real accomplishments. They would be visiting a couple times a year, and he expected they would enjoy playing the organ!

We have gone to a lot of trouble to install this organ. Joshua Wood and Terence Atkin delivered the organ by truck. The basic directions were to leave Boston driving west on Interstate 90, drive 2,750 miles, turn right at Coeur d’Alene (population 44,000), then go north 70 miles. We ate dreary meals five nights in a row at the Moose Knuckle Bar and Grill—the only place in Coolin open on weeknights. The Moose Knuckle menu includes pub food that can be prepared with fryolator and microwave. We drove that hazardous 56-mile round trip seven times. We tiptoed around the beautiful house, terrified that we would “ding” the woodwork.

But rather than the usual exercise of handing the organ over to an eager professional, I counseled this client that if the organ wasn’t played—and I mean, really played—a couple times a month, when summer comes and his daughters arrive, they will all be disappointed as the atrophied instrument wheezes back into service, full of ciphers and dead notes.

§ 

Wendy and I have enjoyed the close friendship of Jim and Lois for many years. Last spring they told us that Jim had been diagnosed with cancer, and through the summer he endured vicious sessions of chemotherapy. A complication developed in the early fall and he declined. The day before I left for Idaho, a mutual friend and I went to visit, and I knew I would not see him again. Sure enough, he died while I was away, and Amory and I returned home without finishing the project.

Jim and Lois were great “foodies” together. They were Italophiles, visiting Italy whenever they could—their last trip followed Jim’s diagnosis. Jim was a prolific organic gardener. To put his prowess in context, his wedding gift to us was a hundred pounds of fresh heirloom tomatoes that he sliced in our garage to be served at our wedding dinner. Jim and Lois befriended cooks, gardeners, and vintners in Italy, and brought those wares home in abundance. He sent me postcards of organs they happened on as they traveled.

We often cooked together, enjoying jointly prepared meals. And when Wendy and I went to their house for dinner, we loved sharing the most recent triumphs from Jim’s garden, wonderful unfamiliar wines, and not to escape mention, Lois is a terrific baker. It was strange standing in their kitchen this week with the bustle of family and friends all around without seeing Jim staking out his territory at the stove, cooking up something wonderful, and sharing tastes of exotic vegetables, “you gotta try this.”

§

The pipe organ is a public instrument. When an organbuilder conceives, designs, and builds an instrument, he intends from the beginning that it will be heard regularly by large groups of people. Attending a concert played on one of his instruments, he’s like an accomplished cook watching people eat food he has prepared. He has put a lot of thought and planning into it and he hopes they like it. He hopes they’ll enjoy familiar flavors, but be surprised and delighted by some unfamiliar ingredient or combination of flavors. He hopes they’ll go home talking about it. But above all he hopes they’ll show up to eat in the first place, and that they’ll come back often.

An orchestral instrument is a private tool used in public. The flautist selects and cares for his instrument as part of himself. He’s happy to take it from its case and share its sounds with an audience, and when the performance is over he packs it up and carries it home.

The pipe organ is standing in the venue before the musician arrives. If it’s the “house” musician returning to play for the hundredth or thousandth time, she mounts the bench with familiarity—the height and position are already set. She knows the strengths and weaknesses of the instrument. She knows how to balance its sounds with those of a large congregation singing with fervor, or with the solo voice of a young child. Like the glove-box of her car, the console is equipped with the pencils, Post-its, paperclips (don’t let them fall between the keys!), and often-played responses that are the tools of her trade.

When the day is done, the last Amen played, and the last listener departed, the organist turns off the blower and the lights, locks the door, and leaves the instrument alone in the room. There it gleams until the next person enters.

If it’s a guest organist, he climbs onto an unfamiliar bench, messes around with blocks to get the height right, tries a stop or two, tries a big full sound, and wonders how to balance with other musical tones he’s never heard. The organ may present itself to him as a willing partner or an obstinate beast. But whoever is playing, the organ is a public presence. Its monumentality complements the architectural and acoustic space it occupies. 

