In the wind . . .

Is it real?
Fifteen or twenty years ago there was an ad campaign for Memorex® cassette tapes in which various setups were created to compare “live” music with recorded music to see whether both would break a piece of fancy stemware. A popular singer would be featured offering a terrible, powerful high note, and inevitably the glass would shatter.
What did it prove?
I’ve heard some singers who could make me cringe, but how plausible is it that the actual, acoustic human voice would break a glass? Conversely, I wonder if any other recorded sound played back with enough wattage would break the glass—a hummingbird’s wings for example or a cat on a hot tin roof. I think the Memorex demonstration was at least a little bit disingenuous, and of course we heard the whole thing through whatever speakers came with our television set. Television advertisements for televisions imply that what you see on the screen may be better than real life, but again, your appreciation of the ad is limited by the quality of your present TV.
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000) defines the word virtual: “1. Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name . . . ” and “2. Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.”
I introduce the word virtual in this context of what I might call the “unreality of reality.” In recent years we’ve been given the phrase virtual reality, defined in the same dictionary as “a computer simulation of a real or imaginary system that enables a user to perform operations on the simulated system and shows the effects in real time.”
An oxymoron is not a person addicted to painkillers, it’s a “rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined.” To my ears, virtual reality is an oxymoron.

Let’s be real.
We might imagine that Bach would have stopped at 175 cantatas if he had been subject to phone calls from the clergy, or Mozart’s 30th symphony would have been his last had he been distracted by television, or—God forbid—video games. But simple things like hot water in the house and electric lights are taken for granted, and more complicated things like computers have become something close to necessities. I’m in favor of technology. The other day I stumbled over a box of detritus stored in an organ chamber by a long-gone organist. I was amused to see a 56K compact disc. 56K? How Stone Age. There’s a half-used 100-pack of 700MB CDs on my desk. Big deal. I replaced my previous 2GB laptop with a 60GB job because of the number of photos I carry around. There’s a 2GB memory card in my camera. What’s next? Remember NASA engineers using slide rules during Apollo flights? (I know that’s true because I saw it in a movie.) With a $400 GPS we have more navigation ability in a 20-foot motorboat than the entire British Navy had during the Napoleonic wars. How much more computing speed or data-storage capacity do we need?
Apply that same question to cameras (mine has more mega-pixels than yours), automobiles (mine has more horsepower than yours), or cell phones (mine’s a camera, a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock . . . ). How much more can they offer before they stop getting better?
Many of us in the organbuilding world are devoted to the pipe-organ-technology of the early 20th century—what Ernest Skinner considered adequate console equipment should be good enough for anyone. But let’s remember that hundreds of terrific Hook organs were replaced by Skinner’s new-fangled electric things where the organist was 40 feet away from the instrument. What makes the early electro-pneumatic pipe organ the ideal? How many organbuilders and organists disdained Skinner’s innovations as superfluous or unnecessary? “If God had intended us to push pistons we would have been all thumbs.” At what point in the development of any technology does one take a snapshot and declare the ideal, after which there’s no need for further development?

Electronics in the worship space
It’s more than 50 years since churches began purchasing electronic organs to replace pipe organs. I think many, even most of us will admit that the 30- and 40-year-old models that are still laboring along are pretty poor. While they have pipe organ names on their stop tablets, they never did sound like organs. They were cheaply made and not durable. A church I served as music director had a 20-year-old electronic in the chapel that wasn’t in tune, according to the technician couldn’t be tuned, and needed parts that weren’t available. Have you ever tried to get a three-year-old computer repaired?
While it’s always risky to generalize, it seems to me that the average church that was once proud of owning a modest pipe organ is inclined to buy an electronic console that emulates a 60- or 70-stop “real” organ. What sense does it make to have an “organ” with 32¢ sounds, batteries of reeds, and secondary and tertiary choruses in a sanctuary that seats fewer than 200 people? Is it so you can play music that was intended for buildings ten times the size? It’s a violation of scale, an anomaly, and artless expression. As I wrote a couple months ago, “the Widor” doesn’t work in every church.

