Fine Tuned
Taylor and Boody Organbuilders keep in step with time-honored craftsmanship.
Story by Meri Price
Photography by Casey Templeton
Nestled between family farms on the outskirts of Staunton, Va. is an old brick schoolhouse. But on a weekday afternoon, there are no children anywhere. Inside the building, all the desks and blackboards have been removed, leaving large open spaces cluttered with new materials. Looming tall in the main room of the building are two polished wooden structures. In every corner there are workbenches, tools and scraps of metal and wood.
Fourteen craftsmen are positioned throughout the building, each working on their respective projects. They stop now and then to share a joke. Some work on carving intricate details into blocks of wood, while others melt lead and aluminum and carefully shape them into small, hollow pipes. They are all working collectively to put together a church organ.
It is a routine to which they are accustomed. As employees of George Taylor and John Boody, the co-owners of Taylor & Boody Organbuilders, they produce what some argue rank among the highest-quality organs in the world.
The company fashions only a handful of organs each year, but each is intricate and unique. All of the organs are built in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Germanic or northern European style, in which T&B specializes. In a given year, T&B is able to complete one or two large instruments while working on a handful of smaller jobs.
“Not the kind of organs that go in your body,” shop foreman Tom Karaffa says laughing. “That’s what I thought the first time I met John and he told me what he did for a living.” The organs that T&B builds are authentic pipe organs made for use in churches and concert halls.
Since the company was founded nearly 30 years ago, it has built about 50 organs in many sizes. Some of T&B’s clients include colleges and universities such as Washington and Lee, Rutgers, Emory, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Richmond, a number of Presbyterian and Lutheran churches across the United States, historic communities such as Colonial Williamsburg and Old Salem Moravian Community, and even a number of churches and schools in Japan.
Big business may have prevailed in many areas, but not here. Small, personal and tightly-knit, T&B reflects an atmosphere that can only be described as similar to a traditional old-world guild. As a group of self-employed, skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools required to produce their goods, T&B is free to uphold the highest standards of craftsmanship.
“What we are is a whole bunch of craftspeople all in one spot, all mixed together here,” Boody says. “Everyone learns how to do different things, and then they expand what they know and they get better and better.”
Taylor and Boody, both craftsmen themselves, successfully manage their company and all of their employees. In return, their employees seem to have only good things to say about working for them.
Karaffa, who used to work in construction, says, “The thing I like about working here is that you can work with your schedule. It’s a very good work environment. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Boody are good fellows to work for; they’re very fair and they let us in on their decision making.”
“It’s like the island of misfit toys,” employee Robbie Lawson says, laughing. Now, a skilled woodcarver, he has worked at T&B ever since they “rescued” him from his job as a Volkswagen mechanic and body guy. The T&B team comes from a wide range of backgrounds.
Craftsmen who have been there for years have acquired a wide variety of skills ranging from case, pipe and windchest making to wood carving and Computer Aided Design (CAD), though no one is made to stick to only one task.
No matter their background, employees enjoy the work that they do. “There’s a lot of creativity,” Karaffa says. “It’s kind of like going to shop class every day — you’re always making something and even if you’re making the same thing over and over again, it’s always different because every organ is different.”
Even the owners enjoy their jobs. Boody says, “Listen, where else can you have control over what you’re making and then go and sell it? You design it, you make it. I mean look at me, I’m in my old clothes,” he says, waving his hand across his body to point out the worn khaki pants and maroon cotton turtleneck he is wearing. “Nobody is telling me what to do.”
No less interesting than the company itself, its founders each have an interesting history.
The choice to become an apprentice to an organ builder in Germany may not have been an unusual one a century or two ago, but it was much later in history when George Taylor decided to follow that route. His story reflects a path similar to that of a master craftsman of a guild.
A typical guild worker began as an apprentice, learned the trade and was then eligible to become a journeyman. As a journeyman, a guild worker was entitled to travel to other towns and countries to learn the art from other masters. After years of experience, a journeyman could finally be elected as a master craftsman.
