In the wind . . .

The show must go on.

Each month, The Diapason sports a flashy color photo of a pipe organ on the front cover. (So do the other guys.) These photos show the glamorous side of the trade—exciting new instruments and important renovation projects. The “centerfold” articles typically include statements by the organbuilder, the local musician, the pastor, and chair of the organ committee. Each is testament to a bold adventure in which a local church or educational institution commits a lot of effort and a ton of money to the commissioning and building, or rebuilding, of a musical instrument.

Once an organ is installed, and the celebration is past, it’s important to maintain it so it will always sound its best, and the owners’ investment is protected. I’ve just spent a week in Boston doing service calls, reflecting on how that work has changed over the years, and enjoying those long relationships with the instruments and their buildings.

Job one

Tuning, cleaning, and repairing of dead notes and ciphers make up the bulk of the routine of pipe organ maintenance, but I think the most important part of the job is being sure the organ is safe. Countless organs have been damaged or destroyed by fire, roof leaks, vandalism, and other forces. This past August, an early organ built by John Brombaugh was lost when the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, was destroyed by fire, and I have been corresponding with a church in North Carolina that lost a fine Schantz organ to fire early this year. I know that the parish in North Carolina had proper and adequate insurance coverage, so they will be able to rebuild and to replace their pipe organ. I hope the same for the people in Lorain, but Brombaugh’s Opus 4 is surely irreplaceable.

The careful organ technician should encourage the owner of a pipe organ to review their insurance policies to be sure that the organ is properly covered. It’s common for people to find that the organ is insured for its original purchase price—fine if the organ is a few years old, but you’re going to lose big if your four-manual E. M. Skinner organ is insured for the same $27,000 that bought it in 1928. It’s usual for an insurance company to require an assessment of the organ. This can be provided by your organ technician, the company that originally built the instrument, or by any knowledgeable and reputable organbuilder. The assessment report should include photographs of the organ, inside and out, to document its complexity, accurate specifications, the history of any rebuilding projects or major repairs, and mention of any prominent musicians who have performed on it. And the figure stated as “replacement value” should include consideration of quality of construction, description of the degree of ornamentation of an organ case, gold leaf, and any special voices included that are particularly expensive or difficult to obtain. For example, an original Skinner Harp is worth a truckload of Tierces!

The careful organ technician will also encourage the organ’s owner to inspect the roof and walls that surround the organ, and the condition of heating, ventilation, and plumbing equipment that may pass through the organ chambers. Recently, a lovely Aeolian-Skinner organ in my care suffered significant damage to the static reservoir and Spencer blower located in the basement of the church, caused by the rupture of a frozen water main. The lower level of the building was flooded—lots of flooring, carpeting, and furniture were destroyed, and the repairs to the organ were fully covered by the comprehensive scope of the insurance policy.

One bad shingle, one missing piece of flashing, and the right storm can wreck an organ.

Hygiene

In my home parish in the 1960s the sexton was an old gent from the back woods of Maine, complete with the authentic accent and the salty talk. My father, the rector, kept a running list of Don Wilkins’s colorful turns of phrase and when Don retired, published a pamphlet recalling them. Don organized the care of the building’s “systems,” kept the floors clean, and wearing an old white Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled up and a skinny dark tie, made and served the Sunday morning coffee. Forty and fifty years ago, the standing equipment in a building like that wasn’t as sophisticated or complicated as it is now, and Don knew how to keep the place humming and sparkling.

It’s common now for churches not to have sextons, but to hire cleaning contractors instead. The volunteers on the property committee look after the physical plant, and simply put, I’ve seen some pretty big mishaps resulting from well-meaning, volunteer oversight. 

My dictionary has two definitions for the word oversight:

1. An unintentional failure to notice or do something.

2. The action of overseeing something.

Definition 2 describes the well-meaning committee member. Definition 1 describes the inevitable result of uninformed supervision. 

It’s too bad when failing to change a filter leads to a mechanical disaster. Hiring professional cleaners while relying on volunteer mechanical maintenance is a false economy. It would be better to have volunteers cleaning, and hire a stationary engineer to look after the equipment. A two-hour visit each month would do it. He would create a schedule for maintenance of the HVAC and elevator motors, alarm systems, and other necessary equipment. He would recommend contractors and oversee their work.

Over years of writing reports for consultation clients, I’ve used the term Institutional Hygiene. I use it to describe the general condition of a building as it affects and influences the care of the equipment. Using mechanical areas for general storage is the perfect example. Decades-old Christmas decorations stacked around and against a furnace is the next thing to arson. In one client church, I have to pass through an attic to reach the organ chamber. During a tuning, I noticed a “Manger Hay Bale” piled with the artificial Christmas trees. There was vapor, some combination of steam and smoke, coming from the bale—composting for Christ. I schlepped it down the ladder and mentioned it to the administrator in the church office, then went to lunch. When I got back, the hay bale was back in the attic, smoking away. Bad hygiene.

There was the frantic call on a Saturday morning: the church is full, the bride has arrived, and the organ won’t play. “I turned on the blower switch and the lights came on, but no sound.” I raced to the church, arriving to the din of vamping bagpipes, to find a card table sucked up against the air intake for the organ blower. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist who said she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. I found a stack of folding chairs on the reservoir, doubling the wind pressure. Bad hygiene.

And there was the call from the organist of the church with the card table, saying she couldn’t imagine what happened, but the organ suddenly sounds horrible. This one was out of their control. The Public Library across the street was being demolished, and they were using dynamite to move stone so the foundation for the new building could be deeper. Every capped pipe and every reed pipe had the daylights knocked out of it!

There’s another level of hygiene that’s a little more sensitive to discuss because it involves your personal habits. A cup of coffee (especially with sugar) or a can of soda is a terrible thing to introduce to your organ console. Maybe it’s sitting innocently on the stop jamb and seems pretty safe, but there have been two episodes in my career when such a quaff has fallen onto the keyboards. Felt bushings, silver contacts, even the glue that holds the ivories to the keys can be compromised and the repair can cost many thousands of dollars.

I’m lucky enough to have a vintage rosewood Steinway at home that came to me through generations of my family. We have a sign next to it that says, “Nothing on the piano, please.” I do not hesitate to speak up when a guest places a drink on my rosewood. It’s not about the wood—there’s an impervious finish on it. It’s about the sensitive, delicate, balanced action inside, made of wood, and bedecked with felt and various fine metals. It’s one instance when a martini is not a preservative.

Many organists don’t like to be called on this issue, so take this as a quiet and anonymous hint. The damage caused by such a spill is not worth the cost of a cup of coffee.

Second to a sugary drink, paperclips are the enemy of the organ’s keyboards. They can cause keys to jam together, and they can wind up on the contacts causing wild cross-ciphers.

And there was the call…

There are a lot of things an organist can do to help the tuner/technician, and many of them are based in common sense. It’s not always easy to tell where a problem is coming from, and mishaps like ciphers can be intermittent. If an organist calls to say there was a cipher on Sunday, but it went away, there’s nothing I can do. If in the heat of battle, you hear a cipher but can’t stop to locate it, there are a few clues that might help recreate it.

Maybe you’re sharp enough to tell me which note of which stop ciphered. If you were playing a trumpet tune as a wedding march, I bet a dollar that the cipher happened when you trilled between F# and G on the Great Trumpet. But if it was more elusive, you can give me a hint.

As soon as you finish the hymn, anthem, or response during which the cipher occurred, jump for your Organ Notebook (don’t tell me there’s no organ notebook on the console!), and write down the piece you were playing, and what registration or piston you were using. Leave the music on the console with a note saying on what page, on what line, in what measure the cipher occurred. If I play the same music with the same registration, the cipher might reappear. If I hear it, I’ll fix it. You can even narrow down the division. While you’re hearing the cipher, make up an excuse to use the Swell pedal. You’ll know right away if the cipher was in the Swell. That may not seem like much, but a clue is a clue. If I know you had a cipher in the Swell strings, I’ll stand in the Swell box while my assistant runs up and down the keyboard. Maybe I’ll hear a little whimper. If I hear it, I’ll fix it!

And there was the call from the organist who left a message on the answering machine saying, “The F-key sounds funny.” (True story.) Hmm. There are twenty-five stops on two keyboards, and eight stops in the pedals. That makes 274 “F-keys” in the organ. And maybe it’s not a single pipe that sounds funny. I’m not sure of which equation to use to compute the number of possible of combinations, but let’s say I square 274. That’s 75,076 possibilities. You can be specific (Great Melodia, #30, F above middle C, etc.), or you can help me find it (Hymn 242, third line, second measure, General 3). I’ll find it.

