John Bishop Organ Consultation

07/17/2022

John Bishop, director of the Organ Clearing House and author of "In the wind...," a monthly column in THE DIAPASON, is available for consultation regarding pipe organs and church music programs. John's thirty years experience as church music director and forty-five years as organbuilder, preservationist, and consultant brings insight to the most difficult situations. Contact John here through Private Message.

03/24/2020

12/29/2019

John Bishop had a study trip to Germany in September. Among the highlights was a visit to the Abbey in Weingarten to experience the organ built by Joseph Gabler, completed in 1750.

04/10/2018

John Bishop writes a monthly column in THE DIAPASON, one of the principal American periodicals dedicated to the work and interests of organists and organ builders. A recent issue has attracted a lot of attention as it describes some of the factors that determine the price of a pipe organ. Here it is, for your interest:

In the wind…
April, 2018

What’s it going to cost?
When you’re shopping for a car, it’s reasonable to start by setting a budget. Whether you say $10,000, $30,000, or $75,000, you can reasonably expect to find a vehicle within a given price range. Of course, it’s up to you whether or not you stick to your budget, but we all have experience with the exercise, and there’s plenty of solid information available. Printed advertisements broadcast prices in huge type, and you can fill in forms online with details about a given car to receive a generated price.

When you set out to buy a piano, you can start with a simple search, and get a quick idea of price ranges. I just spent a minute or two surfing to learn that a new Steinway “B” (that’s the seven-foot model) sells for something over $80,000, and that you should expect to pay about 75% the price of a new instrument to purchase a reconditioned used piano. If you start with that in mind, and do some serious shopping, you may well get lucky and find a beautiful instrument for less, but at least you have a realistic price range in mind before you start.

There is simply no such information or formulas available for the acquisition of a pipe organ, whether you’re considering a new or vintage instrument. In a usual week at the Organ Clearing House, I receive at least two, and as many as ten first-time inquiries from people considering the purchase of an organ. These messages often include a stated budget, usually $100,000, sometimes $200,000, and they typically specify that it should be a three-manual organ. Each time, I wonder how that number was generated. Was it the largest amount they could imagine spending? Did they really think that an organ could be purchased for such an amount?

It’s as if you were shopping for that car, but you promised yourself that this time, you’re going to get your dream car. You test drive a Mercedes, a Maserati, and a Bentley, and oh boy, that Bentley is just the thing. You offer the salesman $20,000. He rolls his eyes, and charges you for the gas. It’s a $250,000 car.

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There’s a popular myth out there that people think that organ companies can be compared by their “price per stop.” The most common source for public information about the price of an organ is the publicity surrounding the dedication of a monumental new organ. You read in the newspaper that Symphony Hall spent $6,500,000 on a new organ with 100 stops. Wow. That’s $65,000 per stop. We only need a ten-stop organ. We could never raise $650,000.

The problem with this math is that the big concert hall organ has special features that make it so expensive. The most obvious is the 32-foot façade. How much do you think those pipes cost? If they’re polished tin, the most expensive common material, maybe the bottom octave of the 32-foot Principal costs $200,000? $250,000? More? And if the organbuilder pays that to purchase the pipes, what does it cost to ship them? A rank of 32-footers is most of a semi-trailer load. What does it cost to build the structure and racks that hold them up? This week, the Organ Clearing House crew is helping a colleague company install the 32-foot Open Wood Diapason for a new organ. It takes ten people to carry low CCCC. And once you have it in the church, you have to get it standing upright. Years ago, after finishing the installation of a full-length 32-foot Wood Diapason in the high-altitude chamber of a huge Cathedral, my colleague Amory said, “Twelve pipes, twelve men, six days.” It’s things like that that pump up the “price per stop.” In that six-million-dollar organ, the 32-foot Principal costs $400,000, and the 1 3/5-foot Tierce costs $700.

Here’s another way to look at the “price per stop” myth. Imagine a two-manual organ with twenty stops – Swell, Great, and Pedal, 8-foot Principal on the Great, three reeds, and the Pedal 16-foot stops are Bourdon and a half-length Bassoon. The biggest pipes in the organ are low CC of the Principal, and low CCC of the Bourdon, and the organ case is 18-feet tall. Add one stop – a 16-foot Principal. Suddenly, the case is twice as large, the wind system has greater capacity, and the organ’s internal structure has to support an extra ton-and-a-half of pipe metal. The addition of that single stop increased the cost of the organ by $125,000, which is now divided over the “price per stop.”

