In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

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

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

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

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

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t make ’em like they used to.

We often come across consumer products that disappoint us. You buy it, get it home, and find that it’s not what you were expecting. Maybe it’s a pair of shoes whose soles come off too soon. Maybe it’s a toaster that won’t stay down. My parents lived in the house in which I grew up for more than 20 years, and the same two telephones were in the same two places with the same single phone number the whole time. I hate to admit how many phone numbers I’m paying for now (personal, business, and fax lines in two locations plus a mobile phone), but I seem to be buying new phones every few months. Those sturdy phones in my parents’ house had two functions—you could pick up the handset to make a call, or you pick up the handset to answer a call. And they had real analog bells in them that rang for incoming calls! The phones I buy now have speed-dial memories, hold buttons, caller ID, conferencing, multiple lines with distinguishable rings, volume controls, redial, busy redial, call forwarding, etc., etc. I appreciate and use all those features, but the phones don’t seem to last as long.

Is newer better?

Likewise, my car has hundreds of features that were unheard of twenty years ago. When I opened the hood of my first car, I could see an engine. My present car has a maze of sensors, hoses, filters, and electronic gadgets under the hood. All that technology means that the engine runs smoothly and reliably and requires very little maintenance. But a breakdown is likely to be caused by a seemingly mysterious failed sensor or a vacuum leak rather than a good old mechanical problem. And there must be hundreds of gadgets for comfort and convenience—electric this, heated that. I’ve had the car about eight months and I still find myself saying, “I didn’t know it did that.” I have to admit that I’d prefer not to give up all the snazzy features in favor of yesterday’s simplicity. I hope my next car will have a heater for the washer fluid!
A modern organbuilder faces this issue daily. We hope and intend that our work will last for generations, but we have to rely on materials that can be substandard. Look at the biggest pipes of the 16' Open Wood Diapason in an organ built by Ernest Skinner, each made of four knot-free boards 18" wide. The trees that yielded that lumber have all been turned into organ pipes. I maintain a Skinner organ in Reading, Massachusetts that was built in 1915 and still has its original reservoir and pouch leather. Ninety-one years! We have to work within a modern economic system that sometimes seems not to value quality. And we have to develop and create a specialized workforce. America’s educational system has no provision for training organbuilders. Each new worker has to be recruited, educated, trained, and sustained in a craft that typically builds very expensive products from rare and expensive materials using donated money.
But all that effort is worth it—pipe organ building is one facet of modern life where they do make ’em like they used to. It’s a privilege to be involved in a field in which excellence is the norm, in which personal craftsmanship is truly valued, in which the client or patron expects excellence. I especially value those conversations with my organbuilding colleagues in which we reflect on the high standards of our predecessors and how to emulate them in today’s world. That’s not an easy thing to achieve, and it does not happen without continual concentrated effort. A good organ is not an accident.
My work with the Organ Clearing House keeps me in regular contact with the best of older pipe organs, and I always marvel at the signs of yesterday’s craftsmanship. For example, there was something special about the way workers in E. & G. G. Hook’s factory sharpened their pencils. You can see this throughout their organs wherever a mortise was marked—those pencils were really sharp, and you know there were no fool-proof electric pencil sharpeners in sight, and you also know there were no plastic pencils with the lead out-of-center. Focusing on pencils may seem obsessive, but in order for a 19th-century pencil to be sharp, someone had to sharpen a knife by hand. Many modern craftspeople rely on factory-produced, laser-sharpened disposable blades for manual tasks such as cutting and skiving leather. And for less than ten dollars you can buy a pair of scissors that will cut just about anything. Achieving the “old days” levels of accuracy with hand-made, hand-sharpened tools is a reflection of a true craftsman.

They pretend to make them like they used to.

