The Console

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 — the height of the bench, the angle of the keyboards, the spacing of the keys, the weight of the drawknobs, the rake of the pedalboard, each parameter shaping the player's body as surely as a chair shapes the body that sits in it, and a console that is wrong in any of these parameters will produce discomfort that accumulates over the length of a recital until the player is thinking not about the music but about the pain in the wrists or the strain in the shoulders or the ache in the ankles, and a player thinking about pain is a player who has been separated from the instrument by the instrument itself, which is the console's only unforgivable failure.

Her father had designed the console for the Dijon organ according to the standard French layout — three manuals stacked above the pedalboard, the lowest manual (Grand-Orgue) closest to the player, the middle manual (Positif) above it, the upper manual (Recit) above that — with dimensions that conformed to the specifications published by the International Society of Organ Builders, which established standard measurements for key width, key length, octave span, and pedal dimensions so that any organist could sit at any console and find the keys where they expected them, the way any driver can sit in any car and find the steering wheel in the same place.

But within these standards, the builder had latitude, and the latitude was where the builder's personality entered the console, the way a chef's personality enters a dish whose ingredients and proportions are specified by a recipe. Her father's personality expressed itself in three ways: the keys were slightly concave, dished to receive the fingertip and guide it to the center of the key surface, a detail borrowed from the harpsichord tradition that most modern organ builders had abandoned but that her father retained because he said the concavity gave the player a sense of place, the finger knowing where it was on the key without the player having to look; the drawknobs were round rather than rectangular, turned from ebony on the lathe and polished to a smoothness that invited the hand to grasp them; and the music rack was angled at twelve degrees from vertical, a degree less than the standard thirteen, because her father believed that a flatter music rack reduced the distance the player's eyes had to travel between the score and the keys, and this reduction of a single degree was, he said, the difference between reading and glancing, between studying the music and knowing it.

Marguerite began with the keyboards. A keyboard is a row of levers — the keys — mounted on a frame called the keybed, each lever balanced on a pin so that pressing the front of the key lifts the back, and the back of the key is where the tracker is attached, the connection to the action that leads eventually to the pallet and the pipe. The keys are made of two materials: the naturals — the white keys — are wooden levers faced with bone or plastic, and the sharps — the black keys — are wooden levers capped with ebony or rosewood. Her father had specified bone for the naturals and ebony for the sharps, natural materials in keeping with the rest of the instrument, and Marguerite had the bone in stock — sheets of cow bone, bleached and cut to size by a supplier in Dieppe who had been providing bone to keyboard makers for three generations — and the ebony she ordered from a dealer in Paris who sourced it from Cameroon, where the Diospyros crassiflora grew slowly and was cut sparingly and whose export was regulated by the same international agreements that regulated ivory, because the wood was precious in the same way ivory was precious, not for its rarity alone but for the quality it imparted to the thing it became, the density and hardness and blackness of ebony being not merely aesthetic but functional, the hardness resisting the wear of the player's fingers and the density transmitting the key's motion without absorbing it, so that the touch of an ebony sharp was crisper and more immediate than the touch of a rosewood sharp, the difference measurable in milliseconds but perceptible to a trained hand.

She cut the key levers from lime wood — tilia europaea, the wood French builders had used for keys since the seventeenth century because it was light and stable and easy to carve and because it absorbed the small shocks of the key's return without transmitting them to the player's finger as a jar or a click, the wood acting as a cushion between the mechanics of the action and the sensitivity of the hand. Each lever was cut to a length of thirty-eight centimeters for the naturals and twenty-four centimeters for the sharps, and each was balanced on a steel pin driven into the keybed at the calculated balance point — the point at which the weight of the front of the key equaled the weight of the back plus the tracker, so that the key would rest in its up position without a spring and would return to that position when released, the return powered by the weight of the key itself and the weight of the pallet, which the tracker pulled back to its closed position when the key was released.

The balance point was critical. A key balanced too far forward would be sluggish in its return, the back-heavy lever slow to rise, and the player would feel the sluggishness as a reluctance in the release, the note holding a fraction of a second longer than intended. A key balanced too far back would be jumpy, the front-heavy lever rising too quickly and jarring the finger, and the player would feel the jumpiness as a loss of control, the key escaping the finger before the finger was ready to release it. Her father had calculated the balance points for each key and noted them on the drawings, and Marguerite drilled the pin holes at the marked positions, checking each one by mounting the key on the pin and pressing it gently and feeling the response, the rise and fall of the lever under her finger, adjusting the pin position by fractions of a millimeter until the key felt right — a word she could not define precisely but could recognize instantly, the way a musician recognizes a note that is in tune, not by measuring its frequency but by the absence of discomfort, the sense that nothing needs to change.