And there was the call from the cathedral organist. That organ has more than eighty stops on four manuals, and it’s more than an hour away. He called in a panic: “The organ is wildly out of tune.” I know very well that unless there has been some big event, like the dynamite at the library, a huge organ in a big stone church doesn’t just fly out of tune. But I jumped in the car, and raced to the cathedral. One pipe in the Pedal Clarion was out of tune. To be fair, it was way out of tune, but to this day, I can’t imagine why he didn’t poke around for a moment to identify it. Was it worth my losing a Saturday afternoon with my family? I think he would have been fine without the Pedal Clarion.

And there was the call from the organist of a church on Martha’s Vineyard. If you’re not familiar with “The Vineyard,” all you need to know is that it’s a quiet little sand-spit of an island offshore from Cape Cod in Massachusetts that morphs into an elite playground for the rich and famous during the summer. U.S. Presidents go there to play golf. Senators keep their lavish wooden yachts there. The summer social life on Martha’s Vineyard is transplanted directly from Embassy Row in Washington.

But this call was off-season. It was Maundy Thursday, and the organ was ciphering. Early the following morning, Good Friday, of course, I drove the hundred miles to the ferry slip, paid $90 for a round-trip ticket, enjoyed the hour-long passage to the island, drove to the church, fixed the cipher, and went home. The whole adventure took ten hours, and included two hundred miles of driving plus the cost of the ferry. I sent an invoice for nearly a thousand dollars. The organist was furious. “You were only in the church for ten minutes.” True enough, but I fixed your cipher on Good Friday, and it took all day. (By the way, I had my own service to play that night.) 

The tuner is coming this week.

There is a short list of things that you, the organist, can do to prepare for my visit. I’m sure my colleagues in this important work will have things to add, and I look forward to hearing from them.

1. Clean up around the console. The tools of your trade include hymnals, organ music, octavo scores, empty coffee cups (tsk!), paper clips (tsk!), cough drops, Kleenex (fresh and used), nail clippers and files, Post-Its, rolls of tape, hair brushes, etc. I can move them for you, but the meter is running, and I’ll never be able to put things back where they were. I’ve used my cell phone camera to document the piles of music, but it’s a nuisance. If you know I’m coming, take a half hour after the service to straighten things up.

2. Be sure the heat or air conditioning will be on. The rule is simple: We want to tune the organ in the same conditions for which it’s used in public. If the heat is turned up to 68˚ two hours before the service, turn the heat up to 68˚ two hours before the tuning. There was the time when after three or four visits to a certain church with the heat forgotten each time, the sexton announced to us joyfully, “I’ve got it good and hot in there for you this time.” That didn’t help!

3. Leave me a note. I trust that you’ve been writing things down in the notebook. (Don’t tell me there’s no notebook!) But take a minute to share your observations and concerns. You can call, text, e-mail, or leave an “analog” note on the console. If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll do my best, but I may not stumble across what’s bothering you most.

4. Follow up. Please don’t call me ten weeks later saying, “Ever since you were here …” The organ changes character when the temperature changes, it’s affected by humidity—especially rain—or extreme dryness. If I missed something, or if something jumped out of tune, let me know that week.

If you don’t know the rules, let me clean the keyboards. A heavy spray of detergent and a lot of scrubbing will cause damage. 

Above all, it’s best if you and I know each other. We should have lunch together once in a while, or at least a good chat in the choir loft. I’d like to hear you play, to see how you sit at the keyboards. I can tell a lot by studying your piston settings, but the more I know about how you use the organ, the better. Feel free to ask me about the organ. The more you know about the organ, the better. Let’s keep that thing sounding good. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The temperamental organ
Winter was coming to an end, and at Fenway Park, fabled home of the Boston Red Sox, and the facilities manager was working down his checklist of pre-season chores. This would be the second year of the new ballpark organ, and he figured it would need tuning. He called up Fred Opporknockity, the guy who had delivered the organ, and asked if he could come to tune the organ before Opening Day. Fred replied that the organ didn’t need to be tuned—he was sure it would be fine. Mr. Facilities suggested that the organ at his church was tuned for Christmas and Easter. “No,” said Fred, “don’t you know that
Opporknockity tunes but once?”
This joins a long list of so-called jokes like the one that ends, “Is that an almond daiquiri, Dick?” “No, it’s a hickory daiquiri, Doc.” Or the one that goes . . . But I digress. (How can I digress when I’m only 160 words into it?)
In fact, the Fenway Park organ didn’t need to be tuned. It’s electronic and was tuned at the factory. But the tuning of pipe organs is a subject without end or beginning, without right or wrong, without rhyme or reason—it just needs to be in tune!
Mr. Facilities’ recollection that the church organ needs to be tuned for Christmas and Easter (notice that I capitalized Opening Day as a High Holyday!) is only half right, in my opinion. For years I scheduled big tuning routes that occupied Advent and Lent, but where I live in New England, Christmas and Easter are almost always both winter holidays, and the August brides would walk down countless center aisles straining to the strains of sorry 8-foot trumpets that made her guests pucker as if they were biting into a lemon. It’s my experience that summertime tuning problems always involve either “soprano” D, F#, or A, ruining virtually every Trumpet-Tune processional. In one wedding I played, the fourth E went dead—the trill on beat three of Jeremiah Clarke’s ubiquitous tune made me laugh. I was only quick enough to go down a half-step, a safe enough transposition because you can keep playing the same printed notes with a different key signature. It was an awkward sounding transition, but at least it gave me back my “dee diddle-diddle-diddle da-da dum de dum dum” instead of “dee doh-doh-doh da-da dum de dum dum.”
Gradually I changed my plan to define seasonal tunings as “heat-on” and “heat-off”—around here that works out to be roughly November and May—and maybe it means I found myself a little extra work because there often seem to be Easter touch-ups as well.

§

Why do we schedule tunings according to seasons? Simply and authoritatively because the pitch produced by an organ pipe of a given length is subject to temperature. Say a pipe plays “440-A” and say it’s 70 degrees in the church. Raise the temperature a degree and now the same pipe plays 442 (roughly). And the catch is that the reeds don’t change with temperature and the wooden pipes (especially stopped pipes) are more affected by humidity than temperature. So when there’s a temperature swing the organ’s tuning flies into pieces. You cannot define organ pitch without reference to temperature. A contract for a new organ is likely to have a clause that defines the organ’s pitch as A=440 at 68 degrees.
And here’s the other catch. My little example said it was 70 degrees in the church. But it’s never 70 degrees everywhere in the church. It may be 70 at the console, 66 in the Swell, 61 in the Choir, and 82 in the Great. If these are the conditions when it’s cold outside and the thermostat is set to 68, you can bet that summertime conditions have it more like 75 or 80 degrees everywhere in the building except any high-up area where you find organ pipes—then it’s super hot and the reeds won’t tune that high.
Conditions outdoors can have a dramatic effect on organ tuning. Imagine an organ placed in two chambers on either side of a chancel, and imagine that the back wall of each organ chamber is an outside wall. The tuner comes on a rainy Friday and gets the organ nicely in tune. Sunday dawns bright and sunny, the south-facing wall gets heated up by the sun and that half of the organ goes sharp. During the sermon the organist “txts” the tuner to complain about how awful the organ sounds. (Wht wr u doing☹) The following Thursday the organist shows up for choir rehearsal and finds the tuner’s bill in his mailbox. What would you do? Was it the tuner’s fault that it rained? Any good organ tuner pays attention to weather conditions and forecasts as if he were the mother of the bride planning an outdoor wedding.
I care for a large tracker-action organ in Boston, housed in a free-standing case with polished tin Principal pipes in the façades of Great, Pedal, and Rückpositiv cases. It’s situated in a contemporary building designed by a famous architect, who gave the congregation the gift of light from the heavens coming through a long narrow window that runs along the ridge of the roof. In the winter as the sun moves across the sky, brilliant light moves across the front of the organ, heating the façade pipes as it goes. Instantly the Great 8-foot Principal goes 30 or 40 cents (hundreds of a semi-tone) sharp. Do the math—how many hundredths of a semitone are there in a quarter-tone? Guess what time of day this happens? Eleven AM. And guess what time the opening hymn is played on a Sunday morning? The first time I tuned that organ, I felt as though I were in a carnival fun-house with mirrors distorting the world around me as the organ’s pitch followed the sun across the room.