The Virtual Pipe Organ
Trinity Church (Episcopal), Wall Street, New York, is a prominent, beautiful, historically significant edifice that houses a large and vibrant parish with an extraordinary music program. According to the church’s website , the parish was founded “by charter of King William III of England in 1697.” The present Gothic Revival building, designed by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated on May 1, 1846. The website includes an Historical Timeline that tells us that some of the church’s vestrymen were members of the Continental Congresses, that the parishioners were divided politically as the Revolutionary War progressed, but that the clergy sided with the crown. An American patriot, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Provoost, was appointed rector in 1784, and the New York State Legislature “ratifie[d] the charter of Trinity Church,” deleting the provision that asserted its loyalty to the King of England.
In 1770, just 28 years after Georg Frederick Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, Ireland, it received its American premiere at Trinity Church. Today’s spectacular and highly regarded Trinity Choir is heard on many recordings. Their annual performances of Messiah are legendary throughout the city. Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote, “All the ‘Messiah’ outings to come in the next two weeks will have to work hard to match this one.” And in 2005, the Times called Trinity’s performance of the great oratorio, “the ‘Messiah’ to beat.” (Now there’s an image!) What a wonderful heritage.
On September 11, 2001, Trinity Church assumed an essential national role by chance of place. Located adjacent to the World Trade Center, the church and its people were thrust into the center of that tragic story. St. Paul’s Chapel, part of Trinity’s “campus” and located a couple blocks away, became an inspiring comfort station for firefighters and other emergency workers. Through the ensuing months, as the rubble was unraveled, the chapel was staffed by the people of the church who provided food, refreshment, and a resting place for the rescue workers. The response of the clergy, staff, and parishioners to that national catastrophe was as inspirational as it was essential.
At the moment of the attack, a service was in progress in Trinity Church, the organ blower was running, and the great cloud of dust that filled the entire neighborhood found its way into the organ. It was later determined that the organ could not be used without extensive cleaning and renovation. A temporary solution was offered. Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, dealers of Rodgers organs in New England, had been developing the “Virtual Pipe Organ,” using a technology they named PipeSourced® voices. A large instrument using this technology was installed at Trinity Church as a temporary solution while the church researched the condition of the Aeolian-Skinner.
A year or so after the Virtual Pipe Organ was installed, I attended a service to hear the instrument and was impressed by the volume and intensity of the sound. The massive building was filled with the sound of an organ. There was no distortion. People were singing, and I’m willing to bet that many of them were well satisfied, even thrilled by the sound. I had not expected to be convinced that the Virtual Organ would really sound like a pipe organ. In fact I’m not sure how I could eliminate the bias of a lifetime as an “acoustic organ guy.” As full and intense as the sound of the Virtual Organ was, it was not the sound of a pipe organ. It lacked the essential majesty of presence, the special physicality, the particular “realness” of the sound of a great pipe organ.
The experience of listening to the Virtual Organ might be compared to listening to a recording of a great pipe organ, as the sound of both comes from speakers. I understand that sampling technology is not the same as recordings, and I expect that proponents of the virtual organ will object to my analogy, but it’s those speakers that make the essential difference. Sound coming from a speaker will always be distinguishable from sound coming from organ pipes.
I can recall the depth of my impressions when as a young teenager I first heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing in Symphony Hall. I think I expected the huge volume of sound and the intensity of the differences of the timbres, but I had no way of anticipating the presence, the majesty, the physicality of all that acoustic sound as enhanced by the magnificent room. Oh, those double basses!
There are few musical presentations more expensive than a symphony orchestra (except opera and ballet in which the symphony orchestra is combined with the theater). A hundred serious musicians on stage in a 300-million-dollar concert hall require important organization to sustain, but we don’t hear a move to replace that experience with digital sampling. We want to hear the real thing. The symphony orchestra and the pipe organ are special in our culture because they’re so expensive. I don’t mean that the money itself is impressive—but that the money represents how majestic the expression is.
In conversations with church members I frequently hear people say that the sound of a digital instrument is “good enough” for the untrained ear. One might respond, unless your fiancée is a jeweler, why bother with a real diamond? She’ll never know the difference.
I don’t want to eat a chemically produced substitute for lobster. I want the real lobster, and for goodness sake, don’t mess with the butter!
I read on Marshall & Ogletree’s website (www.marshallogletree.com) that they sample complete pipe organs: “PipeSourced® sounds, which are skillful note-by-note, stop-by-stop recordings of famous pipe organs (90% of them vintage Aeolian-Skinners), contribute unprecedented virtual reality to Marshall & Ogletree instruments, as well as to its combination organs and custom additions for new and existing pipe organs.” That’s a long, long way from the previous generation of sampling techniques, and proverbial light-years from the early rounds of tone-generators on which the development of the electronic instrument was founded.
There have been a number of articles written in praise of the Virtual Pipe Organ, including Allen Kozinn’s review of a recital played by Cameron Carpenter published in the New York Times on July 7, 2007, with the headline: “A ‘Virtual’ Organ Wins New Converts at a Recital.” And Dr. Burdick has written an apologia defending the church’s decision to sell the dismantled Aeolian-Skinner, retain the Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Organ, and to commission another virtual instrument for St. Paul’s Chapel, which concludes,
Trinity Church is proud of its role in developing the “virtual pipe organ,” which could only exist in this new century because of the continuing exponential growth of computer speed and memory. Without the brilliance of Douglas Marshall and David Ogletree, whose research began in 1997 to develop an entirely new approach to the digital organ, we could never have achieved an instrument such as this. Furthermore, without Trinity Church having taken advantage of its historic opportunity by daring to consider such an interim instrument, the music world would not now have this dramatic new 21st century success: like an automobile with horsepower but no horses, a virtual pipe organ with musical potentials beyond anyone’s imagination.

