App-titude

In the wind…

January 2012

App-titude.

I admit it.  I’m a Mac-junkie.  After my Blackberry fell out of my shirt pocket into a hotel ice bucket in Madagascar (really!) in 2008, I tried an iPhone (everyone’s doing it) and found it easy to use.  I used PC’s since they were first widely available until last winter, when for the third time in not enough years I had to replace a recalcitrant laptop.  Because I liked the iPhone so much I bought a MacBook and was immediately delighted by the clarity of the screen, the fast response, and the ease of navigation.  Now I’ve added an iPad to my arsenal and I’ve become hooked on the new and exploding world of Apps.

I have Apps that convert measurements between English and Metric, manage To-Do lists, give weather forecasts, find restaurants and local tides, warn of heavy traffic, measure decibels, and even provide a carpenter’s level and plumb-bob – all useful and relevant to my work and life-style.  I have New York Times crossword puzzles, I love playing Words With Friends, and I even have Peterson’s Birds of North America, complete with audible calls. 

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has a great App called iTrans NYC (free).  Stand on a street corner in Manhattan, touch the app’s location button, type in your destination, and you get a subway route complete with (amazingly accurate) schedules and related street maps.  Want a quick lunch?  Open your maps App and type in “diner.”  Thirty little red pins fall out of the sky onto your screen.  If you’re in Manhattan, you’re never more than two blocks from a diner.  Does that whet your App-etite?

There's an app called Yelp that allows you type in what you're looking for and provides options based on your current location.  Type in "asian" and you get a list of restaurants with links to their menus, websites, and reviews.  Or type in "hardware," "art supplies," "Episcopal churches," etc., etc.

The other day my colleague Joshua Wood showed me the Starbucks App.  It has a locating feature – touch a button and you get a map with pins showing the nearest Starbucks stores.  You set up an account with a password and credit card, tap a button and the screen shows a barcode.  The cashier flashes the little barcode gun at your phone, and you’re in Joe.  I know perfectly well that if Starbucks is holding twenty-five of my dollars, they’re holding twenty-five dollars from a couple million other people, so on the short term they have the use of fifty-million dollars, but I still like having the App.  It makes me feel as though I belong, just like the turnpike EZ-pass that allows me to drive around a line of traffic – it’s better (and probably safer) than a backstage pass for a Rolling Stones concert.  The dirty little secret is that when I was setting up the Starbucks App it didn’t want to accept my credit card, so I tried again, and again, and again.  The next morning there were seven twenty-five-dollar charges on my bank account, but only one registered on my phone – I’m going back to basics by relying on the cheerful tellers in the bank branch to help sort that out for me. 

There’s a magnificent and innovative App on T.S. Elliott’s poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land ($13.99), which includes a filmed dramatic (memorized) reading by actress Fiona Shaw, complete audio recordings by Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness (among others) and by T.S. Elliott himself, all synchronized to the published text.  Most interesting are original manuscript pages with editing marks by Ezra Pound.  Now that’s educational.  Think of all the great works of art and literature that could be analyzed and presented in this format.

§

App-arition

The Roman Catholic Church has approved an App called “Confession” ($1.99) which claims to be “the perfect aid for every penitent,” and especially useful for those who have been away from the Confessional for a long time.  Like any other App there’s a process you follow to open a “User Account” with password.  Once you’re in, you open an “Examination” page to get a list of the Ten Commandments.  Click on a Commandment and you get a check list of questions, a catalogue of sins, if you will.  When you’ve been through all the Commandments and clicked all the sins that apply to you, you have the option to create a custom list, typing in your own free-style personal failings.  You are then instructed to take your phone with you to the Confession Booth and told how to address the priest.  For reference when you’re finished, there’s a handy page with various Acts of Contrition.  You are required to enter your password frequently, protection no doubt against allowing your private thoughts to fall into the wrong hands.  A warning window clearly states, “This App is intended to be used during the Sacrament of Penance with a Catholic priest only.  This is not a substitute for a valid confession.”  I suppose marriage counseling is next.

Reminds me of the gospel song made popular by Manhattan Transfer:

“Operator, give me information.

Information, give me long distance.

Long distance, give me Heaven.

Operator, give me Heaven,

Give me Jesus on the line…”

(find the complete lyrics at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/manhattan+transfer/operator_20087469.html)

Great song.

The Women of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) have published an App called Daily Grace.  The website says:

“Daily Grace is an on-the-go companion for your journey, offering a faith reflection every day.  In these brief writings you’ll encounter God’s extravagant, boundless and often surprising grace.  You will be comforted, challenged, inspired, consoled, and confronted.  The daily reflection will stir you to live out your baptismal calling.  Take time to reflect, offer a prayer, and prepare for the day.  Read the daily message or choose Random Grace.”

Random Grace.  Does that pair with Custom Confession?  What’s going on here?

There are lots of Apps out there useful to church musicians.  Google “lectionary app” and you’ll get an assortment of choices – one is free this weekend.  The Hymnals of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Episcopal Church, Methodist Church, Church of Latter Day Saints, Adventist, and Presbyterian Church are available as Apps, as is the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, the Quran, and the Talmud.  Think how much work you can get done on the train.

But there’s also the silly.  Google “pipe organ app” and you’ll find a thing from MooCowMusic that puts a two-manual organ with stop knobs on your iPhone.  The website says you can “add gravitas to any situation.”  I bought the Confession App out of curiosity, but I’m not curious enough to bother with the MooCow organ.  If any of you out there get it, let me know how it works.  I have better uses for my ninety-nine-cents.

