The Organ Loft

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The Organ Loft

Forty years at the console: the organ, the hymns, the weddings and funerals, and the annual visit of the tuner
Walter Grimm, organist of Grace Church since 1959

I sat down at the organ console of Grace Church for the first time on the second Sunday of September, 1959, a young man of twenty-two filling in for one Sunday while the regular organist recovered from surgery. The regular organist did not come back, and I have been there every Sunday since, with the exception of two weeks in 1971 when I had my own surgery, and Christmas of 1984, when the ice storm closed the roads and the pastor held the service in his living room with a piano.

This month makes forty years. My granddaughter, who set up this page for me and has been very patient with an old man and a mouse, suggested that I write some of it down. She is right that if I don't, no one will, and there are things about this instrument and this work that ought to be written down somewhere. So: this page is for anyone curious about what goes on up in the loft, for the young organists coming up (there are fewer of you than there used to be, and you are needed), and for the people of Grace Church, who have listened to me for forty years and have been very kind about it.

How a pipe organ works
People are surprised to learn that a pipe organ is a wind instrument. It is, in fact, the largest one there is. Everything you hear comes from air blown through pipes, exactly as a boy blows across the top of a bottle, and the whole machine exists to get the right air to the right pipe at the right moment.

The wind. In the basement of the church there is an electric blower, a large fan in a wooden box, that runs whenever the organ is switched on. It fills a reservoir, a sort of leather-and-wood bellows with weights on top, that holds the air at a steady pressure. Before electric blowers, and ours was installed with one from the start in the 1920s, a boy or a sexton pumped the bellows by hand, and older organists have stories of the wind giving out in the middle of a hymn when the boy fell asleep.

The pipes. Each pipe makes one note, and only one. To play a scale you need a pipe for every note of the scale. A set of pipes, one for each key on the keyboard, all of the same tone color, is called a rank. A rank of flute pipes sounds like flutes; a rank of trumpet pipes sounds like trumpets. Most pipes are flue pipes, which work like a whistle: air is blown against a sharp edge and it sings. The others are reed pipes, which have a small brass tongue that vibrates against a shallot, as in a clarinet; these are the trumpets, oboes and the like, and they are the ones that go out of tune first.

The length of a pipe sets its pitch. The pipe for the lowest C on a rank of normal pitch is about eight feet long, so such a rank is called an "8-foot" rank. A "4-foot" rank sounds an octave higher, a "16-foot" rank an octave lower, and the great 32-foot pipes you hear about in cathedrals are lower still, more felt than heard. Draw an 8-foot and a 4-foot together and each key plays two pipes, an octave apart, and the sound is brighter. That is the whole art of registration: choosing which ranks to combine.

The stops. The knobs or tabs at the console, each labeled with a rank's name, are the stops. Pull a stop out and that rank is "on"; push it in and it is silent. The expression "pulling out all the stops" comes from exactly this. With every stop pushed in, the keys make no sound at all, which has embarrassed every organist alive at least once.

The keyboards. The organ has two or more keyboards for the hands, called manuals, each controlling its own division of pipes, and a keyboard for the feet, the pedalboard, which plays the low bass pipes. Learning to play the pedals without looking is what separates an organist from a pianist sitting at an organ, and it took me the better part of a year.

The swell box. One division of pipes is enclosed in a wooden box with shutters on the front, like venetian blinds, operated by a pedal. Open the shutters and the sound swells; close them and it fades. It is the organ's only way of getting louder and softer on a held note.

The action. Between the key and the pipe there has to be something that opens the valve. In old organs it was a wooden linkage, the tracker action, and you felt the pipe open under your finger. In ours, as in most from the 1920s, it is electro-pneumatic: pressing the key closes an electrical contact, which fires a small magnet, which lets wind into a leather pouch, which opens the valve. Thousands of little leather pouches. When they get old, they leak, and that is a story for the tuning section.

