In the wind . . .

Lunching with geniuses

I used to be an avid baseball fan. Starting with the “Impossible Dream,” the fabled 1967 season of the Boston Red Sox, I followed the hometown team aided and abetted by my father, who had grown up in Cincinnati following the Reds from the bleachers of Crosley Field. Dad had the same seats at Fenway Park for more than thirty years (section 26, row 4, seats 13 and 14), and he and I had an unbroken streak of twenty-five consecutive opening day games there, unbroken even when opening day coincided with Good Friday, and the priest and the organist had to make special arrangements! A big part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats, and though I do not follow the game anymore, I cherish the memories.

Some of my colleagues play Virtual Baseball, a well-organized game in which they build teams by drafting and trading “real” players and keeping track of their virtual teams based on the daily statistics of their players from the live major league baseball games. They track wins and losses, and if they have built good teams, play through the playoffs and World Series. It is very sophisticated and they are very devoted, and there is some wagering involved to keep things interesting.

Throughout my career, I have watched the progress of many organ companies, both domestic and foreign, and it occurs to me that we might develop an organbuilding version of Virtual Baseball. We would make up cards with photos and lists of skills of all the employees in all the workshops, document their contributions to the various organs they worked on, and build a virtual “dream team” of craftsmen. No? Perhaps not.

We follow the great names in organbuilding as avidly as the most enthusiastic baseball fan in a sports bar. We cite their great instruments, celebrate their innovations, and rattle off specifications, just like we rattled off great starting line-ups of history with our seatmates at Fenway Park. (Did Rico Petrocelli bat before or after Tony Conigliaro in the 1967 Red Sox?) We single out our organbuilding heroes, past and present, chronicling their careers and the instruments they produced.

We trace how organbuilders and organists influenced each other, and if you are anything like me, we imagine conversations between them. Gottfried Silbermann and J. S. Bach must have had lunch together a couple times, as did Aristide Cavaillé-Coll with Charles-Marie Widor, and Dirk Flentrop with
E. Power Biggs. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall, or even seated at the table for one of those meals. I have read that Bach played a couple pianofortes built by Silbermann and did not think much of them. Maybe after that the lunches were over. Cavaillé-Coll was a parishioner at Saint-Sulpice in Paris until his death in 1899, when Widor was in the middle of his tenure there and at the height of fame and creativity. Cavaillé-Coll was thirty-three years older than Widor and was largely responsible for Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice. That great organ was nearly forty years old at the time of Cavaillé-Coll’s death, and they must have talked about it frequently. I bet they had a regular weekly table at their favorite bistro and were sometimes joined by friends like Charles Gounod or Camille Saint-Saëns.

Robert Clicquot and François Couperin, Henry (Father) Willis and Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Ernest Skinner and T. Tertius Noble, and Charles Fisk and Daniel Pinkham are among other lunch partners I would love to have joined.

Let’s hear it for the little guys

It may be the genius luminaries of the field that we think of first, but lurking in their shadows are thousands of talented craftsmen and musicians, without whom the history of our instrument would be incomplete. William Horatio Clark (1840–1913) is one whose work has interested me because our paths have crossed several times. He was born into a musical family in Newton, Massachusetts, and took his first regular job as a church organist at the Unitarian Church of Dedham, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen. He subsequently was organist at the Berkeley Street Congregational Church in Boston (now the site of Morgan Memorial Collection Center on Melnea Cass Boulevard, very close to the location of the Hook workshop), and moved to the First Congregational Church of Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1861, which is where I first came across his legacy.

The First Congregational Church of Woburn was built in 1860. It is an enormous wood-frame building whose 196-foot spire is reputed to be the tallest wooden steeple in North America. The magnificent three-manual organ by
E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 283) was also built and installed in 1860, and I was fortunate to serve as assistant organist there while I was in high school. The organbuilder George Bozeman was organist there, and as I remember it from my headstrong youth, he created the position for me partly as the terrific educational experience it was, and partly so I would be there to cover for him as his organ work required him to travel. My first organbuilding experiences were summer jobs in Bozeman’s shop in 1975 and 1976, and I am grateful to him as friend and mentor.

That was one of my first cracks at leading a choir, and I was naïve enough that it never crossed my mind that conducting from an attached keydesk was supposed to be difficult. Today, as I meet with organists and organ committees who cannot conceive of such a thing, I am grateful for that early experience. And what an organ. Thirty-five ranks of Civil War era tone color, brilliant choruses of Principals, two Trumpets, an Oboe and a Clarinet, and a doozey of a Pedal Posaune with wood resonators. As a seventeen-year-old I knew it was a wonderful organ, but I had no idea how fortunate I was.¹ You can see photos and specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041.

The Reverend Stuart Nutter came as a new pastor during my time there, providing my first experience with conservative evangelical preaching. I was not close with members of the congregation, but I recall that members of the choir were not happy with his messages. One winter Sunday, there was a tremendous roar as a huge load of wet snow slid off the roof and fell fifty feet to the parking lot. It seemed a sign that it was Pastor Nutter’s car that was utterly flattened, such a wreck that three of the wheels were broken off.

I do not know if William H. Clarke had anything to do with the planning of that Hook organ, but it is fair to assume that he was present for at least part of the installation, where he would have met Stephen P. Kinsley, the brilliant voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Clarke left Woburn in 1865, returned to the Berkeley Street church for a couple years, then returned to Woburn where he stayed until 1869, when he moved across Woburn Center to the Unitarian Church. It was no coincidence that E. & G. G. Hook installed their Opus 553 there the following year, also voiced by Stephen Kinsley. During my high school tenure, there were two tremendous three-manual Hook organs in my life.

I have a vivid memory of a recital played by James Busby at the Unitarian Church (currently organist at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island), joined by soprano Elisabeth Phinney. Together, they offered Bach’s Cantata 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. The organ included a Carillon (I think the knob said “Carrillons”), the first percussion stop in an American organ. It was a set of 29 metal bars struck by piano hammers, located above the top manual behind the music rack, and playable without wind using a mechanical coupler, and Busby used that distinctive voice as part of “Bach’s Orchestra.”

Mrs. Phinney taught singing at the New England Conservatory of Music for thirty-two years. Her daughter Monique, also a singer, was one of my high school pals, and her husband Keith was director of music at nearby Bedford (Massachusetts) High School. I remember several great experiences when I was accompanying Monique in various local performances, and her parents were there as coaches.

William Clarke was thirty years old when the Hook organ was installed in the Unitarian Church and had moved back and forth between jobs six times. His longest tenure was the four-year stint at the Congregational Church in Woburn. He stayed with the Unitarians and their grand forty-five-rank organ for only one year, and showed up in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871 as the superintendent of school music. In 1873 he become organist of the First Methodist Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in 1874 he moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, to become organist of the First Baptist Church. While he was in Indianapolis he founded Wm. H. Clarke & Co., Church Organ Builders, enticing his friend Stephen Kinsley to leave E. & G. G.
Hook to become head voicer. If I were building a virtual organ shop, I would want to have Kinsley as my voicer!

After the Unitarian church closed,
E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 553 was dismantled by the Organ Clearing House, restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen, Germany, and installed in 2002 in Die Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin. Thomas Murray played the dedication recital. It is known as Die Berliner Hook-Orgel and is highly regarded in its unique situation as a nineteenth-century American organ in a German church.

Wm. H. Clarke & Company built fifteen organs that we know of, two of which have been part of my life. My parents purchased a little house in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), in 1968 where we spent summers, and where they moved after my father’s retirement. There are two historic organs in Yarmouthport, but it was at the Swedenborgian Church where I served as organist for the summer-only congregation. The organ had been built by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. in 1872, then rebuilt and modified by the Andover Organ Company in 1960. You can see “before and after” stoplists at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8978, a study of sign-of-the-times organ renovation.