She made three keyboards in ten days, each one a row of fifty-six keys — forty naturals and sixteen sharps — mounted on a keybed of beech, the keys spaced at the standard French octave width of one hundred and sixty-five millimeters, the naturals faced with bone glued in place with hide glue and scraped smooth with a cabinet scraper, the sharps capped with ebony turned on the lathe and fitted with a friction fit that held them in place without glue so they could be replaced individually if one cracked or wore through, a provision for the future that was characteristic of her father's design philosophy — every component replaceable, every joint reversible, the organ built not for this decade but for this century and the next.

She assembled the keyboards in the console frame, which was a structure of oak that housed the key mechanisms, the coupler apparatus, the drawknob terraces, and the pedalboard. The frame was partially built — her father had completed the main structure before his death, a box of oak panels joined with mortise and tenon and fitted with the brackets that held the keyboards at the correct height and angle — and Marguerite needed only to install the keyboards and connect them to the action, a process that required aligning each key with its corresponding tracker, a task of patient adjustment, each key tested by hand, each tracker pulled to confirm the connection, the alignment verified by measuring the force at the key and comparing it to the target of one hundred and twenty grams.

The drawknobs were next. Forty-two stops meant forty-two drawknobs — the round ebony handles that the organist pulled to engage each stop and pushed to disengage it. Each drawknob was connected by a rod to a slider — a thin board that sat between the wind chest and the pipe holes and that, when the drawknob was pulled, slid sideways to align its holes with the pipe holes above, allowing wind to pass from the chest to the pipes of that stop. When the drawknob was pushed in, the slider slid back, blocking the holes, and the stop was silent. The slider mechanism was ancient — it had been used since the fifteenth century — and it was elegant in its simplicity, a single moving part that controlled an entire rank of pipes, but it required precision in its construction because the slider had to move freely in its channel without leaking wind around its edges, and the fit had to be maintained across changes in humidity and temperature that caused the wood to expand and contract, and this dimensional instability was the slider's weakness, the reason some builders had abandoned it in favor of cone-valve chests or spring-valve chests that did not depend on the tight fit of wood against wood, but her father had stayed with sliders because he trusted wood and because the slider, when well-built, gave the stop a feel at the drawknob that cone-valves and spring-valves could not match, a smooth resistance followed by a definite engagement, the drawknob locking into its pulled position with a click that told the player the stop was on, a tactile confirmation that was not necessary — the player could hear the stop — but that was satisfying in the way that all well-made mechanical things are satisfying, the sensation of parts fitting together as they were designed to fit.

She turned the drawknobs on the lathe from billets of ebony, each knob a cylinder twenty-five millimeters in diameter and forty millimeters long, with a slightly domed face on which the stop name would be engraved — she would send the knobs to an engraver in Lyon when they were finished — and a bore through the center that accepted the brass rod connecting the knob to the slider. She turned forty-two knobs in two days, working the lathe with the rhythm that repetitive work demands, each knob identical to the last, the ebony shaving off the billet in thin curls that fell to the floor like black hair, and the smell of ebony filled the workshop, a dry sweet smell that was unlike any other wood and that she associated with keyboards and with the sharp keys her fingers found by touch when she played in the dark.

She had played in the dark. In the church in Flavigny, on the nine-stop organ her father had built, she had played at night with the lights off, sitting in the tribune with only the moonlight through the clerestory windows and the faint glow of the stop knobs, which were ivory and which caught the light, and she had played from memory — Bach, the great Preludes and Fugues, the Trio Sonatas that required three independent voices, one for each hand and one for the feet — and the darkness had removed the visual and left only the tactile and the acoustic, the feel of the keys and the sound of the pipes, and she had discovered in the darkness that the organ's voice was different when she could not see the console, that the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from the walls and the vault and the floor, as if the building itself were singing, the stone vibrating with the resonance of the pipes, and she had understood then what her father meant when he said that the organ should seem to be not on the gallery but everywhere, and she had understood that this everywhere-ness was not a quality of the organ but of the listener's attention, the darkness forcing her to listen without the anchor of sight, the sound free to exist in the full space of the church rather than in the narrow corridor between her eyes and the console.

She thought about this as she assembled the drawknob terrace — the panel above the keyboards where the drawknobs were mounted in rows, the Grand-Orgue knobs in the bottom row, the Positif above, the Recit above that, the Pedale on the sides — and she thought about who would sit at this console and pull these knobs and press these keys and hear the organ speak for the first time, and she realized that it would be her, that she would be the first player, because the voicing required someone to play the organ while the voicer listened from the nave, and since she was both the builder and the voicer she would have to play and listen alternately, running from the console to the nave and back, adjusting a pipe and then returning to the console to hear the adjustment in context, a process that was exhausting and lonely and that her father had performed for every organ he had built, always alone, because the voicing was the private act and the voicer did not share it.

