Some of the best pipe organs in the world are made by George Taylor and John Boody and their team of craftspeople in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It is a business in which the employees require long acculturation into the history and finer points of the trade. They are able to trace lineages of who taught whom in the overlapping networks of apprenticeship among shops that do similar work around the world. In this fraternity, which includes people living and others long dead, the spirit of emulation and rivalry is intense; they try to outdo one another in making the best organs possible. The work is historically and socially situated in this way, and seems to invite each of its practitioners to experience his or her own development as a craftsperson as a chapter in a longer historical arc.
In the United States (but not Germany, for example), the idea of apprenticeship is criticized for being too narrow an education. It is said that what the economy demands is workers who are flexible. The ideal seems to be that they shouldn’t be burdened with any particular set of skills or knowledge; what is wanted is a generic smartness, the kind one is certified to have by admission to an elite university. This fits well with our ideal of the unencumbered self, and with Kant’s exhortation to view ourselves under the generic heading “rational being.” We are told the economy is in a state of radical flux; “disruption” is spoken of as though it were a measure of value creation, and so a twenty-first-century education must form workers into material that is similarly indeterminate and disruptable. The less situated, the better.
But consider that when you go deep into some particular skill or art, it trains your powers of concentration and perception. You become more discerning about the objects you are dealing with and, if all goes well, begin to care viscerally about quality, because you have been initiated into an ethic of caring about what you are doing. Usually this happens by the example of some particular person, a mentor, who exemplifies that spirit of craftsmanship. You hear disgust in his voice, or see pleasure on his face, in response to some detail that would be literally invisible to someone not initiated. In this way, judgment develops alongside emotional involvement, unified in what Polanyi calls personal knowledge. Technical training in such a setting, though narrow in its immediate application, may be understood as part of education in the broadest sense: intellectual and moral formation.
Technologists who work in a long tradition with inherited forms also offer a useful contrast to our current image of the innovator-entrepreneur as a sort of existential hero who creates the New ex nihilo. After a period of solitary gestation in a California garage, he emerges to disrupt us and deliver us.1
What emerged in my conversations at Taylor and Boody is that the historical inheritance of a long tradition of organ making seems not to burden these craftspeople, but rather to energize their efforts in innovation. They intend for their organs still to be in use four hundred years from now, and this orientation toward the future requires a critical engagement with the designs and building methods of the past. They learn from the past masters, interrogate their wisdom, and push the conversation further in an ongoing dialectic of reverence and rebellion. Their own progress in skill and understanding is thus a contribution to something larger; their earned independence of judgment represents a deepening of the craft itself. This is a story about the progressive possibilities of tradition, then.
It is a story that is relevant to our current economic moment. With global labor markets and progress in automation, the wealthy countries will surely never again have mass employment in manufacturing; I am not suggesting that is in the cards. But there are indications that we are on the cusp of a new renaissance of small-batch, specialty manufacturing in the United States, and probably in other places too.
It would be hard to overstate the excitement you hear in people’s voices when they start talking about some of the new digital tools that have drastically reduced the cost of prototyping (and some of these tools are used at Taylor and Boody, despite their antiquarian image). Design ideas can be turned into real things, and tried out, without huge financial risk. This plays to the strengths of tinkerers and inventors, those erstwhile American types who may become prominent once again. Ironically, a decades-old pipe organ shop in rural Virginia, which is caught up in a conversation with earlier centuries, may offer some guidance for the new “new economy.”
TAYLOR AND BOODY
Pipe organs were to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.
A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this latter role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!2
To be the maker of such an organ, a man must have a bit of sacrilege in him. Yet he must also have something like reverence, as the pipe organ comes to us through tradition. Such are the paradoxes of the organ maker.
For my appointment with John Boody, I rode west from Richmond to Afton on Route 6, then found my way to Hebron Road near Staunton, a narrow ribbon of blacktop that winds through the green cattle farms of Augusta County, to an area drained by Eidson Creek.3 Taylor and Boody is located in a former schoolhouse that stands atop a rise in the land, directly across from an ancient cemetery and church, Hebron Presbyterian. They make organs from scratch, starting with locally felled trees for their sawmill and ingots of lead and tin for their foundry. Sixteen people work there. Their most elaborate organs cost in the ballpark of two million dollars apiece, and business is good.
The cemetery’s stone boundary marker, dated 1746, had me wondering—are people buried here on Hebron Road who knew of Bach as a contemporary, and might have anticipated one of his works for the pipe organ as a new release? I pulled open the outer door of the shop building to reveal an alcove suffused with an even-tempered daylight; a short flight of wooden stairs creaked as I mounted them to an inner set of doors. In certain old buildings one feels a patina of use and settled purpose that strikes one sensually. One feels already oriented, as though a trace has been left by the movements of people engaged in some steady activity.
The inner set of doors opened into a very large undivided space. The entire west-facing wall was windows looking out onto rolling green farmland. Beneath these windows were workbenches that looked as though they had grown there; atop the benches lay planes and chisels and all the hand tools of the cabinetmaker’s art. In this room there was something like a wooden space shuttle taking shape in outline—the case work for Opus 57, destined for the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsford, New York. Like composers, the makers of organs designate their works by sequential opus number. I hadn’t time to take it in before a mustachioed guy holding a chisel asked me, “Are you the clavichord maker?”
I had to reply that, whatever a clavichord is, I’m not the guy who makes them. “Is John around? I’m a bit early.”
“Through those doors.”
Through the doors was a smaller room, around the perimeter of which were heavy floor-standing mortisers, drill presses, grinders, layout tables, and some other implements I couldn’t identify. There were two men, one probably about forty and long-haired, the other in his fifties and short-haired.
“Hey. I’m looking for John.”
“Boody-Man? Through those doors. The orange ones,” the younger one said.
The orange doors opened into another vast room, this one a modern addition to the schoolhouse. Open to the sunlight on one side through a rolled-up bay door, it had all the equipment of a production woodshop. A dust collection system ran through galvanized duct to each machine. John Boody, who appears to be about sixty, was wearing earplugs, jeans, and a blue T-shirt, standing before a 1960s-era Delta twelve-inch table saw with a big, beautiful piece of walnut in his hand. He noticed me and waved, then proceeded to rip the walnut. He pushed it halfway across the saw, walked around to the outfeed table, pulled it the rest of the way through, and turned off the machine. Then he came over and greeted me cheerfully, still wearing his earplugs.
“I’m early, so if you’re in the middle of something, I can wait,” I said loudly.
“Nah.”
He took a coiled air line from its perch on the wall and blew the black sawdust off his clothes. “You want to see some pipe making?” “Yes.” There would be no preliminaries in this conversation. In the pipe shop John introduced me to Jeff Peterson, a reticent man of about fifty, with long hair, tattoos, and the vibe of an old-school biker. His tool cabinet sported some Harley insignia and a bodacious swimsuit model. Jeff was using a type of wood plane called a cabinet scraper, drawing it toward him in long, even strokes. But he wasn’t scraping wood, he was scraping a sheet made of a very particular mix of lead and tin. The metal peeled off in delicate strips, similar to wood chips but not curly. He handed me one; it was soft. John explained that the tin and lead had arrived as solid ingots, were melted in the shop’s furnace, mixed to the proper ratio, and poured into long sheets on the casting table, tapered in thickness. After this foundry work, the sheets were pounded with a drop hammer, a relic machine made in the nineteenth century that sits next to the casting table. The pounding anneals the metal, making it malleable. The scraping Jeff was currently doing gives it a certain historically correct look. Meanwhile Robbie Lawson, in his thirties and clean-cut, sat at a workbench with a printout of numbers, a scribing compass, and sheets of this proprietary metal. He gauged their thickness with a deep-throated dial micrometer, then scribed sections of annuli (doughnuts) on them: truncated cones as unfolded onto two dimensions. These lines were for cutting out sections of sheet metal, which he then bent around a cone-shaped wooden mandrel. Finally, each section was soldered together edgewise by Jeff to form the tapered toe of an organ pipe. Robbie worked as a mechanic at a Volkswagen shop before coming to work at Taylor and Boody in 1996. Jeff began as a pipe maker at the Rodgers Organ Company in Eugene, Oregon, and has been at Taylor and Boody about seventeen years.