Clayton Priestnal was pastor of the small congregation (he served a parish in Philadelphia during the winter) who was the epitome of Central Casting’s version of a rickety country minister. He was a slight man with the shaggiest eyebrows I had ever seen, who had a way of bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet for emphasis as he was preaching. He had established a relationship with the Highfield Theater of Falmouth, Massachusetts, a summer theater company that specialized in productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Cast members were conservatory voice majors from across the country, and a different singer came to Yarmouthport each Sunday to participate in the service, another great educational opportunity for a young organist. It was after my last summer on Cape Cod that I went to Oberlin, where I was reunited with several of the singers I had worked with in Yarmouthport.

The Wm. H. Clarke/Andover organ was a simple and small instrument, but it was lovely, and I loved playing on it. It was about two miles from home, and I did all that walking in bare feet, a memory that sends lightning bolts up and down my legs today. I played recitals each summer, and I know that instrument was an important part of my early education. In 2002, after I had joined the Organ Clearing House, I was invited to play another recital, the first of many lecture-recitals I developed. My topic was roughly the history of the nineteenth-century American organ, with special attention given to William Horatio Clarke. I was fortunate to learn that the Indiana Historical Society had considerable material about Clarke’s life, family, and work, which is the source of the biographical information I am sharing here.

As a student at Oberlin, I worked part-time and summers for Jan G. P. Leek, the ebullient organbuilder who was the school’s full-time organ and harpsichord technician until he left to start his own firm during my junior year. He was a first-generation immigrant, who apprenticed in the Netherlands as a child and came to Cleveland to work for Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was a great teacher and a lot of fun, and I stayed in his shop for four years after I graduated in 1978. It was from him that I learned the fundamentals of organbuilding and woodworking, tuning, and troubleshooting.  

One of the projects we did together was the restoration of another organ by Wm. H. Clarke & Co. This one in Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio, a commanding stone Gothic building with a tall spire that was visible from many miles away across rolling farmland. The church’s organist was a high school student from a farming family with thirteen kids, who had the presence of mind to organize the parish to fund the restoration of the organ. The project was guided by his dream that the organ should be “plaqued” by the Organ Historical Society, and we completed the work in 1980. You can see the specification of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=4256.  

Garth Peacock of the Oberlin organ faculty played the dedication recital. Part of the historical authenticity of our project was the restoration of the feeder bellows and hand-pumping system. The recital was to close with the singing of a hymn led by the hand-pumped organ, and I was the designated pumper. I do not remember which hymn it was, but I do remember the impish glint in Peacock’s eye (we could see other around the corner of the organ case) as he drew more stops, filled in the chords, and played octaves in the pedals, requiring me to flail the pump handle up and down like the clapper between the two bells of an alarm clock!

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William Clarke moved from Indianapolis to Toronto where he became organist of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in 1884, then served Plymouth Congregational Church there from 1884–1886. From 1886 to 1888, he was organist of the First Baptist Church of Rochester, New York, and he returned to the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1888 where he served until he retired in 1892.

In his last years, he lived in Reading, Massachusetts (which adjoins Woburn), where he wrote a treatise on organ mixtures, a “Cheerful Philosophy for Invalids,” and a booklet on “Valuable Organ Information.” He wrote music for organ, edited anthologies of organ music and anthems, and worked as an organ consultant by correspondence until his death in 1913.

William Clarke was not a distinguished or renowned organbuilder, and his organs are not remarkable for their size, content, or innovations. Rather, they were good, solid, reliable church organs. The two that I have known didn’t include reeds, perhaps wise because neither Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, nor Bethlehem, Ohio, had organ tuners nearby in the 1870s.

Judging by the number of times he jumped from one short tenure to another, William Clarke may not have been the most stable or reliable of church musicians. Maybe he argued with the pastors. I imagine he was a colorful and exciting organist because of the number of times he was welcomed back for a second stint at a church where he had presumably left in a huff or been dismissed. I have played and loved organs he knew, built, and others that he presumably designed. I suppose he would have been an interesting guy to talk with. It would be my first choices to have lunch with Ernest Skinner or Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, but if neither were in town, I would be happy to sit with Mr. Clarke. I know some good lunch spots in Woburn.

Notes

1. I had my weekly lessons and practiced after school on a three-manual organ by
C. B. Fisk: http://www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50. When I got to Oberlin as a freshman in the fall of 1974 (the Flentrop in Warner Hall was dedicated that November), I was surprised to learn that some of my peers had never played a pipe organ before.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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? 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The times they are a-changin’
When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in churches. We lived in a suburb of Boston that had a large Episcopal parish (my father was the rector), two Congregational churches, Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Christian Science, and three Roman Catholic. (There aren’t that many Presbyterian churches in the Boston area.) All of them but two of the Catholic churches had pipe organs, and as an ecumenical kid and a young organist to boot, I played on most of the organs. I had a series of regular jobs playing for churches there, and I remember well that it was easy to come and go from the buildings. All of them had regular staffs and office hours. I guess I took for that for granted. In neighboring towns in each direction the situation was the same—a gaggle of big church buildings, each with a pipe organ.
That was the 1960s and 1970s and the organbuilding renaissance was in full swing in New England. Fisk, Noack, Andover, Casavant, Bozeman, and several European firms were building new organs in churches all around the area. Seems we were attending dedication recitals every few months. But the handwriting was on the wall. Aeolian-Skinner was breathing its last, and I remember clearly when the rumors started to fly that that venerable firm was closing. I was sixteen and was more than a little self-righteous when I spread the news to colleague organists before a recital at the First Congregational Church, ironically the new home of a three-manual Fisk organ (Opus 50) that had just replaced a Skinner. That church was two blocks from our house and was where I had my lessons and did most of my practicing.
In the 1970s I went to school at Oberlin, where I started working part-time for John Leek, the school’s organ technician, who did lots of organ service work on the side. Later he started his own business, now operated by his son James. Together we blasted all over Ohio and western Pennsylvania and I remember all the churches had at least a secretary and a sexton on duty. The secretary knew everyone in the parish and could anticipate what would happen next, and the sexton scrubbed and polished five days a week and was on hand on Sunday mornings making the coffee and being sure that all the light bulbs were working. You could count on the sexton to have the heat on just right in time for the organ tuning, and as we worked he was in the chancel several times, almost a nuisance, making sure we knew there was coffee in the office.
It’s different today. Many of those parishes I knew as a teenager have dwindled, 75 or 80 people spread out across 600-seat sanctuaries that were once full. Foundation plantings are overgrown, gutters and downspouts swing free, the bell can’t be rung because it’s off its rocker, the Echo division has been shut down because the roof leaked, and the secretary is in between nine and eleven, three days a week. Sexton? Forget it. A cleaning service comes in once a week, but the tile floor in Fellowship Hall never gets polished. Motors and pumps are never lubricated, heaps of ancient pageant costumes are shrouded with spider webs, and there’s an almost ghostly sense of yesterday’s glory.
And I almost forgot—the last three organists haven’t used the pedals.