There’s little doubt that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was not as distinguished as many other instruments produced by that firm. (It’s at least a little ironic that there’s agreement that Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner organ was less than great, but it’s replaced by something based on sampling “vintage Aeolian-Skinners.”) There’s no doubt at all that the Virtual Pipe Organ represents but a fraction of the cost of commissioning a Real Organ. After all, we live in the age of the seven-figure organ. There’s no doubt that Trinity Church has realized a significant short-term economy by eliminating the immense maintenance budget required by a large pipe organ. In fact, Dr. Burdick reports that they had been spending $56,000 annually to care for the Aeolian-Skinner—a specious argument in that there are many much larger and much older organs that are maintained effectively for less money. The organ world rumor-mill, that most active of subcultures, has reported many different numbers representing the cost of the Virtual Organ. I don’t know what the actual price was, but it’s safe to guess that it was a significant number of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Is it true stewardship of a church’s resources to spend such a volume of money on artifice? For centuries, Christians have given their all trying to make their worship spaces approach their respect for their faith. Huge treasures were spent in 12th-century France building cathedrals that still inspire us. Fortunes have been spent on stained-glass that fills church interiors with magical, mystical light. Trinity Church Wall Street is a spectacular edifice with beautiful vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, carved wood architectural elements and furniture. Hundreds of important preachers, humanitarians, and politicians have spoken there. To walk inside is to respect the care and vision with which the place was created. To walk inside is to find respite from a frenetic city and inspiration from all that has happened there. To walk inside is to worship. This is not a place for artifice.
As I’ve spoken about Trinity Church, I encourage you to read about St. Paul’s Chapel at www.saintpaulschapel. org/about_us/. Built in 1766, it’s the oldest public building in Manhattan that’s been in continuous use. Here’s an excerpt from that website:

George Washington worshiped here on Inauguration Day, April 30, 1789, and attended services at St. Paul’s during the two years New York City was the country’s capital. Above his pew is an 18th-century oil painting of the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782.
Directly across the chapel is the Governor’s pew, which George Clinton, the first Governor of the State of New York, used when he visited St. Paul’s. The Arms of the State of New York are on the wall above the pew.
Among other notable historical figures who worshiped at St. Paul’s were Prince William, later King William IV of England; Lord Cornwallis, who is most famous in this country for surrendering at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781; Lord Howe, who commanded the British forces in New York, and Presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and George H. W. Bush.

St. Paul’s Chapel stands as a shrine for all that happened in that neighborhood and to this country on September 11, 2001. This is also not a place for artifice.
In his Apologia, Dr. Burdick reports, “Because of insurance matters after 9/11, there was no question that we’d have to wait five to seven years for a decent replacement pipe organ, during which time I felt that we’d be starving for good organ sound.” Fair enough. That’s why the purchase of the Virtual Pipe Organ for temporary use was a good solution. But I am sorry that such a church in such a place with such a history would miss their opportunity to add not to the virtual world, but the real world of the pipe organ.

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!