The pipes they were making on this day were for a restoration job: an organ built in 1830 by Henry Erben. The lowest three pipes of this organ had been abducted, “borrowed” for another organ at some point in the last 170-odd years, and though they were recovered, in the course of this misadventure their windways had been altered and their ends chopped off. Some of the other pipes had gone brittle, and their ends had crumbled, requiring extensions to be soldered on. The entire Clarionet stop was missing. (A stop is a group of pipes that get activated when an organist “pulls out the stop”: one of those knobs that you see on an organ console. These groups of pipes are often meant to mimic the sound of some particular instrument, in this case the Clarionet, or clarinet. Some of these instruments are extinct, and exist now only as organ stops.) John explained that this was fairly typical, and that European organs have had the worst of it, especially during World War II when their pipes sometimes got melted down for munitions and many churches were bombed. In repairing the deteriorated pipes and fabricating the missing ones, Jeff and Robbie had duplicated the details of the intact pipes, copying the Clarionet pipes from another Erben organ. John offers as a rough rule of thumb that restoring an organ costs about twice as much as building one from scratch.
THE ENTREPRENEUR
From the pipe shop we made our way to John’s office, a choice space in the old part of the building. In the corner stood a small woodstove; in a rack above his desk were tubes of architectural-looking drawings. Another rack, at floor level, held white pattern boards dense with inscrutable markings and holes, and lettering in various languages. John’s desk was a purposeful riot of tools and books, both antique and modern, all evidently in use. A block plane lay next to an unopened pack of Bosch jigsaw blades; a catalog of modern woodworking machines lay next to a facsimile edition of Dom Bedos’s The Organ Builder. Illustrated with foldout drawings of exquisite mechanical detail, this work was originally published as part of Diderot’s Encylopédie. John Boody reads technical treatises written in German and Swedish as well as English, some printed in a Gothic script requiring paleographic skills. A scholar and a musician as well as an artisan, he presents the image of a humanist from another era.
John offered me a seat. Asked how he got into organ making, he says he took every technical class his high school offered. Then he went to university as a music major, specializing in voice. His trajectory prepared him, then, to fall in love with the organ both as a musical instrument and as something to be fabricated. “In my freshman year somebody gave me a small organ, and it was all over.” Here was a field that would stretch his ingenuity and give it aesthetic focus. But how did an instrument associated with ancient Saxon cathedrals come to be made in Staunton, Virginia? For Taylor and Boody build primarily Baroque organs, and hold a prominent place in what organ builders call the Baroque revival, or more broadly the organ reform movement. I asked John how the business got started.
He and his partner George Taylor had worked together for almost seven years at the organ shop of John Brombaugh in Ohio. Brombaugh, in turn, had apprenticed with the German organ maker Rudolf von Beckerath. Speaking of his time at Brombaugh’s shop, Boody said, “We built about thirty organs in that partnership. John’s a totally creative person, and had this concept of returning organ building to its historic base instruments. He was fascinated by these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century organs in northern Germany, so he went around and studied them. John did this whole return, with George and me and a couple of other partners, a five-way partnership, which is a horrible thing to do. Really one boss, but five people to share all the financial loss. One year I think we made thirty cents an hour. But we shaped up this concept of returning to the historic principles of organ building and authentic construction, and we practiced it.”
Eventually George Taylor and John Boody struck out on their own. “Brombaugh gave us one contract, and that’s our Opus 2. We built it in the garage behind my house. In ’79 we decided we didn’t want to be close to, you know, a big steel city, Middletown. It wasn’t very nice. We came down here and looked around and found this building. It was like wagons going east. We loaded all the stuff and all the families and all the furniture, all the lumber and all the tools, the machinery, and we moved down here and we spent nine months renovating this building. Since then, this is our home, and we’ve never looked back, as they say. Well, we may have, but it was too late. And now I have my son Erik working here.” He also has a number of workers who started learning their trade at other organ makers’ shops, including the one where Taylor and Boody themselves started forty years ago. The making of historically inspired organs seems to be the business of a community, one that is constituted by overlapping lineages of apprenticeship.
“We were young and full of piss at that time. You know how you are when you’re thirty years old and you think you can do anything. More hard-core as far as historic principles and all that. That’s how businesses like this get going. It’s part derring-do and part ignorance and part planning and part fate. Luck. You get hooked up with the right people who want to buy your work and pay you to do it.”
Some of this luck took the form of a cultural moment. “The early music scene just exploded in the seventies and eighties. All the harpsichord builders were busy, and all the people who made recorders and wooden flutes and all that—it was huge. At this point, the strong have survived, and it’s greatly more concentrated, not as diffuse as it was, and the market is not as large. But we’re lucky—we’re tied to the church organ thing. When one denomination is giving it up, the next one is reviving it. The Catholics now [2007] are going after high-quality music because the pope is interested in that. He’s a German and a pianist, and he knows good pipe organs. He doesn’t want Catholic churches to be having guitar bands anymore.” John pronounced “guitar” with the stress on the first syllable.
I asked if the pope was actually sending word down. “Oh yeah! So for example St. Mary’s Cathedral in Austin, Texas, they tore out their pipe organ about twenty years ago and have had an electronic organ, and now they want to buy a new one. I think it’s a great thing for the church. There’s a renaissance going on. People are conservative, I think. They have a yearning for their roots. They’re practicing the Latin mass in this parish. They used to do it in the closet so nobody’d know they were doing it, and now it’s okay.”
This yearning for roots creates a complex set of demands and opportunities that Taylor and Boody has to be responsive to. “We’re in a strange place, because here we are, making a re-creation of an historic thing; we have documentation of organs going back three, four hundred years, and have gone and studied them in Europe. But we’re weird: we’re trying to make a living, for one thing, and make this whole thing practical, so we have to make the parts in good order and build to the contract price, which is an insane thing to do for what we’re producing, and we have to make something that’s going to perform technically or our customers are going to be coming back and getting on us. At the same time the ethos of the instrument has to be authentic—that’s why people are paying big money for us to do the work. So we’re jammed in the cracks, trying to make a realistic business out of this and at the same time be as authentic as we can. The thread of what we’re doing is totally authentic.”
As we talked, John situated his trade in the larger currents of modernization. At some point the making of organs “went one hundred percent industrialized factory building,” but the results were inferior. “It didn’t satisfy, so there was a retrenchment. There were also electronic organs available. But there’s a part of the population that will only take this.” John swept his arm dramatically to his drafting table, where a freshly penciled front view of his latest commission lay. “It’s a totally handcrafted, handmade object, and some people are willing to pay an enormous premium for it. They realize the performance musically is superior. And that’s the only justification.”
In fact the demand for organs such as Taylor and Boody make was created by an astonishing musical experience—the discovery of a sound that had been covered over by sediments of changes in the organ, and had to be recovered through a kind of archaeology that was at once an engineering project and a cultural project, guided by musical considerations.
THE ORGAN WARS
Unlike, say, a piano, the organ assumes an indefinite variety of forms as organ builders try out new ideas; it has always been an instrument in flux. Organs also vary according to national cultures and the liturgical practices of different denominations. Such practices change over time, as do the architectural trends embraced by different communities of faith. The physical space in which an organ is installed determines a good deal of the character of the instrument. Organ builders, then, are part of a conversation among musicians, architects, congregants, and even theologians, which goes back over half a millennium. More than any other musical instrument, as an installed fixture the pipe organ is a situated thing, impossible to understand without reference to its history.