The good old days
In recent weeks I’ve had two telling experiences with these “former glory” parishes in my area: one that cancelled the service contract I’ve had for 25 years, saying they don’t use the organ any more, and another where the insurance settlement for water damage to the organ was used for something else. I’ve been reflecting on what it must have been like in the twenties when all those buildings were new and all the pews were full. Those were the days when American organbuilders were producing 2,000 organs a year. Most of the venerable firms that contributed to that staggering output are gone. This is off the top of my head, but it’s a fair guess based on experience that the lofty club of 20th-century 20-organs-a-year firms included Skinner, Aeolian-Skinner, Hook & Hastings, Kimball, Kilgen, Schantz, Reuter, Wicks, and Austin. Don’t mention Möller with dozens of hundred-organ years, and even many organ-a-day years. Unbelievable.
And by the way, at least two of the most prolific American organbuilders were mostly in the secular world—Wurlitzer built thousands of organs for movie theaters and all sorts of other venues, and Aeolian built more than a thousand instruments for the homes of the rich and famous. Frank Woolworth, the Five & Dime king, had the first residence organ to include a full-length 32-foot Open Wood Diapason. You really have to stop and think just what that means. The biggest twelve pipes of that stop would fill half a modern semi-trailer. Big house. And by the way, it was his country house. He also had a big Aeolian in his city house at 990 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nice address. In an age when there was no central air conditioning, no heated swimming pools, no surround-sound home movie theaters, Mr. Woolworth had a 30-horsepower organ blower in his basement.
I don’t know whether the American organ industry has had any 100-organ years in my lifetime. Probably, because Möller lasted into the 1990s, but I think you get the point. It’s less than that now.

The coal miner’s heritage
Yesterday I visited a Roman Catholic parish in central Pennsylvania that is offering an organ for sale, built by M. P. Möller in the nineteen-teens. It has 26 stops on two manuals. There’s a 16-foot Open Wood in the Pedal, a lovely 16-foot metal Diapason on the Great, and four reeds. I would have expected a dull and heavy sound, but the organbuilder who renovated the instrument about eight years ago described the organ as having a brilliant and exciting tonal character, enhanced by the spacious acoustics of its large and vertical Gothic building. I might not have bothered to visit if he hadn’t spoken so passionately about what a beautiful organ it is. Let’s face it, there are plenty of lukewarm Möller organs on the market.
It’s a coal-mining town—there are lots of coal towns in that area. It was a family-owned mine with as many as 20,000 employees. The ruling family had built housing, schools, a hospital, and many church buildings. Trouble is, the mine stopped operating 50 years ago. There’s a factory that builds high-end stoves, but it’s about to close. The only remaining business of any size is a meat-packing firm that employs around a hundred people. The junior high and high school have closed and are boarded up—the kids are bused nine miles to the next town. Twenty-two hundred people live there, and there’s not much for them to do. The movie theater is in the same town as the schools. A shopping mall ten miles away stripped downtown of all its businesses. And the jobs? A lot of them must be further away than that.
My host was the priest of the Catholic parish. He drove me around town, telling me the local lore and history. He said the owners of the mine were Episcopalians. We drove past their house and saw that “their church” was next door. Though the congregation had always been small, the Episcopal church was exquisite. We didn’t go in, but he told me that all the windows are by Tiffany. And although there are fewer than ten parishioners now, the place is funded in perpetuity, and I’d guess the building had been painted within the last year. The only two people who are buried on church grounds in the town are the mine owner and his wife. The company had provided land for six cemeteries. No schools, no jobs, six cemeteries.
There was one small and exclusive Episcopal church in town, but there had been four bustling Roman Catholic parishes: one Slovak (St. John Nepomucene), one Polish (St. Casimir), one Irish (St. Anne’s), and one Italian (St. Anthony’s). Because they all were founded by and for first-generation immigrants in the early 20th century, each had a distinct cultural and ethnic character. Four years ago, the diocese directed that the parishes should merge. Oof. Did you hear that? Four years ago. Remember I said the organ had been renovated eight years ago? That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. My visit had started at the rectory where the priest lives. When we went outside to get in his car for our tour, he introduced me to his neighbor across the street who told me he remembered when they “came around collecting for the organ project. So much money and then they close the place.”
A significant part of the priest’s job is to divest the merged parish of redundant properties. As we drove he pointed out the recently sold vacant lot where the first building of the Irish parish had been, decrepit rectories, and crumbling church and school buildings.
The building where the organ is (by the way, it’s the Slovak one) stands in a residential neighborhood on a side street that slopes gently up from south to north. That means the morning sun had shone through the St. Cecilia window every day baking the back of the organ until the organbuilder who renovated it recommended that the window be closed. The priest asked if that had been necessary and I replied that since people started building organs in churches there have been conflicts between organs and windows. It’s both a shame to bake the organ and to lose the window.
I was impressed and moved by the relationship this priest has with his community. It seemed as though each time we turned onto a different street he beeped and waved to someone, sometimes calling out the window. We ate lunch in a pizza shop where he was obviously well known, well loved, and very comfortable. A troop of motorcycles thundered by, inspiring a whole series of hoots back and forth through the open door as neighbors (they must have been parishioners) expressed their reactions. I suggested maybe they were looking for the Catholic church. After all, it was Saturday and there would be a Mass in a couple hours.

Let’s get together and be all right
Funny to quote Bob Marley when discussing the Poles, the Slovaks, the Italians, and the Irish. They’re all Roman Catholics (the last four I mean), but they were surely not ready to be one parish. St. Anne’s had built a new building in the sixties. Because it was in the best condition, it would be retained. But because it was built in the sixties, it was not the most lovely. Skylights were popular then, so the ridge of the cruciform roof is glass. There’s no air-conditioning, so it’s terribly hot inside whenever the sun shines. There’s dingy industrial carpet, tacky ceiling fans, and straight, plain pews with crumbling varnish. Imagine a life-long parishioner of St. John’s (that’s the Slovak parish) leaving the arched Gothic ceilings, gorgeous windows, colorful statues, and renovated pipe organ and going to Mass the next Sunday amidst that sixties kitsch.
I asked the priest how in the world you preside over the forced and unwanted union of such diverse ethnic and cultural communities. There was plenty of anger, and lots of people left the church altogether. Most of them grudgingly made the adjustment, but it wasn’t easy. My host had been a seminary student just after the Second Vatican Council, and told me how as a young priest he had been involved in the removal of statuary from church buildings as part of that “new time.” But as he started his ministry in this coal town, he found himself moving statues and icons from the other three buildings to adorn the otherwise blank slate of St. Anne’s building, itself a product of the austerity of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. They moved memorial plaques, a tabernacle, the Stations of the Cross, a pulpit, and a heavy “priestly” chair, among many other things.
When I say moving statues, I mean personally moving statues. He’d get together a couple guys and they’d load these things into station wagons and pickup trucks. The Sunday after they moved the life-size statue of St. Anthony into the narthex, an elderly Italian woman came home from the 7:30 Mass and starting making lasagna in celebration of the appearance of “her” saint. Her middle-aged daughter called the priest to share the family’s delight.
They even tried to achieve parity by moving the same number of things from each building, a formula that only works if you count “The Stations” as one! Now I’ve got to admit, this is a mighty various collection of stuff. There’s no artistic or stylistic connection in the collection. It looks a little like a saintly yard sale. But while I doubt it calmed all the storms and salved all the wounds, it was a great thought and it obviously means a lot to this diminished and altered community.