The First Church in Boston’s Back Bay is a large and central Unitarian Universalist congregation.  The original stone gothic building was destroyed by fire in 1968; all that remains is the east- facing “West End,” replete with rose window, and a stately stone spire.  These relics embrace the striking replacement designed by Paul Rudolph which houses a neo-classical Werkprinzip organ by Casavant.  The quirky interior space of the sanctuary includes several unusual windows that splash sunlight across the façade of the organ at astrologically predictable intervals each day.  The first time I tuned that instrument I was aware late in the morning of a dramatic stretch of the pitch – all the pipes were tuning with the slide-tuners in just the same spot on each pipe, but suddenly a couple octaves of pipes were too short to reach pitch, and I realized that the façade pipes (Ruckpositiv Principal 4’ which I was using as the tuning stop) were heating up in the brilliant sunlight.  Wait an hour for the sun to pass across the window and you can start up again.

I was discussing the strategy of tuning the organ with Paul Ciennewa (organist at First Church, and author of an excellent recent article in The Diapason on the memorization of harpsichord music) and we agreed that during the upcoming tuning session we would install thermometers in each division of the organ so we could develop a record of the temperature and pitch.  Paul whipped out his iPhone and opened the App called ClearTune ($9.99), entered the “calibrate” mode, and we recorded the pitch of the organ.

I was trained to tune “by ear,” setting my own temperaments with a neat system of double-checking, eschewing electronic “crutches” but I was intrigued by the convenience and simplicity of using my phone this way.  I downloaded the App that evening and quickly learned its capabilities, and the next time I made a service call I experimented using the app to set a temperament, then checked it carefully using my system.  I made little corrections to a couple intervals, but was surprised at how quickly and accurately I was able to get the tuning started.  I continued as usual, tuning other ranks to the original pitch stop, but I know this new tool saved me some time.

Now I see an App called “Organ Tuner” ($169.99).  It has a large variety of historic temperaments, strobe displays and spectrum graphs for accurate matching of pitch, it tracks temperature and adjusts itself when the temperature changes, and sets itself to allow you to tune mutations at your given pitch level.  I downloaded and printed the instruction manual – I think I’ll read it before I make the plunge.  I’ve never paid more than fifty-dollars for an App – that was for The Professional Chef, published by the Culinary Institute of America.  (Last night I learned from my iPad how to cut Grapefruit Suprêmes to make a wonderful salad with spinach, avocado, and balsamic vinaigrette.)

§

When President Nixon’s White House tape-recording system was revealed by Alexander Butterfield during questioning by the Senate Watergate Committee in July of 1973, a political firestorm ensued during which one disbelieving White House operative commented that eight years of recordings would take eight years to listen to.  There is such a thing as too much information.  The world of information, helpful tools, and amusements available to us as Apps has no practical limit.  I googled the question to learn that there are more than three-hundred-thousand iPhone Apps and sixty-thousand for iPad. 

As I write today, googling my way through my questions, I’ve bought and downloaded five new Apps.  The Episcopal Hymnal (1982) is downloading at the moment – simultaneously on all three of my Mac devices.  (Have I told you about iCloud?)  That means I’ve added an hour or so to the amount of time it takes to write this column.  Does this represent a net-gain in my productivity?  Will I gain that hour back later in the week because an App saves me time?

This morning I read last week’s New Yorker magazine on my iPad where the App nestles in Newsstand.  A cartoon shows a group of people sitting around a restaurant table.  The plates were empty (so the food must have been good), there were lots of empty wineglasses, and everyone seemed to be having a good time except the couple in the foreground.  He was buried in his iPhone.  With a cross look on her face she was saying, “Fine.  Sit there and check your messages.  Perhaps it will give you something to contribute to the conversation.”  Oof.  How often have you dived into your phone to google the answer to a question that comes up at dinner with friends.  Our daughter Meg hates that.  She says that in conversation we should rely on what we know.  Maybe she’s right.  Maybe if we rely too heavily on our phones for every thing we do we’ll lose the information we’ve worked so hard to cram into our brains.

But I love having all this information and entertainment so easily available.  It’s especially helpful to me because I travel frequently and by carrying a couple slim light-weight devices I have encyclopediæ at my fingertips.  I can navigate effortlessly in foreign cities.  I can communicate instantly with people around the world.  And I have plenty to do while sitting on a plane.

But I’m in danger of separating myself from my art.  There are Apps that play music, and Apps that allow you to record music, but there’s no App that performs music.  There are Apps that register decibels and pitches, but there’s no App that can voice or tune an organ pipe.  There are Apps that crunch numbers and measurements, and Apps that show level and plumb, but no App that can read the grain in a piece of wood before it goes through a planer or a table saw.  The organbuilder still has to know that wood warps “across” the grain – that the grain in a pallet has to be vertical or warping will cause ciphers, and the grain in a keyboard has to be horizontal or the keys will warp into each other.  When you’re standing at your saw working through a pile of wood, you pick up each piece, glance at it with your trained eye, and flip it around in the right direction before you push it to the blade.

No matter how many Apps we carry, when we’re involved in the arts we must leave open the possibility of Operator Error.  No risk, no gain.

I’ve carried on about the convenience and accuracy of tuning Apps, but when I check a temperament by ear that I’ve set using an App I almost always adjust a few notes to make it sound better.  The App has saved me some time, but if the proof is in the pudding, my fifty-something ears are still the best tools I have.  I hope I don’t get lulled into losing my ear by tuning to a graph.

There’s no App to work out the fingerings of a difficult passage.  The idea that every organist would use the same fingerings is as ridiculous as claiming that every organist has identical hands.  There’s no App to choose registrations – you try different combinations, listening creatively and critically until you find the right sound for the moment.  The idea that you would use the same stops on a given piece at every organ you play is as ridiculous as claiming that every organ sounds alike.