This ongoing conversation about organs can be contentious—in the organ wars that have erupted at various points, nothing less than the fate of men’s souls has been at stake. This becomes most clear in traditions that reject the organ altogether. The Puritans who settled in New England rejected pipe organs as a spur to idolatry and pridefulness, the handiwork of Lucifer. One Eastern Orthodox theologian, Pavel Florensky, denounced the organ as an embodiment of Renaissance humanism (that secret rot at the heart of Western Catholicism), producing a sound “too slow, submerged, and alien, too engulfed in the darkness of human nature, for the crystalline transparency of Orthodox liturgical life.”4
There have been quarrels within the camp of organ lovers as well, and in the twentieth century these have turned on musical considerations more than theological questions. Yet the passions on view in these quarrels suggest it is the larger issue of “modernity” that has been at stake, no less fraught with consequences for men’s souls than the theological battles of another era.
The first shot in the twentieth-century organ wars was fired by Albert Schweitzer. The foremost interpreter of Bach on the organ at the turn of the century, Schweitzer had visited the Liederhalle in Stuttgart in 1896 to hear the new organ that the newspapers were raving about. It was played by an organist whom Schweitzer held in high regard. In his autobiography Out of My Life and Thought, he writes, “When I heard the harsh tone of the much belauded instrument and in a Bach fugue which Lange played to me perceived a chaos of sounds in which I could not distinguish the separate voices, my foreboding that the modern organ meant in that respect a step not forward but backward suddenly became a certainty.”5 Schweitzer went on to write a pamphlet that essentially inaugurated the organ reform movement.
To understand how something emphatically “modern” might have struck Schweitzer as “a step not forward but backward,” it is necessary to know the trajectory the organ was on at the time. It was becoming a gadget, impressive more for its technical ingenuity than its musical qualities. It also got much, much bigger. This process, which was just gaining momentum as Schweitzer wrote, culminated in the 1930s with such exaggerated instruments as the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium organ in Atlantic City, which has over 33,000 pipes (the exact number is unknown), driven by blowers with a total of six hundred horsepower, at about thirty times the wind pressure of a Baroque organ. The Guinness Book of World Records calls it the loudest musical instrument in the world, producing an “ear-splitting volume, more than six times the volume of the loudest locomotive whistle.” Because of the wind pressures involved, the pipes are strapped down, lest they launch through the roof. The biggest pipe weighs over three thousand pounds and is sixty-four feet in length. It produces a tone that is in fact not a tone; at eight hertz, it is roughly what you would hear if a military transport helicopter happened to be hovering overhead. The complaint, then, is that such an organ is not very musical.
“ELECTRICITY IS HERE TO STAY”
The reform inaugurated by Schweitzer was directed, in the first place, against the electropneumatic control that had replaced mechanical keyboard actions. Electropneumatic control made the action easier, allowing higher wind pressures and hence greater volume, with no corresponding increase in effort at the keyboard. Overcoming the necessity of direct mechanical linkages running from keys to pipes, electropneumatic remote control also allowed a proliferation of stops, corresponding to different sounds. The “orchestral” organ was born; it seeks to imitate every instrument of the orchestra. Through technological progress new things were possible; the limitations of the organ, and therefore also its distinct character, had begun to dissolve into open-ended possibility: the organ as synthesizer.
But since an electropneumatic action has its own inherent “time constants,” as a physicist would say (here, the time required for a valve to open and shut), the organist has less control over his phrasing; the keyboard has little sense of “touch.” Schweitzer argued for a return to mechanical action. Yet the organ builder Lawrence Phelps tells us that what Schweitzer said about mechanical action and ideal phrasing “was easily passed over as too idealistic and out of touch with reality, for everyone knew that electricity was here to stay.”
In the musical world as elsewhere, there seems to have been a sense of techno-inevitability, a readiness to regard technology as a force with its own magical imperatives, rather than as an instrument of human intentions. The saying “Electricity is here to stay” suggested that the growing prevalence of electricity was due to the working out of some rational necessity, and to deny this was to reveal oneself as “out of touch with reality.” Such a reflex is often part of the makeup of those who take themselves to be the most forward-looking. Yet the progression of an engineering art seems to require a freer sort of relationship to the past without the progressive prejudice, as well as a critical stance toward one’s own times. In retrospect, it is the enthusiasts of electricity who appear to have been caught up in a strange idealism, a willful disregard for function, which, after all, is the whole point of technology.
Schweitzer’s critique of electropneumatic action might be taken as an instance of the wider antimodernist sentiments that were circulating at the turn of the century on both sides of the Atlantic. Such sentiments rested on intuitions of something gone amiss in modern culture. But many found it difficult to back up these intuitions with arguments, so they were dismissed as manifestations of romantic discontent. Yet Schweitzer’s critique of the organ of his day was detailed and at bottom mechanical. It was emphatically rational, and pointed to something irrational in the heedless embrace of new possibilities merely because they are possible. Schweitzer prevailed, enough so to create a critical mass of dissidents in the musical world. The defects of the organs he criticized became visible as defects because eventually it dawned on people that they were not very musical.
Let’s pause here to note that the critique of current trends in automotive design that I offered in Chapter 4 closely parallels Schweitzer’s critique of the organs of his day. Both are arguments for direct mechanical linkages and hence greater “touch”; both demand that an instrument be supple in transmitting sensorimotor information. And both critiques require bringing a certain cultural disposition into view: the fetish of automaticity and disconnection. As we have seen, this is the deep tendency of a culture that connects the upward march of human freedom and dignity to an ever greater abstraction from material contingencies.
It is fashionable to scoff at the idea of a “privileged” moment in culture (for example, the Baroque era for organs, or the decades before the 1990s for automobiles) that is better than any other moment. Let it be conceded that the orchestral organs of the early twentieth century must have swelled the worshippers of that time with an aesthetic-religious experience no less real than that of their Baroque predecessors. To speak of decadence, then, smacks of nostalgia, that thought crime that popular writers are quick to detect in anyone who glances backward.
Yet our low regard for nostalgia often seems not to rest on some substantive standard of excellence, in light of which a preference for the past is seen as missing the mark, but rather expresses idolatry of the present. This kind of “forward-thinking” is at bottom an apologetic species of conservatism, as it defers to and celebrates whatever is currently ascendant.
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS
But what is this Baroque sound that the organ reformers loved so much? Does it go beyond the control of phrasing made possible by mechanical action? To get some feel for what the organ reform movement was all about, I decided to call an organist I knew, Frank Archer. Frank agreed to meet me at the First Presbyterian Church in Farmville, Virginia, for an informal organ clinic, on an instrument made by none other than Rudolf von Beckerath, the German teacher of Taylor and Boody’s teacher.
Frank sat at the honey-colored oak console in the empty church and played a few single notes. “You hear that? Chiff.” I wasn’t sure what I was listening for. “It’s that breathiness in the initial attack of the note. It’s different in different stops, and it’s crucial to the sound of a Baroque organ.” Frank pulled out a few stops, one at a time, each corresponding to a group of pipes designed to produce a particular sound, and after a couple of minutes I could hear what he was talking about: a faint rush of air, audible a split second before the tone, that gave the note a softly percussive quality. With the chiffier stops, it was like listening to a human singer at close range, a husky alto, and almost feeling the hot puffs of air from her lips against the nape of your neck with each phoneme.
Frank explained that chiff makes overlapping melodic lines distinguishable in contrapuntal music, since the initiation of every note is marked by this breath. Without chiff, the music becomes soft and muddy. As organs are instruments played in large, resonant spaces, keeping separate voices distinguishable is an inherent problem for the same reason that voice intelligibility is a problem in movie theaters: the ear receives sound reflected from various surfaces, following different paths and therefore arriving at the ear at different times. What began as a distinct note becomes a blur. In movie theaters, this problem is controlled by covering the walls and floor with sound-deadening materials that minimize reflection. In an organ-listening space, such measures would kill the powerful resonance that organs have traditionally enjoyed in their stone cathedrals, and that composers assume in writing for the organ. Sitting at the console, Frank related how Beckerath had returned years after the initial installation to check on his organ at Farmville and was horrified to see that cushions had been added to the pews for the comfort of the parishioners, and carpet to the floor. In a thick Hamburg accent, he asked where he might rent a truck. “I vill take zees to ze dump!”