What in the world is next for our world?
I left this town and this experience for the three-hour drive to Manhattan to continue work on our project there. Three became four as I realized I was not the only guy who thought of driving through the Lincoln Tunnel on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I had plenty of time to reflect on my day. I had left home that morning at the militaresque oh-dark-hundred to drive 400 miles to see a 90-year-old Möller. Who would have thought? I found a cheerful instrument beautifully renovated, but suffering at the hands of four years of unheated neglect. I lifted a façade pipe and put a photocopied psalm between toe and toe-hole to silence a cipher. The pedal contacts were full of dust and other stuff causing so many ciphers that I didn’t play the pedals at all. Drawing a pedal knob was enough to show the weight and presence of the impressive bass stops. I played for 20 minutes to get the hang of it, figured out a few tricks to navigate around ciphers, and made a ten-minute recording. When I went downstairs, there was a group of former parishioners standing in the street with the priest. They had come when they heard the organ through the open door, the first time it had been played in three years.
The Gothic-inspired case is made of quarter-sawn oak, with lots of beautiful carved and formed details. The drawknob console is comfortable and well appointed. It’s nestled in an alcove of the case. The player sits under the impost and façade, looking down the aisle to the altar. There are heaps of white plaster dust on the pews. There are empty pedestals from which the saints migrated across town. Wrought-iron votive-candle stands are heaped in the narthex. The choir loft has pews to accommodate at least 50 singers. There is still a tray of paper clips, a basket of sharp pencils, a stack of photocopied psalms now one fewer, and a glass canister of Hall’s and Ricolas. But there are no people.
You can sense the decades of rites of liturgy and rites of passage, all the celebrations, sounds, smells, and sights of a century of worship in a vibrant community. One can hardly grasp the number of First Communions with pretty little girls in frilly white dresses, weddings, and funerals, to say nothing of tens of thousands of Masses. There are 5,000 weekends in a century. I bet it’s an understatement to say that there were at least five Masses a week for many years, 20 in the Glory Days. All that’s left is an organ that needs a new home. It’s got a lot of miles on it. Good care. No rust. Only driven by a little old lady on Sundays . . . and Saturdays, and Mondays . . . Take a look at <A HREF="http://www.organclearinghouse.com">www.organclearinghouse.com</A&gt;.
And to you all, my colleagues and friends in the world of the pipe organ, we have a special art that needs special care in this particular and transitory moment. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The Centennial Sentinel
America’s heaviest president, William Howard Taft (cousin of Frank Taft, art director of the Aeolian Organ Company), was inaugurated on March 4, 1909. Apache Chief Geronimo died on February 17. Isaac Albéniz died on May 18, and organist Dudley Buck died on October 9. Giacomo Puccini was fifty-one years old, Claude Monet was sixty-nine, and Camille Saint-Saëns was seventy-four (he would live twelve more years).
Author Eudora Welty was born on April 13, and inventor of the electric guitar Leo Fender was born on August 10. George Gershwin, Louis Vierne, and Charles-Marie Widor still had twenty-eight years of life ahead of them—all three died in 1937. Gustav Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde, Richard Strauss wrote Elektra, and Will Hough and Frank Adams wrote I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. The City of San Francisco banned the residential ownership of cows.1
And on December 1, 1909, the first edition of The Diapason took newsstands by storm. The lead article praised the new Casavant organ at Northwestern University: “Canada has shown that if it is in any way behind United States enterprise, it is not in the field of organbuilding. . . . Casavant Brothers claim the proud distinction of never having built an unsatisfactory instrument in the fifty years they been in business.” (Wow! I wonder what Ernest Skinner thought when he read that! “Dear Editor: Please cancel my subscription.”)
Twelve hundred issues. The October 2009 issue is on my desk. The masthead proclaims “One Hundredth Year: No. 10, Whole No. 1199.” The heritage of the pipe organ covered in the magazine’s early days is the stuff of today’s legends. On page twelve, I read snips from seventy-five years ago (1934) under the heading “Looking Back.” The death of Edwin Lemare is mentioned, as is the work of T. Tertius Noble, David McK. Williams, and Pietro Yon. I suppose one had to choose between Sunday Evensongs at St. Thomas’s, St. Bartholomew’s, and St. Patrick’s, those great New York churches where Noble, Williams, and Yon held forth.
After church you could have dinner at Alexandra (8 East 49th Street: serves a champagne cocktail with dinner; price $1.10 to $1.50), something a little fancier at The Tapestry Room (Ritz Tower, Park Avenue at 57th St.: a small, intimate, charming place to lunch or dine; dinner $2.50 to $3), or go whole hog at Iridium Room and Maisonette Russe (Hotel St. Regis, Fifth Ave. at 55th St.: home of “High-class entertainment”; dinner $3.50 to $4).2 Note the convenience of my travelogue—all three churches and all three restaurants are within five blocks of each other. In three weeks you could attend each service and eat at each restaurant. You’d be out less than ten dollars a head, not counting what you put in the offering plate.
What about the organbuilders? It seemed that all important American organbuilders had showrooms in midtown Manhattan. Leave St. Thomas Church and find the Skinner Organ Company showroom across the street (Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street). One block north was Welte-Mignon (Fifth and 54th, across from the Hotel St. Regis). The Aeolian Organ Company had three Fifth Avenue addresses (at 54th across from Welte, at 42nd, and at 34th), which allowed easy access to the famed Aeolian Music Library. Aeolian patrons could borrow rolls from the library—some organ contracts included extensive “complimentary” library rights. It made sense to have a showroom every twelve blocks.
The Estey showroom was at Fifth and 51st, and the Los Angeles Art Organ Company was at Fifth and 34th, the same intersection as the southernmost Aeolian showroom. M. P. Möller was a block east in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at 49th and Park, no coincidence as there was a Möller theatre organ in the hotel’s ballroom. Each of these showrooms had at least one organ.3 You could walk past all these addresses in half an hour.

A trusted companion
The Diapason has chronicled a very active century. Its history spans almost the entire lives of both E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) and Virgil Fox (1912–1980), who together personified the two sides of a great twentieth-century debate. It includes the last fifteen years of Hook & Hastings, almost all of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner, the last eighty-three years of Möller, the entire history of the Organ Historical Society (founded 1956), and all but thirteen years of the American Guild of Organists (founded 1896).
In the last century, the American pipe organ industry has gone from building more than 2,000 new instruments a year to fewer than one hundred. Attendance at Christian churches has plummeted.
E. Power Biggs spoke of the time when more Americans attended performances of live classical music than professional sports events. Today the pressure for ice time has decimated youth choir programs, as it seems more important to many families (at least here in New England) that the kids be playing hockey at six on a Sunday morning rather than getting ready for choir practice. Non-profit organizations are struggling to survive. Countless technologies have been created and evolved to distract the public from the fine arts. And technologies have been created and evolved to supplant the pipe organ. It’s a pretty grim picture. So what’s to celebrate?

A mid-century renaissance
I have written frequently about the Revival of Classic Principles of Organbuilding (caps intended), which roughly parallels my lifetime. The year of my birth saw the founding of the Organ Historical Society and the death of G. Donald Harrison. The Flentrop organ in the museum formerly known as Busch-Reisinger at Harvard was installed in 1958. At the same time, Charles Fisk was working with Walter Holtkamp as Holtkamp installed an organ with a Rückpositif (on a pitman windchest) at the school formerly known as the Episcopal Theological School in Harvard Square. Since then C. B. Fisk, Inc. has completed more than 130 organs, many of them monumental in scale. Sounds like a lot for a half-century of work, but it pales in comparison to Möller producing five or six thousand organs in fifty years earlier in the twentieth century. (Fisk has built their organs with around twenty-five workers—Möller had hundreds.)
By the time I caught the pipe organ bug, the revival was in full swing. Growing up in Boston, I heard E. Power Biggs play many times, most often at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. I was surrounded by the new organs of Fisk, Noack, Bozeman, and Andover. There were new tracker organs by foreign builders such as Casavant, Flentrop, and Frobenius. And of course there was the nineteenth-century heritage of organs by Hook, Hutchings, and Johnson, among many others. I was mentored and encouraged by the people who built, played, and envisioned all those instruments. There was one fascinating restaurant dinner (at The Würsthaus, formerly in Harvard Square) at which it was noted that nine of the people present were organists at churches with new Fisk organs. My lessons and all my after-school practice were on Fisk organs, and my first real job as a church organist placed me at a three-manual Hook built in 1860.
Ironically, it wasn’t until I was a student at Oberlin that I played regularly on an organ with electro-pneumatic action (a Holtkamp practice organ and the Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, since replaced by Fisk). But at Oberlin I was exposed to the international movement of early performance practice that was breathing new life into the music of J. S. Bach and his seemingly countless predecessors. We practiced scales using the middle three fingers of each hand. We limited registration changes to follow the major architecture of the music. We didn’t think twice about the absence of expression shutters. And we played the masterworks of Romantic organ music on unequal temperaments.