There’s no App to help you balance the voices in a choir.  As director, you listen creatively and critically, coaxing each member of each section to the right slot.  The idea that some machine could take the place of all that human artistic interaction is as ridiculous as thinking that every choir has the same issues.

And there’s no App that diagnoses a mechanical glitch.  The organ technician senses the problem and verifies it with his eyes or by the touch of his finger on the key.

I have a great idea for an App, and I know I’ll never act on it so anyone qualified is free to develop the idea.  There should be an App with a twelve-step program for people addicted to Apps.  It would be called App-endectomy.  Go for it.  I’m exhausted by all this deep research.  I think I’ll take an-App.  (No App-nea.)

"Etiquette"

In the wind…

April 2012

A matter of manners.

In the first days of the twentieth century my great-grandfather and his seven brothers ran a large and successful silk business, importing thread from China and weaving fabric.  There was a large mill complex in Manchester, Connecticut bearing the family name that included a company assembly hall which is still home to a lovely organ by E. & G.G. Hook.  Glad to know my forebears had good taste in pipe organs.  Eight grand houses shared an expanse of lawn, one of which was still my great-grandmother’s home when I was growing up.  Each year at Columbus Day we drove to Manchester for a visit, and I remember exploring that huge house with its endless corridors, seemingly dozens of bedrooms, and a third-floor playroom complete with a swing hung from the ceiling.

Hanging in our guest bathroom we have reproductions of flowery advertisements from the company, touting showrooms in Manhattan, and depicting tidy maids helping their mistresses with their frocks.  My great-grandmother would have hated Downton Abbey.

Lunch at that house was a formal affair with fancy china, and plenty of forks, knives, and spoons, and we were coached in their proper use.  After my great-grandmother died, the immense brass candlesticks from her table were converted into lamps, one of which lights my desk as I write today. 

My grandfather and father were both Episcopal priests, which had the trickle-down effect that my siblings and I were brought up accustomed to a succession of fancy and formal dinners, endless stacks of elegant china, stemware, and utensils having found their way through the generations to our adolescent dinner table.  Now that my parents are living in a retirement community and their household has been downsized a couple times, we have realized that our children and the subsequent generations will have little to do with all that finery.  Beautiful as it is, the stuff is a nuisance because the gold bands on the plates mean they can’t go in the dishwasher.

These remaining traces of formality in family life combined with the community’s expectation of the Rector’s family (ever wonder how Preachers’ Kids got such a reputation?) mean that we were brought up to know good manners.  We knew which fork to use for salad, and how to set the table with the dessert forks and spoons in the proper place, and yes, there were always dessert forks and spoons. My father carved the meat at the head of the table, passing plates to my mother at the foot, ensuring that the food was cold before anyone could take a bite.  The most senior female guest was seated to dad’s right, male to mom’s right.  It was usually obvious who those people were, but I bet there was more than one feather ruffled when someone who considered herself to be senior was seated in the middle of the table.  When we ate at my grandparents’ table the carving went a little better.  Poppy had been a surgeon before entering the priesthood and the turkey seemed to fall apart into appropriate serving sizes the moment he lifted his oft-honed scalpel of a carving knife!

Today when we entertain, Wendy sets a beautiful table, but sometimes I can’t help but speak up to protect the memory of that grand succession of mothers who brought me up to know which way the dessert fork should face.  What is it they say, choose your battles?

I’ve read many novels about life in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and chuckle because so many of the dinner-table rituals I grew up with are present at the tables of the Captain while at sea, battles or no battles.  And British officers serving in distant outposts of the empire were never without their silver and table finery, their sherry and port wine, a custom exquisitely lampooned by the British comedy troupe Monty Python.  We can deduce that the formalization of dining rituals set the stage for freer exchange of ideas in conversation.

When you get right down to it, good manners in just about any situation are a statement of respect for the occasion and the people participating in it.

§

A couple months ago, I wrote of my fascination with the fast-growing world of cell-phone Apps.  Those snazzy little bits of software that are being created to simplify our lives at ninety-nine cents a pop seem like gifts from God because they drop from heaven with no effort at all with the potential of enlightening us like mega-bytes of holy grail.  But in fact, when used without consideration, our cell phones and all they contain are playing a large role in the decay of social order.  How’s that for sounding like an old, um, codger?

But I don’t think I’m being sanctimonious.  How many of us have stood tapping our feet in a long line at the bank while the guy at the teller window can’t finish his transaction because he’s on the phone?  How many of us have traveled to attend a meeting that was continually interrupted by its leader answering his phone or emails while we wait?  (“Sorry, I’ve been waiting for this call.”)  And how many of us have tried to pass someone on a city sidewalk who’s weaving from side to side and walking at a snail’s pace with a phone glued to her ear, making herself into a double-wide with her gesticulations?

You’re sitting in a coffee shop enjoying your non-fat-triple-shot-soy-praline-half-caff beverage.  Nice, but there are two people in the shop with their ties loosened and sleeves rolled halfway up their cubits, laptops open, talking in full voices on the phone.  One is fighting with his wife, the other is clearly the most brilliant and insightful business-person in town.  So much for reading the paper – on my iPad.

§

Under the pews.

Last week I got together with a friend in New York.  We had lunch in a nice little French café, then walked to his church to see the organ.  It’s a large old church with a fascinating nineteenth-century organ, but what really caught my eye was on the literature table in the narthex – a stack of photocopied sheets with the title “Church Etiquette Page.”  It starts out defining Christ’s presence in the Tabernacle, suggesting that it’s appropriate to bow or genuflect when walking past, and continues with a statement: Please observe the following courtesies when you are visiting the church.

