I walked into the choir room after the 10:00 service on Jan. 16 and met an angry alto. The closing hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," had given her a bad case of mental indigestion. She wondered what kind of path we Anglo-Saxons thought we were treading "through the blood of the slaughtered." As more half-vested singers joined the debate, it became clear that not everyone was aware of the song's connection with the Civil Rights movement, but everyone had a strong opinion about it. Even taken in their historical context, the lyrics aren't easy to swallow. I'm among those who enjoy belting it out every year, but I had to ask myself why. Am I co-opting someone else's story or pretending we've fully reached "the place for which our parents sighed?" (Whose parents?)

My family is from Michigan. I was in first grade when my Dad accepted a job at the University of Florida. As we drove out of East Lansing, my parents warned me that things were different in the South. Some people there thought their skin color made them better than others. I was enjoined to resist that attitude with evangelical fervor. At school in Gainesville, my attempts to befriend black students made me a pariah. The Yankee accent didn't help, either.

At our church, one popular with college students, we sang, "We Are One In the Spirit" at every Sunday evening service. It was the first song I learned by heart, and I thought it was a factual description of the Christian life. I don't know what religion I imagined my white Southern peers were practicing when they called me a "n---r lover", but I was sure they weren't Christians. Christians promise to "guard each man's dignity and save each man's pride." Christians are known by their love. Only years later did I learn that the people who'd been buying and selling human beings a century before I was born were also churchgoers. 

When the preacher read the Beatitudes and got to the part about "blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you...on my account," I was eager to believe the bullying I endured at school was indeed for Jesus' sake, but in fact, I was bigoted in my own way. I thought I was a better person because I was from the North. Then once during a Christmas visit to Kalamazoo I was shocked to hear my grandfather complaining about "all these colored people" moving onto their street. And there were riots in Detroit. Clearly moral superiority wasn't determined by geography.

When I sing "Lift Every Voice," do I ignore or embrace the cognitive dissonance? I'd like to think I don't shy away from what "the dark past has taught us," even though I know it still has much to teach. Let me sing it as a confession and a renewal of the vow to respect the dignity of every human being -- with God's help.

                                               by Frank Spinella

     CONCORD, N.H. - 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.

     "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."

     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."
 

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