We rely on high-tech power equipment for processes that were once done by hand. With my family I once visited one of those reconstructed, restored historical villages that had been transformed into a modern museum. Staff people were walking about in historic dress demonstrating traditional crafts such as spinning, weaving, and candle-making. There was a reproduction of an old woodworking shop, and the docent proudly told us how the shop was producing the millwork being used for the restoration of buildings throughout the village. Next to a treadle-powered lathe there was an impressive pile of precisely turned poplar balustrades intended for a large curving staircase and balcony. I was suspicious. I stood up on a bench and peered over a low wall to see a state-of-the-art modern workshop with all the best power equipment. I imagined that the fellow in the leather apron at the foot-powered lathe had been spinning the same piece of wood for weeks.
When I was first working in organ shops we turned a lot of screws by hand (Popeye arms!), and we had Yankee® Screwdrivers—long-handled tools with a built in ratchet that you pumped up and down to drive a screw. Boy, did it make a mess of your wood when the bit jumped out of the slot in the screw-head! Then we cut off the end of a screwdriver and put it in the chuck of an electric drill. Then we had factory-made screwdriver bits that came in big sets. Then we had electric screwdrivers—a rig that looked like a drill but included an adjustable clutch to prevent you from stripping the thread in the wood. Now we have powerful rechargeable batteries that allow a wide variety of cordless power hand tools. (See Photo 1.) I’ve joked many times to younger workers that “when I was a kid we had wires hanging out of our screwdrivers.” When rechargeable batteries were first introduced the technology was inadequate. There was hardly enough power to turn a tough screw, and the charge didn’t last long enough to be practical. But now, with a quick-charger and a couple spare batteries you can work all day without interruption. I recently added to my bag of tricks a battery charger that plugs into my car’s twelve-volt outlets. (And by the way, this car has outlets all over the place.) When I leave a service call with a dead battery, it’s recharged before I get to the next stop.

You think that’s old?

