Charles Hendrickson: Profile of a Minnesota Organbuilder

Charles Echols

Charles Echols has a doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Southern California. He is retired from St. Cloud State University (Minnesota), where he taught organ, piano, and music history. In 2016 he edited the first volume of Organ Music of James H. Rogers, published by Wayne Leupold Editions. Raven Records issued a compact disc of his performance of music of Rogers in 2016.

Organbuilder Kevin Christopher Marrin was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1949, the sixth of seven children. His family called him “Casey,” an Irish nickname drawn from his initials. He also incorporated his initials into his business name, the K. C. Marrin Company.

Marrin’s father was part owner of a small family brass and iron foundry (whose legacy includes 36 miles of ornate street lamps scattered throughout St. Paul, Minnesota). His mother was a naturally gifted vocalist, who before her marriage sang on the road for three years with the Bernie Cummins (big band) Orchestra.

During high school, K. C. boarded at St. John’s Preparatory School in Collegeville, Minnesota, as did his father a generation earlier, part of a long association and friendship with the central Minnesota Benedictine community. Marrin continued at St. John’s University and earned a double major in philosophy and music in 1971. While at St. John’s, he witnessed firsthand the construction of the renowned Abbey Church and other notable academic buildings designed by Marcel Breuer, the modernist Bauhaus architect. 

Marrin was greatly influenced by Brother Hubert Schneider, O.S.B., a member of the St. John’s Benedictine community who worked in the abbey’s woodworking shop for over 60 years. Br. Hubert was a gentle and gifted craftsman who taught as much through his manner of living as by his mastery of craft. Marrin wrote of Br. Hubert: 

 

He was the ideal of a monk who understood what balance in life is about. I asked him if I could help out in the shop and learn woodworking. . . . Brother Hubert had a Shaker-like work ethic—respect for materials, respect for tools, simplicity and honesty in design and execution—qualities that are at the heart of the Benedictine lifestyle as implied appropriately in their motto, Ora et Labora (Pray and Work).

 

Brother Hubert’s mentoring helped Marrin realize that aspiring to be a craftsman, as many of his uncles and aunts had been, could be a fulfilling path to pursue, one especially suitable to his aptitudes and interests.

After graduation, Marrin lived briefly in the rectory of nearby St. Joseph Church in St. Joseph while considering the possibility of becoming a permanent deacon in the Catholic Church. He took a summer job helping two local organbuilders (Eric Fiss, active in Fargo, North Dakota, and Arthur Kurtzman, then active in St. Cloud, Minnesota), who were moving and enlarging the St. Joseph Church’s Wicks organ from a rear balcony location to a cantilevered position behind the altar. This was his introduction into the world of organ building.¹

After work on the St. Joseph organ concluded, Marrin continued briefly with Kurtzman and Fiss, rebuilding local instruments and learning what organ building involved. He then went out on his own, doing service work and tuning. (Eric Fiss died shortly thereafter, but Marrin maintained a lifetime association with Art Kurtzman, who assisted with voicing on many of his instruments.) Marrin’s first project on his own was rebuilding a small Wicks organ in his home parish of St. Boniface, Cold Spring, Minnesota. Just prior to building the St. John’s studio organ, Opus 6, Marrin visited Europe in 1986. Kim Kasling, St. John’s professor of music, then on sabbatical studying with Harald Vogel, guided Marrin to important and interesting organs in Austria and Germany.

As Marrin began to build his own instruments, he endeavored to engage in all aspects of the work himself. Operating a one-man shop was not an ideal business model. This inevitably meant slow production and delivery schedules, as well as under-utilized workspace and equipment, but more importantly for him, allowed time to learn the trade and rediscover older ways of approaching technical problems and to develop hand skills at his workbench.

 

K. C. Marrin Company organs

Opus 1, St. Augustine Catholic Church, St. Cloud (1978)

St. Augustine Church took a chance on Marrin, giving him his first contract to build a new organ. It was completed in 1978, a two-manual, mechanical-action instrument of fifteen stops, balanced key action, and a freestanding oak case. Marrin built the case and winding system, but the pipework and chests came from German supply houses. In recognition of the German heritage of central Minnesota, an inscription was carved around the keydesk: “Zur grösseren Ehre Gottes” (For the greater glory of God).

 

Opus 2, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud (1979)

Marrin built a one-manual portative organ, with three divided stops (8′ Gedeckt, 4′ Rohrflute, 2′ Principal) and a short octave (C, D, E, F) in the bass, for the music department at St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota. 

 

Opus 3, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Sauk Rapids (1981)

Marrin built a two-manual, 11-stop organ with suspended-mechanical action and a freestanding white oak case for Sacred Heart Catholic Church. He made his first large windchest, continuing the process of learning to make components in-house. Originally located in a rear balcony, the organ has been moved to a new parish home a few miles away. Strikingly beautiful carvings distinguish the case—the art of the late Joseph O’Connell, regional sculptor and artist. This includes mahogany Brustwerk doors (with Fats Waller and a jazz band of angels surrounded by singing choirboys) and pipe shades (with angels and various musical instruments). A batik tapestry, now removed, created by area artist Judith Goetemann, added a splash of color to the upper case doors.

 

Opus 4, Cathedral of St. Mary, St. Cloud (1982)

The Catholic cathedral in St. Cloud features an excellent acoustic. Marrin’s 27-stop organ is installed in the apse behind the altar and cathedra (bishop’s chair), where it serves as a visual focus to the sanctuary. Positioning the organ high off the floor created a “balcony” for the pipes to speak, and with the help of the curved dome behind, the organ projects a majestic and unified sound efficiently into the nave. A simple timber frame structure carries the weight much like a medieval Blockwerk organ case, a reference to earlier design influences at St. John’s. The case is constructed from over 6,000 board feet of laminated rift-cut white oak (cut at an angle to minimize the grain that is visible). Structural beams were assembled with Br. Hubert’s assistance, and the traditional joinery was cut by hand. 

The organ design employs features new to Marrin’s thinking in 1982, which was in tune with a small group of American builders led by John Brombaugh, who sought to return to earlier organ design principles and building methods. The organ has a 16′ plenum, flexible winding (a single large wedge-shaped bellows supplies wind to the manual divisions), wooden ductwork (with a Great divided on separate bass and treble chests to help stabilize the wind), three “double-draw” stops, high lead-content pipework, Clicquot-style reeds (made by Roland Killinger in Germany), a five-rank mounted Cornet (all open pipes, beginning at tenor G), and unequal temperament (Werckmeister II). Over 200 Catholic bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, gathered for a meeting and retreat at St. John’s Abbey in June of 1982, attended the dedication of the organ.

 

Opus 5, Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Columbia Heights (1985)

This installation is a 23-stop organ with a Positiv division located on the balcony rail and a partially enclosed Great. In 1987, the organ was joined electrically to an Allen digital organ by another builder. The Marrin organ retains much of its original layout and tonal design. 

 

Opus 6, St. John’s University, Collegeville (1988)

This 22-stop practice and teaching instrument is located in a dedicated room in the music department and has a three-tower case and a graceful ten-degree flare forward at impost level—just enough to distinguish the ornate but playful case design. It includes more of Joseph O’Connell’s work: dozens of wrought-iron figures of Benedictine monks peeking out of the case shadows into the room. Many of the figures resemble living and deceased members of the monastic community—purely coincidence, according to O’Connell. 

 

Opus 7, Gethsemane Lutheran Church, Dassel (1990)

The two-manual, 15-stop tracker organ is positioned on the balcony rail and is playable from the side of the case. The stop knobs connect directly to the ends of the sliders, a concept K. C. observed in a small rural church in northern Germany. Both manual divisions and pedal share a single divided chest. The case has neo-Gothic elements, connecting it to period decorations in this century-old country church.

Opus 8, St. Scholastica Monastery, Duluth (1992)

The organ was installed as part of a renovation project of the monastery chapel. The instrument is positioned in a reformatted library space in a most tasteful and workable way, with suitable height for the organ to develop tonally. It has the appearance of a one-manual organ, with hidden Swell and Pedal divisions in a wall opening behind the case and with the bellows and blower beneath the floor. It has proven to be a flexible liturgical organ that is suitable for the needs of the Benedictine community’s life of prayer and sacred song.

 

Opus 9, Good Shepherd Catholic Church, Golden Valley (1995)

The organ has a central balcony location with limited height, which required positioning the Great in front of the Swell. The mechanical pedal chest permits stops to be played both at unison and an octave above. There are 23 stops housed in a solid mahogany case.

