Tag: cathedral

(Not) Paying the Piper

One player, many pipes

Our church is weighing creative approaches to conducting in-person services next month. Pastor Bob sent out a survey recently asking we-the-congregation to consider options like outdoor church, weekday church, and evening church – all in the name of social distancing.  We’ll also be shaking up the service “touchpoints”, like sharing the peace, passing the (offering) plate, and partaking in communion. The Big Guy doesn’t care about the where’s, when’s, and how’s, of course – just that we have church.  On the other hand, He (She?) might have something to say about the music. After all, how does a church organ sound after a three-month absence from tuning?

It’s bad enough our congregation is gloriously inharmonious when we bellow out the hymns (no choir of angels are we), but add in a fully discordant church organ and you have a complete mess. Organs need tuning like the human back needs a chiropractor: maintenance is key. When dust accumulates and seasons change, organ pipes sound noticeably different than they’re supposed to (hence the term “off-key”).  Imagine the pitch-perfect tones of a bass saxophone, but instead you get more of a sour wail.  That’s an organ pipe sans “tune-up”.

Every one needs tuning

Tuning organ pipes is serious business and can run thousands of dollars per visit.  Consider, the biggest organs have as many as 25,000 pipes.  The booming bass pipes can be thirty feet long and two feet in diameter, while the little pixie sopranos look more like metal soda straws. Each pipe must be individually tested and tuned no matter how big or small.  Tuner A presses a key on the (up to four) keyboards down below, while Tuner B adjusts the pitch of the pipe up above (sometimes on a ladder, sometimes on a suspended platform).  It’s hours and hours of monotonous – and in the case of cathedrals, death-defying work, one demanding pipe at a time.  Better love what you do.

Here’s another reason organ tuners deserve hazard pay.  Imagine you’re suspended hundreds of feet above the sanctuary floor on a swaying rope-suspended platform (I’m already saying “no”), virtually floating like the angels, and as you reach over to adjust the pitch of a mid-sized pipe, bats fly out.  Yep, that’s the kind of critters tuners encounter when an organ wants for too long (or a single pipe sounds suspiciously out-of-tune).  Squirrels even make their homes in the pipes – though don’t ask me how they don’t go plummeting to their death the moment a note is blasted from the keyboard.  Maybe they’re flying squirrels?

The view from above

In the land of COVID-19 there are no organ tuners (or very few).  Those Peter Pipers are being denied access to their church-bound “patients” because a) COVID may reside on a surface like, say, a keyboard, and b) no congregation means no offering plate means precious few payments to the Piper.  So what do stay-at-home tuners do instead?  Why, they tune their pianos of course!  Then they play those pianos hours on end.  We may come out of COVID with a whole new genre of classical music called “tuner tunes”.

Talk about a sprint from feast to famine.  An organ tuner’s busiest weeks are those leading up to Easter, often requiring extra staff and longer hours.  COVID downpoured on that parade.  Demand for pre-Easter tuning disappeared faster than Mr. Bunny himself.  In the case of one tuner – profiled in the Wall Street Journal – 100 contracts withered to less than a dozen inside of two weeks.  He furloughed his entire workforce, worried instead over simply paying the rent on his shop.

One day soon, we faithful will walk away from our laptops and wander back into church sanctuaries instead.  We’ll spread out over more services.  We’ll wave hands instead of shake hands.  We’ll drop the offering into the plate from a “safe height”.  We’ll bypass communion servers and help ourselves to the bread and wine instead.  The organist will play and the congregation will sing; both noticeably off-key.  And when that happens give a nod to the organ tuners, who will someday get the pipes pitch-perfect again. 

Just hope they don’t need an exterminator as well.

Some content sourced from the 3/25/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “As Coronavirus Shutters Churches, an Organ Whisperer Changes Key”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Deutschland-ish Improvements

My wife and I are slowly remodeling our house, a room at a time. First, we took a big plunge and overhauled the kitchen. Then we gutted the master bath. Now we’re thinking about a large deck with indoor/outdoor spaces. But that was before a recent trip to Germany, where we cruised a good stretch of the Rhine. Suddenly “remodeling” takes on a whole new meaning.

Our cruise down the Rhine started in Amsterdam.  Bad idea.  Amsterdam is loaded with the prettiest little canals and bridges outside of Venice.  As we were floating up and down the “city streets” we thought, “let’s put a canal bridge on our property!”  But a canal bridge requires a canal, else you get London Bridge in the middle of the Arizona desert.  So first we’ll be building a canal.