My wife and I just got home from a vacation in Greece. We were fascinated by the culture, awed by the landscape, and charmed by the sunny atmosphere of the islands. But visiting the historic archeological sites was simply humbling. I routinely work with organs that are 150 years old. I live in New England where we are surrounded by buildings and artifacts from the establishment of the original colonies and the Revolutionary War. There are a few buildings around that are close to 400 years old. The history of the ancient city of Delphi is traced to the beginning of the 12th century B.C. when the Dorians arrived in Greece, and the surviving buildings date from around 500 B.C. There is a 5,000-seat theater built in the fourth century B.C.—simply stunning. (See Photo 2.) As a tourist, one can stand on the “stage” at the focus of that vast amphitheater and imagine an enthusiastic crowd cheering you as a favorite actor or musician. Or walk on the field enclosed by the 7,000-seat stadium and imagine an ancient athletic contest. (Several fellow tourists ran a high-energy race.) But what the guide books cannot prepare you for is the topography. These massive buildings are made of stone—huge pieces of stone—and the sites are almost all dramatic, steep, even scary mountainsides. The floor of one building is above the roof of the one next door. One walks from place to place exhausted by the combination of the brilliant Mediterranean sun and the weight of the camera bag, water bottles, and the wildly steep uneven steps. Add to that exertion the thought of carrying the rocks to build the buildings. No payloaders, no Bobcats®, no conveyor belts, no dynamite—just wheels, levers, and muscle.1
The ancient town at Mycenae was first settled around 1950 B.C., with major development or organization in about 1200 B.C. It includes Agamemnon’s citadel and royal palace, and features a sophisticated system of cisterns and aqueducts to supply drinking water through the site. The skill of the stone masons who built the many structures is especially notable. How they were able to achieve perfect joints between stones the size of small automobiles and then hoist them into place is hard to imagine. I couldn’t help thinking of the Organ Clearing House crew with towers of rented scaffolding and electric hoists to lower windchests out of an organ chamber. The adjoining museum displays a collection of bronze tools—hammers, adzes, drills, chisels—that the craftsmen made and used in their work. To use a hand-held adze to create a perfectly flat surface on a ten-ton stone—they certainly don’t make them like they used to! (See Photo 3.)
I was particularly interested in the methods and philosophies regarding preservation and restoration. Two years ago I attended an excellent symposium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on the occasion of the completion of the restoration by Taylor & Boody of an organ built in 1799–1800 by David Tannenberg. The instrument had been rediscovered in storage in a building that is part of Old Salem (another wonderful museum-village, not the site of the earlier mentioned balustrade caper!) and was returned to spectacular playing condition. The restoration was impeccably documented by Taylor & Boody, and they made fascinating presentations of the various tasks and challenges they faced. Some new parts had to be fabricated, but they went to extraordinary lengths to “re-round” literally flattened tin façade pipes, to reconstruct the geometry of the keyboards, and to establish the pitch of the organ. Moravian archives at Old Salem even contain a handwritten letter from Tannenberg to the church describing how to set the temperament and tune the organ.
But a side debate (exercised at length between friends and colleagues over dinner) included the suggestion that true preservation would not undertake to reconstruct the organ but to catalogue, measure, and display the array of parts. To presume to make new parts and to make assumptions about details like key travel would be to intrude on history.
In our work with historic organs we continually face similar questions. When we relocate an historic organ the intention is typically that the instrument should retain its historicity as much as possible, but also should be useful and reliable as a musical instrument, available for regular use by any organist. So can we justify adapting an instrument for modern use? Many modern organists are devoted to the use of combination actions—are we preserving an antique instrument if we adapt it to include an electric stop-action, or are we desecrating it?
Many of the monuments we visited in Greece are simply ruins today—mazes of stone foundations that allow us to surmise what life might have been like in an ancient village. Houses are supposed to have been occupied by merchants or by royalty. Local hierarchies are assumed based on the relative altitude of residences—the royalty lived at the top of the hill, laborers and merchants at the bottom—literally upper and lower classes.
But other sites are in the process of reconstruction. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is the Parthenon, situated on the Acropolis high above Athens. (See Photo 4.) Originally settled around 5000 B.C., the Acropolis is one of Greece’s earliest settlements. Throughout the ensuing centuries the site was fought over, developed and re-developed. Geologically it’s a large flat area, very high up, with very steep walls—a comfortable area to settle that’s difficult to reach and easy to defend. And the best part is there’s plenty of water—a feature common to all those barricaded hilltop cities. The Parthenon was built by Pericles around 450 B.C., made possible by the economic strength of the Delian Treasury that resulted from the formation of the Delian League of city-states. A thousand years later it was converted for Christian worship by the Emperor Justinian, and in the 17th century the Venetian army laid siege to the occupying Turks. In 1684, the Turks destroyed the Temple of Athena Nike (another of the grand structures on the Acropolis) to aid their defensive tactics, and in 1687 a Venetian bombardment exploded a Turkish magazine located within the Parthenon, blowing off its roof and reducing to rubble a 2,000-year-old monument. Today a massive restoration effort is underway, funded by the Greek government, the European Union, and “other contributions.”2
I was fascinated by the restoration site. (See Photo 5.) A huge construction crane is painted the same color as the Parthenon’s marble and housed at night crouching against the side of the building so as not to interfere with the skyline. The stone-workers’ workshops are housed in several low buildings, again designed with discreet profiles. Railroad tracks crisscross the site providing sturdy platforms for material handling. It’s a big effort when each piece of your project is weighed in tons rather than pounds. The rubble has been sorted into piles, individual pieces numbered and catalogued as to where in the building they originated. And fragments of stones have been returned to their original dimensions with new material (both marble and composite material) added. I was especially interested in the restoration with regard to what we learned about the Tannenberg organ in Winston-Salem. New material was added when necessary so the restoration would allow us to appreciate the monument in its original form. (See Photo 6.)
We visited the medieval Byzantine city of Mystra situated on another steep hill, this time on the outskirts of Sparta. There’s a castle at the very top (another steamer of a climb), several stunning churches and monasteries with breathtaking frescos, a royal palace, and the foundations of the houses and businesses that sheltered and supported a community of more than 20,000 inhabitants. The church of Ayia Sofia, built in 1350, features an elaborate floor made of polychrome marble. We were astonished that the public is allowed to walk on it! Like the Acropolis, this ancient city is illuminated at night, visible for many miles in every direction. There are halogen light fixtures mounted all around the hillside with conduit and wiring snaking through the ancient buildings. Nestled in a little neighborhood of the ruins of a dozen or so ancient houses I saw a large transformer shed, humming quietly in the wind.
How do we decide what modern concessions will enhance our ancient monuments?

There must be a better way.

Reflect on all the fancy sophisticated tools used by modern organbuilders. Power everything, laser levels, sophisticated hydraulics, digital measuring. There are no cars allowed on the Greek island of Idra in the Aegean Sea. On a Monday morning we sat at a waterfront café waiting for the ferry that would take us back to the mainland watching a construction crew loading bricks and bags of sand and cement onto donkeys. (See Photo 7.) How do you like this guy leading his brick-laden donkeys while making a call on his cell phone!