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Hometown loyalty
Local loyalty is legendary amongst native Mainers, those who have lived in Maine and nowhere else. There’s the story about the man from “away” who settled in a comfortable house with a backyard fence that separated his property from Eben’s (short for Ebenezer)—Eben had been born and grew up in that house. They were cordial neighbors for years, but our man was always aware that Eben continued to consider him an outsider. Forty years into their friendship, our man asked Eben, “We’ve been neighbors for forty years. Surely by now you must consider me part of the town.” Eben was quiet for a long moment, and then said quietly, “If the cat had kittens in the oven you wouldn’t call ’em biscuits.”
Some fifteen years ago I was renovating an organ in a small town in Maine. An elderly local organist was interested in the project and visited the church several times as I worked. He wanted me to see the organ in his church—an instrument built in the 1920s when his aunt was organist there. He had succeeded her some fifty years ago and was the proud steward of the little organ. I asked if he had lived there all his life. He replied, “not yet.”
I’ve lived in Boston all my life. Well, not really. I spent almost ten years in Ohio, first as an undergraduate and then as director of music at a church in Cleveland and working with organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin. Now although we vote in Boston, my wife and I divide our time between my hometown and mid-coast Maine, an area that I have grown to love. And I spend so much time away from home on Organ Clearing House projects (I’m coming to the end of five weeks in New York City) that I don’t seem to be at home for more than a few days at a time.
But I still consider myself a Bostonian. I’m proud of the city’s role in our country’s history. As a descendant of Paul Revere, I was brought up keenly aware of the sites of critical Revolutionary battles and the wealth of historic sites and buildings scattered throughout the area. We live a few hundred yards from the USS Constitution, familiarly known as Old Ironsides, the Navy’s frigate commissioned in 1797, now the oldest ship in the U.S. Navy. The Old North Church (“ . . . hang a lantern aloft in the North Church tower as a signal light; one if by land and two if by sea, I on the opposite shore will be ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm . . .”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride) is in our neighborhood.
I have been an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox, where until about 1990 the team was made up largely of loyal “lifers.” Carl Yastrzemski played his entire 23-year career for the Red Sox. That seems a gentler era in professional sports when a hometown hero stayed home and was admired over the decades. Dwight Evans seemed headed for such a career until the Sox released him as a free agent in 1990 after eighteen years at Fenway Park. He retired after playing one season for the Baltimore Orioles and that apparent disloyalty on the part of the Sox was the beginning of the end of my unabashed fandom. That feeling was iced followed the thrill of the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory in 2004. (They hadn’t won the World Series since 1918, the year they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 so Red Sox owner and theater impresario Harry Frazee could fund the first performances of No, No, Nanette.) No sooner had the dust settled over Fenway after the 2004 Series, than Sox hero Johnny Damon was traded to the hated New York Yankees. Don’t tell me it’s just a game!

§

Boston has always been an organ town. It was right around 1800 when the Puritans gave in to the evils of church music, and a small pipe organ was installed at King’s Chapel on Tremont Street in Boston. Within a few years, William
Goodrich and Thomas Appleton were building organs in Boston. In 1827, two young cabinetmakers from Salem, Massachusetts (the town famous for the witch trials of 1692) finished their apprenticeship with William Goodrich and opened their own organbuilding shop in Boston. Elias and George Hook started slowly, building fewer than ten organs a year for the first few years, but forty years later they were rocketing along at a fifty-five-per-year clip.
I love to think of the spectacle of a nineteenth-century workshop building that many organs. The instruments were shipped all over the country—how did they manage the correspondence for that many instruments without telephones and self-stick stamps, let alone fax machines and (God forbid) e-mail? How did they organize the flow of materials to their workshop? It takes tons of lumber, metal, and countless other materials to build an organ. The in-street trolley tracks that carried human passengers around Boston during the day were the routes of horse-drawn rail cars that brought rough materials to the workshop. The same carts transported the completed organs to barges, steamships, and railroads. Rural northern New England is pretty difficult to navigate today. There are few large roads, many hills and mountains, and lots of narrow bridges that cross treacherous rivers. It’s hard to imagine hauling a large pipe organ to northern New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine when teams of horses or oxen were the engines of the day.
And picture the rural church receiving its new Hook organ. A couple workers travel from the factory with the organ. The trip takes weeks. They enlist the help of locals for the heavy lifting and complete all facets of the installation. Since the trip took so long, they must have stayed on the job until they were sure the organ was perfect. There would be no relying on a routine two-month check-up to correct anything that went wrong with the new organ.
I suppose that before the workers left the completed installation, they would visit all the other churches nearby, offering the company’s services for more new instruments. There are Hook organs built in the 1860s and 1870s all around the country, including the Deep South. Was it awkward for the Yankees from the Hook factory to cross the Mason-Dixon Line with their organ shipments in the years following the Civil War? I imagine their wives spent sleepless nights worrying for their safety. And how did the southern organists and church committees get in touch with the sales department at Hook? Did Hook advertise in newspapers all across the country? We have copies and reproductions of the Hook catalogue and sales brochures (you can purchase them online from the Organ Historical Society).

