There’s a whistle in the organ. It’s a soft, breathy noise, a tiny airplane taking flight. You would think it was supposed to be there. Organs make a lot of sounds, after all. The King of Instruments is not known for its simplicity. This one has 7,897 pipes, serried tubes of wood and metal that rise along the walls of the chancel — and that’s saying nothing of the swell pistons and toe studs and rocker tabs it takes to actually operate the thing. There are four separate keyboards (“manuals,” in organ lingo), a large, multi-tiered pedalboard, and enough pearly drawknobs (bearing labels like “Double Diapason” or “Hautboy”) to impress a liftman.

In the hands (and feet) of a competent organist, none of this seems to matter. If people in the pews are thinking about levers and knobs while a church is supposed to be ringing with triumphant, Bachian sound, something has gone seriously wrong. You’re supposed to look up — up at the pipes in their ornate wooden carapace, up at the brilliant, kaleidoscopic glass that frames the chancel. In the Princeton University Chapel, seated organists are hidden from their audience completely. On a cold, brittle night, when an invisible instrumentalist is at work in an empty hall, the effect is almost ghostly. Tonight, though, there’s a whistle. 

“It’s just distracting,” says a man as he wraps a thick, checkered scarf around his neck. This is Tyler Simko, a bespectacled, friendly-looking postgrad in the Politics department. Next to him, bent down over the console, is Eric Plutz, the “University Organist.” His hair is white and his briefcase is glossy. Picture a jolly, fresh-faced Paul Giamatti.

“This is… not that bad,” rules Plutz. He straightens, and lets out a high-pitched “doot,” mocking the whistle. Simko is putting on his coat. It’s windy out, and his time with the organ is up.

“The calendar in the chapel is a nightmare,” Simko tells me a few minutes later, in one of the chapel’s vaulted entryways. “This is no fault of the University’s organ department,” he’s quick to add, “it’s just the way things are.” Between church services and weddings and university events and the occasional high school choir concert, it’s hard to find time for the organists (or aspiring organists) to practice. Not that there are many players on the list — “I don’t think there’s a lot of competition,” Simko jokes with a small, humble smile.

This is Simko’s fifth year at the University — he spent the last four as an undergraduate, playing the organ in the evenings and graduating in 2018 with an A.B. in Politics. This fall, he’s taking a job at the University of Michigan. “They have an organ department,” he told me — a lucky thing, as only a handful of U.S. universities do. “I’ll email them at some point.”

For a man who spends hours on end at the helm of what might as well be a mad scientist’s latest contraption, Simko has an unassuming demeanor. Add this to his burgeoning career as a political scientist, and you would assume that he was nothing more than a hobby organist. You would be wrong. Simko started playing the organ “as soon as [he] could reach.” He’s done weddings and funerals and everything in between. He’s played in resplendent cathedrals, and in claustrophobic recording studios. And during short, pre-scheduled slots, he’ll play in the chapel.

This is one of the many oddities of the church organ: you have to share it. There are pipe organs small enough to fit in a living room (if you’re serious about the instrument, you have to practice at home), but nothing compares to the real deal. “It’s very powerful,” says Simko. “You know, it’s built into the physical space.” When you play the Mander-Skinner Organ, you might as well be playing the Princeton chapel.

Since the organ was restored in the early 90’s — it was disassembled and shipped to London, where thirty experts from the N.P. Mander Company worked on its thousands of pipes, some of which are roughly thimble-sized, for more than a year — there have been no major changes to the instrument. Still, given its age and complexity, there are always problems to fix. The whistle, as Simko knows, is just the latest one.

Plutz can usually handle this sort of thing — tweaks are made in the “pipe room,” which he reaches by climbing a little wooden ladder — and if he can’t, he knows who to call. After 20 years as the University Organist, the instrument is an old friend. But now he turns from the organ, and beckons a new face up to the chancel. The whistle will have to wait. The next organist is on.