The convention of conventions
Conventions are big business. Tens of thousands of like-minded people gather in huge hotels and exposition halls for orgies of sales, parties, seminars, and exhibitions. Poking around the Internet, I found that the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association expects about 130,000 attendees at their 2007 convention to be held ten days from now at the Las Vegas Convention Center. SEMA (serving the specialty automotive industry since 1963) deals with custom equipment for cars and light trucks. They are planning a seminar for the 2007 convention titled Mean and Green: Bio-fuel Hummers, Fords, and off-road machines, where they will be exhibiting a 700-horsepower Hummer powered by bio-fuel. They’re not telling what the fuel mileage will be—500 bushels-per-hour? It isn’t easy being green.
In early December, the Las Vegas Convention Center will host the NFR (National Finals Rodeo) Cowboy Christmas Gift Show. They expect 20,000 attendees. Last March the Nightclub and Bar Convention & Trade Show attracted 38,000 people, and in August 13,000 people attended the convention of the American Pool Players Association at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.
Given Las Vegas hotel prices, the cost of travel and food, and the propensity of conventioneers to consume various commodities with unusual gusto, the amount of money involved in these huge shows is incomprehensible. How do they manage the logistics? Imagine the swirl at the hotel check-in desk when 50,000 people are trying to check in on the same day.
Last week the American Institute of Organbuilders gathered at the Valley Forge Conference Center and Radisson Hotel in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The Specialty Equipment Marketing Association has about a ten-year head start in membership development. Founded in 1963, their convention is now among the largest in the country. The AIO was conceived in 1973 and chartered in 1974. I don’t know the exact count, but I believe that around 250 of us attended, and to be truthful, I doubt we’ll get into tens of thousands any time soon.
This seems like a small group, but friends who are not involved in the organ world are amazed when I tell them I’m going to a national convention involving several hundred organbuilders. These are the people who say, “I didn’t know there were any of you left.” I’m feeling pretty good, how about you?
Any convention has an exhibit hall in which vendors show their wares to members of the trade. There were almost 25 firms exhibiting at the AIO convention, including companies that provide leather, specialty tools and hardware, keyboard restoration, organ pipes, console parts, and of course, solid-state control systems. The exhibits hall is open for several hours each day, especially in the evening when it becomes the locus for the convention’s social life. After dinner people swirl through the exhibits, run into old friends, make new friends, and head off to the hotel bars in small groups.
One benefit of this tradition is the dispelling of myth—I’ve been doing business with suppliers to the organbuilding trade for 30 years, and it’s fun to meet those with whom you’ve spent countless telephone hours. You get to form a personal connection with the person who answers the phone at the order desk, and to discuss technical problems in detail with the engineers who design and build the equipment. Over the years I have found great value in knowing the people I talk with on the phone. These relationships are unspeakably valuable when I’m calling from a job site where wedding limos are showing up outside and the organ is acting up.
I got active in organbuilding in the late 1970s just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were entering the market. I had my start in workshops that specialized in tracker-action organs, and my immature understanding didn’t allow much space for digital equipment. I knew many people who resisted or ignored using it. I was fortunate to work for several years along side an old-timer who had worked personally next to Ernest Skinner (in fact, I assumed the care of two Skinner organs he had helped install in the 1920s and had maintained ever since!) who said, “that stuff is for you young guys.”
In the ensuing generation, many if not most organbuilders have had at least some experience with solid-state equipment, and many use it exclusively. Years ago, I remember being easily bewildered. I would stand trembling with my hand on the switch before turning on a system for the first time and would be looking for smoke, unfairly (to both the supplier and myself) assuming that there would be smoke to see. I handled the circuit boards as though they were poisonous, and while I understood what they were supposed to do, I had no idea how they did it.
Enough time has passed that we’ve been through generations of solid-state equipment. Looking back, the earliest systems seem pretty primitive. The companies offering them went to great trouble to make the pin-boards (rows of pins where you connect the wires from the console controls to the system) look as much like traditional pipe organ equipment as possible. Later, multiplexing was introduced—logic-based systems that reduce organ music to data streams that allow the information to be passed from console to chamber using a single wire. In my memory, multiplexing was the first scary leap. Simply put, the system is based on a clock that scans all the console outputs a prescribed number of times per second and sends a code along the wire to the chamber where it is “unscrambled” by another clock. For someone who started with trackers, it was hard to imagine that it would work or that it could be reliable. At about that time, there was a Star Trek movie during which the USS Enterprise was under reconstruction and the famous Transporter was malfunctioning. When a crew member was “beamed” up or down, the machine failed to unscramble the molecules accurately, resulting in horrible scrambling of human tissue. Would this happen to our organ music?
At first bad things did happen. One system I worked with had a clock that was going too slow, resulting in herky-jerky organ music. And lightning strikes were death. I was caring for a couple large organs that had new multiplexing systems, and I sweated out thunderstorms with good reason.