Temperature’s rising
In order to do a conscientious tuning, we ask the church office to be sure the heat is up for when we tune. When they ask what it should be set to, I reply that they should pretend that the tuning is a Sunday morning worship service. If the heat is turned up to 68 degrees five hours before the hour of worship, then set the heat at 68 five hours before the tuning. It’s not very scientific but it seems to get the point across.
I’ve arrived many times to start a tuning to find that there is no heat in the church. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow—and the time and mileage I spent today goes on your bill. Once I showed up at the church (made of blue brick and shaped like a whale—some architects have the strangest ideas) and the sexton proudly announced, “I got it good and warm in there for you this time.” It was 95 degrees in the church and the organ sounded terrible. Sorry, can’t tune. I’ll come back tomorrow. He must have run $400 of fuel oil through that furnace in addition to my bill for wasted time. And the haughty authoritative pastor of a big city Lutheran church once said to me from under an expensively-coiffed shock of theatrical white hair, “We heat the church for the people, not the organ.”
The eternal battle of the organ tuner and the thermostat is not because we don’t like working in cold rooms. It’s not because we want the organ to be warm. It’s physics. When you chill oxygen, the molecules get closer together and it thickens to the point at which it becomes a liquid. When air warms, the molecules get further apart. When the air molecules get further apart, the air gets less dense. When the air gets less dense, sound waves need less energy and they shorten. When the sound waves shorten, the pitch increases. It’s not a matter of comfort, it’s physical law—the laws of physics.
The same laws say that the organ will be in tune at the temperature at which it was tuned. Set the thermostat at 68 on Thursday for the organ tuning, turn it down to 55, then back up to 68 on Sunday. Voila! The organ is in tune—unless the weather changed. And it’s better for the organ not to be vigorously heated all the time. Ancient European organs have survived for centuries partly because their buildings are not superheated. American churches are often guilty of “organ baking”—keeping the heat up all winter, using the argument that it’s more cost-efficient than reheating a cold building several times a week.

It’s a Zen thing.
I’ve been asked if I have perfect pitch. No—and I’m glad I don’t. A roommate of mine at Oberlin had perfect pitch, and he identified that my turntable ran slow (remember turntables?). It didn’t bother me—but he couldn’t bear it. The organ tuner with perfect pitch has to compensate for the fact that you are not necessarily tuning at A=440. If the organ is a few cents sharp or flat when you arrive to tune, chances are you’re going to leave it that way. It takes several days to change the basic pitch of most organs. And for really big organs it can take weeks.
I’ve been asked how I can stand listening to “out of tune-ness” all day. I don’t like hearing it when I’m listening to organ music or attending worship, but when I’m tuning I love it because I can change it. There’s a satisfaction about working your way up a rank of pipes bringing notes into tune. You can feel them “click” into tune—in good voicing there’s a sort of latching that I sense when I give the pipe that last little tick with my tool.
An organ tuner is something of a contortionist—he has to be able to forget about physical discomfort in the often-awkward spaces inside an organ so he can concentrate on the sounds. He often hangs from a ladder or a swell-shutter for stability. (Key holders, please keep your dagnabbit feet off the Swell pedal!) He learns to tune out little mechanical noises and defects of speech. An organ pipe might have burps and bubbles in its speech that are clearly heard when you’re inside the organ and still sound perfect from the nave or the console.
He gets into a nice quiet state and a rhythm develops: “next,” tick-tick-tick, “next,” tick-tick-tick. A couple hours and ten ranks (610 pipes) into it and the sexton comes in with a vacuum cleaner. The flowers are delivered for Sunday. A lawn mower starts up at the house next door. The pastor brings in a soon-to-be married couple. They politely assure me, “Don’t worry, you’re not disturbing us.”
Once I showed up to tune the organ at a university chapel. A couple heavy trucks full of equipment were outside and a guy was loading tools into the bucket of a cherry picker. I went up to him saying I was there to tune the organ and wondered if they’d be making noise. “Not much,” he said, “just a little hammer-drilling.”

§

As I write, the Red Sox official website says that the Opening Day game at Fenway Park starts in twelve days, eight hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three seconds. It doesn’t really matter whether the organ is tune or not—they don’t use it as a ballpark organ any more. But there was a time when the organ music was an integral part of the ballpark experience. A common question in Boston sports trivia quizzes was, “Who’s the only person who played for the Red Sox, the Bruins (hockey), and the Celtics (basketball)?” Answer—John Keilly, the organist for Fenway Park and the Boston Garden.
My father and I have been to dozens (maybe hundreds?) of games at Fenway Park. He’s had the same seats (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14) since the early 1970s. When John Keilly was at the Hammond B-3, we joked about getting to the park early so we could hear the preludes. And he had an uncanny knack for playing the right tune at the right time. When Carlton Fisk hit his now legendary “walk-off” twelfth-inning homerun to win game six of the 1975 World Series, Keilly created a secondary sports legend when he played “Hallelujah”—though not according to historical performance practices.

§

Nancy Faust was organist for the Chicago White Sox from 1970 until her last game on Sunday, October 3, 2010. She missed five games in 1983 when her son was born—otherwise she played for more than 3,200 games without missing one. When she was hired, petitions were circulated by fans and sports officials offended that the White Sox had placed a woman on the team’s payroll. But she came into her own when Harry Caray became the radio commentator for the Sox. He gave her the moniker Pretty Nancy Faust, and started the tradition of leaning out the window of his announcer’s box to lead the singing of Take Me out to the Ballgame as Nancy played. She played by ear, and kept current with all the latest music through her four decades of playing so she was always ready with a current musical quip for the amusement of the fans. She was the originator of the ballpark use of the now ubiquitous 1969 Steam song Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss him goodbye), playing it when the pitcher of an opposing team was pulled out during the 1977 pennant race.
Nancy Faust was honored by the White Sox for her years of service to the team and its fans on September 18, 2010 in a pre-game ceremony. Ten thousand Pretty Nancy Faust bobblehead dolls were distributed to fans that day. My wife Wendy lived and worked in Chicago for about ten years, and as both a gifted organist and a baseball fan, she joined countless other Chicagoans celebrating Faust’s contribution to the game. We heard about her retirement on the NPR sports program “Only A Game” early one Saturday morning, and Wendy let me know how much she wanted one of those dolls. With thanks to Chicago organbuilding colleague and theatre organ guru Jeff Weiler, I found one complete with the ticket stub for the September 18 game, and it now has an honored place in our living room.
In the pages of this journal we often read about churches celebrating their retiring long-time organists. I’ve read plenty of stories about fancy concerts with reunions of dozens of past choir members, music committees commissioning commemorative anthems (bet you can’t say that three times fast!), cakes that look like pipe organs, bronze plaques, and surprise tickets for Caribbean cruises, but never bobblehead dolls. How cool is that? 

How to run a railroad

Recently I had a conversation with the rector of an Episcopal church who had been at that parish for seven years. He told me that in his first weeks on the job, he spent a late evening in the building by himself, wandering the halls, looking into closets and corners, and was startled by the messes he found. Closets were crammed into uselessness, and entire classrooms were so full of junk that you could hardly turn around inside. He told me how he vowed to himself that in two years, every inch of the building would be contributing to ministry. Seven years later, there are a half-dozen twelve-step programs meeting there, an active program of feeding the hungry, and countless other examples of meaningful use of the building, besides the usual activities of the parish. It’s a modest place, but today, the hallways, classrooms, offices, closets, kitchen, and restrooms are all clean and inviting.

I know I’ve shared this wedding story before. I received a panicked call from an organist, “The wedding starts in thirty minutes and the organ won’t play.” I raced to the church, arriving at ten past. There was a row of limos out front, and bagpipes playing in the yard. Running up the stairs to the organ loft, I could tell that the blower was running, so I went to the basement where I found a card table sucked up against the blower’s air intake. That’ll do it.

I’ve also shared the hay bale story before, the one where the Christmas decorations were stored in the attic near the door to the organ chamber. The hay bale from last Christmas’s manger was there with smoke rising from it as the hay decomposed. I wrestled the thing down the ladder and went to the office to ask if the custodian could dispose of it. When I got back from lunch, the hay bale was back in the loft.

I served a church in suburban Boston as organist and music director for almost twenty years. It was a large building, the quintessential white frame building with a steeple on the town square, but it was more than meets the eye. A new commuter highway was built in the area in the 1950s, and the parish expanded dramatically. The intimate nineteenth-century sanctuary became the chapel when the much grander new church was built. The people who had been leaders of the parish during that ambitious building program were still around, and there was a lot of pride in the place. The sure sign that it was a new and well-planned building was that there were electrical outlets under every window for the Christmas lights.

But the day I auditioned for the position, I noticed that the stalls in the men’s room were rickety, coming loose from their moorings, and the doors wouldn’t latch. I mentioned it often during my tenure, but they were never repaired. Everything else in the place was in crackerjack condition. There was some kind of block about that men’s room, a strange way to welcome visitors.