May the force be with you
I’ve alluded to the “Organ Wars” of the twentieth century. Vitriol was commonplace in the pages of The Diapason and The American Organist (the magazine formerly known as Music/AGO—we all said Music-A-go-go). The battle could roughly be described as “Biggs vs. Fox,” or the light side versus the dark side—and your version of chiaroscuro depended on your point of view. On one side were those musicians devoted to the new wave of old styles (tracker actions, early fingerings, crystal-clear registrations); on the other, the “comfortable” world of electro-pneumatic organs (multiple expression boxes, sliding thumbs soloing internal melodies). What one called bright, clear, and cheerful, the other called shrill and screechy. What one called smooth and expressive, the other called mushy and lugubrious. Cross-the-aisle name-calling was commonplace and nasty.
But it was a true renaissance. The entire industry was being renewed. Every tenet and tenon, every principle and Principal was being examined and questioned. We worked hard to develop historic justification for everything we did. We relearned the value of craftsmanship over mass production. We programmed recitals for scholarship over musicianship. And we installed pipe organs for the sake of the music rather than the liturgy.
As a large tracker organ with a classic French specification was installed in an important Episcopal church, the organ committee wrote that their study convinced them that the Classic French organ was ideal for the leadership of Anglican worship. It reminds me of a parishioner in my home parish upset over the introduction of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, who stated, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!”4
As we passed from the 1980s into the ’90s and watched attendance at organ recitals dwindle, it seemed to me that organists and organbuilders were finding themselves in ivory towers. I believe it was by default rather than intention. Our pride in our newly acquired corporate knowledge blinded us to the pleasures of our audiences: “You will sit there and listen to this historically informed recital played correctly on this historically informed instrument. You will not applaud unless or until I say so. It is through my enlightenment that you will enjoy yourself. Y’all come back now . . .”
This idea developed in my mind over several years, and I knew I was treading on dangerous ice, or was it thin ground? In essence, I was criticizing three decades of the thought and work of every one of my colleagues, not to mention myself. With care I began expressing it. I would lob it in the air between sips of brandy at the end of a long lubricated dinner. I would share it with those I was sure would agree. I would share it with people I supposed I could sway. Each time I knew I was expressing something controversial. When I realized that no one was disagreeing with me I grew bolder, sharing my thoughts and watching eyebrows arch.
A performance is enhanced by the historical awareness of the performer, just as we understand more about a Renaissance painting valued at ten million dollars when we realize that the artist died penniless and destitute. But it’s the audience’s response that matters the most, as it is the audience’s response that creates the ten-million-dollar value of that old picture. We rely on a large and appreciative audience to inspire our expression, to ask us back to play again, to fund the frightfully expensive organs on which we rely, and yes, even to appreciate our unusual skills. Our audiences are thrilled when we give them music they know and love, and tunes they can whistle and sing as they make their way home, as well as music that will expand and inspire them.
Of close to 1,100 violins built by Antonio Stradivari, some 650 are still in use, inspiring modern players and thrilling modern audiences. But not one is in original condition. Each has been given a new stronger neck, each has modern strings, each has been boosted to sound forth in the cavernous rooms in which we listen to music, and not one plays at its original pitch. Why should organists and organbuilders limit themselves to sounds of the past, sounds that are curious to the ears of modern listeners, ears that are jaded by stadium roars, jet airplanes, steel wheels on steel rails, and honking horns on Fifth Avenue?5
I was encouraged to find support for this thought in an editorial letter published in The Diapason:

Dear Sir: After many years’ association with the trade, the writer is inclined to the belief that pipe organ manufacturers, as a class, err in taking themselves seriously.
To listen to the tales of our adventures in this field of labor one might easily be convinced that all the knowledge of the past ages had become focalized upon our respective intellects, and that upon our demise the building of organs would become one of the lost arts . . .
Now, it is because of this, and the unresponsive attitude naturally following, that the commercial status of the trade as a whole is not resting upon a higher level. We have managed badly in many respects. Each has assumed that he is the only person in the world who can build a perfectly good pipe organ. We have ‘knocked’ each other, and have at least permitted our representatives to educate the public in the gentle art of ‘knocking.’ [The public’s] reaction we refuse to recognize as our own . . .
Every organbuilder knows that, compared with other industries of like responsibilities and risks, this is about the least remunerative. Started in a monastery, a work of love and devotion, it has never risen above that level sufficiently to classify the owners of factories as ‘capitalists.’
We really desire a remedy, and to most of us the nature of the remedy is obvious, but up to this time not one of us has taken the initiative. . . . The other builder, whose work we decry, can build a good organ—he probably does—and he would gladly build a better one if the conditions imposed by committees whom you have helped educate to demand almost impossible things did not prevent.
The trade CAN unite to PERMIT clean, remunerative business. No one should desire a union for the enforcement of anything.
Let’s get together. Who will make the first move?

This sounds like a time when the organ world started to come to its senses. It sounds like about 1988, when the Organ Historical Society held its convention in San Francisco and featured electro-pneumatic organs by Murray Harris, Austin, and Skinner (but no cows). Thomas Hazleton played music of Tchaikovsky, Guilmant, Howells, and William Walton on the four-manual Skinner at Trinity Episcopal Church, and the OHS presented the church with a plaque honoring the historic organ. A cross-section diagram of a complex electro-pneumatic action was published on the front cover of the convention booklet, taking the place of the ubiquitous ten-stop tracker organ.
It sounds like about 1992, when the monumental Fisk organ was inaugurated at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, an instrument universally celebrated as a successful orchestral powerhouse in spite of its tracker action.
It sounds like about 2004, when the indescribable masterpiece of commercial public organs in the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia (now Macy’s) was regaining its deserved status as one of the great organs in the world, even though it has eleven expression pedals.
Wrong. This passionate plea for honesty and unanimity in the organ business was published on the front page of the seventh issue of The Diapason, June 1, 1910, the same issue that announced that the annual meeting of the American Guild of Organists elected Frank Wright as Warden, William C. Carl as Sub-Warden, and Clarence Dickinson as one of the councilors. In that issue, the AGO membership committee reported 1,000 members, and the treasurer reported a balance of $551.87.
The year The Diapason first published an editorial calling on organbuilders to lighten up was the year the Boy Scouts of America was founded, when the U.S. Senate granted former President Teddy Roosevelt a pension of $10,000, when the Union of South Africa was founded as a union within the British Empire, when German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich announced a definitive cure for syphilis, and when Alva Fisher patented the first complete, self-contained electric washing machine.

Back toward the middle
Shortly after I graduated from Oberlin, I was involved in releathering a large organ by Aeolian-Skinner. I was intrigued by its expressive capabilities, but didn’t understand them and certainly didn’t know how to use them. And shortly after that graduation, I was involved in the installation of a large Flentrop organ—a glorious looking thing with polished façade, gilded pipe shades, and of course mechanical action. A shipping container (arriving in Cleveland on a Greek ship delightfully named Calliope) was delivered to the church. It was a full day’s work to unload the container, each piece of the organ being carried up the large stone stair from the street, and I’ll not forget the significance of noticing that the hundredth or so load I carried was a stack of Swell shutters. A few trips later, a box of pipes labeled Celeste.
Thirty years later, I’ve realized that the real reason we worked so hard not to use our thumbs when we played was that we’d need them to push pistons.
Let’s celebrate good organs. Good organs are machines that have wind supplies and beautifully voiced pipes. They have valves that allow musicians to run air through those beautifully voiced pipes. I don’t care if those valves are opened by levers, magnets, pneumatic motors, or sheer will power. What goes around comes around. Never throw out a necktie.
What will they write on the first page of issue 2400 of The Diapason, December 2109? If there are pipe organs to celebrate in 2109, it will be because we got it right today.