Now we are getting used to software-based systems in which the organbuilder connects the console controls (keyboards, stop knobs, piston buttons, swell shoes) to rows of pins, and using software determines which pin does what. After the organ is finished, you could decide to change divisional pistons into generals by updating the software through e-mail.
It’s fun to think back a few generations to the time when electro-pneumatic combination actions and pitman chests were introduced. Any good modern organ builder knows the symptoms of trouble in a pitman chest. But when those chests were first being perfected, technicians must have sweated out mysterious problems the way I have with solid-state gremlins.
In the exhibit hall of the AIO convention, I was most impressed by the sophistication of new developments in solid-state pipe organ controls, and even more impressed by the sophistication of my colleagues, the organbuilders, who in the last 30 years have worked hard to understand the function, uses, and benefits of this equipment. I joined in conversations in which organbuilders were suggesting improvements, offering solutions to problems, and describing innovative ways they’ve found to use existing controls. I saw an institutional comfort level that can only be to the benefit of our clients. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Because I’ve been involved in some very large organ projects in recent years, I’ve noted an important way in which organ organbuilding industry has changed. Seventy-five years ago, when American organbuilders were producing thousands of organs each year, there were a number of companies that had hundreds of employees. It was much easier for such a large company to marshal the forces to erect a 32-foot Principal, or just to transport an organ of 100 ranks or more. They had people employed in experimental roles, developing combination actions, relays, and new types of voices. Today it’s rare to find a company with 100 employees, and most companies employ fewer than ten people. In this environment, the importance of the supply house is increased as we can decide independently whether or not to build pedalboards “in house,” or which solid-state control system best fits the design and function of the console we design.
I thank the people from the companies who exhibited at the AIO convention. I appreciate the hard work you’ve done developing new products. The American organ industry is strengthened by your efforts. The fees you paid for exhibition space helped make this valuable experience possible. And thanks for the candies, wine, keychains, and door prizes you provided!
Earlier this year I wrote a two-part essay about the new life of the famous, enormous, and almost indescribable organ in the former Wanamaker’s Department Store (May and June 2007, “Size Matters”). In it, I wrote that Philadelphia boasts an unusual array of very large organs. The Wanamaker organ (6/462), the Austin organ (4/167) at Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Dobson organ (4/124) at the Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) add up to 753 ranks in three organs that are within a few miles of each other. The Wanamaker Store and the Kimmel Center are within walking distance. The participants in the AIO convention had a wonderful opportunity to hear these three giant and wildly diverse instruments in two successive days.
While organ-people will no doubt always refer to the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, credit must be given to Macy’s Department Store, now the proprietor of this most grand of retail spaces. Robin Hall is an executive vice-president in charge of Macy’s Department of Annual Events, the group that produces the Thanksgiving Day Parade and July Fourth Fireworks along with numerous flower shows and musical reviews. There can be no division of a modern American corporation more enthusiastic or better equipped for the care of this most singular of pipe organs. In the brief period since their occupation of the store, they have funded extensive and expensive long-needed repairs, provided a large amount of space in the building dedicated to an organbuilding workshop, and established a collegial relationship with Curt Mangel, curator of the organ, and Peter Conte, Grand Court organist. To hear Peter and Curt talk about the people of Macy’s is to hear a gushing exceeded only by the amazing sounds of the organ itself. (Please refer to this column in the May and June issues of The Diapason for more about the Wanamaker Organ.)
Anyone who has attended an organ convention knows the bus rides—hundreds of like-minded people rattling across the countryside on a tight schedule to hear and see organs. Along with the organ demonstrations, there were workshop tours (Patrick J. Murphy & Associates and Nelson Barden at Longwood Gardens), workshop seminars on mounting toe-studs, stenciling façade pipes, and rebuilding Spencer organ blowers, and lectures in a large conference room at the convention hotel. Those lectures were on subjects as diverse as rebuilding and repairing Möller pitman chests, recovering keyboards, and conflict resolution.
Patrick Murphy, whose organbuilding workshop is in Stowe, Pennsylvania, was the chair of the convention, and the staff of his company was present throughout answering questions, guiding us as sheep on and off the buses on schedule, and providing a cheerful and welcoming presence. Randall Dyer (Randall Dyer & Associates of Jefferson City, Tennessee) is the chair of the AIO’s Convention Overview Committee. These folks deserve the gratitude of America’s pipe organ community for their contribution to the education, celebration, and advancement of American organbuilders.
I have always thought that organbuilders are a collegial bunch. Although we are competing with each other in a small market, we are typically willing to assist each other with advice and exchange of ideas, and even by sharing workers when projects get larger than a small staff can handle. But during most of the working year, we are buried in organ chambers in our own areas, seemingly out of touch with what our colleagues are doing. In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, we came out of our holes blinking in the sunlight, and shared a wonderful week of professional growth and companionship. Nice to see you all. See you in Knoxville next year.■