 

Opus 10, St. Augustine Catholic Church, St. Cloud (2002)

Marrin returned to his Opus 1, expanding and relocating it behind the altar, adding a third manual (Swell of 12 stops) and four new Pedal stops (including a 32′ resultant) in towers to the right and left of the old case for a total of 35 stops. The stop action is electric and has a solid-state combination action. 

 

Opus 11, St. Boniface Catholic Church, Cold Spring (2013)

Marrin’s magnum opus is found in his home church, only a half-block from his shop. Forty-four stops are divided between three manuals and pedal, with suspended mechanical key action and electric stop action. Eleven of the stops came from the Eric Fiss organ at St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Shakopee, Minnesota, which Marrin had helped install in 1974. The organ was partially destroyed by fire in 2005.

Opus 11 faces three directions on three chest levels and speaks from a rear-corner of the room. A single-wedge bellows supplies wind to the manual divisions. The 32′ Bourdon extension, located behind the children’s “cry room,” has been known to quiet young children and infants. A 16′ Openbass (wood, in the Pedal), a 16′ Trombone (wood, modeled from a 19th-century Pfeffer organ in Iowa), an 8′ oak Doppelfloete (two mouths), and an independent 11⁄7′ on the Positiv add to the eclectic tonal design. The organ’s tonal spectrum is suitable for most of the standard organ literature. Key cheeks are inlaid with polished granite taken from the Cold Spring quarry. The music rack has a hand-lettered text attributed to St. Teresa of Avila: “Yours are the feet with which He goes about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He blesses us now.”

 

This opus list does not contain other projects and restorations that have filled the time between construction of Marrin’s new instruments. Among these projects are restorations of Jardine (1864) and Joseph Lorenz (1887) organs. For over 40 years Marrin has kept busy in a small shop behind his house, advertising only by word-of-mouth, working as a craftsman, designing, building, and engaging in auxiliary woodworking activities that have kept him active and productive. “Working at home has saved me from three years of commuting on the interstate. No snow days. No excuses for not showing up for work. But time for family, a garden, and Ora et Labora. I have been blessed all around.”

 

Notes

1. Marrin also became engaged that year, and later married Carol Eiynck from nearby Albany, Minnesota. They made their home in Cold Spring, Minnesota, about 12 miles from St. John’s University. Marrin and Carol had two children, Matthew and Annie. Carol died of cancer in 2011. Marrin recently married Anne Studer, a high school and college friend of both Marrin and Carol, adding six more children and seven grandchildren to his family circle.

 

Firsts for Marrin Organs

Opus 1: Mechanical action and slider chests; Embossed display pipe

Opus 2: Short octave; divided keyboard

Opus 3: Hauptwerk (Great) the upper manual, Brustwerk the lower manual; Use of suspended key action; Decorative carvings; Case shutters decorated with batik tapestry

Opus 4: Single large wedge-shaped bellows which supplies wind to the manual divisions; flexible winding; 16′ plenum; 16′ Principal on Great; separate winding for pedal division; first Swell division; use of “double-draw” stop knobs; unequal temperament (Werckmeister II modified); mounted five-rank Cornet beginning at Tenor G; Clicquot-style reeds

Opus 5: Positiv division; partially enclosed Great; Marpurg temperament 

Opus 6: Transmissions from manuals to Pedal; Dom Bedos style tremulant; decorative figures of singing monks cast in wrought iron; Rosignol; Kirnberger III temperament

Opus 7: Key desk on the side of the case; stop knobs attached to the end of sliders

Opus 8: Bellows and blower beneath the floor; full-length resonators for 16′ Trombone

Opus 9: Windchests of Great and Swell at the same level; mechanical Pedal chest permits stops to be played at both the unison and the octave above

Opus 10: First organ with three manuals; first 32′ resultant; first electric stop action and computer-controlled combination action; Crescendo pedal; programmable tremulant; Zimbelstern

Opus 11: Speaks in three directions; electric Swell shutter control; use of salvaged pipes (from St. Mark’s Church, Shakopee, Minnesota); Glockenspiel of 30 cast bells; 32′ Bourdon; stops modeled after successful historical Midwest examples

Allison Alcorn

Allison A. Alcorn received her PhD from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1997 and is now professor of musicology at Illinois State University, where she is active in the Honors Program, Study Abroad, and Faculty Development and mentoring. Alcorn served as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 2012–2017 and joined the AMIS Board of Governors in 2017. She has previously been councilor for research for the Organ Historical Society and on the governing board of the American Organ Archives. Publications include articles for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as well as articles in a variety of national and international journals.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this article was published in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 22–24.

 

Hinners & Albertsen in Red Wing, Minnesota

The Red Wing organ’s specification list represents the standard style 2/10, available in style A, B, or C; that is, in the mail order, the congregation indicated whether it should be built to go on the left, center, or right of the altar. This was a substantial investment for the church at just less than $1,000.00. Clearly, this organ (Figure 10) is nothing elaborate or extravagant. It is a meat and potatoes organ. No dessert here, no fancy garnishes, only what is absolutely needed:

GREAT

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Melodia (wood, 61 pipes)

8′ Dulciana (metal, 49 pipes)

4′ Principal (metal, 61 pipes)

SWELL

16′ Bourdon (wood, 49 pipes)

8′ Violin Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Lieblich Gedackt (wood, 61 pipes)

8′ Salicional (metal, 49 pipes)

4′ Flauto Traverso (metal, 61 pipes)

PEDAL

16′ Bourdon (wood, 27 pipes)

 

Couplers

Swell & Octave to Great Coupler

Swell to Great Coupler

Swell to Pedal Coupler

Great to Pedal Coupler

 

Accessories

Swell Tremulant

Blowers Signal

Wind Indicator

 

Pedal movements

Great Forte

Great Piano

Balanced Swell Pedal

 

Red Wing was originally the site of a Lakota farming village, and then in 1837 missionaries with the Evangelical Missionary Society of Lausanne began a decade of relatively sporadic missionary activity until several treaties were signed with the Sioux and Mendota in the 1850s and a U. S. Land Office opened in Red Wing in 1855. Within a few years, the town of Red Wing—named after the Lakota chief who used a dyed swan wing as a symbol of rank—became a busy river port. A more stable white settlement was established with the opening of a leather and shoe factory—the beginning of the famous Red Wing Shoe empire—and a pottery factory—the Red Wing Pottery empire—in the 1860s. However, it was the wheat trade that spurred rapid growth throughout the 1870s and then ironically also led to a serious economic downturn because of depleted soil and increased problems with blight and rust exacerbated by a series of severe storms.

Industrial diversification probably saved the town of around 4,000 inhabitants; flour mills opened along with lime quarrying and furniture building, lumber, and millwork. Red Wing Iron Works, founded in 1866, was perhaps the chief contributor that enabled the city to diversify and save itself. The iron works was owned and run by Benjamin and Daniel Densmore, Benjamin being the father of Frances Densmore, a true pioneer in American musicology and ethnomusicology.

Frances’s letters provide a good sense of what Red Wing was like in the era in which the Hinners & Albertsen organ came to the city. Frances wrote about having grown up going to bed at night listening to the drums and chanting of the Lakota on Trenton Island, directly across the Mississippi River from her house. She could see their fires from her bedroom window. In 1889 the Lakota were forced onto the Prairie Island Reservation, but they remained both a physical and aural presence in Red Wing.⁵

The Norwegian Lutheran Hauge Synod established a significant stronghold in Red Wing beginning in the 1870s and opened a seminary there in 1879, high on the bluff overlooking the city. The ladies seminary was opened in 1889 and was known especially for its Conservatory of Music and its director, Dr. Bernard F. Laukandt, who was also organist at St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church; therefore, the organist for the 1898 Hinners & Albertsen.⁶ The conservatory was divided into three departments: piano, voice, and pipe organ (the auditorium had a Kilgen organ) and ran a concert series that brought performers from the East coast. People would take the train from Minneapolis for the concerts, so despite the hardships of life in turn-of-the-century Red Wing, people also found a measure of cultured entertainment. The residents of Red Wing clearly appreciated music, so the climate was amenable to raising money for a good pipe organ. On the other hand, the reality was that Red Wing was rural and largely blue collar, and so while they sincerely appreciated the organ, a Möller or a Casavant was out of the question.

Red Wing’s organ was order number 360, placed August 6, 1898, by Carl N. Lien, secretary of St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church (Figure 11). It was to be shipped October 10 and dedicated October 23, 1898. As of December 7, however, it was still being hoped for, but for an unknown reason, it was not shipped until January 25, 1899.⁷ It weighed 5,690 pounds and was shipped on the Santa Fe Railroad at a cost of $34.14. The price of $1,050.00 was payable thirty days after delivery. The organ finally arrived about February 1, 1899, and was installed later that week, ready for the dedication concert the following weekend.