Or take that 21-stop organ with the added Principal 16’, but instead of housing it in an organ case, you install it in a chamber. In that comparison, the savings from not building a case likely exceeded the cost of the Principal 16’.

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Ballpark figures.
On June 10, 1946, a construction manager named Joseph Boucher from Albany, New York, was sitting in Seat 21, Row 33 of the Bleachers in Boston’s Fenway Park, 502 feet from home plate. Ted Williams hit a home run that bounced off Boucher’s head and wound up twelve rows further away. Boucher’s oft-repeated comment, “How far away does a guy have to sit to be safe in this place.” That still stands as the longest home run hit at Fenway, and Boucher’s is a solitary red seat in a sea of blue. That’s a ballpark figure I can feel comfortable with. I have other stories saved up that I use sometimes as sassy answers when someone asks for a “ballpark figure” for the cost of moving an organ.

If you’re thinking about acquiring a vintage organ, you’ll learn that the purchase prices for most instruments are $40,000 or less. Organs are often offered “free to a good home,” especially when the present owner is planning a renovation or demolition project, and the organ has transformed from being a beloved asset to a huge obstacle. But the purchase price is just the beginning. If it’s an organ of average size, it would take a crew of four or five experts a week to dismantle it. Including the cost of building crates and packaging materials, dismantling might cost $20,000. If it’s an out-of-town job for the crew, add transportation, lodging, and meals, and it’ll cost more like $30,000. If it’s a big organ, in a high balcony, in a building with lots of stairs, and you can’t drive a truck close to the door, the cost increases accordingly. In the Organ Clearing House, we might joke that there’s a surcharge for spiral staircases, but you might imagine that such a condition would likely add to the cost of a project.

Once you’ve purchased and dismantled the organ, it’s likely to need renovation, releathering, and perhaps reconstruction to make it fit in the new location. Several years ago, we had a transaction in which a “free” organ was renovated and relocated for over $800,000. The most economical time to releather an organ is when it’s dismantled for relocation. Your organbuilder can place windchests on sawhorses in his shop, and perform the complex work standing comfortably with good lighting, rather than slithering around on a filthy floor in the bottom of an organ.

The cost of renovating an organ is a factor of its size and complexity. For example, we might figure a basic price-per-note for releathering, but the keyboard primary of a Skinner Pitman Chest with its Double-Primaries cost more than twice as much to releather as does a chest with single primary valves. A slider chest is relatively easy to recondition, unless the windchest table is cracked and split, and the renovation becomes costly reconstruction.

It was my privilege to serve as Clerk of the Works for the Centennial Renovation of the 100-stop Austin organ in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall in Portland, Maine. (It’s known as the Kotzschmar Organ, dedicated to the memory of the prominent nineteenth-century Portland musician, Hermann Kotzschmar.) That project included the usual replacement of leathered pneumatic actions, but once the organ was dismantled and the windchests were disassembled, many significant cracks were discovered that had affected the speed of the actions for generations. Another aspect of the condition of that organ that affected the cost of the renovation was the fact that many of the solder seams in larger zinc bass pipes were broken. The effect was that low-range pipe speech was generally poor throughout the organ, and it was costly to “re-solder” all of those joints, a process that’s not needed in many organ renovations.

It’s generally true that if an organ that’s relatively new and in good condition is offered for sale, the asking price will be higher knowing that the renovation cost would be low or minimal. But sometimes newer organs are offered for low prices because they urgently need to be moved.

Let’s consider some of the choices and variables that affect the price of an organ:

Reeds.
With the exception of lavish and huge bass stops, like that 32-footer we were talking about a few minutes ago, reeds are the most expensive stops in the organ. They’re the most expensive to build, to voice, to maintain – and when they get old, to recondition. When you’re relocating an organ, the quality of work engaged for reconditioning reeds will affect the cost of the project and is important to ensuring the success of the instrument. You would choose between simply cleaning the pipes and making them speak again by tuning and fiddling with them or sending them to a specialist who would charge a hefty fee to repair any damage, replace and voice the tongues, mill new wedges, and deliver reeds that sound and stay in tune like new.