·      Silence is the norm while in church.  Conversation is to be confined to the narthex or the courtyard.  Since the acoustics in the church are very fine, any necessary talking needs to be at a whisper.

·      Proper attire is expected.  Since this is relative to taste and fashion, you are expected to use your good judgement.

·      Food and beverages have no place in a church.  However it is permitted in the narthex and courtyard.  The use of alcohol and tobacco is probihited on church premises.  This is not the O.K. Corral.

·      Gum is not to be chewed in church.*

·      Running is inappropriate.  Parents or caretakers need to stay close to their children.  Adults mustn’t run either, unless they’re chasing after a child.

·      Reading newspapers, using cell phones, applying cosmetics, changing clothes (yes, it’s happened) and other similar activities do not have a place in church.

·      Refuse should not be left in the pews or the floor around you.

·      Dogs are allowed to enter the church as long as they observe silence and know the difference between a holy water font and a fire hydrant.  After all, they can be better behaved than some humans.

·      Smoking is simply not to occur anywhere on church property.

*Please use this paper to discard your gum rather than the underside of a pew.

How did that priest know I’ve been sticking gum under the pew?  I thought I was getting away with it.  But how refreshing to see this simple expression expecting respect.  By setting out a code of decorum with a twinkle in his eye, he has taken the pressure off anyone who didn’t know how to behave in church, while giving a nudge to those who know perfectly well but seem to have forgotten.  I’ve heard many stories from colleagues who, sitting in princely splendor at their console in the chancel, look out across a congregation full of Tetrus, Words with Friends, emails, and texting.  One told me how a man answered a phone call during worship, then walked around behind a pillar, thinking that would keep his fellow worshippers from hearing him.  (“Hey Mister, churches have acoustics!”) 

One of my Words-With-Friends friends is organist of a church in Hawaii.  Last week she shared a You-Tube video on the subject of cell-phones in church, saying that she used to play for the church in the video.  Here’s the link – it’s worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_c81Nn

But organists, don’t think you’re exempt from this rant.  At ten-forty-five on a Sunday morning I receive a text from an organist, “cn u fx ded note tmrw?”  Hey, you’re still sitting on the organ bench, sermon probably halfway through.  Put your phone away.  From the pews fifty feet away congregants can see that pale glow reflected on your face.  We know it’s not the console indicator lights, and it’s certainly no halo.  Let’s not txt our friends from the organ bench during worship.  I know it happens a lot.

§

Who is it?

On January 10, 2012, Music Director Alan Gilbert was leading the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.  According to an indignant blogger:

“It was in the fourth movement.  (Funny how these disturbances never happen in fortissimo passages.)  After the last climax, as the movement begins to wind down toward that sublime last page of the score where music and silence are almost indistinguishable.  In other words, just about the worst possible moment.  (After a quick check of my Dover score, I think it was about 13 bars before the last Adagissimo.)”

You guessed it.  A cell phone rang.  The iPhone Marimba.  In the front row.  In Avery Fisher Hall.  It kept ringing.  It rang and rang.

Some in the audience yelled, “Thousand dollar fine.”

The first sentence of reviewer Daniel Wakin’s article in the January 12 edition of the New York Times read, “They were baying for blood in the usually polite precincts of Avery Fisher Hall.”  Maestro Gilbert stopped the performance, turned to face the audience, located the offender, and stood staring at him.  An article in the January 11^th issue of www.dailymail.co.uk (the online version of the famous British newspaper) added, “During a pause of several minutes, the music director asked, ‘Are you finished?’  When the culprit didn’t reply he said, ‘Fine, we’ll wait.’” Holy cow! The incident was covered and commented on by newspapers around the world.  Google “alan gilbert cell phone” and you’ll get a flood of newspaper stories.

But wait, there’s more.  On January 7, the Dayton (Ohio) Philharmonic Orchestra was starting its Saturday evening concert with Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Fawn” when a baby started to cry.  It cried and cried.  The Dayton Daily News  reported:

“The youngster had been wailing for quite some time when [conductor] Gittleman stopped the music, turned to the audience, and asked that the child be removed.  Some audience members applauded…  …Gittleman said he’s had to stop concerts due to cell phones in the past, but this was the first time a child had caused enough commotion to require him to stop and begin a piece again.  ‘The very first noise that the baby made was just as the flute was beginning her solo,’ he says.  ‘The piece begins with a big, long, famous, hard flute solo and my job at the beginning of that piece is to make the flute as comfortable as possible.’”

The story continued:

“Many who attended the concert as well as those who heard about the incident felt that it was handled in the best possible way.

“Jim and Ellen Ratti of Middletown are season DPO subscibers who witnessed ‘the whole affair.’  ‘The baby cried several times, not just once, and due to the outstanding acoustics in the Schuster, the sound carried throughout the concert hall,’ Jim says, adding the cries were very loud, disruptive, and distracting.  ‘I’m sure that some will say that Maestro Gittleman was inconsiderate and rude calling attention to the offending parent(s),’ he adds.  ‘My reply to those criticisms would be that it’s inconsiderate and rude to bring a child of that age to an event which holds no interest for him or her.  It is also inconsiderate and rude to disrupt the listening pleasure of everyone else in the concert hall, or to expect that such disruption would be excused.’”

My grandmother would have agreed.  But had she been the conductor in either of these situations, she wouldn’t have had to say a word.  Just one look.  Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, had nothing on her.  You might as well be using the wrong fork.