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.

§

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.

§

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

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Don’t blame the tools
The carpenter is finishing a house. He’s carefully measuring and mitering baseboards, windowsills, and doorjambs. He’s distracted by a mosquito, and his hammer glances the nail creating a carpenter’s rosette. The first thing he does is look at the head of the hammer—must be some glue on it or something.
The same carpenter needs to make one quick cut. He draws a square line on the board and picks up his handsaw. The saw veers to starboard. The first thing he does is look at the saw. Must be dull.
Or he measures a piece with a folding wooden ruler. He makes his mark and cuts his piece, but he didn’t unfold the ruler all the way—the inch markings skip from 13 to 26 and the piece is a foot too short. The first guy to come up with a wood-lengthener or wood-widener is going to make a fortune.
Organbuilders typically have many more tools than most tradesmen because our trade comprises so many facets. Of course, we have lots of woodworking tools, but we also have tools for leather, soft metal, hard metal, electrical work, and some ingenious rigs specific to pipe organs such as pallet spring pliers, tuning cones, toe cones and toehole reamers, and a wide assortment of nasty-looking little spades and prickers for voicing organ pipes.
When I’m working on a job site installing, tuning, or repairing organs, I carry a canvas sailmaker’s tool bag that measures about 8 by 16 inches and 12 inches high when fully loaded. It’s got 24 pockets on its sides and ends that surround a big central cavity. I like this format because you don’t need extra space to open it. Carry a steel toolbox up onto an organ walkboard and you need twice the space for the open lid. I keep it organized so that each tool has a pocket (some pockets have a half-dozen tools in them), and when I’m squeezed in a dark corner in an organ I can put my hands on many of my tools without looking at the bag. When co-workers borrow tools from me, I ask them to leave them on the floor next to the bag so my system doesn’t get messed up.
This morning I unloaded my car after a weeklong trip to one of our job sites, and all my toolboxes are on the long workbench in my shop. I wonder as I write just what’s in the favorite sailmaker’s bag, so I’ll take everything out and count. My everyday tool kit includes:
• 15 screwdrivers (no two alike, including ratchets, stubbies, offsets, straight, Phillips, or Robertson drive—I hope there’s never a screw I can’t reach)
• 2 wire cutters (fine for circuit boards, heavy for larger wires)
• 2 pairs long-nosed pliers (small and large)
• Flat-billed pliers
• Round-nosed pliers (for bending circles and hooks in wire)
• Double-acting linesman pliers (strong enough to let me bend bar steel in my hands, though the last pair broke in half when I did that)
• 1 pair slip-joint pliers
• 2 pairs vise-grips (one small, one long-nosed)
• Sears Robo-grip pliers (inherited from my father-in-law’s kit)
• 6″ adjustable wrench
• 2 sets Allen keys (English and metric)
• 2 pairs of scissors (one specially sharp, one general use)
• 6″ awl
• Tapered reamer
• 3 hemostats (two curved, one straight, for gripping tiny wires)
• Wire stripper (American Wire Gauge 16 through 26)
• 2 flashlights (large and small with spare batteries)
• 2 saws (one reversible back saw, one “harp” hack saw with replacement blades)
• 2 cheap chisels (3/4″ and 1″)
• 35-watt soldering iron and solder (for wiring)
• Electric test light
• 6 alligator clip leads
• Small hammer (my maul-wielding colleagues call it my “Geppetto” hammer)
• 2 rulers (one 35′ tape measure, one 72″ folding rule)
• 2 utility knives (light and heavy)
• 10 files (flat, half-round, round, big-medium-tiny)
• 3 tuning irons
• Pallet spring pliers
• 2.5-millimeter hex-nut driver (for Huess nuts)
• Wind pressure gauge
• 2 rolls black vinyl tape
• Sharpies, ballpoint pens, pencils
• Sharpened putty knife
• Spool of galvanized steel wire (for quick repairs)
• Bottle of Titebond glue
• Tubes of epoxy
• 5 small brushes
And there’s a canvas tool-roller with 35 little pokers, prickers, burnishers, spades, spoons, a bunch of little rods for raising languids, wire twisters, magnets, special keyboard tools, and an A=440 tuning fork.
I often ship this bag on airplanes, wrapping it in a blanket and stuffing it in a duffel bag—checked baggage, of course—and I dread losing it. It would take weeks to reconstruct this tool kit.
In the back of the car I carry three other larger toolboxes, with cordless drills, bit and driver sets, and heavier hammers, multimeter, etc., etc., etc. There’s a big plastic box with 40 dividers for wiring supplies, and another full of “organy” odds-’n’-ends like leather nuts and Huess nuts, felt and paper keyboard punchings, a few spare chest magnets, and some old piano ivories. And finally, a cardboard box full of pieces of leather and felt of almost any description—any large scrap from a workbench project goes into that box.
And I’m always missing something.