Tickets were sold for 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children, a good indication that the organ had been purchased with a payment plan, which was typical for the company, and selling tickets for the dedication concert is a feature that appears in the histories for many of the Hinners organs. The concert featured Professor Rydning from St. Paul, a virtuoso organist and graduate of the Conservatory of Christiana, Norway. Professor Chally (from the seminary) and other participants in the concert were from Red Wing. The newspaper reported that the turnout was excellent, given how cold it was on that February night.⁸ Professor Rydning was active in the region from the 1890s through the early part of the twentieth century, appearing in newspaper concert program announcements with great frequency.

 

Characteristics of the organs

The stoplists, pipe scales, mouth shapes and cut-ups, and high wind pressures indicate that the Hinners company espoused a romantic tonal ideal. Further, small swell boxes jammed to the edges with pipes, and the packed interior mechanical set-up demonstrate that Hinners was committed to offering as much organ as possible for the limited amount of space available in small churches. The identical nature of measurements from one organ to the next strongly suggests mass-production techniques and certain stock models that could be altered for particular requirements. A number of features stand out as typical of the Hinners organs as represented by this 1898 instrument. First, draw knobs rather than tabs were standard until sometime in the 1920s. Second, early organs have a system of two pre-set mechanisms that were mechanical and could not be reset. One of the pre-sets combined all the loud ranks, while the other combined all the soft ranks. Economically minded construction is seen in details such as lower octave pipes built of wood rather than metal and lower octave pipes of one rank shared with at least one other rank. Some of the organs have a Quintotone in which the stopper doubles the pipe length, making it sound an octave lower without the cost of additional metal. Especially noteworthy because of its uniqueness among contemporary organ builders, Hinners & Albertsen normally avoided traditional reed ranks and instead included a labial reed stop in the Swell. Labial reeds hold pitch through temperature variations in addition to being less susceptible to dirt than a traditional reed pipe. Perhaps most important is that the labial reed, because it does not have an actual reed, was supremely practical for rural congregations without regular access to an organ technician.⁹

Pedalboards used native woods, the sharps stained somewhat darker than the naturals. The pedalboards were flat and short-compassed until the late 1920s, when the company made an effort to conform with the standards set forth by the American Guild of Organists and began building full concave, radiating pedalboards. The façade pipes were painted and stenciled until shortly after 1910, with muted color schemes designed to blend with the natural colors of the console wood. Many of the original pipe stencils (Figure 12) do not offer shining examples of stellar stenciling work. For the most part, the Hinners factory workers were German immigrants with backgrounds in furniture building, not painting, and the stenciling is frequently sloppy in places. Generally, the factory employees took great pride in their work and believed their instruments were giving voice to their own thoughts and feelings, sometimes rather metaphysically. For example, when the Rutz Organ Company rebuilt a 1918 Hinners for Holy Nativity Evangelical Lutheran Church in New Hope, Minnesota, they found a penciled inscription inside the Great chest on the valve spring board: “Peace Proposal of Austria to USA rejected. To Hell with the war Lords. Dade Johnson and F. C. Muehlenbrink 9/18/18.”¹⁰

Nicking of pipe mouths is heavy in all Hinners organs. Metal pipes are nicked on the languid and wooden pipes are nicked in the windway. Hinners used three tuning methods: stoppers, scrolls, and key-hole tuners. Any sleeves found on these instruments were added after the scroll broke. 

The manual keyboards are constructed with ivory slips on the naturals and ebony sharps. Pedal ranks and façade pipes often use a tubular pneumatic winding action while the key action is mechanical throughout.¹¹ Even as regards winding, though, unreliable electricity in rural areas kept Hinners using pump handles for quite awhile after most builders had switched to electric blower systems. Despite eventually having electric blowers, most organs still retained the capability for manual pumping precisely because of that unreliable electricity. Typical Hinners console design is quarter-sawn oak with a dark stain, decorated with raised panels and carved finials and moldings characteristic of early twentieth-century furniture styles. Grillework is sometimes integrated with façade pipes.

 

Continuing History of the Red Wing Hinners & Albertsen

The 1928 photograph in Figure 13 is the only extant image of the 1898 Red Wing Hinners & Albertsen while it belonged to St. Peter’s. Professor Laukandt is seated at the organ. In 1930—two years after this photo—the two Norwegian Lutheran churches in Red Wing merged, taking Trinity Lutheran’s name and building. The St. Peter building was sold to the Christian Science Church in 1933. At some point the Christian Scientists decided to update the sanctuary. This has virtually never been good news for organs—and the 1898 Hinners & Albertsen was moved to the center of the front platform with small side rooms built to its left and right. The console was whitewashed (Figure 14) and the façade pipes were painted gold (Figure 15), but the working parts remained untouched. It was rather untidy, but it was all there, and the paint-just-the-visible-front job on the pipes allowed for later restoration to the original color scheme. That the church members were able to uninstall and reinstall even a ten-rank pipe organ seems to be a testament to the basic mechanical sense used by Hinners and to the general battleship quality of these little organs. This is one of the precise things that made Hinners so successful in the small rural church market—anyone with fundamental mechanical sense could care for the organ; it was sturdy enough to stand up to the rigors of rural life. The 1926 Hinners at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Dimock, South Dakota, went through the Dust Bowl, had not been cleaned in about 60 years, and still sounded beautiful through two inches of solidified dust.

In the mid-1980s, the former St. Peter Church building was purchased by the Apostolic Face Lighthouse Church, and in August 1995 by the Four Square Church. By 1996 the pastor confirmed to me they were about to “throw [the organ] away.” I contacted Tom Erickson, a Casavant representative who lived in Red Wing. Erickson took up the cause. For the next year, Erickson was tireless in attending Kiwanis meetings, Rotary meetings, Lions, city council, and chamber of commerce—any group that would listen to the organ’s story and might agree to help. He first made headway when he raised enough money to purchase the instrument, for by now, the church had become quite convinced of its treasure, and while they would certainly not harm the instrument, they could be convinced to sell it. Next, Erickson persuaded the owners of the historic St. James Hotel to let him store the organ in the hotel’s recently acquired Red Wing Iron Works building that was, at that point, sitting empty while they decided what to do with it. Erickson kept raising money, and the keydesk was sent to Luhm’s Refinishing, a Minneapolis firm that specializes in historic furniture and pianos. A local artist, Delores Fritz, re-stenciled the pipes. In the meantime, the owner of the St. James Hotel agreed to give the organ a home in its lobby and accept the responsibility for its care. It now has become part of the identity of the hotel—“you know, the historic hotel in Minnesota with a pipe organ in the lobby”—so much so that the organ even appears on the hotel’s Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Hotel_(Red_Wing,_Minnesota)), in its TripAdvisor photos and reviews, and ubiquitously on Instagram with the stjameshotel location tag.

The St. James built a small balcony and fashioned a window into a door in order to access the organ for servicing (Figure 16). A ladder is required to climb into the balcony off the exterior stairs, and then the door opens straight into the organ. To get into the swell box, the side façade pipes have to be removed, but that is not unusual for a Hinners. The very compactness and space efficiency that made Hinners organs so attractive to small congregations without much square footage in the sanctuary conversely also made the organs into real maintenance challenges as far as simply accessing its various components. They are intuitive constructions to the mechanically minded, to be sure, but one must first somehow reach the part in need of attention.

As with any organ’s story, this instrument has had to accept compromises along the way in order to continue serving the needs of its changing audiences. Most significantly, the corner façade pipes had to be lowered by about a foot to fit it in the space, and the rear six side façade pipes had to be left off entirely. The Hinners & Albertsen organ is used regularly. Hotel guests may request the blower key between the hours of 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.; as one might guess, the historic St. James Hotel does a brisk wedding business, and the organ is a frequent participant. The hotel staff works hard to keep it safe, and current management seems cognizant of its historic value. The St. Peter Norwegian Lutheran Church building has taken on a new life in recent years as well, now serving as The Red Wing Church House (https://www.redwingchurchhouse.com), a luxury vacation rental that rents for about $2,500 a week (Figure 17).

 

Nuts and Bolts

The Hinners & Albertsen organ company was, even in its time, sometimes dismissed as being the producer of inferior instruments, as was the Hinners Organ Company for decades after it. Gradually, and sometimes with a bit of sentimental nostalgia for the instruments on which so many organists cut their teeth, the organ world began to realize that the organs are not inferior at all, but that they represent a “nuts and bolts” type of organ. Hinners & Albertsen organs offered churches a perfectly serviceable and respectable musical alternative to the reed organ that would fulfill the needs and meet the budget of a small congregation without the nice but unnecessary expense of a large number of ranks on an organ that was individually designed for each particular church.