§

Anyone who knows me might call me a hypocrite for ranting about cell phones.  To borrow a phrase from a colleague-friend, I hold the “like a crack pipe,” checking emails constantly, texting friends with quick thoughts and observations, keeping up with phone messages.  I use it to check the weather, keep my calendar and contacts, look up maps and directions, choose restaurants, make travel reservations, and even sometimes, to the horror of our daughter, Google to find the answer that end dinner-time arguments.  (Yes, Roger Maris did hit his sixty-first home run in the hundred-sixty-first game of the 1961 season.  Nice symmetry.)

I think the cell phone has made possible great flexibility for people during the working day. And well used, it’s a vehicle for good manners.  There’s no excuse for not calling to say you’re on the way, but you’ll be a few minutes late.  But we need to create a new social order to deal with them.  Here are a few general rules I propose to the social court:

·      Don’t put a phone call ahead of a personal, face-to-face conversation.

·      Don’t let your phone call impede or delay someone else.

·      Don’t let you’re phone call diminish anyone else’s enjoyment of anything.

·      Don’t assume that it’s okay with everyone around you to be forced to listen to your conversation.

Does anyone out there in Diapason land want to add to my list?

A few weeks ago a bad thing happened to my iPhone while crossing Broadway in lower Manhattan.  Luckily, there was an AT&T store right there, and twenty minutes later I was upgraded to the iPhone 4S.  For those not familiar with the jargon, this is the new model which includes Sirus, a voice-recognition program that allows to speak to your phone, asking it to place a call, send a text message, or pretty much anything else, except, as I learned, to play an audiobook.  I asked the polite female computer-generated voice to play one of the books in my audio library.  She replied, “I’m not able to do that.”  I said, “you can’t play an audiobook?’  “I’m not able to do that.”  What good are you?”  “Now, now…”  “I’m sorry.”  “That’s OK.”

I have no idea what got into me next:  “You’re cute.”  Her reply, “You say that to all the virtual assistants.”

Who do we think we are?

In the wind…

May 2012

Who do we think we are?

I was a few weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday in February of 1972 when my wisdom teeth were taken out.  I don’t know whether oral surgery was that much more cumbersome in those days, or if my teeth presented some special problems – but I do know I had to spend two nights in a hospital, and I lost the school vacation to the experience.  Because of the pain and perhaps a sense of rebellion, I stopped shaving, and for forty years I was never without a beard.  Through an eighteen-year first marriage, two kids growing up, and many life-long friends, it wound up that the only people in my life who had seen me without a beard were my parents and my siblings.

In the first week of January this year, Wendy and I attended the wedding of a close friend and colleague.  It was a lovely three-day event in a picturesque village in Vermont.  There were about a dozen other guests and together we had a lovely time.  It was a dressy affair and there was an excellent photographer present, and a week or so later we were invited by email to a website to see (and purchase) photos.  They were great photos and everyone looked terrific in snazzy clothes, but I had to admit that I looked older in the photos than my internal picture of myself.  That beard was so white.

I shared my thoughts with Wendy and we agreed to experiment.  Several years ago with the help of a hotel concierge I found a wonderful place for haircuts in New York.  It’s a men’s-only salon that offers drinks and all sorts of nice perks.  I made an appointment with my favorite stylist, Lyuba, and when I sat in her chair she asked, as she always does in her strong Russian accent, “what are we going to do with you today?”  When I said we’re going to take off the beard she gave a little shriek.  They brought me some whiskey, and off it came.  She finished up with a luxurious old-fashioned straight razor shave, and I went out into the evening.

The salon is on 46^th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues and I walked the crowded sidewalks down Lexington to 42^nd Street, and into Grand Central Station to take the “6” train to our new apartment in Greenwich Village.  I continually touched my cheeks and chin, getting used to new sensations.  The feeling of cool air on my face was novel and strange.  But by far the biggest sensation of change was that no one around me knew anything was different.  It was rush hour and I must have walked past sixty-thousand people in those five minutes, and although I knew something was radically different, not one person noticed.

Wendy laughed out loud when I walked into our apartment.  A few days later there was a family outing with my parents and two of my siblings – lots of ribaldry about who in the family I look like.  And a couple days later I stopped shaving.  I retreated to our place in Maine so, as Wendy teased, I could hide in the woods while it grew back.

I’m better now that the beard is back.

Looking back on the experience, it’s funny to think that what I actually look like doesn’t fit my image of myself.  Since I was a teenager I’ve known myself as a person with a beard, as has everyone around me.  Without a beard I am myself, but I don’t look like myself. 

§

We are a community of organists and organbuilders, professionals in a niche market.  It’s as though we’re proprietors of a unique boutique.  What is our image of ourselves?  When we look into a proverbial mirror who and what do we see?  Are we who we think we are?

How many of our customers like us because they think we’re quaint?  I’m reminded of these questions every time I’m at a social event and meeting people for the first time.  In those situations it’s inevitable that someone asks what I do and their response is swift and predictable: “Pipe organ builder?  I didn’t know there were any of you left.”  It’s almost comical how often I hear that, exactly word for word.

During the second half of the twentieth century, much of our effort and talents were focused on the past.  We studied and emulated the instruments that were played by the “old masters.”  We researched and emulated how the “old masters” played, and we programmed thousands of recitals that included nothing written within the last two or three-hundred years.

Make no mistake as you read this.  I believe strongly that movement was essential to the future of the pipe organ.  Without all that creative energy, without all that fresh understanding of the heritage of our instrument, there would not be the high level of excellence and competency in today’s American organbuilding.  And it’s hard to imagine how we would be experiencing the music of Bach unfiltered by the careers of artists like Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, or E. Power Biggs.  That half-century was a modern Renaissance in the truest sense of the word. 