Organ transplants
Now that you know what my tool bag looks like, here’s a story that makes me wonder. I got a Saturday call from one of my clients, a large Roman Catholic church with a big organ in the rear gallery. The organ wouldn’t start and there were two Masses that afternoon. I knocked on the door of the rectory to get the key for the organ loft and was greeted by a teenage girl who was volunteering to answer the parish phones on the weekend. She called a priest’s extension and said, “The organ guy is here.”
The priest was a tall, dignified, elderly man, who came down the stairs, invited me into a parlor, and offered me a seat. I carried my tool bag with me and set it on the floor next to my chair. He asked two or three questions before I realized he thought I had something to do with a human organ donation program. I set him straight as politely as I could, asking for the keys to the organ loft while wondering what in the world he thought I was going to do with those tools!

Tool renewal
When I was first running around the countryside tuning organs, the “land line” was our only means of communication. You had to get all your service visits arranged in advance, and if a day’s plan changed because a sexton forgot to turn on the heat, I’d look for a pay phone at a gas station. Now of course we all have phones in our pockets. I usually have mine with me in an organ, not because I intend to interrupt my work taking calls, but because it has a notepad and a voice-memo system that allow me to keep notes while on the job. If I realize I’m missing a tool, I’m out of glue, or I don’t have any fresh batteries along, I make a note, and every couple weeks I spend an hour with my tools, replenishing supplies, sharpening blades, and keeping things in order.

