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The Nun’s Pipe

The Source

The lyrics to the Jim Croce song go something like, “You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger, and you don't mess around with Jim.” To that I would add, “You don’t mess around with somebody’s church organ.” I’ve done this too many times and never with pleasant results. In fact, in one case I was nearly arrested. 
A former student of mine asked me to play for his wedding in Chicago. The event was to take place in a large Catholic church and this particular church had one humongous pipe organ. Given a choice I’d rather play a piano for any type of service since it’s hard to play a pipe organ without the thing sounding like a call to war. Ask a soloist to sing accompanied by a blaring pipe organ and you have one unhappy soprano. But it was the wish of the young man’s bride-to-be that I play her church’s organ so I agreed. Pianos are very much alike. . . 88 black and white keys that when poked will make pretty much the sound on one piano as on another, but organs are a different bird entirely. The makers of pipe organs purposely build them so they are like no other pipe organ. There’s no standardization in this industry. You can run in at the last moment, plop your butt onto the bench of a piano and take off, but pipe organs take much longer to know and understand. I’ve played dozens of pipe organs and no two have been alike, and when the “stops” (sound switches) are written in Latin then you have to throw up your hands and just start plunking around to find a sound that will float the bride down the aisle without sounding like constipated cats. And I will guarantee you that no wedding rehearsal will allow time for the organist to get to know his instrument. Never. Nada. Forget about it. In fact, I’ve experienced times when I’ve been asked to travel a hundred miles to play for a rehearsal only to have the priest/pastor/rabbi/ship’s captain say, “I guess we don’t need to go over the music.” The result is an organist still unfamiliar with the instrument when the wedding starts, but this monster of a Chicago organ wouldn’t allow any last-minute adlibbing. I absolutely had to learn the thing on the night before the wedding so after the entire wedding party had run through the ceremony and headed off toward their rehearsal dinner I stayed behind to acquaint myself with this musical monstrosity. I ran my fingers up and down each of the five keyboards trying to find a sound tranquil enough for a wedding when I ran into the ugly A-sharp. It was awful. Out of tune. Some bird must have built its nest in the A-sharp pipe. So there I was, alone in the huge church with an errant key on the organ, and the only way to fix it was to remove the pipe. An organ’s pipes are housed in a nest or alley or whatever you call it, and the only way to access a pipe is to crawl on your hands and knees through the pipe chamber until you find the offending tooter. I stuck the A-sharp key down with a folded matchbook cover so I could tell which pipe was bad once I’d crawled into the organ loft then started fumbling my way through the darkened aisle of pipes. After some stumbling around I found the little sucker making the ugly noise, pulled it out of its socket, and began backing on hands and knees out of the pipe loft. Suffice it to say that this was a really bad time to run into a Catholic nun who had heard the single note playing in the sanctuary, saw that no one was at the keyboard, and who poked her head into the row of pipes just as my rear poked out of the alleyway. She was startled. I was startled. She’d found a rogue Presbyterian puttering around her organ pipes and at this moment he had a pipe in his hand. I was stealing her organ one piece at a time. My memory of what happened next is fuzzy since I was both shocked and confused having thought that I was the only one in the church that night. I couldn’t read her expression precisely but I know it was a mix of surprise and holy anger. I do remember that I had to quickly explain what I was doing and that she should not call the police. I distinctly remember the word “police” somewhere in our conversation. The upshot of the whole thing was that she asked me to please return the pipe to where I’d found it in spite of the fact that it needed to be fixed, and the next day I played the wedding while desperately trying to avoid the A-sharp. You don’t pull the mask off the old lone ranger and you don’t mess around with a nun’s pipe.