It’s strange to place an organ in a room where you know it will be rarely played and rarely heard. It’s like a cooking a meal that won’t be eaten.

§

Yesterday Wendy and I joined a big group of members of combined families to celebrate the first birthday of our first grandson. Benjamin is the first of his generation. He turned us into grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, and aunts all at once. He’s a delight with bright shiny eyes and a ready smile, and he’s freely willing to be passed around the room by adoring relatives. He started walking about six weeks ago at just the same moment he started falling down. We all had a blast celebrating with him, enjoying each other’s company, and sampling new foods.

Our daughter-in-law and her family are Brazilian, and Alessandra has recently earned American citizenship. Chris and Alex plan to raise Ben as bilingual. Both of them are great readers, and Ben has a wonderful start appreciating the world of books. As birthday presents were being opened, it was the books that captured his attention. He sat on the floor with a book on his lap, turning the pages and studying the pictures, murmuring little statements as he went. 

He also has an affinity for touch screens. When someone pulls a phone out of their pocket or purse—which is very often—he toddles over and cranes his neck to see the screen. His index finger is pointed and at the ready, and although he has no idea what he’s seeing, he has a lovely little touch as he swipes from screen to screen. One of the gifts he received was a mock tablet with a functioning touch screen. Alex remarked with glee that it would save her iPhone.

I wonder what kind of a world will greet Ben as he grows older. Wendy and I will make every effort to expose him to music, museums, theater, and other facets of the humanities and the world of culture. And I’m equally sure that other family members will introduce him to the magic of Brazilian culture. After all, they come from the land of Mardi Gras, the samba, the bossa nova, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Brazil is a land of infinite color and beauty, and while much of the country’s cultural heritage is different from ours, it’s rich and varied—a cornucopia of forms of expression. I trust that Ben will be the richer for his exposure to two languages, and two contrasting cultural heritages.

But what will the world be like when he’s in his fifties? Will concerts by symphony orchestras be accessible? Will live theater be a thing of the past? I hope I’ll have opportunities to share my work with pipe organs and church music with him. But I’ll not be around when he’s in his fifties. Will he remember the organ as the funny thing that Grandpa did? Today we can find cobblers who can stitch and glue a factory-made heel and sole set on a pair of shoes. But can we find a cobbler who can actually make a pair of shoes from scratch?

In his novel American Pastorale (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), Philip Roth tells of the industries in his home town, Newark, New Jersey:

The most important thing in making leather is water—skins spinning in big drums of water, drums spewing out befouled water, pipes gushing with cool and hot water, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If there’s soft water, good water, you can make beer and you can make leather, and Newark made both—big breweries, big tanneries, and, for the immigrant, lots of wet, smelly, crushing work. (page 11)

Roth gives over eight pages to describing the process of making a pair of fine leather gloves by hand:

Close your hand, make a fist . . . feel how the glove expands where your hand expands and nicely adjusts to your size? That’s what the cutter does when he does his job right—no stretch left in the length, he’s pulled that all out at the table because you don’t want the fingers to stretch, but an exactly measured amount of hidden stretch left in the width. That stretch in the width is a precise calculation. (page 132)

Will Ben, who shows a nascent love of books at the age of one, enjoy the magic of devouring a book by Philip Roth—a real book with paper pages? And will he witness craftsmanship at the level that predicts confidently the amount of stretch in a hand-made glove—none the long way, and just right around the finger?

Together, Jim and Lois were enthusiastic supporters of the arts, giving to their favorite institutions at high levels, and I know Lois will continue that in her new life without Jim. We are grateful to people like them for helping to keep symphony orchestras, museums, and opera companies alive so people like Ben can experience them long after they are gone. Cultural institutions like these are for the public—for our common wealth.

It’s wonderful to witness a great orchestra presenting music of Mozart or Brahms. But enjoying the works of past centuries is not the only reason it’s important. The future of the arts, the humanities—of our entire cultural heritage—is based on our understanding of the past. Everything that is yet to come is based on the foundation of what has been. History informs the future. That means that Ben will thrive in a wider spectrum than we know today. Keep working hard. Our grandson depends on it. ν