My usual routine of consulting, tuning, repairing, installing, and dismantling organs takes me in and out of hundreds of church buildings. Perhaps fifty of them are regular clients, where I visit a few times each year, some of those for more than thirty years. I know the buildings well, usually better than the custodian. And I’m always visiting buildings that I’ve never seen. I can tell a lot about the state of a parish by the state of its buildings.

Real estate rich

Our church buildings are our treasures. I know that some are rough around the edges, and some have outdated and unsafe mechanical systems. Some parishes have small buildings that are inadequate and less beautiful, while others are ironically burdened with huge buildings that were built in an earlier age and are now unsustainable. It can cost a million dollars to repair a leaky stained-glass window. But I marvel at how many parishes, both large and small, operate bustling buildings that provide space for dozens of community activities that would otherwise struggle to find affordable space. Alcoholics Anonymous and the Boy Scouts of America would be different organizations if they hadn’t had access to affordable space in church buildings.

I was struck by the comments of the space-conscious rector who saw the messes in the building as wasted resources. His comments reminded me of the value of the real estate that we might take for granted. As a teenager, I certainly took it for granted that I could have unfettered access to church buildings so I could practice the organ. The cash value of such a resource never occurred to me.

There are hundreds of magnificent church buildings in New York. Some are free-standing, iconic places along the big avenues, but by far the majority of New York’s churches are nestled on the narrow numbered cross streets. A church’s grand façade has townhouses pressed up against each side, and you can’t get more than 50 or 60 feet away, the width of the street and two sidewalks. Many of those buildings are more than 150 feet long inside, and the illusion of the interior space is heightened because you haven’t seen the length of the building from the outside. It’s a great sensation to walk through a doorway on a narrow street into a cavernous room, in a city where space is so valuable that many people live in apartments smaller than 500 square feet. A 150 by 80 foot room, 60 feet high could be developed to 720,000 square feet.

In New England and small towns across the country, church buildings dominate “downtown.” Countless little burgs through New Hampshire and Vermont have three white churches with steeples surrounding the town green: Congregational, Baptist, and Unitarian. The Episcopal church is a stone building with a red door, half a block up, and the Catholic church is a little further out because the Protestants got there first. There weren’t many Roman Catholics among the early colonists.

I’ve lived most of my life in northern cities, where the boundaries are determined by geography. Both Boston and New York are surrounded by water, so there’s no room for expansion. When I’m traveling, I marvel at the sweeping new campuses built by congregations in areas like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, or Phoenix, places where future streets are laid out, ready for growth and expansion, unheard of where I live. If a church in New York City had a 500-space parking lot, no member would ever have to fill out another pledge card. A parking garage in mid-town Manhattan gets $30 an hour—a white-striped gold mine.

For the sake of the little ones

Many of the buildings in which I work house daycare centers or nursery schools. In some, classrooms are used for daycare during the week and Christian education on the weekends. In others, a parish simply doesn’t need a dozen rooms dedicated to Sunday School. Some parishes operate daycares themselves, others rent the space to companies from the outside. In either case, a daycare center changes the dynamic of a building. Most, if not all states and towns require certification of facilities that offer daycare. Buildings are inspected, locks are changed, security protocols are established. No daycare employee is pleased to see a troupe of organbuilders walking in unannounced.

The parish where I grew up, where my father was rector, has a grand gothic-inspired brick sanctuary, a two-story “gothicky” brick parish house attached, and a newer parish hall with a lofty A-frame ceiling. The parish hall is a lovely space, large and airy. There are French doors along one wall that open into a cloister garden, the new parish hall added to the rest to complete that enclosure. There’s a fountain, a statue of St. Francis, and gardens that my father tended personally during his tenure­—he was a prolific, joyful gardener. He instituted the Cloister Garden Concert Series for summer evenings. The whole thing is very elegant.

But the planning of the new parish hall included classrooms in the windowless basement. When I was appointed at the position with the big new building, I took Dad to see the place. He marveled at the lovely, breezy, well-lit classrooms on the second floor of the new parish house, beautiful environments for the children of the parish. It was a lesson for me about priorities of planning a new building.

Turf wars

Space is at a premium in most church buildings. I’m not thinking of the campus that has a hundred-seat amphitheater for a choir room. I’m thinking of the place where Sunday School classes are separated by vinyl accordion doors that don’t quite work, and where the custodian keeps his tools and supplies in the organ blower room. In one building I know, the sacristy has an outside door, and the custodian keeps a snowblower there in the winter. I know a lot of altar guild members who wouldn’t stand for that. (My mother-in-law served on altar guilds most of her life. When she claimed that adding gin to the water made cut flowers last longer, I suggested that was an excuse to have the gin bottle out on Saturday morning.)

Altar guilds and music departments often wind up at odds. The sacristy is usually adjacent to the chancel, a perfect place to store music stands. And what’s it like when the organist has to practice on Saturday morning? Does he have a fit because the altar guild is chattering, or does he find another time to practice? We’re all here to worship. Work it out, people.

The sacristy really gets threatened when we start to plan a new organ project. Remember, it’s adjacent to the chancel. If we add the sacristy to the organ chamber above, we’ll have space for 16-footers. Oh no, you don’t.

Row with the oars you have

Through forty years of working with parishes, installing and caring for their pipe organs, I’ve seen significant changes in how they manage themselves as businesses. Churches that used to have a secretary in the office 9–5, five days a week, now have an answering machine. We have office equipment in our homes more sophisticated than the church office of a generation ago. It’s easy enough to run off bulletins yourself if you have to. At least the names of composers would be spelled correctly.

Alongside the functions of faith and worship, a church is a corporation. In some denominations, the priest, rector, or minister serves legally as a CEO. In others, the leadership and management is run by an elected board, sort of like an old-fashioned town meeting. Some of those CEO pastors are savvy businessmen and women and are able to oversee and delegate the management of functions of the business besides worship. But others fail terribly, knowing nothing about the mechanics or structure of a building, and nothing about managing employees and their tasks. How many seminaries offer courses in building management?

Instead of a full-time custodian, some churches hire cleaning companies who send a team for half a day a week. Not bad, as they can really get the place clean in a hurry. But who is looking after the mechanical systems? Any church building of any size has equipment far more complex than we have at home. Three-phase electricity, industrial HVAC equipment, elevators, tower bells, commercial kitchen appliances, and, oh yes, pipe organs require professional attention. In the old days, the custodian would have had a sense of that, and a schedule for regular maintenance. Today, those important functions are often the responsibility of a volunteer property committee.

There have been many churches where I thought it would be better to assemble volunteers from the parish to do the cleaning and hire a mechanical contractor to manage the physical maintenance of the place. Property management firms have specialists who can assess all the equipment in a building and develop a regular maintenance plan. It’s certainly less expensive to have professionally managed maintenance than to be rebuilding complex air-handling equipment because no one oiled the bearings.

Church bullies

If you’ve never worked in a parish that has a bully, you might dismiss the idea. But if you have, you know how destructive it can be. I’ve worked for quite a few churches with resident bullies, but one stands out in particular. He was a powerful professional who retired from business and moved to the town where he had always vacationed. Since he had attended services during summer vacations, people in the parish knew him and were excited at first that he would be around all year. He was appointed to committees, joined the choir, and roared enthusiastically into the life of the parish. A building project was in planning stages, and he volunteered to participate, logically getting appointed to, and then becoming chairman of the building committee. By then, it was too late. 

I’ve been maintaining that church’s organ since it was installed in the 1980s, coming twice a year to tune, but because the organ had to be removed to storage during the building program, I was in the building more than usual. There would be some modification to the organ’s location to make maintenance access easier, so I attended a couple meetings of the building committee, and, of course, worked there for weeks dismantling and then re-installing the organ.

I saw this guy reorganizing the parish bulletin board in the hallway outside the office. I saw him haranguing the parish administrator, calling out mistakes in the bulletin, and criticizing her methods of running the office. The long-time organist was in tears every week because this guy was so domineering during choir rehearsals. The rector became meek and withdrawn. We had words when he challenged my approach to the care of the organ.

The rhythm of the place changed. While there used to be a pleasant stream of parishioners coming and going during a weekday, chatting in the office, dropping something off in the sacristy, or preparing the kitchen for a parish supper, now the halls were empty—except for the bully. It took less than a year for one person to change the life of a parish.

Caring for the organ all those years, I built up a nice friendship with the organist. She had built the choir program enough that they had a tour one summer, singing in English cathedrals. It was painful to share her distress as her twenty-plus year tenure seemed to be going up in smoke.

If you’re unfamiliar with this syndrome, and especially if you think it’s going on where you work, give “church bully” a quick google. You’ll learn right away that it’s a “true thing,” that it’s very common, and that there are methods and programs designed to steer bullies away.