Our instrument
The organ at Grace Church was built in 1926, when the present church was new, by a firm that is long since gone. It has two manuals, Great and Swell, a thirty-two-note pedalboard, and fourteen ranks, about nine hundred pipes in all, ranging from a wooden Bourdon in the pedal whose largest pipe I can barely get my arms around, to a tin Fifteenth whose smallest pipe is the size of a pencil. The pipes stand in two chambers on either side of the chancel, behind painted wooden grilles, and the console sits in the loft at the back of the church, so I play with my back to the congregation and watch the pastor in a mirror. Forty years of a mirror.

It is not a famous organ. It is a good, honest, solid instrument of its period: warm foundation tone, a lovely soft string rank called a Dulciana that I use for the quiet moments, a Stopped Diapason on the Great that is the most beautiful thing in the church on a Sunday morning in Advent, and an Oboe on the Swell that has been temperamental since the Truman administration. There is one Trumpet, which I save for Easter and for the last verse of "A Mighty Fortress."

It was releathered in 1962, three years after I arrived, and again in 1993, and I expect it will outlast me if it is looked after. That is the thing about a pipe organ: an electronic organ is a machine and wears out, but a pipe organ is a building, and buildings can be repaired forever.

The Sunday routine
I arrive at seven for the ten o'clock service. The church is cold and dark and it takes the blower a few minutes to bring the reservoir up. I switch on the console lamp, sit, and play a few scales on the Dulciana to warm up my hands, and to hear whether anything has ciphered overnight (a cipher is a pipe that sounds without being played; a stuck valve. There is always one somewhere in the winter).

The pastor and I have set the hymns on Tuesday, four of them, plus the service music. I practice the prelude, which I've chosen for the season, and run the hymns once through, marking the verse where I'll change registration. The choir comes at nine for a run-through of the anthem. I have played for seven choir directors and outlasted them all.

Then the service: prelude as the people come in, the opening hymn, the responses, the anthem, the offertory (usually something quiet on the Swell), the closing hymn, and the postlude, which is the organist's one moment to make some noise. I have a rule that the postlude is played all the way through whether anyone is listening or not. Some Sundays there are three people left in the pews when I finish. Some Sundays there are thirty who stayed to hear it, and that is a fine feeling.

By half past eleven I have switched off the blower, covered the keys, and gone home to lunch, and I have done that some two thousand times.

Weddings
I have played for several hundred weddings, and now for the weddings of the children of couples I played for in the 1960s, which is a strange and wonderful thing. I keep a card file.

The brides ask for the same few pieces, and I am glad to play them: the "Bridal Chorus" from Wagner's Lohengrin for the procession ("Here Comes the Bride," though I have never once heard anyone sing the words), and Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream to go out. In recent years the "Trumpet Voluntary" has been very popular for the bride's entrance; it was credited to Purcell for two hundred years, but it is actually Jeremiah Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March," and I tell the bride so, and she generally does not mind. Pachelbel's Canon in D is asked for at nearly every wedding now, for the bridesmaids, and I have made my peace with it. Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" is another favorite, and one I never tire of.

My advice to couples, offered at the planning meeting and here for free: choose your music early; tell me if the aisle is long or short, because the "Bridal Chorus" can be stretched but the "Wedding March" cannot be shortened gracefully; and please, do not ask the organist to play a popular song from the radio by ear at the rehearsal. I will try, and it will not sound the way you remember it, and that will be nobody's fault.

The best wedding I ever played was in 1977, a farm couple in their sixties, both widowed, who asked for one hymn, "Now Thank We All Our God," and sang it themselves, loud, holding hands.

Funerals
There are more of these now than there used to be, because the people I started with are getting old, and so am I. I have played for the funerals of three pastors, two choir directors, more choir members than I care to count, and for my own wife, in 1996, which I did not think I could do and did.

The music for a funeral should be plain and should be carried by the congregation. "Abide with Me." "Amazing Grace." "The Church's One Foundation." "O God, Our Help in Ages Past." "For All the Saints," which the choir will sing if there is a choir. For the prelude I play quietly, chorale preludes of Bach most often, or Handel's "Largo," and for the postlude something that walks the family out with their heads up: "Crown Him with Many Crowns," or "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty."