The sustain of an organ, crucial to its aesthetic character, is largely an architectural fact—the church is part of the instrument.6 Yet this desired resonance is in tension with the listeners’ ability to discriminate separate voices. Chiff eases this tension by punctuating each note with a nontonal attack; a sound that will not reflect because it is not “coherent” as a wave form, and decays quickly.
The acoustical logic of the ancient organs’ chiff, then, is impeccable. As a pneumatic instrument, the organ has within itself the resources to overcome a problem inherent to its site, and the Baroque organ builders seem to have understood this. Yet chiff is something that had to be recovered by the organ reform movement, as it had been lost due to the advent of deliberate nicking of the languid (part of the windway of a pipe). Why would one do this? Pursuing this question reveals a fascinating case of changes in musical taste that are tied to a kind of cultural sedimentation, and rest ultimately on a process of physical decay. Writing in 1969, Lawrence Phelps explains:
Why was nicking introduced anyway in the early 18th century? Was it really because of a changing taste? I think not. I have suggested that the practice of nicking was introduced to make new pipework cohere better with the pipework of previous builders; older pipework that had lost its sizzle due to the aging of the metal and the wearing of the edge of the languids by the passage of a few decades of wind. This aging and the change it produced in the sound of pipes was a perfectly natural physical phenomenon. Making small nicks on the edge of the languid was found to bring about a similar effect artificially in new pipes, but the effect was of course compounded with each generation of builders. Thus, the practice of nicking eventually, though very gradually, brought about the change of taste that produced the smooth, lifeless, opaque tone so common in the flue-work of even the best of the romantic builders and which reached ridiculous extremes in the early decades of this century. We, moderns, having been re-exposed to the natural sound of undoctored new pipes, have found that it restores meaning to the music and the instrument we love so much, and we know that this sound is here to stay.7
Through sediments of forgetfulness, the original excellence of the pipe organ fell into oblivion, “compounded with each generation,” as Phelps says. The muddy sound characteristic of erosion of the languids became an aesthetic fact of the West, culturally established as the horizon within which organ music grew comfortable. The crisper musicality proper to the organ had to be recovered through an archaeological effort. Digging through the strata of confusion, organ builders discovered the root cause of their discontent with the twentieth-century sound: metal erosion. Ironically, these antiquarians opened the way for real progress; their work led to a discovery that made possible an unexpected musical freshness—the sound of “undoctored new pipes.”8 In reverse-engineering the old organs, then, the reformers weren’t simply finding technical tricks to accomplish an end they already had in mind. Rather, they were discovering the standard aimed at by those earlier builders. In doing so, they came to affirm that goal as the proper one for “the music and the instrument we love so much.”
This entailed not just a technical accomplishment but a reorientation. In a sense, the judgments of the ancients have become their own judgments. To the casual bystander this looks slavish; it looks like what John Stuart Mill called “the ape-like faculty of imitation” and Kant called “the self-imposed immaturity of mankind.” But in fact it reflects an earned independence of judgment. The organ reformers’ discontent with the present loosened their deference to it, strengthened their opposing critical muscles, and prepared them to be turned in an unexpected direction.
It seems we need to supplement Kierkegaard’s psychology. He taught us that reverence is a prerequisite to rebellion. The organ reform movement sheds light on the other side of this coin: a readiness to rebel—against the self-satisfaction of the age—seems to be prerequisite to discovering something you judge worthy of reverence. To affirm something in this way, freely and with discernment, is surely one element of what it means to be an individual.
Notice that in this movement, liberation is the beginning, not the end, of an education into independence. As the term “liberal education” suggests, to be educated requires getting free from—led out from—taken-for-granted certainties. But when we go deep into a practice, so that its ends become our own, we find ourselves situated in the jig that surrounds the practice, for example the rich and contentious inheritance of organ making, which is disciplined by musical considerations. This jig imposes some definite shape on one’s own life as one who is devoted to making good organs. Within it there is room for, indeed a necessity of, interpretation of the standards and of how best to realize them, so the organ maker necessarily puts his own stamp on his product. We can understand this as a richer, more highly elaborated version of what the short-order cook does when he improvises to meet the demands of the kitchen.
After I spent the morning with Frank at the console, patiently demonstrating the musical significance of the various sounds made by the organ, he allowed me to go inside the instrument and watch the action while he played some Bach. Clambering around on a catwalk with a flashlight, I felt encased in a breathing organism as Bach’s musical intelligence, and Frank’s, surrounded me like a heartbeat. The distinct lines of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor were visibly realized as the layered movements of Beckerath’s artfully arranged aluminum tracker rods, each with ball joint swivels just like a motorcycle shift linkage, sounding notes above me and below me, to the left and the right in interlocking themes. It was like being in the middle of a lively dinner conversation of close friends, my head swiveling to catch the gestures accompanying each syllable of Frank’s interpretation. At the end of the day, I felt better prepared to return to Taylor and Boody and go deeper into their world.
LEATHERING AND NIBBLING, AND DIFFERENT TEMPERAMENTS
As I followed John across the assembly room, we came across Chris Peterson (“Pete”) releathering the wedge-shaped bellows for the Henry Erben organ, which would be pumped by the organist himself while playing, using his feet. “This is very nice what you’ve done here. Did you do this with your router?” John asked.
“I did it with my chisel.” Pete had opened up a large crack in the face of the bellows, resulting in a square hole about an inch on each side, then plugged it with a new piece of wood cut to fit precisely. Finer cracks he covered with leather on the inside; the bellows needs to be completely airtight. “I put a Harley sticker in there too, hope you don’t mind.”
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. People who make stuff, and people who restore old stuff, often want to leave a message to be found by some bloke in the future. It is fun to discover these, and to contribute. In any case, Pete clearly didn’t regard this organ as an inviolable fetish object. It had been entrusted to him for a reason—to make it functional once again—and to do that, he was going to have to make it his own for a spell, before passing it on to the future.
Penciled on the wood of the bellows were the words “Pull open 7 ½.” This had apparently been written at some earlier point in the organ’s history. Pete said, “What I have down is one hundred fifty-five millimeters.” I took him to mean the tangential travel of the bellows at the point farthest from its hinges.
John pulled out his tape measure, with millimeters and inches both, and said, “Seven and a half inches is one hundred ninety, not one hundred fifty-five.”
Pete said, “These hinges were in disarray, so that might have something to do with it.”
John suggested the hinges were “cheap Victorian cast iron.”
Pete allowed that “they drilled like cast” when he restored them, but thought they had been put on when the bellows was releathered in 1957, and that the problem lay with the location of the ribs of the bellows in relation to the hinges, causing excessive wear. Pete explained that he builds a bellows differently to avoid this problem.
I asked how long the new leather is expected to last.
“Long enough that I won’t have to do it again.”
John explained that the longevity of leather used to be a bigger problem, but it has been alleviated by getting back to a vegetable-based tanning process, which leaves more oil in the leather than harsh chemical tanners.9 “We’ve used Cabretta goat leather here, which seems to stand up quite well in movable pieces. It’s got a lively feel to it.” He handed me a piece of thin white material that was unbelievably supple, like an old T-shirt.
“Pete has used all traditional hide glue as well, for attaching the leather to the wood, and that’s so the next guy who has to releather it can get it off. You just heat it up with some hot rags; that’s how Pete got the old stuff off. With a modern glue, you’d be bleeding trying to get it off.”
Pete said, “You’d have to sand the leather off, or hand-plane it off, or cut it off with a chisel.”