The whole package

In every church where I’ve worked, the pipe organ has been my mission. It’s not my job to meddle in how things are being run, in the condition of other equipment, or getting rid of a bully. But I care about the church, about its rites and traditions, and its importance to the social lives of its people. It has been part of life since my parents brought me home from the hospital to the rectory. I can’t help mentioning the hay bale, because protecting the organ from damage is my direct responsibility. I can’t help mentioning the dry bearings on the furnace fans, because a failed furnace spoils the tuning. And I can’t help mentioning the bully, because the thriving music program of that small local parish, built so happily by the dedicated organist and her friends in parish, was falling to pieces.

Everything in your church building was purchased with donated money. The parishioners contributed to the building fund, and that money paid for every light switch, every toilet, every folding chair, and that pipe organ that is so central to your work, to your career, to your art. Here’s a scary one. Is the organist at your church ever a bully?

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

A recipe for success
A couple months ago—the January issue to be exact—I quoted an article from the newsletter of the parish in which I grew up:

Trapped on the paper, it is just a lot of lines and squiggles, circles and flags, black and white—an ancient language, undecipherable to the uninitiated. But to those who are “called” to it, music on the page is the door to a multi-colored, “sensational” world, both a challenge and a reward for heart, mind, and soul . . .
It seems improbable that a few dozen pages of black and white “directions” could convey the recipe for an opera, or a symphony—and yet they do. But it is only the recipe. It takes a parish choir to pick up the pages, to apply much valuable time and energy, to learn the skills in order to share this amazing transformation with each other, with a church family, and in the praise of the Creator who has gifted us with the miracle that is music.
I improvised on this theme, suggesting that the printed score is a recipe for a living work of art, that the music comes alive when a performer reads the recipe and sends it out into acoustics. I wrote:

We place heavy emphasis on Urtext editions of the pieces we play, those publications claiming to be accurate transmission of the composer’s intentions—the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. But does that mean we all have to play the pieces the same way? I think that Urtexts ensure that we start from the same recipe—that our extemporizing comes from the same source. But for heaven’s sake, don’t be afraid to add some garlic and salt and pepper to taste.

I drew parallels between cooking and making music—starting with a recipe and creating a masterpiece:

Ingredients in a recipe are the blueprint, the roadmap to be translated by the cook, through the utensils and heat sources, into the magic which is delicious food.
Notes on a score—those squiggles and symbols—are the recipe, the blueprint, the format to be translated by the musician, through the instrument, into the magic that is audible music.
The chef learns the basics, the techniques, the theories, and the chemistry. Once he knows those basics and can reliably prepare and present traditional dishes, he’s freer to experiment because he knows the rules.
The musician learns the techniques, the historical priorities, and the language of the art. Once he can reliably prepare and present the great masterworks, he’s more free to experiment, to innovate, and to challenge himself and his audience. How’s that for a lot of lines and squiggles?
I return to this now because after that column was published several of my friends were in touch to comment and one sent a little stack of quotations from well-known musicians that add to the mix:

Classical, Romantic, Modern, Neo-Romantic! These labels may be convenient for musicologists, but they have nothing to do with composing or performing . . . All music is the expression of feelings, and feelings do not change over the centuries . . . Purists would have us believe that music from the so-called Classical period should be performed with emotional restraint, while so-called Romantic music should be played with emotional freedom. Such advice has often resulted in exaggeration: overindulgent, uncontrolled performances of Romantic music, and dry, sterile, dull performance of Classical music.
The notation of a composer is a mere skeleton that the performer must endow with flesh and blood, so that the music comes to life and speaks to an audience. The belief that going back to an Urtext will ensure a convincing performance is an illusion. An audience does not respond to intellectual concepts, only to the communication of feelings.
That passage may sound like an excerpt from the January issue, but I give myself too much credit. That was Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989). As a bright-eyed student of historically informed performance in the 1970s, I recall knowledgeable and eloquent student-lounge debates about Horowitz’s performances. My peers and I were pretty sure he was old-fashioned and we were the wave of the future. But I have to admit that his performances were better attended than mine. I guess he did a better job communicating feelings. Mr. Horowitz continued:

In order to become a truly re-creative performer, and not merely an instrumental wizard, one needs three ingredients in equal measure: a trained, disciplined mind, full of imagination; a free and giving heart; and a Gradus ad Parnassum command of instrumental skill. Few musicians ever reach artistic heights with these three ingredients evenly balanced. This is what I have been striving for all my life.

Vladimir Horowitz was celebrated for his performances of the great Russian Romantic piano repertory. I vividly remember a stereo simulcast in 1978 (FM radio and public television) of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. (I bought a new stereo just in time for it.) There was something magic about the way his huge Russian hands enveloped that intricate and expansive score. You can see that historic performance by the 75-year-old virtuoso on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5mxU_7BTRA&feature=related>. Amazing! I gave it the full 45 minutes this afternoon. Give it a look. I think you’ll join me in seeing the imagination and the free and giving heart piled on top of a lifetime’s work developing one of the most fluid keyboard techniques ever.
But he was also celebrated for his readings of sonatas by Antonio Scarlatti: unerring rhythmic drive, mystical coloring of the piano’s tone (how did he do that?), colorful and humorous phrasing. His fertile imagination enabled him to play dozens of those seemingly similar short pieces with infinite expression. Of course, it was technically perfect. That was a given. When Horowitz sat at the piano, one never wondered if he would “get through it.”

Painting a sunset
Arthur Friedheim was a student of Franz Liszt who later developed a successful concert career in the United States. In his book, Life and Liszt (Taplinger, 1961), Friedheim related Liszt’s comments on interpretation:

The virtuoso is not a mason who, chisel in hand, faithfully and conscientiously whittles stone after the design of an architect. He is not a passive tool reproducing feeling and thought and adding nothing of himself. He is not the more or less experienced reader of works which have no margins for his notes, which allow for no paragraphing between the lines . . . He is called upon to make emotion speak, and weep, and sing, and sigh—to bring it to life in his consciousness. He creates as the composer himself created, for he himself must live the passions he will call to light in all their brilliance . . .
Conscientiously whittles stone . . . That sounds ominous. Is that what we do when we produce a historically informed performance from an Urtext edition? Does it follow that the piece sounds the same the next time we play it?
Friedheim continued,

I recall one of my later lessons with him in the Villa d’Este, in Tivoli, not far from Rome. Late one afternoon I sat down at the piano to play Liszt’s Harmonies du Soir. Before I had time to begin he called me to the window. With a wide sweep of the arm he pointed out the slanting rays of the declining sun that were mellowing the landscape with the delicate glamour of approaching twilight. “Play that,” he said. “There are your evening harmonies.”

On January 6, 2010 concert pianist Byron Janis published an article titled “In Praise of Fidelity” in the Wall Street Journal. In it he contrasted comments about musical scores from conductor and music historian Gunther Schuller and Spanish cellist Pablo Casals: Schuller stated, “A conductor is the faithful guardian of the score—the score is a sacred document.” Casals opined, “The art of interpretation is not to play what is written. Our interpretation of what is written cannot, in fact, be written down.”
Mr. Janis relates a story by Julius Seligmann, president of the Glasgow Society of Musicians as he commented on a performance by Frederick Chopin. Mr. Seligmann

. . . attended a recital where the composer played his new Mazurka in B-flat, Opus 7, No. 1, as an encore. According to Seligmann, it met with such great success that Chopin decided to play it again, this time with such a radically different interpretation—tempos, colors and phrasing had all been changed—that it sounded like an entirely different piece. The audience was amazed when it finally realized he was playing the very same Mazurka, and it rewarded him with a prolonged, vociferous ovation.