Other companies built stock organs, to be sure, and other companies used a catalog approach to sales. Lyon & Healy, Kimball, Felgemaker, Estey, and Wangerin-Weickhardt all had a similar product line and methodology—particularly Felgemaker with the Patent Portable Organ. On the other hand, certainly for Hinners & Albertsen, operations were focused nearly exclusively in the realm of the small stock organ. The vast majority of all Hinners instruments were organs of about ten ranks—the largest Hinners organ ever built had only twenty-eight ranks. Moreover, Hinners built these small pipe organs for nearly 50 years, long after the other companies had followed the trend to larger organs with strictly electric actions. Hinners & Albertsen organs, and ultimately the Hinners Organ Company, supplied a unique need in American society that arose from circumstances peculiar to the American situation. The frontier was closed and settlements were progressing beyond concern for mere survival to concerns for improving their quality of life. Raised in small mission churches around the rural Midwest, John L. Hinners felt the people’s desire for a pipe organ and understood their frustration with the expense and complexity of the instrument that made it impractical for small country churches. In a creative combination of business methods and comprehension of musical and construction issues, the Hinners & Albertsen Organ Company brought pipe organs to rural America and, in the case of the Red Wing, Minnesota, organ, filled the bluffs of the Mississippi River with music.

 

Notes

5. Frances played organ, and for many years she was a church organist at the Red Wing Episcopal church. It seems a safe assumption that Frances would at least have known this Hinners & Albertsen organ, likely heard it, and possibly even played it.

6. The school’s students included girls who wanted to marry ministers, but also “status offenders,” that is, girls who had committed no crime but had become impossible to control.

7. This is an excessively delayed schedule, even for a business at the time. Hinners typically turned around its orders well within three months, with some organs shipping within a matter of a few weeks.

8. Sadly, weather data for Red Wing is recorded only as far back as 1902.

9. Allison Alcorn, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000), 17.

10. This organ was built for Church of the Sacred Heart, Spring Valley, Illinois, and was moved to Minnesota in 1990.

11. One of Hinners’s distinctive characteristics is how late the company relied on tracker actions. Even in its few theater contracts, Hinners remained loyal to tracker action and was probably the last builder to give up theater trackers, with two installed as late as 1916.

Ortloff Organ Company, LLC, Brookline, Massachusetts

Opus 1 – 2016

In collaboration with Russell & Company Organ Builders

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church,

Penfield, New York

 

From the builder

Organbuilders will likely say how their first contract was the hardest, or certainly one of the hardest, to procure. And why not? Spending a great deal of money on a product built by somebody with no previous track record is, in a word, insanity. But churches are necessarily in the faith business, and it was certainly an act of faith by St. Joseph’s Church to entrust my company to build this instrument, our Opus 1.

The road to Opus 1 began long before St. Joseph’s contacted me, long before I could even reach the pedals the first time I played a pipe organ at age four—a single chord on the 1933 Kimball at Trinity Episcopal Church in Plattsburgh, New York, after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. That one chord began a fascination with the pipe organ that led to the decision in my teenage years, while working for Stephen Russell, to devote my life to this craft. Nine years of training at Russell & Company, further work for C. B. Fisk, Inc., and Spencer Organ Company, and six years at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester provided a broad range of experience that has informed how I play and how I wish to build. By 2014, I saw an opportunity to fulfill a dream of running my own shop and founded Ortloff Organ Company, LLC. Within just a few weeks, I was surveying St. Joseph’s Church in Penfield, preparing to draft my first proposal for a new pipe organ.

In 2013, St. Joseph’s received a generous bequest specifically to enrich the musical life of the parish. This happy event led to a decision to commission a new pipe organ, which would replace a failing 30-year-old electronic. Nathan Davy, the director of music and a fellow Eastman alum, approached me about the project, and from there he championed my firm, expressing faith in my ability to produce a high-quality instrument of distinction.

This abundance of faith was, however, fully sighted, and St. Joseph’s requested that the contract be co-signed by an established organbuilder to provide a level of security in the project’s success. It was only logical that I should collaborate with my mentor Steve Russell, to which Steve enthusiastically agreed, and we began discussing the instrument’s mechanical and tonal design shortly after my initial visit. This particular show of faith was perhaps the most important. Knowing my training and ability better than anyone, Steve’s tacit “You can do this. You’re ready. It’s time,” propelled me forward with confidence and excitement.

Distilling many musical requirements into 18 stops, particularly within a fixed budget and limited space, is naturally a challenge. Moreover, working in the shadow of our alma mater, Nathan and I were all too aware of the scrutiny the organ would receive, adding pressure to how the stoplist, scaling, and tonal approach were developed. But a suburban Catholic parish is not the academy, and my vision for the instrument was that it need make no apology for serving its liturgical requirements first and last. In the broad picture, the organ should subscribe to certain guiding principles. As much as possible, slider chests are used, for simplicity of mechanism, the benefits of tone-channel chests, and the honesty they enforce in design. Chorus work should be silvery and bright but not shrill, made of a high-lead alloy, and supported by amply scaled, warm 8′ tone. Reeds are ideally placed on higher pressure for improved speech, better tuning stability, and noble power. Applying these principles to St. Joseph’s, seating about 600, we strove to create an ensemble that would have plenty of energy and clarity without being unduly powerful. It should lead without overwhelming, not only a largely volunteer choir, but also occasionally reluctant congregational singing. The color palette should tend unapologetically toward the romantic, but be based firmly in sparkling classical choruses.

While organs of this size are often treated essentially as giant one-manuals spread over two keyboards, the architecture of St. Joseph’s necessitated the two manual divisions being too physically divided for that kind of approach. Furthermore, the ultimate design felt more honest; a few Swell stops are duplexed to the Great for accompanimental variety, but otherwise each division is independent, with its own chorus. While the organ’s original design included an independent Swell 8′ Diapason, a funding shortfall necessitated its elimination, as well as independent Pedal registers, a Clarinet on the Great, and mutation bass octaves. In turn, we modified the design of the Chimney Flute and Viola, and repitched the Swell mixture lower, introducing 8′ tone by treble C.

In these and many other details throughout the design process, Nathan, Steve, and I found ourselves largely on the same page. Thus it was a jolt when, shortly after signing the contract in November 2014, Nathan accepted the position of assistant organist at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C. Happily, Nathan’s successor, Jacob Fuhrman, picked right up where Nathan left off and has proven to be just as collaborative as his predecessor.

Built in 1967, St. Joseph’s wasn’t designed with a pipe organ in mind. Its low ceilings, quirky acoustics, and lack of obvious location for an instrument all contributed to the challenge of layout and visual design. Fortunately, the church was amenable to placing the organ front and center, giving it the best possible advantage. My older brother, Buffalo architect Chris Ortloff, Jr. developed a striking multi-tiered design of flamed and polished copper, with gentle curves and multiple layers. The façade also creates a useful arcade between sacristy and church, integrating into the room in an organic way. Great care was taken to maintain focus on the altar and to complement, not compete with, the gold mosaic surrounding the crucifix.

Behind the façade, the organ proper is arranged on a new, single-level, 37′-wide platform. The wind system lives in the center, with Great and Pedal to the congregation’s left and Swell on the right. Two fields of shutters direct tone both down the nave and into the south transept, where the choir sits. Electric-slider chests form the basis of the chassis, with electric and electro-pneumatic chests serving bass pipes and unit registers.

Of the organ’s 18 voices, six are vintage ranks, including reeds, wood flutes, and strings. All have been restored and revoiced. New flue pipes, built in the Russell & Co. shop, are made from a 94% lead alloy to promote warm, singing tone. Reed renovation and voicing was carried out by the Trivo Company, who also built a new 16′ Trombone of generous scale. A somewhat higher pressure is employed for the reeds, allowing a warm, rich voicing style.

Construction began in August 2015, with a deadline to have at least part of the new organ playing by Easter 2016. To ensure an installation process as free as possible from complication, everything was pre-erected and tested in our shop. On a twenty-below-zero Valentine’s Day, 2016, a truck left Waltham, Massachusetts, bound for Penfield with the Great and Pedal. Amory Atkins, Terence Atkin, and Dean Conry brought their signature steam-shovel efficiency to the installation, accomplishing in 10 days what I thought would take three weeks. By Holy Week, five stops of the Great and the Pedal divisions were playing, and much of the Swell mechanism was in place. Over the next few months, the remainder came together in the shop, with final installation in May and tonal finishing completed by early August. Much beloved by his former parish, Nathan Davy returned to dedicate the organ on September 9. His careful thinking about repertoire demands during the design phase paid off in a colorful, varied program that made the instrument seem far larger than its actual size.

