‘Voicer’ of a Mighty Pipe Organ May Spend Months Getting the Sound Just Right

The next time you hear a pipe organ, listen closely. It took someone like David Johnston hundreds of hours to make it sound that way.

He’s not a piano tuner who makes one-hour house calls. Johnston makes church calls, and he stays for months.

That is how long it can take to perfect the largest, most complex and most versatile musical instrument.

Johnston is a voicer and tonal finisher. That is organ talk for the guy who makes one sound the way it should. It’s easier said than done.

A piano has 88 keys. An organ may have more than 200 keys, 32 pedals and thousands of pipes, and Johnston attends to each one individually--and lovingly.

He recently finished work on a new organ at St. Paul’s Church in Concord. Johnston, who works for Austin Organs of Hartford, Conn., and Bob Leslie of Concord, an organist who was the consultant for the church, spent 70 hours a week for two months adjusting the 2,480 pipes.

‘A Personal Thing’

“Some people think an organ is just another fixture in a building,” Johnston said, “but a musical instrument is a very personal thing.”

Each organ is built by hand, like a custom-made suit. Unlike a piano or a trumpet, an organ is designed for a specific room. Such workmanship also makes pipe organs extremely durable.

“There’s a good chance that if the Earth is still here 10,000 years from now, the St. Paul’s organ still will be there. They don’t burn out after 10 years,” said Johnston.

It may be 70 years or more before the organ needs any maintenance other than an occasional tuning, which currently costs about $400, Leslie added.

The St. Paul’s organ is valued at about $250,000. It weighs about five tons, and most of its pipes are a made of a tin and lead alloy.

By comparison, St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s organ in New York City has more than 9,000 pipes, is 32 feet long and weighs more than twice as much. The Mormon Tabernacle organ in Salt Lake City has about 11,000 pipes.

“Size doesn’t make the organ,” Johnston said. “The idea is not to blast people out, but rather to make certain the full sound of the organ is heard. A big organ can be buried in a room, dead in a wall.”

Sound Is Customized

Each organ has a voice of its own. Some have the deliberate, chamber-music sound of the Baroque period of Bach and others feature the softer sounds favored by the 20th-Century French composer Francis Poulenc.

It took 16 months to build the St. Paul’s organ and five weeks to install it. As the tonal finisher, Johnston is the last person to work on a new instrument.

St. Paul’s, rebuilt since the fire in 1984, has near-perfect acoustics, he said. Its hand-plastered walls and uncarpeted floors don’t absorb sound, and it seats only about 600 people.

After the organ was installed, Johnston needed a day to tune it to ensure that the pipes had the right pitch. Each pipe gets separate attention.

With Leslie at the console, Johnston adjusted one pipe at a time, using a special cutting knife to increase or decrease the air passages. It’s called voicing a pipe.

“It’s done with a great amount of feel,” Johnston says. “The sound is in your head.”

Special scaffolding had to be built, and adjustment of one 16-foot pipe took half a day. Johnston and Leslie had to carry it down a ladder, make one adjustment, carry it back into place, listen, then do it all over again several times, until the sound was just right.

Length Determines Pitch

A pipe’s length determines the number of vibrations per second within it, which determines the pitch.

St. Paul’s organ has four divisions, or keyboards, including the pedal division; 44 sets, or ranks, of pipes and 33 distinct instrumental sounds, known as stops. A good organist knows how they interact.