An AGO Christmas

An AGO Christmas Meditation

John Bishop

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the nave

Parents were hissing, “Sit still and behave.

We won’t drag you back here again until Easter,

            So quiet your mouth and sit down on your keester.”

A boy in a shepherd suit fastens his sandals,

            The ushers are frantically handing out candles.

One says to the other, “I think this is crazy.

            Each Christmas we do this – our thinking is hazy.

This beautiful building’s a hundred years old.

            We work all year long doing just as we’re told

To take care of the place.  We treat it like gold.

“But one night a year we go out of our minds,

            The people walk in here – they’re fools of all kinds.

We give them a smile, our best Christmas cheer,

            Then we give them a torch – will it happen this year?

I’ve been saying in meetings that this has to stop,

            We’re asking for trouble, it’s over the top.

At least we should quit with the kids in the choir.

            Just one of them trips and we’ll have a big fire.”

A family arrives in a swirl of good cheer,

            (it seems they drink eggnog just once every year!)

The father resplendent in holiday dress,

            (Plaid pants, red carnation, an old green felt vest)

Comes through the front door and trips on the sill.

            His wife shoots a dagger – that look that could kill.

He spots an old friend across the big room,

            Hasn’t seen him since April (when Christ left the tomb).

He bellows a greeting in well-oiled voice.

            The friend only grunts ‘cause he’s not there by choice.

The Pastor enrobed is outwardly merry.

            He’s proud of himself, had just one glass of sherry.

The day’s been a long one – first show was at seven.

            He’s running on fumes now at ten ‘till eleven.

His mind is well filled with plans for the service,

            But a thought passes through that makes him feel nervous.

He remembers a box back at home in the attic,

            He bought it himself ‘cause his son’s a fanatic

For moving at speed.  So some time before six

            His hands will be bleeding.  He’ll run out of tricks.

A shiny new bike should be built before morning,

            But he wonders just what will go wrong without warning.

This job that he loves takes control of his life,

            He yearns for more quality time with his wife.

Each year at Christmas this problem gets worse.

            His family life shifts for two weeks to reverse.

           

The flower committee did it big time this year.

            They drafted their husbands who worked without fear

On ladders and stools with nails and hammerous,

            Their wives were so proud that it made them feel amorous.

Wreaths and fresh garlands stretched here, there, and far,

            The whole thing topped off by a fake natal star.

The organ façade was covered with greens,

            And ribbons and sparkles of various sheens.

It was tricky to fasten that stuff to the pipes,

            “Just a few little holes couldn’t hurt, holy cripes.”

The R.E. director lassoes the great crowd

            Of donkeys and angels and kings with heads bowed.

They huddle together and practice the script

            And try not to laugh when a shepherd gets tripped.

Joseph pipes up that his costume is ripped.

           

The organist sits by himself on the stair,

            He cradles his face in his hands in despair.

 He wonders what force dragged him in to this mess.

            But he knows deep inside that he has to confess

That part of the plan for this night was his work.

            The love of the pageant – a personal quirk.

It started last fall, in early September,

            He had an idea, a smoldering ember.

The staff went away for its planning retreat,

            They sat by the waves, hot sand under their feet.

Each one of them brainstormed when asked by the pastor,

            The silly ideas came faster and faster.

They developed a plan that they thought they could master.

            Not one of them saw it could cause a disaster.

Eleven o’clock, the hour appointed,

            But we can’t start yet – the crowd’s still disjointed.

The ushers encourage the folks to the pews,

            “The wise men are waiting and so are the ewes.

If we can’t get started we’ll never get finished,

            The later it gets, the more joy gets diminished.”

A ten past the hour the signal light blinks.

            The prelude is ended, the organist thinks

About how to arrive in the key of G major.

            From where he is now, this is all about danger.

But suddenly, somehow it happened like magic.

            They came, all those faithful, and nothing was tragic.

An improvised intro that sounded just glorious,

            Including a hint of a descant notorious.