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When I was a teenager, I had my organ lessons on a new organ built by Fisk (First Congregational Church, Winchester, Massachusetts). I had organist duties at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which had a terrific organ by
E. & G. G. Hook, with around 30 stops on three manuals, built in 1860. My family had a summer home on Cape Cod in a town that was home to a small Hook & Hastings organ, and another by William H. Clark.
You may not have heard of William H. Clark. He had been organist of the First Congregational Church in Woburn, playing on the same terrific Hook organ as I. In the late 1860s he moved across the square to the Unitarian Church, where in 1870 he oversaw the installation of an even larger three-manual Hook organ. The Unitarian Hook is the instrument that was relocated to Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin, Germany, and so beautifully restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen. Stephen Kinsley was the chief voicer at the Hook factory—today we would call him tonal director—and the great and good friend of William Clark—good enough that Clark was able to woo him away from Hook into an organbuilding partnership. William H. Clark Company was located in Indianapolis. They built about a dozen organs, including the one I knew so well on Cape Cod, another in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio—an instrument that I helped John Leek restore in the late 1970s.
Those were all wonderful organs, but I know I took them for granted. As an incoming freshman at Oberlin, I realized that my classmates had had no such luck. One guy played a pipe organ for the first time when he auditioned at Oberlin. All his high-school experience had been on electronic instruments. I was dazzled by the then brand-new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall, but quite a few of the organs I played there were much less than what I had grown up with. Growing up in Boston, I had been fortunate to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals on “his” Flentrop organ at Busch Hall (then called the Busch-Reisinger Museum) at Harvard University. I heard the dedication concert of the Frobenius organ at First Church in Cambridge. Few people knew much about the Danish organbuilder Frobenius in the 1970s, and the organ was a knockout. I heard Fisk organs at Harvard, King’s Chapel and Old West Church in Boston, and another dozen or so in the suburbs.

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You may have noticed that all the organs I’ve mentioned so far are trackers. There is no American city where the revival (I like to say Renaissance) of the pipe organ was more active than in Boston. When I was in high school, companies like Fisk, Noack, Andover, and Bozeman were building exciting and fascinating new organs at a rapid rate. My several mentors took me to workshop open houses where I first experienced the ethic and mystery of the organbuilding shop. And skillful organists populated the area’s organ benches, playing recitals followed by receptions and parties that all helped me learn to appreciate the pipe organ, not only as a musical instrument but as a community and way of life.
It wasn’t until after I graduated from Oberlin that I had any meaningful experiences with electro-pneumatic instruments. I worked with John Leek replacing leathers in a large Aeolian-Skinner organ in Cleveland and in several other smaller instruments, notably one by E.M. Skinner in original condition. When I returned to Boston after my Ohio hiatus, I took on the care of the Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Church, Copley Square, and the Aeolian-Skinner (4 manuals, 237 ranks) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church). Being around those organs exposed me to some of the finest musicians and helped open my eyes to the range of tone and expression for which those organs are famous.
And those Skinner organs are products of Boston. Traveling on the Southeast Expressway (Route I-93 south of Boston) you can still read “Aeolian-Skinner” written on the wall of a large brick building, directly across the highway from the headquarters of the Boston Globe. The large erecting room at the south end of the building was sacrificed for the construction of the highway, precipitating the company’s move to Randolph, Massachusetts, and signaling the beginning of the end of the company. But in the “glory days,” Ernest Skinner himself worked in that building, developing the rich orchestral voices for which he is still famous. (Or we might say, after the tracker-action blitz of the 1970s, voices for which he is again famous!)
Skinner was fascinated by the ergonomics of the organ console—though I suppose the word ergonomics was not part of our language until after his lifetime. He watched organists as they played and perfected the dimensions and geometry of the console. He worked hard to lessen the distance between keyboards—no small feat given the need for piston buttons large enough to use easily (piston buttons that easily conflict with the sharp keys of the keyboard below). The design of the Skinner keyboard included tracker-touch springs, lots of ranges of adjustment for travel, spring tension, and contact point. The stop knobs had distinctive over-sized ivory faces, with names engraved in a font (another word that Skinner didn’t know) that was both elegant and easily legible. He was proud of his combination actions, and with good reason, as he developed them in the first years of the twentieth century—among the first mechanical machines that functioned as programmable binary computers.
He invented the whiffletree expression engine, inspired by the rigs developed to hitch teams of horses to a carriage. The horse-teams would perform better if each individual had freedom of motion, and each individual’s relative strength could complement the others. By extension, Skinner’s expression machine has individual power pneumatics for each stage that are hitched together using the same geometry as the team. Good observing, Mr. Skinner.