This project brought together both the seasoned and the newcomer. Bart Dahlstrom, Ortloff Organ Company’s first employee, flunked retirement at age 62 when he decided to join his woodworking skills to his organ-playing talents and become an organbuilder. His steady hand, impeccable work, and unfailing cheer have been a blessing throughout the project. Andrew Gray, a precocious 16-year-old son of an organist and a singer, had expressed interest in organbuilding for a few years; he came on as a summer employee in 2015. His meticulous wiring and pipe racking speak to his quiet diligence. Kade Phillips, an MIT student, lent help when not busy studying computer science 80 hours a week. Robert Poovey, organist-choirmaster at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Rochester, and someone with not a little of the organbuilding bug himself, provided generous local assistance for installation and some of the tonal finishing. And Jonathan Ambrosino helped in scratch-tuning the organ on Labor Day, four days before its dedication.

Finally, the support from Steve Russell’s shop has been vital, principally in the construction of the console and 971 of the organ’s 1,390 pipes—each meticulously handcrafted. An organ’s soul lies in its pipes, and these are gorgeous indeed. Steve himself provided the sober foundation of over 40 years’ experience in all aspects of design and construction and was invaluable in helping me to shape the instrument’s final sound, both in shop and site voicing.

On behalf of the 14 people who had a hand in crafting this instrument, my thanks go to St. Joseph’s Church, and especially to its pastor, Fr. Jim Schwartz, for the vision not only to commission a pipe organ, but for putting faith in untried quarters. He and members of St. Joseph’s offered generous support and hospitality at every turn. It is my hope that the faith this parish demonstrated in all of us will be repaid by generations of faithful service from this instrument, our proud Opus 1.

—Jonathan Ortloff

 

Personnel

Ortloff Organ Company:

Bart Dahlstrom

Andrew Gray

Jonathan Ortloff

Kade Phillips

 

Russell & Company:

Mayu Hashigaya Allen

Paul Elliott

Erik Johansson

Carole Russell

Stephen Russell

 

From the former director of music

I remember the beginning of the organ project at St. Joseph’s very clearly. I was in the church office kitchen, making tea, when Father Jim Schwartz walked in and said, “We need a new pipe organ. You should go talk to some organ builders.” How often does it happen that the pastor approaches the organist about a new instrument?! Though not entirely without context—the church’s electronic instrument was old and ailing (a few months later it caught fire during a funeral)—I was still dreaming wistfully of a pipe organ and considering how to broach the issue persuasively.

Among those from whom we sought a proposal was Jonathan Ortloff. Jon and I had been at Eastman together, and I had been his assistant when he was one of the organ department’s staff technicians. I knew his work ethic, and I knew his preferences and values in organ sound. Upon receiving his proposal, we were taken with both the tonal and physical design. Each voice would be able both to stand on its own and to contribute uniquely to the united chorus. The façade would adorn the front of the church, catching the eye, but directing attention to the altar.

Now, Jon would be among the first to grant that to sign a contract with an unproven organ builder is not without a certain amount of risk. The parish was mindful of that risk, but two factors allayed our concern. The first was my above-mentioned firsthand knowledge of Jon and his work. The second was that Stephen Russell, with whom Jon had apprenticed, and whom I knew by reputation, had agreed to work alongside of Jon throughout the project. It was Jon and Steve’s combined presentation to the Parish Pastoral Council on a memorable night in the summer of 2014 that won over the hearts of the parish and persuaded us that we would be in good hands.

I could not have been more pleased with the completed instrument when I first played it in September. Never have I seen flamed copper so well integrated into a church’s interior architecture. The broad richness of the foundations fills the room, the mixtures add clarity and brilliance without stridency, and the reeds balance smoothness of tone with a prevailing warm effulgence. This is an instrument perfectly suited to congregational and choral accompaniment, but also fully capable of realizing a wide variety of organ repertoire in a thoroughly satisfying way. It is my sincere hope that it is the first of many.

—Nathan Davy

 

From the current director of music

Our organ’s arrival over the past six months has fulfilled my hopes and expectations of almost two years. When I began my work at St. Joseph’s in March 2015, the contract had already been signed, the stoplist was finalized, and design had begun. I am as fortunate as an organist can be, enjoying a world-class new organ without having had to do any of the groundwork—convincing committees, raising funds, and the like. 

It was exciting for me, as a relatively early-career musician, to work with an organbuilder who is at a similar point in his own career. The entire church staff enjoyed Jonathan’s sincere, energetic love for the organ. His combination of youth, expertise, and passion helped give St. Joseph’s parishioners confidence that our art has a future.

Those of our parishioners who were at the dedicatory recital had an epiphany singing a hymn with a large audience of organists and choristers—this organ really sings, and it supports full, vibrant congregational singing. The choruses are bright without ever losing gravity. The reeds are penetrating, yet admirably vocal. The console is extremely comfortable and manageable, and it is light enough that one person can move it easily in just a few minutes: I can play from the middle of the church whenever I want to, which helps tremendously for preparing performances. The physical design of the organ, with its outward-radiating flamed copper façade, draws the eye to the altar, complementing both the shape of the building and the color profile of its stained-glass windows. I couldn’t be more pleased with this instrument.

—Jacob Fuhrman

 

GREAT

16′ Bourdon (Pedal/Swell)

8′ Diapason (1–12 façade) 61 pipes 

8′ Harmonic Flute 61 pipes

8′ Viola (Swell)

8′ Chimney Flute (Swell)

4′ Octave 61 pipes

2′ Fifteenth  61 pipes

11⁄3′ Mixture III–IV 204 pipes

8′ Trumpet* 61 pipes

Great 16

Great Off

Great 4

Swell to Great 16

Swell to Great

Swell to Great 4

SWELL

16′ Bourdon (tc) (from 8′)

8′ Chimney Flute* 61 pipes

8′ Viola* 61 pipes

8′ Viola Celeste (tc) 49 pipes

4′ Principal 61 pipes

4′ Flute* 61 pipes

22⁄3′ Nazard (tc) 49 pipes

2′ Flute* (ext 4′) 12 pipes 

13⁄5′ Tierce (tc) 49 pipes

2′ Mixture IV 244 pipes

8′ Trumpet* 61 pipes

8′ Oboe* 61 pipes

Tremulant

Swell 16

Swell Off

Swell 4 

PEDAL

32′ Resultant (Bourdon)

16′ Principal (1–34 façade) 56 pipes

16′ Bourdon* 44 pipes

8′ Octave (ext 16′)

8′ Bourdon* (ext 16′)

8′ Chimney Flute (Swell)

4′ Choral Bass (ext 16′)

32′ Harmonics (Trombone/derived)

16′ Trombone* (ext Great) 12 pipes

8′ Trumpet (Great)

Great to Pedal

Great to Pedal 4

Swell to Pedal

Swell to Pedal 4

 

 

18 stops, 24 ranks, 1,390 pipes

 

3½″ wind pressure throughout

*5″ wind pressure

8 general pistons

8 divisional pistons per division

300 memory levels

Orgues Létourneau,
St-Hyacinthe, Québec, Canada

The Sabbatino Family Memorial Pipe Organ, St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, New York, New York

 

From the organist and director of music

For more than 187 years, the congregation of St. Joseph’s Church has worshipped and praised God in the sacred liturgy through prayer and song. Founded in 1829, St. Joseph’s Parish was the sixth to be established among those still in existence in the Archdiocese of New York. The cornerstone of the present structure was laid on June 10, 1833, “at the corner of Barrow Street and Sixth Avenue” and allows St. Joseph’s Church the distinction of being the oldest Catholic church edifice in Manhattan and perhaps the entire archdiocese.

Dedicated on Sunday, March 16, 1834, St. Joseph’s Church is today an integral part of the vibrant neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Tribeca. In 2003, the Archdiocese of New York invited the Order of Preachers (the “Dominicans”) to care for the combined ministries of both the neighborhood residents and the students and faculty of New York University. Today, four friars serve these constituents of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.

The organ at St. Joseph’s has always been an important element of the music program. Earlier instruments by Henry Erben (1836) and Aeolian-Skinner (1952) had been in use prior to the installation of Létourneau’s Opus 128. This new organ, built in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, Canada, has mechanical key action as well as electric stop action and contains 31 stops and 39 ranks over the three manuals and pedal.