But the voicer needed a player. An assistant, someone to hold the notes while the voicer stood in the nave and listened to the sound as it arrived from the gallery, transformed by the acoustic of the space, and this was a practical problem she had not yet solved — she could not be in two places at once, and the alternative — clamping the keys with weights, a common expedient — was inadequate because a clamped key produced a static sound, the pipe speaking at constant volume and pressure, and the voicer needed to hear the pipe in motion, the attack and the sustain and the release, the whole arc of the sound, which required a player who could play a single note with the attention the voicer needed, holding the key for exactly the right duration, releasing it at the right speed, varying the touch to test the pipe's response to different playing styles.

She would need help. The thought was unwelcome because she had been working alone since her father's death and the solitude had become a structure she lived inside, a room whose walls she did not want to move, but the organ required what the organ required and the voicing required a player and the player could not be her because she was the voicer, and she thought about who she could ask and the answer came immediately, as answers do when they have been waiting for the question: Helene Blanchard, the organist at Notre-Dame de Dijon, who had known her father and who had been consulted on the specification for the Saint-Benigne organ and who had hands that Marguerite had watched on the keys of the Notre-Dame console and that moved with a precision and a gentleness that suggested the instrument was not being played but being spoken to, the keys addressed rather than struck, the notes offered rather than demanded.

She would ask Helene when the time came. The time was not yet. The voicing was months away, and between now and then she had to build the swell box and the coupler mechanism and make sixteen hundred more pipes and install everything in the cathedral, and these tasks were sufficient to fill her days without the additional complexity of another person in her working life, a person who would bring not just hands but opinions and presence and the inevitable disruption of a routine that had become, in the months since her father's death, as regular and as necessary as breathing.

She completed the console in the second week of December, the keyboards installed, the drawknobs mounted, the pedalboard — a radiating concave board of thirty keys, each key a long lever of oak faced with maple for the naturals and rosewood for the sharps — connected to its action, and the coupler mechanisms — the systems that allowed one keyboard to be connected to another, so that pulling a stop on the Grand-Orgue while playing on the Positif would sound both divisions together — assembled and tested. She sat on the bench — a simple wooden bench, adjustable in height, padded with leather — and placed her hands on the Grand-Orgue keyboard and her feet on the pedalboard and pressed nothing, just felt the keys under her fingers, the smooth bone of the naturals and the hard ebony of the sharps, the wood of the pedalboard through the soles of her shoes, and she sat there in the workshop with the silent console and the silent pipes and the silent wind system and felt the instrument around her, the mechanism waiting for the wind that would give it voice, and she thought about her father sitting at this same console, which he had partially built and she had completed, and she thought that the console was the place where their work overlapped most intimately, his hands and her hands having shaped the same surfaces, his design and her execution meeting in the keys that she now touched, and she pressed a key — middle C on the Grand-Orgue — and felt the tracker move beneath the key and heard the faint click of the pallet opening in the wind chest at the other end of the workshop, a sound as small as a heartbeat and as significant, because it meant the connection was made, the chain was complete from finger to pallet, and all that remained was the wind and the pipes and the voicing and the cathedral and the sound.

She lifted her finger and the key rose and the pallet clicked shut and the workshop was silent again, and she sat on the bench and looked at her hands on the keys and thought about the word her father had used for blend — "l'oubli de soi," the forgetting of oneself — and she thought that this was what the console demanded of the player, the forgetting of the self that sat on the bench and the hands that pressed the keys and the feet that depressed the pedals, the forgetting of the body that was the instrument's intermediary, so that only the music remained, the sound passing through the player as the wind passed through the pipes, the player not the source of the music but the channel through which the music moved from the score to the room, and the console was designed to facilitate this forgetting, the keys where the fingers expected them, the stops where the hands could reach them, the bench at the right height, the angle of the keyboards correct, everything arranged so that the body could disappear into the mechanism and the mechanism could disappear into the sound and the sound could fill the room with something that was neither the player's nor the organ's but belonged to the space between them, the space the air crossed, the space the music occupied.

She stood up from the bench and covered the console with a cotton sheet and went into the house and it was evening and the house was quiet and she made dinner and ate it alone at the kitchen table and the silence in the house was the same silence that was in the workshop, the silence of things waiting to be used, the piano in the parlor waiting for hands, the stove waiting for fire, the bed waiting for the weight of a body, and she thought that silence was not emptiness but readiness, the condition of an instrument before the first note, and she thought that she had been in this condition since her father's death, waiting, not for something to happen but for herself to be ready for what would happen, and the building of the console had brought her closer to readiness because the console was the place where the readiness would end, the place where she would sit and press a key and hear the organ speak for the first time, and the first sound would be the end of the silence and the beginning of whatever came next.