Tool envy
There are many clever people working in tool design—every time I go into a hardware store I notice some neat little innovation: the cordless drill-screwdriver with a little headlight that lights when you pull the trigger; the 4-in-1, then 8-in-1, then 10-in-1 screwdriver (I carry one of those in my briefcase); the little rubber octagonal washer that goes on the end of the flashlight to keep it from rolling. And boy, are they tempting. I buy a ten-dollar hand tool because it’s cool and stuff it in my tool bag. Every now and then there has to be a culling. I guess it’s good news that tools break and wear out. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones.
When I was a hotshot apprentice in Ohio, I bought a fancy set of chisels by mail order. These were the Marples beauties, with maple handles, iron ferrules, and Sheffield steel blades. I paid about a hundred dollars for the set of nine—a huge amount of money for me in 1978. (Those were the years when good new large organs cost $5000 per stop!) I was enough of a beginner that my mentor teased me, saying all I needed now was some wood. But I still have those chisels, and I still have the racks I made to hang them on the wall over my bench. They’re the only workshop chisels I’ve ever owned, and while some of them are a little shorter than they used to be, they sharpen just as easily as when they were new. The iron ferrules mean you can hit the handle pretty hard with a mallet without damaging the tool. They are old friends.
By the way, also hanging on the wall over my bench in that shop was a display of my mistakes, hung there by my mentor to keep me humble. I think they’re still there.
When I started the Bishop Organ Company in 1987, I bought a Rockwell-Delta 10″ table saw—it’s known as a “Uni-Saw” and it must be one of the most popular table saw models ever made. The blade can be tilted to make angled cuts, and there’s a crosscut miter gauge that allows me to cut angled ends of boards. Over more than 20 years, I’ve cut miles of wood with it, and only last month I had the first trouble with it. The arbor bearings had finally worn out, and I found a local industrial supply company that was able to replace the bearings quickly. It was such a pleasure to use my saw again with the new bearings that I treated it to a new Freud carbide-tipped blade.

A reflection of attitude
The organbuilding firm of E. & G.G. Hook was most active in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century. There’s a legend handed down through generations of workers there that in order to be hired to work in the factory an applicant had to present his toolbox for inspection. In the days before Sears, Home Depot, Woodworker’s Warehouse, Woodcraft Supply, Duluth Trading Company, McMaster-Carr, and Grainger, a woodworker built himself a box to store and transport his tools. Remaining examples show infinite attention to detail, with special drawers and cubbies designed for each specific tool, fancy dovetail joints, and hidden compartments. The worker that could produce such a masterpiece could build anything required in an organ shop.
Recently I noticed that Lowe’s was featuring a new line of mechanics’ toolboxes. These were not the little boxes you’d carry around, but monumental affairs with dozens of steel drawers on ball-bearing slides and heavy-duty casters. Some were five and six feet wide and just as tall. Fully loaded they’d weigh a ton or more. I’ve seen things like these for years in mechanics’ service bays and I have a more modest version in my shop, but I’d never seen a toolbox with a built-in refrigerator! Not a bad idea, though.
You may have seen the traveling salesmen who peddle tools to mechanics. The companies are Snap-On, Cornwell, and Matco, among others. A heavy mobile tool showroom pulls up to a service station and the mechanics all come out to shop. The driver is a franchise owner who travels a regular route of customers. He extends credit to his customers, allowing them to make cash payments each week so the wives never learn how much money the guys are spending on tools. And the Snap-On driver is likely to be armed. He’s carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tools that every mechanic would love to own.

A tool for every purpose
I take a lot of pleasure in my tools. I know, I know—it’s a guy thing, as my wife often mentions (though her weaving habit depends on an in-house service department!). But maintaining a comprehensive and effective tool kit is essential to good organbuilding. We say don’t blame the tools, but we cannot work without them. It’s a simple pleasure to draw a sharp knife along a straight edge to cut a neat piece of leather. I enjoy the sound and sight of plane shavings curling off my workpiece onto my hands and wrists, littering the workbench and floor with aromatic twists. It brings to mind the cute little Christmas dolls made from plane shavings in places like Switzerland—Saint Nicolas with a curly beard of cedar shavings. Moving the languid of an organ pipe to achieve good musical speech, soldering wires to a row of pins that wind up looking like a row of jewels, gluing goat-skin gussets to the corners of a reservoir are all motions repeated countless times that I don’t take for granted and can’t repeat without my tools. When I use someone else’s tools they feel funny in my hands.
Sometimes I’m asked how we can maintain patience to complete a project that might take a year or more. Easy—every day you take satisfaction in each little thing you make. A finished organ comprises thousands of those little projects blended into a unified whole. Listening to an instrument brings back the memories of each satisfying cut, each problem solved, and of course each mistake. My tools are my companions and my helpers. They’ve been with me to almost every American state and as far abroad as Madagascar. Right now they’re all spread out on my workbench for a photo shoot, but they’ll be back at work on Monday morning.