Piping up, to good effect
Charles Brenton Fisk’s daughter once said that her father was “dedicated to his work the way that some people are dedicated to a true love.” The Memorial Church’s new organ is a product of that devotion. In 1943, the U.S. government tapped Fisk, then an 18-year-old Harvard student, to work for physicist Robert Oppenheimer in the bomb-trigger division of the Manhattan Project. Later, Fisk studied nuclear physics at Stanford University, but soon the onetime chorister at Christ Church in Cambridge traded his lab talents for his workshop skills to craft some of the most complex musical instruments. Eventually another Harvard man, the spiritual heart of the University for more than 40 years, noticed Fisk’s artistry. An accomplished organist himself, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes became the driving force behind a donor-funded, $6 million effort to provide his church with the type of sound it deserved. Senior reed voicer Michael Kraft tunes the row...