The choir appeared in the aisle like a vision

            With nary a hint of rehearsal derision.

The chorus of creatures in costumes a-flowing

            Were following suit, their faces were glowing.

The last verse with harmonies rich and appealing

            Concluded – the church was in silence revealing

A beautiful scene – a well honed tableau,

            Outside, in the dark, it started to snow.

A moment of silence, and then invocation,

            A reading, an anthem, a psalm incantation.

A carol, and then the Luke-based Christmas sermon,

            Not even the littlest donkey was squirmin’.

The pageant was next – parents’ eyes starting tearing.

            The kids DID speak up, so the people were hearing

The young tuneful voices with words full of meaning

            While camels and oxen and sheep sat there preening.

One kid whispered, “Mommy, it’s not even boring.”

            There was no other sound save the green vest man’s snoring.

At the end of the story the lights were turned down.

            And a pretty young angel in flowing white gown

Lit a candle.  And under the gaze of that usher,

            All candles were lit, and the hush became husher.

A shimmering sound from enclosed Unda Maris,

            A note from the chimes, and the prayerful parish

Began to sing quietly, then gradually swelling

            Silent Night, Holy Night, the old story retelling.

We work all year long, down in the trenches,

            Sometimes it seems the gears fill up with wrenches.

Holiday times can bring out great frustration

            But you shouldn’t forget that all through the nation

Your colleagues are sharing the work of the season.

            The planning.  The practice.  Remember the reason.

Your talents have been freely given as gifts;

            In order to hone them, you work double shifts.

Then freely and humbly you offer them back

            To the folks in your church.  So stay on the track.

Keep up your strength, keep your eye on the prize,

            And give to the parish a Christmas surprise.

Come Rutter, come Willcocks, come Benjamin Britten

Composers of carols with which we are smitten.

Come T. Tertius Noble, come William Matthias,

            Come writers of music that’s stirring and pious.

There’s no better way to adore Virgin Mary

            Than with music by Bach and C. Hubert H. Parry.

             

The service is ended, the candles are snuffed,

            The fear of a fire once more is rebuffed.

The blower is off now, the costumes are shed,

            The angels and donkeys and cows are in bed.

The choir room table is covered with piles

            Of music that brought all those holiday smiles.

The pastor’s son’s bike gleams bright in the hall,

            And finally the parking lot’s closed at the mall.

The man with the funny green vest is in bed

            While visions of sugarplums dance in his head!

The AGO member now turns off the light,

            “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”

Feeding your passion

In the wind…

December, 2012

Feeding your passion.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I caught the pipe organ bug when I was a kid growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts.  My father was rector of the Episcopal Church, and the organist was a harpsichord builder.  I sang in the choir, took piano lessons, took organ lessons, had summer jobs in organ shops, accompanied all the ensembles at the high school and countless rehearsals for musicals, went to college to major in Organ Performance, and never looked back.  When my kids were teenagers and well aware of how my career track had started, they commented freely on how difficult it was for them to face adulthood without having such a clear track in mind.

Working in the organ world as a player and builder for decades, I’ve known many people with similar experiences.  After all, the young musician who is most likely to be accepted as a performance major in a recognized school of music is a person for whom regular and serious practice at their chosen instrument was a priority from an early age.

When I was in high school, I was the most accomplished organist in town under the age of twenty, and I was mighty pleased with myself.  In my first week as an entering freshman at Oberlin, I remember being impressed – flabbergasted – at how wonderfully some of my classmates played.  Winchester was a pretty small pond.  I wasn’t such a big fish at Oberlin.

Passionate feeding.

James Andrew Beard was a cook.  He was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and he said that his earliest memory was watching Triscuits ™ and shredded wheat biscuits being made at the Lewis and Clarke Centennial Exhibition in Portland in 1905.  Two years old?