Known as the Sabbatino Family Memorial Organ, the instrument and its installation were made possible through a bequest from Clare C. Sabbatino, a lifelong resident of Greenwich Village and faithful parishioner of St. Joseph’s Church. Clare had a deep appreciation for music—her father and uncle were both musicians with the New York Philharmonic—and her gift in honor and memory of her entire family is a permanent reminder of her extraordinary generosity to her beloved parish. The Sabbatino Family Memorial Organ was blessed by the Reverend John P. McGuire, O.P., nineteenth pastor of St. Joseph’s Church, and dedicated by Kyler Brown, organist, on April 10, 2015. As director of music ministries and organist, I am thrilled to have such an instrument for worship and concerts in Greenwich Village.

The organ has enriched the musical life of this area greatly with its perfectly voiced stops whose individual colors combine so flawlessly. Each flute stop is different in color and weight, making possible endless solo possibilities as well as exquisite combinations, while the reeds have both power and an ability to sing as solo stops. The mechanical key action weds with the vocal nature of the stops, and this combination opens the path for great expressivity. In sum, the organ is grand and delicate at once, a perfect instrument for the environment at St. Joseph’s Church.

—Kyler Brown

 

From the builder

We remember fondly our first visit with Father John McGuire at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village to talk about a new Létourneau pipe organ for the parish. The church is a handsome space, tucked away in a busy block on the Avenue of the Americas and boasts gracious acoustics. This historic building appears skewed, an impression that is confirmed visually where the barrel vault ceiling’s coffers intersect awkwardly with the back wall. The nave seats approximately 700 people but perhaps this risks overstating its size; the deep side galleries account for perhaps a third of this number.

Replacing an 11-rank Aeolian-Skinner, our Opus 128 resides in the rear gallery and projects sound easily throughout the church. Given the size of the nave and its kind acoustic, we set out to create an instrument that charms with the elegance of its colors and the fluidity with which its stops can be combined. Indeed, the organ impresses with its warmth and calm demeanor rather than trying to dazzling with muscle. With this patrician bearing, the organ truly excels in all its roles as the music ministry’s primary instrument.

The instrument is arrayed within a wide wooden case made from painted solid maple with walnut highlights. Taken from the Great 8′ Principal, Pedal 16′ Principal, and Pedal 8′ Octave stops, the façade pipes are made from 70% hand-polished tin and sport Roman mouths gilded with 23k gold leaf. A large Swell division sits immediately behind the console, while the Great is divided into C and C# wind chests on either side. The Pedal is located at the extremities of the organ case, again on divided wind chests. The horizontal trumpet projecting from the casework—the 8′ Festival Trumpet—was a relatively late addition to the project and has its own dedicated manual; the chest pallets are actuated electrically due to the spread-out arrangement of pipes across the top of the organ case.

The organ is played from a three-manual terraced console attached to the organ case. The combination action offers 256 levels of memory with 12 general pistons and a general piston sequencer. The interior of the console is finished in a dark walnut, while the three manuals have bone overlays and solid ebony accidentals. The drawknobs are likewise made from turned ebony. A short tracker action and pallet box were provided for the console’s third manual (controlling the 8′ Festival Trumpet) despite its electric action so as to preserve a consistent mechanical pluck when moving from manual to manual.

We were given a largely free hand to develop the organ’s stop list, and it reflects the space available, the acoustic, and the musical roles the organ fills. The Great and Swell offer generous foundations; scalings in the principal ranks tend towards the modest for good harmonic development within the individual stops. The Great Cornet, a compound stop of three wide-scale tapered flutes, pairs handsomely with the 8′ Chimney Flute and 4′ Open Flute for this characteristically French sonority. The organ’s chorus reeds feature tapered English shallots with long triangular openings to achieve a balance between snap and body while the 8′ Festival Trumpet features domed shallots in the style of Bertounèche.

The organ has proved itself at ease in concert with music from all periods and nationalities, beginning with the inaugural recital played by Kyler Brown. Maurice Clerc, organiste titulare at Dijon Cathedral in France, wrote the following after his concert at St. Joseph’s during the summer of 2015:

 

I was greatly impressed by the quality of your pipe organ. As an instrument, the stops are properly balanced and their voicing permits them to sound beautifully in the church. I specifically enjoyed the 8′ Festival Trumpet which, in partnership with the superb Cornet of the Great, permits an excellent French grand jeu. Also noteworthy are the Swell stops, which offer numerous possibilities for honoring the romantic and modern repertoire. The console and the piston sequencer further multiply the possibilities in terms of interpretation, making this overall a very comfortable organ to play . . . This is a pipe organ of rich potential on which one can present a great deal of repertoire with exceptional ease and authenticity . . . I already knew firsthand the quality of Létourneau’s instruments but in New York, my impressions were confirmed. Bravo!

—Andrew Forrest, Artistic Director

—Fernand Létourneau, President

 

GREAT (3″ wind)

16′ Bourdon (c¹–g²⁰ wood) 58 pipes

8′ Principal 58 pipes

8′ Flûte harmonique 58 pipes

8′ Salicional 58 pipes

8′ Stopped Diapason 58 pipes

  (c¹–b¹² wood)

4′ Octave 58 pipes

4′ Open Flute 58 pipes

2′ Super Octave 58 pipes

11⁄3′ Mixture IV 232 pipes

22⁄3′ Cornet III 174 pipes

8′ Trumpet 58 pipes

  (harmonic resonators from f#⁴³)

Tremulant

8′ Festival Trumpet Solo

 

SWELL (expressive, 3¼″ wind)

8′ Geigen Diapason 58 pipes

8′ Gamba 58 pipes

8′ Voix Celeste (from g⁸) 51 pipes

8′ Bourdon (c¹–to b¹² wood) 58 pipes

4′ Octave 58 pipes

4′ Spire Flute 58 pipes

2′ Flageolet 58 pipes

11⁄3′ Larigot 58 pipes

2′ Mixture III–IV 215 pipes

16′ Fagotto (full length) 58 pipes

8′ Trumpet 58 pipes

  (harmonic resonators from f#⁴³)

8′ Oboe (capped resonators) 58 pipes

Tremulant

SOLO (3¼″ wind)

8′ Festival Trumpet 58 pipes

PEDAL (3¼″ wind)

32′ Resultant (derived from Subbass and Bourdon)

16′ Principal 32 pipes

16′ Subbass (wood) 32 pipes

16′ Bourdon Great

8′ Octave 32 pipes

8′ Bass Flute 32 pipes

4′ Choral Bass 32 pipes

16′ Trombone (full length) 32 pipes

16′ Fagotto Swell

8′ Trumpet 32 pipes

8′ Festival Trumpet Solo

 

Usual unison intermanual couplers.

Pallet and slider wind chests with mechanical key actions.

31 independent stops; 39 ranks; 2,056 pipes

John A. Panning

Vice President & Tonal Director, Dobson Pipe Organ Builders, Lake City, Iowa

Dobson Pipe Organ Builders, Lake City, Iowa

St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, Carmel Valley, California

Dobson Pipe Organ Builders of Lake City, Iowa, has built its Opus 94 for St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Carmel Valley, California. The church’s spare yet handsome building, designed by parishioner Mel Blevens of Holewinski Blevens Fedelem & Lukes Architects in 1963, accurately reflects a parish of modest means but artistic vision. Never intended to house a pipe organ, St. Dunstan’s had been served by an increasingly cranky electronic organ. Fitted with carpet, inadequate lighting, and pews stained the color of asphalt, the church was no longer the most visually or aurally welcoming space. Dobson’s design of an organ standing front and center encouraged the parish to beautify its worship space and enliven its acoustic by removing the carpeting and staining the concrete floor, refinishing the pews, and installing new LED lighting. The revised altar platform, now deeper and constructed of concrete rather than noisy plywood, is sheathed in stone quarried near Jerusalem. A new communion rail and ambo complete the chancel.

Standing behind all this, the organ makes a sensitive statement, drawing attention to the front of the space rather than overwhelming it. To accommodate the choir, seated to one side of the chancel, the organ console is placed on that end of the instrument. From this location, the organist can easily give direction to the choir and remain abreast of activity in the nave. The angled geometry of the building called for a similarly non-traditional visual design. The speaking front pipes of burnished tin make a bold, sweeping gesture, echoed by slotted openings in the organ case that permit additional sound egress. The arc of the front pipes is anchored by wooden ones that stand along the left side of the instrument. The instrument’s white oak case is crowned by a sheltering roof whose slope parallels the ceiling above. A simple Latin cross stands at the front of the instrument, honoring an earlier cross of similar design that was displaced by the chancel renovation.