After graduating from Washington and Lee, Taylor went to Germany and became a master organ builder. He apprenticed for four years with an organ builder named Rudolph von Beckerath in Hamburg before attending the German master organ builder’s school. After receiving his certificate, he moved to Ohio to work for an organ builder named John Brombaugh.
It was Brombaugh’s company that made partners out of Taylor and Boody. Boody, a returned soldier from Vietnam and a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, where he majored in voice, had developed a major interest in pipe organs. “I got into organ building because I sang in church choirs and fooled around with organs a lot,” Boody says.
Both men ended up working together at Brombaugh’s company for seven years before they decided to start their own company on the East Coast. Taylor, a Virginian, invited Boody to his sister’s graduation from Mary Baldwin College in 1979. It was then that they began thinking about Staunton as a place to establish their new company. “George had a college friend who gave us the idea that if we found an old school, we could have a room to set the organs up in,” Boody says.
They took the advice and went with it, buying an abandoned schoolhouse in 1979 for $11,000 and moving their new company into it.
“This was an old school,” Boody says, his footsteps echoing as he walks across the concrete floor of the large, open space in the main room of his workshop. “It was 12 grades, three grades in every classroom, a principal’s office and the library.”
The schoolhouse, which served its original purpose for about 15 years, shut down when schools began to consolidate. “There’s a bunch of these little all-grade community schools around Virginia,” Boody says. “They have a standard design and they were very well made.”
After nearly 30 years of success working out of the same building, T&B is just now adding some new rooms to create additional workspace.
Though the workspace they had before never lessened the quality of their work, their new space will be useful in the future, especially for the $1.2 million project they are currently working on for Yale University.
Martin Jean, director of the Institute of Sacred Music and professor of organ at Yale, says he has worked closely with T&B in the past and is enthusiastic about the newest project they are working on for Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel. The new northern European style organ, which will be used during the chapel’s daily service, is scheduled for completion in 2008.
“It will fit in, in a unique way, to the organs we already have on campus,” Jean says, “between our American Classic organ and our Romantic organ.”
According to Jean, Yale decided to use T&B for the project because, in addition to having the most experience and the best track record, T&B is one of the best organ-building firms in the world.
This organ will be medium-sized, but very elaborate and with a special purpose, Boody says. “You know Yale; they have to do something that’s really unique.”
Jean says that T&B was the obvious choice for the project. “They built in the style we were looking for in very specific ways,” he says. “We even looked in Europe, but Taylor and Boody know how to build better in American style churches because they have less stone and granite than European churches.”
Having garnered respect among the Ivy League music community, T&B also has spread its reputation across the United States and overseas.
For such a small company, T&B has done a remarkable job of making its name and products well known. Boody explains that this was possible because, “First of all, there are not many people that do this in this country, that are builders like us. People ask how many organ builders like us there are in the country. I’d say maybe 10, and they’re all like us. We’re handcraft businesses, which means we make everything by hand, and its very high quality. So there’s not a lot of competition.”
Boody says that the clients who seek them out definitely know a thing or two about organs. “There are a couple of organ magazines in the country, and our clients see our work published in those magazines, and they see what we do, and they know what we do, and the people that are interested in this kind of organ building will pay attention and get on our Web site.”
Beyond the United States, T&B currently has seven organs in Japan. Their first job there was secured by a Japanese woman with whom Taylor and Boody became acquainted with in Europe while taking a course about organs and organ building.
“She was a professor for years and years at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston,” Boody says. “She had graduated from a girls’ school in Yokahoma, and they were in the market for an organ so she called us up. It was our first big organ in Japan, about a million dollars’ worth of work. When people in Japan saw that organ they said, ‘Oh wow, these guys really know what they’re doing.’ ”
They built another big organ in Tokyo, 200 miles south, and they have sent over a number of their portable organs. Their clients have been impressed by the quality of the organs, which seem to have sold themselves from the start.