Having studied music and theater, Beard moved to New York City in 1937 (the same year that George Gershwin and Charles-Marie Widor died), hoping to forge a career in the wildly active Broadway scene.  While he failed to find a niche on stage, he was a smash hit on the Broadway cocktail party circuit, to the extent that he founded a catering company called “Hors d’Oeurve, Inc.,” specializing in producing elaborate cocktail parties.  He followed this with a cookbook called Hors d’Oeurves and Canapés.  In 1946, he was the first to host a television cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC.

James Beard wrote more than twenty cookbooks, he founded several cooking schools across the country, and was an important advocate for the careers of many influential chefs including Julia Child and Jacques Pépin.  He was the original modern American foodie.

He was a mountain of a man, a man of insatiable appetites, of unflagging energy, and focused passion.  When he died in 1985, his estate became a foundation, based in his Greenwich Village townhouse.  Today, the James Beard Foundation has provided over two million dollars in scholarships for promising chefs, and the James Beard House hosts countless dinners each year, promoting the work of chefs chosen from around the world.

Medium-rare at 140⁰.

You’re giving a dinner party.  You’ve worked hard to gather a list of great guests, organize a menu, shop for the food.  You’ve made “the house fair as you are able, trimmed, the hearth, and set the table.”  The guests arrive, you mix drinks, set out hors d’Oeurves, and the conversation picks up quickly.  You go to the kitchen and realize you’re in a pickle – the broccoli is overcooked, you forgot to make salad dressing, and in spite of the care you’ve taken with the temperature-time continuum, the meat is simply not done.  (Never happened to me, but I’ve heard it from others…)

We went to a dinner at the James Beard House last Friday.  Wendy’s assistant, literary agent Lauren McLeod, is married to Chef Danny Bua of The Painted Burro in Somerville, Massachusetts.  His creative approach to Mexican cuisine attracted the attention of the scouts, and he was invited to present a dinner – a very big deal for a young chef.

Danny and his team prepped the food in their own restaurant kitchen on Thursday.  Before sunrise on Friday their truck was on the road, and they spent the day toiling in the unfamiliar cramped kitchen of the James Beard House.  The menu was sophisticated and complex.  There were five hors d’Oeurves, including Crispy Native Oyster Tacos with Cabbage-Jalapeño Slaw, Baja Mayonnaise, Cilantro, and Lime; and five entreés including Avocado Leaf-Roasted Short Ribs with Spiced Red Kuri Squash, Masa Dumplings, Heirloom Kale con Plátanos, Cotija Cheese, and Red-Wine Cola Mole.  Altogether there were fifteen different dishes, each with at least five major ingredients, sixty guests, and everything was served warm, plated beautifully, each table was served as one, and the house-full of New York foodies were full of praise.

It was the culinary equivalent of getting off a train, walking cold into an unfamiliar hall, and playing the entire Clavier Übung (all parts) on an instrument you’ve never seen before, from memory.  Danny is passionate about his art, and it’s a mighty amount of work.

A memorable effort.

Last Monday night, colleague and friend David Enlow played a recital at his home Church of the Resurrection on the 1915 Casavant organ we installed there, completed in 2011.  Our daughter Meg came to the recital with Wendy and me which meant a lot because while she’s familiar with my work as she sees it in the workshop, it’s fair to say that serious organ music is really not her thing.  It was really nice to have that support from a family member, and David made it worth her while.  At home later in the evening, Meg talked about how impressed she was with David’s focus and command over what he was doing, and knowing perfectly well that there is nothing easy about what he was doing, she was impressed by the apparent ease of it.  His fingers and feet just flickered around the console as if there was nothing to it.

David’s program included the entertaining, the academic, the sophisticated, and the sublime.  He spared us the ridiculous – you can go somewhere else for that. His command of the repertory, the instrument, and his own person – his technique – was obvious at every moment.

It’s for the birds.

Kenn Kaufmann is a client of Wendy’s literary agency, and he and his wife Kim are close friends of ours.  With the support of his parents, Kenn dropped out of school at sixteen and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States in a quest for a birder’s Big Year – an effort to see the largest number of bird species in a year.  Birding is a big business, and there have been several recent movies that give a glimpse into what it means to devote one’s life to such an effort.