Steven Denmark, director of music, had long dreamed of the new organ’s tonal design, and together we explored many stoplists. His thinking was dramatically affected by a 2014 visit to the organ in St. Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough, England. Installed in 1905 and attributed to Charles Mutin, the organ appears to contain older elements built by Mutin’s master, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Set within a small but acoustically stunning Gothic revival chapel, this organ of only fourteen voices makes an unforgettable impression.

Encouraged by the possibilities on display in the Farnborough organ, essentially a one-manual instrument divided over two keyboards, the design of Opus 94 took a new turn. Though improved and now proportional to the space, the acoustic of St. Dunstan’s church building is but a pale shadow of that at Farnborough. However, a foundation-rich design as exemplified by the Farnborough organ is not only an appropriate response to a less-reverberant room but also a musically responsible choice for a parish with a traditional choral program. In Opus 94, nine of the manuals’ fifteen stops are of 8′ pitch. For dynamic flexibility in both accompaniment and literature, the Plein Jeu and manual reeds stand within the Récit enclosure. Denmark felt strongly that some sort of Jeu de tierce registration should be present. There is no precedent in the work of Cavaillé-Coll for an independent Tierce, and when a stop of 22⁄3′ pitch was included, it was always a Quinte. We elected to make both mutations as flutes with strongly ascendant trebles so that they function well with the principal-toned unisons. A 16′ Bourdon shared between Grand-Orgue and Pédale is a feature of most Cavaillé-Coll choir organs that I didn’t feel we could replicate here; the poor bass response of the church dictates a scale and treatment for the Pédale that would have muddied any manual texture.

Despite its modern appearance, the instrument is laid out in a traditional way, with the Grand-Orgue standing immediately in front of the Récit. The Pédale Bourdon pipes are painted our customary “Dobson red.” Most of the pipes in the organ were built in our shop; the pipes of high tin alloy—the façade pipes, the strings, and the reeds—are the work of Killinger in Freiberg am Neckar, Germany. All are voiced on a wind pressure of 70 mm, regulated by a large, weighted, single-rise reservoir. The mechanical key action is balanced, running from the console to transverse rollers just above the floor that are fitted with crank arms for the pulldowns. While not an historic feature, the coupling manual offers useful registrational possibilities beyond the common II/I coupler. An electric stop action and 100-level combination action are provided. Mechanism is present for the eventual installation of a Pédale 16′ reed.

The organ was dedicated on November 15, 2015, with Steven Denmark at the organ. Inaugural year programs have been presented by Angela Kraft Cross, James Welch, Thomas Joyce, Tiffany Truett, and Kimo Smith.

The Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture presented this organ with an award in the category of Religious Art: Liturgical Furnishings. The award was announced in the Winter 2016 issue of Faith & Form magazine.

 

Dobson Pipe Organ Builders

William Ayers

Abraham Batten

Kent Brown

Lynn Dobson

Randy Hausman

Dean Heim

Donny Hobbs

Ben Hoskins

Arthur Middleton

John Ourensma

John Panning

Kirk Russell

Bob Savage

Jim Streufert

John Streufert

Jon Thieszen

Pat Thieszen

Sally Winter

Randall Wolff

Dean Zenor

 

COUPLING MANUAL (I)

GRAND-ORGUE (II)

8′ Montre

8′ Salicional

8′ Flûte Harmonique (bass from Bourdon)

8′ Bourdon

4′ Prestant

22⁄3′ Nasard

2′ Doublette

13⁄5′ Tierce

RÉCIT EXPRESSIF (III, enclosed)

8′ Viole de Gambe

8′ Voix Céleste (FF)

8′ Cor de Nuit

4′ Flûte Octaviante

III Plein Jeu 2′

8′ Trompette

8′ Basson-Hautbois

Tremblant (affects entire instrument)

PÉDALE 

16′ Soubasse

8′ Bourdon (ext 16′)

16′ Bombarde (preparation)

8′ Trompette (ext 16′)

G.-O./Pédale

Récit/Pédale

 

Manual/Pedal compass: 58/32

18 ranks

Allison Alcorn

Allison A. Alcorn received her PhD from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1997 and is now professor of musicology at Illinois State University, where she is active in the Honors Program, Study Abroad, and Faculty Development and mentoring. Alcorn served as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 2012–2017 and joined the AMIS Board of Governors in 2017. She has previously served as councilor for research for the Organ Historical Society and on the governing board of the American Organ Archives. Publications include articles for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as well as articles in a variety of national and international journals.

A unique figure in the story of the American organ is John Leonard Hinners (1846–1906), who perhaps epitomizes the late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial spirit in the face of the closing frontier (Figure 1). He is something of a musical amalgam of Henry Ford and Montgomery Ward: Ford brought the passenger car to the common man and Hinners brought the pipe organ, and just as Montgomery Ward successfully reached the isolated Midwestern farm house with its mail order merchandise, Hinners reached out to the isolated Midwestern country church with his mail order pipe organ business. Although Hinners was not the only company to use the mail order idea, he seems to have been at least among the most successful with it. In fact, the Hinners Organ Company never extensively employed outside salesmen. All preliminary business was conducted by catalog and letter, the organ was crated up and shipped by rail, and the first time the buyer had any real contact with the company was when an employee, whose expenses were included in the contract, arrived to direct the parishioners in installing the new instrument. John Leonard’s entrepreneurial ambition was clearly shaped by the experiences of his entire life, combining to formulate his ideas about meeting the musical, religious, and social needs of rural churches.

 

Family background

John Leonard Hinners was the son of German immigrants who set out from Hanover, Germany, with a group of Pietists seeking religious freedom. In 1849, Peter Hinners (1824–1887), John Leonard’s father, was accepted as a missionary of the German Methodist Episcopal Church. Peter and his family left Wheeling, West Virginia, to work a circuit in the Midwest, locating variously in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana for the next number of years. Unlike the English-speaking Methodist circuit riders, the German missionaries tended to use river transportation, traversing north on the Mississippi to visit German settlements scattered across the Midwest, particularly along the line of St. Louis-Chicago-Milwaukee, each of which was home to more than 10,000 Germans in 1860. Peter’s particular skill was constructing churches, and many of his assignments involved mission sites in which he erected a church before moving to the next site. With Pekin located as a major port on the Illinois River, the decision to move the John L. Hinners family to Pekin in 1879 may have been related to the work of the Methodist missionaries, among several other factors. 

John Leonard, therefore, spent his childhood in any number of small, rural congregations throughout the Midwest, shaping his future in profound ways. As a musician deeply involved with these churches, he certainly would have felt the limitations of the typical church reed organ from both a musical and an aesthetic/cultural point of view. Moreover, he would have been intimately familiar with the frustration of these rural congregations who struggled to pay their ministers, much less find additional cash for a pipe organ. Peter, known for his skills as a church builder, must have provided John Leonard’s basic woodworking skills, since one might reasonably expect that Peter’s sons would have assisted him with his building projects. Music occupied a central position in the Peter Hinners household as well and so, as Peter’s son, John Leonard was reared with his hands on a hammer and his feet on the pedals, learning skills of building and music that he would later combine into a business that produced nearly 3,000 pipe organs and approximately 20,000 reed organs in its five and a half decades of existence.¹

 

Marketing and sales models

John Leonard accepted a position with Mason & Hamlin in Chicago in the 1870s, a time when reed organs were rapidly gaining popularity throughout America. Music was seen as a worthy pastime, one that was integral to a happy home. Further, owning a reed organ signified a measure of prestige that was second only to the piano, the latter more of a “citified” instrument and the former more of a status symbol in rural areas. Reed organs were such a desirable commodity that in the mid-1880s, a small reed organ was offered by the Ladies’ Home Journal as a premium for submitting 350 one-year subscriptions at .50 each (Figure 2).

The sales techniques of reed organ companies are particularly important, because it appears that John L. Hinners modeled his pipe organ enterprise, both target audience and sales approach, directly on that of the reed organ business. Advertisements in periodical literature were ubiquitous. Everything from popular magazines and newspapers to church journals ran the advertisements of dealers or manufacturers hawking their particular brand of organ. Some ads were a full page, but many were no larger than an inch square, squeezed in among advertisements for women’s shirtwaists and Calumet Baking Powder.

A common technique of these ads was to include an “inquiry address” to which one could write for a free catalog. Often these catalogs—such as the Hinners catalog from 1895 in Figure 3—were not much more than testimonials from satisfied customers, and occasionally the accounts were somewhat improved in the editing process, and some were probably entirely fabricated. Catalog houses such as Montgomery Ward and Sears carried entire lines of musical instruments, including reed organs. The catalog houses’ sales philosophies were followed almost to the letter by John L. Hinners in his pipe organ business.