Keyboards.
An organbuilder can purchase new keyboards from a supplier for around $1000 each to over $10,000. The differences are determined by the sophistication of balance, weighting, tracker-touch, bushings, and of course, the choice of playing surfaces. Plastic covered keys are cheaper than tropical woods, bone, or ivory, which is now officially no-touch according to the United States Department of the Interior (remember President Obama and Cecil the Lion). Some organbuilders make their own keyboards, and don’t offer choices, but especially in renovations, such choices can make a difference.

Climate.
If an older organ has been exposed to extremes of dryness, moisture, or sunlight, it’s likely that the cost of renovation would be higher because of the need to contain mold, splits, and weakened glue joints.

Casework.
A fancy decorated organ case with moldings, carvings, and gold leaf is an expensive item by itself. As with keyboards, some builders have a “house style” which is built into the price of every organ they build. If you don’t want moldings, towers, and pipe shades, you can ask someone else to build the organ. Especially with electro-pneumatic organs, chamber installations are often an option, and are considerably less expensive than building ornate casework. However, I believe that it’s desirable for a pipe organ to have a significant architectural presence in its room, whether it’s a free-standing case, or a well-proportioned façade across the arched opening of a chamber.

Console.
Drawknob consoles are typically more expensive than those with stoptabs or tilting tablets. Sumptuous and dramatic curved jambs speak to our imagination through the heritage of the great Cavaille-Coll organs, especially the unique and iconic console at St. Sulpice in Paris. Those dramatic monumental consoles were the successors of the 17th and 18th century stop panels, as found on the Mueller organ at Haarlem or the Schnitger at Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. The default settings of most woodworking machinery are “straight” and “square,” and by extension, curves require more work and greater expense.

Many modern consoles, and most renovation projects include the installation of solid-state controls and switching. There is a range of difference prices in the choice of which supplier to use, and the cost of individual components, such as electric drawknob motors, vary widely.

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What’s the point?
Some of the items I’ve listed represent significant differences in the cost of an organ, while some are little more than nit-picking. Saving $30 a pop by using cheap drawknob motors isn’t going to affect the price of the organ all that much. And what’s your philosophy? Is cheap the most important factor? When you’re commissioning, building, purchasing, or relocating a pipe organ, you’re creating monumental liturgical art. I know as well as anyone that every church or institution that’s considering the acquisition of an organ has some practical and real limit to the extent of the budget. I’ve never seen any of the paperwork between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II, who commissioned the painting of the Sistine Chapel, but it’s hard to imagine that the Pope complained that the scheme included too many saints and should be diminished.

You may reply that putting a twenty-stop organ in a local church is hardly on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, but I like to make the point that the heart of planning a pipe organ should be its artistic content, not its price. If you as a local organist dream of playing on a big three-manual organ, and you imagine it sounding like the real thing, and functioning reliably, you can no press a job for $100,000 or $200,000 than you can drive away in the Bentley for $20,000.

Let’s think about that three-manual organ. Money is tight, so we think we can manage twenty-five stops, which means that while you’ve gained some flexibility with the third keyboard, that extra division might only have five or six stops, not enough to develop a chorus and provide a variety of 8-foot tone or a choice of reeds. Sit down with your organbuilder and work out a stoplist for twenty-five stops on two manuals, and you’ll probably find that to be a larger organ because without the third manual you don’t need to duplicate basic stops at fundamental pitches. Manual divisions with eight or ten stops are more fully developed than those of five or eight, and let’s face it, there’s very little music that simply cannot be played on a two-manual organ.

Further, when we’re thinking about relatively modest organs in which an extra keyboard means an extra windchest, reservoir, and keyboard action, by choosing two manuals instead of three, you may be reducing the cost of the mechanics and structure of the organ enough to cover the cost of a few extra stops.

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Let the building do the talking.
Because a pipe organ is a monumental presence in a building, and its tonal structure should be planned to maximize the building’s acoustics, the consideration of the building is central to the planning of the instrument. It’s easy to overpower a room with an organ that’s too large. Likewise, it’s easy to set the stage for disappointment by planning a meager, minimal instrument.

