Mighty Wind: Church Organ Gets a Tuneup Every 150 Years
By JESSIE ROYCE HILL
LAWRENCE - On a flat gray morning, 1,000 pewter and wooden
pipes and ivory keys are spread over three floors of workshop space in
the Andover Organ Company.
They are here to be examined, patched and reassembled again into the
organ that has served Edgartown's Old Whaling Church for 150
years.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/benjamin_mague_sm.jpg" A vestige of an old world, the organ shop breathes with secrets of
apprentices and masters.
In the first floor woodshop, a couple of men in toolbelts sand a
long board full of holes that give it the appearance of a giant game of
cribbage. This is the windchest, the board into which the organ pipes
will be fitted. In a working organ, when a key is pressed, a valve opens
and air produced by a blower creates the sound. If the holes on the
windchest aren't sanded smooth, the sound, too, will be jagged.
A winding staircase to the third floor opens onto the metal
department, a tin and leaden world of pipes. Two artisans bang out dents
with hard wood sticks, pausing to test each pipe's tenor with a
blow of air, a grimace and another blow.
The oldest and largest of six pipe organs on the Vineyard, the one
scattered around this workshop was built to accompany weddings and
church services. It arrived on the Vineyard sometime in the late 1860s.
Installed by the Methodist congregation of the Main street church,
the organ served whaling captains, their families and descendants. Over
the generations, climate and wear and tear took a collective toll. By
the 1980s the organ was wheezy, leaky and tonally unreliable.
Now, for a bill of $84,400, the 18-stop, 19-rank pipe organ is being
restored.
A History of Music
Robert Newton, part owner of the Andover company, has been tuning
the instrument on visits to the Vineyard for years, and is now charged
with its resurrection. "The organ was the most important thing the
church ever bought, after the building," he says.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/robert_newton_sm.jpg" And while there are more expensive organs on the Vineyard, such as
those at the Federated Church in Edgartown and at the West Tisbury
Congregational Church, the Whaling Church's is the oldest and
rarest; it is one of only two still extant from a rare collaboration
between prominent New England organmakers, Fisher and Simmons of Boston.
"People know the Whaling Church, this stately, elegant scale
model of the Parthenon," says Chris Scott, director of
Martha's Vineyard Preservation Trust, which has owned the building
since 1980, "but they don't necessarily know the story of
the creaky organ inside it."
Years of minor repairs on the intricate moving parts of the Fisher
Simmons, as it is known to organ enthusiasts, left a wish list of
restorations that would befit an entire building: Install new pull-down
wires, rebush swell shades, renut pedal key action, provide new
windtrunk from blower. But the pièce de resistance: Tune the
entire organ to original pitch.
Has it really been that badly out of tune? Mr. Newton, a bearded
64-year-old whose voice has the folksy resonance of Garrison
Keillor's, shudders at the mention. Lately the Fisher Simmons has
lived a lonely musical life, as few instruments could blend with its
sharp tone.
Now, "we want to return the organ to its original pitch so
trumpets and other instruments can tune to it again," says Mr.
Newton.
An Organ Master
With a title of "director of old organs and tonality,"
Mr. Newton is a man who takes his business seriously. He has spent the
last 42 years tinkering with organs ravaged by time; he estimates he has
restored 100 of them.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/organ_hammers_sm.jpg" He came by his interest in organs in the same way most of Andover
Organ's longtime employees did: attending church as a child and
becoming taken with the multi-branched musical instrument that climbed
the walls like ivy. Today, Mr. Newton's home in Methuen is a
renovated church where he keeps a collection of musical instruments and
antiques.
The Andover Organ Company occupies three stories in the corner of
the old Malden Mills, nestled along the Merrimack River in this
northeastern Massachusetts town. An industrial landscape dotted with
mills, the town is perhaps best known for this one because of the 1995
fire that burnt most of this mill to the ground. Malden Mills, the
makers of Polartec fleece, rebuilt its headquarters next door. The organ
company still sits in the corner it has owned for nearly three decades,
unscathed by the fire.