Kenn can look at an apparently empty sky and pick out all the birds.  He knows their calls, their habits, what they like to eat, what they’re afraid of.  He knows what trees they prefer and why, and he knows their migratory routes, schedules, and destinations.  He has written several field guides, developing a new technique for the computer-manipulation of photographs to create the “ideal” example of each bird. 

Like so many of our musician friends, Kenn’s genius is communication.  All of that knowledge and intuition would be lost if he couldn’t write or speak about it in such a compelling way.  We’ve been with him when he leads big groups on bird walks and gives slide-show-lectures, and there’s never anyone in attendance unmoved by all the information, but even more, by the rich personality that has learned how it all fits into the big scheme.

Measured success.

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925-1983) studied Nuclear Physics at Stanford and Harvard, worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and then committed to a career as an organbuilder.  He clearly would have made more money working in the high levels of Nuclear Physics, but the pipe organ was his real love.  Those who worked with him and still operate the company that bears his name remember him as a caring and thoughtful mentor who taught by asking questions, encouraging his students and co-workers to think well for themselves.  Charlie was passionate about the pipe organ, and his contributions to the modern American organ can hardly be measured.

Charlie was one of the first modern American organbuilders to travel to Europe to study the “Old Master” organs, collecting meticulous measurements, and studying the relationships of the organs to the music of their day.  I expect that his scientific background was integral to those studies – he must have had a great power of attention.

There are two Fisk organs in Winchester, Massachusetts, and I didn’t know how fortunate I was at the time to have such access to fine instruments.  Ironically, my first real relationships with electro-pneumatic instruments happened in the practice rooms at Oberlin!

§

Every one of these people knew his career path early in life.  I suppose we all know people who were forced into a career that was not first choice: “I’m a lawyer, all your uncles are lawyers, your grandfather was a lawyer, and you’re going to be a lawyer.”  Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham was a banker, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps.  It was when he realized the depth of his son’s dedication that Abraham Mendelssohn made piece with Felix’s career choice.  I don’t know if Felix would have had much to offer the world of banking, but we surely would have been the poorer without the music he left us.  The thought leaves me without words.

In the concert hall, there’s nothing like hearing a performance by a master musician who in middle age is still working toward the unattainable perfection he envisioned as a six-year-old.  In a restaurant, there’s nothing like tasting a dish created by someone whose earliest memory is based on a fascination with food.  In an examination room, there’s nothing like being treated by a doctor whose early dreams were to care deeply for the health of their patients.  And if you’re meant to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, be a great lawyer.  We know a brilliant young woman who finished law school with a large debt, held a lucrative job long enough to pay back the debts, then dove into the world of law in developing nations.

Lovely idealism, isn’t it?

But what happens when the money runs out?  Most organbuilders would love the luxury of unlimited time to get things right, but the organ is built according to an agreed price, and as they say in the real world, “Time is Money.”  Remember Charlie Fisk’s definition of a reed?  “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.”

The tuner might like to have another eight or ten hours to get things “just so,” but the church is supposed to pay for that at an agreed hourly rate, and organ tuning is a line-item on the annual operating budget.  To propose an increase in the tuning budget, the organist makes a recommendation to the Music Committee, which meets bi-monthly and makes recommendations to the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee makes recommendations to the Parish Council, and the Parish Council makes recommendations to the congregation at the Annual Meeting.  (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.) 

It’s mid-October now.  The vote will happen on June 15.  And during the Annual Meeting, someone’s going to ask, “If it costs $150 to tune a piano, why do we have to spend $2500 tuning the organ?”

The organist might like to have another five hours to practice anthem accompaniments and postlude for the coming Sunday, but there’s a staff meeting, octavo scores to be filed, a bride to meet with, and then the sexton is vacuuming the nave.  If I had a nickel for every organist whose dream was fulfilled by being offered a full-time position in a prominent church with a terrific organ, only to find that there was never time for practicing, I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ernest Skinner often added stops to his organs not specified in the contracts because he felt the building called for them.  Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh were impoverished through much of their lives, and often couldn’t afford paint to put on canvas.

