WINDOW ON WELLESLEY
MUSIC
A GREAT SET OF PIPES MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS don’t usually get birthday celebrations. But the Fisk organ in Houghton Chapel is 30 years old this spring, and College Organist James David Christie’s May 7 recital there defi finitely counted as a celebration. The music of the great Dutch composer Jan Th Pieterszoon Sweelinck soared through the chapel earlier this month as Christie put Opus 72, built by the late Charles Brenton Fisk, through its paces. Played at weddings and memorials, recitals, vespers, Christmas carol sings, and worship services, the organ has a secure place in the life of a 21st-century college but is particularly well suited to performing the rich repertoire of north German music from the 1500s to about 1690. It’s used for teaching as well, Christie says, and even beginners are able to adapt to its distinctive features. Opus 72 is an organ of not just national but worldwide significance. fi It was the first 20th-century American organ with what is known as meantone tuning, which was often used in earlier centuries. This tuning, Christie explains, gives each key “its own personality”—and some keys, such as C major and E minor, sound much better than others. Contemporary organs and pianos usually are tuned in more standardized ways. Tuning is not the only aspect of the organ for which Fisk made old things new. Opus 72 features To learn how a C.B. Fisk tracker action. This organ is built, watch a video means that the organist’s at www.cbfisk.com/do/ pressure on the keys is DisplayProcess. translated into sound by mechanical action rather than electricity. And although Opus 72 has an electric-powered “wind” supply, it also can get its air the old-fashioned way: from bellows operated by pedals. (On occasion, a student with strength and heft has operated the bellows for Christie.) Opus 72 was the last organ Fisk built, and he was seriously ill as he was working on it. Christie remembers sitting in the chapel one day just watching Fisk at work, “voicing” pipes—performing the minor adjustments to produce the desired tone. “He took two hours to voice three pipes. I’ve played a lot of Fisk instruments around the world, and none of them had more of him in them than that organ. Fisk put his heart and soul into that organ.”
‘I’ve played a lot of Fisk instruments around the world, and none of them had more of him in them than that organ. Fisk put his heart and soul into that organ.’ —James David Christie
RICHARD HOWARD
—RW
This spring also marks the 50th anniversary of C.B. Fisk, Inc., of Gloucester, Mass.; Virginia Lee Crist Stone ’55 serves as chairman of the company her late husband, Charles, founded. Linda Cook ’74 works as an organ builder there.
spring 2011
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