We’re going in circles.

Have you noticed? I grew up in Boston in the 1960s and ’70s in what was a thrilling time for the art of organbuilding. Charles Fisk was well into his brilliant and innovative—and sadly foreshortened—career. Fritz Noack had established his company and was building the first of an impressive succession of instruments. Churches in the area were commissioning instruments from a wide variety of American and European builders, and organists and students of the organ were delving into the relationships between these “newfangled”—or was it “oldfangled”—tracker-action organs and the music of the baroque era that had inspired the concepts behind them.

The Organ Historical Society was an important part of that revolution—America’s nineteenth-century heritage of organbuilding was being rediscovered and celebrated. We recognized how many wonderful venerable instruments had been sacrificed to make way for the “new-fangled” electro-pneumatic organs of the early twentieth century. By the time I graduated from high school there were two Fisk organs in my hometown, and I was organist of a church in the next town that has a three-manual Hook organ built in 1860. I thought I knew all I needed to know.

I was a freshman at Oberlin in 1974, the year that the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. That organ has plenty of mutations, historically inspired reeds, suspended and “unbushed” tracker action. It was tuned in Werckmeister III, an historic temperament that sounds wonderful in many keys (let’s say for simplicity, up to four sharps or flats), but when I played Widor for one of my required performances and wound up in B-flat minor, I felt it in my fillings. And of course, that performance was offered without the grace or benefit of a Swell box. Forgive me, Charles-Marie.

While I was a student at Oberlin, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland received a three-manual Flentrop organ, and I was privileged to work with the team from Holland installing it. You don’t forget the first day of an installation, when the organ in parts is unloaded from a shipping container and carried up the front steps of the church. It’s heavy work. And I’ll not forget noticing a crate that contained Celeste pipes, or realizing that I was carrying a bundle of Swell shutters. I was perhaps too naïve to realize all the implications, but that sure seemed like part of a circle.

Recently I had a lengthy conversation and correspondence with several colleagues that set me to thinking about this circle and what it means to our art. The exchange started when the organbuilding firm Juget-Sinclair of Montreal announced an open house at which they would exhibit the new organ they had built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (Visit their website at http://www.cam.org/~sinc/.) The e-mails started flying between organbuilders John Brombaugh, Hellmuth Wolff, and Karl Wilhelm. John remembered that the first time he met Hellmuth and Karl was in Wellesley during the installation of that church’s Casavant organ. (It’s no secret that the Casavant was installed in 1964, so these guys were younger then than they are now!) John also told us that at the moment he was involved with the relocation of the organ he built for the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio (Opus 9, 1972). That congregation was moving to a new building and their original sanctuary had been sold to a congregation with musical priorities that did not involve a Brombaugh organ. The organ would be installed temporarily at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York (where it will presumably be available to students at the Eastman School of Music) until its permanent home at Sonoma University is ready.

When a new organ is finished, the builder might be proud of his accomplishment, relieved to be finished with particular complications, excited about moving on to the next project—but he is certainly not imagining that the organ he just finished will be replaced in thirty or forty years. Pipe organs seem permanent. I’ve had contact with many people who are surprised when they realize that an organ can be taken apart and moved. They thought it was part of the building. But isn’t an organ an expression of its builder’s current philosophy? While an organbuilder might hope that his work would never be replaced, would it be good for organbuilding in general if churches routinely purchased two new organs every century?

Because I had been involved in arranging the sale of the Wellesley Casavant to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts, I jumped into the conversation explaining that while the people of St. Andrew’s remained dedicated to the concept of tracker action, they felt they would benefit from having an instrument with more emphasis on fundamental tone. I added that the Organ Clearing House had relocated an instrument built by Hellmuth Wolff (Opus 17, 1976), installing it in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Durham, North Carolina. It was a coincidence that St. Paul’s previous instrument was a one-manual organ built by John Brombaugh—and rather than being replaced, the Brombaugh was moved to the front of the church where it is used as a liturgical organ.

As I was writing that letter I remembered an amusing and poignant story about Ernest Skinner, an organbuilder whose brilliant innovations in many ways defined the twentieth-century American organ. He who gave us pitman stop action, whiffle-tree Swell engines, French Horns, and vertical-selector combination actions, and who built instruments that emphasized fundamental tone, colorful orchestral solo stops, and shimmering strings was later criticized for failing to keep up with fast-changing trends, insisting that his instruments were the ideal and should not be changed. The story I refer to was quoted in All the Stops, the wonderful book about the twentieth-century American pipe organ written by Craig Whitney (PublicAffairs, 2003). (If you haven’t read this book yet, you’ve missed much. You can order it from the OHS catalogue: http://store.yahoo.com/ohscata log/crrwhallst.html.)


Whitney wrote:


Skinner was effectively frozen out of the company that bore his name, associated with it now in name only. But it was not only at Aeolian-Skinner that tastes were changing. To the romantic-orchestral organ that Skinner had built in the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1922, the young Cleveland organbuilder Walter Holtkamp added in 1933 something new and revolutionary—a small rückpositiv division designed along German classical lines. Though technically the term applied only to that part of a baroque organ that was detached from the rest and behind the organist’s back, typically in the gallery of a church, Holtkamp’s imitation was freestanding, playable via electro-pneumatic connections to the organ console, but its clear-speaking high-pitched stops were intended to produce a brighter tonality than the rest of the Skinner organ had. The addition produced much comment among organists and other builders, and it was seen as another blow to Skinner’s now old-hat notions that an organ should try to imitate an orchestra. At an organists’ convention, [Dorothy] Holden’s biography relates, Holtkamp saw Skinner standing alone, ignored now that he had gone out of fashion, and thought, ‘Now, this is a perfect shame! There stands one of the greatest figures in the art of organ-building, and all those sissies are afraid to go up to speak to him, for fear they might lose face among their peers!’ As Holtkamp told the story to Robert Bates, an organist friend, he went up to Skinner and said, “Mr. Skinner, I am Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland, and I just want to thank you for all you have meant and done for the art of organ-building through your splendid career.” Apparently, “Cleveland” was all that registered on Skinner, who was by then hard of hearing, and rejoined, “Cleveland! Say, you know, I have one of my best organs out there in the Art Museum, and some damn fool has come along and just ruined it.”1



I finished my letter to John Brombaugh saying: “Poor Skinner’s organ only lasted 11 years before Holtkamp got his hands on it. A Rückpositiv in 1933—who knew?” That was a pretty radical innovation for 1933. We raise the question, did Walter Holtkamp improve the Cleveland Museum’s organ? Who is the judge of that?

Should we alter works of art? We wouldn’t change a portrait by Rembrandt because Parisian clothing designers are featuring green this year or because it’s not stylish to put feathers in hats these days. We wouldn’t change a Shakespeare play because the word methinks isn’t part of every day speech now.
We would, however, alter an historic building by installing wheelchair ramps and elevators. Those instances where we condone such alterations often have to do with usefulness. You don’t have to consider the usefulness of a painting or sculpture. It is what it is. It’s a snapshot of an instant from another time. We can appreciate it (whether or not we like it) as an artist’s expression and we don’t depend on it for anything else.

Organs are different. A fine organ stands as a work of art, but it is also a tool to be used by contemporary artists to another artistic end. And, more than any other instrument, the organist is stuck with the instrument. If you are the regular organist of a church, all you do must be done with the existing instrument. If you are traveling to play a concert in a distant city, you must channel your creativity through whatever instrument you encounter.