Yesterday I heard a story on National Public Radio about actors who have researched the accents, pacing, and delivery of Shakespeare’s plays as they were produced during his lifetime.  A recording was played of Sir Lawrence Olivier delivering the famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet followed by one of the modern actors doing it according to this research.  The research seemed to be saying the accent was close to that of modern Ireland (whatever that is), and the delivery was very quick.  It was interesting enough, but I couldn’t help wondering how in the world they think they know what a sixteenth-century actor sounded like?

I’ve lived in Boston most of my life, a city renowned for its famous accent, but as a Bostonian, I know there are least five distinct “Boston” accents.  How do we decide on an authentic accent for Stratford-on-Avon in 1595?  And I’m not sure we can claim to know how fast a sixteenth-century Shakespearean actor spoke, any more than we can claim to know how fast Bach played the “little” Fugue in G Minor.  The value of the research, both for Shakespearean accents and Bach’s tempos, is whether it adds to the vitality of the performance.

Walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York any day of the year, and you walk into a mob scene.  The soon-to-be-replaced steps at the main entrance on Fifth Avenue have a carnival atmosphere, the big entrance lobby is jammed with tourists from dozens of different countries, and the galleries are all a-swirl with people gawking at the artworks.  People used to go to organ recitals that way.  There are plenty of historic accounts of huge enthusiastic crowds at concerts in municipal auditoriums and churches alike.  Just a couple months ago in this column I reprinted the account of the dedication of the big Skinner organ in the ten-thousand seat Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922.  The place was jammed, the aisles were full, thousands of people were turned away, and the police gave up trying to control the crowd.  When was the last time you saw something like that at an organ recital?

I don’t have the statistics at hand just now, but I remember reading that it was sometime in the 1960’s that the cumulative attendance at live performances of classical music in the United States was surpassed for the first time by attendance at professional sporting events.  I doubt that even the recently announced scandal-driven suspensions of coaches and players of the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints will contribute to a reversal of that development.

§

It’s the twenty-first century now.  We’ve survived the transition from one century to another.  Remember how uptight everyone was about Y2K?  Airplanes would crash, ATM’s would run dry, clocks would stop, and heaven help anyone depending on a computer.  January 1, 2000?  No big deal.  And what were we going to call the first ten years of the century?   The oh’s, the aughts?  Now we’re about to enter the teens.  No big deal.

In the nineteen-twenties, American pipe organ builders produced more than two thousand organs a year.  Companies like Skinner and Austin built a new organ each week – M.P. Möller had many years during which they shipped a new organ each day! 

I’ll go out on a limb and make an educated guess: American organbuilders have not produced two thousand organs in the last thirty or even forty years combined.  Since 1960 companies like Fisk, Noack, Dobson, and Andover have each built between one and two hundred organs.  Taylor & Boody has just signed a contract for Opus 70.  Möller built fewer and fewer new instruments each year until finally closing in 1992. Aeolian-Skinner closed in 1972.  Year for year, the American market for new pipe organs is less than five percent of what it was a hundred years ago.

In fairness, these numbers need some interpreting.  Today’s organbuilders have a much higher percentage of projects rebuilding older organs than those of a century ago.  Thousands of nineteenth-century masterpieces by builders like Hook, Jardine, Hutchings, and Odell were replaced by the new-fangled electro-pneumatic jobs built by Skinner, Austin, Kimball, and their competitors.  Today we are much more likely to be renovating organs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than building new instruments.  And some of the markets for new organs a century ago are simply gone, such as the municipal organ, the big-money residence organ, and the cinema organ.  Utterly outside the market for church organs, Wurlitzer and Aeolian built thousands of instruments for movie theaters and private homes.  Last year’s Oscar-winning movie, The Artist, about the quantum shift from silent movies to talkies never gave a hint about the collapse of the market for theater pipe organs!

But however you analyze the numbers, we can’t escape the fact that the market is wildly different today.  And we who love the organ are responsible for its place in our cultural heritage for the coming century.

So how do we see ourselves?  Who is our audience?  What is the future of the pipe organ in America?  Are we condemned to crying in our beer as we lament the good old days like the enthusiasts of steam railroads?

What is our image of ourselves? 

·      Are we coconspirators in a quixotic adventure? 

·      Are we hanging on the glories of past ages? 

·      Is our range of expression limited to those of our predecessors? 

·      Are we playing to each other from positions of expertise assuming that the general audience will be moved vicariously?

Answer those questions relative to the price of a new organ.  We live in the age of the “million-dollar” organ.  That’s what it costs to commission a new instrument with three manuals and forty or fifty stops, and that’s not a very large organ.  That’s a mighty amount of money for a church to spend on a musical instrument in a society rife with poverty and other social needs.  Are we presenting ourselves, and our music, to the public and to our congregations in a way that’s worthy of expecting laypeople to justify coming up with that kind of money? 

§

That was a mighty negative list of questions.  I offer them as challenges.  I challenge you to think about your work, your interests, your plans for future repertoire and performances with those questions in mind.  A great performer is a great communicator.  When you perform you share your convictions about your art with those who come to hear. 

We refer to public performances of organ music as recitals.  The dictionary says that a recital is a performance of music by a solo musician or a small musical ensemble.  But if we embody the root of the word, recite, what are we offering to the listener?  In that sense of the word, there’s no implication of originality, or even passion.  Don’t recite, communicate.

I think that one of the attractions of viewing a work of visual art in a museum is that you are free to interpret it any way you want.  You might be influenced by the way it’s hung, the way it’s lit, or the architecture of the gallery, but when you simply view the painting or statue you’re on your own. 