I asked, what if you just wanted to get the job done and weren’t concerned for future restorations? In unison, Pete and John said, “Titebond.” (This is a popular brand of wood glue.) In many of the details of organ making, the recovery of traditional techniques seems to be motivated not by a hankering after the past, but rather a concern for those who will come later.
* * *
Shannon Regi makes all the wooden pipes, which have a different sound than metal pipes; most organs include both types. She came to Taylor and Boody looking for a short-term job after college, and never left. Currently she was working on the reed pipes for Taylor and Boody’s Opus 57, which is inspired by an organ made in 1800 by David Tannenberg. John Boody estimates the organ will take about fourteen thousand man-hours to complete. As the name suggests, reed pipes have a reed that vibrates against a shallot, exciting the air column in the pipe just as in a clarinet. Shannon was fitting resonators to the reed blocks, intently nibbling away at them with very small cuts while standing at her bench against a west-facing window. “She works for eight hours and there’s this little tiny pile of chips under her workbench and you wonder what she’s doing all day.” John’s floor boss ribbing was clearly in jest. Did it perhaps carry an edge as well? He is the boss, after all. The slightest curl at her lips, Shannon’s gaze didn’t shift. She ignored John and kept at her pipes. For they indeed seemed to be her pipes, and she was too absorbed to acknowledge our presence. John continued in a vein that seemed to exonerate small chip piles. “We do a lot of work like this where all the parts have to be fit together, and every part is different, and every part has to be paid attention to, measured, filed, and fit together.
“All the parts are different sizes because they’re related to the musical scale. We can get efficient with some parts, like tracker rods—we might make a thousand at once. But generally everything is one-off.” Not only do many of the parts within a single organ scale with pitch, but one organ may have a different tuning than another, with correspondingly different dimensions throughout. The tuning of a keyboard instrument is called its temperament, and there are several different temperaments extant, corresponding to the kind of music an organ is designed for.
John pointed out that, ironically, his shop is less mass-production-oriented than a sixteenth-century organ shop would have been, since he is not making many copies of a single kind of organ. The explosion of historical knowledge since the 1960s, spanning different regions and epochs, and the corollary demand for diverse kinds of organs, means that there is very little repetition in the shop.
THE BOSS
I asked John about his role as boss. “The clock is ticking here all the time. It takes a hundred thousand a month to run this place—that’s our operating cost. That means we’ve got to turn one point two million a year, and if we’re not, the ship is sinking. So the guys may not feel it, but George and I are under that strain, and Cindy, we’re talking about that all the time. We try to be very organized.” Cindy is the bookkeeper.
What about motivating employees? “We have to encourage them to have good work habits. We post a schedule of work to be done. And we have rules.” I asked John to elaborate. “Oh yeah, we have a handbook.” He began to quote from the handbook. “Come to work. Work forty hours a week. Come during the core time, which is eight-thirty to four-thirty. Clock out for lunch. Take half an hour for lunch, hopefully not too much more than that. Be diligent.” As he pronounced these straightforward imperatives, it became clear that John is innocent of such developments as “liberation management.” He’s a boss, not a life coach or facilitator of personal growth.
On one of my visits, Robert Hanna was refinishing the casework of the Henry Erben organ. Hanna is not an employee of Taylor and Boody. A specialist in finishes, he is a journeyman in the original, literal sense. He goes wherever the furniture is, traveling by car because the airlines do not allow the chemicals he carries. He is at the very top of his profession, a conservator of multimillion-dollar pieces of furniture, and he makes a lot of money. He is essentially a forensic chemist; he speaks of particular oils, shellacs, acetones, and methylated spirits. He is also a cultural historian, and gave me an impromptu dissertation on the variations in American furniture by regions, periods, the local arboriculture, the ethnicity of the cabinetmaker, and the particular tradition within which he worked (for example, Shaker).
John Boody remained throughout this conversation; he seemed as interested to talk to Hanna as I was. This was a bit of a surprise, given that John was paying Hanna close to a thousand dollars a day, and here we had taken up an hour of his time. John’s view of productivity appears to be a complex one, as it evidently includes talking, the kind that frames the work going on in his shop in historical context.
When Hanna criticized certain illustrious cabinetmakers in the pantheon of Americana, John noted the parallels with organ building, where in restoring organs by old masters you sometimes “see where they were disastrous in how they approached something, choosing poor materials or not understanding how to do something so it would last a long time. You learn from their mistakes.” Over the next several months it became clear to me that such conversations combining history and engineering, guided by a visceral concern for the excellence of organs, are a regular part of working at Taylor and Boody, however much John might groan sometimes about “people standing around flapping their gums.” John himself is the worst offender, instigating these conversations as he moves through the shop.
The conversations seem to enact a particular kind of authority that John has in the shop. It is more like that of a teacher than that of a manager, and I think it is best understood in connection with the idea of “the thread” John mentioned in our first conversation. His role appears to be that of taking what can be learned from the tradition, interrogating it critically, and linking it to an image of perfection to be achieved in the future. The conversations help to make this a shared image. They also locate the goals that the shop is aiming at in the dramatic arc of a history, extending back into the past and forward into the future. In this way, the work is enlivened by a sense of going further on a trajectory they have inherited. Their ingenuity is focused both by the shifting contours of organ making over the centuries and by the timeless standards of engineering, specifically as they contribute to musicality. These provide two different sets of criteria for their performance as organ makers, neither of which is simple enough that it could be reduced to an explicit recipe. Each requires what Polanyi called “personal knowledge,” just as we saw in the case of scientific apprenticeship. Further, these two criteria of historical coherence and musicality aren’t simply in harmony, nor are they simply at odds with each other, but rather exist in a fruitful tension. This tension seems to be the upshot of “the thread.” John’s role is that of keeping it taut by keeping it in the shop’s collective awareness through these conversations.
“THE ORGAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME”
The sense of inheritance that the employees are working within is experienced not as a burden, but as a source of energy. If regarded differently, however, it could easily be a source of complacency, a dragging anchor of stasis. This became clear in a certain controversy related to me by Chris Bono, who has been working at Taylor and Boody since 1988. “The Organ Historical Society will have nothing to do with me,” he said.
A musician as well as an apprentice organ maker in 1988, he volunteered to restore the organ at St. Francis, a Catholic church in Staunton where he got a weekend gig as organist. “The organ wasn’t playable in 1988. It would make some sound, it would kind of wheeze away, but there were pipes leaning every which way, I mean, it was dangerous. Somebody had taken tubes of silicone bathtub caulk and tried to fix the leaks.” It was also covered in plaster dust; under that was coal dust. “So I took the whole organ apart. The concept went from cleaning the organ to ‘Well, now that I’ve got it apart, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to add a this, to add a that.’ I think I had my first child before I was done with the darn thing. But in the end the church got a good organ that I enjoy playing.”
As the disapproval of the Organ Historical Society suggests, Chris’s concern was for musicality more than historical accuracy—“a good organ that I enjoy playing.” The historian adopts a neutral or nonjudgmental stance toward the facts of the past. The preservationist’s love for the old is similarly nonevaluative: it requires of it nothing other than that it be old. The St. Francis organ represented a certain stage in American organ building, and a case can certainly be made that it ought to have been restored according to the original intent of its makers. But the musician wants a good instrument. As an organ maker as well as a musician, Chris could not adopt a nonjudgmental stance toward the facts, as the historian does, nor a deferential one as the preservationist does. Merely as facts, they do not impress him.
Chris made Baroque-style wind-chests and action for the very non-Baroque St. Francis organ. From a certain perspective, this looks perversely anachronistic. But his high regard for the testimony of the more distant past, as against the more proximate past, is informed by the timeless demands of musicality. In striving to meet these demands within the forms available, the organ maker is engaged in a form of rational inquiry. His work wouldn’t have this progressive sense—this quality of being a kind of inquiry—if he didn’t adopt an evaluative stance toward the facts he has inherited, a way of regarding them that is illuminated by “the good.” Here the good in question is simply “a good organ that I enjoy playing.”