 

The move to Pekin

Why John Leonard chose to move his family to Pekin, Illinois, in 1879 is a subject for speculation. Pekin is located on the banks of the Illinois River about 50 miles due north of present-day Springfield and was organized under a city charter dated August 20, 1849. It is said that the town was named after Peking, China, when Ann Eliza Cromwell, wife of one of the original town title-holders, pushed a hat pin through “Townsite” on a globe and it came out on the opposite side at Peking, China.² Because of the town’s prime location on the river and its status as a terminal railroad station, numerous industries developed in Pekin. More than that, however, if one conjectures that John Leonard had the rural church market in mind right from the start, a Midwestern location was desirable as an effort to gain the trust of an Eastern-wary rural Midwestern clientele. Because the first settlers in Pekin were primarily native-born Americans, the earliest churches in each denomination were English-speaking, but when the Germans began to arrive in large numbers in the 1850s (attracted initially by the T. & H. Smith Wagon Company), German-speaking congregations were established. The first German congregation in Pekin was the Methodist Episcopal, building a small frame structure in 1850 and becoming a leading congregation in the St. Louis Methodist Conference.

Undoubtedly, the Hinners family had contact with that congregation through their strong involvement with the national German Methodist Episcopal denomination. After his years as a circuit rider, Peter Hinners, John Leonard’s father, functioned as a financial agent for the denomination and traveled frequently to the regional German Methodist Episcopal churches, surely visiting Pekin on a regular basis. Pekin’s congregation even hosted the 1875 Conference of the German Methodist Episcopals, which John Leonard may well have attended, probably then meeting Fred Schaefer, for whom he initially manufactured his reed organs. Schaefer was a member of the church, and as a musical instrument dealer, he certainly would have spoken with an employee of Mason & Hamlin who happened to be visiting his church. In the course of conversations, it would have been quite natural for John Leonard to voice his frustrations with hopes of advancing within the Mason & Hamlin operation as well as his desire to build his own organs. The scope of Schaefer’s businesses shows him to be nothing if not enterprising (Figure 4), and it is easy to picture the wheels turning in his mind at the idea of enticing a young organbuilder to manufacture reed organs for him right there in Pekin. The city did offer a small amount of competition for the Hinners organs. In an 1878 Pekin newspaper, Geiger & Thompson’s Sewing Machine Exchange also advertised “the Matchless Burdett Organ” (Figure 5).

After Chicago, however, the competition in Pekin offered little intimidation or resistance for the ambitions of John Leonard, though some even continued to offer Mason & Hamlin organs, like the local musical merchandise dealer in this advertisement in Figure 6. Another competitor, however, succumbed to the offer of employment by the Hinners firm, as is documented in the 25th anniversary booklet listing Gilbert Skaggs as a 14-year employee. Skaggs is cited in the 1905 Pekin City Directory as an independent organbuilder and may have been one of the men recruited to help get the pipe organ enterprise underway, as his tenure coincides with the beginning of pipe organ production.

Regardless of the impetus, John L. Hinners’s Perfection Organ Manufactory in Pekin began a new era of industry for the region. He set up shop in a back room of Schaefer’s new building on Court Street, across from the courthouse and spent the next ten years building reed organs, perfecting the skills and techniques he would then apply to the manufacture of pipe organs. Specifically, in addition to the marketing and sales acumen modeled on the reed organ trade, John Leonard brought to his pipe organs an understanding of compactness, mechanical reliability, and superb carpentry that he had learned in reed organ construction.³ Perhaps the most important entrepreneurial application, later seen as a defining characteristic of the pipe organs, was his standardization of the reed organ. In an 1895 Hinners Reed Organ catalog (in English and German) he lays out just five action types and ten cabinet styles. By strictly controlling variations, he was able to produce them literally by the dozens. When he turned this idea to pipe organs, such standardization permitted him to offer quality instruments at significantly lower prices.

 

Hinners & Albertsen

Schaefer sold his instrument manufactory and musical merchandise business in early 1881. John Leonard took the opportunity to cash in on the reputation he had built for himself in the previous year and recruited a group of local investors to back the Perfection Organ Works as a private reed organ factory. Ubbo J. Albertsen (Figure 7) purchased the interest of the original investors in 1885, and the company became Hinners & Albertsen.⁴ With the infusion of Albertsen’s capital, the firm expanded once again and reed organ sales soared. The turn to pipe organ production was announced in a special catalog that was written in German and English—with a sketch of the Boston Music Hall organ on the cover. These Hinners & Albertsen organs had one manual and pedals, available in three ranks for $375, four ranks for $485, five ranks for $575, and six ranks for the bargain price of $635. The 1890 catalog introduced “Our New No. 5 Pipe Organ” for $485 with economical specifications:

 

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Melodia (wood 61 pipes, enclosed)

8′ Gamba (metal, 61 pipes, enclosed)

4′ Principal (metal, 61 pipes)

 

16′ Pedal Bourdon (wood, 15 pipes)

 

Super Coupler

Manual to Pedal Coupler

Swell Pedal

The three-rank organ included two 8′ ranks and one 4′ rank; for the five-rank instrument, they added a 2′ rank to the No. 5 specifications, and the six-rank organ added two 2′ ranks to the No. 5 specifications. Churches close to Pekin could reduce the cost by sending members of its congregation to the factory with their own wagons, handling drayage and set-up themselves. In this case, the organ would cost only $75 a rank, which amounts to a significant savings for budget-minded congregations.

If shipped, the swell box served as the shipping crate, and many of these still have the shipping labels nailed to what is now the inside of the box (Figure 8, nailed on the far back side). In the early years, all of the non-local organs were shipped via the railway. The pipes and components, all numbered, were placed in numbered crates and loaded into the boxcars. When the organ arrived at its destination, church members retrieved the crates from the depot along with the company representative who directed the organ’s installation. The numbering system (cf. Figure 9) made installation quick and easy, usually requiring only one company man to oversee the operation, though larger organs sometimes required teams of two or, rarely, three. The Hinners representative’s signature and the installation date is often found penciled somewhere inside the instrument, frequently somewhere on or in the swell box. Trucks eventually replaced the horse-drawn wagons, and organs within an eleven-state radius of Illinois were delivered by truck, which drove at a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The Hinners firm managed to keep even the switch to motorized drayage within the family—or at least within the extended organ family—when Philip Kriegsman, a 13-year tuner for Hinners, purchased the drayage company that had been handling organ shipping and became the contractor who moved the organ business from horse-drawn wagons to motorized vehicles.

The 1898 Hinners & Albertsen organ built for the St. Peter Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Red Wing, Minnesota, exemplifies the typical smaller two-manual organ (Figure 10). Like the reed organs, the one-manual pipe organs had a keyboard divided at middle C, each half controlled by a treble and bass knob. Most often, the Hinners & Albertsen pedal ranks encompassed only the lower octave, and the second octave was supplied as a pull-down. The catalogs claimed that the notes above the lower octave were only very rarely used for church services, and so they were omitted “as a needless expenditure.”

 

To be continued.

 

Notes

1. Cf. Allison Alcorn, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000): 13–25. The Tracker article provides a more detailed account of the complete company history, though much in the present article’s overview is indebted to that work. This article provides a simple company overview up to the date of the Red Wing organ and then a focus on the story of that Red Wing, Minnesota, instrument.

2. Louella Dirksen, The Honorable Mr. Marigold (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 1. Mrs. Cromwell must have had a rather crooked pin, actually, because the direct antipode of Pekin is in the Indian Ocean off the far southwestern tip of Australia.

3. Unfortunately, the only Hinners organ remaining in Pekin is at St. John Lutheran Church. In 2014 it was rebuilt by the Buzard Organ Company of Champaign, Illinois. The original console was gone, so they used a 1927 console from the Hinners built for Hope Reformed Church in Chicago plus a number of other console materials from the Hinners that had been built for the Pekin Elks Club Lodge (the last Hinners pipe organ built before the company closed). Some odds and ends were used in the interior from the 1913 organ built for the Hinners’ family church, which assumed the non-Germanic name of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church when it rebuilt in 1914 after a devastating 1911 fire. That organ is now completely dismantled, with only the façade pipes remaining as visual display to house an Allen electronic organ. 

4. An unfortunate typographical error in the 2000 Tracker article (op. cit., 15) cites “Uddo” J. Albertsen as John Leonard’s partner. Some confusion had already existed about Albertsen, as early sources sometimes incorrectly reference Urban J. Albertsen as the partner in the organ business. Urban, however, was not born until 1887, and it was his father, Ubbo J. Abertsen (1845–1926), who bought into the Hinners organ enterprise.