So what’s this all about? I’ve spent the last 40 years in the thrall of the pipe organ. I’ve worked as a recitalist, a church musician, a tuner and technician, a designer, builder, restorer, relocator, writer, and elocutionist. And I’m not finished. I figure that with luck (and some attention to portion sizes) I could last another 25 years or more. I’m assuming that people will be listening to, commissioning, and caring for organs longer than I’ll be able to appreciate them. But is that a rash assumption?
The publishing schedule of The Diapason means that I submit this column six weeks before publication date. So as I write, the rush of preparing for Christmas is fresh in my mind. (In fact, this is a good moment because in January the mailbox fills with our clients’ payments for December tunings.) During December I ran in and out of about 30 churches and as I’ve noted in years past, there’s not much new. Virtually every organ console and choir room table sports copies of Carols for Choirs (especially the green and orange ones, volumes I and II). And when I look at the paper clips I can see that each choir is singing the same selections. Almost no one sings A Boy Was Born by Benjamin Britten (page 4).
Those books have defined 50 years of Christmas music in American churches—simple proof of the immense influence the English tradition has over our worship. Because of the lovely and brilliant arrangements in those volumes, at least two generations of American church musicians have grown up with David Willcocks, Reginald Jacques, and John Rutter. Each carol, each descant, each varied harmonization is more beautiful than the last. But isn’t there anything else?
Volume I (the green one) was copyrighted in 1961. I first handled it as a young teenager in about 1969, when my voice changed and I got to be in the senior choir, and haven’t passed a Christmas without it since.
As part of my work with the Organ Clearing House I am often invited to visit churches that are offering their pipe organs for sale. You walk into the chancel and find drums, microphone stands, electronic keyboards, saxophone stands, and wires all over the floor. Are they played by professional musicians with liturgical backgrounds? Most often not. They’re more likely to be local amateurs playing from scores that come each week by subscription. My first recommendation always is that they should keep the organ. How do you know that the next pastor won’t want to use the organ? I think the organ is more permanent than those alternative forms of musical worship.
And why have those churches made those changes? We’re told that modern worshippers no longer connect to traditional musical forms. Why is that? Is it because public schools don’t expose students to the fine arts any more and it’s catching up with us? Is it because people listen to popular music genres so much that they cannot appreciate anything else?
Or is it because organists are failing to present interesting, thoughtful, varied, and challenging music programs that keep people interested and that give them something to think about as well as tunes to whistle? Is it because using the same ten carol arrangements every Christmas fails to interest our congregations? Is it because the same ten carol arrangements are offered in every church in town, in the county, in the state, or in the country?
Do we as musicians spend so much effort on the accuracy and correctness of our performance that we fail to present the emotions of the music to our congregations? Do we think so highly of our skills and knowledge of what’s correct that we program music that’s unintelligible to our congregations?
Think of a pipe organ as a high-performance machine. You step on the gas and your wig flies off. The builder of that machine intended that you’d feel the thrill of G-force cornering and lighter-than-air acceleration. Climb in a car like that and putt-putt to the grocery store to pick up milk and toilet paper and you’ve missed the point of the machine.
Your American organbuilders put thrilling instruments under your fingers, instruments that can go from zero-to-sixty in three measures, instruments that can both roar and caress. We rely on you the player to take it to the edge, to push it to the limit—to tell us about the limitations of our instruments. If the congregation—the consumer—is enthralled we get to keep at it.
If you’re not using that instrument so the congregation is thrilled, then we won’t get to build any more organs.
And organbuilders, it’s up to you too. Let’s not settle for ordinary. Ordinary is for substitutes. Let’s reserve extra-ordinary (say it slowly!) for the pipe organ, that high-performance machine with the capacity to thrill the players and the hearers. If we put magic under their fingers, they’ll put magic into the air. I’ll still be writing 30 years from now—and forget about the portion control! 

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

James and Marilyn Biery are two very active composers, performers, and church musicians. Husband and wife, they share leadership of the music program at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. They met at Northwestern University, where both studied organ (that organ department, as most know, no longer exists).
Marilyn Biery, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ and church music from Northwestern, and a DMA from the University of Minnesota, served as director of music at First Church of Christ in Hartford from 1986–96; she is now associate director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul. James Biery, who also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ and church music from Northwestern, served as director of music at Holy Trinity Church in Wallingford, Connecticut from 1982–89, and from 1989 until 1996 as organist and director of music at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, assuming the position of director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul in 1996.
Both Bierys are prolific composers (see the complete list of their works on their website, <http://home.att.net/~jrbiery/&gt;. Their works are published by MorningStar, GIA, Oregon Catholic Press, Boosey & Hawkes, Alliance, and Augsburg Fortress. Marilyn has also been a contributor to The Diapason (see “The Organ in Concert,” January 2005). We visited with the Bierys in St. Paul in July 2007.

Joyce Robinson: How did you get into this? Marilyn, you were a pastor’s kid, so you had that early exposure. James, how about you?
James Biery: I was a kid of parents who went to church! (laughter) Actually, my grandfather on my mother’s side was a minister, so that’s in my blood. We went to church, a fairly little church in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, but it was fortunate enough to have a pipe organ, a five-rank Reuter. It could shake the pews, in its own way, and it made an impression.

JR: How old were you when you got on the bench?
JB: Eleven, maybe ten.
Marilyn Biery: I was eleven. I looked through my diaries and I had the date of my first organ lesson! Isn’t that cool.
JB: It’s a funny thing, but you get the bug somehow. And it was pretty strong. After I’d seen a real music program in Omaha, and started studying with a real organ teacher, then I really got hooked.

JR: I find it interesting that you, Marilyn, have a doctorate in organ, and James, you went the route of getting a master’s and then the AGO’s Fellow and Choirmaster certificates.
JB: I went through a little period when I thought it was fun to do that. Schooling is not my cup of tea.
MB: But I like school. James reads books and does all these things on his own—like the [AGO] Fellow and the Choirmaster; he did that all on his own.
JB: That’s not really true. We had gone to New York at that point, to study with Walter Hilse, improvisation and various things. I enjoyed that.
MB: But he still reads books. I only do if I’m taking a class.
JB: Everyone has their motivators.
MB: So I needed a class—a regimen and a schedule. Actually, I started my doctorate in conducting; I didn’t want another degree in organ. I started it in Connecticut; then we moved, and I thought that I was going to finish it in conducting, but at that time they didn’t have a doctorate in conducting in Minnesota, believe it or not. The state with St. Olaf and such places, yet a conducting doctorate just didn’t exist! So when I moved here, I was for one very short semester looking at the orchestral program, but decided pretty quickly that I wasn’t interested in being an orchestral conductor. I switched back to organ. It was a good thing. It was fun.

JR: You’d both been in Connecticut in separate positions. When you came to Minnesota, was it just you, James, taking this job?
JB: Yes.
MB: He was nice. I said I’d be happy to move if I could just go and not have to work, because I was in the middle of the degree, and at that point I had decided that I was going to be a director of choral activities in a college. That was my career goal. I wasn’t thinking “church job.” We agreed that we would move and figure out if we could live here on his salary, and I’d go to school and find something else. There was a budget for an assistant position, which they had before, so he started interviewing people as soon as he got here; and along about November, said, “let’s just hire Marilyn.” So it was a temporary thing and I just never left.
JB: It worked out nicely because we went through the process—we advertised the position, we were interviewing and auditioning, and I had a committee. We reached a certain point where one of the people on the committee said “Why aren’t we just hiring your wife?” But it was better that it didn’t come from me; rather, it came from the parish.
MB: So I did that part-time for three years; when I finished the degree in ’99, the pastor said, “please put in a proposal to increase your hours to 20 hours a week.” At that point it was perfect to just keep it at 20, because our daughter was ten. It was so nice to work in the same place. We knew we could work together, and in fact we’ve done things together almost our whole married life. The building needs two people; in fact, more than two people.

JR: But you knew that working together would succeed.
MB: Oh, yes. We’ve done it for years. When we were students together, we’d do things together, and then before I finished my degree we were in one church and we used to do some things together. We’ve been together for 30 years. I’ve always helped out at his churches, and he’s always helped out at mine. I always knew we’d enjoy working together. I just like being in the same room with him all the time! (laughs) I like to hear him play the organ and we like to do things together.

JR: James, you are director of music at the cathedral, and Marilyn, you are associate director. Are you the entire music staff?
JB: Well, yes and no. We have music staff at the diocesan level too. Michael Silhavy is in charge of diocesan events. We are also fortunate to have Lawrence Lawyer as our assistant in music, helping with a multitude of musical and administrative duties.

JR: Who does what?
JB: In order to cover everything that happens in the building, there really are four of us who are regularly employed here.
MB: Who are actual musicians and not administrative.
JB: We’re talking about organists and directors.
MB: For diocesan events, where the bishop comes, we have Michael, who’s next door, who does those, with our help. But he can ask anybody in the diocese, so if he knows that it’s a really busy time for us, he can ask someone at the seminary to come in and play for an ordination Mass. Michael doesn’t get involved with anything on a parish level. There is a separate choir he conducts, which is mostly volunteers, about 60 or 80 people. We do the day-to-day work, but we get involved when he asks us. Michael used to work at GIA years ago, then he moved to the cathedral in Duluth, then moved down here as the worship center director. We’ve known him for almost twenty years.
We do four weekend masses with organ; there is another one with cantor only, just a sung Mass. Right now all three of us are going to be at the choir Mass, which is our high Mass. We both play the organ, we both direct; Lawrence Lawyer, our music assistant, at this point doesn’t do any directing, but we’re hoping he will. We have the Cathedral Choir at the 10 am Mass and we both switch off and do everything—if we’re not playing, we sing. I do another weekend Mass, and we rotate, and he’ll do two Masses a weekend and Lawrence does one. The St. Cecilia Choir is the kids’ choir, and all three of us do that. You can listen to sound bites of that on the web. (See <www.cathedralsaintpaul.org/calendars/sounds.asp&gt;.)

