If anyone had told J. Michael Barone a quarter-century ago that the radio program about organ music that he was starting would still be going strong today, he might have dismissed the idea.
J. Michael Barone, a celebrity in the world of organ music, at the St. Paul studio that produces his “Pipedreams” radio program.
'Pipedreams' Program Archive. 
J. Michael Barone playing at Wooddale Community Church in Eden Prarie, Mn.
But this month is the 25th anniversary of “Pipedreams” as a weekly national show, distributed to public and commercial stations by American Public Media of St. Paul. Even Mr. Barone sometimes has trouble believing it.
“I feel as if I had walked down a corridor past an open door, gone in and started doing the show, and been waiting ever since for someone to return and kick me out,” he said the other day on a short visit to New York to attend a concert by the young virtuoso Cameron Carpenter (on a digital organ).
The radio audience is not huge but it is devoted and steady. Appearing on more than 150 stations (down from a peak of 180) across the country, the show draws about 250,000 listeners, Mr. Barone says, and more worldwide who listen on the program’s Web site, pipedreams.org.
“Interestingly, my two largest listening audiences are on commercial classical music stations,” he said, with those stations drawing an average quarter-hour audience of about 9,000 each in Chicago and Dallas, where the 90-minute program is broadcast on Sunday evenings. He hopes to pick up a few more stations after January by making the program available in one- and two-hour formats.
In some places it is hard to find. In New York in recent years, devotees have had to chase it across the lower end of the FM spectrum, where at 10 on Saturday nights it can now be found on two Long Island stations, WLIU (88.3) and WCWP (88.1); in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it has no radio home at all. XM Satellite Radio Channel 133 carries “Pipedreams” on Sundays — at 5 a.m. Eastern time.
“I suspect organ music will always be a niche,” Mr. Barone conceded. “If a million people listened to ‘Pipedreams,’ I’d be thrilled. I don’t think there’s anything about the organ that should get in the way of its being embraced by many more people than it is today.”
To people who care about the instrument and its music, Mr. Barone, 62, is a celebrity, his rich bass-baritone voice as instantly recognizable as his long, gray (and thinning) ponytail and full beard.
Among his regular listeners is Alan Koole, a truck driver from Wyoming, Mich., who until he retired in May used to record “Pipedreams” on Sunday mornings and then play it over and over on the road in his tractor-trailer rig. “Traveling, I really appreciated what he’s doing,” Mr. Koole said in a telephone interview. “I had no idea there was so much music specifically for organ.”
Neither did Mr. Barone before his early teens, when he began listening to recordings of organ music and then playing at his Presbyterian church in Kingston, Pa. He was encouraged by a friend there, Robert Wech, who later attended Oberlin College and persuaded Mr. Barone to follow in 1964.
“He suggested it would be a good place for me, even though he knew I wasn’t going to go into music as a profession, because of the limits of my executive skill as a player,” Mr. Barone said. He went on to earn a degree in music history at Oberlin and took courses at the conservatory there, but it was by working at the 10-watt student-run radio station that he stumbled into his profession.
“When I realized I was going to get out after four years, I thought maybe I could announce classical music,” he said. He was offered the job of music director at a new radio station at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., after answering an advertisement, and drove from Ohio to take a look.
“So on the 20th of August, 1968, I showed up, and I believe my intent was to work for a year or two, pay back some of my student loans, take a deep breath and jump on the academic bandwagon again,” he recalled. “Forty years later, I’m still here, trying to figure out what I’ll do when I grow up.”
St. John’s University Radio eventually became Minnesota Public Radio, a nonprofit private corporation that, as American Public Media, also distributes “A Prairie Home Companion,” among other programs.
As Minnesota Public Radio’s classical music director for 25 years, Mr. Barone could acquire and listen to as many recordings as he wanted, starting with the notable organists of his youth: E. Power Biggs, Virgil Fox, Richard Elsasser, Catherine Crozier. He has kept listening and discovering instruments and organists from all over the world.
Tuning In to the Organ, and Not Just in Church Published: October 17, 2008
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He started a weekly Sunday night organ program there in 1970; that eventually led to a pilot series of 14 programs starting in January 1982 with performances recorded at the 1980 national convention of the American Guild of Organists in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Nicholas D. Nash, the station’s program director at the time, suggested calling the series “Pipedreams.”
It was so well received that “Pipedreams” came back as a weekly program in October 1983, and has been on the air ever since. Mr. Nash’s brother-in-law and sister, credited in every broadcast as Mr. and Mrs. Wesley C. Dudley, have provided financial support from the beginning.
Mr. Barone still plays the organ occasionally, and is a co-founder of the Chamber Music Society of St. Cloud. He also collects Citroën cars, including two of those 2CV’s that look as if it would take a can opener to peel the sunroofs back, and is president of the Citroën Club of Minnesota. One thing he never expected was to become “Michael Barone of ‘Pipedreams.’ ”
That persona led him to an advisory role in pipe organ installation projects like those at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. At an organ recital marathon at the Kimmel two years ago, he was master of ceremonies when the newly installed instrument (by Dobson Pipe Organ Builders of Lake City, Iowa) developed a couple of stuck notes after Mr. Carpenter played his transcription of the last movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on it.
“Cameron, you broke it,” Mr. Barone observed. “This is very expensive. Are you insured?”
The organ wasn’t broken, of course, and unlike some of its counterparts in concert halls elsewhere, it has a sizable endowment and is often heard. Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York do not have pipe organs, a situation that worries Mr. Barone, though they use digital instruments when they need them.
“The digital or electronic or synthetic organs of the 21st century have made remarkable advances in their ability to give a convincing impression of the pipe organ’s effect,” Mr. Barone said, “but the very best pipe organ is still able to create an experience and an impression that has not found a synthetic equivalent.”
Organists like Mr. Carpenter disagree, and Mr. Barone — like Paul Jacobs and Hector Olivera, two other contemporary organists he admires — does not dismiss digital substitutes as “toasters,” as many pipe organists do. Mr. Barone also admires Barbara Dennerlein’s jazz improvisations on the electronic Hammond B3 organ and thinks that theater organists could teach their classical counterparts a lot about technique.
On Sunday, which the American Guild of Organists and other associations have designated as a day for organ spectaculars around the country to celebrate the International Year of the Organ, Mr. Barone will help to lead the festivities in Minneapolis, a multiorganist concert on the Casavant Frères pipe organ at Central Lutheran Church.
“I’m just trying to open a door in an inviting way to provide access to this marvelous realm of thoughtful, passionate, soothing, exciting, delicious, brainy and blissful music,” he said of “Pipedreams.” “It can tell its own story, or stimulate our curiosity to discover it, if we will simply listen.”
Hearing an instrument he has not heard before, he said, “is like meeting new people and finding out how interesting they really are.”
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