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I’ve mentioned several organbuilders who contributed to the culture of Boston. Others include George Stevens, George Hutchings, S.S. Hamill, Robert Roche, Nelson Barden, and the Spencer Organ Company. Extending the area to northern New England, you can add the names of Robert Waters, Jeremy Cooper, Stephen Russell, and David Moore. Extend the area to central Massachusetts and you can add Stefan Maier and William A. Johnson (later Wm. Johnson & Sons). Add them all up, from Goodrich to Fisk, from 1800 to 2010, and you get a total of something like 8,500 pipe organs built in Boston and surrounding areas. It’s a terrific heritage—a rich variety of musical imagination and creation that includes some of the finest organs ever built. But in sheer numbers, it pales in comparison to the world’s largest organbuilder, M.P. Möller, a single company that produced 13,500 organs in less than 100 years, all in the same town.

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It’s a beautiful town. The Italian North End has scores of terrific small restaurants. The Freedom Trail (United States National Park) is an organized walking tour of two-and-a-half miles that covers sixteen important historical sites. The Museum of Fine Arts has impressive collections of ancient Roman and Egyptian art as well as the expected glories of high European Art. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comprises the private collection of an individual, opened to the public following her death. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of James Levine is as good as a great orchestra can be, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Symphony Hall (right across the street from the Christian Science Mother Church) has recently been renovated.
There’s plenty to do on the water. Boston Harbor Cruises operates tours ranging from an evening hour or two to a full day whale-watch cruise. You can take a fast ferry to Provincetown and back in a day. And if you visit in the fall, you can add a couple days of coveted foliage-touring in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The website of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists
(bostonago.com) has a good listing of organ recitals and related events. Emmanuel Church (Episcopal) on Newbury Street is the only place in the United States where you can hear a complete Bach cantata with orchestra every Sunday presented as part of worship service. The music is presented by the resident ensemble Emmanuel Music, a highly respected and accomplished group of some of the city’s finest musicians. Visit www.emmanuelmusic.org to see their schedule of performances. As Newbury Street is the city’s high-end shopping district, you can count on finding an exquisite Sunday brunch to complement the wonderful music.
Come to Boston, the pipe organ capital of America.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Barone's John Weaver interview

See the interview here.

Other items of interest:

John Weaver honored by Juilliard

John Weaver honored by Union Theological Seminary

Honoring John Weaver's 80th birthday

John Weaver dies at age 83

John Weaver honored by long time representative

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Expressly expressive
I once heard an orchestral conductor state that the pipe organ is not an expressive instrument because the player cannot alter the volume of a single pipe. This ignorant statement was part of his argument against including an expensive new organ in an even more expensive new concert hall.
One might respond that most of the instruments of the symphony orchestra are unmusical because they can only play one note at a time. By saying “most” I’m excepting the strings of course, which can play two notes at time—maybe three under special circumstances. So an orchestra (by definition) needs many instruments to play music, expressively or not.
Aha! In order for the organ to be an expressive instrument, it comprises thousands of pipes. And big groups of those pipes are enclosed in wonderful expression machines that give the organist all sorts of control over dynamics.
The first Swell boxes were pretty simple affairs made of light wood with a few shutters in front that were operated by a lever near the floor. You could push the lever down and a little sideways with your foot to latch it open, you could let it slam closed, or you hold it halfway open, calf muscles a-trembling. Rigs like this are found on very old English organs, and there are quite a few nineteenth-century American organs that still have expression boxes like that. In 1996 I restored an organ built by E. & G.G. Hook in 1868 that had a “ratchet” Swell pedal. There was a sort of stationary wooden gear whose teeth could arrest the motion of the pedal in five or six different places. You could push the pedal a certain way to release the ratchet or you could leave the shutters partially open at any of those positions. And it was a good idea to release the ratchet as you opened the shutters—otherwise they said “click-click-click” as they opened.
The development of the mechanical balanced Swell pedal was a pretty big deal. Most American organs built between 1870 and 1900 have them. A sturdy mechanical linkage connects the pedal to the shutters. Because gravity works on horizontal shutters, balanced Swell shutters are almost always vertical. You can take your foot off the Swell pedal and the shutters stay still right where you left them. The only problem is that you have to remember to leave the shutters open when you’re finished playing to allow the temperature inside the Swell box to stay as close as possible to the ambient climate of the organ. Leaving the shutters closed typically results in a different temperature inside the Swell box so the Swell won’t be in tune with the Great. That’s not too big a deal because as soon as you open the shutters the temperature will moderate and the pitches will come back together—so if you’re halfway home and realize you’ve forgotten to leave the Swell pedal open, don’t worry about it too much!
If you get halfway home and wonder if you’ve left the blower running, then you’d better go back to the church.
And by the way, in most electro-pneumatic organs, the shutters are held open by springs, so when the organ is turned off the shutters open, no matter what position the pedal was left in.

