When Charles Fisk arrived at Stanford in 1950 to begin a doctorate in physics, he already had an impressive résumé as a scientist. He'd been recruited into the Manhattan Project as an 18-year-old high school graduate, working first as an electronics technician and later in the bomb physics division on the detonator team. After the war, he studied physics at Harvard and then continued in research at Brookhaven National Laboratory while applying to graduate school. Anyone might have said these experiences presaged a promising career in physics. But after three weeks on the Farm, Fisk walked into Memorial Church and got another idea that filled him with enthusiasm he'd never felt for atoms. He could conjoin the study of the physical world with the study of music: He could build pipe organs.
I first heard Charles Fisk's story in the Memorial Church organ loft at the console of the instrument that bears his name. I was a sophomore, coming to grips with the fact that I wasn't cut out to major in physics or any other discipline that involved higher math, though that had once been my intention. I wasn't sure what I was cut out for—not music, either, but that wasn't the point of organ lessons for me. I'd signed up on a lark, enthralled by sounds so powerful they set the building atremble, hopeful that learning to perform Bach with all four of my limbs might somehow make me smarter. That hope may have been misguided, but it was replaced with the inspiration that I took from my teacher's account of Charles Fisk. In my ears, his story resonated with as much power and beauty as the instrument itself. He did become one of the preeminent organ builders of the 20th century, following a path no less convoluted than my own.
When Fisk wrote to his parents in October 1950 that he was quitting physics, taking a leave of absence until winter quarter when he'd begin a masters in music, and apprenticing himself to an organ repairman, they assumed he had written in a febrile delirium. (He'd mentioned a cold.) They wouldn't be the last to question his career change, though as Fisk became more influential and respected in his new field, the queries came mostly from admirers who were fascinated by his personal history. Fisk prickled when some asked if he had turned to music to atone for the bomb. While he had moral qualms about the destructive applications of nuclear physics, his career choice was not about penance; it stemmed from his desire to create things of tangible and enduring beauty—things more awe-inspiring than any explosion.
Blame It on Bach
At Stanford, Fisk set about developing his musical skills. He'd sung in church choirs as a boy and as a student at Harvard, so he'd listened to organs often, but he'd never formally studied the instrument before he began lessons with Stanford organist Herbert Nanney in 1951. At the time, there was only one organ in Memorial Church: a Romantic organ built by the Murray Harris Company in 1901. At that instrument, Fisk learned two important things. First, he was not destined to be a performer; second, the Murray Harris was, like so many American organs, unsuitable for an authentic rendering of Bach. Three years later, Fisk left Stanford, sans degree, to apprentice himself to an organ builder in Ohio. Ultimately he'd return to Massachusetts to establish his own shop. But what he learned at Stanford would stay with him. He later wrote: "The reason I established C.B. Fisk Inc. in 1961 was to build organs truly suitable for playing early music, especially that of J.S. Bach."
Fisk traveled to Europe to research historic organs. He'd listen and go crawling into the casework to understand how the instruments worked. The organs Fisk created were not historical replicas but modern instruments that made use of historical approaches. He's particularly known as a champion of tracker action: the traditional way of connecting the keys to the pipes through mechanical linkages rather than electrical circuits. Tracker action gives players more direct control over the attack and release of each note; the keys are not simply on-off switches but controllers that allow a human touch to be transmitted to the instrument, producing sounds sometimes less polished but potentially more beautiful in the hands of a gifted player, and invariably more alive. It was Fisk's explicit goal to make organs feel like living, breathing beings.
When money was donated to Stanford in the 1970s to fund the addition of a Baroque organ in Nanney's honor, Fisk won the contract. The Fisk-Nanney organ would broaden the range of repertoire that could be authentically performed in Memorial Church. Its design was unlike anything that had come before. The most distinctive original feature is a large iron lever just above the manuals that enables the organist to switch from meantone, which was the standard tuning system in the 16th and 17th centuries, to well-tempered tuning, which Bach and others began to advocate in the early 18th century. Its tuning system is among the reasons that musicians and musicologists find the Fisk-Nanney organ thrilling and provocative, but one need not be an expert to understand the sheer power of its sound, which can send palpable vibrations down every pew and fill the tiled heavens above.
Brought Full Circle
Fisk was deeply involved in the design of the Stanford organ and its construction at the shop in Massachusetts, but his declining health prevented him from participating in the installation. Since his 20s, he'd suffered from an autoimmune disease of the liver. Fisk always worked obsessively in spite of his health problems, or perhaps because of them, knowing his time might be limited. He carefully trained his successors, mindful of the legacy of his work. Those craftsmen were installing the organ in Memorial Church in December 1983 when they got news of Fisk's death. They finished the organ in a manner befitting the master from whom they learned, and they carry on his work today.
Describing the Stanford organ, Fisk said: "I wanted to build an organ that not only will serve as the Memorial Church organ . . . but one that would bring full circle the process that began there for me, a quest for a truly old organ. . . . This all seems to be a working out of my destiny, to bring me back to Stanford."
Though I've scarcely touched an organ in the 15 years since I left Stanford, the things I learned in the loft are among the lessons that remain most relevant. I touched an instrument that breathed with the spirit of its creator, that responded to my hands with the vitality of a living thing. The inspiring sensation of playing it was enhanced by knowing that the man behind it had stopped in that very building to question the inexorability of the future he saw before him, and found an alternate route, a creative path, that would enable him to leave the world enriched through objects of enduring quality and beauty. His organ became a symbol of what all of us seek from our education: the possibility for transformation and reinvention that begins in ourselves.
Laura Sewell Matter, '98, is researching a book about Fisk. She teaches English at Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico.
