Sure, there’s artistry involved in playing and building organs—and lots of it. But as Norman Goad explains it, there’s a lot more going on.
”People ask me (how they) can become an organ tech,” Goad says. “And I say, well, tell me how many trades you think there are involved in organ building?”
There’s tuning. And woodworking. And metallurgy. And electronics. And welding. And a good working knowledge of aerodynamics helps a lot, too.
In Amarillo, few—if anyone—know the art and the science of organs as well as Goad. He has performed as a church musician for 50 years and, since 2004, has worked as director of music and organist for First Presbyterian Church of Amarillo, where he headed a $351,000 project to rebuild its pipe organ in 2018. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
Chip Chandler: What’s your earliest memory of hearing an organ being played?
Norman Goad: My earliest memory was in church. I grew up in a little Baptist church in Pampa. There was a lady that played a little Hammond organ. I thought it was just the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. I was just a little bitty boy at that point. And it was fascinating, plus it had buttons to push on and I wanted to go push all of the buttons.
CC: What about the organ is so appealing to you, both as a listener and a performer?
NG: They’re probably very much related, those two things. The sound of a pipe organ is unique, and at the same time, it can resemble orchestral sounds. It’s so inspiring to hear those sounds blended together in various ways.
CC: Watching you play and other organists play, do you just feel like you have to be an octopus and stretch and have multiple arms to hit everything?
NG: I’m always amazed when I watch concert performers and what we call “console management.” They have this amazing management capability of the console itself—the organ, the keys and the stops are all called the console—and then the pipes are up in the chambers.
CC: How many hymns do you think you’ve played over the years?
NG: Oh. Oh, man.
CC: That’s a very unfair question.
NG: That is really unfair (laughs). OK, let’s say three hymns per Sunday times 52 weeks is 156 times, gosh, 50 years. So, I’ve probably played at least 7,800 hymns, and that’s actually in front of people in worship services.
CC: How many weddings?
NG: I lost count. It’s hundreds.
CC: How do you learn how to repair and build an organ?
NG: You need an internship with a real organ building company. I apprenticed with an organ builder in Fort Worth in the late ’80s for two years and learned lots. I had been in building trades and been an electrician and all kinds of stuff before then. I thought, hey, I know all the tools, right? But there’s all these wonky little, crazy-shaped tools that I’ve never heard of in my life. And told my wife when I went home after the first day, I said, I’ll never learn all this stuff. Well, now I’ve done it for, you know, close to 40 years.
CC: Talk about the expansion of the First Presbyterian organ in 2018—what was it like before, and why did you expand it?
NG: This organ has a long history. It was the first, original organ in the church, which was built right after the building in 1927. [In the 1950s] some additions were made to the organ. And then, fast forward to 1990, and there was a major rebuild done. Now fast forward to 2018. We’re looking at moving our choir from the balcony to the front of the church, and in order to do that, we had to either move the existing organ console to the front or maybe do better than that and add to the organ and fix everything that was wrong with it, which, there were quite a few things wrong with it by that point. Because that had been 30 years, you know. So I just had to tell [church leaders], rest assured, you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck when
we do this. And sure enough, they did. I added stops to the organ so that they shake the room and they literally shake the roof of the building.
CC: Besides playing at First Presbyterian, how else do you share your love of music in Amarillo? And why is that important to you?
NG: One of the ways is the fact that I work on all these pipe organs around the Panhandle and beyond. I love doing that. I love it a lot. I sometimes play with Amarillo Symphony as a side keyboard player and provide specialty synthesizers and other keyboards for them. Sometimes I’m asked to play the side keyboard and recently played in their concert featuring Holst’s The Planets.