When an organ is playing, the art of the builder, the player, and the composer are being combined to create yet another artwork, which is the performance itself—a virtual, temporary structure that thrills, moves, excites, or angers the listener, and that is gone as soon as the sound dies away. What’s more, it might thrill one listener and anger another. And each listener is responding to each component—the playing, the music, and the instrument. Does this view of performing music give the player license to propose alterations to the instrument, or more to my point, to replace the instrument with another?
There are of course many reasons why an organ might be relocated. Sometimes a parish has closed, either because its congregation has disbanded or merged with another. Sometimes an institution gets a new organist whose interests are different from those of predecessors. Sometimes, let’s face it, we are replacing an instrument that was never any good to begin with.

It is interesting to watch trends. We have spent a huge amount of energy relearning ancient skills, and developing new appreciations of early styles. E. Power Biggs and his contemporaries took us on virtual tours of older European organs (using the vinyl conveyances of the day). We assimilated, imitated, and built on the sounds we heard then. That work gave us greater ability to analyze and understand the components of sound, allowing us new ways to appreciate other styles. If we were devoted to the examples left by Arp Schnitger in the eighteenth century, suddenly we could appreciate and understand anew what Ernest Skinner was up to in 1920.

There was a wonderful moment at the convention of the Organ Historical Society in North Carolina in 2001 when on Wednesday, June 27, the convention visited the chapel at Duke University, home to three excellent and wildly varying pipe organs. There were three recitals—Mark Brombaugh played on the Flentrop organ, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played on the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played on the Aeolian. We were taken from Scheidemann to Wagner, from Liszt to Frescobaldi, from Buxtehude to Bossi all in a single day. What a dazzling display of the variety of the pipe organ and its music, and how passionately people defended their preferences as the buses took us back to Winston-Salem! I thought it would have been fun to have each of the performers play on each of the organs, but I had trouble finding supporters.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist . . .

A good friend of mine is a terrific singer whose husband is an astrophysicist. He works in a Smithsonian-affiliated lab at Harvard University using a telescope in Arizona that he operates remotely by computer. Once at a party Jane was asked what it’s like to live with such a brilliant person. “You know how they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist?” she replied. “There are lots of things around the house that really don’t need a rocket scientist!”

Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I know there’s a navigation trick called a gravitational slingshot that’s used to propel interplanetary probes through space. The vehicle is steered toward a planet and makes use of that body’s gravity to fling itself further into space. For example, on August 27, 1981, Voyager 2 used the gravity of Saturn to fling itself toward Uranus, where it arrived on January 30, 1986.2
I wonder if a gravitational slingshot could be used to break the circle and send the art of organbuilding to new places, new concepts, and new plateaus. It seems to me that many of the more recent innovations in organbuilding have been “returns” to one idea or another. When Craig Whitney described Holtkamp’s addition of a Rückpositiv as “new and revolutionary,” he was in fact referring to a concept that was some five hundred years old. We reach back through history to recreate the technology of the slider windchest and of voicing organ pipes on low wind pressures just as we reach back through history to understand again the glory of high-pressure reeds and air-tight swell boxes. We have incorporated computer technology to duplicate and enhance the registration equipment developed early in the twentieth century. We have built new organs using ancient architectural elements and we have modified those ancient elements to incorporate them in contemporary designs. But I suggest that no specific instrument or style of instrument, and the work of no one organbuilder can stand for the future of the instrument.

Igor Stravinsky assimilated all the tools of musical composition he had inherited and produced music that startled the world. And that music that caused riots when it was first performed is celebrated today as part of the wealth of musical expression. Is the future of the pipe organ based on the comparison between the instruments of early eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century America or can we assimilate all we’ve inherited to create new concepts for the organ, new ways to use the organ, and new ways to listen to it?

Why it matters.

An hour ago, I finished my last “Christmas” tuning. It’s been a fun season involving lots of organs—some wonderful, and some a little less wonderful. I started tuning organs in Boston in 1984 when I joined Angerstein & Associates after returning from almost ten years in northern Ohio that included my years as a student at Oberlin, my first marriage, a long stint as director of music at a large Presbyterian church in Cleveland, and my terrific apprenticeship and friendship with Jan G. P. Leek. I still tune quite a few of the organs I first saw when working for Dan Angerstein in 1984—organs that were nearly new then and that have lots of miles on them now. In those churches I’ve outlasted as many as ten organists, five pastors, and who knows how many sextons.

It’s fun to return to these places several times each year, visiting the old friends who work in the buildings and monitoring the condition of the organs. Many of my tuning clients couple with a particular restaurant or sandwich shop. We were disappointed a couple weeks ago in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to see that the favorite sandwich shop near the church had been torn down. A sign indicates that they’ll reopen in a new building in the spring, but I think it will take twenty years to get the place seasoned so things taste right.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to be associated with some very special organs—special because of their size, their musical beauty, or their historical significance. It’s exciting to tune an organ that was played by Marcel Dupré, Lynnwood Farnam, or Pierre Cochereau. And I’ve had the thrill of preparing organs for concerts by such giants as Simon Preston, Madame Duruflé, Catharine Crozier, and Daniel Roth. You sit in the audience waiting for the artist to play that C# in the Swell Clarion you had so much trouble with two hours ago. Hold on, baby, hold on!

Of course, most of those experiences happen in big city churches with rich histories, fabulous artwork, heavy tourist traffic, and outstanding musicians. I’ve always felt it’s a special privilege to work behind the scenes in those monumental places, surrounded by all that heritage. But let’s not forget the importance of the small church with the seemingly inconsequential organ. 

Yesterday, I tuned one of the older Möller unit organs known as The Portable Organ. The opus list of M. P. Möller includes something like 13,500 organs, and while we know plenty of big distinguished instruments built by that firm, by far the most of them were these tiny workhorse organs with two, three, or four ranks. They built them by the thousand, and you find them everywhere. Maybe you’re familiar with the newer Artiste models that have a detached console, and one or two, or even three eight-by-eight-by-four foot cases stuffed full of pipes like a game of Tetris. The model I’m referring to predates that—they were popular in the 1940s, had attached keyboards, and usually three ranks, Spitz Principal (they called them Diapason Conique—oo-la-la), Gedeckt, and Salicional. The ranks were spread around through unit borrowing, each rank playing at multiple pitches, and there were compound stops such as “Quintadena” which combined the Gedeckt at 8′ and the Salicional at 22⁄3′.

The particular instrument I tuned yesterday was originally in a Lutheran church in Bronx, New York. As that parish dissolved a few years ago, the Organ Clearing House moved the organ to another Lutheran church in Queens. There was no budget for renovation, so we simply assembled it, coaxed all the notes to work, gave the case a treatment of lemon oil, and off we went. It had been a year since the last tuning, and it was fun to find that all the notes were working, the tuning had held nicely, and the organ sounded nice. I spent less than an hour tuning the three ranks, chatting with the pastor, and cleaning the keyboards.

When I got home this afternoon, I had a quick lunch and took a look at Facebook to be sure everyone out there was behaving. I was touched to see a post by colleague Michael Morris who works for Parkey OrganBuilders in the Atlanta area. He had just tuned another copy of the same Möller organ and wrote this:

It’s not always the quality of the instrument that makes a tuning job enjoyable. For some years now, my last regularly scheduled tuning has been in Georgia’s old capital of Milledgeville. It’s usually a pleasant drive through farm country to get to the antebellum Sacred Heart Church.

This was Flannery O’Connor’s parish, the center of her spiritual life and an influence in her writing. In 1945 Möller delivered a three-rank unit organ and placed it in the heart-pine gallery. It’s not a distinguished instrument, but it’s always easy to tune and I enjoy the thought that this instrument was part of the fabric of her life.

I’m always done just before the parishioners start the Rosary before noon Mass. I have lunch at a Mexican restaurant, then drive back to Atlanta knowing I have put another tuning season behind me.

