The Sounding

The letter had been sitting on the workbench for three days before she opened it, wedged beneath a half-finished languid pipe whose tin alloy she had been testing for the bright flatness particular to the four-foot Princ

The workshop occupied a building that had been, before her father bought it in 1986, a pressoir — a wine press house — belonging to a domaine that had gone bankrupt when the owner's son decided he preferred banking to vi

The tin arrived from Goslar on a Tuesday in November, four ingots of ninety-nine point nine percent purity, each one weighing twenty-five kilograms and wrapped in waxed paper inside a wooden crate that the delivery drive

She opened the notebook on a Sunday because Sundays were the days her father had reserved for thinking rather than making, a distinction she had not understood as a child — he was in the workshop on Sundays too, sitting

Wind in an organ is not air. Air is what you breathe, undirected and ambient, the medium in which all sound travels but which is not itself sound.

The action of a mechanical organ is the system that connects the keys to the pipes.

The console is the organist's station, the place from which the instrument is controlled, and its design is the builder's most intimate act because it determines the physical relationship between the player and the organ

She made pipes through December and January, through the short days when the workshop was lit from seven in the morning to seven at night by the overhead lamps and the north windows admitted a light that was more gray th

The move began on the first of March, a Thursday, with a cold that had settled on the Burgundy plateau overnight and that turned the fields white with frost and the roads dark with the particular sheen of frozen moisture

She telephoned Helene Blanchard on a Monday evening in the second week of March, standing in the kitchen of the house in Flavigny with the phone in one hand and a glass of water in the other, because she had learned from

The foundation of an organ's sound is built from the bottom up, the way a building is built from its foundation, the lowest stops voiced first so that each subsequent stop is voiced in the context of what already exists,

The Positif is the organ's second voice, the counterpart to the Grand-Orgue, and in the French tradition it occupies a position that is both architecturally and musically distinct — the Positif case stands at the front o

The Recit expressif is the organ's enclosed division, the division housed inside a wooden box with movable shutters that the organist controls with a foot pedal, and the shutters function like eyelids — when they are clo

It happened with the Trompette. She had been voicing for six weeks, the Grand-Orgue and Positif and Recit flues complete, the Positif Cromorne complete, the Recit Hautbois complete, and she had developed a confidence in

After the Trompette came the rest of the reeds, and the rest of the reeds came quickly because the Trompette had taught her something she could not have learned from the notebook — that the reed voicer's authority reside

She arrived at the cathedral at six in the morning, before Helene, before the diocesan staff, before the city was fully awake, the April dawn coloring the spire of Saint-Benigne pink against a sky that was still gray in