Concert One Hundred: 5/30/26 at the United Methodist Church

...donations benefited the Re-Treasured Community Closet

At the Corinth concert, Susan Gordon invited us to come to the Groton United Methodist Church. Groton Librarian Sarah Spira, who had invited us earlier to play at the library before learning that we always look for a real piano, helped organize the event.

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Gordon’s Granite Calliope!

Back in Corinth, Susan had mentioned that her husband John had built a calliope out of a single 1200-lb chunk of granite. Alas, he was not a musician and so he could not be my local Grotonian performer collaborator. But would it be possible, she wondered, for me to somehow include the calliope in my Groton concert?

She asked this as if I’d be doing them a favor. I, of course, unaware until that moment that this instrument even existed, was immediately dead-set on playing it at any cost.

There was no shortage of “rock”-themed tunes to choose from. “I Am a Rock” and “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me” seemed the most fitting—I mean, they’re literal descriptions of the situation. Ernie Burnett’s “Steamboat Rag” was mandatory, given the calliope’s history and the Vermont connections of both the calliope and the steamboat (see “about the calliope” below). “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” just sounded great on the instrument.

I had the repeat pleasure of playing with former student Leah Gagnon, who began at UVM the same year I did, and is now teaching instrumental music at the Hazen School in Hardwick, where she joined me in the project’s first year. You can hear the complete Poulenc Sonata at the Hardwick writeup.

As usual, much of the program was keyed to town history. Groton was home to William Scott, the Civil War “Sleeping Sentinel” who fell asleep while on a double guard duty he had taken on to relieve an exhausted comrade. He was sentenced to death but was pardoned at the last minute by President Lincoln, whose electoral support in Vermont was higher than in any other state. Scott died in battle less than a year later, and the highway where the Groton UMC sits is named for him. Though Scott never reached old age, I played Robert Stults’ “Old Sentinel March” in his memory.

...about the calliope

The calliope, invented in 1855 by Joshua Stoddard of Pawlet Vermont, produces tones by blowing a gas, originally steam, across large whistles, originally locomotive whistles. In the steam era, calliopes were used primarily on steamboats and in circuses, two places where steam power was in use and loud music was fitting. The calliope is nothing if not loud; some can be heard for five miles. Incidentally, the first successful steam paddle boat was also built by a Vermonter, Samuel Morey of Fairlee, despite that distinction usually being ascribed to Robert Fulton of New York.

About 150 years after Stoddard’s invention, retired computer engineer John Gordon decided he’d had enough of mowing around a large rock in his Groton field and decided to dig it out. It turned out to be mostly underground and to weigh about 50,000 pounds. So he drilled holes to drive wedges to split it into manageable chunks. He used an air compressor to clean out the holes prior to inserting the wedges and discovered that when he blew air across the holes, they whistled. One thing led to another, and several years, 1800 work hours, and $6000 later, he had the world’s only granite calliope, driven by an air compressor and played by a MIDI keyboard controlling 45 repurposed 1950s-era military jet valves.

From the original calliope’s and steamboat’s Vermont roots, to the mixture of ingenuity, persistence, thrift, and frankly general weirdness in John’s invention, not to mention its origins in the quintessential state activities of mowing, tinkering, and hauling stone, Gordon’s Granite Calliope is a serious contender for the Most Vermont Thing Ever. I feel honored and privileged to have been able to play it in this very Vermont project.

You can read more about Gordon’s Granite Calliope on John’s website and in this Stuck in Vermont video feature.