JR: What’s the size of your main adult choir?
JB: 30–35.
MB: It fluctuates. There are nine section leaders, and then we have 20 or 25 really good volunteers. The main core is 30.

JR: How many children’s choirs are there?
JB: One.
MB: We started branching off by using the older girls for some things, so we’ve developed a group of six or eight older girls that we call the Schola. We also invented something new for the boys, because a lot of them are home-schooled kids. So they come with their families.
JB: We just really didn’t have the heart to turn them loose when their voices changed. One family, just the sweetest people, asked if there was something we could do. My first answer was no, I’m sorry, it’s a treble choir. Then I thought about it for a week or two, and talked to the person who was then running it with me, and we decided to figure out a way to deal with this. We’re doing the Voice for Life program, the RSCM program, which is very nice. So at first we occasionally had them sing on some things, but it’s gone even beyond that now. We had three of these boys with changed voices last year, and they were doing some things on their own, too.
MB: We had them ring handbells—if you listen to one of our pieces that’s on the website, his O Come Divine Messiah—that’s everybody. That’s our daughter playing the oboe, and the main chorus singing the whole thing; the Schola sings the middle section, and the boys are ringing the bells. We’re doing two pieces this year where we taught them the bass line—I’m sure one of them’s going to be a tenor—but James taught them how to read the bass line.
JB: Another wonderful thing as you know with Voice for Life—they have some musical skills, rudimentary, but in some ways, better than some of our adult singers.
MB: They learned the bass part of an Ave Verum of Byrd, and then of the Tallis If Ye Love Me, and With a Voice of Singing. The girls who were trebles sang the soprano part with the adult choir, and the boys—I put them in with the basses, and the basses loved it. Some day, some choir director in some church somewhere is going to thank us because she’ll have these three boys who then, grown-up, will still have it in them.
As cathedrals go, and I could be wrong about this, we have one of the more active parishes in the United States. But it’s just like any kind of city church—the parish, for the children and for the parish choir in a building like this, is usually smaller than in suburban churches. We have 30 kids in the choir, which we think is really good. I’d love to have 50!
JB: The parish tends to be more singles and folks who move in and out—a large turnover; some families too.
MB: For a while, our biggest parishioner group was the 29 to 39 single female. We had a lot of young professional women in the choir.

JR: How do you divide the conducting and accompanying tasks?
JB: One thing that we discovered along the way is that for the most part it doesn’t work to switch off conducting and organ playing in the middle of a concert. (chuckling) We used to do that, and it just makes things harder. There’s something about the continuity and how to budget time and that sort of thing. So we did stop doing that a few years ago. Working backwards from that, the one concert that we do every year is around Advent/Christmas. It will work out that whoever is conducting that concert will do a lot of the rehearsal through November–December. But that’s the exception. During most of the year, we just split things up—sometimes it’s back and forth in a rehearsal, sometimes she’ll take half of the rehearsal and I’ll take the second half—it depends what we’re doing.
MB: He sings baritone, and I sing soprano. You know the Allegri Miserere, the one with the high Cs—right now we only have one person in the choir who can sing the high Cs. So it means that he has to conduct, because I have to sing those. My voice tends to be better for the Renaissance things; I don’t have much vibrato, and it’s a small, light tone. During Lent I do more singing with the choir, because we do more Renaissance works then, and he’ll do most of the conducting, whereas we need him more for pieces of other periods, so then I’ll conduct more of the things we need him to sing on; if we have brass and such and it’s a big celebration that needs improvisation, we’re more comfortable having him at the organ and me conducting. The things needing a lot of filling in or improvisation—he tends to get those. The last deciding factor is whoever’s not sick of something. Sometimes I’ll say, “I conducted that last time, you do it”— it’s more a matter of what would be most fun to do next time.
JB: One thing that sets us apart from 99% of the rest of the world is that neither of us likes to have an anthem marked—with all the breathing, and the interpretation. And then everybody has it marked, we sing it the way we did last time, and the time before that, and the ten times before that! That just drives us both nutty—because every time we bring out a piece, you have different singers, things are always a little different, you have a little different idea of how the piece should go, or maybe you’ve actually even learned something about it! Part of it sometimes is boredom—you know, “I’ve done this piece five times in a row, it’s time for you to do it.” It drives our singers nutty, because most of them come from other choirs where you have markings in your part, and you can expect that the conductor will do it that way. And people who have sung with us for 11 years will say, “But I have marked a breath there”—well, we don’t want a breath there this time! (laughter)

JR: Since both of you are composers, how do you handle pieces you’ve written? If you wrote an anthem, do you play it, do you conduct it?
JB: That’s a great question, because sometimes if you’ve written a piece, you learn more if you’re not the one who conducts it. I think frequently we might do it that way. If it’s a piece that I’ve written, that I want to try out, I will have her conduct it, because then I’ll find out how clear I have been in the notation—there are written indications that somebody else will interpret totally differently from the way I think it should be.
MB: He tends to write more choral things right now, and I tend to do a few more organ pieces. So he tends to play my organ pieces, more than I do.
JB: Another thing I like is if it’s a piece that we’re trying out, I would prefer to just listen, or if it’s accompanied, just sit at the piano or organ, and not be in charge.
MB: I generally tend to do more of the conducting in his pieces, too. When we celebrated our tenth anniversary at the cathedral, we had decided that I would do all the conducting. In fact, the program says that I did all the conducting. But then there were two pieces, which aren’t marked in your program, that at the last minute we decided Jim should do, partly because of the makeup of our sopranos—he always conducts the Ubi Caritas—and they’re more used to him.
JB: It kind of breaks the rule of what I was just saying. In that case, they’re kind of used to doing it in a certain way. We had to do all these things in a short rehearsal time, so—
MB: It was easier. The other piece was Ave Maria, and the sopranos needed me, so at the last minute we decided to switch, and he conducted those two pieces, and I did the rest of the conducting. We have a recording of that. We also have done hymn festivals, with Michael, where we put our two choirs together.
JB: Michael is very interested in hymnology. He has a gift for being able to put things together in interesting ways, and he can also write a really nice script for a program like that.
MB: For one of our Christmas programs, we had a set of poetry commissioned, Near Breath, which is really wonderful, from Anna George Meek, one of our section leaders. The whole program was based around that, and she intertwined the music we were doing.

JR: The cathedral is quite a presence—for instance, you’ve had the Minnesota Orchestra playing here, doing the Bruckner symphonies, and those were conceived for a cathedral-type ambiance.
JB: We are really excited about that. Osmo Vänskä, that’s his baby.

JR: Is that something you originated?
JB: No, he was behind the whole thing. He came to us with his proposal to do this. The performance is done two or three times, only once in the cathedral, but the cathedral one is the “main” performance—it’s the one that gets broadcast, and so forth.
MB: There are organizations that use the building a lot—Philip Brunelle uses it a lot for VocalEssence. Every time they bring over a boy choir group, they use the cathedral; I’m not sure why not the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, except that probably we seat more people.
JB: I think also he has sort of a Minneapolis group, so it’s an outreach to come over to “this” side.
MB: It’s just too much of a cavern for a small sixteen-voice group. We’ve had other groups like the National Lutheran Choir try it, and they ended up over at the Basilica of St. Mary too, because the room’s too wide, too big. You can have too much acoustic.

JR: Did either of you formally study composition? James, you reportedly taught yourself—studying organ literature and orchestral scores.
JB: Marilyn thinks that’s how it started out, and I think she’s right!
MB: We used to play duets. When we started out as players, we wanted to play organ duets and we still do—we do two-organ things now too—but there isn’t much repertoire out there that’s really very interesting.
JB: We got bored in a hurry. So I just started looking around for different things to do, and the transcription idea was appealing, and it ended up being intensive score study.
MB: I’ll never forget his very first piece—his parents had died and he was in a situation where the church was full-time but it didn’t take up his whole day. And we lived nearby and I was gone most of the day.
JB: At times it was very, very busy, but then there were other times when, frankly, there wasn’t that much to do.
MB: I remember coming home, and he had said to me earlier, you know the famous Make Me a Channel of Your Peace—he said, kind of on a dare to himself, “I think I could write something on that text and I think I could get it published.” He’d never written anything before except little choral sentences or whatever. I came home from Hartford one day, and he said, “I wrote a piece today.” And that kept happening for a while. I’d come home and say, “What did you do today, dear?” “Oh, I wrote a piece.” (laughter)
JB: One day, she came home, and I said, “I wrote a Christmas piece, only it needs words. No hurry!”
MB: “—but I want it for my rehearsal next week.” (laughter) He said “I want to do it for our Christmas program,” and could I do some text? He showed me the tune, and I sat right down and wrote something, and we got that published pretty fast. He always says “I don’t need it right away—but could you do it tomorrow?”