Maybe you have in your mind and heart the concept of the ideal organ. Maybe that’s an organ you played while a student or a visiting recitalist. Or maybe it’s one you’ve seen in photos and heard on recordings. But unless you have the rare gift of being able to picture a hypothetical organ in a given room, there’s a good chance that you’re barking up the wrong tree.

While I state that the building defines what the organ should be, five different organbuilders will propose at least five different organs. Think about what the room calls for, think about the needs of the congregation and the music it loves, and conceive what the organ should be. Then we’ll figure out how to pay for it.

07/11/2017

I'm just back from a week in Canada, where it was a thrill to participate in the Montreal Organ Festival. I presented a lecture on the history of pipe organ stop action, with Pythagoras and broccoli as sub-plots. I first gave this talk at the Presidents' Day Conference of the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

I'd be happy to discuss presenting it again. Look forward to hearing from you.

06/23/2017

John Bishop contributes an essay to THE DIAPASON monthly. Here is his from the May 2017 issue.

Music in terrible times.
“This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensively, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
-Leonard Bernstein

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia under the code name Operation Barbarossa, a plan that led to the Siege of Leningrad, the horrific isolation of a city of three million people. After systematically closing access routes to the city during the summer, the German Army closed the last road into Leningrad on September 8, 1941, and during the ensuing 872 days, nearly a million people died from starvation. One out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Dimitri Shostakovich was born in Leningrad (then known as St. Petersburg) in 1906, and established himself as an outspoken, provocative artist. In 1936, Joseph Stalin stormed out of the Bolshoi theater after the third act of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. The next morning, the state newspaper, Pravda, wrote that Shostakovich was “playing a game” that “may end very badly.”1

Shostakovich wrote the first two movements of his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as the siege began. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in Central Russia in October 1941, after all roads were closed, during a period when 650,000 civilians were evacuated, mostly by boat across Lake Ladoga, or by ice road across the lake as winter set in. There, he completed the symphony on December 27, 1941, dedicating it to the City of Leningrad. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater in Kuibyshev performed the premier on March 5, 1942. Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the American premier in a radio broadcast on July 19.

The people of Leningrad first heard “their” symphony on August 9, 1942. The score and parts were flown into the city by a pilot, skimming above the surface of Lake Ladoga to avoid detection. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, and there were only 15 players remaining in the orchestra of the city’s radio station, so the ensemble was filled out by musicians who were serving as active soldiers in the Russian army, released by their commanders for the occasion.

I hadn’t thought much about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony until last week when Wendy and I heard it performed in Carnegie Hall by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Six minutes into the opening Allegretto, when the muffled snare drum started a relentless ostinato, and pizzicato violins introduced the seductive melody, I was on the edge of my seat. The oboe repeated the melody, echoed phrase by phrase by the clarinet, and the haunting tune repeated with ever increasing orchestration, ever more complex harmonizations, and ever expanding, even maniacal intensity until the orchestra reached a towering climax with all the thundering guns of the percussion section, and an astonishing closing statement of the theme by the bass brass, as powerful in that mighty orchestra as all the diaphonic fog horns the Coast Guard could muster from Maine to North Carolina.

We were dressed for a night at the symphony, and seated on red velvet chairs in a box in the first balcony. The heat was on, the hall was comfortable, the lighting was perfect, and the legendary acoustics of Carnegie Hall brought every nuance of the complex score to every ear in the house. Each musician on the stage was playing a first-class instrument in perfect condition, and each was supported by a comfortable salary and pension plan. You could just tell that they had all practiced earlier in the day. And by the way, that was the first time I heard the BSO’s new conductor, Andris Nelsons. Wow! They should keep him.

It takes about 75 minutes to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The program book listed a huge orchestra, with a phalanx of percussion, and almost as a footnote, “additional brass group (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones).” Those bad boys and girls were seated in a long row, stage right, with the traditional brass section (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba) seated stage left.

That first performance in Leningrad must have been a very different experience. If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance, and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

The performance was broadcast by radio, and over loud speakers in public places. I bet that not one member of that audience was sitting on red velvet. I wonder if there’s a Syrian refugee at work on the score of the Aleppo Symphony.

