November 25, 2024 Issue

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s “Clean Your Pipes,” in this week’s issue. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story about the renovation of the giant pipe organ in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Basilica. McGrath reports that the organ has been disassembled and trucked to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. McGrath visits the warehouse. He writes,

Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902.

He says, “To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor.”

McGrath’s piece reminded me of another New Yorker “pipe organ” story – Laura Preston’s wonderful “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). In that piece, Preston visits Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to see some of the pipes of the massive Midmer-Losh get “voiced.” She watches Brant Duddy, a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician at work in the voicing room: “He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.”