§

During the Great Revival of classic styles of organbuilding in the second half of the twentieth century, many of us got used to playing organs that had no expression enclosures. Twenty years into that movement, shutters started finding their way back into organs, and today new organs are built with very sophisticated collections of expression chambers including double expressions—those fancy divisions in which an expression box that encloses ten stops might also enclose another expression box with five or six stops. It’s mighty effective when either very powerful voices (Tuba) or very soft voices (Unda Maris) are double-enclosed. The Tuba can start from nothing and Swell to a roar, and the Unda Maris can start from a whisper and vanish into thin air.
I often write about the organ as the most mechanical of instruments. (I’m glad that opinionated ignorant conductor didn’t wade into this pond!) A large organ, especially with electro-pneumatic action, can look like a mysterious mechanical monster inside. It’s no wonder that the sexton of your church mistakes it for a furnace room and piles it full of folding chairs. (You shouldn’t be storing chairs in the furnace room either.)
The organbuilder is forever challenged by the conflict between the organ’s mechanical identity and its artistic purpose. If the music is interrupted by too much mechanical noise, the effect is diminished.
The expression shutters can be the biggest culprit. Who among us has not sat through a recital or a worship service marred by a squeaking Swell shutter? I once attended a choral concert in a conservatory concert hall in which several pieces were accompanied on the organ. The Swell shutters were exposed as part of the façade, they squeaked, and the organist had an annoying habit of beating time with the Swell pedal. Flap-flap-flap, squeak-squeak-squeak was all we could hear.
I’ve made lots of service calls to correct squeaking shutters. Often enough a little squirt of oil or silicone is all that’s needed—that’ll be $200 for the travel and time and four cents for the squirt.

§

For the organist, the ideal expression shutters can silence the division when closed and allow it to roar when open. They can open or close in a nano-second, and if you operate the pedal slowly they provide infinite gradation of volume —no jerking from one stage to the next. OK, we’ll see what we can do.
In order to achieve really effective expression, the box and its shutters must be massive. If you build a Swell box and shutters out of three-quarter-inch-thick wood, you’re building more of a soundboard than an enclosure.
Let’s start with the fabric of the box. The walls and ceiling of the box should both deaden and reflect the sound of the organ. Deaden—so when the shutters are closed there’s no resonance going on. Reflect— so no sound is lost or absorbed by the interior surfaces. In other words, the sound should be effectively contained when the shutters are closed and when the shutters are open the sound should be propelled out through them.
Organbuilders have experimented with all sorts of construction styles. The simplest is heavy soft wood. Use two-inch-thick pine for the walls and you’re doing pretty well. Try two one-inch-panels with an airspace between. Just as massive, but the airspace cuts down the transmission of vibration. How about fill the airspace with sawdust? That works great—the sawdust really absorbs sound so the box is most effective when closed. But it’s a real drag when you’re surprised by fifteen cubic feet of sawdust pouring out by accident when you’re dismantling an organ.
There’s a material called MDF (maximum density fiberboard). It is manufactured in 4′ x 8′ sheets like plywood. It’s made from a sophisticated recipe, but it can be described simply as sawdust and glue cast into sheets. A sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood weighs about 65 pounds, heavy enough. But the same size sheet of MDF weighs 96 pounds. We have built a number of expression boxes using double-thicknesses of MDF. It’s hard work because the stuff is so heavy, and because it’s so dense it’s hard to cut—it burns up saw blades like kindling wood. But it sure makes an effective tonal enclosure.
My first work in organbuilding shops focused mostly on classic-style mechanical-action organs. It was from that bias I heard or read that E. M. Skinner had built cement swell boxes. Cement swell boxes? How decadent. What I pictured was the newly poured foundation of a house with rebar (steel reinforcement bars) sticking up out of it. How could that be musical? But when I finally worked on an organ that had such a thing I realized that my youthful and ignorant bias was exactly that—a youthful and ignorant bias. In fact, the “cement” swell box has a structure of studs and joists something like normal wood-frame construction with heavy plaster surfaces, and a finish coat of Keene’s Cement, which is an anhydrous calcined gypsum mixed with an accelerator used as a hard finish, or more to the point, hard plaster. The heavy structure of the walls and ceiling deaden the sound and the Keene’s Cement surface reflects it—the best of both worlds. The expression chambers of the mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York are built as free-standing rooms in the huge spaces some 90 feet up above both sides of the chancel. The walls are thick and heavy, and the surfaces are finished with Keene’s Cement, and those powerful reeds sure go quiet when the shutters are closed.