Throughout history, passionate inspired people have had to find alternative means of support.  That’s why I’m so impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life, like the concert organist who balances practicing and travel with the demands of the liturgical year or a university teaching schedule.

J. S. Bach had a busy professional life, was subject to the civic bureaucracy that employed him, and we know he spent at least enough time with his children to give them music lessons.  A family that size must have taken up some of the old man’s time and attention.  But he left a body of work that has inspired many generations of great musicians.

Mozart also left a tremendous catalogue of some of the most beautiful music ever written, but he died a pauper.  Were he living today, he’d be playing the accordion in the subways of New York.  Wouldn’t that be a treat!

Feeding a national passion.

Subscribers to The Diapason must be well attuned to the importance of the arts in modern society.  As I write, we are in the midst of the great crescendo of political chaos, watching two otherwise dignified men duke it out in the public forum.  We’re hearing a lot about the balance of public priorities, and how the federal budget might be skewed in support of different points of view.

One thing we have not heard in stump speeches, televised debates, or from the talking heads super-analyzing everything that’s said, is a candidate standing up for the arts.  I cannot see how a nation can fail to support the arts and humanities and consider itself a leader on the international stage.  Is military might or the balance of trade more important than the cultural heart of a great people?  We are the country of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein, of Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Virgil Fox, but I’ve read figures that compare the United States’ annual support of the arts with the hourly cost of warfare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an elected official talk passionately about the artistic culture – the passion – of our country.  I think they’re missing something.

The Invincible Da Vinci

In the wind...

November, 2012

The Invincible DaVinci

The other night I was watching a documentary about the life and work of Leonardo, who lived from 1452 to 1519, a time when the arts and sciences were flourishing.  His contemporary, astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), was studying the motions of celestial bodies and developing his theory of heliocentric cosmology, displacing the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, and proving that a system of planets including the earth rotates around the sun.  Physician Richard Bartlot (1471-1557) was working hard to understand the functions of the human body.  Another contemporary was Michelangelo (1475-1564), whose genius with the visual arts in both painting and sculpture dazzles us more than five hundred years later. 

Leonardo was fascinated by flight, and made hundreds of drawings of the wings of birds in various positions, theorizing about how a bird could alter the shape of its wings to affect the direction of its flight. He noticed that soaring birds used spiraling updrafts of air to ascend effortlessly, and how they braked to slow for landing.  I'm in an airplane as I write, and can't help but associate the wing flaps with the drawings I saw on television.

Leonardo wondered if it would be possible for humans to fly, and imagined and sketched numerous designs of flying machines. The documentary tells of a group of aeronautical scientists in England building a glider according to one of those designs.  It was a single fixed wing about thirty feet across with fabric stretched over a wooden frame weighing about ninety pounds. When it was finished, they tested it first by mounting it on the back of pickup truck and covering it with sensors.  As the truck drove forward, a computer recorded everything that was going on, and the team deduced that the glider developed enough lift to fly in air that was moving around twenty miles per hour. 

A pilot skilled at parasailing was engaged to try to fly the thing.  Because the glider had no controls for direction or altitude, the team attached ropes to front and back and to each wingtip, and on a windy hilltop off she went.  The first couple tries allowed her to get a sense of how it handled, and on the third try she went up about ten feet and flew as far as her team could run before they lost control.  She flew a little farther each time, eventually getting up as high as thirty feet and flying forward for a couple hundred yards.  It was fascinating to see that a design conceived five hundred years was so effective.

The film discussed Leonardo's grasp of human anatomy. His drawings of muscles and tendons in human arms, hands, and faces bore direct relationships to the forms of those body parts in Leonardo's most famous painting, Mona Lisa. 