THE VOICER
The pipes of an organ must be minutely adjusted to achieve a desired sound. In his exhaustive 1905 treatise The Art of Organ-Building, George Audsley writes,
Experience—tedious and expensive—together with individual talent and infinite patience, are the chief factors which combine to form the Voicer. It does not take a great organist to become expert in the art of voicing; but the voicer should have knowledge of the rudimentary principles of music and the laws which govern the production of musical sounds. In my experience, I have found that men with good voices and capable of using them well in singing, good violinists, and men endowed with patience and great mechanical skill, make good voicers.10
On my third visit to Taylor and Boody, I mentioned to John Boody that I had traveled to Farmville and spent a day with the Beckerath organ, and this seemed to convince him I was serious in wanting to learn about organs. He pushed open the door to a room I hadn’t yet seen. Far from the whine of saws and the pounding of drop hammers, the voicer does his work in the quiet sanctum sanctorum of the organ maker’s shop, where pipes are made to speak.
Here John introduced me to Ryan Albashian. I half expected some Gandalf-looking wizard, but Ryan is impressively normal-looking, even athletic, and appears to be in his early thirties. “Ryan is an organist who then trained as an organ builder, and is now the head voicer here.”
Ryan pauses for effect and says, “Yeah. Head voicer.” The way he says it, it sounds like he intends some double entendre, though I can’t be sure. He then brings the pipe he is holding in his hands to his mouth and blows on the end of it, exciting its harmonics. “You hear how badly this … [blows again] I mean, this thing is just completely not behaving. Part of the reason is that the cutup is ridiculously low.”
John: “Did Jeff look at these to make sure there aren’t open seams in the back and such?”
Ryan: “I don’t know. I haven’t had any problems with that, and the seams look hot on all these pipes.” I take him to mean they look like they’ve got fresh solder on them. Ryan is taking the original pipework of the Henry Erben organ, listening to it, going through the new pipes made by Jeff and Robbie, and fitting them all in to work together musically.
John has other things to attend to, and leaves me alone with Ryan. I ask, “What are you actually doing when you voice a pipe, and what are you listening for?” He plays some notes on his voicing station, which is essentially a compact pipe organ in which the pipes simply rest on felt gaskets on a small wind-chest, directly above the individual keys. There is a round gauge on one corner of the keyboard that registers wind pressure.
“These sound pretty even. I’ve worked on all these. I’m trying to pick out one that might not sound so good in terms of what we call the color of the sound. It’s hard to explain. It’s the difference between the car horn on a Ford and the car horn on a Chevy—there’s going to be a difference.” He zeroes in on one pipe, pressing its key over and over in rapid succession. “Okay, that one’s sort of … hmm, borderline. I had trouble with that pipe. But it’s good: I mean, for something that’s made in 1830, I’ve recovered it to life pretty well. You hear how when it initially speaks it kind of goes, ‘yeeaahh, yeeaahh.’” Ryan makes a sound like an adolescent boy’s voice breaking, from high to low in the course of a single syllable. Now he presses the key several times through only the initial part of its travel, so the pipe is just beginning to speak, but never getting to full song. He imitates what he hears with a weak falsetto “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
I ask him if he’s zeroing in on the initial attack of the note.
“The initial attack and the ongoing sound. It’s kind of flutey and … [Ryan makes a sound like someone discreetly coughing up phlegm in a quiet seminar room] windy.”
“Is that what you call chiffy?”
“No, chiffy is when they go ‘choong, choong, choong, choong.’” He makes a sound like a steam locomotive leaving the station. “They have a very definite speech, but it’s a very hard kind of speech, with a kind of pop at the beginning. I mean, sometimes you can get away with that in a really big cathedral kind of space, but in most churches you can’t.” What had taken my ear some time to discern under the guidance of Frank Archer, namely chiff, is for Ryan a noise so overbearing that it does not enter into his considerations with this organ.
Still speaking of this one pipe, he says, “It’s a little bit quiet too. But it’s acceptable. I’m not trying to change the character of what this organ was. That’s the challenge, to make the pipes work but not take away from the integrity that they had.” Ryan plays an ascending melodic line, then a descending one. “They’re very even, I mean they’re really pretty good.”
The windways of organ pipes get eroded over time by the passage of air through them, and this can degrade their sound. But there is another respect in which they improve with use. Ryan explained how metal organ pipes change over time due to being played. The maxima and minima of vibration along a pipe’s length, corresponding to the fundamental frequency and higher harmonics of the pipe, apparently bring about a molecular change in the metal such that the pipe is more easily excited after a few centuries of use. In some respects, Ryan says, organ pipes “sound their worst at the very beginning of their life.” Over time the sound becomes softer, less harsh.
“Part of the challenge of the Yale organ [Taylor and Boody Opus 55] is that they wanted an organ that was historically inspired and sounded like these organs that they heard in Europe. Well, that’s all well and fine, but from the voicing standpoint, I had to think to myself, What can I really get away with here, and what will the results of my actions be four hundred years from now? If that Yale organ is still in that chapel four hundred years from now, and we assume it will be, then what is going to have happened to the voicing I did? Is the organ going to be so politely smooth that it’s got no life in it? So I had to be conscious of that and not overdo anything. Yet we wanted these to behave like old pipes.
“I guarantee you there’s no pipe in the Yale organ that looks like this.” He points to the Erben pipe. “Not at all. To the naked eye, looking at almost any pipe in the Yale organ, your eye is not drawn to any kind of manipulation that was done in the windway. It’s so subtle. By all accounts, we’re told it’s one of the most successful results that anyone’s ever heard.”
Ryan clearly means to rival or outdo those previous organ builders whose activities have imparted a shape to his own life, in an ongoing dynamic of reverence and rebellion.
“One of the things I’ve discovered…” Ryan pauses. “I have to be careful not to take credit for this.” As a voicer, Ryan evidently feels himself part of a community that has certain unwritten rules. The knowledge of this guild is largely shared—they are all in conversation with one another, whether explicitly or not, and with the past masters. But the knowledge must be put into action, and in doing so there are occasions for the pride in discovery that comes with experimentation.
“To my knowledge no one else has ever suggested that this is the case, and in fact it took me a long time to convince a really, really fine organ builder friend of ours down in Chattanooga. But I know for a fact that pulling the upper lip out makes the pipe faster, and pushing the languid down also makes the pipe faster, but they don’t do the same thing. The upper lip is like the starter, it controls the starting energy of the pipe, how well it starts, how fast it starts. The languid, in here, controls the ongoing sound.”
Ryan pauses to concentrate on what he is doing: “cutting up” one of the pipes for the Erben organ. He cuts to a line scribed just above the existing upper lip, which was Jeff’s approximation, then bevels the new lip with a knife wielded with a pulling motion, his arm tensed as it would be in any action that requires both high effort and precise control. The soft metal of the pipe, a mixture of lead and tin, gives way to the hardened tool steel of Ryan’s knife. He splits the fine scribe mark down the middle.
“The sound quality of the pipe is very much colored by how tall the mouth of the pipe is. The higher you raise the upper lip, the more you alleviate the intensity of the upper harmonics and the more you get the fundamental. But you don’t want just fundamental, you want that other stuff too.”
Returning to the job at hand, Ryan mutters that Jeff hasn’t properly aligned the foot of the pipe with the body. “Usually he’s right on the money. Jeff’s a real craftsman. But this is no good. This can make or break the way a pipe plays.” The foot is the end of the pipe, and it is cone-shaped. It is soldered onto the main body of the pipe; the mouth is located where the two meet, with the lower lip supplied by the foot and the upper lip by the body. They must be aligned so that the two lips are perfectly parallel.