Our next stop on the Rhine kept us in the Netherlands.  We landed briefly in Kinderdjjk, not even a map dot if it wasn’t for some of the most beautiful windmills in the world.  Kinderdijk’s windmills not only pump water; they’re houses.  We must add a windmill to our remodel list!  It would make a unique guest house, and instead of pumping water from our well we’ll just windmill it up to the house from the canal.  You know, the canal we just installed so we could put in a canal bridge.

Once our river boat hit Germany, I knew our remodel was entering uncharted territory.  In Cologne, we walked through one of the most spectacular cathedrals in the world (seven centuries to complete!)  In every Rhine river town we passed there was another cathedral (more likely a church, but over there they all look like cathedrals).  Am I saying I need a cathedral on my property?  Of course not; the neighbors would consider that a little pompous.  But a chapel would be nice.  Something to accommodate a steeple and bell tower as elegant as the ones you find in Germany.  Wouldn’t it be great – calling the family in at dinnertime?  BONG-BONG-BONG!!!

Here’s the other problem with Germany.  Castles.  Big ones.  Little ones.  Intact ones and crumbling ones.  Wherever you look in the Rhine region, you see postcard-perfect towns with castles at their highest points.  I mean, who wouldn’t want a castle on their property, right?  The problem is, here in the flatlands east of the Colorado Rockies, a castle would look, well, compromised.  You’ve got to have your castle sitting higher than everything else (otherwise, how would you lord over your domain?).  Not to mention, castles take centuries to build.  I’d like to be alive when my remodel list is finished.

(Side note: my wife showed a disturbing interest in the castle torture chambers and all their nasty devices.  Either this is lingering effects of watching “50 Shades of Grey” too many times, or I’m in deep trouble.  I’ll have to keep a closer eye on her).

Castles just reminded me about one more thing in Amsterdam.  They love their cobbled streets.  Sometimes they’re perfectly uniform and flat; other times they’re ankle-busters if you’re not careful.  Either way there’s no avoiding the cobbles.  So now my driveway needs a remodel too.  I watched an Amsterdam-ian working to replace the cobbles on one of the bridges (yes, they cobble those too).  It looked like backbreaking work, one heavy stone at a time.  But if I’m going to have all my other Rhine region elements, an asphalt driveway just won’t cut it.

In the southwest of Germany, just before the Rhine flows into Switzerland, you make a stop in Bavaria: land of dense fir trees, Black Forest cake, and cuckoo clocks.  You’d swear you walked into a fairy tale, with Snow White (or Hansel & Gretel, or a hobbit) emerging from the nearest Tudor-style cottage with a smile and some gingerbread.  Fortunately, nothing in Bavaria made it to the remodel list.  I suppose we could plant a forest of firs, but that’s just tempting a large-scale fire and we’ve already had enough of those in Colorado.

Also just before Switzerland, the Rhine passes through several locks; those mechanical wonders raising vessels from the lower river on one side to the higher river on the other.  There’s nothing like watching a lock do its thing while you’re in the lock.  Just when I thought I was done with my remodel list, here come the locks.  What a great way to secure my property!  Raise the driveway higher than the street; then force my visitors to enter through a lock!  On second thought, that’s too much work.  I’ll add another castle element instead – a drawbridge over the canal I installed way back in the second paragraph.

If you think my remodel is brazen (i.e. “Dave, do the deck and call it good”), just you wait.  My list is not quite complete.  Our cruise ended in Switzerland.  OMG.  I repeat, OMG.  How the heck am I going to remodel our property into Little Switzerland?  There’s nothing I wouldn’t tap from this Alpine dreamland: the dairy farms (which means a whole herd of dairy cows), the cheese and chocolate, and some of the prettiest, cleanest lakes in the world.  I’d even recruit a few of the Swiss themselves (as if they’d rather live in Colorado).  Of course, the real problem with recreating Switzerland is those dang gorgeous Alps – snowy caps, grassy meadows, cog railways and all.  Building Alps on my property would require ten billion delivery trucks of dirt and I just can’t afford that.  I’ll settle for gazing at the distant Colorado Rockies instead.

Come to think of it, gazing at the Colorado Rockies requires a deck.  That I can manage.  Let’s put my Deutschland delusion to the side and just start with a deck, shall we?