Perhaps most impressive was Leonardo's study of the human heart.  He obviously did some very gruesome experimentation to inform his drawings, and he documented how he deduced the heart's valves functioned, even determining that the valves cause blood to form vortexes or eddies that add to the quality of blood flow.  A modern heart surgeon compared Leonardo's studies with X-rays and scans that prove their accuracy.  I was amazed to see how well those sixteenth-century studies stood up to modern scrutiny.

From one organ to another.

While Leonardo was quietly slicing up human hearts, the pipe organ was being developed into the most complex machine on the planet.  Simple flutes had been made from grass and canes for centuries - the panpipe grew common in the sixth century BC.  I wonder who was first to think of making a flute out of metal, and forming a tone-producing mouth using a horizontal languid at the connection between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator?

In 256 BC, a Greek physicist named Tsebius created a musical instrument called the Hydraulis which had mounted flutes similar to organ pipes, a wind system that used the weight of water to create and regulate pressure, and a keyboard and mechanical action that operated valves to open those pipes.  All this was fifteen hundred years before Leonardo was wondering about flight.

I was a young teenager when I was introduced to the unique and lovely organ in the Cathedral-Fortress in Sion, Switzerland through E. Power Biggs’ recording, The Historic Organs of Switzerland. At the time of that recording, it was widely thought that the organ was built in 1390.  There is some modern research suggesting that it was more like 1430, but I wouldn’t argue about a forty-year difference – it’s a mighty old organ, and it’s perfectly recognizable and playable.  There’s a nice video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiyy7AtMvis.  It’s narrated in Dutch, but even in you don’t understand the language, you can see and hear this remarkable instrument.

I love recognizing the pipe organ as such an ancient art form, stopping to reflect on what life was like in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century.  Think of the state of public water supplies and sanitation, personal health and hygiene, transportation and commerce.  If you’ve ever visited a modern organbuilding workshop, you have an idea of the complexity and precision necessary to make a monumental musical instrument function.  Think of the effort and ingenuity involved in building a pipe organ in 1450, when there were no cordless drills, laser-sharpened blades, or electric lights. Those early organbuilders harvested trees and milled lumber by hand, hauled it to the workshop on oxcarts, cast metal and soldered seams, fashioned parts for mechanical actions, skinned animals and tanned leather, all to make music.

Anchors aweigh.¹

We can compare that effort to shipbuilding.  We all have pictures of Christopher Columbus’ little armada, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in our minds’ eyes.  The names roll off our tongues like “I before E, except after C, or when sounding like “A” as in neighbor or weigh.”  The largest of those ships, Santa Maria, was about sixty feet long on deck with a forty-one foot keel, about eighteen feet wide, and weighed about a hundred tons, smaller than many modern personal pleasure yachts.  While we might sail in a sixty-foot sailboat on a sunny afternoon with six or eight people on board, the Santa Maria had a documented crew of forty.  The reason that a lavatory on a boat is called “The Head,” is because in those early sailing ships, the crew’s sanitation facility was to hang over the side at the head of the ship.

Mechanically, Santa Maria had three masts and a bowsprit, and five spars bearing five sails.  Each sail would have had about eight control lines (halyard, sheets, downhauls, etc.) and many of the lines ran through blocks (multi-wheeled pulleys) for increased leverage.  Complete the catalogue with a rudder for steering, a wheel with related lines and pulleys, and a capstan (winch) for mechanical advantage for hoisting sails and anchors, and we can estimate that Santa Maria had a couple hundred moving parts.  The simplest two-manual organ of the same era, with forty-five or forty-nine note keyboards, would have some four or five hundred moving parts, including keys, trackers, squares, rollers, and valves.  It’s amazing to me that such a complex machine would be devised and built for the purpose of making music in a time when most machinery was so very primitive.

Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing, producing the Mazarin Bible about forty years before Columbus’ great adventure.  His printing press had only three or four moving parts – but that was one of the greatest advances in the history of communication.  Without Gutenberg, we wouldn’t have email.