“Our first contract was in 1969 for an organ in Ohio,” Boody says, “and since then, we’ve had more jobs than we know what to do with.”
With an excess of jobs, what they really need is more time. Depending on the size of the organ, it can take less than six months or more than two years to build. There are a lot of steps involved in the process. Then, once the organ has been completed in the workshop and sent to its location, it takes about two weeks to assemble and an additional six weeks to listen to the pipes and tune them.
“We call this tonal finishing,” Boody says. He points to a large bucket of scrap aluminum and lead and explains that two of his men are currently on site in Indiana working on tuning their most recent project. “They cut this all off the pipes as part of the tuning process and they sent it back here. We’ll melt it down and reuse it.”
Of course, the more pipes an organ has, the longer it will take to tune. “Our largest organ has 52 sets of pipes, which is 4,000 individual pipes total,” Boody says. “It also has four manual keyboards. It took us two and a half years to build it, about 30,000 hours of work.” They built this organ for the chapel of Holy Cross College, a Catholic school in Massachusetts.
As for the cost of such a large-scale project, Boody says, “That was done in 1985 so it wouldn’t cost very much then, but if we sold an organ of that caliber right now, it would be close to $2 million.”
While some of the instruments that T&B builds are large and expensive, they are not always so grandiose as the one at Holy Cross College or the one planned for Yale. No less intricate, but much more humble, T&B also makes smaller wood and portable organs. The most recent are two twin organs done in the 18th-century English style. These organs, measurably smaller, have five sets of pipes instead of 52, and cost at about $250,000. Together they will take roughly six months to complete and will then be sent their separate ways.
Now seasoned experts in their work, Taylor and Boody have begun to bring in new generations to ensure the future of their business.Boody’s son, who is currently working on the odds and ends of the organ construction, recently left his job to work for his father. Boody hopes for his daughter, who is currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Macedonia, to return to work for the company. But he sighs in submission and says, “She will probably want to follow a different path.”
Although none of George Taylor’s family has come to work in the business, a 25-year-old, Ryan Albashian, seems to be following in his footsteps. After graduating in 2002 as an organ major from Lawrence University in Wisconsin, he came to Staunton to learn the tricks of the trade from Taylor and Boody. Upon learning this Albashian plans to go to Bonn, Germany to study under an organ builder named Klais Orgelbau, much like a journeyman of a guild. In exchange, an apprentice of Orgelbau will be sent over to study in the United States.
In Europe guilds once dominated the market. That was before the advent of industrialism and before the French Revolution, when the guilds began to disband and were replaced by corporations. Though sparse today, a few particular trades in Europe, such as shoemaking, managed to hold out against industrialization and have preserved certain guild rituals to this day.
Pipe organ building in America seems to have followed a similar pattern. Boody says there was never much competition from industrial organ builders.
There aren’t many of those left in this country anymore,” he says. “The largest of those companies went out of business about 10 years ago. At one time, there was a company up in Hagerstown, Md. and at their prime they had about 1,100 employees. Industrial organ building in this country used to be very big, but they are kind of like dinosaurs now. Also, their quality isn’t very good.”
Boody says, “We’re in a kind of higher class of competition. Really, we compete all the time with four builders in the United States, and we divide up the work and we know and love those four builders and we’re calling each other up all the time, talking on the telephone, sharing information. We very seldom compete directly.”
It’s different over here though,” Boody says of the United States. “Europe is full of organ builders. In Germany there are 250 organ builders and they’re like dogs — they fight over every job. Some of them are good and some of them are really bad. In Europe there are thousands and thousands of old organs and a lot of these companies spend a lot of time repairing and restoring. They have wonderful places to build new organs because there are gorgeous big stone buildings. We have to build for punky new American churches,” Boody says jokingly.
No matter the project, T&B has left many of its clients satisfied over the years, bringing a touch of the Old World into each of their new works. In an age of huge corporations and chain companies, they stand as proof that bigger does not always mean better.