Andover builds new organs as well as repairs them, but the market
for new organs is small - New England's many churches
generally prefer to salvage the ones they've got.
As Mr. Newton directs a small core of assistants reshaping pewter
pipes, he acknowledges that "we're bending history to make
the pedals more versatile. In a restoration, the tone moves inevitably
in the direction of what I like. But at the same time I keep very close
to what Simmons did."
In restoration, Mr. Newton balances his historical sensibility with
the needs of church organists who will be using these instruments in the
future - chiefly the need to play the music written for their
instrument.
Back in the mid-19th century, American church organists mimicked
England's. Hymns and wedding marches were in; Romantic and Baroque
repertoire, often more complex and requiring more keys, was shunned.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/organ_newton_sm.jpg" "Bach just wasn't played in America at the time,"
Mr. Newton says. "You try to play the Little Fugue in G and you
run out of pedals on these organs. English pieces were written for hands
alone." He notes that the Fisher Simmons organ had 18 pedal keys,
and will soon be outfitted with 27. "Organists at the Whaling
Church will now be able to play almost all the works of Bach," he
says.
Raising the Money
Raising funds for the organ restoration was not an easy task.
For all of the weddings and services the organ had dutifully
accompanied over the last century and half, few people actually took
notice of its steep decline.
Mr. Scott of the Preservation Trust was one. But the needs of the
building that housed the organ cried out louder for his attention:
peeling paint on its trademark Greek Revival columns, a leak in the
roof.
So the organists who knew the church's prized possession
firsthand formed a restoration committee.
In the late 1990s, Gary Zwicky and Philip Dietterich banded together
with the Organ Historical Society in Boston and began a series of
noontime fundraiser concerts. With a $5 ticket price, the net result of
the concerts was really to raise consciousness, more than dollars. It
worked.
The music series stirred the imagination of an opera singer named
Lia Kahler. Ms. Kahler's mother, Peg Littlefield, had died in 2000
and the singer and sometime philanthropist was searching for a way to
pay her tribute.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/organ_keyboard_sm.jpg" "I heard from Phil Dietterich that the organ committee, along
with Gary Zwicky, had raised enough money to maintain the organ but not
enough to restore it," says Ms. Kahler, who divides her time
between New York city and the Vineyard. "I've always felt a
need to give back as an artist, and my mother was interested in
historical preservation. So this would have tied in with her
interests."
Ms. Kahler ultimately set up a $20,000 endowment for the pipe organ
and cut the Preservation Trust a check to get the instrument on
Andover's three-year waiting list.
During the same time, Owen Larkin, president of the Vineyard Golf
Club, heard from a choir singer about the withering organ. "I
heard they were keeping it together with paper clips, chewing gum and
string. What a treasure for the Island!" Through his foundation,
Mr. Larkin set up a $30,000 matching grant with the Preservation Trust,
which, over two years, successfully met it.
A Bright Future
Just as Fisher and Simmons designed the organ to be played at
weddings, it is the start of the nuptial season that calls it back to
the Vineyard.
"We've got a woman whose daughter is getting married in
the Whaling Church May 1 and she wants that organ," Mr. Newton
grumbles. "But we'll have it there."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/04/02/content/organ_playing_sm.jpg" It will arrive, in fact, on April 12, which happens to coincide with
Edgartown's annual town meeting the next day, held in the Whaling
Church. Mr. Scott hopes the audience won't mind sharing some of
the pews with the organ's bits and pieces as the team hurries to
reassemble it.
To the schedule of 30 weddings held at the Whaling Church this
season, the Preservation Trust has added an unusual ceremony to mark a
new marriage between the organ and its church. "In July,
we're inviting all of the brides and grooms who've been
married in the church to come back again and hear the new organ,"
says Mr. Scott. "They can even wear their gowns."
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