That ingenious business.²

Let’s jump ahead three hundred years.  By the 1860’s, science and technology had leapt forward exponentially.  During that decade, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Transatlantic Cable were completed, and Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.  And Aristide Cavaillé-Coll built the grand organ at Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris with a hundred two stops, five manuals, and a fantastic array of pneumatic registration devices. 

Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece at Saint-Sulpice must be one of, if not the most influential organs in existence.  The bewildering array of levers and knobs gave those organists unprecedented control over the instrument, and the music written by Widor and Dupré, inspired by the sounds and mechanical assets of the Cavaillé-Coll organ, form a centerpiece of the long history of organ music.  And like the ancient organ in Sion, the instrument at Saint-Sulpice is still in regular use, not as an antique curiosity, but as the church’s main instrument that is played every Sunday for Mass, and for countless concerts and recordings.

Forty years later in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a neighborhood of Boston), Ernest Skinner was at work on a new revolution.  Starting around 1890, a number of American organ companies were experimenting with pneumatic and then electric organ actions, but none was more creative or prolific than Mr. Skinner.  As an employee and later factory superintendent of the Hutchings Organ Company, and later in the company that bore his name, Mr. Skinner invented and produced the Pitman Windchest, the first electro-pneumatic organ action in which the stop action functioned as quickly as the keyboard action.  That simple fact, which when combined with Skinner’s fabulous electro-pneumatic combination action, was as influential to organists as Cavaillé-Coll’s fantastic pneumatic and mechanical console appliances, because for the first time, dozens of stops could be turned on or off simultaneously as quickly as an organist could move from one key to the next.  And those actions operated instantly there was no mechanical noise.

A combination innovation

As I mention Mr. Skinner’s combination actions, I repeat a theory that I have proposed a number of times.  Those machines, built in Boston around 1905, allowed the organist to select any combination of stops and set it in a binary memory, ready to be recalled at the touch of a button.  Decades earlier there were water-powered looms that could be programmed to weave intricate patterns using blocks of wood with patterns of holes, the forerunners of the computer punch cards that people my age used to register for college classes.  But it’s my theory that Mr. Skinner’s combination actions were the first industrially produced, commercially available, user-programmable binary computers.  The first, ever.

I’ve had a number of opportunities to propose my theory to scientists outside the organ world, and have not heard any contradicting theories.  If any of you out there in Diapason land know anyone who is expert in the history of computers, I’d be grateful if you’d pose this theory to them and let me know what you learn.

As electro-pneumatic actions allowed organists unprecedented control over their instruments, so they allowed instruments to be larger than ever before.  In 1865, forty or fifty stops made a very large organ.  By 1920, such an organ had become commonplace.  It was usual for a large church to commission an organ with four manuals, many dozens of ranks of pipes, and components of the organ in multiple locations around the church.  Imagine yourself as the first to play an instrument with an Antiphonal Division – how your mind would race with ideas of how to exploit it.

If we compare pipe organs that Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Copernicus might have known,  those that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Claude Monet heard, and those of the time of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, what milestones of development should we recognize.  What innovations brought our instrument from the panpipe to Walt Disney Hall?

1.     Tsebius’ Hydraulis was the first huge leap, introducing mechanically produced wind pressure, mechanical action, and a keyboard for the first time, as far as we know.

2.     Adding a second set of pipes foreshadowed the complexity of the modern organ.  There would have been no stop action – two pipes played simultaneously with one key.  I suppose they were pipes of similar character at different pitches, like today’s Principals eight-and-four.

3.     In the early Renaissance, organ divisions called Blockwerk were developed.  These consisted of numerous voices, including the fractional pitches we know as mutations.

4.     The stop action was the next obvious innovation, allowing the musician to select individual voices, or multiple voices in any combination.

5.     The stop action would have led to the idea of contrasting voices.  Instead of two or more similar voices, there would have been different timbres for each pitch, like our modern Principals and Flutes.