Music doesn’t work that way.  The only people who can appreciate a piece of music at that level are those who can read a score and understand the piece in silence.  That experience is not available to the casual listener.  When you listen to a piece of music you are influenced by the performer.  It’s therefore up to the performer to decide what kind of experience to provide for the consumer.  It’s up to the performer to give the listener a good experience.

§

You might not think so from reading this so far, but I’m optimistic.  In this world of instant communication, flashy digital equipment, and dwindling intellectual content in much of the public discourse, I think I see a refreshment of public appreciation for things that are real, that have depth of expression, and that feed people’s cultural hunger.  I’ve written often of my celebration of the ever increasing numbers of genius young organists whose pedagogic abilities are such that the technical demands of the most complex music simply dissolve, allowing the listener to hear the music un-bumped.  There are dozens of players like that today, performers with old-world work ethics who are willing to devote themselves to routines of practice and diligence that we used to be able only to read about, shaking our heads.  And the best news is that many of them are now the teachers of tomorrow’s generation of masterful performers.

The Organ Historical Society was founded in 1956.  In its nearly sixty-year history, the OHS has had a huge influence on how we view the heritage we’ve inherited from our predecessors.  Over the same period of time we have studied and adored the music and instruments of various epochs of European history.  We are much the richer for all of that.  We have a strong community of outstanding organ building firms.  We have a rich crop of brilliant musicians who are finding new and exciting ways to use the pipe organ.

The past has informed us, but the future is a blank slate.  Let’s be sure we know who we are.

Why is their air?

In the wind…

November, 2005

Why is there air?

Forty years have passed since Bill Cosby raised this question in his recording by the same name.  The record (remember those black vinyl discs?) was released in 1965 and the title cut referred to his days as a Physical Education major at Temple University.  With tongue in cheek he teased philosophy majors, observing that they wandered around campus mulling over such fundamental questions.  I no longer own a turntable and couldn’t refresh my memory so I paraphrase his response:

“Any Phys-Ed major knows that.  There’s air to blow up basketballs, air to blow up footballs…” 

I was in elementary school at the time, and my friends and I thought that was the funniest thing ever, but forty years later the Wyman School has been converted to condominiums and I think I have a more sophisticated reading of what Mr. Cosby was getting at.  As our lives and society grow ever more complex we often lose track of the fundamental questions that drive what we do.

What are the questions?

Ours is a field rich with people who “caught the bug” – who were excited, even enchanted by the pipe organ early in life.  I’ve heard plenty of those personal stories.  One colleague told me how when he was very young his family traveled clear across the country to attend a wedding.  The trip itself was a huge experience for him, but he had never seen such a large and ornate church building, and when the organ started to play he knew what he wanted to do with his life.  Another friend told that when he was shown inside a large organ as a child the concept of the apparently contradictory relationship between the organ’s industrial interior and its glorious sound led to his important career as an organbuilder.   My own introduction to the instrument was a natural succession – the organist of the church I grew up in (my father was the rector) was a harpsichord maker and the community of instrument builders was well represented in the choir.  My childhood piano lessons led to organ lessons and why wouldn’t I have a summer job in an organbuilder’s workshop?  Was there in fact anything else one might do?

A wonderful world has grown up around the pipe organ, a world full of talented people dedicated to both the study of what has preceded us and to innovation.  It’s a complicated subject with a very deep history, myriad technical issues, and elusive artistic concepts that drive the whole thing.  The instrument itself is tangible – you can build it, touch it, feel it, play it, care for it.  But the basic concept is more difficult to explain.  This is not like the admiration directed toward the first person to eat an artichoke or lobster, rather it is the understanding of the collective contributions of countless people through the ages.  The intertwined relationship between the instrument, its music, its builders, and its players is like those quirky philosophical questions about trees in the forest, smoke and fire, chickens and eggs – or Bill Cosby’s why is there air?  Any organbuilder knows the answer to that question:  There’s air to blow organ pipes, air to leak through worn gaskets, air to cause ciphers.  We are the heirs of erring air.  (Remember E. Power Biggs talking about pumping the bellows of an 18th century British organ – “handling the handle that Händel handled.”) 

However lofty our introduction to the pipe organ, once we are engaged in our careers we often move from one deadline to another somehow forgetting that original inspiration.  We may know the thrilling sensation of a huge Swell box opening, allowing the sound of powerful reeds to gradually join the choir procession during a festival service.  (If the procession is slow and in the middle of the service, we could use the Swell box to gradually join a gradual Gradual!)  But what do we have in mind if we are in an organ chamber struggling to get a Swell motor to work properly – technical issues, skinned knuckles, and holed leather, or that spectacular procession, banners a’flying?  Try whistling a hymn tune as you work – I recommend Westminster Abbey!

The struggle between art and commerce is well defined and frequently written about.  A friend who loves to paint recently put it succinctly when she said she simply doesn’t have the time for it.  Who was it that said, “time is money?”  At what point does the thrill of creating a monumental pipe organ become a battle between time and money? 

I recently stumbled across a quotation from Daniel Barenboim: “Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”  Did Mr. Barenboim forget the past as a third face?  Aren’t great works of art at least informed by the past?  Certainly pipe organs are.

There’s a debate in the world of pleasure boats between the merits of wood and fiberglass hulls.  A purist might say there’s nothing like the sound of water slapping against a wooden hull.  But there are many arguments in favor of fiberglass boats.  Does this debate actually confuse questions of personal preference or convenience with whether or not it’s a good boat?