A word to the young organist: at a funeral you are furniture. You are not performing. Play well, play simply, do not draw the eye, and do not stop playing until the last mourner has left the church. Then switch off the blower and sit for a moment in the quiet. That is part of the job too.

The annual tuning

Every October, when the furnace has been on long enough that the church has settled into its winter temperature, the tuner comes. He is the third one I have worked with. He brings a canvas roll of tools, a thermos, and an apprentice, and it takes them the better part of two days.

Why every year, and why in the fall? Because the pitch of a pipe depends on the temperature of the air in it. Warm air, sharper; cold air, flatter. All the flue pipes drift together, more or less, so the organ stays in tune with itself, but the reed pipes, with their brass tongues, do not drift the same way, and by September the Oboe and the Trumpet are noticeably at odds with everything else. The tuner comes when the church is at the temperature it will be all winter, and I turn the heat on the day before so it is right when he arrives. Tuning a cold organ and then heating the church is a wasted day.

The work itself is two people and a great deal of patience. The apprentice sits at the console and holds a key. The tuner is up inside the chamber, on a ladder, with the pipe in front of him, and he listens to that pipe against a reference pipe that is already right, and adjusts it: on a metal flue pipe, by moving a slide or opening or closing a little rolled flap at the top; on a wooden pipe, by moving a stopper; on a reed, by tapping a tuning wire up or down a hair's breadth. Then he calls "next," and the apprentice moves up one key, and they do it again, nine hundred times. I usually bring them coffee at ten and lunch at one.

While he is inside he also looks at the leather. The little pouches I mentioned dry out and crack with age, and a cracked pouch means a note that speaks late, or won't stop, or sounds weakly. He replaces the worst few each year, and tells me when the whole thing is going to need doing, which is how we knew in 1992 that the releathering could not wait.

He comes back for an hour before Christmas and an hour before Easter to touch up the reeds, which by then have wandered off again. They always do. I have made my peace with the Oboe.

The hymns I would keep, if I could keep only a dozen
People ask which hymns I love best, after forty years. It changes, but not much. These are the ones I would want if the hymnal were reduced to a single page.

"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." Luther. The last verse on full organ, with the Trumpet, is the loudest thing I am permitted to do in church.
"Now Thank We All Our God." For every Thanksgiving, every harvest, and that wedding in 1977.
"Holy, Holy, Holy." The tune is called NICAEA and it is as solid as a stone wall.
"O God, Our Help in Ages Past." Watts's words to Croft's tune, ST. ANNE. The last Sunday of the year, always.
"Praise to the Lord, the Almighty." The congregation sings this one better than any other.
"Abide with Me." For evening, and for the end of things.
"The Church's One Foundation."
"Be Thou My Vision." An old Irish tune. Play it quietly on the Dulciana and the church goes still.
"For All the Saints." The Vaughan Williams tune, SINE NOMINE, with the walking bass in the pedals. All Saints' Sunday.
"What a Friend We Have in Jesus." The old people ask for it, and I understand why.
"Jesus Loves Me." Because I have played it for every Sunday School in forty years and I never once saw a child who did not know it.
"Amazing Grace." Which everyone knows, and which is why it belongs on the list.

And one that is not a hymn: the Toccata from Widor's Fifth Symphony, which I have played as the Easter postlude every year since 1963, and which I practice all through Lent, and which I will play again next April, God willing, with the shutters wide open and the Trumpet drawn.

My granddaughter tells me I may add pages as I like. I would like to write about the choir directors, all seven, and about the year the mice got into the Bourdon. In time.

Other musical neighbors: Piano Tuning Explained, by a man who understands what the tuner goes through; Opera for Beginners; The Community String Quartet; Gospel Quartet: The Harmony Brothers; and the rest of the Vienna neighborhood.

Visitors since June 1999:

[email protected]
(My granddaughter reads these to me and I dictate the replies. Be patient with us both.)

This site is a member of the Time Capsule WebRing,
owned by Church organist Walter Grimm
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