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A Cathedral in Ruins.
On November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) dropped more than 36,000 bombs on the City of Coventry in Great Britain, killing more than 1400 people. Hundreds of structures were destroyed, including St. Michael’s Cathedral. Besides the human loss and suffering, think of the cultural and historical loss. How many works of art, how many rare books, how many pipe organs were destroyed during that attack?

I was seven days old when Queen Elizabeth II laid the cornerstone for the new Coventry Cathedral on March 23, 1956, and the controversial contemporary structure was consecrated on May 25, 1962. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a choral work for that occasion, with freedom to choose topic and content. Britten’s War Requiem comprises a combination of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems of the British poet, Wilfred Owen, who at the age of 25 was killed in action in the British Army during World War I, seven days before the Armistice of 1918.

War Requiem is dedicated to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerly, David Gill, and Michael Halliday, all close friends of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who were killed during World War II. Like Shostakovich’s Seventh, War Requiem is scored for a huge force of musicians, including full orchestra; chamber orchestra; four-part chorus; soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists; a boys choir (at a distance) accompanied by a chamber organ or harmonium, and grand organ. It’s about five minutes longer than Shostakovich’s Seventh, and it rings with the deepest emotions.

Wilfred Owen became well known as a war poet posthumously. He was commander of a rifle brigade, and the poems that Britten chose to include in War Requiem were written in the field. Imagine the young man on a bed roll in a military camp, writing:
Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action
“Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great Gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse.
Spend our resentment, cannon, yea disperse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul.”

I had to look up some of the words. In English, there are many words for curse.

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He plays like a German.
Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937) is one of the towering figures of the pipe organ. He was born into a family of organbuilders in Lyon, France, and his earliest studies were with his father François-Charles, a church organist. The great French organbuilder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, a friend of the Widor family, encouraged young Charles-Marie to go to Belgium to study with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens at the Royal Brussels Conservatoire.

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817-1869) was a prominent French organist, known for his many compositions in “popular” style. I have enjoyed playing his music, especially programming the famous Sorties as rollicking larks – foils to more serious, meaty music. Cavaillé-Coll advocated Lefébure-Wély, arranging for him to play the dedication recitals of many of his prominent organs. It’s no accident that he was installed as organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in 1863, home to Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental magnum opus completed in 1860. But by that time, the young Widor was in Cavaillé-Coll’s sights as a young genius who represented the future of serious organ playing and composition, and he apparently grew tired of Lefébure-Wély’s shallower antics, feeling that his huge and sophisticated organ was deserving of a more serious musician. Legend has it that Cavaillé-Coll made life miserable for Lefébure-Wély, even hinting that contributed to his death.

In the late 1860’s, Paris was in a state of political tension as Prussia was on a tear toward German Unification, and the French Empire of Napolean III anticipated and feared that if the Prussians succeeded, the balance of power in Europe would be upset. Sure enough, on July 16, 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and three days later, the Germans invaded France.

With that political climate as background, Cavaillé-Coll championed the twenty-six year old Widor to the rector at Saint- Sulpice, but Parisian organists, many of whom must have wanted a crack at the plum position, protested that Widor “plays like a German.”2 That explains why the rector offered Widor a temporary position, feeling the weight of Cavaillé-Coll’s recommendation, but not making a full commitment. Widor started his legendary tenure in France occupied by Germany. Marcel Dupré, in his memoir Recollections, shares Widor’s telling of presenting himself at the rectory when the year was up, hoping for an upgrade in his status. The rector simply wished him Happy New Year, so Widor assumed he should just keep playing – 64 years as temporary organist!

Marcel Dupré succeeded Widor as organist at Saint-Sulpice in 1934. German troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, starting the occupation that lasted until 1944. In his memoir, Dupré wrote that as the occupation began, while many Parisians were fleeing the city, he and his wife Jeanne stayed at their home in Meudon, about 6 ½ miles from Paris. The city was deserted and transportation was stopped. For the first two Sundays, Marcel and Jeanne Dupré walked together back and forth to Saint-Sulpice: “Our fatigue was nothing compared to the joy we felt when we reached the organ, and I know that the parishioners still remaining in Paris found comfort when they heard it.”