Ryan shows me the allegedly crooked job, and because I don’t want to interrupt his work flow any more than necessary, I pretend to see the out-of-parallel Ryan was exercised about, but in fact I can’t. He proceeds to pull the upper lip out on one side, then to use a tiny brass hammer to push it in on the other side. I ask if there is some measuring instrument he might use in such cases, and he says, “Eyeballs.”
Tapping away, he announces the pipe is now passable. “A lot of the changes we make are not measurable. I mean, you’re talking millionths of a millimeter. It all has to do with what you hear.” Ryan takes the pipe and blows on the end of it, producing a succession of different notes. “Okay, the pipe is a little bit fast. You hear it overblows very easily.” If you have ever blown on an empty beer bottle, you know that blowing very softly produces the lowest note, and blowing harder produces higher notes.
Ryan puts the pipe to his mouth and plays the fundamental, then the third harmonic (a pipe that is closed at one end has only odd-numbered harmonics), then the fifth, and finally, blowing very hard, the seventh. This whole harmonic series is present when the pipe is played softly, but it is the fundamental that predominates.
Ryan puts the newly doctored pipe on the voicing station and plays it, alternating with another pipe. I think I can hear the overblowing he’s talking about: the initial note is higher, before the pipe settles into its lowest mode. Just like a beer bottle.
“Okay, there’s a few things going on here. The languid is a little bit low. I’m going to raise it up just a little.” Some subtle manipulations follow. “Also the toe hole seems a little large.” Ryan commences another operation to collapse the hole at the tapered end of the pipe.
“Voicing is listening. There’s very little written material on it. A voicer develops his or her own techniques. You have to understand the science. Friends of mine think it’s inherent talent, but not really. The preparation—getting the cutups right, getting them straight, manipulating the windway sizes and the toe holes—you could train a monkey to do that sort of thing. Just give them the list and they do it. If that’s done really, really well, that’s ninety-seven percent of the work. After that ninety-seven percent is finished, the pipe will make a sound, it’ll play. Getting it to play beautifully, that’s the last three percent. And that’s where I’d like to say the artistic integrity of the voicer is put to use, and it’s at that point where the good voicer who has done really well preparing the pipes can take all the math and all the science, if they so desire, and you can start to throw some of that out the window. Now we’re not in the science book anymore, we’re not studying the math, now we’re making music. Now the canvas has been prepared, your base of the canvas has been painted on, you’ve got the brushes in your hand, and you can feel free to put the strokes down. But you can only do that if the preparation is really well done. If you don’t do that, it makes the brushstroke very difficult to get clean on the page.”
On Ryan’s account, making a musical instrument seems to parallel the process of making music. It doesn’t feel very “artistic” to practice scales endlessly; like the preparation of organ pipes, “a monkey could do it.” In both cases the expressive element, that last 3 percent, rests on a large base of technical proficiency.
Ryan consults a graph plotting the measured heights of the cutups of the Erben organ’s existing pipes. It is a jagged line with a general trend to it. Ryan has drawn a straight line through the jagged one, capturing the trend, and extrapolated it beyond the existing data points to determine the cutups for the replacement pipes. He isn’t going to even out the cutups on the existing pipes, as they are part of the character of the organ. “But I guarantee you’d never go into the Yale organ and measure the cutups and find them all over the map like that. Although there are little discrepancies, intentional ones, so if anyone ever does get their paws on those pipes, they’ll wonder, ‘Hmm, I wonder why he did that.’” I ask if these variations were for musical reasons. “No, just having a fun day. Putting my mark on it.”
When you are building something that you expect still to be in use hundreds of years later, you apparently imagine yourself as an ancient, being imagined by those moderns to come, the shadowy progenitor of pipes that will be held in hand by some organ restorer of the future. Building his organ in 1830, did Henry Erben form some image in his mind of Ryan, and wonder at the encounter? Like Ryan, Erben did restorations on organs that were old to him, as well as building new ones for the future. Did he pass along some message to Ryan, expressed in the common language of organ makers but inflected by the idiom of his own handiwork? Certainly he did, for every aspect of organ building fits such a description. The narrative of an organ maker’s career runs in the larger current of a continuous history. If he becomes an expert maker, his signature is entered into the organ makers’ book of common prayer: Schnitger, Flentrop, Beckerath, Noack, Fisk, Brombaugh, Taylor and Boody. This is like the holy book of the Jews, for it is scribbled dense with marginalia by scholars like Ryan, which may or may not become canonical as the tradition of interpretation carries forward.
Ryan puts the pipe back on the voicing station. “That’s exceptionally good-sounding. That pipe sounds really good. There’s a certain kind of fuzz. There’s even more fuzz in this one than there is in C. C is a little bit breathy, and a little bit more flutey. This one is not as breathy, but it’s real fuzzy. It’s still a little bit fast.” He raises the languid by a couple of taps and puts it back on the voicer. “It’s a really good-sounding pipe, it’s one of the best ones in the whole set yet. Except that it’s still a little bit fast.” Ryan removes the pipe and taps lightly on the upper lip. “It doesn’t need much at all. Again, these are manipulations that you can’t really measure.” He puts it back on the voicing station and plays it. “That’s fine. That pipe is done.”
* * *
Given how much love Ryan had lavished on a single C-sharp pipe in an organ that doesn’t even carry the Taylor and Boody name on the console, I asked John about the culture of his shop. How does he motivate his employees to care about quality?
“They are absolutely the most vicious and greatest proponents of that,” he said. “The way to get people most disturbed here is to give them any sense that you’re trying to cheapen things, or push them ahead. You think when you start out on something like this that the hardest thing is going to be to teach people to care and value that aesthetic. But it happens, and you cannot convince them to do less. I’ve never seen them be so angry as when they think that you’re trying to cheapen the product, or do it faster—you know, lower the quality.”
“So they develop a sense of honor as organ builders?”
“They’re impossible. They’re totally impossible.”
THE DIALECTIC WITH TRADITION
In a kind of mechanical forensic archaeology, George Taylor, John Boody, and a small cadre of other builders with overlapping apprenticeships reverse-engineered the ancient organs to recover the construction techniques and preferred materials of the old masters. John pointed out that centuries ago, as now, the cleaning, maintenance, and tuning of previously installed instruments provided the occasion for an organ “service tech” (as we might call him) to study an instrument. Generally such techs were themselves organ builders, so the activity of reverse-engineering another maker’s organ to learn new techniques is itself part of the tradition of organ making. (It is much like the history of philosophy in this regard.) The explosion of information in recent decades, including design drawings and specifications for old organs, John finds “both helpful and distracting”—helpful for obvious reasons, and distracting because “at some point you’ve got to get on with it.” Get on with building your own organs, that is. In doing so, Taylor and Boody seem to adopt a neutral stance toward both history and technology, fraught neither with romantic resentment toward change nor with the kind of uncritical enthusiasm for “high tech” that embraces change merely for the sake of change. Their purpose is to build the best organs they can.
But what is best in an organ? Unlike a space shuttle, the pipe organ is a species that comes to us through cultural traditions, and serves aesthetic purposes that would be unintelligible without reference to those traditions. To start with a “clean sheet of paper” would be to miss the whole point, because to a large extent the history of organs constitutes what it means to be an organ. John Boody and his coworkers are constantly making improvements, and their inventiveness is both limited and energized by tradition—an unusual combination of the spirit of technology with the spirit of loving antiquarianism. These are ethical dispositions, really—the one gets enlivened by new challenges to be overcome, the other finds its dignity in the continuation of old ways. If these seem incompatible, it may be because we moderns have inherited a view that pits the technical spirit versus tradition.11 Partisans of the first will say it embodies reason, and that the latter amounts to little more than inherited prejudice. For their part, partisans of tradition often see in technology a spirit of vandalism that can only destroy meaningful human activity.