6.     I’m not sure when the first reed stop was introduced or who made it, but I sure know that a wide variety of reeds were present in organs in the very early sixteenth century.  The tones of all organ flue voices are produced by the splitting of a “sheet” of air that’s formed by the slot between the front edge of a pipe’s languid (horizontal piece at the joint between the conical foot and the cylindrical resonator) and the lower lip, which is a portion of the circumference of the conical foot that’s made flat.  The tone of a reed pipe is produced by a vibrating brass tongue, which creates a sharp contrast of timbre.

7.     The addition of a second keyboard made it possible for a melody to be accompanied by a contrasting sound, or echo effects to be achieved without changing stops.  I am not researching this as I write, but I guess this innovation dates from around 1475 or 1500.

8.     The logical and magical extension of multiple keyboards was the invention of the pedal keyboard and development of the technique for mastering that most “organistic” of skills.  Playing melodies or the individual lines of polyphonic music with ones feet allowed organ music to develop deeper complexity.  This level of sophistication was achieved late in the fifteenth century.

9.     A wonderful example of a very early organ with two manuals and pedals was the first Große Orgel of the Marienkirche in Lübeck in Germany, the church later made famous in our history by organists Franz Tunder and his successor Dietrich Buxtehude (who married Bruhns’ daughter).  That organ had thirty-two stops and was built between 1516 and 1518, just at the time of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and when Michelangelo was about forty-five years old.

10.   By the time Heinrich Scheidemann (1595-1663), Tunder (1614-1667) and Buxtehude (1637-1707) were composing their catalogues of organ music, the use of the pedal board for independent voices was in full swing.  More complex forms of composition, in those days especially the fugue, exploited the versatility of the organ.  And of course, it was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) who brought pedal technique to a level of virtuosity that was the true forerunner of the near-maniacal feats of the feet of early twentieth-century virtuosi like Edwin Lamare and Lynwood Farnum, that school of players who took organ playing to new heights in response to the innovations of Ernest Skinner in the same way that Widor and Dupré responded to the genius of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

11.   The Expression Enclosure (Swell Box) was an invention that transformed organ playing.  Its earliest forms were like the Brustwerk of Baroque and Neo-Baroque organs, with doors that the organist could open and close by reaching up from the bench, or (God forbid) standing on the pedal keys.

12.   Pneumatic motors such as Barker Levers allowed huge organs with otherwise mechanical actions to be played with little effort.

13.   The introduction of electric actions gave us the modern symphonic organ, the detached and remote console, and the possibility of dispersing various organ divisions throughout a large room.

14.   I discussed combination actions earlier.

15.   And more recently, solid-state control systems for pipe organs have given us multiple levels of memory, piston sequencers, transposers that are considered a crutch by some and a God-send by others, and playback sequencers that allow an organist to capture a performance as a digital file, then ask the organ to play it back allowing critical listening to registration, balance, technique, and accuracy.

Today we anticipate wireless consoles, tap-screen music racks, and heaven knows what else.  Just as Leonardo da Vinci could not possibly have imagined the automobile or the cellular telephone, Jan Sweelinck (1562-1621) would be astonished by our massive consoles and high-pressure reeds.

I wonder what the organ would be like today had Leonardo included it in his sketchbooks.

Notes:

1.     Nautical.  While “anchors away” may seem the intuitive spelling, implying casting off dock lines or hoisting an anchor and setting a vessel “underway,” the correct spelling, aweigh, defines the moment when the anchor is lifted off the seabed and is “weighed” by the anchor line. Anchors Aweigh is the fight song of the United States Naval Academy.  The text of the chorus:

“Anchors Aweigh, my boys

Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to college joys

We sail at break of day, 'ay 'ay 'ay

Thou our last night ashore

Drink to the foam

Until we meet once more

Here's wishing you a happy voyage home!”

2.     That Ingenious Business, Ray Brunner, The Pennsylvania German Society, 1991.

a.     In 1762, Benjamin Franklin referred to organbuilding in Eastern Pennsylvania as “that ingenious business.”