I shudder to think
What about the shutters? Just like the boxes, there are lots of ways to build expression shutters. They are usually made of wood, ideally an inch-and-a-half thick or more. The edges are usually beveled so they effectively overlap when closed. The edges of the shutters where they come in contact with one another usually have heavy felt or some other soft material glued to them so they close quietly and tightly. Some builders make shutters out of metal and we’ve even seen them made of glass and Plexiglas. Just like the walls of the expression chamber, the best shutters are massive and shaped and fit so they close really tight. The more massive, the more they contain the sound of the organ.
The shutters are mounted in frames—we call them expression frames. Sometimes the shutters are vertical, sometimes horizontal. As I said earlier, it’s easiest to build a balanced mechanical expression action if the shutters are vertical—that way there’s no effect of gravity on the weight of the shutters. All you have to balance is the action itself.
Shutters are mounted in the expression frames with some kind of rotary bearing to allow the shutters to pivot. Most often you find a strong steel pin (axle) that pivots in a hole drilled in hard wood. The holes and pins are greased, and if the shutters are vertical, the bottom bearing is figured out so as to keep the shutter high enough that it doesn’t rub against the wooden frame. In fact, those bottom bearings are often adjustable—if the shutter settles and starts squeaking against the frame, you can raise it with a turn of a screw.
Some organbuilders go the extra mile and use commercial ball bearings for mounting expression shutters.
It’s also ideal for the shutters to be easily removable. In many organs it’s necessary to remove shutters in order to tune, but you also want to be able to remove a shutter that has warped and needs to be planed straight.

And something to drive it
Some pneumatic expression systems feature an individual pneumatic to operate each shutter. Each contact on the expression pedal opens one shutter. (Most Möller organs work that way.) But it’s more common for the shutters to be linked together by an action that is in turn operated by a single machine. The machines can be electro-pneumatic or all-electric. But what you’re looking for is a combination of expression machine, linkage, and shutters that have a large enough travel so the shutters can close tight and open really wide, move silently when operated either fast or slow, and that have plenty of gradation between stages so that the range of expression seems infinite.
Most electro-pneumatic or electric expression machines have eight stages. It’s generally agreed that for most organs eight-stage expression are sufficient. I think it was Ernest Skinner who built the first sixteen-stage machines. (Dear reader, if you know otherwise please share it.) Those machines are elegant, fast, and powerful. Dividing the travel of the console expression machine into sixteen stages really gives a smooth operation.
Mr. Skinner called his expression motors Whiffle-trees. The term Whiffle-tree was originally used to describe the system of harnesses and reins that tied a team of horses together, allowing the weight of the load to be distributed between the horses according to their individual strength. Mr. Skinner used that principal to harness a row of pneumatic motors together so that each motor (or stage of the machine) contributes to the motion of the shutters and collectively they equal the total motion of the machine. Skinner’s Whiffle-tree expression motors were installed in thousands of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs and in my opinion set the standard for electro-pneumatic pipe organ expression.
There are several suppliers to the pipe organ industry that have developed and market all-electric expression motors. The best of these use the powerful, compact, and quiet electric motors developed for wheelchairs. They are equipped with solid-state controls that translate the contacts on the console expression pedal into stages of expression. The organbuilder can adjust them for different distances of travel and adjust the amount of travel and the speed of each stage separately. So, for example, you can make the first step from fully closed be fast on opening (so it responds instantly) and slow on closing (so it doesn’t slam shut). Mr. Skinner handled this by using a small exhaust valve for the first stage, which choked its speed, keeping the shutters from slamming.

A rose by any other name
You’ll notice that I’m saying expression box, pedal, or shutter rather than Swell box. It’s true that most organs with expression are two-manual organs, and on a two-manual organ the expressive division is usually a Swell. But keeping the language clean, I’d rather not put a Choir division in a Swell box—so expression is the word.

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In a large organ, the shutters of one division might collectively weigh close to a ton. It takes a lot of thought and skilled engineering to get that amount of stuff to move quickly and silently in response to the artistic twitch of an organist’s ankle. But when an expression chamber is working well, it can produce breathtaking effects. As familiar as I am with all that gear, I love to think of that big mass of stuff on the move when I’m sitting in the pews listening to an organ. It’s difficult to express.