Nice work, Michael. 

Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) was a devout Roman Catholic. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, she lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with classics translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. In 1952, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus (from which her father died in 1941) and returned to her childhood home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. 

Her writing is spiritual, reflecting the theory that God is present throughout the created world, and including intense reflections on ethics and morality. The modest little organ in Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville was present for her whenever she worshipped. On such a personal level, that three-rank organ is every bit as important as the mighty 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston or the iconic Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

How did you get started?

After his ordination as an Episcopal priest, my father was rector of a small church in Somerville, Massachusetts. Subsequently, he was the first rector of a new parish in Westwood, Massachusetts, starting there when it was formed as a mission. I was two years old when we moved into the rectory next to the church building. The church building was designed as a very simple structure, sort of an A-frame with a linoleum floor. It was furnished with folding chairs, so the single room could be used for worship, dinners, and all sorts of other things. A few years later, the planned second phase was executed. An adjoining parish hall was built, and the original building was turned into a proper church with towers, stained glass, pews, and a rear gallery for organ and choir. The organ was also planned in stages. It was one of the first instruments built by Charles Fisk, back in the days when he was of the Andover Organ Company. It had six stops, mechanical action, and a detached-reversed console, all mounted on a six-inch-high platform down front. Get it? It was the console and Rückpositiv of an organ that could be expanded to include two manuals and pedal. When the second phase was under construction, there was a moment when the roof was off—and that’s the moment they moved the organ. They lifted the whole thing with a crane, pipes and all, and placed it in the new balcony. I would have a fit if someone did that with one of my organs today, but seeing that organ hanging from the hook of the crane is one of my earliest pipe organ memories. It was more than twenty years before the second case containing Great and Pedal was built.

When I was ten, we moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad became rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, home to an Ernest M. Skinner organ built in 1904 (Wow! That’s an early one.), during the time when Robert Hope-Jones was working with Mr. Skinner. I started taking organ lessons a couple years after we got there and was quickly aware that the organ was on its last legs. I didn’t play the Skinner organ much, because less than a year after I started taking lessons, I was playing for money at other churches. That organ was replaced by a twelve-stop Fisk in 1974, their Opus 65. Six additional stops that were “prepared for” were added in 1983. The on-site installation of those stops was under way when Charles Fisk passed away. A 16′ Open Wood was added in 2012.

My organ lessons continued a few blocks away at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home to Fisk’s Opus 50.¹ During my high school years, I was assistant organist to George Bozeman at the First Congregational Church in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played on the fabulous 1860 three-manual E. & G. G. Hook organ, which at 156 years old is still one of the very few remaining pre-Civil War three-manual Hooks. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I got to Oberlin a few years later and started hearing about the organs my classmates got started on.

All my college buddies were terrific organists, but I learned that some of them had never played a pipe organ before their audition at Oberlin. And while I had free access to those glorious organs by Fisk and Hook, some had only ever played on modest electro-pneumatic unit organs. The first time I played a tiny electro-pneumatic pipe organ was in a practice room at Oberlin! But thinking back and knowing that all of them were wonderful organists when they were in high school, I’m sure that thousands of parishioners in those few dozen churches were moved and excited to hear such young people play those organs so beautifully.

A matter of scale

Many composers and musicians consider the string quartet one of the purest forms of music-making. The composer working with four musicians and four independent parts is writing intimately and minimally. Each measure, each individual chord is specially voiced and tuned for the moment. There is no blurring of the edges; everything is exposed. Compare that to a symphony orchestra with twenty first violins. Conductors are fond of saying that an instrumental or choral ensemble is only as strong as its weakest member. I’ve always thought that was baloney. It’s a great cheerleading sentiment, but it seems to me that in a twenty-member violin section, the stronger players inspire and encourage their colleagues, helping them to achieve new heights. I’ve led volunteer church choirs whose collective ability far outshone the individual skills and musicianship of the weakest member.

We can draw an analogy with pipe organs. A tiny chamber organ with four or five stops is every bit as beautiful as a big-city monster with two hundred ranks. It’s almost unbelievable that both are called by the same name. When you’re playing a chamber organ, you listen to the speech of each individual pipe, but when you’re whipping through a big toccata with a hundred stops drawn, each four-part chord involves four hundred pipes. There might be an individual stinker in the Swell Clarion (remember, the pipe I was having trouble with), or a zinger in a Mixture that stands out in the crowd, but otherwise, you’re really not listening to individual pipes any more than you single out an individual violist in a Brahms symphony.

If we agree that a tiny chamber organ and a swashbuckling cathedral job are both beautiful organs, we should also agree that they serve different purposes and support different literature. I suppose we should allow that it’s likely to be more effective to play Sweelinck on a hundred stops than Widor on five. But we’re lucky that we still have organs that Sweelinck knew, so we can imagine and even reconstruct how his playing sounded. I don’t know if Widor had much opportunity to hear others play his music, but I bet he wouldn’t have liked hearing “that Toccata” on a small two-manual organ in a two-hundred-seat church.

Will it play in Milledgeville?

I’m sure my colleague Michael Morris did a lovely job tuning that little Möller organ. I assume, or I hope that some caring person will be playing lovely music and our favorite Christmas carols on the organ in the next few days. Maybe the congregation will sing “Silent Night” while holding candles, lighting that simple sanctuary with magical twinkling. Maybe that lovely effect will make people’s eyes go moist. Families will go home after Mass, whistling and humming those familiar tunes.

We know that Flannery O’Connor worshipped in that church during bleak moments in her life. There was that first Christmas after she was diagnosed with the disease that killed her father. There was that last Christmas before she died, when she must have been in terrible pain. But there was that organist doing that special thing that adds so much to worship at any time, and on any scale. And the organ was in tune.

One more thing . . . 

I’ve tuned around forty organs in the last month. Some days it seems that all I do is carry my tools back and forth to the car. I’ve seen a ton of Christmas decorations—some gorgeous, and some horribly tacky. The brightly colored life-sized inflatable plastic Nativity scene was the nadir. I expect there will be some snickering going on there on Christmas Eve.

The sacred spaces that are the most worshipful are almost always beautifully kept. There are no ragged stacks of last Sunday’s bulletin, no wastebaskets overflowing with Styrofoam coffee cups, and no inflatable Santas.

Wendy and I worship at Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York. It’s a beautiful Gothic-inspired building with magnificent stained-glass windows, elaborate carvings around the pulpit and choir stalls, a big, shiny brass eagle holding up the lectern, and a fabulous organ built recently by Taylor & Boody. John Boody has a degree in forestry and a special affinity for beautiful wood. I believe that Taylor & Boody is alone among American organbuilders in harvesting trees and milling and curing their own lumber. And the Grace Church organ sure looks it. Intricate enchanting grain patterns abound. The two facing organ cases and the massive freestanding console add their gleam to the place. It’s nice that I’ve never seen a stack of music on the console.

There are lots of organ consoles that look like the day after a fire at a Staples store. Everything from Post-it notes to rubber bands, from cough drops to hair brushes festoon the cabinet. The organ console is a worship space, especially when it’s visible from the pews. I know that the console at your church is your workspace. I know you have to view it and use it as a tool, a workbench—something like a cubicle. But you might think of creating a little bag that contains all your supplies, or installing a neat little hidden shelf to hold your hymnals. I bet your organbuilder would be happy to build you one. 

Please don’t let the state of your organ console intrude on someone’s worship. Every week you’re playing for people who are suffering, scared, sick, or worried. Be sure that everything you do is enhancing their experience of worship. That’s why we’re there. ν

Notes

1. On the Fisk website, this organ is referred to as Winchester Old and Opus 65 is Winchester New. Another similarly cute organ nickname belongs to the Bozeman-Gibson organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts—Orgel-brookline.