JR: Do you have any compositional process, or do you just hear a tune going through your head and take it from there?
JB: Grief.
MB: Grief and angst and paranoia—both of us. He’s just as bad.
JB: Everything’s a little different. So I don’t know if there really is any “process.” Choral music is different from organ music.
MB: We do things without the keyboard, sometimes. But I always use it, as I need to.
JB: I have found that the things that I’m most proud of and happiest about are pieces where the bulk of the whole thing has been done at one session—like in one day. It takes weeks or months to finish it and flesh out all the details, but I do find that the best things are done at one sitting.

JR: Do you have a keyboard hooked up to “Finale” at home?
JB: We do.
MB: He just built us a “virtual organ.” He ordered the pedalboard and the keyboards, and he has it hooked up—which organ are we playing right now, whose is it?
JB: It’s a Casavant organ, from Champaign, Illinois.
MB: It’s a great little practice instrument. Our basement’s small. It beats an electronic. It sounds just like a real organ.
JB: I can play that thing for hours on end and not get sick of it, which is saying a lot. I never have run into any electronic where I could do that. It has the advantage of being connected to the computer.
MB: We can compose on it. I’ve just started using it. I’m not as computer-happy as he is; I love to use it once it’s all set up, but he has to show me and then I’m fine.
JB: It has been interesting to grow with this technology, because I always used to write things out, paper and pencil, first, and then gradually move to the computer program. I found as the years have gone by that the computer portion of that has crept in earlier and earlier in the process. In fact, it’s right at the beginning now; even if I do write things on pencil and paper, generally there’s a computer file to start with.
MB: It looks nice, and my handwriting’s terrible, and for me I just put everything in after I plunk away, and then I can fiddle with it.
JB: We have our laptops, and once you get a piece to a certain point, you can just sit there and listen to it, and change things around, and you don’t have to be anywhere near a keyboard.
MB: I’ve been doing more words lately—organ music and more texts. The one I’m happiest with is my setting of the Beatitudes—everybody wants to sing them, and there just are not many choral settings that don’t get pretty redundant.
JB: It’s a hard text to set. The form doesn’t really lend itself too well. She did a strophic hymn that’s inspired by the text, to get around that problem. And I think it’s really very nice.
MB: That took a year. But anyway, Jim has a piece based on it, too, with descant, and middle stanza parts.

JR: Tell me about Stir Up Thy Power, O Lord, which is a nice anthem for a small choir.
JB: That anthem is almost entirely in unison. In fact, it could be done in unison. It’s kind of surprising. We have a composer friend who heard the premiere of that, and he has a very sophisticated ear, and one of his comments at the end was that he wasn’t really quite aware that it was almost all unison! I thought that was a very nice compliment.

JR: Congratulations, you got ASCAPLUS awards in 2006 and 2007.
JB: Yes. It is really a nice little program, because it recognizes composers who have pieces that are actually being performed, but in places that don’t generate performance fees, namely in churches. I fill in an application, then I Google my name and try to find all these places where things are being done, and it’s amazing! But they’re all at church services, or occasionally recitals and things.
MB: College choirs do his O Sacrum Convivium a lot, and O Holy Night.

JR: Marilyn, let me ask you about your new music championing. You wrote an article for The Diapason about MorningStar’s Concert Organ series, and last I looked it has three dozen titles in it. Is it doing well?
JB: The publisher is not pulling the plug on it, so I think that’s a good sign.
MB: I’ve been so disappointed all along in the way people are NOT interested in new music—we’ve noticed it in our own things, and I’ve noticed it a lot with organ music. I am disappointed in the lack of widespread interest in simply supporting these composers.
JB: My theory is that the problem is that there was a period where there was so much avant garde music and music that was just plain hard to listen to, and so many people got turned off to the idea of new music. It’s too bad, because many composers are writing very easy-to-listen-to music now. If anything, I’d say that’s the preponderance of what’s being written.
MB: I think it’s coming back.
JB: I don’t think the market has caught up with the new trend yet.
MB: And it’s hard to get things published.
JB: And organists—well, churches—tend to be on the conservative side, so that enters into the picture too.
MB: I think that the more original you are as a composer, the harder it is for your piece to get published. One composer I was working with for so long wrote this incredible organ duet and other pieces that were so amazing, and one response from a publisher was, “it’s a magnificent piece of music, but it simply won’t sell.”
JR: How did you get into writing texts?
MB: We took a hymnody class together at Northwestern. After that hymnody class, and feeling “gee, I’d like to do this,” I would do a few a couple times a year, and I had maybe a dozen, but in my mind I felt that I’d written a hundred in my life. All of a sudden I thought, “wait a minute, I’m in my forties, I write one a year—how am I going to get up to a hundred? This is not going to work.”
At that time my dad died. And—I think you have to have suffered a little before you can write any kind of hymnody. And I had quite a bit of suffering. My dad had Alzheimer’s, as his father did, and I was there at the end. His pastor said this wonderful prayer over him as he was dying, about how he knew that Al was in two wonderful places: he was very present on earth, that he can feel all his family’s love, and yet he’s one step into heaven and he can see the glory. It set off a hymn, which I knew was inspired from that. So I wrote a bunch of hymns; I must have written three, four, five dozen. I’m not quite up to a hundred, but I’m not dead yet!
JB: For a while, Marilyn was doing it as a daily discipline. You were going through the meters—sitting down and writing one every day.
MB: That was hard to keep up every day. It’s like practicing an etude every day, after a while you have a certain amount of technique. But I miss the discipline of it; I’ve gotten out of that habit. I did that for about a year or two. Now I do things on request, or if he has something and he wants help. And this year, do you know the Eric Whitacre piece that everyone sings—Lux aurumque—he had this piece that he’d written, which was in English verse that he had translated into Latin. I wrote a text, and then a woman in the choir translated it into Latin for us. That one will be published in a little bit. It’s a cool thing to have somebody in your choir who can translate something into Latin for you.
JB: So she did an English text, and then Maryann Corbett did a Latin translation, and then I wrote a piece on the Latin, Surge inluminare, for choir and harp. The next step was that the publisher wanted an English translation—an English text that could be sung. So then they had to go back and recreate another thing, so it was like going around in a circle back to the English. It was interesting!
MB: We like to do a lot of different things: we both like to sing, to play, to conduct, to write, and I like to do the hymn texts. It keeps us from getting burned out. So right at the moment, I’m writing general things.

JR: What about your duets? You sometimes perform as a duo, is this just occasionally?
JB: Not so much recently.
MB: We used to do two-organ things, and we got a little tired of that, because we’d done all the repertoire multiple times.
JB: Two-organ repertoire, you just can’t take it on the road. Every situation is totally different. We did do a two-organ program in Milwaukee last year. That was fun, but there are limits to what you can do with that.
MB: The registration time is immense. It takes a good five or six hours just to register pieces, and then if you’re lucky you’ve got four or five hours the next day to work all the bugs out. It takes a lot of time. So we tend to play duets here, simply because it’s easier—it’s our instrument, we can register them over a period of a couple months, or whenever we feel like it. We’ve given up on the touring because it takes so long. If we were going to do something, we would have to allow three full days of just practicing. We can do it in two, but it’s hard.

JR: One last question—how do you keep a general balance in life, physical health along with everything else?
JB: I bike ride. It helps.
MB: I’ve been riding a couple times a week. And the Y’s right down the street.We walk a lot—walk and talk. In winter it’s hard to get out, because the wind is so bad and it’s hard to walk. That’s when we’re better about going to the Y. But we eat as healthfully as we can, so we try to do as much as we can. The mental health—I have no clue!
JB: Neither of us has ever figured out how to be well rounded!
MB: Well, we’re two perfectionists, and we tend to be very precise, and it’s not easy to work with that. Our choir does really well with it, but in an office situation that can be hard for people who aren’t as interested in getting details done.

JR: Do you have any other hobbies?
MB: I’m the parent organizer for our daughter’s swim team, so other than that, no, just exercise and eating right, and wine! And keeping up with our daughter. When she leaves, I don’t know what we’ll do. Internet stuff.

JR: Thank you!