But to be in conversation with a tradition is a kind of rationality; a mode of thinking that helps us get at the truth about things. This was brought home to me by a story John told about restoring the organ at the chapel of the University of Richmond. This organ was built in 1965 and boasted certain “space age” materials. Thirty-five years later, these plastic action parts and synthetic gasketing materials had melted, and the organ was unusable. Taylor and Boody tore the organ down and replaced the space age stuff with traditional materials: wood, felt, and leather. If the standards of technology are those of functionality, then in this case wood and leather turned out to be higher-tech than plastic. As woodworkers have known for centuries, the dimensional changes of wood with humidity (there is little with temperature) can be accommodated by orienting the grain lengthwise to the dimension that needs constant tolerance. Wood and leather are easily worked with hand tools, have excellent “toughness,” and their durability is a known quantity. They are general-purpose materials readily available, rather than proprietary ones tied to the fortunes of one company. With respect to future generations, they make repair work a transparent matter—leather can be sewn and wood can be glued with common glues, whereas the chemistry of plastic polymers is an opaque matter that makes bonding uncertain. Here is a case where space age materials were a bad idea precisely because, ironically, they were insufficiently future-oriented.
Yet those who work within a craft tradition cannot dogmatically identify the good with the old: a living tradition does not consist of a set of static truths passed down. For example, Taylor and Boody will soon undertake the restoration of an instrument in Pittsburgh. “All the synthetic materials are going to go, all new squares in the action, all new trackers. We’ll replace them with either wood or carbon fiber.” When I expressed some surprise at this last item, John’s eyes lit up. “Carbon fiber turns out to be excellent material for trackers. It’s stable, extremely strong, and stays absolutely straight.”
The tradition of organ building evidently consists of an ongoing quarrel about how best to realize certain functional ends. John Boody is engaged in a living conversation, concretely expressed in action, with every organ maker whose work he has examined, and with the authors of every musty organ-making treatise extant. Given the opportunity to examine his organs, one imagines these predecessors would recognize in Taylor and Boody a competent conversational partner, which is different from someone who simply parrots your words back to you. The conversation has a point, and moves along. To participate, an interlocutor must have good manners: he must listen well, contribute with tact, and have that sense of shame that helps you recognize when you have been refuted.
There are external facts that keep the conversation moving along, as this conversation not only answers to the internal goods of organ making but also issues in a product that must please others who are not directly involved in organ making, and may be oblivious to its finer distinctions: the congregation who will use the organ, and pay for it. Thus Taylor and Boody’s Opus 64, for St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, in Bon Air, Virginia, will have electric stop action. It will still have mechanical key action, which determines the touch of the instrument, but the organist will have the convenience of being able to choose preset stop combinations, which is useful for church services. John says, “We don’t think it’s essential, but if it makes a difference in whether someone buys an organ or not, we have to think about that.” If organ making is to be a livelihood rather than a hobby, then it has to defer to the institutions that pay the bills, and these usually value the music that will be played (often in the context of a fast-moving Sunday service) more than the particulars of the instrument. In this way the organ maker becomes responsible to a wider community of his contemporaries, outside the charmed circle of his guild. He must put his cherished endeavor in its proper place and become public-spirited, out of financial necessity. This helps him gain perspective on his own preoccupations, which otherwise may threaten to become obsessions. As we explored in the case of the motorcycle mechanic, there is a process of triangulation with other people that is built into the organ maker’s livelihood; he has to try to square the internal standards of organ making with the wider field of social meaning that we call economics.
As we have seen, the dialectic between tradition and innovation allows the organ maker to understand his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited. This is very different from the modern concept of creativity, which seems to be a crypto-theological concept: creation ex nihilo. For us the self plays the role of God, and every eruption of creativity is understood to be like a miniature Big Bang, coming out of nowhere. This way of understanding inventiveness cannot connect us to others, or to the past. It also falsifies the experience to which we give the name “creativity” by conceiving it to be something irrational, incommunicable, unteachable.
The “going further” that happens in an established tradition, what John called the thread, may be illustrated by a seemingly narrow technical point. John says many of the north German organs of the Baroque period suffered corrosion of their metal pipes from within, and that tannic acid has been identified as the culprit. The tannic acid comes from the oak used throughout those organs, including the wind-chests. Especially in damp conditions near the sea, the air picks up tannic acid from the oak on its way to the lead/tin pipes. Yet oak is the traditional material for Baroque organs. Is there a reason for this? The reason they used oak, it turns out, is that in that part of Europe, woodworms are a big problem; the worms will eat through any softer wood. But in America woodworms are not a problem. So Taylor and Boody are currently transitioning to the use of poplar and pine in their wind-chests, out of concern for the longevity of their pipes. They haven’t observed any problem of corrosion in their pipes, but that is based on observations spanning only forty years. They intend their organs to be in service four hundred years from now.
Taylor and Boody approach tradition with their critical faculties intact. Because the organ needs to work, this puts them on the alert for possibilities opened up by their own circumstances (here, the absence of woodworms). Perhaps it is more generally true that in order to learn from tradition, one has to be able to push against it, and not be bowed by a surfeit of reverence. The point isn’t to replicate the conclusions of tradition (here, the use of oak), but rather to enter into the same problems as the ancients and make them one’s own. That is how a tradition remains alive.
The study of the past seems to quicken the activity of the workers at Taylor and Boody rather than burdening it. The history of their craft is constantly being metabolized, absorbed into their own sinews, where it becomes nourishment for vigorous and youthful deeds. In his essay “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes that the thought of being a late arrival in history, though frequently distressing, may, “when grandly conceived,… vouchsafe great effects and a hopeful desire for the future…” This is so when we conceive ourselves to be “the heirs and successors of classical and astonishing powers, and see in that our honor and incentive.” He goes on:
That the great moments in the struggle of individuals form a chain, that in them the high points of humanity are linked throughout millennia, that what is highest in such a moment of the distant past be for me still alive, bright, and great—this is the fundamental thought of the faith in humanity.
According to the Enlightenment concept of knowledge we explored in “A Brief History of Freedom,” the exemplary sort of knower is a solitary figure, and his knowing happens always in the present tense. He is not encumbered by the past, nor does he recognize the kind of authority that operates in communities. His arguments are demonstrative rather than conversationlike in the way we have seen at Taylor and Boody; they float free of any particular historical circumstances or set of lived experiences. Tradition is thus disqualified as a guide to practice. Tradition may convey some truths, it will be conceded, but to be ratified as such the truths in question must be scrutinized by a mode of reasoning that is independent of what came before. To be rational is to think for oneself. For the most part, this Enlightenment understanding views tradition as a darkness that grips men’s minds and a habit of inflexibility to be rooted out.
But this view gets a lot wrong. As we saw also in the case of scientific apprenticeship, in the development of any real competence we don’t judge everything for ourselves, starting from scratch each morning. Rather, we have to begin by taking a lot on faith, submitting to the authority of our teachers, who learned from their teachers. The individualist conceit that we do otherwise, and the corresponding discredit that falls on tradition, makes people feel isolated.
As we learned from Tocqueville, this isolation brings with it a certain anxiety, which we try to relieve by looking around to see what others—our contemporaries—are thinking and feeling. The rugged individualist becomes the statistical self. The statistical self is the kind that is knowable in bulk, a suitable subject around which to design manufactured experiences. We increasingly encounter the world through representations, produced according to the economies of scale of mass culture. In the worst cases, such as machine gambling, they are guided by a design intention that is inimical to our aspiration to autonomy, even while relying on that aspiration as a psychic hook: manufactured experiences promise to save us from confrontations with a world that resists our will.
The workers at Taylor and Boody are not isolated in this way. They understand the long story of organ making as their own, and find for themselves a place in it. In this highly situated self-understanding, the excellence they reach for in their work expresses their individuality: an earned independence of judgment, a deepened understanding that is the fruit of their own labors.
Some critics will say that these craftspeople have “retreated from the modern world.” I think nearly the opposite. We have come to accept a condition of retreat from the world as normal. The point of the organ shop example is to help us see what it would look like to inhabit an ecology of attention that puts one squarely in the world.