The debate between the merits of mechanical and electric keyboard actions has been raging for more than fifty years.  It seems to me that one can argue that the debate couldn’t really get started until electric and pneumatic actions were well-developed and prevalent so there was strong basis for comparison.  I’ve said many times that the result of the debate is that our organbuilders are producing excellent instruments using all kinds of actions.  The questions surrounding the construction of organ cases, the design of wind systems, or the deployment of stops in divisions are just as fundamental as those concerning keyboard action.  Let’s debate the relative merits of balanced or suspended tracker key actions, or whether the keyboards of electric action instruments should be pivoted in the middle or at the end.  My point is I want to play and listen to good organs, well conceived and beautifully made.  Just as I’ve had great days sailing in both wooden and fiberglass boats, I’ve been thrilled by both tracker and electric action pipe organs.

When I say I’ve been thrilled by both tracker and electric action pipe organs I have also to say that I’ve equally been disappointed by both. 

One thing that sets the pipe organ apart from other instruments in my opinion is the extraordinary variety from one example to another.  I know that a clarinetist recognizes countless differences between clarinets, but how can one compare a three-rank continuo organ with a mighty two-hundred-rank job in a huge church?  The experiences they produce are worlds apart as is the music that can be played on them?  (I’ve noticed that we often talk about what music an organ can play – as if there would not be an organist involved.)  What’s really funny is how we try to mix those experiences.  Widor’s famous Toccata is a staple of the modern organ repertory and it’s played as often on ten-stop organs as on those of the scale for which it was conceived – many, many more than ten stops.  And it’s not just about the number of stops but more important, the acoustics of the room.  I remember vividly the first time I played that piece in an appropriate acoustical setting.  It was in Lakewood, Ohio in a cavernous church building with a marble floor.  It was a Wicks organ of only moderate size but the way the harmonies rolled around the place helped me understand the piece more fully.  Of course, this was after I had played the same piece in perhaps dozens of small, dry rooms on dozens of small, dry organs.

It seems to me that our love affair with pieces like that has led us toward an artificial world.  We know that thirty-two foot stops add a lot to large-scale organ music, so we add artificial thirty-twos to organs in churches that do not have space for them.  Ideally, we design organs using mathematical formulas that have been proven through the ages.  The Golden Section, for example, is a classic system of ratios that defines the proportions of countless structures built over thousands of years.  There’s a pleasing naturalness when an instrument is conceived well in relationship to the room it graces.  Hearing thirty-two foot tone in a building with a fifteen foot ceiling leaves one somehow confused.

An organist’s work is often defined by the struggle between tradition and innovation.  Christmas is coming.  Are you preparing for the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth Christmas in the same church?  How do you program innovative exciting music without disappointing the expectations of tradition?  Think of the congregation that was first to sing O Come, All Ye Faithful (there must have been one).  Did anyone go home that day grumbling that the organist didn’t understand the value of tradition?  One piece that struck me at first hearing as a future chestnut is John Rutter’s Candlelight Carol.  Easily singable, absolutely beautiful, text full of meaning – I wonder if that’s what people experienced when they first heard In dulci jubilo some seven hundred years ago. 

I had a parallel musing the first time I visited St. Sulpice in Paris.  I wondered how many of the older people in the congregation would remember Marcel Dupré as their parish organist.  It’s a stretch, but it’s at least possible that a few of them remembered Widor – it was fewer than sixty-five years after his retirement.  Think what those people must have experienced in the way of musical tradition when so much of what they heard from the organ was improvised!

One of my greatest professional struggles has involved wedding music.  It’s the privilege of the parish organist to be a part of so many celebrations.  I played for more than four hundred weddings at one church.  It’s a thrill to be able to share one’s skills to enhance such an occasion.  I didn’t keep proper records but I would be fascinated to see a spreadsheet that showed a statistical analysis of the music I played at all those weddings.  At what percentage of weddings did I play Mendelssohn, Wagner, or Schubert?  How often did a couple listen to eight or ten choices before lighting up when I offered Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring the evening they were choosing music?  It’s very likely that the only time a couple actually chooses what will be played live on a pipe organ will be their wedding.  How does an organist introduce creative and meaningful music into a wedding service without disappointing the expectations of families and their friends?  When I was first an independent organbuilder I had as an employee a young woman who worked for me for nearly ten years.  She was both a terrific worker and a close friend.  She had many opportunities to hear my reports of “last Saturday’s wedding” when I would regale her with the trials of the wedding organist.  (Maybe there’s a movie title in that sentence.)  It is a great regret of mine that she formed such an impression of my feelings about weddings that when she got married she asked someone else to play the organ.

Is the future of the pipe organ better assured if we sustain tradition or if we find exciting new ways to use it?  How do we strike a balance between those concepts?  Are consumers of organ music always going to be happy with old favorites?  How do we find, write, create those pieces that will become tomorrow’s chestnuts or are today’s chestnuts good enough to last?  And if we find such a piece, how do we introduce it in the place of something else? 

What is the future form of the pipe organ?  Can its builders stay faithful to ancient forms while continuing to be innovative? 

What is the future of the economics of organbuilding?  Will churches, schools, concert halls always be willing to commit to such enormous expenditures?  Does our society value artistic expression enough to justify that?  How do we share our passion and enthusiasm in the interest of the future of our art?  Do we assume that a strong future for our art will add to the cultural wealth of society?  How can we sustain the wealth of the heritage of our instrument in the world of the sound-bite, the mega-byte, the Big Gulp®, the Big Mac®, the Playstation®, VCR, DVD, or PCD.  With music education in public schools in decline, who will be the next generation of organists and who will be the next generation of music lovers?

We are stewards of a glorious heritage.  It’s essential that we find new ways to communicate that wealth.  We must be informed by the past, but we shouldn’t dwell on it.  As we are informed by the past, we are better able to inform the future.  How many ways can we read the phrase, The Past Becomes the Future?