A few days into the occupation, German officers visited Dupré’s home in Meudon, where there was a clear view of the entire city. The Germans intended to install anti-aircraft guns on the roof of Dupré’s salle d’orgue. When they saw the hall’s interior, they thought it was a chapel, but Jeanne Dupré told them that a musician worked in that room. The Germans reconsidered, and occupied the roof of the house next door, evicting the woman who lived there.3

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A cold night at Stalag VIIIA
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a soldier in the French Army during the German invasion of 1940 when he was captured and taken to a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, near the modern border between Germany and Poland. Fellow prisoners included the clarinetist Henri Akoka, Violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier, which explains the unusual instrumentation of Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which Messiaen wrote after his arrival at Stalag VIIIA. Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic guard, provided Messiaen with paper and pencil.

The premier of the quartet was presented on January 15, 1941, in an unheated space in Barracks 27, using instruments that Brüll helped procure. The performance was announced with a flyer bearing an official stamp, “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft” (approved). There was an audience of about 400 prisoners, with German officers sitting in the front row.4

Messiaen’s deep Catholic faith was at the heart of the composition. In the preface to the score, he quoted from the Book of Revelations, Chapter 10:
“And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire ... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth .... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth for ever and ever ... that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ....”

The opening movement is titled Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). In the preface, Messiaen described the movement:
“Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane, and you have the harmonious silence of heaven.”

Imagine the mix of emotions of prisoners-of-war, playing that new music on beat up instruments in a frigid prison room, with their captors in the audience shivering amongst the other prisoners, the throng listening to music expressing the sadness, the rage, the pathos of war.

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Just another gig.
Have you ever felt that a gig was a nuisance? “Do I really have to play that wedding on Saturday, or grind out another Sunday in the heart of Pentecost?” Is your phone sitting on the console on “silent” while you’re playing a service? Have you ever sent a text from the bench during a sermon? When I receive a text from an organist at 10:42 on a Sunday morning, letting me know that the swell shutters are squeaking, I know that his eyes are not on the road, and that his heart is not in church.

I keep two artifacts in the top drawer of my bureau in our bedroom in Maine. One is a note I received twenty-five years ago from a soon-to-be bride. I had met with her and her fiancée a few evenings earlier to help them choose the music for their wedding. It’s a simple drug-store thank you card, and the handwriting is childish (the transcription is verbatim):
“Mr. Bishop, we wanted to thank you for such a nice night, we had picking out our music. You were so very nice, the way you helped us, pick out what we wanted. I’am sure our wedding day will sound beautiful, thank you again for you kindness. Steve and Ruth.”

Maybe Steve and Ruth’s wedding was another go-round of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Did I think it was just another gig I had to finish? Doesn’t matter. It was important to them.

Music matters. Music is important. A bride and groom and a war-torn city have something in common. They can express themselves through music. If you think you’re a vendor providing music, standing in line for a check with limo drivers, florists, and caterers, you’re missing something. Anyone can wrap bacon around a scallop. You know how to play the organ. You’re providing a sacred art. It matters to people. You’re their voice.

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So pretty.
The second artifact in that bureau drawer is my draft card, dated April 15, 1974. The draft had ended in 1973, but the Selective Service issued numbers to all American men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended. I had to report to Local Board No. 108 in the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (There’s a McDonald’s in that storefront now.)

In 1968, while war was raging in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Leonard Bernstein wrote the song, So Pretty, with lyrics by Comden and Green for a fundraiser for Broadway for Peace, where it was premiered by Barbra Streisand, with Bernstein at the piano. A child is learning in school about a far-away place, wondering why the pretty people are dying. The teacher replies, “… they must die for peace…”5

1. Book review: Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, The Washington Post, Peter Finn, October 3, 2014, quoting from the book by Bryan Moynahan.
2. That story was told to me by Daniel Roth, current organist at St. Sulpice, as we walked together up Park Avenue in New York after he played a recital at the Church of the Resurrection.
3. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, page 107, Belwin-Mills, 1972
4. Alex Ross, Revelations: The Story behind Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.
5. You can read the lyrics of So Pretty here: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=7245&lang=en, and hear Deborah Voight singing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYlwwRmv8c